Shabbat shalom, friends.

On Tuesday in central Nicosia, three Israelis were attacked with sharp objects by two Syrian nationals later arrested in the manhunt that followed. One was wounded in the ear, and Israel’s ambassador to Cyprus said the three men had been targeted for their visibly Jewish appearance.

Four days earlier near Governor’s Beach, Cypriot police arrested two Palestinian nationals, thirty-two and thirty-eight, and recovered chemical mixtures and bomb-lab materials in an intelligence-led operation. A Larnaca court ordered both held for eight days.

In Manchester, a forty-nine-year-old man became the eighth person taken into custody in the investigation of the Yom Kippur attack on the Heaton Park synagogue that killed Melvin Cravitz z”l and Adrian Daulby z”l.

Berlin arrested a second Syrian national the same week as an alleged accomplice in the February 2025 stabbing at the Holocaust Memorial.

Antwerp prosecutors indicted two Jewish mohels for premeditated bodily harm against minors and unlawful practice of medicine, with a closed-door pre-trial chamber set for June 18.

In Golders Green, the Kosher Kingdom supermarket caught fire on Wednesday morning — a hundred firefighters and fifteen engines — and the cause turned out to be electrical, in a neighborhood that has spent the past year and a half counting torched Hatzola ambulances and watching the Yom Kippur Manchester attack land an hour up the M62.

In Manhattan two weeks before, federal prosecutors had unsealed a complaint against Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, an Iraqi militia commander charged with directing approximately eighteen attacks across Europe and two in Canada, plus a planned tri-city US operation targeting a Manhattan synagogue and Jewish centers in Los Angeles and Scottsdale. The federal language named the target category, in the indictment’s own words, as “Americans and Jews.”

In Berlin, the Federal Prosecutor’s office charged Ali S. and Tawab M. on May 21 for an IRGC-tasked surveillance and assassination plot against Zentralrat chair Josef Schuster, German-Israeli Society chair Volker Beck, and two Jewish business owners in the city.

In Canberra, Royal Commissioner Virginia Bell — appointed after the December 2025 Bondi Beach Hanukkah shooting that killed fifteen — surfaced on Tuesday that witnesses who had testified before her commission were being subjected to a dramatic increase in online hate and intimidation, with at least one referral to the Australian Federal Police.

In southern Lebanon and northern Israel, Hezbollah ran the largest drone campaign of the war while the IDF crossed the Yellow Line on a weeklong Golani Reconnaissance raid into Zawtar al-Sharqiyah and additional targeted operations beyond the Litani. Sergeant Nahorai Lazer z”l of the 601st Engineering Battalion was killed Sunday when a Hezbollah explosive drone took a direct hit on his armored evacuation vehicle.

In the Strait of Hormuz, US Navy strikes on Sunday and Tuesday hit IRGC mine-laying vessels and a SAM site tracking American aircraft, then an IRGC ground-control station at Bandar Abbas, with four Iranian drones shot down. Overnight on Sunday, Doha mediation circulated a draft sixty-day Iran-US framework: the Strait reopens, mines clear, sanctions waivers issue, and nuclear-scope talks begin within thirty to sixty days. On Thursday, new Airbus Defence and Space satellite imagery showed Tehran had cleared at least fifty access points across eighteen separate underground missile sites since the April 8 ceasefire. A US official summarized the read in one sentence: the Iranians have beaten every timetable the intelligence community had for the pace of their recovery.

The Buildup Is Real and Already on Schedule

We can no longer afford to hedge — if we ever could.

The lull is Tehran’s buildup phase. Hamas has retained an estimated twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand active fighters against a pre-war baseline of roughly thirty thousand across five brigades and twenty-four battalions. The IDF assesses Hamas has recruited ten to fifteen thousand new operatives during the war, of substantially lower training quality, holding hundreds of rockets and producing IEDs and anti-tank munitions at hundreds per month. Channel 13’s Moriah Asraf, working from an IDF document, called it the most severe assessment on the cease-fire she had seen in her time on the file. The IDF, she reported, “chooses time after time to put in writing these warnings… so that nobody will be able to say that they did not know that Hamas is growing stronger.” That sentence is now the standing position inside the building.

Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir told the Security Cabinet on Monday the response can no longer work with tweezers. A different equation has to be built, the chief said, and the equation includes striking buildings in Beirut and Tyre to deter. Northern Command Chief Maj. Gen. Rafi Milo said Hezbollah had crossed a serious and unacceptable red line. Netanyahu said Israel is at war with Hezbollah. Smotrich said for every explosive drone, ten buildings should fall in Beirut. The US position, audible underneath, asked Israel not to bring buildings down in Beirut while the Tehran talks were proceeding. The cabinet sits inside the contradiction between what the IDF generals are saying about the next round and what Washington’s envoys are willing to authorize while Doha is still open. The generals are saying the next round is a question of when. The envoys are saying the next round is a question of whether it has to happen at all.

US envoy Tom Barrack told reporters Hezbollah is receiving roughly sixty million dollars a month “coming from some place,” and a Treasury delegation is in Beirut tracking the flow. Since January 2025, IRGC-Quds Force has moved more than a billion dollars to Hezbollah through money exchanges, the Dubai/UAE banking layer, and Turkish transit. Hezbollah had asked for two billion annually. Tehran committed to one. The World Bank puts Lebanon’s direct war losses at $7.2 billion across ten sectors and the reconstruction need at $11 billion — money the Hezbollah network has positioned itself to absorb on its own terms, not Beirut’s.

The Yemen front is a sort of continuation of the theme. The IISS missile-capability assessment catalogues at least ten distinct missile types in 2025 seizures, against a Soviet-era baseline from 2014. The so-called UN Panel of Experts found about five percent of components were Iranian-origin. The rest traced to sixteen jurisdictions, arriving as coded “DIY kits” the Houthi network now assembles inside Yemen. Production and storage have migrated underground. What Iran can no longer ship, the periphery has learned to make.

In Iraq, the Popular Mobilization Forces have fragmented across two tracks. Kata’ib Hezbollah and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada hold the military attack track, with KSS publicly committed to continued hostilities and KH offering a conditional ceasefire on embassy attacks. Badr and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq dominate the political and coalition-formation track. A March 2025 draft PMF law would formally subordinate the force to the prime minister, and on February 28 US and Israeli strikes hit KH, KSS, and AAH bases together. The fracture between the military and political tracks is the documented finding. The opinion-writing version painting AAH and Nujaba as openly fighting each other inside Iraq is not in the sources, and we will not adopt it. The fracture is real, and the body it leaves behind is still pointed in the same direction.

Tehran has cleared at least fifty blocked access points across eighteen separate underground missile sites since the April 8 cease-fire. Bulldozers and removal trucks moved at a pace one US official described as having beaten every timetable they forecasted for the post-strike recovery. Itamar Eichner and Lior Ben Ari at Ynet called the period “the illusion of quiet” on the last day of 2025. The illusion has not survived May. Yossi Yehoshua at Yedioth, Avi Issacharoff at Israel Hayom, Limor and Shoval at Israel Hayom, Yaron Abraham and Eyal Ofer at N12 — the working Hebrew-press read of the cease-fire is now the buildup-phase read the IDF has been putting in writing for nine months.

The Same Buildup, Aimed at the Body, Already Inside Other Borders

On May 15, the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York unsealed a complaint against Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, a thirty-two-year-old Iraqi national, on five counts including two conspiracies to provide material support to Foreign Terrorist Organizations (Kata’ib Hezbollah and the IRGC), a conspiracy to bomb places of public use, and destruction of property by fire or explosives. The complaint alleges al-Saadi directed roughly eighteen attacks across Europe and two in Canada, including the Toronto US consulate, and that he then offered an FBI undercover posing as a Mexican-cartel intermediary ten thousand dollars to firebomb a Manhattan synagogue, a Los Angeles Jewish center, and a Scottsdale Jewish center, with three thousand paid in cryptocurrency as a down payment and a deadline of April 7. He was arrested in Turkey [at the request of the United States, don’t make the mistake of thinking Erdogan is interest in stopping jihadis] and extradited to Manhattan. He is held without bail. Photos in the complaint show him posing with IRGC leaders. The indictment’s target category, in federal language, is “Americans and Jews.” Not “Israelis.”

The al-Saadi case identifies Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI) as a Kata’ib Hezbollah / IRGC cover identity. HAYI emerged in March 2026 and has claimed at least seventeen attacks in approximately seven weeks across Europe, targeting Jewish communities, Israeli diplomatic missions, financial institutions, and Iranian dissident journalists. Documented attacks include the Liège synagogue bombing on March 9, the Rotterdam synagogue arson, the Amsterdam Jewish school explosive on March 14, an Antwerp car arson in a Jewish neighborhood, the Golders Green stabbings of two Jewish men on April 29, an attack on Bank of NY Mellon Amsterdam, and the attempted Bank of America Paris attack on March 28. ISD analysts characterize parts of the corpus as “violence-as-a-service” — financially motivated young people and criminals paid via encrypted messaging to conduct attacks. UK Met Police DAC Vicki Evans told CNN authorities are considering whether the tactic is being used in London, with operatives who have “no allegiance to the cause and are taking quick cash for their crimes.” That qualifier is its own evidence. Whether each HAYI claim was Quds-Force-tasked or only some of them were is a kinetic-command question. The doctrine of claiming attacks on diaspora Jews as legitimate resistance is what the public record now documents.

Germany has filed alongside the SDNY case. On May 21, the Federal Prosecutor’s office announced charges against Danish national Ali S. and Afghan national Tawab M. for an IRGC-tasked plot to surveil and prepare assassination and arson attacks against Zentralrat chair Josef Schuster, German-Israeli Society chair Volker Beck, and two Jewish business owners in Berlin. Ali S. was arrested in Denmark in June 2025. Tawab M. was arrested in November. Germany summoned the Iranian ambassador. The Hamburg state court filing was lodged on May 7. The public announcement landed two weeks later. Berlin’s response to the Press TV statement Tehran issued in reply was that the federal prosecutor’s filing speaks for itself.

The UK record was already long before May. MI5 Director-General Ken McCallum told the public in October MI5 had tracked more than twenty potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in the prior year alone. The May 2025 London Israeli embassy plot, in which five Iranian nationals were arrested by UK counter-terror police, was traced to IRGC Quds Force Unit 840. ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess put the cleanest tradecraft language any Western service has been willing to put on the table: the Adass Israel synagogue arson in Melbourne and the Lewis Continental Kitchen arson in Sydney ran through, in his words, “a layer cake of intermediaries… overseas cut-out facilitators to coordinators that found their way to tasking Australians.” The local cut-out, Sayed Moosawi, was paid twelve thousand Australian dollars. Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador, suspended its embassy in Tehran, and on November 27 listed the IRGC as a state sponsor of terrorism.

On April 20, Mossad, Shin Bet, and the IDF jointly unmasked IRGC Intelligence Organisation Unit 4000 under the late Rahman Moqadam — the Special Operations Division running country-level handlers against Israeli and Jewish targets in Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Greece, Germany, and Australia. Moqadam was killed at the opening of Operation Roaring Lion on February 28. The disclosure was retrospective and named the network he had been running. The Turkey–Cyprus axis under Mehdi Yekeh-Dehghan, called “the Doctor” in the disclosure, was smuggling explosive drones from Iran via Turkey into Cyprus, with reconnaissance against US and allied assets. The two Palestinian nationals Cypriot police picked up near Governor’s Beach last Friday, read against that disclosure, are exactly the surface Unit 4000 was building toward.

Iran did one more thing in March 2026 that named the doctrine in a personnel decision. After Mohammad Pakpour was killed on the opening day of Roaring Lion, Khamenei elevated Ahmad Vahidi — IRGC deputy chief since December — to IRGC commander-in-chief. In 1994, Vahidi was Quds Force commander. AMIA killed 85 people in Buenos Aires that July under his command. The Argentine Court of Cassation ruled on April 11, 2024 that Iran directed and Hezbollah executed the 1994 AMIA bombing and the 1992 Israeli embassy bombing in Buenos Aires that killed twenty-nine, declaring both crimes against humanity. Argentine prosecutor Sebastian Basso said it in Spanish for the record: “Hezbolá ejecutó el atentado bajo órdenes directas de Irán.” Argentina’s Law 27.784 (2025) opened the door to trials in absentia, and on May 21 the Camara Federal ordered the in-absentia proceeding against ten Iranian and Lebanese suspects to advance. The same week Berlin charged the Schuster plot, Buenos Aires moved its 1994 case forward. The man who ran Quds Force the night the AMIA bomb went off has now been promoted to IRGC apex command, and the court in Buenos Aires is finally getting his deputies on the docket in absentia.

The Royal Commission in Canberra is the other live procedural surface. Virginia Bell AC SC was appointed after Bondi and tabled her interim report on April 30 with fourteen recommendations, five classified. The interim report’s headline finding was that Australia’s existing legal and regulatory frameworks had not hindered agencies’ ability to prevent or respond to the Bondi attack, and that “no urgent or immediate action is required.” A hostile reader will weaponize that line. Twenty-six days later, Bell publicly named the second-order surface: witnesses who had testified before the Commission had been subjected to a dramatic increase in online hate and intimidation, with at least one referral to the Australian Federal Police. “We will not tolerate,” Bell said, “attempts to subvert this inquiry or silence those who have been brave enough to speak.” The interim report said the legal framework held. The follow-on hearings have already documented that the operation’s pattern continued inside the Commission’s own jurisdiction, against the witnesses the Commission was hearing from.

Sweden adds the recruitment layer. SAPO documented at least four attacks or attempts against the Israeli embassy in Stockholm in 2023–24, including a fifteen-year-old armed teenager arrested in May 2024 and a fourteen-year-old who fired a semi-automatic near the embassy. US Treasury sanctioned the Foxtrot gang for Iran-directed work. The Rumba network reportedly offered Iranian help killing Foxtrot leader Rawa Majid in exchange for synagogue and embassy strikes. The Iranian network was paying minors to fire automatic weapons at the Israeli embassy in a Scandinavian capital, and the press of record carried it as a Swedish gang story until Times of Israel and CNN’s investigative desk named the network.

And before any of that, the continuum of high-fatality diaspora attacks since May 2025 names the cost the federal docket is now catching up to. Israeli embassy staffers Yaron Lischinsky z”l and Sarah Milgrim z”l were killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington on May 21, 2025. Justice announced intent to seek the death penalty on May 15 of this year. Karen Diamond z”l, eighty-two, died of her burns after Mohamed Soliman firebombed Run for Their Lives walkers in Boulder on June 1, 2025. Manchester at Heaton Park on Yom Kippur killed Cravitz z”l and Daulby z”l — the first UK antisemitic terror fatalities since CST records began in 1984. Bondi on Hanukkah killed fifteen. Toronto ran three synagogue shootings in five days in March. Nineteen diaspora-Jewish fatalities between May 2025 and the spring of this year, in five countries on three continents, before the al-Saadi tri-city US plot would have added more.

The Doctrine Reads the Body

The doctrinal register inside which all of this is happening reads the Jews-as-people unit as the target. Whoever doubts the proposition has not read what the doctrine says about itself.

Hamas Charter Article 7, the 1988 founding text — headed “The Universality of the Islamic Resistance Movement” — quotes the gharqad hadith from Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim: “The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, for it is one of the trees of the Jews.” The 2017 Hamas “document” did not supersede the 1988 charter. The founding text remains the foundational reference, and the doctrine the gharqad hadith carries is not bounded by a territorial perimeter. The hadith names the Jew, wherever the Jew is standing.

Hezbollah’s own register is publicly readable. Al-Manar Lebanon has labeled its 2024–25 round the “Khaybar Series” (سلسلة خيبر), branding strikes against Israeli military intelligence bases including Glilot Base (Unit 8200) near Tel Aviv as “Khaybar Operations.” The Khaybar referent invokes Muhammad’s 628 CE expulsion of the Jews of Khaybar. It is not subtle. The chant carrying it — Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud — has circulated in protest and militant registers from Tehran to Western European campuses to Sydney’s Opera House steps. The Jews of Khaybar and the Jews of Manchester sit inside the same vocabulary.

HAYI’s own name fits the register precisely. Companions of the Right is a Quranic-paradisiacal designation drawn from Surah al-Waqi’ah. FDD’s analysts read HAYI’s supporters as seeing Jews as collectively guilty, the long-term war culminating in the appearance of the Imam al-Mahdi and the destruction of Jews worldwide. ISD, MEF, and GNET concur on the doctrinal pedigree of the naming. A franchise calling itself by a paradisiacal title and targeting Jews in Liège and Amsterdam is not a marketing accident. The self-naming connects to the same well as the gharqad tree.

Khalil al-Hayya in January 2025 said October 7 was “a historic moment… a source of pride for our people… to be passed down from generation to generation.” The same al-Hayya was elected Hamas-Gaza leader, survived the Israeli strike in Doha on September 9, 2025, and is now the operative voice in the post-Sinwar Hamas politburo. The line stands. October 7 — pogrom against the Jews of southern Israel, sexual violence in the kibbutzim, two hundred and fifty hostages taken into Gaza — is, in the words of the elected Hamas-Gaza leader, the inheritance to be passed down. The doctrine names that program as legitimate resistance.

Naim Qassem’s Hezbollah register works the asymmetry between the English-language podium and the Arabic sermon, and the asymmetry is the point. His March 2025 Quds Day speeches, tracked by FDD’s Long War Journal, addressed the Israeli public directly: “We instill fear in a million Israelis living in distress… Leave our land… or you will pay an unprecedented price.” Reuters wire and the Western audience get the line in that register. The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, tracking his Arabic addresses, finds Qassem “frames the current battle along religious lines, drawing on classical Islamic anti-Judaism.” The doctrine lives downstream of the English podium — in the Arabic sermon, in the attack claim by the allied entity, in the protest chant. The translated press conference is wrapping. The Arabic sermon is the doctrine.

Ali Khamenei’s documented Quds Day pattern, compiled by ADL, names the unit the regime is fighting in his own words. He calls Israel “not a country, but a terrorist base,” and Zionism “a virus that must be eliminated.” On Tuesday, May 26, his son Mojtaba used a Hajj-occasion message to say Israel “will not exist” within fifteen years, threaten to end US bases in the region, and declare that “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” have become “a common language for the Islamic nation and the oppressed peoples of the world.” The third Supreme Leader’s first public elimination statement landed in the same week as the Bandar Abbas strikes, the Hezbollah drone campaign, the Berlin indictment, the al-Saadi unsealing, and the Bondi witness-intimidation surfacing. The doctrine is being stated at the cabinet level the morning the buildings are being targeted in Beirut.

And the regime supplied one more sentence the same week. After the Berlin charges landed, Tehran’s embassy in Berlin issued a Press TV statement on May 23 that did not deny the Jews-as-target framing. The embassy invoked the April 7, 2026 Israeli air strike on Tehran’s Rafi’-Nia Synagogue, arguing moral symmetry: “the military attack by the Israeli regime in April 2026 on the Rafi’-Nia Synagogue in Tehran should also be perceived and condemned with the same sensitivity.” The IDF acknowledged the April 7 strike at the time and characterized the synagogue destruction as collateral damage on an adjacent building — a real, traceable claim that hostile readings will rotate against the rebuttal here, and one that does not redeem the embassy’s move. The embassy did not deny the surveillance of Schuster and Beck. The embassy accepted that synagogues are inside the contest and argued only the score. The regime gave its own answer on the doctrinal question, on the record, in May 2026, in Berlin.

The Continuum Has Localized Against the Body

The Jihadist Continuum established that Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, and the PA share a doctrinal bloodstream organized through two forms. The first is the franchise model that ISIS uses, with distributed brand licensing. The second is the proxy-empire model Iran has run since the 1980s, with discipline maintained through funding. Post-Roaring Lion and Epic Fury, the proxy empire fragmented. The doctrine survived. The continuum has localized across five successor formations, each of which retains state-level capability in the local theater, and each of which operates against the body wherever the body sits.

Hamas in Gaza is reconstituting. Hundreds of millions of Iranian dollars are moving into Gaza-reconstruction-adjacent flows through Hamas-tied Turkey-based money exchange houses, per Israeli intelligence disclosure from December — primary Turkish-side reporting on the pipeline has not appeared. The pipeline mirrors the one Hezbollah uses upstream, before it diverges through the UAE banking layer toward Beirut. The franchise has not lost its sponsor. The sponsor has rerouted around the Syrian corridor it lost.

Hezbollah in Lebanon is rebuilding — IRGC-Quds Force, the Dubai/UAE banking layer, Turkish transit, and into the network at sixty million dollars a month per Barrack and more than a billion since January 2025 per Treasury. The September 2024 to February 2025 OFAC sanctions on Ossama Jaber and adjacent facilitators documented tens of millions moving inside that line. The World Bank’s $11 billion reconstruction need is exactly the amount of money the Hezbollah network is positioned to capture, launder, and rebuild on. The IDF’s Zamir is asking the cabinet for permission to hit buildings in Beirut because the reconstruction will happen one way or another. The question on the cabinet table is whether it happens with Hezbollah inside the contracting chain or without it.

The Houthis in Yemen run the indigenization model already documented. Ten or more missile types now in service, five percent Iranian-origin components, sixteen jurisdictions sourcing the rest, coded “DIY kits” the local production line completes inside underground sites. The IRGC’s external-supply problem became Yemen’s internal-assembly success. The successor formation does not need the centre to ship a full system, because the periphery has learned to finish it.

KH and KSS hold the military attack track, Badr and AAH hold the political and coalition-formation track, the March 2025 draft PMF law would formally subordinate the force to the prime minister, and the February 28 US–Israel strikes hit the military track together. The body is fractured between the two tracks, still pointed at the same target.

And the IRGC’s external-operations command is the most active of the five successor surfaces. Quds Force Unit 840 ran the May 2025 London Israeli embassy plot that put five Iranian nationals into UK custody. Special Operations Division 4000, under the late Moqadam, ran the Azerbaijan–Cyprus–Greece–Germany–Australia geography Mossad/Shin Bet/IDF unmasked in April. HAYI runs the franchise-style cover identity. Al-Saadi’s tri-city US plot ran inside the same network and reported into the same command. Sweden’s recruitment of minors and gang operatives via Foxtrot and Rumba runs the same playbook through Stockholm and Gothenburg. The five successor surfaces share a sponsor, a doctrine, a financial line, and a unit they are pointing at.

The degradation school has the damage right. Khatib at Belfer in April, the Stimson team earlier this year, and the IPF/INSS authors of “Fracturing the Axis” last September all read the kinetic breakage correctly. Syria gone, Khamenei eliminated, Pakpour and Khademi and Moqadam dead inside the opening hours of Roaring Lion, Hezbollah forced into a cease-fire it cannot rebuild from openly. The Iran network of 2023 has been broken. The Belfer/Stimson/IPF read of the breakage is correct. The substitution is what the read has not foregrounded, and the substitution is what al-Saadi, Vahidi’s elevation, Unit 4000, HAYI, the Berlin charges, the Royal Commission’s witness intimidation, the Cypriot bomb-lab arrests, the Stockholm recruitment of minors, the Toronto synagogue shootings, the Boulder firebombing, and the Heaton Park Yom Kippur attack all describe in one picture. The franchise and the proxy empire have fused under stress.

The degradation school will eventually catch up to this read. The analysts have the breakage right. What we are arguing is that what was rebuilt was rebuilt in a different shape, aimed at the body the doctrine has always recognized, wherever the body is standing. The territorial perimeter that ran from Sheba’a to Rafah is no longer where the contest is being fought. The successor pattern is the Iran network reading its own break as a redeployment problem.

The Apparatus Is Built Not to See It

Seth Mandel got there first. There Are No Cease-Fires in Iran’s Global War on Jews, published in Commentary on April 7, 2025 — more than a year before the Iran war began, more than a year before Operation Roaring Lion, before Vahidi’s elevation, before al-Saadi was extradited, before Berlin charged Ali S. and Tawab M. — names the framing we operate inside. The piece

walks through the murder of Rabbi Zvi Kogan z”l in Dubai in November 2024 and the Iranian Quds Force officer who offered a Georgian drug trafficker two hundred thousand dollars to kill Rabbi Shneor Segal in Azerbaijan, and lands the argument the title already carried: “ceasefire” is a category error against an enemy that has not paused outside the kinetic theater. Mandel named the frame. What he left for later was the synthesis across the four desks the picture sits on, and the reason no single desk crosses to the next.

Take the Israeli analytical centre of gravity. Amit Segal owns “what is Israel doing next militarily.” Our standing line on his work is that he is the indispensable read on the Israeli political–security file, and we read him every day. Across twenty-three It’s Noon in Israel posts surveyed across May 2026, the al-Saadi indictment appears zero times. The Golders Green stabbings of April 29 appear zero times. The Heaton Park investigation appears zero times. The AMIA case at the Camara Federal appears zero times. The Berlin Schuster plot appears zero times. The Cypriot Larnaca bomb-lab arrests appear zero times. Segal treats Hamas reconstitution as a domestic Israeli security problem. He treats the Iran proxy network as transformed and still in the picture. He does not treat the diaspora dimension at all. He is not wrong, on the file he is keeping. He is keeping a file the Israeli political class wants kept, and its perimeter sits where the last war ended.

US prestige press has the inverse problem. The desks are competent and do not cross. The al-Saadi indictment of May 15 was carried by The New York Times and The Washington Post as a domestic-terror story, and neither piece linked to its own desk’s coverage of Hezbollah financing through Dubai and Turkish transit. The two streams almost never cross-reference in the same article. Time‘s feature by Mandel and David Blair was the lone exception. The desk that covers Tehran financing and the desk that covers Manhattan synagogue plots use the same byline pool less than once a month.

The ADL register lives at the atmospherics layer. Its Pro-Iran Terrorist Attacks Against Jewish Communities catalogue reads as an incident inventory. The AJC’s Iran’s Terror Network Around the Globe page is closer to the diagnosis but still reads as catalogue. The incidents are correctly counted. The state-directed network underneath them is not what the cataloguer’s framing is built to name. ADL’s standing function is monitoring and atmospherics. Nobody should ask its mailing list to do the work of a strategic intelligence shop. The friendly Jewish-institutional read is sized to the incident on this question, and the doctrine producing the incident has been left outside the framing.

The degradation school is the most analytically serious of the four desks and the most exposed to the substitution it is not tracking. Khatib at Belfer, the Stimson team, the IPF/INSS authors of “Fracturing the Axis” are correctly reading the kinetic damage to the network. They are not foregrounding the diaspora-distributed cell substitution. The substitution is exactly what the Berlin federal prosecutor and the SDNY US Attorney and ASIO’s Burgess and Italy’s Carabinieri and Sweden’s SAPO and Cyprus’s police are now putting on the record together. The degradation school has the damage right. It does not yet have the recovery right, and the recovery is the news.

European mainstream press is the inverse of the US case — operationally honest, rhetorically evasive. Belgium has deployed military to its synagogues. The UK uplifted Jewish Community Protective Security funding from £18 million in 2024/25 to £28.4 million for the next cycle, with an additional £10 million emergency uplift post-Manchester and one hundred and fifty new CST volunteer applications inside a fortnight. Germany’s Hesse parliament moved a Boris Rhein/Christian Heinz bill criminalizing denial of Israel’s right to exist, with prison time on the table for “from the river to the sea” and Israeli-flag desecration, ahead of a Bundesrat hearing. Australia called its first-ever Royal Commission on antisemitism after Bondi. Every European interior ministry is now budgeting against the threat the federal courts are now indicting. And the press of record around all of it still routes the story through “antisemitism rising” — a domestic-pathology frame for what the evidence describes as an Iran-directed campaign on European soil against European Jews. The interior ministries have figured it out. The newsroom desks one floor up have not.

Daniel Gordis carried J. L. Talmon’s line into a 2021 Substack post, and the line is older still — Talmon coined it after the 1975 UN “Zionism is racism” resolution. “The state of the Jews has become the Jew of the states.” The line named the inversion the prior generation could see. The Jew as European pariah of the 19th century had vanished into the state. The state had taken his place as the new pariah at the UN podium. Five decades on, the chain has run one more step. Now the Jews of the states are becoming what the state was supposed to absorb.

Mandel had the framing. Gordis carries Talmon. Kobi Michael, at Misgav in December, described Iran as “intensifying cyber efforts and attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets abroad” in the closest one-paragraph anchor any Israeli think-tank piece has dropped on the diaspora-as-target picture. The Anglosphere Jewish press — JTA, Algemeiner, the Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News, Australian Jewish News, Jewish News Syndicate, the Israeli desk at Times of Israel — keeps the record. Nobody has put the chain together. The gap is what the institutional response sized to the territorial perimeter has been allowed to walk through.

What the Next Round Is Being Prepared Against

The army Tehran is rebuilding is being aimed at the people.

Korea-1953 ended at the line on the map. Two armies arrayed across a parallel of latitude, an armistice signed at Panmunjom, no peace, no progress on the political question for seventy-three years and counting. The line froze and held. The lull-into-buildup question settled on the line itself, because the doctrine that line separated was a doctrine about geography. North and South of the 38th parallel were the units in contest. The Israeli strategic establishment has been quietly worried it is being told to accept Korea as the precedent on Lebanon, on Gaza, on the post-Iran-war terrain. A frozen line on the next Lebanon front would be the precedent the Iranian network is openly hoping to reproduce, because freezing the line removes the variable from the table the regime can still afford to lose.

This buildup is not aimed at a line. The doctrine the gharqad hadith carries was never about a parallel of latitude. Khaybar was not a border dispute. The target is Jews specifically and the West more generally. The category crosses the Yellow Line. HAYI’s claim corpus does not respect the Litani. Mojtaba Khamenei’s fifteen-year elimination statement does not stop at Rosh Hanikra. The IRGC’s Unit 4000 was running operatives in Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Greece, Germany, and Australia. Vahidi was at AMIA in 1994 and at IRGC apex command in 2026. The line is everywhere Jews are.

The Israeli strategic establishment cannot accept the frozen-line frame on Lebanon because the IDF reads the kinetic buildup against the Yellow Line and the corridors north of the Litani as the surface where the next kinetic round will land. The Inverted Body showed the other half: the diaspora institutional class has been allocating against three peoples — Israeli, American Jewish, European Jewish — while the attackers allocate against one body. The institutional response sized to a perimeter Tehran has stopped treating as the theater will keep under-defending the geography the network is actually operating across, until the institutional class reads what the adversary read in 1975 and has not stopped reading. The unit is the body, amongst whom the regime considers it permitted to fight without reaching the Yellow Line. The adversary has used that framework since the AMIA bomb, and the federal courts in Manhattan, Berlin, and Buenos Aires are now putting it on the record, one indictment at a time.

The doctrine has been naming that line since the gharqad hadith. The buildup is being prepared against a perimeter that includes Manchester, Boulder, Antwerp, Bondi, Nicosia, Berlin, Stockholm, Toronto, Buenos Aires, Golders Green, and whatever street any Jew anywhere is standing on the morning the operative kit arrives. The CST plus SCN single-body case The Inverted Body documented is the answer to what the institutional response would look like if the institutional class read the doctrine the way the adversary writes it. The institutional class has not yet.

The next round is being prepared against the body the doctrine has always recognized. The institutional response is still sized to a perimeter the war is no longer being fought at. The line is everywhere any Jew is standing.

Hamas is in Gaza. Hamas is also in Manchester.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

Boker tov, friends.

About a week and a half ago I was stuck on the tarmac for a delay at LAX, and the woman [she looked was dressed in what appeared to be a sort of religious-Zionist way, and we thought she might have been Jewish—seems like she was] two seats down spent a good twenty minutes on the phone with what turned out to be her daughter.

Half of it was the ordinary stuff — did you eat, is the wifi any good there. The other half was a grandson three weeks into the army, a cousin’s wedding pushed to the fall, whether the whole family could get over for it, what the flights cost now. She wasn’t making a point. She was a grandmother whose family runs across two countries and an ocean, and who plainly does not experience that as two of anything.

She has it right. Every institution built to serve her has it wrong.

Because the institutions still count her as three. American Jewry, where she votes and pays her dues. Israel, where her grandson serves, handled like a line of foreign policy. And the communities at risk somewhere else again, Britain, France, Latin America, the old Soviet places, filed under rescue [not as though there are no issues in the US]. Three units of account. Three campaigns. Three reasons a donor gets asked to give. The grandmother at the gate is one body. The system that raises money off her is three.

The Jewish people has not been three things since 1948. It has been one center and a diaspora since 1967, visibly, and one body without argument since the morning of October 8, 2023. The grandmother lives that as a plain fact. The institutions that fundraise in her name still do not, and what they fund is the median artifact of American Jewish life in 2026. What follows is the distance between the two.

The body is one, and it inverted

Simon Rawidowicz asked the right question before either side of it had a shape. In Bavel vi-Yerushalayim he refused Ahad Ha’am’s center-and-periphery model and named the unit plainly: not a sovereign center with a fading rim, but a single people held together across borders.

At the founding conference of the Brit Ivrit Olamit in Berlin in 1931 he put it in one line. We have learned the laws of center and periphery, he told the room, and from now on we must learn the laws of partnership. When Ben-Gurion later wrote to him that locking the word “Israel” to the new state was harmless, that no educated reader would confuse the people with the polity, Rawidowicz answered that the appropriation “divides that which is one.”

He was right, Ben-Gurion was wrong, and almost nobody in the institutions that would have to live inside the answer ever read the book.

His editors, Myers and Ravid, say so directly: it stayed “linguistically inaccessible to most readers in the Diaspora and ideologically remote from most readers in the State of Israel.”

A decade earlier, in his essay on what he called the ever-dying people, he had written that each Jewish generation experiences itself as the last and that the dying is how the people keeps living. That was the seat he watched 1948 from, and he never contested the state. He contested the move that shrank the people’s name to the state’s.

His question survived him. His answer did not. He imagined two generative centers in renewed dialogue, each producing, each formally distinct, and that held in 1957. It stopped holding by the 1970s, and the number that tells the story most simply is the demographic one. In 1948 roughly six percent of the world’s Jews lived in Israel and ninety-four percent in the diaspora. By 2024 Israel held the largest Jewish population on earth, 7,153,000 against 6,300,000 in the United States, a near-even split tilting Israel’s way, with the majority projected inside a decade. Sergio DellaPergola put the inflection in cool prose in his 2024 population survey: Israel “arose again, after 2000 years, to the status of the largest Jewish community in the world.” Fertility drives it. Israel’s total fertility runs near 3.0, the highest in the developed world, and the diaspora sits below replacement almost everywhere, with Pew measuring American Orthodox families at 3.3 children and the non-Orthodox at 1.4. The only diaspora communities still actively generating themselves are the ones whose demographics look Israeli.

The money inverted on the same curve. UJA raised $175 million in the month after the Six-Day War, against a $250 million baseline for an entire year, and the Israel Emergency Fund it stood up in June 1967 hardened into a permanent channel by the time the 1973 war made it routine. The Reform movement’s own fiftieth-anniversary retrospective is blunt about what changed: 1967 “transformed Jewish culture” and “changed both the direction and focus of the Jewish communal agenda.” Israel stopped being one cause among many and became the purpose the rest organized around. CJF and UJA merged into UJC in 1999, which became JFNA in 2009, and the org chart finished what the giving had already done.

Look. The people who built the conceptual room for this were not writing about Jews. Stephen Krasner, in Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, was writing about the gap between what states swear to and what they actually do, and about what international-relations theorists call informal empires — real authority exercised over populations that are, on paper, citizens of somebody else. Saskia Sassen was writing about sovereignty leaking out of the nation-state. Israel runs inside what they described. The application to the Jewish case is mine, not theirs. But the books are on the shelf, and the institutional class allocating American Jewish capital against a 1957 model hasn’t seemed to have cracked them open.

The 1950 Law of Return gives every Jew the right to come [subject, however, to interminable bureacracy it would seem], and the 1970 amendment widened it to a Jewish grandparent and to spouses, broader than halacha and broader than any citizenship offer any other state extends to a people abroad. The 2018 Basic Law made immigration-to-automatic-citizenship exclusive to Jews and wrote it into the pseudo-constitutional layer.

The operating side matches the legal one. The Jewish Agency works in more than sixty countries on a budget north of $300 million, ties forty-five Israeli communities to more than five hundred diaspora ones through Partnership2Gether, and embeds its shlichim inside diaspora schools and youth movements. Mosaic United, stood up in 2015 by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry as a joint Israel-government and diaspora-philanthropy initiative, funds identity programming on American campuses at tens of millions of dollars. Foreign Minister Sa’ar quadrupled the public-diplomacy budget to roughly $730 million for 2026, twenty times the pre-October-7 figure, and defended it in the same breath as “jets, bombs, and missile interceptors.” That is a sovereign treating diaspora-facing work as a function of the state. Sa’ar is not subtle in this. The MFA understands what the diaspora institutions still call partnership.

When the bodies are physically threatened, the center acts as if they are its own. After the 1992 embassy and 1994 AMIA bombings in Buenos Aires, Mossad gathered intelligence and prepared retaliation, then called it off for fear of provoking further attacks on Jewish targets. The capability was there, and so was the standing. Israel’s ambassador said in 2014 that most of the AMIA perpetrators had been tracked down and killed. Thirty years on, Argentina’s Court of Cassation ruled Iran responsible and Hezbollah the executor, and passed a law to try them in absentia. The coordination is bilateral and old, and nobody calls it by its real name.

October 8 through 14, 2023 is the week that settles it. Israeli decisions — mobilization, hostage policy, the Gaza plan, emergency aliyah planning — moved every American Jewish institution inside a window measured in days. Federation campaigns, denominational liturgies, security-grant requests, all of it fell in behind.

The coordinator on the Israeli side never had to ask the diaspora institutions for consent, because the relationship runs on mobilization. And the institutions mobilized.

JFNA’s emergency campaign passed $850 million by day 300 and closed near $908 million, the largest single-purpose American Jewish fundraising event ever run. [Though not quite at the level where the Jewish people were told to stop giving–still a once-in-an-eternity case from the Torah.]

The Jewish Agency coordinated. JFNA raised. Decisions flowed out of Israel and money flowed in, and the people doing it kept describing it as a partnership of equals.

No modern parallel carries the inversion this far.

The Babylonian and Palestinian centers ran in tandem for a thousand years with no sovereign power in either, held together by text and law.

The colonial templates everyone reaches for, Britain and its dominions or France and Algeria, put the sovereign at the metropole and the subjects at the rim. This runs the other way. Other peoples have a homeland and a diaspora. None of them pairs a sovereign center that claims every member by right of return with distributed communities that hold full citizenship in other states, coupled to the center by its constitutional law and its operating budget.

The metropole here is the sovereign body. The rim holds the foreign passports. And the people who call this colonialism, Israel reaching over borders to “represent” Jews who are citizens elsewhere, have the picture upside down.

Informal empire covers it without the colonial frame, because the diaspora institutions were not conquered. They signed up. Mosaic is co-run. The Jewish Agency partnerships are co-funded. The security protocols are bilateral by signature and design. The diaspora institutional class is operating inside this and paying for it, and still will not name it.

David Biale dismantled the myth of the powerless diaspora and read 1948 as recovered sovereignty, stopping at the line where the genuinely new thing begins. Salo Baron broke the lachrymose history and folded Israel into one continuous Jewish story — which is exactly the move that cannot read 1948 as the break it was.

DellaPergola has produced the densest demographic series anyone has on the post-1948 people, and presents Israel and the diaspora as two populations to compare.

Yerushalmi mapped Jewish memory against modern history and never reached the third thing sovereignty produces, where the mundane fact of a state and the long covenantal time of the people fuse back together.

The body is one. It inverted two generations ago. The institutions still fund three.

What the money is funding

Start with the first error in how she gets counted. We argued in The Wrong Map that the diaspora runs on four trajectories, four different relationships to the center, and we logged the odds: full continuity around ten percent, tiered continuity around thirty, managed contraction around twenty-five, and a momentum path, contraction continuing because nobody redirected it, around forty.

A budget that books “American Jewry” as a single line is implicitly betting on the ten-percent outcome. The momentum path, the worst aggregate result, sits at forty. The institutions are over-funding the least likely future and under-funding the most likely one. That is what the median Federation budget is, stated as a wager.

The clearest artifact is JFNA’s Israel Emergency Fund grants report from February 2024. The allocations are competent and well-disciplined. Lifeline services. Economic relief. Mental health and trauma. Community resilience. Every category points at need inside Israel.

Not one line addresses the four-way split among the communities that raised the money. The most consequential allocation document in American Jewish life in two years has no way to think about the bodies generating the dollars. The dollars went out fine. What went unread was the question of who was giving and on what trajectory.

Eric Fingerhut gave the rhetorical version in his February 2026 “State of the Jewish Union.” The state of the union is “strong, but it is being tested.” One allocation category, in the most important institutional speech of the cycle. Six security recommendations to Congress, a billion-dollar grant ask, an education-tax-credit push, and no four-trajectory differentiation anywhere in it. The “but” gives it away, and I will come back to it.

One denominational decision reads the demographic curve honestly, and it is the one that looks like a defeat. Hebrew Union College has, if lawsuits don’t stop it, ordained its last Cincinnati class, after a hundred and fifty years. Enrollment ran 214 in 2006 and roughly half that by the 2022 restructure, and when the doors close every major American rabbinical seminary, across denominations, will sit on a coast. Cincinnati is where Isaac Mayer Wise built American Reform. Its closing is the demographic verdict on mid-tier non-Orthodox life in the interior, the same interior the Federation budgets still book as undifferentiated “American Jewry.”

The AVI CHAI census already showed where the next generation is: more than two-thirds of day-school enrollment sits in Orthodox, yeshiva, and Chassidic schools, and barely a tenth in non-Orthodox ones. The budget that funds “American Jewry” as one envelope cannot see this, because the envelope was built for a community that stopped existing around 2015.

The security side is where the misallocation has the most unfortunate repercussions. The Secure Community Network, built in 2004 by JFNA and the Conference of Presidents, runs a national operations center in Chicago and a federal line most faith communities do not have. It works. It is also undersized and politically exposed.

The federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program ran about $274 million in FY2025 against JFNA’s own estimate of roughly $765 million to protect Jewish communal life, under forty percent coverage, and DHS pushed $94 million to 512 Jewish organizations in a single June 2025 cycle, a one-time answer to a standing problem.

Then the FY2025 grants came conditioned on ICE cooperation, DEI restrictions, and anti-boycott compliance. The federal track that funds Jewish communal security is now partisan-conditioned, which means it cannot be relied on, which means the bilateral relationship with the center becomes the thing actually holding the line whether the institutions running it name that or not.

And the population the money represents has split underneath it on the central question.

Take a moment and go take a Tums. I’ll wait.

Polling reported last year by the Washington Post found 61 percent of American Jews saying Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza, and 39 percent saying genocide. Set the merits aside.

The point for the budget: the people writing it preside over a community bifurcated on the question that defines the politics, and the budget has no category for bifurcation. It was built for a single addressable “American Jewry,” and that body is gone.

The fix follows from the diagnosis.

Split the single American-Jewry line into the four it already contains.

A full-continuity line that puts growth capital where the demographics are actually building, which is the Orthodox communities. A tiered-continuity line for the flagship-metro Conservative and Reform institutions whose density holds over a fifteen-year horizon — and work hard to build up those communities and institutions. A managed-contraction line for the mid-tier communities planning an honest transition, with HUC’s Cincinnati decision as the model and not the embarrassment. And the momentum line, the one that currently happens by default, brought into the open so it has to win the budget meeting instead of drawing the others down in silence.

Naming the fourth line is the whole move. The allocation that currently happens because nobody decided anything becomes the line item that has to defend itself out loud against the other three. And this should not be read as a call to give up — quite the contrary. We need to be brutally honest with ourselves and build the future we want. Tonight, at my shul’s Shavuot event [with a theme centered on the Jewish future], I’m talking about part of the book of Ruth… the stayers. We all need to be stayers.

Sorting communities into those four takes a real test, and we laid one out in The Wrong Map: five indicators read together, never one alone.

1. Day-school sustainability, meaning the enrollment trend, the tuition-to-income ratio, the scholarship depth, the teacher pipeline.

2. Communal-security capacity, the per-capita spend and how professional it has become.

3. Physical clustering, how many families live inside walking distance of a shul.

4. The leadership pipeline, ordination rates and the age curve of the lay board.

5. And the political environment the institutions sit in, which moves faster than the other four put together.

Read as a set, they place a community on its trajectory. Read one at a time, they mislead. And the test runs on communities, never on individual Jews, because the moment it gets pointed at persons it curdles into the diaspora-is-over elegy we have absolutely refuse to write.

Refusing to look does not unmake the body. It guarantees that next year’s budget repeats this year’s, and that the trajectory the money was supposed to slow keeps moving at the speed contraction moves when you fund the wrong category.

The “but” is the symptom

The thesis we own as the American Jewish “but” is the linguistic surface of all of this.

A leader affirms Israel, then qualifies the affirmation against a domestic constraint.

It exists only because the speaker is working a two-centers model. If you accepted that the body has one political center, the qualifier would be unnecessary. If you accepted that the diaspora is structurally distributed, the qualifier would be impossible.

The “but” is what is left of the model after its analytical content has run out, and it is failing now because the audience it was built for has split.

J Street is the cleanest case of that [amongst others] failure. In mid-April Jeremy Ben-Ami announced the group would stop supporting U.S. assistance for Israeli defense systems when the current MOU expires in 2028, on the reasoning that Israel, with a nominal per-capita GDP above Britain’s and France’s, can pay for its own.

Fifteen years of “pro-Israel, pro-peace” required that the defensive systems be a marginal case. Iron Dome is the system that stops the Qassam from landing on the Sderot kindergarten at seven in the morning. Withdrawing support for that, in the name of pro-Israel, is the “but” with the affirmation finally stripped out. Disgustingly, the opposition was never about offense, and the interceptor is the proof.

The ADL ran the same move until it broke in its hand. Greenblatt told the Knesset in January 2025 the group had failed to put out the post-October-7 fire, then two months later pulled out of an Israeli antisemitism conference over the guest list — pro-Israel cooperation on Jew-hate, but not photographed next to politicians with diverging policy views on other things. It worked. He got out of the room. What he could not do was reach the audience the “but” was built for, because that audience is now two audiences. We named them in Two Middles: one moral vocabulary hears “we support Israel” and stops there, the other hears the qualifier as the real position.

One sentence cannot serve both.

Zohran Mamdani’s office supplies the end state of the move, calling synagogues that host pro-Israel events violators of “international law” — the “but” with the affirmation gone entirely, and the buffer-zone politics that follow it.

On the parliamentary surface the same split shows in the count. We tracked in The Fifty Year Front the Senate Democratic votes against Israeli arms moving from 19 in mid-2024 to 27 in July 2025 to 40 of 47 this April on the Caterpillar D9 sale, with 36 against the bomb package.

The “but” rides on top of those votes. The votes underneath carry the real position.

And it is not a one-party story. To paraphrase my rabbi [who has a great track record on being correct—even if he thinks I’m too pessimistic], both parties should make us ashamed.

We have argued before that what looks like abandonment is really a partisan sort, and the sort runs through both sides. The qualifier that used to live on the Democratic left is now audible on the Republican right too, at the donor level, on the record. The middle the “but” was built to address did not collapse. It divided, and one sentence is still being aimed at both halves of it.

An institutional class working a single-body model would not need the “but” at all.

It reaches for it anyway, because the failing model is the only one it knows how to operate.

The adversary has been reading it correctly for fifty years

Here is what the same few weeks looked like from the other side of the table.

Last Saturday two demonstrations arrived in central London on one day: Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally, the larger of the two at tens of thousands, and a smaller Nakba 78 march. The Metropolitan Police ran its biggest public-order operation in years, roughly four thousand officers, 31 arrests, and a new dedicated Community Protection Team standing up specifically to protect Jewish communities. The unit did not exist a month ago. It exists because the demand on London’s protective capacity outran what the CST and ordinary policing could absorb.

Three thousand miles west, Mohamed Soliman pleaded guilty two weeks ago in a Boulder courtroom to firebombing a Jewish gathering on Pearl Street. He told officers his target was “all Zionist people,” and he had planned it for a year. The state sentence is life without parole plus more than two-thousand years. The federal hate-crime case is still live, where the death penalty remains on the table.

Five months earlier, during Hanukkah, the Akram father and son terror duo shot fifteen Jews dead at Bondi Beach, and Australia’s first Royal Commission on antisemitism opened its hearings, where the Executive Council of Australian Jewry testified that documented incidents had roughly quadrupled in the year after October 7.

That is one register, and there are others, all inside the same stretch. Italy’s Meloni suspended automatic renewal of the 2005 Italy-Israel defense memorandum in April. AOC, Khanna, Lander, and Mamdani converged on opposing Iron Dome funding, the same interceptor test J Street had just failed. Rashid Khalidi pulled his Columbia course over the university’s adoption of the IHRA definition.

A diaspora-security register, an allied-government register, a legislative register, an academic register, four faces of one thing.

The diaspora institutions still have not read themselves as one body. The people targeting that body have read it as one for fifty years.

One target

The model for how cross-border activist networks gain political weight is not exotic, and it diagrams the asymmetry exactly. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink named it in Activists Beyond Borders: the transnational advocacy network, actors “bound together by shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services.”

They identified four working tools — information politics, symbolic politics, leverage politics, and accountability politics, the last of which turns a target’s own stated principles back on it — and a geometry they called the boomerang.

A domestic actor blocked at home routes the claim outward through allies abroad, who press their own governments and the international bodies, which then bear down on the original state from above. Sound familiar?

The target reads a domestic complaint it thinks it already settled. The network reads a transnational claim it can move through entirely different doors. Which grievances become network output is decided by the best-connected nodes, by position, not by the merits.

Watch it run on Israel.

An Israeli-Arab advocacy group that loses an argument in a Jerusalem courtroom does not stop there. It files in Geneva, where a friendly rapporteur [now, who might that be?] writes it up, where European foreign ministries cite the writeup, where the citation comes back down on Israel as outside pressure. Israel reads a domestic case it already adjudicated. The network reads a global claim with four more doors to walk through. The tools fan out across the network. One files the report, one hangs the banner, one moves the divestment, one turns Israel’s own stated commitments back on it. Nobody in the chain has to share the next one’s reasons.

This is the move that matters, and it is why we read hostile coalitions as instruments of pressure before we read them as a conspiracy.

The four tools work from any corner of the network without the actors sharing a motive. A scholar applying an academic boycott, a city councilman pushing divestment, a UN rapporteur filing a report, and a campus group hanging a banner can produce coordinated output while wanting different things.

Malice exists, and we name it where it lives. But malice is the second explanation. The first is that the structure produces the targeting, and the test is simple: does the output change when the personnel change? It does not. The slot-holders rotate and the product stays the same. Naming this as structure is the precondition for any response that is not one more round of the moralizing the diaspora institutions have already exhausted.

And this is not classified. It is undergraduate political science. Anyone who wrote a thesis on transnational advocacy in the last twenty years passed through Keck and Sikkink, and the framework is taught at Georgetown and Columbia, the same campuses whose chairs sit at the center of the network it diagrams. The institutions most exposed to the thing have read the diagram and not recognized themselves in it. Peer-reviewed work has already caught up, naming BDS as a textbook case.

The system that has been running since 1975

The standing thing all these registers run on was installed in 1975, and we named it in The Fifty-Year Front. On November 10 of that year the UN General Assembly declared Zionism a form of racism, 72 to 35 with 32 abstentions. That text fell sixteen years later, revoked 111 to 25. The text fell. What 1975 also built did not.

The same month, Resolution 3376 created the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, renewed every year since for fifty years.

A 1977 resolution stood up a Special Unit inside the Secretariat to “promote maximum publicity” for the Palestine question, which grew into today’s Division for Palestinian Rights, its mandate renewed in December 2024 with a new directive to commemorate the Nakba annually. [As if you needed more of a reason to hate the shambles the UN has become.]

A 1993 resolution created the Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories and made the mandate open-ended, alone among every country-specific rapporteur, all of which renew on a one-year cycle with a tenure cap.

The comparison carries the claim. There are country rapporteurs for Afghanistan, Belarus, Burundi, Cambodia, North Korea, Eritrea, Iran, Myanmar, Russia. All renew annually. The Israel mandate alone stands exempt. Agenda Item 7, the human-rights situation in the Palestinian territories, is the only standing country item on the Human Rights Council’s permanent agenda. There is no Item 7 for China, for Syria, for Iran, for North Korea. Even Ban Ki-moon, while Secretary-General, said the singling-out troubled him. The item is still there.

Strip the legalese and it is simple. In 1975 the UN built a permanent office whose job is to produce one findings about one country. They gave it a budget [out of money from your pocket] and a calendar, and never built the equivalent for anyone else. The finding was settled before the office opened. Everything since has been the office doing its work as designed.

The holders rotate and the output holds. Dugard, Falk, Lynk, Albanese, different people and the same conclusions, decade after decade. Albanese, in the slot now, filed a 2024 report calling Israel’s Gaza campaign genocide. And the system absorbs correction the way it absorbs everything else. When Richard Goldstone retracted the central finding of his own Gaza report in 2011, the Council never withdrew it. The reasonable assumption would be that engagement and evidence move these bodies. The record says they do not. They take in retraction, counter-evidence, and every possible set of facts on the ground, and they produce the same finding. That is a standing interpretive machine, and the network runs on it.

Here is the part the framework people miss. The settler-colonial vocabulary that now organizes elite talk on Israel arrived to interpret machinery that was already running. Patrick Wolfe standardized the chassis in 2006 — “invasion is a structure, not an event,” “settlers come to stay,” “elimination of the native” — in a paper now cited some five thousand times. The journal Settler Colonial Studies launched in 2010. Khalidi’s Hundred Years’ War came in 2020. The 1975 committee, the 1977 unit, and the 1993 mandate all predate Wolfe by decades and the journal by a generation. The framing arrived to give a system that had already run for thirty years a respectable vocabulary. Edward Said got there first while the unit was still being stood up, which makes him the origin layer, Wolfe the chassis, and Khalidi the exemplar.

And because the vocabulary is only the shell, it swaps without the network missing a step. Tarrow’s own account of these networks has them changing frames the way they change clothes, through diffusion and internalization, the coalition underneath untouched. The record bears it out. The anti-apartheid coalition that BDS openly copies ran a settler-colonial framing in the 1960s, a human-rights-and-sanctions framing through the 1980s, and the boycott template from the 1990s on, three vocabularies and one machine. The anti-globalization networks made the same march into climate justice, same organizers, same backbones, new frame. So whether the settler-colonial story about Israel is true is almost beside the point for the people running on it. We have argued at book length, and will again when Rooted in Judea comes out shortly, that it is false on the documentary record, the Mishnah compiled in Tzippori and the Jerusalem Talmud in Tiberias and four centuries of Ottoman census underneath it. The network does not need the story to be true. It needs it to be available, and a frame is always available.

It says so in print

Omar Barghouti’s 2011 book, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, names no diaspora institution, no Hillel, no Federation, no AIPAC. The weight sits in the PACBI guidelines Barghouti co-wrote, which are posted on the movement’s own site and quotable verbatim.

The academic guidelines declare “all Israeli academic institutions, unless proven otherwise” boycottable, then widen the target to “Israel, its lobby groups or complicit institutions” and to non-Israeli bodies that “serve Israeli propaganda purposes.”

The cultural guidelines go further and say it plainly: the boycott “must target not only the complicit institutions but also the inherent and organic links between them,” and they sweep in “international ‘brand Israel’ organizations.” That is the single-target picture in the movement’s own words. Diverse Jewish institutions named as one network of complicity, with the diaspora bodies pulled in by function.

It reaches the diaspora in practice. A CUNY Law student government passed a boycott resolution naming groups “like Hillel.” A Massachusetts activist site published a literal network diagram tying synagogues, a Jewish high school, a center for disabled people, Jewish charities, and newspapers to “the colonization of Palestine,” dots and lines, the one-body target drawn at neighborhood scale.

The ADL’s own post-October-7 tracking watched the same targeting move onto Israeli and Jewish-owned businesses on the street. The 2023-24 academic year ran 86 BDS resolutions across student and faculty bodies. The BDS National Committee coordinates the whole thing from a secretariat across five countries — the network Keck and Sikkink diagrammed, with the four tools deployed together.

The most expensive part of this is the academic terrain, and it runs on public-record money. Rashid Khalidi held the Edward Said Chair at Columbia from 2003 until his retirement in October 2024, came back as a special lecturer, then withdrew his course when Columbia adopted the IHRA definition in its settlement with the federal government, calling the definition a deliberate conflation of Jewishness with Israel. The chair he held was endowed at several million dollars, some of it Gulf money.

The chair sits inside a funded landscape. As we documented in The Fifty-Year Front, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies was founded in the same 1975, has drawn more than two-thirds of its money from Arab governments, and sits inside a university that has taken close to a billion [yes, with a “B”] Qatari dollars. Set that against the diaspora side, where an endowed Israel-studies chair runs one to five million in private money that keeps its exit rights — the University of Washington handed a chair back in 2022 over the holder’s positioning. One side runs on sovereign-state capital that does not walk. The other runs on diaspora capital that can.

The terrain is asymmetric by design. The adversary owns the ground, and Israel keeps funding the reaction.

What reading like the adversary would mean

If the people targeting the body operate as one, the answer is to defend it as one, and the pieces already exist, built unevenly, scattered across borders, coordinated only as far as whatever protocols each national organization happened to sign.

The IDF Spokesperson works in seven languages now, with Turkish added last year, and it is the closest thing to a single-body broadcast layer in Israeli life — and it sits on the army, not on the diaspora, which has no equivalent.

The J7 Global Task Force, stood up in July 2023, links seven national advocacy organizations, among them the UK Board of Deputies, France’s CRIF, the ADL, and the Conference of Presidents, into joint working groups. It runs as voluntary coordination with no central command. The model exists. Scaling it is the open question.

Two security organizations sit at the center, and the gap between them is the diagnosis. The Secure Community Network runs its Chicago operations center, a proprietary threat platform tracking more than 12,400 Jewish facilities across North America, the only faith-based direct line to the FBI’s threat center, and a staff that grew from five to seventy-five. It is dwarfed, though, by Britian’s version — which serves fewer people in a smaller area.

Britain’s Community Security Trust runs four offices, ninety-odd staff, several thousand volunteers, protects roughly 200 schools and 250 synagogues, and recorded 4,103 antisemitic incidents in 2023. Its funding climbed from £14 million in 2022 to a £72 million package for 2024 through 2028. S

CN talks to the FBI. CST talks to the Home Office.

No public document describes a standing coordination protocol between SCN and CST, or between either of them and Israel’s Diaspora Affairs ministry.

The closest thing on the available record is the Penn Station case, where the Community Security Service, CST, and ADL worked a single plot with New York law enforcement. One after-action memo, waiting for the next case.

The people targeting the body produce standing infrastructure. The people defending it produce case files.

What the missing line would do is not exotic.

A threat that CST’s analysts flag in London on a Friday would reach SCN’s Chicago floor before the same play runs in New York on Sunday.

A funding pattern Mosaic can see on a French campus would tell NBN what to expect at a New York aliyah event. The IDF Spokesperson’s Persian desk would feed the diaspora organizations tracking the same Iranian accounts, and the MFA’s diaspora liaison would sit in the room instead of reading about it afterward.

None of that costs anyone a board seat. It costs a shared line and the decision to treat one body’s threats as one body’s problem.

The cost of leaving it like this shows up on the broadcast side too.

As we reported, Israel’s combined public-diplomacy spend was a rounding error as recently as 2023, roughly twenty-fold smaller than the war-time budget across three ministries, and Sa’ar’s twentyfold increase is largely unspent. And the national public-diplomacy directorate’s top job went vacant for over a year.

Meanwhile the post-October-7 emergency money, that $908 million, went substantially into Israel through thousands of grants, while diaspora-side communal security scaled separately and an order of magnitude smaller.

The serious objection is the autonomy one. American Jewish life is voluntary, plural, fragmented by design, nothing like a kehilla, and a single-body operation sounds like it would crush that.

It would, if it meant unified governance. It does not.

Voluntariness is threatened by anyone trying to run the community from one chair, never by shared threat-assessment and shared response.

J7 already proves the point, seven countries’ autonomous organizations coordinating without a central command. Scaling J7 from working-group pace to operational pace, coupling SCN and CST into a standing transatlantic threat-assessment line with the IDF Spokesperson’s languages and the MFA’s diaspora liaison feeding in, closes the asymmetry without touching anyone’s autonomy.

The pieces are not hypothetical, because the de facto version already runs in three places. Mosaic United has been governed jointly by an Israeli ministry and diaspora philanthropy for a decade. The post-October-7 emergency campaign decided its allocations through a joint Israeli-diaspora committee. And the longest-running case is Argentina, where Israeli intelligence drove a host state’s legal system to rule on the AMIA bombing three decades after the attack. The model exists in fragments. What is missing is the standing line that connects them.

The order matters, because doing it backwards produces the worst result on offer. Diagnose first, community by community, on the five indicators. Reallocate second, rebuild the budget lines to match what the diagnosis found, and make the momentum line argue for itself. Coordinate third, couple the security organizations and accept Israeli operational weight on defense in exchange for an Israeli budget commitment. Let the vocabulary go last. The word “partnership” falls away on its own once the money has moved. An institution that takes the language first and the allocation never has only performed the new model on top of the old machinery, which is worse than the honest two-centers version, because it imports the urgency and skips the work.

The single moves are already happening. Hesse’s parliament introduced a bill last month to criminalize denial of Israel’s right to exist, five years’ imprisonment, and sent it to committee — a near-identical version stalled there before, so the outcome is open, but a German state legislature is at least trying procedural defense while the MFA looks elsewhere. Columbia’s IHRA adoption is procedural defense at the university. The Met’s new team is protection sized to one city’s demand. Each is one move at one point. None of them is the standing institution the diagnosis calls for, the body the network can push against and find resistance.

The cost does not arrive as theory. It arrives in next year’s denominational budget, in the next line booked against “American Jewry” as one thing, in the next security incident the funding was sized too small to meet, and the one after that. It arrives until the institutions either read the body they are funding or stop funding the version of it that no longer exists.

The diaspora institutions have not read the body. The people targeting it read it correctly in 1975, and they have not stopped reading it since. Closing that gap is what watching is for, and the adversary is not waiting for the diaspora to catch up.

We mark the morning at Sinai this week, when a crowd of former slaves stood k’ish echad b’lev echad, as one person with one heart, and became a people. The oldest thing we know about ourselves is the thing the adversary relearned and the institutions forgot. One body. We should start funding it like one.

Chag sameach!

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

Shabbat shalom, friends.

Rabbi Dov Lando is ninety-five years old and the spiritual head of Degel HaTorah, the Lithuanian-Haredi faction of United Torah Judaism. On Monday afternoon he instructed his lawmakers to dissolve the Knesset. The sentence he sent through them: We no longer have any trust in Netanyahu. After that, the coalition whip Ofir Katz submitted the dissolution bill — cosponsored by every party that had been sitting in the coalition Lando had just walked out of.

So Israel is heading to an election — a little earlier than planned. Possibly September 1st, more probably September 15th, possibly the last viable Tuesday before October’s High Holidays close the window. The bill leaves the date to the Knesset House Committee, which is chaired by Katz himself, which means Netanyahu will pick when the question is finally put to voters. Likud is bleeding seats in every poll. Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid have merged Yamina and Yesh Atid into a single ticket that may finish ahead of Likud. The Israeli public is angrier at the Haredi draft exemption than at any point in the country’s history. Eighty-four percent of Israelis now support drafting eligible Haredim, up from sixty-seven percent at the start of the year before. The diaspora is watching this and noticing — for the first time in years — that someone other than Netanyahu may actually be in a position to fix something.

This brief is here to disappoint that read. Sorry.

The election will happen. The math will not move. The next coalition will give Shas and UTJ roughly what this coalition gave them, because the political arithmetic of proportional representation does not change between cycles and the mechanisms producing Haredi leverage are not on the ballot. Diaspora Jews who have been watching Israeli democracy through the lens of “will the public finally throw the bums out?” have been asking the wrong question for thirty years. The question that actually maps onto things the diaspora cares about — conversion recognition, civil marriage, Kotel access, “Who Is A Jew?” for diaspora kids — runs on coalition portfolios, on which specific MK gets which ministry after the agreement is signed. The election picks the bloc that gets to negotiate. The agreement decides the answers all of us actually must live with.

Israel’s Coalitions Collapse by Design

The Knesset that took office in late 2022 will be the seventh Israeli government in seven years to fail to serve a full four-year term. [Though it got pretty close!] The one before lasted twelve and a half months. The one before that fell apart twice — April 2019 to September 2019, then September 2019 to March 2020 — without ever producing a working coalition between elections. Going back to 1999, exactly one other Israeli government has come close to its statutory term, and even that one ended in dissolution rather than calendar.

The system is built to produce this. Israel runs nationwide proportional representation with a 3.25% threshold and no constructive vote of no confidence. The German Basic Law’s Article 67 requires the Bundestag to elect a successor by majority before removing the chancellor, which means a German coalition partner who walks out has to commit to a replacement. Israel has no such requirement. A Knesset majority can dissolve the government without naming what comes next. That changes the incentive on coalition partners at the margin. In Germany, walking out is a positive act. In Israel, it is a free option.

The free option gets exercised when the cost of staying inside exceeds the cost of going to the country. For Shas and UTJ the cost calculation broke this month.

The June 2024 High Court ruling — unanimous — held that the government must draft Haredi yeshiva students into the IDF, that the prior June 2023 cabinet decision instructing the army not to begin drafting was illegal, and that the state was engaged in “invalid selective enforcement, which represents a serious violation of the rule of law.” The coalition agreement Shas and UTJ signed in December 2022 promised them a legislative fix that would put a permanent exemption beyond the court’s reach. Nearly incalculable attempts have produced no such legislation, because any bill the coalition can pass will not survive judicial review and the bill that would survive judicial review the coalition cannot pass.

Netanyahu told the Haredi leaders in early May that he could not deliver before an election. Moshe Gafni refused to take his calls. Yitzhak Goldknopf, who leads UTJ’s Agudat Yisrael faction, said publicly that Netanyahu had never had any intention of honoring the agreement. Lando issued the directive to dissolve. Aryeh Deri of Shas — whose own party is now brokering the date question between Degel HaTorah (which wants September 1) and his own faction (which wants to vote during the High Holidays for maximum traditional turnout) — told the Shas paper:

We will not enter a coalition or government without regulating the status of Torah students.

The mechanism of collapse is the Haredi draft fix Netanyahu cannot legislate. The question the election will functionally ask is which coalition arithmetic best lets the next government continue to fail to legislate it. Corruption charges, Iran, Gaza, the Trump administration — those are atmospherics. The exemption legislation Lando broke the coalition over is what the next coalition must still grapple with. Frankly, the opposition needs to give up on some of its demands and partner with Likud if it wants the Haredim to serve. Ra’am is a nonstarter for a stable coalition, and the Haredi factions aren’t going to give up on their quest. [If you can’t have what you want, it’s still better to avoid the more distasteful options. But why would politicians commit to logic?]

The Israeli electoral cycle has two versions. The first — and the rarer one — runs the constitutional clock to roughly the four-year mark and dissolves at the deadline. That has not happened in twenty-seven years. The second — the actual baseline — collapses somewhere in years two or three, when a coalition partner concludes their leverage is worth more from the outside than from the inside. This election is the second kind more than the first. The next one, almost certainly, will also be the second kind.

What the Haredim Want, and Why Bibi Cannot Deliver It

The current Haredi demand is specific, and the specificity is what makes it impossible. Shas and UTJ are not asking for a yeshiva-stipend increase, though they want that too. They are not asking for a coalition fund allocation, though they will take one. They are asking for legislation that would permanently exempt full-time Torah students from military service in a form that would survive the next High Court challenge. That second clause is the one Netanyahu cannot satisfy.

The June 2024 ruling grounded its holding in the 1988 Rubinstein doctrine — that any dramatic policy harming the principle of equality, including a blanket Haredi exemption, must be legislated by the Knesset rather than effected by government decision. Because the legal-framework clauses of the Security Service Law expired in June 2023 without a replacement, the IDF was obligated to apply the universal draft. The court accepted an IDF starting target of 4,800 Haredi recruits by June 2025 as a minimum starting figure. Actual enrollment by late April 2025 ran to just over two thousand, with an optimistic projection of 2,500 to 2,700 by cycle end. Of 24,000 Haredi men sent draft notices in the year that followed the ruling, 1,212 began the enlistment process. That is five percent. The IDF estimates 71,000 people are evading service, of whom roughly eighty percent are Haredim. Of the first three thousand to receive call-ups, some 1,300+ had arrest warrants issued for failure to comply. Between January 2025 and January 2026, only some seventeen Haredi draft evaders were arrested via proactive Military Police operations. The Israel Police, IDF officials told the AG, are systematically blocking the army from arresting evaders in Haredi neighborhoods. [You may recall in a recent issue of the daily brief that we detailed Haredi groups distributing tasers, pepper spray, and the like for the group to use against police. Clearly, then, this is not an issue of being a pacifist. Pathetic.]

The legislative attempts since June 2024 have failed in instructive ways. Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, as chair of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, drafted a bill in 2025 that imposed individual sanctions on draft evaders and aimed to significantly increase the IDF’s conscription base. UTJ left the government on July 14, 2025. Shas pulled its ministers on July 16. On July 23 the Likud faction voted 29-4 to remove Edelstein from his committee chair and replace him with Boaz Bismuth, with Communications Minister Karhi telling MKs that the move was aimed at repairing relations with the Haredi parties. The Bismuth-era replacement bill softened the sanctions and broadened the exemption pathways. Knesset legal counsel concluded in December 2025 that the new bill would not reduce inequality and would therefore not survive judicial review. AG Gali Baharav-Miara told the High Court the government is in violation of its order on Haredi conscription, calling the refusal “a real danger to Israel’s democracy.” She pans the coalition bill on the merits — its sanctions are too weak to disincentivize evasion, its exemption pathways are too broad. [For once, something I can agree with her on.] The bill the coalition will pass and the bill the court will accept are not the same bill, and they have not been the same bill at any point since the original ruling.

The theoretical pathway out of this is a Basic Law: Torah Study — constitutional-rank legislation enshrining Torah study as a foundational value and pre-empting equality-doctrine review. The current coalition’s agreement contemplated such a Basic Law in December 2022. It has not been advanced, and its passage is quite unlikely. The override clause Haredi parties pursued inside the 2023 judicial-overhaul package was meant to provide the same legal cover, and it died with the broader reform.

So the demand Shas and UTJ are charging Netanyahu for is a price he has no mechanism to pay. He cannot pass the bill that would satisfy the court, because the coalition is split on whether to actually conscript Haredim and the bill that would conscript them is the one Shas and UTJ walked out over. He cannot pass the Basic Law that would override the court, because he does not have the votes inside his own party. And he cannot defy the court directly. And due to a more general public resentment and because IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir is on record warning the IDF could collapse without Haredi enlistment, the public isn’t going to stand for much more gamesmanship — they’re currently at eighty-four percent support for the underlying conscription. The coalition is paying for a fix that the system cannot produce. Yitzhak Goldknopf was right. Netanyahu never had a way to deliver it. He probably knew that in December 2022.

The War Changed Everything Except the Math

October 7 was thirty-one months ago. Reservist combat soldiers served on average 136 days in year one of the war. Combat commanders served 168. The pre-war comparator was twenty-five days every three years plus annual training. Forward projection, doesn’t look any better.

Forty-five percent of reservist commanders reported a ten-percent-or-greater drop in turnout, attributed directly to burnout. Fifteen thousand previously released reservists were re-called up amid the troop shortage. Seventy-three percent of self-employed reservist spouses reported economic harm. Twelve percent of pre-war self-employed reservists became salaried employees during the war. Eight percent became unemployed. Half of reservist spouses reported harm to their marriages. One in three reported that the harm had escalated to thoughts of separation. One in five couples had actively considered divorce.

This is the worst it has been since we started the brief.

The polling on Haredi draft has tracked the burden in lockstep. Public support for drafting eligible Haredim ran eighty-four and a half percent in November 2024 — up from sixty-seven percent in January of the same year — and has not retreated since. Sixty-eight percent of Israelis oppose any law exempting Haredim from military service even if rejecting it triggers government collapse and new elections. Eighty-five percent of non-Haredi Jewish Israelis support sanctions on draft evaders. Religious-Zionist support for Haredi enlistment more than doubled in a single year — from thirty-six percent to seventy-two percent. The Brothers and Sisters in Arms movement, founded in 2023 to oppose the judicial reform, resumed activity in mid-2024 and reoriented its program around Haredi conscription and new elections. A reservist told the Knesset committee debating the draft bill in August 2025 — speaking the line that has now become the canonical framing — We have prayer, we are serving, we are dying.

So the analytical question is whether thirty-one months of disproportionate burden are different in kind from the previous public-fed-up cycles, or just larger in degree. The case for “different in kind” is real.

The reserve burden has never been this sustained. The economic damage to reservist families has no precedent.

The Religious-Zionist sector, the IDF’s traditional officer corps, has shifted its position on Haredi conscription.

The IDF’s own chiefs are now publicly testifying that the coalition’s draft bill will not solve the manpower problem.

The Bank of Israel is on record saying the bill is insufficient to ease the burden on the economy.

Even the Likud aliyah minister has warned that pushing the exemption legislation could trigger a large shift in election results.

Every word of that is true, and every word of it has been true at some level in every prior cycle, and the math has not moved.

Public support for Haredi conscription stood at sixty-seven percent in some polls during the Bennett-Lapid period. The 2013 Yesh Atid platform was built on draft equality and the Haredi parties returned to coalition by 2015. The 1999 Barak election was supposed to mark the moment the public revolt against Haredi exemption would force the policy. Shas grew from ten seats to seventeen in that election — its all-time best result.

The Israeli electoral system absorbs cycles like this and metabolizes them into coalition agreements that nominally address the issue— though, in practice do not.

This Bismuth-era exemption bill is the metabolization in real time. Nineteen percent of Israelis back the coalition’s specific bill. Fifty-four percent believe it would not actually lead to Haredi service. [The other forty-odd percent haven’t read it.]

Public Fury Has Never Broken the Bloc

Haredi voters turn out at near-totality. The three majority-Haredi cities — Elad, Beitar Illit, Modi’in Illit, which the Israel Democracy Institute uses as the proxy for Haredi turnout because the Central Elections Committee does not break it out by sector — ran well above the 70.6% national rate in the November 2022 election.

The Haredi-party absolute vote rose nineteen percent over 2021 while overall national turnout rose only about three points. Haredi turnout exceeds the national average for the same reason Mormon turnout in Utah exceeds the American average — it is mediated by religious authority. The vote is treated as a halachic obligation, and the community votes as a bloc. The two-party Haredi consolidation, Shas and UTJ, runs to roughly zero wasted votes because both parties clear the 3.25% threshold comfortably and neither serves a public the other party is also serving. The bloc converts its turnout efficiency into seats.

The Haredi share of Israel’s population was 14.3% in 2025, per the Israel Democracy Institute’s annual statistical report drawing on Central Bureau of Statistics data. It was 8.6% in 2009. The community grew from 750,000 to roughly 1.45 million in sixteen years, at a per-year growth rate of about 4.2% — the highest of any population in the developed world. The CBS forecasts put Haredi share at 16% in 2030 and the Haredi population at two million in 2033. Fifty-seven percent of Haredim are under twenty, versus thirty-one percent for the general Israeli population. Total fertility runs 6.5 children per woman for Haredi women, against 2.2 for other Jewish women — a forty-three-year low for the Haredi rate, and still close to three times the non-Haredi rate. The trajectory is not slowing fast enough to matter for the next decade of elections.

The school-level indicator is sharper still. In the 2025 academic year, for the first time in Israeli history, religious first-graders (Haredi plus national-religious combined) outnumbered secular first-graders by thousands. Secular first-grade enrollment declined for two consecutive years. In Jerusalem, Haredi first-graders alone numbered 8,652 — nearly double the combined non-Haredi total of 4,643. The 2025 first-grade cohort is the 2037 draft pool. The Haredi share of that pool will substantially exceed the Haredi share of today’s adult electorate. Anyone telling you that the bloc’s demographic momentum is about to break is reading a chart someone drew with crayons during a bumpy car ride.

The secular and traditional Israeli majority that the public-fed-up theory imagines as a single political force has never been a single political force. The 2022 Knesset seated thirteen parties across the spectrum, from Otzma Yehudit on one end to Hadash-Ta’al on the other. The largest non-Haredi party — Likud — won 32 seats. The second-largest, Yesh Atid, won 24. Shas and UTJ combined won 18. Inside that asymmetry sits the actual game.

The Haredi bloc operates as one unit. The non-Haredi majority is split into roughly a dozen units, none of which can govern alone, all of which have to form a coalition with someone. And most of which find that the simplest available coalition partner is the bloc that votes together and accepts a stipend increase as the price of admission.

Every Israeli government since 1977 except the Rabin governments and the Bennett-Lapid government has included one or both Haredi parties. The Bennett-Lapid coalition lasted twelve and a half months.

The seat history compresses the same picture. Shas and UTJ ran 7 and 6 in 2015. 8 and 7 in April 2019. 9 and 7 in September 2019. 9 and 7 in March 2020. 9 and 7 in March 2021. 11 and 7 in November 2022. The bloc has never dropped below 13 seats in the modern era and is currently at 18. Its growth has been smooth, steady, and decoupled from the political weather. The 2022 result is the highest in Shas history. The Haredi vote share rose from 12.8% of the national vote in 2021 to 14.2% in 2022 — slightly exceeding the Haredi population share for the cycle, because of the turnout differential and the absence of wasted votes.

The Bennett-Lapid government is the natural experiment everyone reaches for, and the natural experiment cuts against the theory.

Eight parties spanning the full Israeli political spectrum including Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am, and the government still excluded both Haredi parties for the first time in Israeli history. Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman cut the childcare subsidy for kollel families. The expiring Netanyahu-era draft exemption framework was allowed to lapse. The Kotel implementation was announced. Twelve and a half months in, the government fell on internal coalition friction, Yamina defections to Likud, and standard coalition stress.

The replacement was the 37th Government, which gave Shas and UTJ NIS 13.7 billion in coalition discretionary funds, nearly doubled the kollel stipend from NIS 700 to NIS 1,300 per month at an annual taxpayer cost of NIS 1.5 billion, raised yeshiva-system funding thirty-one percent over the prior budget, and committed to the permanent exemption legislation we have just spent two sections explaining the system cannot pass.

The Bennett-Lapid coalition was the strongest anti-Haredi government in Israeli political history. It was not enough. Its lifespan was 376 days. Its successor was the largest Haredi concession package in the country’s history.

The bloc does not need a particular outcome on September 15. It will be there with enough seats that whoever forms the next government will give generous consideration to their price.

Anti-Bibi Math Doesn’t Solve the Haredi Problem

So what happens if the opposition wins. The polling through April and May 2026 is consistent enough to take seriously. Channel 12’s late-April reading — Bennett-Lapid’s “Together” alliance at 26, Likud at 25, Eisenkot’s Yashar at 15, the Democrats at 10, Shas at 9, Yisrael Beitenu at 9, Otzma Yehudit at 9, UTJ at 7, Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am at 5 each. The Walla poll the same week put Likud at 28 and Together at 27. The bloc count Channel 12 has been running is Netanyahu’s bloc at 50, the Zionist opposition at 60, Arab factions at 10. Neither Jewish-only bloc clears 61.

To form a government without Shas and UTJ, the anti-Netanyahu coalition needs 61 Knesset seats. The polling math gives it 58 to 60. The gap is closed only by Ra’am, the Arab party led by Mansour Abbas that signed a January 2026 preliminary agreement to revive the Joint List as what Abbas called a “technical bloc,” allowing Ra’am to split off after the election and join a Jewish-led coalition. Inside the Arab caucus, Ra’am is the only party open to coalition entry. Hadash and Ta’al will support an anti-Netanyahu bloc from the opposition. Balad is opposed to any Zionist-led coalition.

Now look at what the Together alliance pledged when it formed on April 26. Bennett and Lapid committed to coalition only with Zionist parties — explicitly ruling out both Haredi and Arab parties. Liberman of Yisrael Beitenu, more categorical:

For me, there is no place for non-Zionist elements in the next government, not for the Arab parties and not for the haredi parties.

He isn’t wrong. [Read Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy if in doubt.] Yisrael Beitenu formalized this in a five-point pledge ahead of the campaign. Liberman in November said":

First, we will put all draft dodgers in prison, and then we will strip them of the right to vote.

So the opposition is running on a pledge that, taken literally, makes it mathematically impossible to form a government without Shas, UTJ, or the Arab parties.

Pick any two of those three and the bloc clears 61. Refuse all three and the bloc does not. The campaign promise is the campaign promise; the coalition arithmetic is what arrives the morning after the count.

They’re going to have to get over themselves and swallow their pride and join Likud if they want to get this done. Which, to be clear, is at extremely low odds.

So, what happens then runs along two branches. Branch one, the opposition holds the pledge. The Together-Yashar-Democrats-Yisrael Beitenu coalition forms somewhere around 60 seats, picks up a defector or two from elsewhere to get to 61, and governs without Haredim and without Arabs. The Bennett-Lapid 2021 to 2022 precedent applies directly.

That government formed at 60 plus Ra’am abstention, held for 376 days, and fell on Yamina defections, Judea and Samaria policy friction, and the budget cycle. The current Israeli budget cycle would put the first hard money fight in the spring of 2027. A coalition that thin cannot realistically survive that fight.

Branch two, the opposition breaks the pledge. The most plausible version is that Gantz — who has urged at points a hostage-redemption government including Netanyahu, and who has not categorically ruled out a coalition with Haredi parties the way Liberman has — takes a coalition agreement with Shas after Shas extracts a smaller-than-2022 but still material package of yeshiva-stipend protection and a quiet shelving of draft enforcement. The Haredi parties accept smaller concessions in exchange for getting back inside the room. The new coalition discovers, eight or twelve months in, that it cannot pass a budget without Shas’s votes, and the price was already negotiated.

Eisenkot has been clearer than Lapid or Bennett on the draft. The coalition bill, in his framing, is “dangerous for the security of the State of Israel” and “dismantles the framework of the people’s army.” The merged Yashar-Liberman bloc that has been forming in negotiations through April and May 2026 carries the hardest line in the opposition on Haredi conscription. They are the floor on what an anti-Netanyahu coalition could give Shas while still calling itself an anti-Haredi government. The ceiling is Gantz.

Yuli Edelstein, the Likud MK removed from his FADC chair for the draft bill that broke the coalition, responded to the Haredi push to dissolve the Knesset with three words. I told you so. The opposition is about to discover the same thing. Changing out the casting doesn’t change the arithmetic.

What an Election Cannot Touch

Three institutional facts will be on the next government’s desk whoever wins.

The first is the High Court, which has spent the last two years writing itself into the conscription question and shows no sign of retreating. The November 2025 ruling ordered the state to produce an effective enforcement policy within forty-five days, including economic sanctions on draft evaders. The subsequent ruling conditioned welfare benefits — first-time homebuyer discounts, daycare and after-school subsidies — on IDF enlistment, with the Israel Land Council and the Labor Ministry directed to comply within twenty-one days. The government has not adopted the economic-sanctions plan. The court has not blinked. The pattern of judicial assertiveness documented in our earlier long brief The Unfinished State — the High Court writing itself a veto on coalition policy and exercising it as a matter of doctrine — applies here in its hardest form: a question the Knesset cannot legislate around without a constitutional move the coalition does not have the votes to make. The next government inherits the court’s order regardless of which bloc wins — and will need to grapple with its own version of judicial reform.

The second institutional fact is the AG. Gali Baharav-Miara has aligned with the court against the government and stayed there. Her position on the coalition’s exemption bill is the position of the court’s legal counsel — that it will disincentivize enlistment rather than produce it. The AG is independent by appointment design. The next government could attempt to replace her, but the legal mechanism for doing so is contested and the political cost of doing so during a manpower crisis is high. A government that came in promising to enforce Haredi conscription would not be moving against her. A government that came in promising to satisfy Shas would be — and would face the same High Court that issued the November 2025 sanctions order.

The third institutional fact is the IDF Personnel Directorate, which is publicly split from the government on the conscription question. Brigadier General Shay Tayeb, head of Personnel Planning, told the Knesset the IDF can absorb 5,760 Haredi soldiers a year and “everything needed beyond that” with advance notice. Major General Dado Bar Kalifa, head of the directorate, said publicly that arrests of Haredi draft evaders are ineffective because they are blocked by “psychiatrists and an army of lawyers who arrange what is called ‘the exemption.’” The IDF’s stated need is 12,000 recruits urgently, with a broader 15,000-additional-personnel estimate including 7,000 to 8,000 combat positions. Eighty thousand Haredi men aged 18 to 24 are non-enlisting. One in five IDF fighters is now female — a compositional response the army has framed explicitly as compensating for the Haredi gap.

None of those three institutional facts is on the ballot. The court is not on the ballot. The AG is not on the ballot. The IDF Personnel Directorate is not on the ballot. The demographic curve underneath all three is not on the ballot. What is on the ballot is which coalition gets to fail to legislate around the court, fail to satisfy the manpower demand, and fail to bend the demographic curve.

This is what the diaspora has missed for thirty years. The electoral question is real, to be sure. But, the institutional questions are bigger.

Diaspora Stakes Live in the Coalition, Not the Vote

The question diaspora Jews should actually be asking in the run-up to September 15 is which coalition composition puts which minister in charge of which portfolio. The diaspora-relevant questions — conversion recognition, civil marriage, Kotel access, “Who Is A Jew” for the grandchildren of intermarried families making Aliyah — flow from those portfolios. Religious Affairs, Interior, the Conversion Authority, the Religious Services Ministry. Not from electoral mandate. Not from “Israeli democracy” as an abstraction. From which particular MK is sitting behind which desk after the coalition agreement is signed.

The natural experiment runs in both directions. The Bennett-Lapid government held the portfolios with Yamina, Yesh Atid, and Yisrael Beitenu. The Kotel implementation was announced. The kollel childcare subsidy was cut. The lapsed Haredi draft exemption was celebrated. The 2021 High Court ruling that Reform and Conservative conversions performed in Israel must be recognized for Law of Return purposes was operative and respected. The Conversion Authority’s leadership question stayed open but movable. The 37th Government took the same portfolios with Shas and UTJ. The Kotel bill cementing Orthodox-rabbinate control over the entire Western Wall — defining non-Orthodox worship at the Ezrat Israel section as “desecration” — passed preliminary reading. The Conversion Authority head appointment has been frozen by Netanyahu-Haredi deadlock since January 2023, leaving 1,200 to 1,400 of the roughly 560,000 Israeli citizens not formally recognized as Jewish in conversion limbo. Avi Maoz of the Noam Party proposed in May 2025 to amend the Law of Return’s grandchild clause, the 1970 amendment that allowed Soviet-era refuseniks and their descendants to make Aliyah, calling current practice “one of the greatest absurdities in the Israeli law book.” The Law of Return amendment debate was just reignited a few weeks ago.

The pattern is clear and the lesson is the same regardless of which framing you reach for.

Which government has Religious Affairs and Interior in 2026 will determine where conversion recognition sits in 2027 and 2028, the Kotel bill’s path in the Knesset, the Conversion Authority head appointment, the grandchild-clause amendment, and the civil-marriage legislation Yesh Atid presented in 2013 and 2015 and has not moved since.

The Reform movement’s URJ statement, co-signed by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, framed the grandchild-clause amendment threat as a rift-with-diaspora question — “deep concern about efforts to either revoke recognition of Reform, Conservative, and modern Orthodox conversions or abolish the Law of Return’s grandchild clause.”

The Rabbinical Assembly “unequivocally rejects” calls to end recognition of Masorti-Conservative and Reform conversions for Aliyah. These are real institutional positions. They are also positions that move or don’t move based on which Knesset committee chair is sitting on the relevant bill.

I have given some version of this explanation many times to people and groups throughout the diaspora, and the resistance is always to the granularity. The audience wants a political-team frame — “is your guy the good guy or the bad guy” — and the granularity is the part that requires actually reading the coalition agreement.

The audience that has been watching Israeli politics through “will democracy hold” is watching the wrong dial. Israeli democracy holds. Israeli democracy has held through every government that has formed and dissolved over the past twenty-seven years.

Israeli democracy is going to hold through whatever forms after September 15 too.

What is contested is the composition of the coalition the system produces. That composition is what determines whether a Reform-converted teenager born to an intermarried American family can make Aliyah, whether a non-Orthodox prayer group can hold a bat mitzvah at the Kotel without being defined by statute as desecrating the site, whether the Conversion Authority has a head who can move files.

These are the questions diaspora Jews live with. They flow from portfolios. They do not flow from electoral mandate.

The diaspora institutional class that prefers to operate on “democracy is on the ballot” framing has been doing so for thirty years and has the fundraising outcomes to show for it.

JFNA raised $683 million in its 2024 Israeli Emergency Campaign and $908 million total since October 7. Some of that money funded Brothers and Sisters in Arms.

None of it funded a serious public-affairs program on the coalition-portfolio question, because the coalition-portfolio question requires the diaspora institutional class to take a Knesset-level position and the institutional class has been resistant to that.

Reform and Conservative Jewish leadership have been the exceptions. Federation leadership and JAFI have not.

If you read the next Israeli coalition agreement to find your answer on conversion, civil marriage, Kotel, and Who Is A Jew, you will find your answer.

The agreement is public. It will be signed in October or November of 2026. Your portfolio answers will be the appendices.

Scenarios: Four Paths Out of the Knesset

The probability calibration that follows weights political friction, coalition fragility, and institutional inertia heavily. Israeli electoral systems metabolize public-fed-up energy into cosmetic adjustment. That bias dominates the assignment.

Netanyahu Survives and Buys Shas Off Again.
The polling has Likud bleeding seats, but the prior election cycle’s polling also had Likud below 30 and the November 2022 actual delivered 32 with Smotrich-Ben Gvir’s combined slate at 14. The 2026 coalition reconstitutes around Likud at 22-25, Religious Zionism plus Otzma Yehudit at 13-15, Shas at 9-11, UTJ at 6-8, possibly Yisrael Beitenu peeled off through portfolio offer. Cosmetic exemption language in the coalition agreement, yeshiva-stipend protection at current levels or slightly higher, a Basic Law: Torah Study reintroduced and stuck again. The Haredi parties get less than in 2022 because the war has shifted the baseline, but they get more than the 2021 floor.
Probability: roughly 40 to 45 percent. This is the highest-probability path because it is the path of least friction, and Israeli political systems default to least-friction outcomes.

Anti-Bibi Coalition Forms and Folds.
The Together-Yashar-Democrats-Yisrael Beitenu coalition forms at 60 to 62 seats with a Ra’am abstention or one or two defections from other blocs, holds the pledge against Shas, governs for eight to fourteen months, and falls on the budget cycle in spring 2027 or on internal Together-Yashar friction over Judea and Samaria policy. The Bennett-Lapid precedent applies directly. Twelve and a half months. This scenario is the cleanest version of the opposition’s promise and the version the campaign will be sold on. It is also the one the Israeli system has metabolized once already, and the second metabolization is faster than the first.
Probability: roughly 20 to 25 percent. The arithmetic supports it. The politics, almost certainly, do not survive it.

Anti-Bibi Coalition Forms and Brings the Haredim Back In.
The Together-led coalition forms at 58 to 60 seats, discovers in negotiation that it cannot pass a budget without Shas, breaks the pledge in stages — first by accepting Shas’s abstention on confidence votes, then by passing a yeshiva-stipend protection clause, then by quietly shelving draft enforcement in exchange for Shas joining the coalition formally. Gantz is the most likely vehicle for this move, because he has been the least categorical of the opposition leaders on Haredi exclusion. The resulting coalition gives Shas less than in 2022 but more than zero, gets a budget passed, and serves out a full or near-full term. The Religious Affairs and Interior portfolios are negotiated. Diaspora-relevant policy moves, partially.
Probability: roughly 25 to 30 percent. This is the path the Israeli system metabolizes most efficiently — opposition wins, opposition governs, opposition adopts the same compromises the prior coalition made because the math demanded them.

The Court Forces the Issue.
Whichever coalition forms continues to fail to deliver enforcement at the levels the High Court has demanded. The court, in late 2026 or early 2027, orders the IDF to stop deferring Haredi conscripts as a class. The AG aligns with the order. The IDF Personnel Directorate complies operationally. Haredi communities mobilize, demonstrate, possibly riot. A confrontation begins that no coalition is prepared to absorb, because Shas and UTJ would walk out of any government that complies and the secular middle would walk out of any government that doesn’t.
Probability: roughly 10 to 15 percent. This is the live scenario the Bismuth bill, the AG’s posture, and the November 2025 sanctions order make available. It is also the one the system has the strongest institutional resistance to, because every actor inside it — court, AG, IDF, coalition — prefers continued institutional standoff to direct confrontation. The court has been more assertive than the political system has been able to absorb at every step since June 2024. Whether it forces the next step depends on whether enough justices conclude that the political class is treating the existing orders as cosmetic and decide that judicial credibility now requires the harder move.

The diaspora overlay across the four: under scenarios 1 and 3, Religious Affairs and Interior stay with Haredi parties or are negotiated in Haredi-favorable terms, and conversion, civil marriage, Kotel, and Who Is A Jew do not materially move. Under scenario 2, the portfolios go to Together-aligned parties, the Conversion Authority head is appointed, the Kotel bill is dropped, and the 2022 grandchild-clause amendment threat lapses — for as long as the government holds. Under scenario 4, the diaspora-relevant questions become a footnote in a broader institutional crisis whose Knesset arithmetic is unpredictable.

September 15 is going to come. The Israeli public is going to vote. The bloc that comes out of the vote ahead is going to negotiate a coalition with the parties that survive the math of the system that produced this election in the first place.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

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Shalom, friends.

I decided to write this brief because I felt attacked by absurdly naive vocabulary — from our own camp. One morning last week, I read a column by a journalist who used the phrase. The same morning a cable-news segment had used the phrase. During an afternoon Zoom meeting that day, an upper official from a major Jewish organization had used the phrase. And at that point I could not keep quiet anymore [though I’m sure many don’t think I can manage to keep quiet even while I sleep.] The phrase was “the most right-wing government in Israeli history.” It’s not. I get it. You don’t like Trump. Ok. But stop assuming things in other countries work the same as in DC or Chicago or Denver. Or at least own up to using it in support of your politics, not as though you’re saying anything truthful — at least not in the way the American recipient of those words will understand. Or you’re Israeli and don’t realize the context that is doing substantial harm with your words. Not entirely your fault — the translation is just not quite right.

By the time the third invocation arrived that day I had to do breathing exercises to tamp down my stress levels and a supreme annoyance the situation should not have produced. Especially not in someone who is paid to think clearly about exactly this kind of category error. The annoyance, however, was earned.

In American English those three words carry a partisan-weight load the Hebrew original does not.

The journalist, the cable-news anchor, and the panelist on the webinar did not know they were performing a translation that the categories can’t survive. Though they should have.

I have given the corrective explanation more times than I could count. By the end of that day, I thought maybe it was time to issue a comprehensive corrective.

So here is the corrective, written down.

“Right-wing” in Israel is not a single dial.

It barely exists in the way an American can understand it. The coalition has four parties that disagree with each other on three different axes, and the only thing the parties agree on is the coalition arithmetic that put them together. Likud cut child allowances in 2003 and expanded them post-2022. Shas sat in Rabin’s coalition and abstained on Oslo — the abstention is what carried Oslo across the line. Religious Zionism’s sovereignty agenda is a different doctrine from Otzma Yehudit’s National-Guard agenda. The Haredi parties are economically socialist. Fifteen minutes into any of these conversations the listener has stopped nodding agreeably and is squinting or cocking their heads. They want to ask the question. The question is almost always the same.

So what is it then?

That is the right question. This brief is the answer.

The mirror conversation, with Israelis who do not quite hear the English they are speaking, runs the other direction and is somehow more exhausting. An Israeli analyst, an Israeli politician’s English-language adviser, a Tel Aviv journalist landing a piece for the Atlantic will say “most right-wing government in history” because in Hebrew the phrase is arithmetic. Ha-memshala ha-yamanit be-yoter (literally: the most right-wing government) — the most right-wing combination by seat-count and ministerial composition. In English the same words pick up an ideological charge that was not in the Hebrew original. The Israeli speaker does not hear it. The American listener does not hear anything else. Two Middles, the long brief from April 24, traced what happens when American political life sorts Israel into one of its two partisan containers. This brief tracks what happens when an American sort reads a country that does not run on its grammar, helped along by Israelis describing the country in the only English available.

American Right-Left Cannot Read Israeli Politics

Every American reading of Israeli politics that begins with “right” or “left” has already failed the data, and the failure is structural. The American sorting apparatus bundles cultural, economic, and foreign-policy positions into two opposing partisan containers.

Once you know an American voter is a Democrat, you can predict their position on abortion, climate, immigration, LGBTQ policy, police funding, and Israel with roughly 75% accuracy.

The accuracy comes from the sort, which has connected the issues regardless of any logical connection among them.

Israeli politics runs on the opposite grammar. The effective number of parliamentary parties in Israel rose from 4.39 in 1992 to 8.69 in 1999 and has averaged roughly 7.8 across the nine general elections since. The American comparator runs under 2.0. This is a different operating system. Coalition-system politics with eight effective parties cannot mechanically produce a single-axis sort, because the audience required for the sort (voters whose positions cluster on one dimension) does not exist at sufficient density. The Israel Democracy Institute’s 2026 pre-election survey clocked the top three voting factors among Jewish voters within five points of each other: foreign policy and security at 20%, religion-and-state at 19%, economy and cost of living at 19%. On the Israeli left specifically, religion-and-state surfaced as the most decisive factor — ahead of security — in IDI’s cross-tabs by several points. Three independent axes pulling roughly equally on the same electorate is the empirical signature of a system the American sort cannot read in one dimension.

The mismap is therefore not a failure of any particular analyst. It is what happens when a sort calibrated for one country gets pointed at another. The sort produces output. The output is internally coherent inside the original grammar. The output is wrong about the country it was pointed at.

The reader who has been told the 37th government is “Israel’s far-right government” — J Street’s standing characterization, Bernie Sanders’s recurring formulation, the wallpaper running through NYT, Guardian, and Haaretz English coverage 2022 to 2026 — has been handed an output that bundles Likud, Religious Zionism, Otzma Yehudit, Shas, UTJ, and Noam into a single ideological actor on a single axis. Each of those parties extracted its coalition price on a different axis, and the prices were not interchangeable. UTJ extracted yeshiva funding on the religion-state axis. Shas extracted food vouchers and ministerial rotation on the economic-redistributive axis. Religious Zionism extracted Civil Administration powers in Judea and Samaria on the sovereignty axis. Otzma Yehudit extracted the National Guard and police authority on the security axis. The coalition agreements themselves are public. The axis-by-axis structure is a five-minute reading. The bundling persists anyway, because the alternative is to retool the categories, and retooling the categories is harder than running the categories that don’t work.

We tracked that bundling in Two Middles at the caucus level. Here we look at what the senators were voting on, axis by axis. On April 15, 2026, Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan released the statement explaining her vote to block two arms transfers to Israel. She did not say it from the floor. Kelly did that part. She put it in a press release. The line her staff almost certainly crafted to soften the vote for a 2028-curious Democratic primary audience ran like this: “being pro-Israel today is not about simply supporting the political or military agenda of Prime Minister Netanyahu, just like being pro-American should not be equated with loyalty to President Trump.” The careful Michigan moderate, with the CIA-and-Pentagon CV, has just told the country that pro-Israel commitment and Netanyahu’s “political or military agenda” are properly distinguishable categories — and that the distinguishability is the same kind of distinguishability that separates pro-American from loyalty-to-Trump. One agenda. One man. One axis on which to be for or against. The parallel construction is a giveaway.

Slotkin’s grammar reads American partisan tribalism as a one-axis sort and exports the same one-axis read to Israel. She is voting against a coalition that bought religion-state policy from Shas and UTJ on Haredi welfare lines and bought sovereignty-axis policy from Religious Zionism in a February 2023 administrative transfer that gave Smotrich sway over Judea and Samaria. She is voting against a Likud whose voters skew 58% Sephardi-Mizrahi and 46% below-average-income — the wrong half of any American demographic stack you might draw to map them. She does not know any of this is what she is voting against. Her colleague Senator Mark Kelly, on the same day, framed his floor speech as opposition to “the reckless decisions being made by Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump.” Two names. One axis. One political agenda you are either for or against.

Friedman’s February 2026 column “Netanyahu Plays Trump and American Jews for Fools — Again” is the columnist-class instance of the same error. The previous version, “The Israel We Knew Is Gone“ from November 2022, bundled Likud, Religious Zionism, and Otzma Yehudit into a single rightward shift across all three axes simultaneously. Each successive Friedman column repeats the same error [don’t worry, he finds new errors too].

The institutional class downstream of the column then repeats it. The columnist’s framing becomes the briefing-book consensus, and a Senator Slotkin who is trying very hard to vote thoughtfully ends up speaking the language the briefing book prepared for her. [She has been failed by the grammar her staff inherited.] The mismap travels as a pre-loaded grammar, harder to dislodge than an explicit claim. Explicit claims can be checked against data. Grammars determine what counts as data in the first place.

A personal note, because the failure mode is in front of me and I am in the middle of it. I used to think of myself as fairly progressive, interested in what I thought of as social justice. I voted Democrat in every cycle going back to the first one I was eligible for. More recently the apparatus around me has moved enough that where I stand is read as centrist. In some rooms, people wonder if I’m a Republican. My positions on the underlying questions haven’t changed. The apparatus has. The most recent presidential election was the first I did not vote in. I could not bring myself to vote for Kamala Harris, and the state I am registered in is firmly red enough that my abstention changed nothing, neither for good nor for bad. The diagnostic the brief just delivered — a sort calibrated for one country pointed at another — has a domestic counterpart. The sort moves. The voter stays put. The label belongs to the sort.

Three Axes, Not One — and a Substrate Beneath All Three

Israeli politics runs simultaneously on three independent axes, and the axes do not move together. The first is security and territorial: where Israel’s defensible borders sit, what the IDF’s operational stance is, what the country’s relationship is to the populations west of the Jordan River. The second is religion-and-state: how religious authority is administered inside a Jewish-majority state, who controls personal status, conversion, marriage, Shabbat in the public square, and the boundaries of the rabbinate. The third is economic: how redistribution, regulation, taxation, and welfare are organized in an economy that is simultaneously a Western tech-export power and a society with substantial sectoral dependencies on state transfers. None of the three reduces to either of the others. A voter’s position on the first does not predict the second. The second does not predict the third. Any analyst who claims otherwise has not looked at the longitudinal voter-factor data.

Beneath the three sits an ethnic-cultural substrate that has been weakening for two generations but still shapes coalition formation. Ashkenazi-Mizrahi intermarriage climbed from 13% in Israel’s first decade to roughly 25% in the most recent marriage cohorts, and only about 5% of Israelis now name ethnic cleavage as the country’s main source of tension. The substrate has receded. It has not disappeared. The Sephardi-Mizrahi modal voter, the Ashkenazi-secular modal voter, the Russian-speaking Soviet-aliyah modal voter, the Ethiopian and Mountain-Jew sub-clusters — each carries voting patterns that align imperfectly with axis positions. Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu illustrates the point with painful clarity for any single-axis American observer. The Russian-speaker community is roughly 770,000 voters, some 12% of the eligible electorate, and 40 to 50% back Lieberman, who runs a coalition platform that is secular, hawkish on the security axis, economically liberal, and aggressively anti-Haredi. There is no American axis on which all four positions sit together. The combination is unintelligible to the American sort because the American sort has only one axis on which to put it.

Two Middles described this same multi-axis structure in identity terms — religious/secular, Ashkenazi/Mizrahi, hawk/dove, veteran/oleh. This brief reframes in issue terms — security and territorial, religion-state, economic. Same terrain. Different cut.

A note on the Hebrew, because it matters more than the translation lets you see. The word for right-wing in Hebrew is yamani — adjective form of yamin, which means right hand and also south. In Tanakh the default orientation is qedem(east as “front”), so south sits to the right hand of anyone facing the rising sun. Hebrew geography embeds in the word. Yamin is a directional and territorial term first, a hand-orientation term second, a political term third. When an Israeli says ha-memshala ha-yamanit be-yoter the word does work English does not — it locates the coalition spatially-territorially before it locates it ideologically, because that is the order Hebrew built into the term. English “right-wing” is purely political-directional, an artifact [and here’s some pub trivia just waiting for an application] of where representatives sat in the post-1789 French National Assembly. The Hebrew speaker is using a word saturated with Land-of-Israel orientation. The English translation strips the saturation in the same step it claims to be doing the translation. I keep coming back to this when I am trying to explain why the Israeli analyst on stage at a US foreign-policy conference cannot quite hear the gap. The gap is in the word itself. The analyst is the medium in which the word loses its load.

An example for the cross-cutting structure: the Rabin coalition of 1992. Rabin assembled Labor, Meretz, and Shas — a coalition routinely described as Israel’s most dovish ever, with Shas’s six Haredi seats sitting alongside Meretz’s secular-left contingent. On a single American axis the combination is impossible. Haredi parties cluster with the religious-traditionalist right. Secular-left parties cluster with the progressive flank. To the American mind, the two cannot share a coalition. It’s incomprehensible. On the actual Israeli grammar the combination is the system functioning as designed. Shas and Meretz disagreed on the religion-state axis sharply. They agreed on a coalition price that resolved each party’s primary axis-demand: Meretz extracted security-axis flexibility for Oslo. Shas extracted economic-redistributive line items and religious-services portfolios. Shas abstained on the Oslo vote (which is what carried Oslo across the line) and left the coalition in September 1993, as Deri’s legal problems converged with the post-Oslo backlash. The religion-state and economic gains had been priced for one level of security-axis cost. The formal signing pushed the cost past the price.

The Israeli left runs the same machinery in the opposite direction. Yair Golan, currently leader of the merged Democrats party, is a former IDF Deputy Chief of Staff who on October 7, 2023 drove south in his personal Toyota Yaris and rescued Nova Festival survivors with the combat reflexes of nearly forty years’ service. The current leader of Israel’s left is a combat-decorated Major General. There is no American axis on which “leader of the progressive flank” and “former Deputy Chief of Staff who pulled wounded civilians out of a kibbutz under Hamas fire” sit on the same point. Golan is the natural leader of a left whose institutional lineage runs back through Mapam to the Haganah to the kibbutz movement — the same kibbutz movement that disproportionately staffed elite combat units for fifty years. The Israeli left built the IDF. Again, to an American steeped in our politics, that reads as incomprehensible.

Lieberman completes the demonstration. His voters are secular, hawkish on the security axis, economically liberal, and aggressively opposed to Haredi exemptions. On the American axis the same voter would have to be either secular and progressive or religious and conservative — the bundles do not separate. On the Israeli axis the secular-hawkish-anti-Haredi combination has commanded 40 to 50% of a 770,000-voter community for two decades. Three worked examples, three cross-cuts, all invisible to the American sort and decisive on the Israeli one. The grammar is just different. The cost of refusing to learn it accumulates downstream in every Senate floor speech, every NYT column, every J Street press release that mistakes the system for a flatter version of itself.

One more thing about the substrate before we look at the parties. Historical axis salience has shifted across decades. Post-1967 the security-territorial axis dominated. The 1977 Likud Revolution introduced the Mizrahi-substrate axis at electoral scale, breaking three decades of Mapai dominance. The 2011 J14 protests — 450,000 participants, the largest rally in Israeli history — elevated the economic axis from secondary to primary for several cycles, and Yesh Atid’s 2013 19-seat showing was the downstream expression. October 7 pulled the security axis back to dominance. Each shift moved which axis dominated. The other axes kept operating in the background. The American observer who reads “Israel has shifted right” since 2022 is reading a re-prioritization across three axes as movement along one. The voter who appears more hawkish on security after October 7 may sit unchanged on religion-and-state and unchanged or more redistributive on economic policy. The single-axis read collapses three-axis movement into one direction the data does not support.

The Likud Is a Populist-Right Coalition Party, Not a GOP Analogue

The Likud-as-GOP equation is the most consequential American misread, and almost every downstream error compounds from it. Likud is hawkish on the security axis. Likud is redistributive-populist on the economic axis — child allowances, welfare, settlement infrastructure subsidies, public-sector expansion — none of which are GOP fiscal orthodoxy. Likud is pragmatic-secular on the religion-state axis with internal factional pulls. Its voter base is heavily Mizrahi-traditional, below-average income, and Masorti-religious in roughly equal measure. Drop a modal Likud voter into the United States in 1972 and they vote working-class Catholic Democrat. They do not vote Reagan Republican. The mismap is wrong on every axis except security, and even on security the equation breaks once you read the actual record.

Take the fiscal record first, because it is where the equation breaks most cleanly and where US analysts have the longest history of refusing to look. The 2023–2024 budget allocated NIS 13.7 billion in coalition funds — a category of spending whose entire purpose is to satisfy coalition partners’ redistributive demands. Of those 13.7 billion shekels, roughly 3.7 billion went to yeshiva stipends, about 1 billion went to a food-voucher program pushed by Shas’s Aryeh Deri, and roughly 1.2 billion went to UTJ’s non-state-supervised educational systems — the institutions that do not teach core subjects like math and English, on which the Finance Ministry’s own economists warned the government. The 2025 state budget increased total spending by NIS 32 billion, a fiscal expansion under a coalition the American sort would predict to be cutting. Smotrich himself, sitting as Finance Minister and acting in the most “right-wing” capacity an American observer could imagine, defied the Attorney General in August 2024 to maintain daycare subsidies. The opposite of GOP-style welfare retrenchment. The opposite of Reaganite fiscal orthodoxy. None of this is hidden. The data is in the budget documents.

Now the demographics. Likud voters are 58% Sephardi-Mizrahi, and only 26% Ashkenazi at peak. The demographic profile shows 46% of Likud voters reporting below-average income. IDI characterizes the base as commanding “strong support from lower- and lower-middle-class voters.” On religious identity, 35% of Likud voters identify as Masorti-traditional-non-religious, 23% as Masorti-religious, with a combined 58% traditional and only about 5% Haredi. The base is empirically the development-town and urban-periphery working class — the demographic the post-1980 GOP’s suburban professional anchor does not reach. Drop these numbers into a US sociodemographic crosswalk and the comparator is the working-class Catholic Democrats of the 1960s and 1970s — urban-periphery, ethnic-out-group from a previous generation’s view, redistributive on economics, traditionalist on culture, comfortable with strong national-security commitments. The American party those voters sat in for forty years was the Democratic Party. The Likud’s analytical home in US comparative-politics terms is the Carter-era Democratic working-class coalition, which has no current American equivalent because the partisan sort dissolved that coalition in the 1980s and 1990s.

The security axis is where the GOP analogue holds best, and even there it does not hold cleanly. Netanyahu’s 2009 Bar-Ilan speech explicitly accepted a demilitarized Palestinian state under conditions: “two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect. Each will have its own flag, its own anthem, its own government.” That is a Likud prime minister, on Likud platform space, accepting the two-state frame that hostile US commentary subsequently accused Likud of categorically rejecting. The Abraham Accords continued the same security-axis logic: alliance-building with Sunni Gulf states framed around shared Iran threat, with the Palestinian question deliberately set aside. The “Abraham Alliance” framing Netanyahu reached for after Iran’s April 2024 attack extended the alliance-building logic into the post–October 7 environment. This is the move of a populist-right coalition party whose security-axis position is hawkish-pragmatic and whose territorial position is whatever the coalition will support. The American observer who reads Bar-Ilan and the Abraham Accords as instances of Netanyahu’s “right-wing extremism” — Sanders has used exactly that formulation — is reading text that contradicts the framing as evidence for the framing.

The American who insists on the Likud-as-GOP equation is translating across a category gap they have not been told about. The translation produces output that reads coherent inside the original grammar and is wrong about the country it claims to describe. A Likud finance minister defending Haredi daycare against an Attorney General is not Paul Ryan. A Likud prime minister addressing Bar-Ilan on a two-state demilitarized framework is not Marco Rubio. A Likud voter on 46%-below-average-income with Masorti-traditional religious identity and Mizrahi family origin is not the median GOP primary voter and never has been.

The Israeli Left Lives in the Tel Aviv Bourgeois, Not the Squad

The mirror error inverts the actual sociology of the Israeli left so completely that the American observer who maps Meretz onto AOC has gotten something close to the demographic opposite. Meretz voters are 93% secular, the highest secular share of any Israeli party. The Ashkenazi-Mizrahi split among Meretz voters runs 69% to 12% — almost the inverse of Likud’s base. Labor voters are 75% secular and 55% Ashkenazi. The Center-Left voter base reports above-average income at a plurality, against Likud’s 46%-below-average. Geographically, Meretz and Labor concentrate in kibbutzim, regional councils, and high-income coastal cities: Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Ramat HaSharon, Herzliya. The base is wealthy, secular, university-educated, IDF-veteran-dense, and concentrated in the country’s professional-managerial coastal corridor. Drop that voter into US politics and they vote suburban Republican on every axis except security-axis dovishness.

The institutional lineage is the second piece, and on this one the inversion runs deeper. Mapam was founded in 1948 from the kibbutz-based Hashomer Hatzair Workers Party and Ahdut HaAvoda, rooted in the kibbutz movement and the IDF’s founding cadres. Mapam was Israel’s second-largest party in the 1950s. Mapai, David Ben-Gurion’s party, became Labor in 1968. Labor Zionism built institutions still standing in Israel today, including the IDF. The pre-state Haganah, which became the IDF, was a Labor-Zionist creation. The kibbutz movement disproportionately staffed elite combat units — Sayeret Matkal, Sayeret Tzanhanim, Shayetet 13 — for fifty years. The party’s founding declaration describes the combined entity as “liberal-democratic Zionist.” The American “Squad” comparator misses every demographic dimension except security-axis dovishness. The Israeli version of the dovishness is calibrated as separationist. The Squad’s voter base opposes its own military. The Israeli left built theirs.

The honest acknowledgment, before we move on: the Israeli left as currently constituted is electorally small. Labor took four seats in the 2022 election, and Meretz did not cross the 3.25% threshold. The merger to The Democrats consolidated electoral position. It did not expand the program. The argument here turns on the bloc’s sociology, which is the reality on the ground regardless of seat-count, and the sociology is the inverse of what the American comparator predicts. When American observers ask why Israeli elections keep producing right-wing coalitions, the implicit assumption is that the Israeli left has been outvoted by a working-class populist majority — the way American progressives have been outvoted by a working-class populist majority. The implicit assumption inverts the sociology. The Israeli electorate’s working-class populist majority is the Likud base. The Israeli electorate’s secular-bourgeois minority is the left base. The combination produces electoral outcomes the American single-axis sort cannot predict because the sort reads the wrong demographic stack onto the wrong party labels.

Aaron David Miller’s Carnegie observation that the merged Democrats’ positions reflect “where most US Democrats are” is itself a mismap. The substantive policy claims may overlap on the security axis. They diverge everywhere else. A US progressive Democrat is more likely to be young, working-to-middle-income, downwardly mobile, increasingly diverse on race and religion, and military-service-light. An Israeli Democrats voter is more likely to be older, above-average income, economically secure, Ashkenazi, and IDF-veteran. The single-axis equation collapses the demographic realities into the policy overlap, and the collapse produces the Squad analogy plus the consequent surprise when Yair Golan turns out to support the Iron Dome upgrade and the Lebanon campaign and the targeted-killing program. He supports them because he is the demographic the equation said he wasn’t. The equation failed. The politician did not.

The Haredi Bloc Is Sectarian-Redistributive, Not Religious Right

Mapping Shas and UTJ to “American religious right” misses every defining feature of their politics. The misunderstanding has cost American observers two decades of analytical clarity on Israeli coalition dynamics. The Haredi parties are sectarian, defined by community boundary. The national-religious project belongs to a different bloc entirely. They are economically redistributive: Haredi welfare, yeshiva stipends, child allowances are central to their coalition demands. They are historically dovish-to-pragmatic on territory, especially Shas under Ovadia Yosef. Their position in right-wing coalitions is instrumental: it buys religion-state policy concessions, with no ideological alignment to the security axis. The Christian-right comparator gets the religion-state axis right and everything else wrong. Even the religion-state axis it gets right at the wrong altitude, because the Haredi religion-state agenda doesn’t cleanly map onto the American culture-war agenda of moral legislation.

Start with Yosef on territory, because the historical anchor is the cleanest demonstration that the Christian-right analogue cannot survive contact with the record. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas’s founding rabbinic authority, ruled in the late 1980s, in a responsa titled “Ceding Territory of the Land of Israel in Order to Save Lives,” that pikuach nefesh (saving life) overrides territorial commandments. Yosef ruled that it is halakhically permissible to give territory from the Land of Israel in order to achieve a genuine peace. The ruling enabled Shas to join Rabin’s coalition in 1992 — six Knesset seats sitting alongside Labor and Meretz — and Shas remained until September 1993, abstaining on the Oslo vote (the abstention is what carried Oslo across the line) and then exiting the coalition in the weeks around the White House lawn signing as Deri’s legal problems converged with the post-Oslo backlash. On a single American axis this is a contradiction. On the actual Israeli grammar this is a Haredi party operating exactly as its religion-state-and-economic-axis priorities predict: it joined to extract religion-state and welfare concessions. It left when the security-axis cost of staying exceeded the religion-state-axis benefit. The American observer who reads Shas as “Israeli Pat Robertson” is misreading both Shas and Pat Robertson.

UTJ is the other half of the Haredi bloc and runs the same logic from a different community-boundary. UTJ is a non-Zionist faction that does not endorse the creation of a secular Jewish state. The party “maintains no political commitment to Israeli sovereignty over specific territories and the party has been open to concessions in the past.” UTJ was a member of the Sharon coalition that carried out the 2005 Gaza disengagement — sitting in the cabinet that authorized Israel’s largest territorial withdrawal in three decades, while Religious Zionism experienced the same disengagement as a doctrinal-political defeat. UTJ’s coalition behavior is what the literature describes as “centrist” in the technical sense: positions determined by religion-state imperatives, with security and diplomatic considerations subordinate. The party has no uniform position on Judea and Samaria resettlement. The party has been pragmatic on territory across decades because territory is not the axis the party prioritizes. The American Christian-right comparator, hawkish on Israeli territorial questions as a matter of theological commitment, runs in the opposite direction.

The economic-axis evidence is even more direct. Shas built schools and social services targeted at development towns, poor areas, and slums. Aryeh Deri ran on “socioeconomic equality and consensus ‘one nation’ politics that resonated outside the traditional Shas votership.” Bituach Leumi child allowances scale with family size. A large Haredi family receives roughly NIS 1,336 a month in child allowances. Kollel stipends average about NIS 752 per student per month. The 2023–2024 budget extracted NIS 13.7 billion in coalition funds from a Likud-led coalition, of which the majority flowed to Haredi line items — yeshiva stipends, daycare, food vouchers, UTJ educational systems. This is sectarian-redistributive politics. The Christian-right American comparator is fiscally conservative and culturally maximalist. The Haredi parties are fiscally redistributive and culturally preservationist. The two are inverse on the dimension American observers most consistently miss.

The religion-state agenda, where the Christian-right comparator nominally holds, also operates at a different altitude than the American observer assumes. Sacred Authority, the long brief from January 1, 2026, traced the Rabbinate and adjacent religion-state institutions in detail. The operative point for this section is that the Haredi religion-state agenda is preservationist. The American culture-war frame of moral legislation does not apply. The agenda is to maintain rabbinic authority over personal-status questions (marriage, divorce, burial) and to preserve specific public-sphere arrangements: Shabbat closures, kashrut certification, military-service exemptions for yeshiva learners. The agenda does not legislate moral codes onto the population at large in the American culture-war sense. There is no Haredi school-prayer fight, because Israeli public schools already track religious observance by school stream. There is no Haredi abortion fight at scale, because Israeli abortion law is administratively permissive and has been for decades. There is no Haredi LGBT-marriage fight, because Israeli civil marriage is administered through the Rabbinate, and the Rabbinate already does not perform same-sex marriages — there is no civil alternative to be legislated against. The American culture-war frame projects fights that have no Israeli analogue onto Israeli religion-state institutions organized along different fault lines. The Christian-right comparator sees overlap. But the overlap is rhetorical.

Shas’s voter base is the giveaway that the comparator is wrong. Roughly 75 to 80% of Shas voters self-identify as Sephardi-Mizrahi. Only 3 to 5% identify as Ashkenazi. About 60% define themselves as Haredi, 23% as Masorti-traditional, 16% as national-religious — a Haredi majority with a substantial traditional-Sephardi tail UTJ does not reach. Shas is a sectarian-redistributive party with strong religious-identity politics, defined by community boundary. The party operates as the political vehicle for Sephardi-Mizrahi religious-traditionalist working-class Israelis, and its coalition demands track the priorities of that constituency: economic redistribution, religion-state preservation, sectarian patronage. None of those priorities are American Christian-nationalist priorities. None sit in the cluster American observers expect when they hear “Israel’s religious right.”

Religious Zionism Has No American Analogue — and the Sovereignty Axis Is Why

Look. None of the IR theorists who built the sovereignty literature were writing about Israel. They were writing about post-Cold-War sovereignty, post-colonial state formation, the EU. Their frameworks describe what Religious Zionism actually does because the configuration sits inside the conceptual room they cleared. Religious Zionism reads the room. The American institutional class trying to map Religious Zionism onto Christian nationalism has not. The party closest to a functional American religious-nationalist analogue is Religious Zionism, and the analogue breaks on a feature American politics does not contain: a sovereignty-and-territorial axis where the party’s position is constitutive of its doctrine, with everything else subordinate. Without that axis, Religious Zionism reads to Americans as fringe theocratic. With it, the party reads as a coherent post-Oslo strategic bet about Jewish sovereignty over the historical Land of Israel. The bet may be wrong. It is not unintelligible.

The doctrinal lineage runs through Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) and his son Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook (1891–1982). The elder Kook held that settling and building the Land of Israel would bring the Messiah. Tzvi Yehuda spent fifty years teaching, expanding, and applying his father’s practical-messianic ideas, especially to the lands captured in the 1967 Six Day War. Gush Emunim was founded in 1974 under the slogan “The Land of Israel, for the people of Israel, according to the Torah of Israel,” after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, as a religious-nationalist movement aimed at Jewish sovereignty over all parts of the Land as defined in the Bible. Gush Emunim’s eight resettlement attempts in 1974–1975 in the Nablus area, evading IDF roadblocks with the participation of Tzvi Yehuda Kook, established the practical-doctrinal pattern: resettling the land as a religious obligation that overrides government directives when government and religious obligation conflict. The doctrine’s central feature, for the purposes of the American mismap, is that it is sovereignty-axis maximalist. The territory is the project’s object. The territory is constitutive of what the project is for.

This is the feature the American Christian-nationalist comparator does not contain. American Christian nationalism is a cultural project that uses biblical-territorial language for the United States. Religious Zionism is a sovereignty project that uses biblical-territorial language for Eretz Israel. The doctrinal cores are inverse. Christian nationalism applies biblical sovereignty to a non-biblical national territory and operates inside a constitutionally-secular state’s culture-war frame. Religious Zionism applies biblical sovereignty to the biblical territory itself and operates as a sovereignty-axis position inside a coalition system. The two projects share religious vocabulary and almost no shared features. The American who reads Smotrich as “Israel’s Mike Johnson” is reading two doctrines whose only shared element is a shared lexicon.

Smotrich’s Decisive Plan from 2017 is the doctrinal articulation. The executive summary holds that “there is only room for one expression of national self-determination west of the Jordan River: that of the Jewish Nation,” and that “any solution must be based on cutting off the ambition to realise the Arab national hope between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.” Smotrich’s biblical framing draws explicitly on Joshua’s letters to the inhabitants of the Land — “those who want to accept will accept; those who want to leave, will leave; those who want to fight, will fight.” The doctrine is sovereignty-explicit and territorially grounded in the biblical sovereignty narrative of the Land. The argument is doctrinal-sovereignty. The American observer who hears the argument and translates it into Christian-nationalist register is performing a translation the categories cannot survive.

The operational outputs are recent and concrete. On February 23, 2023, Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Defense Minister Gallant signed an agreement transferring Civil Administration authority in Judea and Samaria to Smotrich. Smotrich became responsible for designing much of Israel’s settlement-and-administration policy in the area — land allocation, planning, construction, law enforcement on illegal construction (both Palestinian and Israeli), infrastructure, water allocation. The transfer translated the doctrinal-sovereignty-axis position into practical power over civilian governance, exactly as a sovereignty-axis party would extract on its primary axis-demand. The American press attribution that read this as “Netanyahu annexes the West Bank” is the bloc-attribution failure we will deal with directly in the synthesis section.

Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit operates in the adjacent space, and the comparator works even less cleanly there. Otzma Yehudit’s doctrinal lineage runs through Kahanism. Kach was banned in Israel in 1994 and listed as a US foreign terrorist organization the same year — the US listing was lifted in a routine 2022 review. Ben-Gvir’s political background runs through three decades inside that banned movement. His current operational role centers on the National Guard he extracted in March 2023 in exchange for supporting a temporary pause on judicial-reform legislation. Three different axes operating inside one transactional moment, with each actor extracting on the axis it actually prioritizes. The American reading that bundles “Smotrich and Ben-Gvir” as Israeli Christian nationalists misses that they are sovereignty-axis and security-axis maximalists respectively, with overlapping but not identical doctrinal commitments, operating inside a coalition that uses the religion-state and economic axes as bargaining substrate for both of their primary axis-demands.

Ben-Gvir’s voter base completes the demonstration that “Smotrich and Ben-Gvir” was always two distinct electorates bolted together for threshold-crossing arithmetic. Smotrich’s base is the national-religious settler core — 61% national-religious, concentrated in the heartland of the territorial right, with 22% of the settler vote in 2022 (over twice the national share) and majorities east of the security barrier. Ben-Gvir’s base is younger, more Mizrahi, more periphery, more soldier — voters reaching for an internal-security axis the established right has historically under-served. Two parties on one slate, two axes inside one bloc, two electorates inside one cabinet portfolio. The American reading that takes it as one ideological project misses all of it.

The bet may be wrong. The settlement project’s strategic premise — that compounding administrative acts produce de facto sovereignty over time, that the demographic question can be deferred indefinitely while territorial facts accumulate, that international recognition follows Israeli fait accompli — is a bet about how sovereignty actually accumulates in contested territory. The costs are real. The project has produced friction with the Israeli legal system, with American administrations of both parties, with European partners, and with the Sunni-Arab partners the Abraham Accords were supposed to consolidate. None of those costs are the same as unintelligibility. Whether the bet pays off is an analytical question. Whether the bet is intelligible is not.

Israeli Centrism Is About Which Axis to Fight On

The Israeli “center” is a position about which axis to prioritize. Yair Lapid’s project — and Benny Gantz’s after him — is to push the security axis to the background and run Israeli politics on the religion-state and economic axes, where the secular middle has plurality coalitions. American “centrism” does not have an axis-prioritization function because there is only one axis to prioritize. The Israeli center has no equivalent in US politics, and the difference is what the American sort cannot read.

Yesh Atid’s founding platform in 2012 emphasized religion-state and economic axes explicitly: “equality in education and the draft — with all Israeli school students required to be taught essential classes and all Israelis to be drafted into the Army, including the ultra-Orthodox sector.” The 2013 election produced 19 Yesh Atid seats (the strongest first-showing for a new party in two decades), running on burden-sharing and Haredi conscription. The result was the security-axis-deferred, religion-state-axis-foregrounded outcome, and it produced a concrete legislative output: the Shaked-Lapid Conscription Law which established annual Haredi conscription targets rising through 2017. Yesh Atid was prioritizing one set of axes over another. Prioritization itself was the political content.

The Bennett-Lapid government was the full axis-prioritization experiment. An eight-party coalition spanning the full ideological spectrum — Yamina through New Hope through Yisrael Beiteinu through Yesh Atid through Labor and Meretz and Ra’am — governed on the explicit premise that security-axis-divisive issues (Iran strategy, two-state versus annexation) would be deferred to enable religion-state-and-economic-axis governance. The legislative output was the demonstration: an overdue budget passed. Specialized funding for religious parties was reduced. A Haredi draft bill passed first reading 51-48 on January 31, 2022, lowering the exemption age from 24 to 21. The government collapsed before the draft bill completed subsequent readings, but the first-reading passage demonstrates the prioritization mechanism working as designed.

A Yesh Atid voter can be hawkish on security and dovish on religion-state simultaneously, or vice versa. What makes them centrist is the axis-prioritization. The position on any single axis is secondary. Yesh Atid’s voter base (concentrated in Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Ramat HaSharon, Kiryat Ono, Ramat Gan, with 55% self-identifying as centrist, 21% as left, 24% as right) is a coalition of voters whose primary axis-priority aligns even when their secondary positions diverge. The American “moderate” comparator collapses this into a left-right intermediate position and loses the analytical content that makes the centrist project what it is.

October 7 pulled the security axis back to dominance, and the Bennett-Lapid 2026 “Beyahad” merger is the centrist response: a polling-competitive project that explicitly excludes Arab-party reliance (”The Arab parties are not Zionist, and therefore we will not rely on them,” in Bennett’s framing) while running primarily on the religion-state and economic axes. The mechanism still operates. The salience has shifted. October 7 did not kill axis-prioritization centrism. It made the security axis harder to defer. May 2026 polling shows Beyahad at 25 against Likud at 25, with the right-wing bloc at 59 against 61 needed for a majority. Both blocs are below threshold. Whether voters tolerate axis-prioritization governance when the security axis demands constant attention is the open question the 2026 election will answer.

The Arab Parties Are Off the American Frame Entirely

Mapping Israel’s Arab parties to “minority Democrats” is the cleanest American category error in the entire mismap inventory, because the Arab parties are not one constituency and have never been. Ra’am is the Israeli Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing. Hadash is communist. Balad is rejectionist-nationalist. Ta’al (Ahmad Tibi’s secular-Arab-nationalist-pragmatic party) is the fourth project. The one-time Joint List slate, formed in 2015 in response to the electoral threshold rising from 2% to 3.25%, masked four distinct political projects that shared only their excluded-from-Zionist-coalition status. The Joint List fragmented in stages — Ra’am peeling off in 2021, Balad in 2022 — and the staged fragmentation made the four-projects-in-one-coalition structure visible. None of them maps onto US minority-coalition behavior. The Ra’am-Bennett coalition agreement in 2021 was unintelligible to American observers in part because the analytical category that would make it intelligible did not exist on their map.

Take Ra’am first. Ra’am is the political wing of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, the Israeli Muslim Brotherhood lineage with the Southern Branch’s operational discipline the Northern Branch (banned in 2015) refused. The Jihadist Continuum mapped the Brotherhood as the institutional-capture variant of the same end state ISIS and Hamas pursue through spectacle: “Its texts and offshoots aim for the same end state as more openly violent actors.” Ra’am operates inside that tradition. Mansour Abbas’s framing — “for the southern branch the sanctity of life prevails over the sanctity of land, therefore it abandoned violent resistance and focused on improving the living conditions of Arab residents” — is the enforcement-choice version of the Brotherhood operating system. The framing carries a tactical operating choice. The doctrinal end state is unchanged. Ra’am’s June 2021 entry into the Bennett-Lapid government (the first Arab party to formally join an Israeli governing coalition) was the move in practice. Tactical coalition entry when the math allows. No doctrinal repudiation of the end state. The coalition agreement extracted approximately NIS 53 billion in budgets and development plans for Arab society, NIS 30 billion over five years in economic-development funds, NIS 2.5 million to fight crime in Arab society, a two-year freeze of the Kaminitz Law, and legalization of three unrecognized Bedouin villages within 45 days of swearing-in. The extraction was on the economic-redistributive axis and on the law-and-order axis. The American “minority Democrats” comparator predicts none of this. A Muslim-Brotherhood-lineage Islamist party in a Zionist governing coalition extracting redistributive concessions is what the comparator’s grammar cannot read. The analytical move is to read the entry as tactical-redistributive extraction inside an unchanged doctrinal frame. Islamic moderation is not what is happening.

Hadash is the second project. Hadash is a left-wing-to-far-left political coalition formed by the Communist Party of Israel and other groups. The Communist Party origin is direct: Maki split in 1965, with the anti-Zionist faction forming Rakah, and Rakah’s 18th Congress in December 1976 resolved to form Hadash for the 1977 elections. Hadash is a Jewish-Arab joint communist project. The party’s doctrinal commitment is communist and binational, with all the doctrinal baggage that entails — including Soviet-era international alignments and a continuing commitment to a one-state binational outcome. Mapping Hadash onto AOC is the same kind of category mistake as mapping the French Communist Party onto Bernie Sanders: rhetorical overlap on specific issues, no doctrinal overlap on shared features.

Balad is the third project and runs on rejectionist-nationalism. Balad is a secular Arab nationalist party founded in 1995 by Azmi Bishara, with a platform calling for the transformation of Israel into “a democracy for all its citizens, irrespective of national or ethnic identity” — the “state of all its citizens” formulation. The platform opposes Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and supports its reformation as a “democratic and secular” state, which is doctrinally incompatible with the constitutional structure of Israel. Balad submitted a separate candidate list in 2022 because its rejectionist project was not compatible with Hadash-Ta’al’s pragmatist project. The 2022 separate-list submission is the operational evidence that “the Arab parties” was always a procedural alliance, never an ideological coalition.

The single-axis American sort cannot read these distinctions because it has nowhere to put them. “Minority Democrats” assumes a single ethno-political constituency aligned with one of two partisan containers and pursuing distributive politics inside that container’s frame. None of the four Arab-Israeli projects fits the template. Ra’am pursues distributive politics inside any Zionist coalition that will pay for it. Hadash pursues binational communism no Zionist coalition will accept on substantive grounds. Balad pursues rejectionist-nationalism the Zionist consensus will not accept on definitional grounds. Ta’al pursues secular-Arab-nationalist pragmatism that floats in and out of coalition with Hadash on tactical considerations. Four projects, four doctrines, four operational behaviors, one electoral category. The single electoral category is the artifact of an electoral threshold and American observers’ grammar. No underlying ideological convergence ties the four projects together.

The post–October 7 cross-cutting data on the Arab-Israeli electorate completes the picture and complicates it further. Trust in the IDF among Arab citizens increased from 21% in June 2023 to 44% in December 2023, a 23-point post–October 7 surge. Druze service has reached 85%, Bedouin service over 60%, with many in combat roles including the Desert Reconnaissance Battalion. Druze identification with the Jewish state polls at 80%, Christians at 73%, Muslims at 62%. Mansour Abbas’s foreign-facing line — “does not reflect Arab society, the Palestinian people, and the Islamic nation” — is the enforcement-choice version of the doctrine. The line is not theological reform. More than half of Israeli Arabs agreed with the line in polling. About a third did not. The Israeli-Arab civic distance from Hamas is the variable that matters. None of this is on the American sort. Arab citizens whose IDF trust doubled in six months. Druze whose Israeli identification runs ahead of some Mizrahi-Sephardi traditional voter populations. Bedouin combat-soldiers in the Desert Reconnaissance Battalion. All consequential, all analytically invisible to a grammar that only knows how to read minority-coalition behavior on a single axis.

Read the Bloc, Not the Party

Israeli policy outcomes are produced by coalitions. The analytical unit that matters for the American reader is the bloc — and the corrective to two decades of mismap is procedural: look at the coalition agreement, look at which party holds which ministry, look at the axis on which the policy is moving, then attribute. American reporting that names “Netanyahu” or “Likud” as the actor and ignores the bloc misreads who is actually setting policy on each axis. The procedural fix is not difficult. It is unfamiliar to a reading that defaults to single-actor attribution because the actor’s name is what the front-page headline can hold.

The 37th government, formed December 29, 2022 after the November 1, 2022 election, gathered five parties at formation (Likud, Shas, Otzma Yehudit, Religious Zionist Party, Noam), with UTJ joining at swearing-in. The government’s basic guidelines text held that “the Jewish people’s exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel” was the founding premise, alongside a vow to “bolster the settlement of the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan and Judea and Samaria.” The American press read the guidelines as a unified ideological project. The actual coalition structure was an axis-by-axis trade. Likud held PM (Netanyahu), Defense (Gallant, then Katz), Foreign Affairs (rotating to Sa’ar), Justice (Levin), and the bulk of the economic-administration portfolios. Religious Zionism held Finance (Smotrich) with Civil Administration authority over Judea and Samaria, which is the sovereignty-axis portfolio. Otzma Yehudit held National Security (Ben-Gvir) with police authority and the National Guard, the security-axis-internal-enforcement portfolio. Shas held Interior and Health (Deri, until Supreme Court disqualification) and the food-voucher program, which carries religion-state and economic-redistribution work. UTJ held Housing (Goldknopf) and yeshiva-budget streams. Noam took the Jewish National Identity portfolio (Maoz) — the euphemism the coalition agreement gave the explicitly anti-LGBT brief — and subsequently left.

The coalition agreements were published in full. The axis-by-axis structure is a five-minute reading. The American press attribution that read judicial reform as “Netanyahu’s judicial coup” missed that Levin (Likud) led the reform but Rothman (Religious Zionist) was the Knesset-committee enforcer, and Smotrich publicly framed the reform as a sovereignty-axis vehicle. The coalition agreements required “complete and total preference” to legislation aimed at judicial-system reform, binding all factions to support judicial-reform bills as proposed. The bloc structure forced bloc-level enforcement of a policy that originated outside Likud’s electoral platform. Attribution to Netanyahu personally misreads which actor is moving which policy on which axis.

The internal coalition dynamics reinforce the point. Otzma Yehudit (Ben-Gvir) left the government on January 19, 2025over a Gaza ceasefire agreement — a security-axis dispute with Likud — and rejoined after the ceasefire collapsed in March 2025. Smotrich (Religious Zionist) threatened to quit over a deal preventing a return to war. Likud and Religious Zionism have publicly disputed Smotrich’s crushing Knesset defeat on specific votes. The bloc is a transactional alliance whose members constrain and amplify each other axis by axis, and whose internal disputes are the routine operating texture of the system.

The corrective is procedural. When a policy moves, ask which party drove it. Look at the coalition agreement establishing the demand. Look at the ministry holding the relevant portfolio. Look at the axis the policy operates on. Then attribute. A US senator preparing a floor speech who runs this procedure for ten minutes produces a speech that reads more accurately than 90% of what the institutional class is currently producing. A US columnist who runs it for an hour produces a column that does not embarrass the columnist five years on. The procedure is available. The data is public. The mismap persists because the categories are unfamiliar, and retooling the categories is harder than running the categories that do not work.

Slotkin issued her statement and Kelly took the floor on April 15 to vote against two arms transfers to a coalition whose internal axis structure they had not been told about. The vote made sense in their grammar. Their grammar made sense in the political environment that pre-loaded it. Neither tells the American reader what is actually moving inside Israeli politics. Two Middles established that US-Israel relations are now sorted into a partisan container. This brief has shown that mismapping Israeli politics under those conditions produces real error — the senator’s vote, the columnist’s framing, the institution’s strategy all run through the mismap, and the policy outputs that follow get the country wrong on every axis except the one the sort can read.

Read the bloc, not the party. Read the axis, not the headline.

The coalition that forms after the 2026 election will be assembled the same way the 37th was — axis by axis, agreements public, ministry assignments traceable in the record.

And, finally, please just stop saying “the most right-wing government in Israeli history.” It doesn’t mean what you think it means.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

Shabbat shalom, friends.

We usually gate the Long Brief. The map in this piece is the one the institutional class has not yet drawn — and I want to ensure the readers who most need to see it (Federation trustees, day-school boards, denominational leadership, and the rabbis running the institutions the framework) can easily read it. Consider it open. Forward it, post it, restack it.

A Jewish day school board met this month to review renewal of a ten-year capital campaign. Enrollment softening — not collapsing, softening. Security costs up by a multiple over the last three fiscal years. Tuition past $38,000 for the upper grades, which puts the real cost-per-seat, once scholarships are factored in, near $55,000.

The board split along a line that was not there a decade ago. Parents who assume continuity as default and want the campaign renewed at scale, and demographers holding forecasts that suggest the campaign is funding infrastructure the community will not need.

The question on the table was not “is American Jewish life ending.” No one at the meeting framed it that way. The question was whether the capacity they were being asked to build would still be in use in 2045, or whether they were raising capital to subsidize the closing decades of a specific kind of institutional life.

Nobody at the meeting had a workable framework to answer it. Every Federation operating memo the board had read treated “American Jewry” as a single allocation category. Every communal-security presentation measured incidents — how many, what kind, where.

Neither told the board what it needed to know, which was: what is the trajectory of the community whose day school this is, and how does that trajectory differ from the trajectory of the American Jewish community in aggregate?

The question has an answer. It requires a map. This is the map.

Tenability Is the Wrong Question

The post-October 7 conversation about Western Jewish life has run on two rails, and neither goes anywhere analytically useful.

One rail is dismissal — the engagement surge at Jewish day schools, the rise in synagogue attendance, the Federation Israel Emergency Campaign passing $850 million by day 300, all read as evidence that the diaspora is fine, possibly thriving, certainly not in crisis.

The other rail is elegy — the 2025 calendar year’s twenty murdered Jews across four attacks on three continents, the 9,354 antisemitic incidents the ADL logged in the US in 2024 alone, the 344% five-year increase and 893% ten-year increase in that same measurement, all read as confirmation that the end is here and the only honest response is to grieve.

Both rails share the same analytical error. They treat the Western Jewish diaspora as a single object that admits a yes-or-no verdict. Neither premise holds.

Five questions sit unexamined inside “tenability.”

1. Physical safety — can Jews be protected at synagogue, at day school, on the street.

2. Institutional continuity — will the denominational, educational, and communal infrastructure still function in thirty years.

3. Religious transmission — will Jewish life be passed to the next generation in recognizable form.

4. Political standing — will Jewish institutional voice carry weight in the civic life of the host society.

5. Subjective belonging — will individual Jews feel this place is home.

Collapse all five into one question and every answer is either an overstatement or an understatement.

Rather we need ratio analysis. Capacity — institutional, educational, security, leadership — measured against pressure — ambient hostility, political erosion, demographic contraction. Read across communities, not across “the diaspora.” Read for trajectory — whether the ratio is expanding, holding, or collapsing — not for current-state verdict.

The Prizmah enrollment trend report is the illustrative case. Fifty percent of responding day schools reported new enrollments post-October 7 from families not previously on prospect lists. Sixty percent attributed the new interest to “change in climate.” Sixty-eight percent of inquiring families named fear of antisemitism as the driver.

Read through the dismissal frame, this is evidence of communal strength.

Read through the elegy frame, it is evidence of siege.

Read through ratio analysis, it is neither — it is an indicator of environmental pressure showing up on the capacity side of the ledger, which says nothing, by itself, about whether the capacity will still exist at the end of the arc the pressure produces.

The ratio is specific to a community, not the diaspora. The trajectory is specific to the sub-community inside that community.

The real analytical work is differentiation — and the institutional class responsible for allocating capital against the result has not yet publicly done it.

Five Indicators, Not Six

The framework reads trajectory from five load-bearing indicators. Each is specified by the metrics that measure it and the threshold values that distinguish the three categories — runway, parity, without runway. Parsimony is the discipline.

1. Day school sustainability.
   The sustaining metric is enrollment trajectory over a ten-year window, read alongside tuition-to-median-Jewish-household-income ratio, scholarship capacity, and teacher pipeline depth. The final AVI CHAI Jewish Day School Census recorded roughly 292,000 students across 906 US schools in 2018-19, up from 185,000 in 1998-99. The growth was almost entirely Chassidic and Yeshiva World. Non-Orthodox day school share fell from 20% of total enrollment in 1998-99 to 13% in 2013-14 and has continued to contract. Roughly 40% of Jewish day schools carry fewer than 100 students — a financial-sustainability flag that has held across every census year since the metric has been tracked. Tuition at flagship-metro Prizmah-network schools now routinely exceeds $40,000. In a community whose median household income does not support that tuition at the required enrollment density, the math stops mathing quickly..

2. Communal security infrastructure.

   The metric is per-capita security spend, professionalization depth, and state-coordination sustainability. The UK Community Security Trust operates on a £72 million government commitment running through 2028 — £18M per year covering 200-plus Jewish educational sites, 28 youth movement camps, 100-plus communal sites. The US Nonprofit Security Grant Program was funded at $274.5 million for FY2025 against a JFNA estimate of the actual annual cost of protecting US Jewish communal infrastructure at approximately $765 million — less than 40% coverage. FEMA approved only 43% of 2024 NSGP applications. The Secure Community Network has grown from five employees to seventy-five since Pittsburgh 2018, and 93 federations now employ full-time security directors, a fourfold increase over five years. Australia’s federal government committed $62 million (AUD) post-Bondi — $30M synagogue rebuilding, $32M institutional security — a decent absolute figure for a community of 117,000, and a late one.

3. Physical clustering.
   The metric is geographic consolidation or dispersion over time, read against the institutional-density threshold below which communal infrastructure becomes operationally unsustainable. Eighty-five percent of Australia’s roughly 117,000 Jews live in Sydney and Melbourne. Toronto’s Jewish community concentrates in the North York/Bathurst corridor. Manchester’s 30,000 is the largest UK community outside London. In the US, roughly half of American Jewry lives in six metros — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, South Florida, Boston, DC. Clustering is operational density and concentrated target surface at once. The threshold below which institutional life breaks down is neighborhood-specific, not community-specific — a community of 10,000 with all 10,000 in one neighborhood sustains more than a community of 30,000 dispersed across a metro area.

4. Institutional leadership pipeline.
   The metric is ordination and rabbinical-training rates against the aging-cohort replacement rate. HUC rabbinical enrollment fell from 214 in 2006 to aroughly half by the 2022 restructure. HUC voted in 2022 to phase out the Cincinnati rabbinical program after 150 years in the city; the final Cincinnati ordination runs in spring 2026. In June 2024, HUC ended its ban on ordaining students in interfaith relationships — the third major non-Orthodox seminary to do so after RRC in 2015 and Hebrew College in 2023 [the admissions pressure is not subtle]. The USCJ Conservative-movement congregational count declined from 573 in 2011 to 552 in 2021 through mergers and closures.

5. Political-institutional vulnerability.
   The metric is the political dependency structure sustaining communal infrastructure, read against the trajectory of that dependency. This is the indicator that most current diaspora-capacity frameworks omit and the one that moves the analysis fastest. American Jewish institutional security rests on NSGP funding, which in 2025 was conditioned on ICE cooperation, DEI restrictions, and anti-boycott compliance under the Trump administration — and on state-level hate-crime enforcement architecture that varies by political coalition. German communal infrastructure is a Federal Interior Ministry line item funding the Zentralrat der Juden, one of the specific budget lines the AfD has contested. French communal protection runs on the Vigipirate/SENTINELLE deployment that French Jewish leaders are explicitly watching the 2027 election to assess. Political-institutional vulnerability is the hidden capacity variable. A community whose incident rate is stable and whose institutional infrastructure is current-state functional can still be without runway if the political substrate that sustains both is eroding faster than the community can replace.

One note on what is not here. Intermarriage is not an indicator. It is an outcome variable driven by the interaction of the five indicators above — community density, institutional leadership, educational infrastructure, political standing, physical safety.

Though a popular metric to bandy about, intermarriage [while admittedly problematic on several levels] is functionally irrelevant to the structure of this discussion — though it can be illustrative at times. Treating intermarriage as an independent variable inverts the causal structure. The five hold. A sixth replaces one, not the set.

North America Jews Are Not One Community

American Jewry is, at a minimum, three communities.

American Orthodox — runway.

Pew’s 2020 survey measured Orthodox fertility at an average of 3.3 children per woman against 1.4 for non-Orthodox. The Orthodox median age is 35. Conservative 62. Reform 53. Orthodox retention stands at 67%. The Pinker-Cohen demographic projection, drawing on Pew 2013 with 2020 validation, projects Orthodox share of US Jewry rising from 12% to 29% over fifty years — and, more consequentially, Orthodox share of the American Jewish child population rising from 22% to 51%. Within the Orthodox sub-community, Haredi fertility measured via the American Community Survey runs around 6.6 children per woman. The global Haredi share of world Jewry is projected to rise from roughly 14% today to 23% by 2040. On every indicator the framework reads — day school enrollment trajectory, institutional density, pipeline depth — American Orthodox infrastructure is building, not maintaining.

American non-Orthodox — parity moving to without runway.

USCJ congregational count 573 in 2011, 552 in 2021. HUC ordination down 41% since 2008. The closures are visible and named. The trajectory on the underlying five indicators is sharper than the congregational count alone suggests. Denominational membership data captures the institutions. It does not capture the contraction in Hebrew school hours, the decline in mid-career non-Orthodox Jewish professional life, the generational erosion of Shabbat observance among affiliated families.

The unaffiliated Jewish population is not a separate trajectory category in the framework. It is the outflow population the non-Orthodox denominational infrastructure is losing to. Counting unaffiliated Jews as a trajectory-distinct community treats non-engagement with Jewish communal infrastructure as itself a form of Jewish infrastructure. It is the absence of it.

Canadian communities — parity with structural distinctions.

Toronto and Montreal both run higher on institutional-density indicators than comparable US metros. According to the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, 55% of Canadian Jews attend Jewish day schools, against 29% in the US. Canadian intermarriage runs at 35% compared to the US at 54%. Montreal’s population decline has effectively stabilized, per University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym’s analysis for the CJN — driven by Haredi growth (the Montreal Haredi population is now over 20% of the city’s Jewish community) and inflow from France. Toronto’s political substrate is the structural concern. Toronto Police Service 2024 data showed Jews, less than 4% of the city population, targeted in 40% of all hate crimes and 81% of religiously-motivated hate crimes. Anti-Jewish hate crimes up 144% since 2021. The institutional infrastructure is strong. The political environment is the variable.

Mid-tier American communities — the most vulnerable category in the map, and the one the institutional class is least prepared to recognize.

The distinction between flagship (New York, Los Angeles, South Florida, Chicago, Boston, DC) and mid-tier (Cincinnati, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Houston, Denver) is not size.

Atlanta and Houston are not small.

The distinction is on the five indicators: day school density, institutional leadership replacement, state and local political dependency structure.

HUC’s decision to consolidate rabbinical training out of Cincinnati after 150 years is an institutional vote on the demographic trajectory of Midwestern non-Orthodox Jewish life — the decision is made, the ordination runs in spring 2026, the campus closes, the local pipeline goes with it.

Cincinnati is not representative of mid-tier. It is the edge case where a flagship non-Orthodox institution has already called the trajectory.

St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh are further along the curve than Atlanta or Houston. All are on it.

Aggregated population masks the differentiation.

The institutional capital flow treats “American Jewry” as one allocation target — JFNA’s $16 billion endowment and $900 million-plus annual campaign operate on that frame.

The Federation model is geographically federated but strategically unified. It does not price the Orthodox runway sub-community’s capital needs differently from the Conservative-movement contracting infrastructure’s. It does not separate flagship-metro capital campaigns from mid-tier consolidation. The capital continues to flow by momentum and historical relationship, not by the trajectory the five indicators read.

That is the American map. Three distinct communities, one allocation frame.

The mismatch is the indictment.

Western Europe: France Is Without Runway

France is the sharpest community-level verdict this framework produces.

Peak French Jewish population — 530,000 in 1970, per the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. Current — 442,000 estimated for 2024. A 17% decline over fifty-five years, with the trajectory sharpening rather than flattening.

Aliyah from France ran at 1,109 in 2023, 2,200 in 2024, and 3,300 in 2025 — a 45% year-over-year acceleration and near-triple 2023 levels. The AJC Paris survey puts 38% of French Jews — roughly 200,000 individuals — as “actively considering aliyah.” Twenty percent have removed mezuzot from outside their homes. Sixteen percent have changed names on delivery apps to obscure Jewish identity.

The reader who has been paying attention will note that French antisemitic incidents fell from 1,570 in 2024 to 1,320 in 2025 per the TAU report. Great. But. Violent attacks actually rose — 106 to 126. Worrying. But the headline incident number came down. So, predictably, institutional voices describe this as stabilization.

The capacity framework reads it differently.

A community whose aliyah rate is accelerating while its incident rate is declining is a community whose exit decision has become uncoupled from any single incident threshold.

The exit trajectory is no longer responding to marginal improvements in the pressure side of the ratio because the capacity side has already been priced in.

French Jews are leaving not because 2025 was worse than 2024 but because the indicator they are reading is not the year-over-year incident count. It is the ambient state of French Jewish life. Their institutional leaders — explicitly naming the 2027 presidential election as the inflection point — have effectively confirmed what French Jewry is already doing. The Jewish Agency's One People survey, fielded by Ipsos in September–October 2025, caught the indicator in a single number. 22 percent of French Jews report feeling safe in France. Not 22 percent unsafe. 22 percent safe.

Only 21 percent of French Jews report optimism about the future of their community. 40 percent in Europe overall. 46 percent in North America. 60 percent in Australia and South America. The divergence between those four numbers is what differentiation looks like as a bar chart — and it is almost exactly the shape the framework’s three categories predict.

The UK is parity-to-without-runway with a faster-moving political substrate.

CST operates on the £72 million commitment through 2028. Incidents ran 4,103 in 2023 — record high — 3,556 in 2024, 3,700 in 2025.

The institutional infrastructure is robust. The political substrate is the variable.

On 2 October 2025 — Yom Kippur — Jihad al-Shamie, a British-Syrian attacker who had pledged allegiance to ISIS [with a given name to match], drove a car into worshippers at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester and stabbed them. Two died.

UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who does not write in hyperbole, said:

“This is the day we hoped we would never see, but which deep down, we knew would come.”

Aliyah from the UK ran 406 in 2023, 676 in 2024, 840 in 2025 — second consecutive year of growth, 19% acceleration year-over-year. The One People survey puts the ambient discussion higher than the operational count — 56 percent of European Jews report having discussed the option of aliyah inside the home. 64 percent in the UK specifically. The annual flow is what the discussion looks like when a portion of it moves to decision. The discussion base is several times larger than the flow.

The CST infrastructure did not fail. A Yom Kippur attack does not land the same way as a Tuesday-afternoon assault, and the political and cultural environment in which the attack became thinkable is outside the scope of what CST funding alone can address.

Controlled Surrender named that environment. The host culture's pre-commitment to not naming the ideology, not confronting the clerics, not enforcing against the infrastructure. CST funding through 2028 is a capacity decision. The substrate decision — whether Britain remains a place where Jewish institutional life can continue to be funded into existence — is being made in different venues on different timelines by people who are not being invited into the CST funding conversation.

Germany is parity with structural vulnerability.

Roughly 118,000 registered Jews. Incidents declined from 6,560 in 2024 to 5,729 in 2025. The AfD won 20.8% in the February 2025 federal election — second place nationally, 32.5% to 38.5% across the East German states — and in the same year was classified by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a “confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor” [a state-funded investigation of the second-place party]. The AfD has appealed that ruling. The Zentralrat der Juden is funded out of the Federal Interior Ministry — the German state funds the Jewish representative body, which is a stability arrangement only as long as the state maintains the post-1945 consensus. That consensus is no longer uncontested in German politics. A parity-level capacity rating for Germany that does not price this is understating the trajectory.

The Northwestern European communities — Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia — are without runway on scale alone. The infrastructure thresholds below which full communal life cannot be sustained are population-dependent, and these communities sit below them. Belgium’s incident count rose from 129 in 2024 to 232 in 2025, with physical assaults up from 27 to 32. Institutional contraction in the Netherlands has been running for two decades. These communities are already in terminal trajectory on infrastructure scale, before any capacity-to-pressure calculation runs.

Italy and Spain are distinct small-but-functional cases. Italy’s community is stable at roughly 45,000. Spain’s community is expanding slightly through the 2015 Sephardic return-of-nationality law. Both sit outside the Northwestern European contraction pattern. Neither is in the five-indicator runway category. Both are parity with specific structural features.

France is the verdict. The rest of Western Europe sits on a spectrum whose shape France has already defined.

Australia, the Pacific, and the Scoping Lines

Australia was the quiet runway community through 2023.

Small (roughly 117,000), concentrated in two metros, institutionally robust, politically insulated. It is not that community anymore.

The acceleration phase ran fast.

ECAJ’s incident data for the full Jewish calendar year — 472 incidents in 2022, 1,200 in 2023, 2,062 for the year ending September 2024, and 1,654 for the year ending September 2025. A near-quadrupling between 2022 and 2024 followed by sustained elevation. Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne was firebombed in December 2024. The Lewis’ Continental Kitchen kosher deli in Bondi was arsoned [this word feels odd, but I’m sticking by that choice] in October 2024 — Australian intelligence later determined Iran directed the attack, and in August 2025 Australia expelled Iran’s ambassador, the first Western country to do so. A Melbourne synagogue was arsoned on 4 July 2025 while a Shabbat meal was in progress inside.

Then, 14 December 2025. Sajid Akram and his son Naveed, father and son, inspired by ISIS ideology, attacked Jews on Bondi Beach during Hanukkah. ISIS flags littered their car. The motivation was clear and that motivation led to fifteen massacred people. Driven by Jew-hate. The deadliest mass killing in Australia in nearly three decades. Of the twenty Jews murdered worldwide in antisemitic violence across 2025 — Bondi, the DC Capital Jewish Museum shooting in May, the Boulder flamethrower attack in June, Heaton Park Manchester in October — fifteen died from that one attack on that one theretofore family-friendly beach.

The political substrate had been moving faster than the security infrastructure could compensate.

The Albanese government recognized a Palestinian state in September 2025, three months before Bondi.

The Australian Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, had delivered 49 recommendations in July 2025. The government had implemented zero of them by 14 December.

ECAJ CEO Alex Ryvchin, speaking after the attack, did not hedge: the writing had been on the wall, and this sort of thing was always going to happen.

Prime Minister Albanese announced a Royal Commission on 8 January 2026, with terms of reference including government and National Intelligence Community inaction since 7 October 2023 [a Royal Commission into the government’s own inaction].

The indicator verdict: Australia sat on runway through 2023 on all five metrics. It now sits on parity. Whether it holds at parity or crosses to without runway depends on whether the Royal Commission produces structural reform of the political environment or produces the theatrical-inquiry outcome that Australian Royal Commissions, like their British and Canadian analogues, often produce. The security capital flow — $62 million (AUD) post-Bondi — is adequate as a one-time appropriation and insufficient as a trajectory response.

New Zealand is parity at small scale.

A community of roughly 7,000. Incidents ran 131 in 2024 and 143 in 2025. Distinct political environment from Australia. The framework applies, but the analytical resolution is limited by community size.

Three scoping lines.

Latin America — Argentina, Mexico, Brazil — is its own institutional logic. Argentina’s roughly 171,000 Jews, the largest community in Latin America, operate on a demographic and political pattern shaped more by Argentine economic cycles and political populism than by the North Atlantic diaspora dynamics the framework reads. Aliyah from Argentina tracks peso collapse more reliably than antisemitism-incident data.

The FSU — Russia, Ukraine, Belarus — is shaped by post-Soviet conditions and the active Ukraine war. Russian aliyah ran 43,500 in 2022, 19,500 in 2024, 8,300 in 2025. These are migration flows driven by war and regime stabilization, not the capacity-to-pressure dynamics of Western communities.

South Africa — 50,000 Jews, down 60% from the 1970 peak, 1% aliyah rate in 2021 — is closer in pattern to the Western framework but sits inside a state that has taken Israel to the ICJ on genocide charges, which places it in a trajectory category that merits its own full treatment.

The scoping is not really avoidance. Each of these communities has its own institutional structure, its own political substrate, and its own capital-flow environment.

Collapsing them into the North Atlantic map produces categorical confusion that degrades the analytical value of the map for both the North Atlantic communities and the scoped-out communities. The map shows what it shows.

Incidents Are the Output. Capacity Is the System.

Institutional leaders who allocate capital against antisemitism-incident data are allocating against a lagging indicator.

Incidents are the output of a system. They are what happens when pressure exceeds capacity at a specific place and time. Measuring them is necessary because the deaths and injuries and harassment are real and the institutional response to each has to be precise. Using them as the primary signal for trajectory is a grave analytical error. They tell you what already happened. They do not tell you whether the institutions that respond to them will still exist in twenty years.

Which is basically the same analytical error The Fifty-Year Front named in the foreign-policy domain — institutions measuring the output their adversary generates and funding against the measurement, while the adversary builds terrain the institutions refuse to recognize as the strategic category.

Federation capital allocated against incident counts is the diaspora version of MFA shekels allocated against the latest hostile headline. Two operational domains, one structural failure.

The structural reasons are specific. Reporting conventions vary — CST, ADL, ECAJ, TAU all use different methodologies and different definitions of “incident.” Definitional drift is real — the categorization boundaries around harassment, intimidation, physical assault, property damage, and hate speech have shifted measurably over the past fifteen years. Reporting-institution political positioning affects what gets counted and how — the ADL under Jonathan Greenblatt is not the same measuring instrument as the ADL under Abraham Foxman. And aggregation obscures local trajectory — a national number up 15% tells you nothing about whether Cincinnati is stable and Atlanta is collapsing.

Most consequentially, incident counts are responsive to recent events, not to the infrastructure conditions that determine whether the community can respond to those events over time.

Two communities with comparable incident rates can have completely different capacity trajectories.

Germany’s incident count declined from 6,560 in 2024 to 5,729 in 2025.

The UK’s declined from 4,103 (the 2023 record) to 3,556 to 3,700.

On the incident metric, both are improving modestly.

On the capacity framework, the UK sits on parity with a stable political substrate while Germany sits on parity with a substrate that is actively contested by a party now sitting at 20.8% of the Bundestag vote and officially classified as right-wing extremist.

These are not communities on the same trajectory. Incident data does not discriminate between them.

The same analytical problem applies inside communities.

Pre-Bondi Australia and post-Bondi Australia are not the same community on the capacity framework. The five indicators moved. The incident data moved as well, but the incident data was lagging — the 316% incident spike between 2022 and 2024 was the signal that the political substrate was shifting, and the institutional class read it as the problem rather than as the indicator of the problem.

The Segal recommendations came in July 2025. The government implemented none of them.

The indicator — incidents — was visible. The underlying condition — political substrate erosion — was not addressed.

The attack on Bondi Beach in December did not happen because Australian institutional security spending was too low. It happened because the political substrate that determines whether institutional security funding, hate-crime enforcement, intelligence prioritization, and political will to treat anti-Jewish violence as terror had degraded past the point where the institutions could compensate.

The political-substrate layer is the hidden capacity variable.

American Jewish institutional security depends on the federal NSGP and state-level coordination. The NSGP’s recent conditions — ICE cooperation requirements, DEI restrictions, anti-boycott compliance — align the grant structure with one partisan coalition in a way the grant structure did not historically require.

The Trump administration’s early-2025 freeze of reimbursements during FEMA review is not a one-off administrative delay. It is an indicator that the grant infrastructure is now firmly inside the partisan-sort trajectory, and the partisan sort does not run backwards.

The Two Middles traced this mechanism at the Israel-policy layer. The sort does not negotiate. NSGP conditionality is the same dynamic on a different clock — federal funding for Jewish institutional security now sits inside the same sorted environment the Democratic caucus's April 2026 arms-sales votes already confirmed.

The institutional class that still thinks it can engineer a return to the pre-sort consensus is misreading what the sort is.

French institutional protection runs on Vigipirate/SENTINELLE state deployments that are politically contested. German communal infrastructure is a line item in the Federal Interior Ministry budget that the AfD has named. Australian institutional security coordination depends on the NIC and the federal government — and the post-Bondi Royal Commission terms of reference name both as subjects of inquiry.

Community-by-community capacity trajectory revised for political substrate:

• American Orthodox runway confirms. The Orthodox sub-community’s institutional infrastructure is least exposed to the federal political sort because its capital is internal and its political coalitions are more insulated.

• American non-Orthodox revises from parity toward without runway. The institutional infrastructure is sufficient for current state. The substrate it relies on — federal security funding, state hate-crime enforcement, denominational political coalitions — is moving.

• France’s without-runway verdict is confirmed and sharpened.

• Germany revises from parity toward without runway because the substrate trajectory moves faster than the institutional capacity can be rebuilt.

• The UK holds at parity — CST and UK government have committed through 2028 and the political environment, while under pressure, is not substrate-eroding at the rate Germany or France is.

• Australia revises from runway to parity and sits at risk of without runway pending the Royal Commission’s actual output, not its announcement.

The political-class task inside Jewish communal infrastructure is different now. It is to stop building toward a substrate the sort has already moved past.

NSGP reform conditioned on DEI restrictions is not the aberration — it is the structural position federal Jewish institutional funding now occupies.

The advocacy posture that treats 2025 conditions as deviation from a recoverable baseline is spending political capital against a clock that is not running.

The coalition work that still matters is work that maps to the sorted environment. State-level relationships where the coalition holds. Federal relationships that assume the conditions are the norm. Parallel structures where the federal substrate cannot be relied on. The institutional class allocating capital by momentum has a political-class mirror — the advocate allocating political capital by restoration. Same error. Different ledger.

Incident data, read alone, would give different verdicts on several of these communities. That is the point. Incident data is the output the system generates.

Capacity — institutional, structural, political — is the system that generates it.

Institutions allocating against output are always one cycle behind the system.

The Floor the Framework Does Not Read

One qualifier the capacity framework needs — without it the framework reads more optimistic than the ground warrants.

The substrate’s direction in most Western host societies is downward, and the direction is not primarily being set by variables the framework treats as available to institutional intervention.

It is being set by Islamist demographic and ideological momentum inside host societies. By the cleric networks Britain has declined to confront for forty years. By the Qatari academic funding the United States has declined to sanction for two [Section 117 is a public filing — the reason the sanction has not come is not access to the data]. By the elite capture of European interior ministries by coalitions whose policy positions treat Jewish communal security as a category subject to negotiation. Two scales, one trajectory.

The floor that mechanism sets is the 2025 casualty count — the highest toll in three decades per the Tel Aviv University Annual Report. Each of the four major attacks that produced it landed in a community whose institutional infrastructure was functioning on most metrics. Capacity wasn’t the failing variable.

The capacity indicators, by their construction, read institutional trajectory — not the physical-risk trajectory the substrate is setting. A community reading “parity” on day-school enrollment, security spend, leadership pipeline, and clustering can still sit above a physical-risk trajectory whose slope is being determined upstream of all of those variables.

The rabbi reading from the pastoral side of the community — Jews walking into his shul, children in his day school, families asking whether to raise their kids there — is reading that floor directly. He is not wrong to be pessimistic about what the floor is doing. Indeed, he’s right.

The institutional class measuring capacity is not reading the floor at all. The two reads answer different questions. The rabbi’s question is the more proximate one for the people in front of him.

The framework still works for the question it is built to answer — which communities are on trajectories that justify capital reallocation, which institutional investments scale with growth, which scale with maintenance, which are funding infrastructure the community will not need. What the framework cannot do is tell the rabbi what to say to the mother who is deciding in April 2026 whether her six-year-old should still be in the day school by kindergarten in 2027. That decision is being made against the floor, and the floor is moving the wrong way.

What the framework can do is tell the rabbi which of two conversations he is having. Pessimism read against structural drift is honest. Pessimism read against structural resilience is a call to keep building. Same floor, different maps. The rabbi reading the former is owed that read by the institutions whose job it is to fund against it. The rabbi reading the latter is owed the same honesty in the other direction. The map does not override the floor — it tells the rabbi what the floor is doing at altitude.

Where the Pattern Puts Each Community

The historical record of Jewish diaspora trajectory is not rhetorical weight. It is data.

Five anchor windows structure the record. And if you think “ancient history” isn’t relevant, you are sorely mistaken.

1. 1290 Edict of Expulsion — Edward I expels England’s Jewish community after a century of legal marginalization, blood libels, taxation-driven asset extraction, and ghetto-like residential restrictions. The expulsion is the legal culmination of a trajectory that had been measurable for a century.

2. 1306 and 1394 France — Philip IV and then definitively Charles VI expel French Jews after the pattern repeats on the French royal side of the Channel.

3. 1492 Alhambra Decree — Ferdinand and Isabella expel roughly 800,000 Jews from Spain after the 1391 pogroms, the Inquisition, and blood-purity statutes — centuries of infrastructure erosion before the decree itself.

4. 1920s-1930s Germany — the most integrated Jewish community in Europe in 1920 is subject to the Nuremberg Race Laws by 1935 and industrial-scale genocide by 1942. From Weimar’s structural stability to Nuremberg is fifteen years.

5. 1945-1972 Arab-state communities — approximately 850,000 Jews flee or are expelled from Arab-majority countries, with the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad in 1941 and Tripoli in 1945 as pre-expulsion signals, through the final clearances of Libya (declared Judenrein by 1970) and the Syrian confinements of the post-1967 period.

The scholarly record is settled. Wistrich, Nirenberg, Julius, Lewis — the disagreements are about causes and emphases. The continuity is not in dispute.

The analytical discipline for reading the current record against this is pattern-matching, not prediction.

A community that pattern-matches 1928 Germany is not on a fate line toward 1942.

The structural features of 1928 — an integrated community, an extremist party at roughly a fifth of the national vote, state-subsidized institutional infrastructure under political contest, a macroeconomic shock recent enough to shape voter behavior — are legitimately comparable to current conditions in specific communities.

Pattern-matching produces attention allocation, not inevitability claims.

The reader who wants the framework to produce “and therefore X will happen” is asking the wrong question of it.

Current communities against the anchor windows:

Late-sequence phase. France pattern-matches late pre-Alhambra Spain and late pre-1306 France. A community at historical-peak-minus population, centuries of integration and contribution, concentrated political pressure, documented community exit accelerating, institutional leadership explicitly naming the inflection point. South Africa pattern-matches late-1940s Arab-state communities — formal government hostility, 1% aliyah rate, the judicial-institutional targeting of the host state’s foreign policy against Israel.

Mid-sequence phase. Germany pattern-matches late Weimar — integrated community, extremist party at a fifth of the national vote and officially classified as extremist, state infrastructure under political contest, macroeconomic stress visible. Australia pattern-matches the acceleration phase of the 1930s — community growth interrupted by rapid incident escalation culminating in deadly mass attack, political establishment slower to respond than the threat moved. These are mid-sequence placements, not late-sequence. The structural features are present. The political outcomes are not predetermined.

Stable-interval phase. American Orthodox pattern-matches 19th-century Pale of Settlement core communities — demographic growth, internal infrastructure development, relative insulation from the political trajectory of the broader host environment. The UK pattern-matches late Victorian/Edwardian stability — institutional robustness, state partnership, incident pressure but not systemic legal deterioration. American non-Orthodox pattern-matches something that has no clean historical analogue, which is itself diagnostic — the non-Orthodox denominational decline is a structural-demographic contraction rather than a host-environment expulsion, and the historical record is thinner on infrastructure collapse by voluntary disengagement than on infrastructure collapse by external pressure.

Does pattern-matching justify the reconfiguration of diaspora institutional capital? The record shows specific phases. The record shows specific communities at specific phases. The record does not show what happens next in any community. The record shows what has happened in communities structured like each current community.

The Decision Surface

The framework produces a decision surface. It does not produce prescriptions.

For runway communities — American Orthodox, at the sub-community level — the decision is whether current capacity investment is a ceiling or a floor. JFNA manages roughly $16 billion in endowment assets, raises over $900 million annually, distributes $2 billion-plus from foundations and endowments. The LiveSecure initiative launched in 2021 at $54 million over five years — roughly $11 million per year. For a sub-community whose child-population share is projected to move from 22% to 51% over fifty years, $11 million per year in dedicated infrastructure investment is maintenance capital, not growth capital. The decision: is the Orthodox runway an expected outcome the institutional class will simply watch materialize, or is it a growth trajectory that justifies explicit capital allocation on the growth frame rather than the maintenance frame.

For parity communities — the UK, Canadian urban centers, American non-Orthodox flagship metros, Australia at its new parity level — the decision is which moves in the next five-to-ten-year window either consolidate runway or lose it. The UK’s CST funding certainty through 2028 is the consolidating move, but the question is what the 2028-onward commitment looks like, and whether the 2028 political environment that determines it can be engaged now. The parity communities do not have time they do not know they are using.

For without-runway communities — France, Northwestern European communities below sustainability threshold, South Africa, the most structurally exposed American mid-tier communities — the decision surface splits.

Building continuity infrastructure — preserving specific institutions, cultural artifacts, archives, rabbinical training materials, cemeteries, documented communal histories — is one institutional strategy. Managing dignified contraction — planning for eventual near-complete exit, coordinating with aliyah infrastructure, maintaining dignified closure of institutions rather than neglect — is another.

Neither is prescribed. Both are live institutional strategies that can be named. To refuse naming the two is to choose the third path by default — continuation by momentum.

The One People survey also recorded a generational signal the capacity indicators do not register. 91 percent of Israelis say it is important that their children feel connected to Israel. 58 percent of Global Jewry say the same. A 33-point gap in what the two sides of the relationship think the next generation’s obligation is. The absorption architecture the Jewish Agency is building assumes a diaspora that still transmits the Israel connection as a communal obligation. That transmission is weakening on the diaspora side — which means the absorption architecture may eventually face a demand curve lower than the forecast. Not because the crisis communities are not exiting, but because the next generation may not read Israel as where they exit to.

The aliyah infrastructure question surfaces as structural implication, not individual prescription. The Israeli government’s recent actions are the baseline. The Jewish Agency and Aliyah and Integration Ministry expanded aliyah fairs to the US, France, UK, Ukraine, Georgia, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, and Australia, with first-ever Sydney and Melbourne fairs held late last year and had over 20,000 global participants.

The ministry announced a NIS 170 million absorption program in February 2025 and ran an “emergency immigration” drill late 2025 to test readiness for a mass-arrival scenario. Doron Almog, Jewish Agency chair, has forecast a potential wave of one million olim in coming years. Between 2022 and 2025, North American aliyah applications rose 50%. Nefesh B’Nefesh facilitated 4,150 North American olim in 2025 — one of the largest annual totals in its 23-year history.

The Israeli state is building aliyah infrastructure against a trajectory the diaspora institutional class has not yet publicly come to terms with. The coordination question — whether diaspora institutions engage aliyah infrastructure as a complementary line of institutional work, or treat it as a separate line the Israeli government manages — is the decision surface the framework produces. No prescription is required. The decision is there whether or not the institutional class uses it.

The first meeting is not about capital. It is about vocabulary. A Federation board that cannot say the word “terminal” about a specific community cannot allocate against a map that requires it. A denominational leadership that cannot say “runway” about a sub-community whose growth is funded at maintenance levels cannot build against the growth. The institutional class’s first problem is linguistic, not analytical — and the absence of the vocabulary is a poor choice that does more harm than good.

What this does not do is tell individual Jews what to do. The framework reads communities, not persons. An individual Jew in a without-runway community may have every reason to build a life there. An individual Jew in a runway community may have every reason to leave. The framework has no standing to address either case. It addresses the institutional class whose job is to allocate capital against the map, and it tells them what the map says.

Scenarios: Four Paths, One Most Likely

Four paths sit on the decision surface. The probability distribution across them reflects what the prior two briefs in this arc established about Israeli institutional politics, and what extends by straightforward analogy to diaspora institutional politics: reallocation is harder than continuation, and the arithmetic usually loses to the politics.

1. Full-diaspora continuity with capacity investment.
   This is the path the institutional class publicly describes itself as on. Coordinated capital reallocation sufficient to rebuild communal infrastructure across the full map, new institutional formation where the current Federation-and-denomination structure cannot scale, political alignment across fragmenting denominations. The prerequisites do not exist in current visible form. No Federation strategic plan, no denominational long-range document, no publicly released philanthropic framework from any of the major funders operating on this scale names this as the operating strategy. Probability: roughly one in ten. Stated not because the case is impossible but because the institutional prerequisites are absent and the creation of those prerequisites is itself a large-capital project no actor has taken up.

2. Tiered continuity with strategic concentration.
   Capital flowing from low-runway communities to high-runway communities at explicit institutional direction. Some version of this is partially visible already in the pattern of Federation capital campaigns — new JCC builds in some metros, consolidation in others — but operating as implicit rather than named strategy. The politically difficult step is naming it: the moment a Federation says aloud that it is redirecting capital from Cincinnati to Miami because the demographic trajectory justifies the redirection, the community the capital leaves is owed an accounting the institutional class has not developed the vocabulary for. Probability: roughly three in ten. Likely to continue as the implicit pattern without explicit adoption, with the downside that implicit tiering is less efficient than explicit tiering because the implicit version still pays political costs to opponents of capital redirection who cannot be engaged on merit.

3. Managed contraction with aliyah acceleration.
   Honest institutional acceptance that specific communities — France, South Africa, Northwestern European below-threshold communities, specific American mid-tier communities — are on terminal trajectories. Capital redirected toward continuity-infrastructure preservation in those communities and toward aliyah absorption capacity rather than toward maintenance investment. The Israeli state is effectively building half of this scenario unilaterally. The Jewish Agency is effectively operating on it. The diaspora institutional class has not publicly adopted it, because the political cost of naming specific communities as terminal is high enough that the institutional actor closest to adoption can always defer by one more budget cycle. Probability: roughly one in four. Partial adoption is happening whether or not anyone names it.

4. Momentum.
   Current pattern. Capital flows by historical relationship, Federation-campaign inertia, and denominational political equilibrium rather than by map. Piecemeal consolidation where individual institutions fail, piecemeal expansion where individual donors concentrate, no strategic direction at aggregate level. Probability: roughly two in five. This is the highest-probability path because it is the lowest-friction path. It is also the path that produces the worst aggregate outcome across the map, because capital continues flowing to contracting infrastructure in parity and without-runway communities where it generates the lowest marginal return, while expanding infrastructure in the runway sub-community is funded at maintenance levels.

Across the four paths, the weighted trajectory favors the path with the worst outcome.

This is the specific character of institutional-system failure the prior two briefs documented in the Israeli context — political friction favors continuation, continuation compounds the arithmetic it is losing, the arithmetic does not reward patience. The diaspora institutional class is not Israeli politics. Yet, sadly, the failure mode is the same.

The reader who is not a trustee has standing the trustee does not — the standing to ask. Ask the Federation what map it is using. Ask the day-school board what trajectory the capital campaign is priced against. Ask the denominational leadership which sub-community the scholarship pool is designed to serve. Momentum holds because the people who could force it to stop are assumed not to be watching. Watch.

The institutional class responsible for diaspora continuity is still allocating capital by momentum against an inherited map. The actual map is three categories of community, read on five indicators, priced against a political substrate the aggregate allocation model cannot see.

It exists whether or not the institutional class reads it.

The decision surface exists whether or not the institutional class uses it.

Whether Jewish life in the West is ending was always the wrong question.

The question is whether the people whose job is to steward Jewish communal infrastructure are doing that job against the map that is actually there.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

Shabbat shalom, friends.

We usually gate the Long Brief. This week we’re not, because the argument here is the one we don’t see people making at sufficient scale. Consider it open — forward it, post it, restack it. The reader who needs this hasn’t seen it yet.

On April 15, 2026, the Democrat from Arizona — astronaut, former Navy combat pilot, one of the names floated consistently in early 2028 Democratic presidential speculation — stood up on the Senate floor and walked Bernie Sanders’s Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to a vote. Forty of forty-seven Senate Democrats voted to block a $295 million sale of Caterpillar D9R and D9T armored bulldozers to Israel. Thirty-six voted to block a $151.8 million sale of munitions. Both resolutions failed. Republicans held. The failure is nearly immaterial.

More alarming is the trajectory. Nineteen Democrats voted with Sanders on the first Block the Bombs resolution in September 2024. Eighteen in November. Twenty-seven in July 2025. Forty on April 15, 2026.

That is the curve of a caucus being reconfigured in real time, and the reconfiguration has a clear direction. Tzeva adom.

Kelly’s floor speech cited “the reckless decisions being made by Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump” — language calibrated to the centrist Democratic primary voter a 2028 hopeful needs to reach, not to the DSA flank. Senator Elissa Slotkin, the Michigan moderate also on the 2028 shortlist, told reporters after the vote that she had struggled with the vote as much as any she had taken in Congress.

At this point, it’s basic math. We have sorely mismanaged the messaging. A Democratic presidential aspirant reads the coalition, reads the donor base, reads the primary electorate, and concludes that voting to block weapons to an ally at war with Iran’s proxies is the safer position in 2028. They’d be right (in that’s it safer, not that it’s morally correct).

That is the problem. Fifty-Year Front traced the terrain our adversaries spent half a century cultivating. This brief traces the ground as it shifted and sorted us away. We are all — yes, even those of us who were dyed-in-the-wool “progressives” or the as-a-Jew camp — we are toxic to the Democrat’s party line. Whether you voted Trump or not, you might as well be wearing a red MAGA kippah — at least in the eyes of the party machers.

The Sorting Mechanism Doesn’t Care What Israel Does

Israel did not lose the Democratic Party because of Gaza, Netanyahu, or the settlements. No matter what Rahm Emanuel says to Bill Maher.

Israel lost the Democratic Party because the American political system sorts every culture-war-visible issue into two partisan containers, and once an issue enters the sorting apparatus, the outcome is structurally determined regardless of what the subject of that sort does or does not do.

The mechanism is named, mapped, and empirically mature. Matthew Levendusky’s The Partisan Sort (2009) established the model. Once elites at the top of each party coalition converge on opposing positions, the cues propagate downward through the rank-and-file, and voters who had previously held cross-cutting combinations of views reorganize themselves along party lines.

Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats — the Jacob Javitses and Howell Heflins of the pre-sort era — disappear, and with them disappears the cross-party coalition that single-issue advocacy once relied on.

Once partisan and social identities lock together, the emotional intensity of partisanship rises independent of actual policy movement.

Sorted partisans express greater anger toward the out-party. They assign it more extreme views than it holds. And they process new information through tribal rather than analytical circuits — even when the underlying policy disagreements have not extremized at all.

Shanto Iyengar and colleagues at Stanford tracked the affective gap itself: out-party feeling-thermometer scores began their sharp descent in the late 1980s. By 2016 the gap had doubled. By 2024 it sat near 55 points. I shudder to think what the numbers say today.

The mechanism has already processed three issues that we can view it by.

Climate change entered the sorting apparatus in 1992 — McCright and Dunlap document zero statistically significant partisan divergence on environmental concern from 1974 to 1991, followed by Republican voting scores collapsing in the early 1990s, conservative media attacks on the science by 1997, and a 45-point partisan gap by the Trump first administration. Immigration entered in 2009 — Gallup shows a 7-point gap on “immigration should be decreased” in 2008, widening to 17 points in 2009, reaching 52 points by the mid-2020s.

The mechanism is not novel. It is not a surprise. It has been running on other issues for thirty years.

Israel entered the sorting apparatus roughly in 2001, inflected sharply in 2014, and accelerated again after 2021.

Gallup’s longitudinal series shows Democratic favorability toward Israel dropping 14 points after the 2014 Gaza war alone — under a Netanyahu government, yes, but a Netanyahu government making substantially different strategic choices than the one in office post-October 7.

Democrat favorability then ran 63% in 2022, 56% in 2023, 47% in 2024, 33% in 2025, and by March 2026 sat at a 44-point partisan gap — the largest ever recorded in the series. The narrowing began years before October 7, 2023.

The hostile claim is that Netanyahu alienated Democrats by integrating himself with the Republican Party.

Netanyahu is not solely responsible. Not even mostly responsible. Israel and the Democratic Party have both moved in opposite directions. Correct. The sorting was already under way. Netanyahu’s Republican alignment was a response to a structural condition, not the cause of it.

Partisanship is the dominant variable structuring how Americans view every foreign policy question. In the 2008 Chicago Council data, Republicans and Democrats overlapped substantially on which threats mattered. By 2025 they agreed on two items — international terrorism and government corruption — and disagreed on everything else.

The Ukraine case, as we will explore below, is a knockout blow to the Bibi-did-this hypothesis.

Israel was not abandoned. Israel was sorted.

Abandonment implies a moral choice that a different moral choice on the other side could reverse. Sorting is a structural condition that moral choices in the vicinity cannot undo.

Israeli Multi-Axis Politics Cannot Read American Mono-Axis Sorting

Israeli political reasoning cannot natively parse American mono-axis sorting, because the two political systems run on incompatible grammars — and the mismatch is the mechanism by which even Israel’s most American-fluent leaders still keep getting the American political system wrong.

Israeli political logic is built for a coalition system (with an average of 7.8 effective parties across the nine general elections since 1999). Identity moves independently on multiple axes — religious/secular, Ashkenazi/Mizrahi, hawk/dove, veteran/oleh — and coalition partners are assembled across those axes issue by issue.

A voter can be Haredi and left-economic. A coalition can contain Religious Zionism and Shas and Likud without that combination imposing a single position on judicial reform, Iran strategy, or settlement policy.

The entire operational grammar of Israeli politics is cross-cutting.

American political life has been running on the opposite grammar since the 1990s.

Party identity pre-loads positions across every culture-war-visible issue as a bundle.

If you know someone is a 2024 Democrat, you can predict their position on abortion, climate, immigration, LGBTQ policy, police funding, and Israel with roughly 75% accuracy — not because those issues are logically connected but because the sorting apparatus has connected them.

Israeli leaders who intellectually understand the bundling still default to coalition-logic instincts under operational pressure. The reversion point is not a failure of intelligence. It is the failure of a lifetime of political reflexes formed inside one grammar to sustain calibration inside a different one at the speed decisions require.

The paradigmatic demonstration is the March 2015 joint session. Speaker John Boehner organized Netanyahu’s address on Iran without consulting the Obama administration. At least 58 Democratic lawmakers boycotted. Nancy Pelosi wrote afterward that she was “near tears…saddened by the insult to the intelligence of the United States.” Representative John Yarmuth, a Jewish Democrat, described the speech as pure Dick Cheney playbook. The speech received multiple standing ovations in the room. Outside the room, it crystallized a Democratic perception that Israel had chosen a side in American domestic politics — and that the side was not theirs.

An Israeli coalition instinct reads the 2015 calculation as sensible. The Iran deal is an existential question. Congress is the relevant forum. Boehner offers the platform. What can you do? You have to take the platform.

The grammar of Israeli coalition politics assumes that policy disagreements cross party lines and that direct appeals across those lines are normal.

The American sorted grammar reads the same move as a tribal alignment — Netanyahu chose Team Red, full stop, and everything he says downstream is processed through that tribal assignment regardless of merit.

Michael Oren, Netanyahu’s ambassador in Washington during the Obama period, warned internally that the partisan-capture strategy would prove costly. He was overruled. The overrule was not stupidity. It was coalition-logic instinct overriding sorted-politics analysis inside an Israeli decision-making apparatus built to run on the former.

The new MFA budget structure reproduces much of the same category error at scale. It seems that Sa’ar convened a single deliberative body — former spokesmen, IDF veterans, YouTube influencers, comedians — to design a single messaging strategy for a single American audience. The structure assumes one audience. The audience has two moral vocabularies. The structure will not reach the second vocabulary regardless of how much the Finance Ministry dumps into the budget.

Senator Chris Murphy, whatever his current rhetorical posture, has privately warned Netanyahu several times over the past decade about the alignment risks. The warnings were not cryptic. They were diplomatic kindness from a politician who understood the mechanism and assumed that a sophisticated Israeli prime minister would eventually hear it. He heard it. He could not operationally move on it.

The PM Best-Equipped to Read the System Still Cannot Navigate It

Benjamin Netanyahu is the most American-fluent prime minister in Israeli history.

That fact has to sit at the front of this section because every argument downstream depends on it. If the Israeli leader with the deepest American political formation still cannot navigate the sorting mechanism, then the mechanism is not navigable through conventional diplomatic craft. It is a structural condition.

The Netanyahu family lived in Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania from 1963 to 1967, when Benjamin — known to his American classmates as Ben Nitay — graduated Cheltenham High School. He returned to Israel for IDF service, then returned to the United States in 1972 to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was there through May 1976, with a break in 1973 to fight in the Yom Kippur War. He earned a degree in Architecture in February 1975 and another from the Sloan School of Management in June 1976. He was admitted concurrently to MIT’s political science PhD program. His studies ended when his brother Yonatan was killed at Entebbe.

Then came his stint at the Boston Consulting Group from 1976 to 1978 — overlapping with Mitt Romney, who was at BCG from 1975 to 1977 — where Netanyahu was placed on a cross-European strategic planning team for the Swedish government, traveled to study Britain and France, and absorbed what he has since described as BCG’s intellectually rigorous boot camp.

Then deputy chief of mission at the Israeli embassy in Washington (1982 to 1984). Then permanent representative to the United Nations (1984 to 1988).

No, I’m not trying to give you his CV. I want you to see how Western-literate he is and to see what he absorbed. Look at that UN tenure window. The Reagan second term.

The exact moment the evangelical-Republican-Israel alignment crystallized under the Moral Majority coalition. Which is precisely the realignment the partisan-sorting literature identifies as the consolidation phase of the modern American political system.

Netanyahu was physically present in New York. He was giving interviews to American outlets and watching the alignment lock into place in real time.

This is not a leader who stumbled into American partisan politics. This is a leader whose formative political education took place during the formation of the modern American partisan system, on American soil, inside the institutions that shaped the realignment.

And he still got trapped.

The Trump second-term alignment has been — by any metric an Israeli prime minister would have used in 2015 — successful. Six White House visits in the first thirteen months. First foreign leader welcomed at the White House in the second term, February 4, 2025. Recognition of Israeli sovereignty positions that the Biden administration had blocked. Arms transfers that Democratic administrations would have slow-walked or conditioned. On the surface, the partisan-capture strategy delivered concrete outputs — Abraham Accords extensions, sovereignty recognitions, expedited arms transfers.

Look underneath it, though. Trump’s May 2025 Middle East trip — his first major foreign travel of the second term — skipped Israel. A US official told Axios: “Nothing good can come out of a visit to Israel at the moment.” Trump uncoupled the Saudi nuclear agreement from Israel normalization, reversing the structure Biden had built. He negotiated directly with Hamas for the release of American-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander in May 2025 without Israeli involvement. He conducted indirect talks with Iran in Oman. When Netanyahu arrived at the White House in February 2026 for his sixth visit, Israeli media described him as worried that Trump’s rush for a deal might produce terms harming Israel’s security.

Matthew Kroenig, the former Pentagon Iran lead, put the dynamic plainly on NPR before that February 2026 meeting. Trump is unpredictable. Trump likes deals. Trump wants to be the peacemaker. Netanyahu is worried about what that means for Iran strategy specifically. The most pro-Israel American president since Reagan, serving in a second term with an Israeli ally he has been explicitly aligned with since 2017, is a source of strategic anxiety for the prime minister who built the alignment — because the alignment delivers access without leverage, and access without leverage is not a strategy.

The partisan-capture strategy has produced this outcome. A Republican president the Israeli PM cannot fully trust on Iran. A Democratic caucus in which forty of forty-seven senators now vote to block weapons sales. And a Republican primary electorate in which 52% of voters prioritize lowering domestic prices over Israel funding. That is what the absence of a strategy looks like when it runs long enough to be observed in the wild.

The hostile claim — that Netanyahu did this to Israel — has the causal arrow backwards.

The sorting mechanism made bipartisan access impossible, and Netanyahu chose the partisan option the old grammar let him recognize as a choice.

It might be rational-within-the-trap. But it was still trapped.

AIPAC Is Defending Ground That Has Already Moved

AIPAC’s architecture was built for a consensus that no longer exists.

Some several decades of institutional decisions were calibrated to sustain and operate inside a bipartisan environment the sorting mechanism has since dismantled, and the institution has not restructured to match the dismantling.

The operational expansion under Howard Kohr, who led AIPAC from 1996 to 2024, is the surface story. Budget from $105 million in 2011 to $164 million in 2022. Staff from 40 to 300. Claimed membership above five million. Seventeen regional offices.

The expansion is real, but it is expansion of a consensus-era architecture, not redesign of it.

More regional offices mean more venues delivering the same bipartisan message to a bifurcating audience.

The layer under that story is the 2021 break with the no-endorsements policy. In December 2021, AIPAC announced the creation of two political vehicles: AIPAC PAC for direct candidate contributions, and the United Democracy Project as an independent-expenditure super PAC.

The leadership framed the move as a response to the changed environment.

Tom Dine, who ran AIPAC from 1980 to 1993, called it “a public failure” and urged a return to the no-endorsement rule. Dine was right about the failure. He was wrong about the remedy.

The failure is not that AIPAC started endorsing. The failure is that AIPAC started endorsing inside an institutional identity that was grounded on not endorsing — and therefore cannot do the endorsing work credibly.

UDP’s 2024 cycle is an empirical demonstration. The super PAC raised $68.4 million through August 2024 — Jan Koum alone contributed $5 million — and deployed it primarily against two Democratic incumbents: Jamaal Bowman in New York’s 16th district and Cori Bush in Missouri’s 1st. They spent $9.9 million opposing Bowman and $4.8 million supporting challenger George Latimer. Which the New York Times described as more than any single-interest group had ever spent on a single House race.

Look at what UDP did not do in the races it won.

Justice Democrats communications director Usamah Andrabi noted afterward that not one UDP advertisement in the 2024 cycle mentioned Israel. Not one. [That is an admission encoded as a media buy.] The organization whose operating purpose is pro-Israel advocacy ran its most consequential political operation by refusing to argue on the substance of its mission — because the Israel-based argument no longer wins inside a Democratic primary. Which is AIPAC’s institutional disclosure that the consensus method has stopped working.

Kohr himself made the admission plainer in a November 2023 donor-only meeting. Asked how to encourage members of Congress to stand up to what he called “pro-Hamas” claims, Kohr outlined an enforcement architecture: Members who support Israel would be helped politically. Members who work to weaken Israel would be defeated at the ballot box. The statement is strategic enforcement-through-primary-challenge. It is not consensus-plus-lobbying. It is the operating model after the operating model changed.

Post-October 7 fundraising surged. AIPAC received roughly $12 million per month in pledged donations through September 2023. October 2023 alone brought over $40 million. November and December 2023 combined: roughly $50 million. The total haul through late January 2024: $90 million.

The money came in because donors understood Israel was in existential danger and an American pro-Israel institution needed resources. The institution receiving the resources did not read the moment symmetrically. The dollars funded an expansion of the existing architecture rather than a redesign.

Kohr retired at the end of 2024. Elliot Brandt succeeded him. The transition did not produce a public strategic reset. Brandt inherited the outgoing framing — AIPAC as the tip of the spear for pro-Israel policies in Congress — which is the operational language of a pre-sorting era institution addressing a sorted audience, and the mismatch is visible in the sentence itself.

Why can AIPAC not restructure into parallel partisan affiliates? Three reasons, each structurally decisive.

First, institutional identity. AIPAC’s legitimacy claim — the reason members of Congress take its calls — is grounded on bipartisan access. A public split into Democratic-aligned and Republican-aligned affiliates would delegitimate the claim that produced the access in the first place, and it is not clear that the affiliated structures could then rebuild separate legitimacy inside their partisan containers faster than AIPAC would lose the bipartisan legitimacy it still partially holds.

Second, donor coordination. AIPAC’s donor base is itself sorted, roughly along the denominational lines the next section covers in detail. Republican-aligned donors and Democratic-aligned donors both write checks to AIPAC because they accept its bipartisan cover. A public split forces each donor pool to choose, and the split almost certainly does not produce two institutions each as well-funded as AIPAC is today.

Third, board legitimacy. The AIPAC board of directors is drawn from the consensus-era lay leadership class. The board composition itself is an institutional anchor to the old model. A restructuring mandate would require either replacing the board or persuading it to oversee its own obsolescence — neither of which is a thing institutional boards typically do.

AIPAC is not structurally incapable of change. It is structurally incapable of this specific change from its current starting position — without a major, painful push anyway. That is why the architecture this piece will eventually describe — parallel partisan coalitions — likely has to be built somewhere other than inside AIPAC.

The Coalition Fractured on Both Sides — Republican and Jewish

Both party coalitions are fracturing on Israel simultaneously, and the Republican fracture is converting at a rate that forecloses any long-term partisan-capture strategy.

The Democratic collapse is the more visible front. The piece of the picture that receives systematically less attention is that the same mechanism is running on the Republican side, and running faster than Democrats converted on Ukraine.

The IMEU/YouGov December 2025 survey is an unambiguous indicator. Among Republicans under 45: 51% prefer a 2028 presidential candidate who supports reducing taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel. 53% oppose renewing the current 10-year, $38 billion Memorandum of Understanding that expires in 2028. 51% oppose entering the 20-year, $76 billion MOU reportedly under negotiation. 74% agree that taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel should be reinvested in lowering domestic healthcare costs.

Netanyahu net favorability among Republicans over 45: +40. Among Republicans under 45: +2. What a gap. Thirty-eight points inside the same political party — which is to say, the Republican Party of 2035 is not the Republican Party of 2025, and the replacement dynamic is already visible in the current data.

Pew’s September 2025 survey confirms the trajectory. 19% of Republicans said Israel had been going too far in military operations in Gaza, up from 12% in December 2023. 41% of Republicans held an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 27% in 2022. Gallup’s March 2026 series showed Republican favorable views of Israel at 69% — down 15 points from 2025 and the lowest level in over two decades.

The America First realignment is accelerating the effect. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, J.D. Vance in rhetorical moments, the podcast right broadly — the conservative media ecosystem that Republicans under 45 actually listen to has been running Israel-skeptical content at scale since 2023. The content does not present itself as left-coded. It presents itself as nationalist, anti-interventionist, skeptical-of-elite-consensus — which is to say, it reaches the exact Republican demographic most available for generational-replacement sorting.

The Jewish community itself has already sorted into two partisan containers that cannot be lobbied as a single constituency.

Pew’s 2020 Jewish Americans study is the definitive data anchor. Orthodox Jews: 75% Republican or Republican-leaning, up from 57% in 2013. Reform Jews: 80% Democrat or Democrat-leaning. Orthodox Trump approval in the 2019–2020 fieldwork window: 81%. Overall American Jewish Trump disapproval: 73%. Half of Orthodox Jews told Pew they had “not much” or “nothing at all” in common with Reform Jews. The feeling seems to be reciprocal.

Manhattan Institute’s October 2024 survey captured the denominational political behavior heading into the election. Harris margin overall: +36. Reform: +53. Unaffiliated: +45. Conservative: +14. Orthodox: −29. Trump net favorability: overall −39, Reform −56, Orthodox +25. The Trump favorability gap between Orthodox and Reform Jews is not a community with internal disagreements. It is two communities occupying the same demographic census category and moving in diametrically opposed political directions.

The JEI/Mellman post-election exit poll confirmed the Manhattan Institute projection. Harris 71%, Trump 26% overall. By denomination: Reform 84% Harris, Conservative 75% Harris, unaffiliated 70% Harris, Orthodox 74% Trump. By religious attendance: 81% of Jews who never attend services voted Harris; 61% of those attending more than monthly voted Harris.

The Tablet and Split Ticket precinct data showed the effect at the neighborhood level. Heavily Orthodox Lakewood, New Jersey: Biden received 17.2% in 2020, Harris 11.2% in 2024. Lakewood precinct 27: Trump 366-0. Precinct 36: 560-1. Squirrel Hill, Teaneck, Scarsdale all shifted Republican by 3 to 12 points between 2020 and 2024.

The Orthodox surge inside the Jewish vote is a communal realignment running in parallel with the denominational institutional realignment it expresses politically.

The claim [if it could ever rationally exist given the old joke about two Jews and three opinions] that the American Jewish community speaks with one voice on Israel is empirically dead. A coalition that includes 74% Trump Orthodox voters and 84% Harris Reform voters cannot be lobbied as a single constituency because the two halves of the coalition now trust different political validators, read different media, and process the same Israel question through different moral vocabularies.

Mark Mellman, who runs Democratic Majority for Israel, put it diplomatically: “There’s a fight going on in the Democratic Party. It’s a hard fight.”

The undiplomatic version is that the fight is over, and the winner did not win because of Israeli conduct — the winner won because the sorting apparatus does not negotiate.

Two cores are fracturing simultaneously. The hinge constituency that AIPAC’s consensus-era architecture was built to represent has disassembled into two partisan constituencies, and each of those constituencies has internal generational dynamics running the same mechanism one layer deeper.

That is not a recoverable environment. That is the environment for which a different architecture has to be built.

The Inverted Horseshoe: Two Middles, Two Vocabularies

The political extremes converge on Jews and Israel. The moderate cores diverge. That second observation — not the first — is where the structural consequence for institutional advocacy lives, and the moderate-core divergence operates on a mechanism with a name and an empirical literature behind it.

Horseshoe theory, attributed to the French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye in Théorie du récit, observes that the political extremes bend toward each other: the far right and the far left, nominally opposite, converge on structural features like authoritarianism, conspiracy, and — the application most relevant to this brief — antisemitism.

The primary path for the horseshoe? Far-right respondents endorse classic conspiracy and dual-loyalty tropes. Left-wing respondents endorse Israel-as-colonial-oppressor framings.

The vocabularies differ. The underlying structure — Jews or Israel as uniquely malevolent actor — is the same.

Over the past year, you’d need to be functionally illiterate to miss this growing trend. Tucker Carlson ran conspiracy content about “globalist Jews” on the right. Candace Owens suggested on her podcast that Israel was involved in Charlie Kirk’s assassination because Israeli cellphones had been detected in the area. On the left, Zohran Mamdani, the Queens state assemblyman who won the New York City mayoral race in November 2025, told supporters that the boot of the NYPD on a civilian’s neck had been laced by the IDF. Different costumes, same opera.

That the extremes converge is the observation the horseshoe literature has been making for fifty years. The inverse is also true to an extent. The extremes converge, yes. And, functionally, the moderate cores diverge — and the moderate-core divergence is the structurally consequential phenomenon, because the extremes are not the audience any institution is actually trying to reach.

The analytical spine for the inverted observation is Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. Graham, Haidt, and Nosek established in 2009, across four studies, that liberals and conservatives activate different subsets of the same moral psychology. Liberals rely disproportionately on two individualizing foundations — Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity — and discount three binding foundations: Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. Conservatives rely roughly equally on all five. The finding has been replicated across dozens of studies, in multiple countries, and across issue domains.

Apply the finding to Israel.

A moderate Democrat processing a news item about an IDF strike in Gaza routes the item through the Harm foundation — how many civilians, what was the proportionality, what does humanitarian law say — and the Fairness foundation — is the use of force proportionate, was there a reasonable alternative, how does this read against the universal standard. These are the dominant foundations the moderate Democrat’s moral psychology activates by default.

Loyalty, authority, and sanctity are secondary. They are present but in no way are they load-bearing.

A moderate Republican processing the same news item routes the item through: (1) Loyalty — Israel is the ally, the ally is defending itself, allies get support; (2) Authority — the Israeli government authorized the operation inside its own sovereign decision-making, and the challenge to that authority is itself suspect — and (3) Sanctity — the land carries biblical covenantal significance, the people carry religious significance for the evangelical base, the moral weight of the ally is substantially higher than neutral third-country weight. Harm and Fairness are present but not dominant. The binding foundations carry the moral load.

The same event enters two completely different moral processors.

The bipartisan message AIPAC spent seventy years crafting assumed that a single moral vocabulary — a vocabulary built on security alliance, shared democratic values, and strategic cooperation — could activate both processors simultaneously.

That assumption held as long as the political coalitions both contained moderate voices using substantially overlapping moral vocabularies.

Once the coalitions sorted, the vocabularies bifurcated, and the single-message architecture started failing — not because the messaging got worse but because the audience split into two audiences the message was not built to address.

The denominational data above is the test of the theory running in real time.

Orthodox Jews, whose religious practice maximally activates Loyalty (Jewish peoplehood), Authority (rabbinic structure, Torah obligation), and Sanctity (Shabbat, kashrut, holiness codes), align 75% Republican. Reform Jews, whose religious practice minimizes the binding foundations and emphasizes Harm and Fairness (tikkun olam, universal justice, social concern), align 80% Democrat.

Same people, same Israel, same news.

Two different moral vocabularies. Two different political containers.

The operational implication is brutal.

An Israeli official activating binding-foundation rhetoric — Netanyahu in any of his American media appearances since 2023 speaking about sovereignty, alliance, biblical inheritance, civilizational defense — reaches the moderate Republican core with high fidelity and reaches the moderate Democratic core with approximately zero signal-to-noise.

An Israeli official activating individualizing-foundation rhetoric — the proportionality argument, the humanitarian law frame, the civilian-casualty accounting — reaches the moderate Democratic core at reasonable fidelity and reads to the moderate Republican core as dangerously close to conceding the adversary’s moral frame.

There is no register available to a single messenger that simultaneously reaches both cores adequately. And the attempt to split the difference produces a bland message that reaches neither.

This is the diagnostic that makes the architectural prescription unavoidable.

If the two moderate cores process the same facts through two different moral processors, and if the institutional vehicles designed to reach them were all built for a single processor, then the vehicles are mismatched to the terrain.

No amount of better messaging inside the existing vehicles fixes the mismatch.

The vehicles themselves have to be redesigned — or replaced — with two-track architecture that speaks each moderate core’s native moral vocabulary through messengers those cores already trust.

The extremes have converged. The cores have diverged. The architecture has to follow the cores, because the cores are where the votes, the donors, and the policy outcomes actually live.

The Affiliate Structure That Was Never Built

Two-track advocacy architecture is not a novel institutional form. It is the default structure in at least three mature American political-movement traditions.

What is novel — what has never been attempted — is building the structure for a foreign policy question, inside a movement whose founding institutions were designed for bipartisan consensus and have never mutated away from that design.

Start with reproductive rights. The National Abortion Rights Action League, founded 1969 and now operating as Reproductive Freedom for All, runs three coordinated entities: a 501(c)(4) for advocacy and lobbying; a 501(c)(3) foundation, incorporated 1977, for research and education; a PAC for direct political operations. Thirty-five state affiliates carry the work at the state level with substantial operational autonomy. The entities coordinate research, share data, calibrate timing on major announcements, and deploy separately through messengers calibrated to their respective audiences and venues. The structure is federated by design.

The opposing side built an even more extensive version. The National Right to Life Committee operates 50 state affiliates and roughly 3,000 local chapters, claims 7 million members, runs a $9-plus million annual operating budget, and deploys both a candidate-contribution PAC and — critically for the AIPAC comparison — the National Right to Life Victory Fund, established 2012 as an independent-expenditure super PAC. The Victory Fund claimed a 79% win rate across 295 endorsed candidates in the 2020 cycle.

The structural parallel to AIPAC PAC plus UDP is exact. The key difference is that NRLC’s affiliates speak in voices calibrated to their local political environments, while AIPAC’s endorsements come through a single central voice that can’t credibly speak in two partisan registers at once.

Labor built an older version. The AFL-CIO PAC lineage traces to 1946, restructured under its current name after the 1955 merger. Individual union PACs — SEIU COPE, UAW-V-CAP, AFSCME PEOPLE — operate in coordination with the federation but deploy separately, calibrate their messaging to specific union memberships, and when necessary break with the federation on specific races without fracturing the federated relationship.

The Sierra Club has run a 501(c)(4) plus 501(c)(3) Foundation plus PAC plus state chapter structure on the environmental side since before the modern sorting mechanism accelerated.

The architectural vocabulary is specific. State affiliate. Local chapter. Sister organization. Dual-affiliate structure. Coordinated entities with separate operational deployments.

The IRS structures — 501(c)(3) for educational and research work, 501(c)(4) for advocacy and lobbying, PAC for candidate contributions, super PAC for independent expenditures — are the legal plumbing that makes the architecture possible.

AIPAC already has the plumbing. AIPAC PAC, UDP, AIEF as the 501(c)(3) sister organization, and the main 501(c)(4) are the four entities.

The apparatus exists. But the apparatus is deployed as single-voice, not as sister-organization.

Why has Israel advocacy not mutated to the sister-organization model already?

The causal chain runs through founding-era path dependence. AIPAC was constituted in 1954, inside a bipartisan consensus environment, by founders who assumed the consensus was the terrain.

The institutional decisions made in the next seven decades — Kenen’s no-endorsement rule, the foundation of AIEF as educational-trust form in 1988, the expansion under Kohr along centralized-messaging lines, the 2021 PAC and UDP rollout structured as extensions of the central voice rather than as sister organizations — all reinforced the single-voice premise.

The institution mutates incrementally. The mutation required to shift from single-voice to sister-organization is discontinuous, not incremental.

Several secondary blocks compound the path dependence.

An Israeli ministerial class has been sorted — already — into Republican-recognizable American media venues. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir on Christian broadcasting. Netanyahu on Fox. Eylon Levy across the Anglophone center-right.

These messengers can be calibrated tomorrow to reach the moderate Democratic core by topic and tone, and the calibration will fail on arrival, because the messengers are already tribally assigned in the audience’s perception.

A sister-organization architecture cannot use the messengers AIPAC has on hand. It needs different messengers. Building the Democratic-facing messenger pool from scratch takes a decade.

Further, AIPAC’s donor base is itself sorted along denominational-partisan lines.

Republican-aligned donors who believe in Israel write checks to AIPAC because AIPAC’s bipartisan positioning launders the partisan alignment as universal support.

Democratic-aligned donors who believe in Israel write checks to AIPAC for the inverse reason: the bipartisan positioning lets them support Israel without signing on to centrist or right-leaning politics.

A sister-organization split forces each donor pool to choose — which means some donors leave entirely, some donors halve their giving across both sister organizations, and the total combined intake very plausibly declines rather than growing.

To be clear, no parallel-affiliate structure has been built on a foreign policy question because foreign policy questions have historically remained inside the bipartisan-consensus zone in American politics.

Now that Israel, Ukraine, and China policy are all sorting into partisan containers, the precedent will start existing — but the first institution to build the new architecture pays the full innovator’s tax, and institutional boards typically prefer the costs of inertia to the costs of being first.

The new Israel-aligned institutions that have formed since 2023 gesture at the architecture without completing it.

The Democratic-flank slot, in particular, remains empty — because the institution that was supposed to fill it is not, on present evidence, Israel-aligned.

J Street has spent fifteen years printing “pro-Israel, pro-peace” on its letterhead while functioning as the Washington-respectable permission structure for opposing concrete Israeli security measures under cover of supporting Israel in the abstract.

On April 12, 2026, Jeremy Ben-Ami announced that J Street will no longer support U.S. assistance for Israeli defense systems when the current MOU expires in 2028 — which is to say, an organization trading on a “pro-Israel” brand now opposes continued American support for the interceptors that kept 700,000 American citizens in Israel alive during Operation Roaring Lion’s missile salvos.

An organization that will not defend the interceptor above a kindergarten in Sderot is, plainly, an anti-Israel organization whose brand is older than its current position and needs updating. [The brand will get updated when the donor base does the math; not before.]

Democratic Majority for Israel is the institution that actually occupies the Democratic-aligned pro-Israel slot — center-Democratic PAC, operationally unambiguous, at a fraction of the scale a sister-organization architecture would require.

IMEU Policy Project runs from the opposite direction, explicitly anti-weapons-to-Israel.

ZOA operates Republican-aligned without formalizing the partisan positioning.

The space of new institutions exists. None has built the sister-organization architecture at the scale the two-track environment requires.

The architecture remains specifiable in form, and unbuilt.

The MFA Is Funding the Wrong Category

The MFA budget allocated to public diplomacy is being deployed into a terrain the budget’s architecture cannot read, which is why the marginal return on additional shekels is near zero.

The 2025 allocation was a twenty-fold increase over the pre-war typical annual allocation of roughly NIS 27 million. The December 2025 government approval — announced jointly by Finance Minister Smotrich and Foreign Minister Sa’ar — brought the 2026 total to approximately $729 million.

Sa’ar framed the purpose as a diplomatic campaign aimed at foreign policymakers combined with a cognitive campaign targeting “global public opinion.”

“Global public opinion” is the category error.

There is no global public opinion, and there is no American public opinion. There are two American publics, sorted, processed through two different moral vocabularies, reached by two different messenger networks.

A cognitive campaign targeting the composite is a cognitive campaign targeting an analytical fiction. The dollars — the shekels — spent on the composite enter a single pipeline, emerge through single-voice messengers, and arrive at an audience that divides them cleanly along the sort line.

The structure of the January 2025 brainstorming sessions reproduces the category error at the operational level. Sa’ar convened a single deliberative body — former government spokesman Eylon Levy, former IDF English spokesman Jonathan Conricus, INSS fellow Ophir Dayan, StandWithUs executive director Michael Dickson, makeup YouTuber Ashley Waxman-Bakshi, Israeli model Nataly Dadon, comedian Yohay Sponder — to design a single messaging strategy. Subsequent consultations with civil society institutions — Jewish Agency, ELNET, AJC, Nefesh B’Nefesh, NGO Monitor, World Zionist Organization, HonestReporting — added weight to the same single pipeline.

The deliberative architecture is a committee designing a message. The audience is not a committee’s counterpart. The audience is two audiences.

The Clock Tower X LLC contract, signed in 2025 under Sa’ar, pays the US-based firm $6 million to produce digital content and — this is the line from the FARA filings — influence how large language models respond to Israel-related topics. The premise assumes that AI discourse is a unified space. AI discourse is not a unified space. The language models encounter training data that is itself partisan-sorted, Democratic-leaning outlets and Republican-leaning outlets producing content with different framings of the same facts, and the model outputs split across the underlying sort when probed from different user contexts.

Much like the rest, influencing AI discourse as if it were one object is another avoidable category error.

David Weinberg at the Misgav Institute warned in the Jerusalem Post against specific failure modes: do not set up a grand hasbara directorate layered on existing structures; do not consume budget on hasbara research and consulting firms; do not try to outspend TikTok’s anti-Israel posts.

Weinberg’s instinct on the failure modes is correct. His frame — that the problem is execution quality inside a correct category — misses the deeper diagnosis.

The category itself is wrong. A single well-executed message calibrated for global public opinion cannot land simultaneously on the moderate Democratic core’s individualizing foundations and the moderate Republican core’s binding foundations.

The secondary failure is messenger pre-sorting. The Israeli bench most visible in American media since 2023 — Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu, Levy — has been absorbed into the Republican-recognizable validator network by the audience’s default processing, regardless of the substance of what those messengers actually say.

A moderate Democratic voter watching Smotrich on any American platform processes Smotrich’s remarks through the pre-assigned tribal marker before the remarks are even fully heard. No matter how many millions of shekels are deployed to bring those messengers to the forefront reaches one of the two moderate cores at reasonable fidelity. It reaches the other at approximately zero.

A two-track MFA directorate would deploy differently. Republican-track messaging through Republican-recognizable messengers, on evangelical broadcasting, on national-security conservative platforms, through think-tank partners calibrated to Heritage, Hudson, AEI. Democratic-track messaging through Democratic-recognizable messengers — which Israel currently does not have at sufficient scale — on humanitarian-law frames, on shared-democratic-values frames calibrated to Obama-alumni foreign policy networks, through think-tank partners calibrated to Brookings, Carnegie, CNAS.

The two tracks would share intelligence, research, and timing coordination. They would not share messengers or venues or framings. Fifty-Year Front diagnosed the execution failure. This diagnosis specifies why the category being executed is the wrong category to begin with. Upping the budget without restructuring the category only scales the mismatch.

Israel Has Eight to Twelve Years on the Ukraine Clock

Ukraine is the precedent where the full arc has already played out inside a window short enough for the trajectory to be readily legible. The arc ran from bipartisan hero’s welcome to partisan stalemate in roughly 28 months. The Israel arc has been running for roughly 25 years and is substantially further along the same curve.

December 21, 2022: Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed a joint session of Congress in his first trip outside Ukraine since the February 2022 invasion. Nancy Pelosi introduced him. The chamber delivered multiple standing ovations. Republican senators praised him unreservedly — Lindsey Graham called it one of the most inspiring joint session speeches he had ever witnessed. Rob Portman endorsed accelerating aid. Chuck Grassley called the speech historic. The bipartisan welcome was real. The durability of the bipartisanship was an illusion produced by the sorted mechanism not yet having processed the issue.

The trajectory from that December ovation:

By April 2022, 14% of Americans said the United States was doing too much to support Ukraine.

By September 2023, 41%.

By December 2023, 50% of Republicans — up from 9% in March 2022 — said the United States was providing too much support. Forty-one-point intra-party shift in 22 months.

In October 2023, roughly 100 House Republicans stripped $6 billion in Ukraine aid from a government funding bill.

In February 2024, the Ukraine-Israel-border supplemental deal failed on the Senate floor after Trump publicly lobbied Republicans to kill it.

By March 2025, the Chicago Council recorded a 47-point partisan gap on support for Ukraine.

Zelenskyy’s position in December 2022 was structurally stronger than Israel’s has been at any point in the last decade. He had the sympathy of a bipartisan Congress. He had operational cooperation with a Democratic administration and a substantial Republican bench in the Senate. He cultivated no settlements across the Green Line. He endorsed no Republican president. He appeared at no partisan political events. He didn’t give speeches arranged by one party’s speaker against the wishes of the executive.

Ukraine did everything the consensus-era advocacy playbook prescribed. Ukraine was still sorted, in less than two years, because the sorting mechanism does not process the advocacy choices — it processes the elite cues, the validator networks, and the media ecosystem bifurcation, and those all tipped regardless of Kyiv’s conduct.

The INSS analysis in March 2025 named the parallel directly. The case of Ukraine is a serious warning sign for Israel. The Israeli think tank closest to the Israeli defense establishment read the trajectory correctly and articulated it publicly. The operational response to that warning has been insufficient — not because Israeli analysts failed to recognize the mechanism, but because Israeli institutions are built to respond to conditions the mechanism renders obsolete.

Israel runs approximately eight to twelve years ahead of Ukraine’s on the sorting timeline — not because Israel is further from collapse but because Israel’s sorting began earlier. Ukraine reached the 47-point partisan gap in 28 months. Israel reached the 44-point gap in March 2026 and will cross 47 points in a cycle or two.

The difference is that Israel’s advocacy infrastructure outlasted the consensus conditions by roughly a decade — the institutional lag.

That lag is the window in which a sister-organization architecture could have been built. The window is closing.

Scenarios: Four Paths Forward, One Unbuilt

Four paths are live. Three accept decline in different forms. One requires institutional innovation that is itself structurally disfavored by the conditions making it necessary.

The scenarios are not equally probable.

Political friction, donor inertia, and institutional path dependence all weight against the innovation path precisely when the innovation path is the only one that does not accept decline.

• Partisan capture doubled down.

  The path of least institutional resistance.
  Netanyahu-Trump alignment extended through the second Trump administration and into 2028, with Israeli ministerial reliance on Republican access as the operational default. The path is stable through 2028 given current institutional inertia and the operational benefits the alignment has delivered on specific outcomes — Abraham Accords extensions, sovereignty recognitions, expedited arms transfers. The path becomes unstable after 2028 as the Republican generational fracture widens. By 2032 or 2036, the Republican under-45 cohort that preferred reduced weapons to Israel is the Republican primary voter. The partisan-capture strategy’s shelf life is measured in political cycles, not decades. It is the probable path through 2028. It is not a long-run strategy.

• Bipartisan consensus restoration.

  The path of greatest institutional comfort and least analytical honesty.
  AIPAC reformist wing, DMFI centrist messaging, intensified legislator tours, additional primary interventions calibrated as defense rather than transformation. The path assumes the sorting mechanism reverses, or that institutional pressure can reverse it. Neither has occurred on comparator issues. Climate has shown no partisan reunification in 34 years since the 1992 inflection. Immigration has shown none in 17 years since the 2009 inflection. The probability of dominant success for this path is near zero. The probability of substantial institutional resources being consumed while the path fails is high. AIPAC’s 2024 UDP operations, already described as a public failure by Tom Dine, are the current demonstration of this scenario running and consuming without delivering dominance.

• Two-track parallel coalitions.

  The unbuilt architecture.
  Differentiated Democratic-aligned and Republican-aligned sister organizations, sharing research and timing but deploying separately through messengers calibrated to each partisan core’s moral vocabulary. Probably requires new institutional formation outside AIPAC and requires substantial donor reorganization that sorts existing pro-Israel capital into two separate funding streams rather than the current unified stream that AIPAC launders. Probability of dominant adoption within five years: low, absent major donor and institutional reorganization that no current actor is visibly driving. Probability of partial adoption through new institutional formation outside AIPAC: higher and rising, as the operational failures of the first two scenarios force capital reallocation by attrition. The path that would matter most is the least likely under current conditions — precisely because the conditions that would make it likely are the conditions we, sadly, argue have not yet been recognized by the institutional class that would need to build it.

• Managed decline with diaspora repositioning.

  The path that accepts the American ground has moved decisively and builds elsewhere.
  Contingent on Israel-Europe realignment maturing, on Israel-Asia partnership depth, and on diaspora institutional capacity to absorb functions American advocacy structures currently perform. Probability strongly conditional on external factors: Europe relationships have been strained by Spain’s and Ireland’s 2024 Palestinian state recognitions and EU court interventions. Asia relationships with India and Japan are deepening but have not reached a scale that would compensate for American erosion. Diaspora institutions outside the United States have capacity gaps that would take a generation to close. The path is operationally available but structurally dependent on maturity that does not yet exist. [The diaspora question itself is a separate analysis this brief will not attempt to resolve — the Long Brief next week scopes it.]

The probability-weighted surface favors scenario 1 through 2028 and scenario 2 as the institutional default that keeps consuming resources indefinitely. Scenario 3 is the scenario that matters for long-run outcomes and is the least probable in the short run. Scenario 4 becomes more available as time passes and external conditions mature, which is to say, Scenario 4 becomes more available at precisely the rate at which it also becomes more necessary and less a choice.

None of the four scenarios returns the coalition to the pre-2014 bipartisan consensus, because that consensus was not a choice any institution made. That environmental condition that has ended.

The question is which of the four paths the institutional class selects in the absence of restoration, and the answer the scenario analysis produces is that the class will most probably select the path of least institutional resistance — which is the path that accepts the most decline.

The sorting mechanism does not negotiate. And the institutional inertia that produced AIPAC’s current positioning, Netanyahu’s partisan-capture default, and the MFA’s single-audience hasbara pipeline will not be dissolved by better messaging, sharper talking points, or an additional NIS 2 billion in public diplomacy allocation.

Bipartisan outcomes — Iron Dome reauthorizations, arms transfers that clear the Senate, sovereignty statements that hold across administrations — remain attainable in the new environment, but they are attainable only through a two-track architecture addressing two bifurcated moderate cores through two separate messenger networks coordinated at the research and timing layer and deliberately differentiated at the delivery layer.

The bipartisan method that produced those outcomes for seventy years is over.

The bipartisan outcomes are not.

The architecture that replaces the method has not yet been built, and the institutional class that would need to build it is still operating on assumptions formed inside a consensus that ended twelve years ago.

Kelly will stand up again. So will the Democratic senator who follows him. So will the 2028 Republican primary voter who tells the pollster that Israel funding should be redirected to domestic priorities.

The ground has already moved. The only live question is whether any institution builds on the ground that is actually there.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

Friends, Shabbat shalom — this one runs without a paywall.

Usually we gate the Long Brief, but this week the argument is too operational to keep behind one. Consider it open — forward it, post it, send it along. Keep it moving (the reader who needs this hasn’t seen it yet).

Just this past Monday at Yad Vashem, Benjamin Netanyahu told the world that Israel had fulfilled its post-Holocaust pledge. Stated plainly, Operation Roaring Lion and the joint American-Israeli campaign had broken what he called “the industry of death” — Iran’s nuclear plants, its missile arsenals, its UAVs, the Revolutionary Guards’ senior command, the naval fleet, the air force.

Those were his words: “This year, we turned that promise into reality.” Raw, no hedge — no “signals,” no “shifts.” Every beat landed declarative: the thing was done, and the Prime Minister said so in front of the names of six million dead.

Enter today.

The coalition that existed to deny him that achievement had grown. Italy — Meloni’s Italy, until this week the most reliably pro-Israel government in Western Europe — suspended automatic renewal of its 2005 defense cooperation memorandum. Eighteen European foreign ministers plus Australia issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s April 8 strikes on Hezbollah infrastructure in Lebanon “in the strongest terms.” Forty of forty-seven Senate Democrats voted to block a $295 million sale of Caterpillar D9 bulldozers to Israel — thirty-six voted to block a $150 million bomb package — and Mark Kelly, the putative centrist 2028 contender, stood on the floor and introduced the Sanders resolutions himself. And two weeks earlier, at a DSA forum in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had announced she would no longer support U.S. funding for Iron Dome — the purely defensive system — followed days later by J Street [the Washington lobby that keeps the “pro-Israel” label for as-a-Jew marketing purposes] calling for the 2028 MOU to phase out direct financial assistance for Israeli defense systems altogether.

Victory didn’t travel. It couldn’t. The ground between Tel Aviv and the West was taken fifty years ago, and Israel seemingly never went to contest it.

Every Israeli broadcast asset now deployed — press conferences, ministries, spokespeople, a NIS 500 million public diplomacy budget — is performing on terrain laid by an adversary coalition that started building in 1975 and has never stopped.

Broadcast fights the last news cycle. Terrain owns the next. This Long Brief is about the difference.

Iran Lost. Israel Still Got Hit.

Netanyahu’s declaration was an operational claim: Iran’s nuclear weapons program has been destroyed, its senior IRGC leadership killed, its strategic air defenses collapsed, its missile infrastructure crippled. The claim is broadly correct. Iran broke. The Arrow system — evolved from Arrow 1 through nearly Arrow 4 across twenty years — held against one of the largest missile salvos in the history of air defense. The 700,000 American citizens resident in Israel stayed alive because of a system J Street now wants to defund.

And the diplomatic arithmetic ran in the other direction.

Italy — the Meloni coalition, until this week one of the three most reliably pro-Israel governments in Europe — notified Israel through Defense Minister Guido Crosetto that the 2005 defense cooperation memorandum would not automatically renew.

Meloni’s own statement: “In view of the current situation, the government has decided to suspend the automatic renewal of the defense agreement with Israel.” The trigger she cited was Israeli warning shots at an Italian UNIFIL convoy in Lebanon and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani’s condemnation, from Beirut, of “unacceptable attacks against the civilian population.” The operation under discussion — Eternal Darkness, April 8 — hit over 100 Hezbollah targets including headquarters, intelligence centers, missile infrastructure, and Radwan Force sites. Hezbollah had continued firing rockets into Israel through then (and beyond). The professional military reality of the strike does not appear in the Italian statement because the Italian statement is not about the strike. It is about distance.

The same day, nearly twenty “Western” governments issued the now-standard joint condemnation, this one citing “more than 350 persons” killed and “more than 1000” wounded per Lebanese figures [the OHCHR’s own numbers the next day were 303 and 1,150; the IDF count of Hezbollah combatants killed in the strike was at least 180, and the ministers used the Lebanese Ministry of Health figure, which treats those combatants as civilians by definition]. None of the eighteen governments noted that Hezbollah had been firing into Israel through the hours before the strike. None noted that the November 2024 ceasefire had been broken by Hezbollah rearmament across the intervening sixteen months. The purpose of the statement was not to describe an event. It was to mark territory.

Then the Senate. On Wednesday, Bernie Sanders’s two joint resolutions of disapproval — one targeting the bulldozer sale, one targeting the bomb package — failed 40-59 and 36-63. Both failed. Both should have failed by larger margins. Some eighty-five percent of the Senate Democratic caucus voted to block arms sales to a U.S. ally during an active war with Iran-backed forces. In July 2025, the comparable vote drew 27 Democrats. In the year before that, 19. The line is linear and steep.

The senator who walked Sanders’s resolutions to the floor was Mark Kelly — a former astronaut, an Arizona Democrat, a candidate who seems like he intends to run for president in 2028 — whose strategists have concluded that opposing weapons sales to Israel is the safer position in the Democratic primary. Chuck Schumer voted no on both. Kirsten Gillibrand voted no on both. That is the rearguard.

On Tuesday, David Horovitz — founding editor of the Times of Israel, a man who does not write from the left flank — published a column under the headline “Netanyahu claims to have prevented an Iranian-wrought second Holocaust. If only we could be so sure.” Ian Bremmer, on the American side, observed in TIME that Netanyahu has engineered a political comeback that “may have exceeded Trump’s.” Both are true. Netanyahu won the war and is winning his politics. Even if it makes for an inconvenient narrative. And in the same few days, allied governments contracted, legislative majorities flipped, and the Iron Dome funding line — which had passed the House some 420 to 9 in September 2021 — became a discarded Democratic orthodoxy.

Kinetic victory and institutional collapse ran on parallel tracks in the same week. That is the diagnostic.

When They Came for the Shield

Iron Dome intercepts short-range rockets fired at civilian population centers. It has no offensive capacity. It cannot strike Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, or any other adversary. It does one thing: it destroys inbound munitions. You know, those ones aimed at schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and bomb shelters. The ones Iran resorted to trying to bypass by using cluster bombs. In September 2021, the House of Representatives passed a $1 billion supplemental appropriation for the system. Dissenters included the likes of Ilhan Omar. Rashida Tlaib. Ayanna Pressley. Cori Bush. Marie Newman. Raúl Grijalva. Thomas Massie. And two “present” votes including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That was the ceiling of opposition to defending Israeli civilian lives four years ago.

On April 1, 2026, at a DSA event in New York City, Ocasio-Cortez announced she would no longer support Iron Dome funding. Her 2025 rationale — that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Iron Dome amendment “did nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel” — had required the defensive-offensive distinction to do real work. The 2026 rationale dropped the distinction entirely: “The Israeli government is well able to fund the Iron Dome system. I will not support Congress sending more taxpayer dollars and military aid to a government that consistently ignores international law and U.S. law.” Ro Khanna — another presidential-tier Democrat — followed: “We should not be subsidizing them, especially given their egregious violations of human rights law.” Brad Lander, running to unseat Dan Goldman in June, executed the identical pivot from his 2025 mayoral-race position. Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of New York, publicly agreed with Ocasio-Cortez. The Democratic presidential bench, the Democratic congressional bench, and the country’s largest Democratic city government had converged on the same position inside three months.

Then, on April 12, J Street.

Jeremy Ben-Ami announced that the organization — which has spent fifteen years calling itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace” — will no longer support assistance for Israeli defense systems when the current $38 billion MOU expires in 2028. His reasoning, pre-written for circulation: “With a per capita GDP higher than countries like the United Kingdom, France and Japan, Israel is more than capable of paying for its own defense — just as America’s other wealthy allies already do.”

The GDP argument is selective by design.

Nobody at J Street is publicly calling for an end to security cooperation with Japan, South Korea, Germany, or the United Kingdom on per-capita GDP grounds.

The principle only applies to the Jewish state.

Ben-Ami’s argument is the DSA argument with fifteen years of additional Washington polish. The branding has now caught up to the position.

Ben-Ami is not defecting. He is reporting. For fifteen years, “pro-Israel, pro-peace” functioned as a license to oppose every concrete Israeli security measure under cover of supporting Israel in the abstract.

The abstraction has now run out, because the concrete measure under attack — Iron Dome — is the one that keeps Israeli children alive in bomb shelters.

An organization that will not defend the interceptor above a kindergarten in Sderot is not a pro-Israel organization whose pro-Israeli-ness has been tested by a hard case. It is an anti-Israel organization whose brand is older than its current position and needs updating.

Ritchie Torres, one of the diminishing number of House Democrats still willing to defend the line on a defensive weapon, said: “Even the most committed pacifist should have no objection to the Iron Dome, because its only purpose is to prevent civilians from being killed.” Dan Goldman added: “The Iron Dome provides critical protection to millions of civilians and saves hundreds of innocent lives every day.”

Sen. Chris Coons, inadequately defending his no vote on the bulldozer sale, said: “My votes should be taken neither as an endorsement of the actions of the Netanyahu government nor as an abandonment of the state of Israel, the Jewish people, or the US-Israel relationship.” That is the sentence produced when someone is voting against Israel and trying to avoid saying so. We can see what it is.

The intellectual architecture for defunding a defensive weapon didn’t come out of nowhere. The foundations are in plain sight. Dylan Saba, writing in Jewish Currents in May 2023: “the Iron Dome cannot meaningfully be considered ‘life-saving’ in any value system that recognizes Palestinian life alongside Israeli.”

Read that sentence again. It is not an argument for restraint. It is an argument that Israeli lives saved by interception ought to be balanced, on some moral ledger, against Palestinian lives that Hamas’s own rocket targeting decisions put at risk.

The “defensive systems enable aggression” frame requires, at its foundation, an acceptance that indiscriminate rocket fire at Israeli population centers has legitimate deterrent function — that dead Israeli civilians ought to be baked into the strategic calculus. This is no longer on the fringe.

This is the reading that has moved, in under five years, from Jewish Currents to the floor of the United States Senate to the statement of the Washington lobby that still insists, against all logic, on calling itself pro-Israel. Absurd.

The Iron Dome was the cleanest test of whether the defensive-offensive distinction Israel depended on for two generations could still hold. It shouldn’t surprise us to learn that it no longer holds.

The underlying objection — then and now — was to Israel, and the reasons given would rearrange themselves around whatever concrete object was available to oppose.

The Iron Dome was just the object in reach. When the object is a defensive interceptor and the opposition holds, the advocacy was never about offense.

What 1975 Actually Changed

On November 10, 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The vote was 72-35 with 32 abstentions, sponsored by twenty-five Arab and Muslim-majority states. The Soviet information apparatus had been constructing the Zionism-racism equation since the mid-1960s, first introduced during debates on the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, when the Soviets proposed it as a counter to a U.S.-Brazilian effort to condemn antisemitism in the same instrument.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the American ambassador, delivered the response that most Western diplomatic commentary still quotes. “The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”

Chaim Herzog, then the Israeli ambassador, called 3379 “based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance.” The text was eventually revoked. The revocation was Resolution 46/86 on December 16, 1991. 111 for and still 25 votes against the revocation —some sixteen years later.

This is the episode Western foreign-policy writing generally treats as concluded. 3379 existed. 3379 was revoked. The UN no longer equates Zionism with racism (ha!). Chapter closed.

Chapter not closed. 3379 was the text. The institutional architecture 3379 authorized was separate, passed the same day, and was never revoked.

On November 10, 1975 — the same day the assembly adopted the Zionism-racism text — it adopted Resolution 3376, establishing the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

In 1977, Resolution 32/40 B established a Special Unit on Palestinian Rights within the Secretariat to support CEIRPP’s work and “prepare studies and publications on the issue and to promote maximum publicity for them.”

The Special Unit was expanded into the Division for Palestinian Rights, which sits today in the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. CEIRPP’s mandate was most recently renewed by the General Assembly in November 2022.

The DPR’s mandate was most recently renewed in December 2024. The Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967 — established by the Commission on Human Rights in 1993 — is the only country-specific rapporteurship in the entire UN system whose mandate is not subject to periodic review. Every other country-specific Special Rapporteur mandate — for every other jurisdiction, including active genocide contexts — is renewable on one- to three-year cycles. This one is permanent.

Agenda Item 7 of the Human Rights Council — the standing agenda item requiring the Council to address Israeli human rights violations at every session — is the only standing country-specific agenda item in the Council’s procedural architecture.

There is no Agenda Item 7 for China, Russia, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Sudan, or Nicaragua. The procedural asymmetry is glaring. That is the 1975 architecture operating in 2026. It does not need 3379’s text to operate. The text was only ever the permission slip.

Look at what runs on these rails. Francesca Albanese, the current Special Rapporteur, holds an affiliation with the Georgetown Institute for the Study of International Migration, serves as Senior Advisor on Migration and Forced Displacement to Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development, and co-founded the Global Network on the Question of Palestine. She consistently reasserts the central Goldstone Report claim — that Israel intentionally targets civilians as a matter of policy — which Richard Goldstone himself retracted more than a decade earlier. Albanese’s three predecessors — John Dugard, Richard Falk, Michael Lynk — produced output consistent enough in framing and conclusion that the individuals were largely interchangeable.

Resolution 46/86 did what it said. It revoked a sentence. But. The machinery that sentence authorized has been renewed, expanded, and staffed continuously for fifty years. Across Israeli governments from Rabin to Netanyahu. Across American administrations from Ford to Trump. Across every conceivable set of facts on the ground.

The kinetic war with Iran cannot alter it. Israeli hasbara cannot penetrate it. Italian defense memoranda cannot compensate for it.

Until the nature of that architecture is named, every Israeli response to its outputs is rearguard.

The Massacre Playbook Was Written in Jenin

The operational mechanism the 1975 architecture produces is the manufactured-massacre cycle. The template has four beats: Amplify a claim beyond its evidentiary support. Secure institutional adoption before investigation can catch up. Extract diplomatic cost on the claim. And ignore retraction when retraction eventually arrives.

The cycle was written in Jenin, April 2002. It has run functionally unchanged through every subsequent Israeli operation.

April 7, 2002. Palestinian Authority official Saeb Erekat told CNN that “some 500 Palestinians had been killed in the [Jenin] camp.” Five days later, PA Secretary Ahmed Abdel Rahman told UPI the number was “in the thousands.” The Guardian ran “massacre of 500” framing for two weeks.

On July 30, 2002, the UN Secretary-General’s own report concluded: “Allegations by Palestinian Authority officials in mid-April that 500 or more persons were killed in Jenin camp were not substantiated by the evidence that subsequently emerged.”

The IDF withdrawal, by that point, had left 52 Palestinian bodies — of whom up to half were civilians, the remainder combatants — and 23 Israeli soldiers.

Amnesty International: “No matter whose figures one accepts, ‘there was no massacre.’” Human Rights Watch: 52 Palestinian deaths, at least 27 suspected militants.

Peter Beaumont — the Guardian’s own reporter — conceded on April 21, 2002: “what happened in Jenin was not a massacre.” The Guardian published no correction. It never has.

September 2009. The UN Human Rights Council’s Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict — the Goldstone Report — concluded that Israel had “intentionally” targeted civilians during Operation Cast Lead as a matter of policy. On April 1, 2011, Richard Goldstone himself, writing under his own byline in the Washington Post, retracted the central finding: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document… civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.” The report’s three co-authors — Chinkin, Jilani, Travers — refused to join the retraction. The Human Rights Council did not withdraw the report. The finding remains, to this day, the authoritative UN framing of Cast Lead. The retraction had no institutional consequence because the institution was never running on facts.

October 31, 2023. Israeli forces struck the Jabalia refugee camp. The IDF announced it had killed Ibrahim Biari, one of the senior Hamas architects of the October 7 massacre, by collapsing a tunnel complex beneath civilian buildings.

Hamas denied the operation, denied Biari had been present, and accused Israel of inventing the target to justify civilian deaths.

Within 48 hours: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, the Arab League, UNICEF, and Scotland’s First Minister had issued condemnations.

The UN humanitarian chief called the strike “the latest atrocity to befall the people of Gaza.”

Fifteen months later, during the January 2025 ceasefire, Hamas finally got around to confirming Biari’s death — along with his son and other commanders killed in the tunnel collapse.

No Arab government retracted. No UN official retracted. The Scottish First Minister did not retract. The condemnation had done its job; the truth arriving fifteen months later was no longer an event the system needed to process.

October 17, 2023. The Gaza Ministry of Health announced within ninety minutes that an Israeli airstrike on the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital had killed 500 people. The figure was globally amplified before the first responders arrived.

Within twelve hours, Jordan had canceled its scheduled summit with Biden, Sisi, and Abbas. Pope Francis issued a condemnation. Hezbollah called for a “global day of jihad.”

Antisemitic incidents surged in Western capitals. IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari identified the cause — a failed Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket — within three-and-a-half hours.

U.S. intelligence, French DRM, British intelligence, Human Rights Watch, and AP open-source analysis all subsequently converged on the same conclusion: a failed PIJ rocket landed in the hospital parking lot. Real casualty estimates: 100 to 300 per U.S. intelligence, dozens per the European diplomat count. Not 500. Not an Israeli airstrike. Not a hospital strike at all — a parking-lot impact from Palestinian munitions. Biden said so in Tel Aviv on October 18.

But, the diplomatic damage had already been paid. And in April 2025 — eighteen months after the facts were known — Reuters, AFP, and CAMERA were documenting ongoing Western media coverage that still framed Al-Ahli as “an attack on the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital [that] killed hundreds of people.”

The cycle runs on pre-investigation amplification because that is when the pricing window is open. By the time the facts arrive, the institutional balance has shifted and cannot be moved back.

IDF briefings from Gaza describe what the amplification pipeline omits. Rockets stored inside scout troop buildings. Two rockets under a child’s bed. An IDF soldier killed by a booby-trapped teddy bear. The 28,000 rockets fired at Israel since the 2005 Gaza disengagement. Forty foreign militaries sending officers to learn urban warfare from the IDF, because Gaza is, operationally, the most complicated urban battlefield any Western military has been asked to fight.

None of that is in the Special Rapporteur’s report. None of that is in the April 14 joint statement. None of that enters the cycle because the cycle is not built to process it.

The Jenin template persists because it works. It has extracted costs from every Israeli operation for twenty-four years. The cycle’s inputs are Palestinian claims. Its outputs are institutional condemnations. Facts enter only as exogenous noise after the cost has been paid.

When a system runs stably for twenty-four years on inputs it was never testing, the honest conclusion is that facts were never what it was processing.

The Money That Buys the Ground

The Jenin pipeline has to be staffed, translated, placed, and published.

The staffers have to be trained, the outlets funded, the conferences hosted, the academic credentialing maintained, the translation networks that move the frame from Arabic to English to French to Spanish kept operational.

As of February 2026, Qatar has disclosed approximately $8.8 billion in gifts and contracts to U.S. institutions of higher education under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act — making the Qatari state the single largest foreign funder of American universities, ahead of China. Cornell alone has received roughly $4.2 billion in aggregate foreign funding. The single largest contract in Section 117 history — $1.1 billion, award period beginning January 1, 2026 — is a restricted Cornell-Qatar agreement. These are the disclosed figures. A 2020 investigation found universities had failed to report over $6.5 billion in additional foreign funds. Texas A&M’s disclosed Qatari reporting doubled after forced disclosure, from $131 million to $244 million.

The real Qatari number is higher. We can see it and we can infer it.

Qatar hosts numerous American branch campuses in its Education City complex — Virginia Commonwealth, Weill Cornell Medicine, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and Northwestern, whose journalism program operates in direct partnership with Al Jazeera.

Qatari owned Al Jazeera’s own annual operating budget runs approximately $1 billion.

The Iranian state officially allocated at least $600 million between 2024 and 2025 for propaganda activities — a figure that does not include IRGC-linked cutouts, whose activity the Clemson and Oxford Internet Institute research programs have documented at scale.

Turkey’s Maarif Foundation, established by law in 2016 specifically to conduct Turkish educational operations abroad, now runs 467 or more institutions across 52 to 55 countries, serving 50,000 to 70,000 students. The Turkish Diyanet directorate controls a multi-billion-dollar budget and oversees 90,000 mosques and 140,000 imams worldwide.

Israel’s equivalent line — the combined Foreign Ministry, Diaspora Ministry, and IDF Spokesperson public diplomacy allocation — was approximately $6 to $7 million annually as recently as 2023.

In FY2025 Gideon Sa’ar negotiated an increase to roughly 500 million shekels, or $135 to $150 million — more than twenty times prior allocations.

That is the new, historic, post-October-7 Israeli hasbara budget.

Al Jazeera alone runs on roughly six-and-a-half times that figure. Iran’s declared propaganda allocation is four times it. Qatar, in a single year of single-program Cornell funding, can obligate more than Israel’s entire annual public diplomacy line.

The arithmetic is not close. Not even in the same conceptual category.

This is the math held by the people who recycle the oldest lie in the Western anti-Jewish repertoire — that disproportionate Jewish money controls Western institutions.

The balance sheet is public. The Section 117 portal is open.

Qatar’s $8.8 billion in disclosed American university funding is one filing away from any reporter, legislator, or activist who wants to check.

Nobody in the coalition that mobilizes the trope is embarrassed by the arithmetic, because the trope was never descriptive. It was always a pre-emptive accusation deployed by the actual dominant funder to prevent its own funding from being reviewed.

Even the new $150 million Israeli allocation [the emergency budget that was going to fix everything] has largely failed to move.

Israel Hayom’s Great Hasbara Report (August 2025) found the PMO, Foreign Ministry, and IDF Spokesperson together produced no response in four of fifteen communication crises. In the other nine, response averaged a 19-hour delay. As of mid-2025, only a small portion of the new allocation had been utilized. The head of the National Public Diplomacy Directorate position had been vacant for over a year following Moshik Aviv’s resignation. Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli twice proposed that his ministry take operational responsibility for the national hasbara apparatus. Netanyahu rejected the proposal twice, without explanation. Avi Cohen-Scali, the Diaspora Ministry director-general, on the record: “This activity has failed by every conceivable parameter.”

The Israeli structural problem is not underfunding. The Israeli structural problem is that even with funding increased twentyfold, no directorate exists to spend it. No strategic concept governs its deployment. And no category of adversary action has been correctly identified.

Qatar spends and Israel does not, because Qatar knows what it is buying. Israel, even with the money in hand, does not.

Broadcast Loses to Terrain Every Time

The Israeli public diplomacy apparatus is built around events. The PMO Public Diplomacy Directorate, the Foreign Ministry Public Diplomacy Directorate, the IDF Spokesperson Unit, and the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism all operate on a strategy that is event-driven or reactive. A press conference responds to a headline. A spokesperson rebuts a claim. A delegation flies to brief a congressional staff.

These are all broadcast functions. `they produce content in response to events that have already occurred.

The adversary apparatus operates in a different category.

It produces the frame before the event.

The Special Rapporteur mandate is not a response to Israeli actions — it is a standing interpretive machine that processes Israeli actions, whatever they are, into a pre-existing framework.

The UNRWA journalism training pipeline in Gaza does not respond to the latest news. It gives press credentials to terrorists and it produces the next generation of reporters who will write the next cycle’s first drafts.

The Qatar Foundation International K-12 curricula shape how American middle-schoolers will read Middle Eastern news a decade from now.

Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies — founded in 1975, the same year as UNGA 3379 — trained the Foreign Service officers and policy analysts who are now deciding, decades later, how to read an Israeli briefing.

Georgetown’s CCAS was founded with initial funding from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and $750,000 from Libya — the Libyan tranche endowing a chair that went to Hisham Sharabi, a close associate of Yasser Arafat.

Over two-thirds of CCAS funding continues to come from Arab governments. The current director, Fida Adely, holds the Clovis and Hala Salaam Maksoud Chair in Arab Studies, funded by the Qatari Embassy in Washington.

The Qatari Embassy also funds CCAS’s Qatar Post-Doctoral Fellowship.

According to the Middle East Forum’s January 2026 report, Qatar has given Georgetown nearly $1 billion over twenty years, funded four endowed chairs, and seated Sheikh Abdulla bin Ali Al Thani — son of the former emir — on the university’s Board of Directors.

Ian Almond, a Georgetown-Qatar professor who publicly justified the October 7 attacks, sits as a voting member of the Main Campus Executive Faculty. CCAS programming under Adely has included workshops titled “Weaponizing Antisemitism to Stifle Criticism of Israel,” “Genocide in Gaza,” and “Deconstructing Western Media Narratives: Israel’s War/Genocide in Gaza.”

Columbia runs on an analogous framework.

The Edward Said Professorship in Modern Arab Studies and Literature — $2.5 million endowed, with $200,000 directly contributed by the UAE — was held by Rashid Khalidi from 2003 to 2024. Khalidi called the October 7 attacks “inevitable” and left Columbia citing the university’s IHRA adoption, which he described as conflating Jewishness with Israel “deliberately, mendaciously, and disingenuously.”

Joseph Massad, still on the Columbia faculty, described Israel as a “racist” state unworthy of existence and used the word “racist” five times in a single sentence about Israel in Al-Ahram Weekly in 2003.

The department that housed Khalidi and Massad — MEALAC, renamed MESAAS in 2007 — expanded fastest immediately after the 2004 Columbia Unbecoming film documented classroom intimidation of pro-Israel students. Rewarded, not sanctioned.

Columbia trains journalists, diplomats, and UN staff. Georgetown trains Foreign Service officers. The terrain between an IDF briefing and a Western ministry’s decision whether to treat that briefing as credible was shaped in these classrooms, by faculty whose chairs were endowed by the governments on the other side of the briefing.

This is what the MFA recognizes internally. Senior diplomatic staff describe the current conflict as having an “eighth front” — a public relations war — and are routing resources toward counter-delegations, legislator tours, and lone-soldier programs on Nova-site bus routes.

The analytical frame is correct. The scale is not.

A 150-legislator delegation flight is a broadcast event. An endowed chair is terrain.

The delegation lands, produces a news cycle, and leaves.

The chair stays for thirty years and trains the analysts whose careers will shape the next thirty years of Middle East reporting.

The structural failure is not that Israel is slow to respond. The structural failure is that the category Israel is funding — response — cannot, by its nature, take ground. It cannot give it up, but it must do more.

And the asymmetry is about to accelerate, not narrow.

From an IDF official: “AI age will be hard on us. Al Jazeera will use AI to be fast.”

Al Jazeera’s billion-dollar operational budget, applied to AI-scale content generation, will produce interpretive frame at a velocity Israeli broadcast functions were never designed to meet.

The next iteration of the Jenin pipeline will run on synthetic media generated in the hours between an event and the first wire-service correction. Israel is not building for that.

The only institutions building for that — Palantir, specific DARPA-adjacent research programs, a handful of Israeli tech firms operating outside the government apparatus — are not part of the hasbara architecture.

They are, at best, adjacent. The broadcast loses to terrain now. In five years, it will not even be competing.

The Ceiling Nobody Admits

Israel could have invested in academic chairs after 1975. It did not. Israel might have been able to contest the Special Rapporteur mandate at UNHRC’s founding successfully. It did not. Israel could have built translation networks, journalist training programs, and counter-institutional NGO infrastructure across thirty years of post-revocation opportunity. It did not. Each of those is a strategic miss and every one is, in principle, correctable.

The deeper structural problem does not correct.

There is a ceiling on what any Israeli strategy, however well-funded and well-conceived, can achieve inside the existing Western institutional frame, because the frame itself carries a pattern of institutional hostility toward Jewish sovereignty that predates the UN, the modern academy, the NGO sector, and the modern information environment — and operates across regimes and centuries regardless of Jewish conduct.

The argument for this is not theological. The evidence is empirical, secular, and sitting in the historical record. Here’s an abridged portion of that historical record:

• 1290: Edward I of England issues the Edict of Expulsion on the ninth of Av. Three thousand Jews expelled. Return banned for 366 years.

• 1306: Philip IV of France, the same measure, the same assets-seizure structure.

• 1492: Ferdinand and Isabella, the Alhambra Decree — the demographic seed, among other things, of the Sephardic communities that would be expelled again from Arab states in 1948-1970.

• 1881: over 250 pogroms across the Russian Empire following Alexander II’s assassination. 2.5 million Jews emigrate. Political Zionism is born from this wave.

• 1933-1945: Germany.

• 1948-1970: the Arab and Islamic world. The Jewish population of the Middle East and North Africa outside Israel falls from approximately 900,000 in 1948 to under 8,000 today.

• Egypt: emergency law passed May 15, 1948. 250 Jews killed or wounded in 1948 Cairo bombings. Fewer than 400 Jews by 1971. Three Jewish residents total as of 2022.

• Libya: eighteen killed in 1967 pogroms. A population of 7,000 reduced to fewer than 100.

• Iraq: the 1941 Farhud pogrom killed 179 Jews and orphaned 242 children while British officials and pro-Axis Iraqi officials stood aside.

The specific political justifications given by each regime — religious, economic, racial, colonial, anti-imperialist — are incompatible with each other. The cycle was identical.

The scholarly literature that treats this as a continuous pattern, rather than a sequence of discrete prejudices, operates in entirely secular analytical vocabulary.

Robert Wistrich of Hebrew University: “A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad” — the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism awarded it Best Book of the Year.

David Nirenberg’s “Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition” tracks anti-Jewish framing as a foundational Western rhetorical structure rather than a sequence of local hatreds.

Anthony Julius’s “Trials of the Diaspora” documents the durability of antisemitism across English political regimes regardless of political character.

Bernard Lewis on the Arab-Muslim case.

Four substantial scholarly frameworks, converging on a single empirical claim: the thing is continuous, operates regardless of regime type, and reconstitutes in whatever idiom the dominant culture of the period will license.

The persistence of specific falsehoods past their refutation is the same pattern we’ve already seen.

The blood libel, originating in twelfth-century Norwich, has persisted for 900 years across regimes and languages. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — proven a Russian forgery in 1921 — circulates today in Iranian state media, Turkish state broadcasting, Arab state curricula, and algorithmically amplified online ecosystems globally. The 2009 “Israel harvests Palestinian organs” story, reanimated by Iranian Press TV and Hamas and Hezbollah messaging, is structurally identical to the medieval blood libel — the specific claim that Jews kill non-Jewish people to harvest their body parts. A European newspaper printed it in 2009. Press TV reprints it now. The vehicle changes. The falsehood is recognizable.

The Midrash knew. God told the tongue: I imprisoned you behind two enclosures — one of bone, one of flesh — and still you do damage. The rabbis said a word of lashon hara leaves a mark that cannot be erased. Nine hundred years of blood libel is the secular proof.

The Tel Aviv University Annual Report on Antisemitism, released a couple of days ago, documented that violent antisemitic attacks in 2025 killed the highest number of Jews globally in thirty years — twenty Jews killed, fifteen of them in a single attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney.

The report is not theological. It is actuarial.

No Western communication strategy operating inside the existing institutional frame has reduced the contemporary physical risk to diaspora Jewish populations below the baseline of 2010, 2000, or 1990.

We don’t have to be fatalists about it, however. Identifying this ceiling is the precondition for any strategy that is not merely absorb-and-retreat.

A strategy that acknowledges this will allocate toward the things the ceiling does not constrain — bilateral security relationships with states outside the Western institutional frame, diaspora infrastructure that does not depend on Western NGO accreditation, legal warfare architecture operating on state sovereignty rather than universal-jurisdiction claims, technology platforms that route around the Qatari-Iranian information-operations terrain rather than contesting it on its own ground.

Scenarios: Four Paths Forward, Two That Matter

Israel’s information posture over the next two to five years will move along one of four paths. The default path is the most probable and the most dangerous. The middle two are the live contest — the places where actual strategic choice is made. The fourth is genuine and time-sensitive and depends on conditions Israel does not control.

Absorb-and-retreat.

The Israeli apparatus continues broadcast investment, accepts declining returns as the cost of doing business, and treats each new diplomatic contraction as an individual event to be managed rather than a pattern to be addressed. The new 500-million-shekel budget remains largely unspent. Italy re-suspends every cooperation agreement. The eighteen-country statements accumulate. Senate Democratic blocks of arms sales rise from 40 to 50 to 60 across the next two election cycles. J Street’s 2028 position normalizes to the remainder of the Democratic caucus by 2032.
Probability: roughly 40-50 percent. This is the path institutional inertia selects unless displaced. And nothing currently in the Israeli political system is organized to displace it.

Reformist investment.

Israel’s existing institutional framework receives increased resources and modestly improved execution. A Public Diplomacy Directorate director is appointed. Response latency falls from 19 hours to 9 hours. More delegations. More legislator tours. Better IDF Spokesperson content. A modest pilot in counter-academic chair funding, run through the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs or a MFA-linked foundation. The category being optimized is broadcast. Terrain continues to move. The ceiling holds.
Probability: roughly 25-35 percent. This is the scenario most Israeli decision-makers will prefer because it feels like action while requiring no structural choice. The worst possible outcome lives here, because it generates enough motion to prevent radical redefinition without generating enough effect to alter the trajectory.

Radical terrain redefinition.

Israel, through some combination of government action, diaspora-organized philanthropy, and coalition partners, begins building the institutional category the adversary has been building since 1975. Endowed chairs in Jewish history, Zionist thought, and the legal foundations of Israeli sovereignty at major American universities, placed by donors who understand the difference between a one-time gift and a 99-year endowed professorship. Journalist-training infrastructure — not a sponsored fellowship, a journalism program with its own accredited credential pipeline. Legal warfare architecture on the scale of NGO Monitor but with an order of magnitude more resources, coordinated across jurisdictions. A parallel NGO ecology capable of absorbing the UN Human Rights Council’s output at the rate the Council produces it, and of systematically contesting each item in front of member-state parliaments rather than allowing the UN framing to go unchallenged into domestic legislation. Lawfare reversal using IHRA adoption in jurisdictions where it has not yet been adopted. ICC response architecture operating on state sovereignty grounds rather than ad-hominem delegitimization of the court. Technology-native platforms — Palantir-adjacent work, open-source intelligence verification, distributed journalism networks — built for the AI-generated content environment Al Jazeera will enter next.
Probability: roughly 10-15 percent of becoming dominant posture. The pieces exist. They have not scaled because no Israeli government has treated terrain as the strategic category. This is a choice, not a capacity question.

Civilizational realignment.

Under Trump-era alliance geometry, Israel formalizes integration with a coalition — the United States, the Abraham Accords states, potentially Saudi Arabia if the political conditions align — that has collectively rejected the existing Western institutional frame rather than continuing to seek reform within it. The MFA knows: “For the first time the division is between countries which want stability and those that want chaos and power. Palestine is basically not relevant to joining the stability camp.” The probability of this scenario as a dominant posture over five years is genuine but fragile, because it depends on U.S. political conditions that April 15’s Senate vote shows are eroding at the base of the Democratic coalition. If the 2028 presidential election returns a Democratic administration elected on a platform that includes the positions Ocasio-Cortez, Khanna, and Sanders hold openly, the coalition framework collapses on inauguration day.
Probability: roughly 10-15 percent of dominant posture, contingent on U.S. political continuity through at least 2032. The Senate vote is a leading indicator.

Two of these scenarios matter strategically. Reformist investment is the default Israeli choice and produces the result we are already observing — motion without effect, budget without ground. Civilizational realignment is the biggest external opportunity and carries the largest upside, but the shelf life is the Trump administration and whatever political infrastructure survives the 2028 election. Radical terrain redefinition is the one Israel can choose unilaterally. It does not depend on U.S. political cycles. And it addresses the category problem rather than the execution problem. It is also the one least likely to be chosen, because Israeli political culture treats five-year horizons as long-term and thirty-year horizons as fantasy — and the terrain category, by its nature, runs on thirty-year horizons.

Israel will probably do some of the first two, hope the third materializes on its own, and not do the fourth.

Iran broke this year. The kinetic war was won. The Supreme Leader is dead. The IRGC’s senior command is dead. The nuclear program is functionally destroyed. The regional proxy architecture is degraded across every axis Israel could reach. You might not know that if you get your news from the legacy media channels.

This week the Prime Minister stood at Yad Vashem and named the achievement. Italy walked. Eighteen governments condemned. Forty Senate Democrats voted to deny a U.S. ally weapons in wartime. And the Washington lobby that still prints “pro-Israel” on its letterhead announced it would phase out support for the interceptors that keep Israeli children alive in their own bedrooms.

The coalition that existed to deny Israel the victory did not lose ground. It gained it.

The ground it gained was taken fifty years ago and has been compounding since, and no quantity of broadcast. However well-funded. However fast. However well-delivered. Can or will take it back — because broadcast was never the category that held it.

The adversary bought terrain. Israel rents studio time. Until Israel builds ground it owns, it will keep winning the wars and losing the ground around them

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

Shabbat shalom, friends.

This week, roughly 4,200 trucks are entering Gaza. Same as last week. Probably the same as next week. That could be ok, except history say it isn’t. Not to mention the armed Hamas operatives — carrying light weapons and RPGs — who guard the convoys, direct traffic, and enforce order up to the yellow line. The organization levies a 15% fee on every shipment. That is a tax system — the operational signature of a governing authority, not a defeated insurgency.

Hamas remains Gaza’s largest employer. Tens of thousands of operatives — in uniforms and civilian clothing — draw salaries, manage municipal services, and maintain the administrative infrastructure of sovereignty.

Tunnel refurbishment is ongoing. Recruitment is ongoing. Weapons smuggling — including drones — is ongoing.

Col. (res.) Alon Evyatar characterized Hamas’s message as clear: the organization still considers itself “the homeowner.” The residents of border communities including Netiv HaAsara and Kfar Aza watch this unfold from their living rooms, independently monitoring events beyond the fence, because official assurances that Hamas has been dismantled no longer match what they can see.

No donor conference has convened. No monitoring framework has been designed. No international body has declared “reconstruction.” It doesn’t matter. The reconstruction cycle is already running.

This is the fifth time. After the 2008–09 war, donors pledged $4.7 billion. After the 2014 war, they pledged $5.4 billion. After 2021, Qatar alone pledged $500 million. After October 7, Trump’s Board of Peace received $17 billion in pledges. The total across four major donor conferences now exceeds $27 billion. Each cycle produced the same output: aid entered, Hamas captured a share, military infrastructure regenerated, and the next war followed. The model has a perfect record. Not of failure — of function. The reconstruction pipeline is the rearmament pipeline. They are the same pipe.

The question this piece answers is not whether the model works. It does. The question is what replacing it actually requires — and whether anyone is willing to pay the cost.

The Gaza Reconstruction Trap

Every Cycle Rebuilt the Next War

Gaza’s reconstruction history is not a sequence of post-war recoveries. It is one mechanism running on repeat, and its output is war.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. The greenhouses left by Israeli settlers — a $14 million investment in economic infrastructure, left specifically to give Palestinians a functioning agricultural base — were looted within hours. Hamas won legislative elections in January 2006 and seized full control of Gaza in a violent coup against the Palestinian Authority in 2007. That twelve-month sequence — withdrawal, asset destruction, election, coup — established the template everything since has followed. The international community invested in Gaza’s future. Hamas consumed the investment and converted it to military capacity.

After Operation Cast Lead (2008–09), donors convened at Sharm el-Sheikh in March 2009 and pledged $4.7 billion, with $1.6 billion earmarked for Gaza. Saudi Arabia pledged $1 billion. The United States pledged $900 million. The conference communiqué spoke of “sustainable recovery” and “institutional capacity-building.” Most of the money never materialized — because Hamas still governed Gaza, and no one could explain how reconstruction aid would avoid becoming military infrastructure under Hamas’s control. The unfulfilled pledges were a tacit admission that the donors understood the problem. They pledged anyway, because pledging is what the system does. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that reopening crossings was the “first and indispensable goal.” The crossings reopened. The aid trickled in. Hamas used the reconstruction period to rebuild its rocket inventory and expand its tunnel network — the same pattern that would repeat, at escalating scale, after every subsequent conflict.

After Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), the IDF targeted over 120 tunnels. The eight-day conflict was framed as a targeted degradation of Hamas’s offensive capability. Hamas responded by expanding that capability. New offensive tunnel construction began immediately. By January 2013 — weeks after the ceasefire — a new cross-border tunnel was discovered near Kibbutz Nir Oz. The same Nir Oz that Hamas attacked on October 7, 2023. The gap between “degradation” and reconstitution was measured in weeks. Weeks! Not even years.

After Operation Protective Edge (2014) the Cairo Conference pledged $5.4 billion, with Qatar as the largest single contributor at $1 billion. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry noted — with no apparent irony — that it was “the third time in less than six years” the international community had been “forced to confront a reconstruction effort.” By December 2016, only 51% of pledges had been disbursed. Arab states accounted for 87% of unfulfilled commitments. Gulf pledges went 78% undelivered. The money that did arrive found its way to Hamas. By April 2015 — less than a year after the ceasefire — Hamas was using heavy machinery and small bulldozers to accelerate tunnel construction. Iran was transferring tens of millions of dollars to Hamas to rebuild underground infrastructure and replenish rocket arsenals. The Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism — the international community’s most sophisticated attempt to control dual-use materials (which we’ll cover in the next section) — was established after this conflict. It failed.

After the 2021 conflict, Qatar pledged another $500 million. By that point, Hamas claimed to have built 500 kilometers of tunnels under Gaza. Israel destroyed some 60 miles during the eleven-day war — leaving hundreds of miles intact. The reconstruction aid that entered after each of the four prior conflicts had not just replenished Hamas’s capabilities. It had expanded them. Each war ended with a more capable Hamas than the one before.

Ban Ki-moon told the Security Council in 2014 that Gaza was a “tinderbox” and that donors were “wary about giving aid if this cycle of conflict and rebuilding continues.”

The donors gave the aid. The cycle continued.

And on October 7, 2023, more than a thousand Israelis were massacred, hundreds more were abducted, and countless were subjected to rape and torture by a military force that the reconstruction pipeline had armed, housed, trained, and financed for eighteen consecutive years.

Now the Board of Peace has pledged $17 billion for the sixth round. The UN and World Bank estimate Gaza needs $70 billion. The Carnegie Endowment’s assessment of the Board, published this month, concluded the body lacks the capacity to deliver, is untethered to international law or standard financial oversight, and is “unlikely to last long.” Cycle six is loading. The only difference is the dollar figure.

Cement Becomes Tunnels — and No Inspector Can Stop It

The dual-use problem at the heart of Gaza reconstruction is structurally unsolvable. Every material required to rebuild a house is a material required to rebuild a tunnel. No inspection regime in history has separated civilian end-use from military end-use in a territory governed by the military actor doing the diverting.

The international community tried. The Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism — the GRM — was established in September 2014 as a tripartite agreement between Israel, the PA, and the UN. It was the sophisticated answer to an obvious question: how do you get cement into Gaza without it becoming tunnels? The GRM classified aggregate, reinforcing steel bars, and cement as restricted “dual-use” materials. UNOPS established an end-use monitoring unit with a central IT database, GPS tracking of deliveries, PA vetting of all vendors and contractors, and spot-checks by UN-contracted engineers. Israel retained veto power on security grounds.

By January 2017, over 6.5 million tons of construction materials had entered Gaza through the GRM. COGAT acknowledged that Hamas “often attempts to steal the cement that enters the Gaza Strip in order to construct terror tunnels, rather than reconstruct civilian housing.” A “small proportion” of works underwent spot-checks. The monitoring could track what entered Gaza through official channels. It could not verify where materials went at 2 a.m. once they were inside.

In April 2016, Israel suspended cement imports for the private sector after documented diversion. A cross-border tunnel was discovered — the first since the 2014 conflict — directly coinciding with the diversion. A second tunnel appeared weeks later. Cement prices spiked from 560 to 1,800 NIS per ton — a price signal that told you everything the monitoring system couldn’t. Former Israeli National Security Advisor Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror stated that when examining what Hamas did with construction materials, “most went on the tunnels.” An IDF estimate put Hamas tunnel construction costs at $30–$90 million, using 600,000 tons of concrete for approximately three dozen cross-border tunnels before 2014 alone.

The precedent is not unique to Gaza. The Iraq Oil-for-Food Programme — established in 1995 to allow Iraq to sell oil in exchange for humanitarian supplies under UN monitoring — ran for eight years before an independent inquiry found Saddam Hussein’s regime had diverted an estimated $1.8 billion through surcharges and kickbacks. The programme had sophisticated monitoring. The regime controlled the territory. The regime won. The lesson is incredibly consistent. Monitoring regimes fail when the governing authority controlling the territory has both the incentive and the infrastructure to divert.

Iran made the point explicitly in March 2014 when the Israeli Navy intercepted the Klos-C — a cargo ship carrying both weapons and over two million kilograms of cement bound for Gaza.

Dual-use materials and weapons travel the same supply chains. The distinction between “humanitarian” and “military” cargo is a line drawn on a manifest. It does not exist on the ground.

The answer to “can we build a better monitoring framework?” is: the GRM was the better monitoring framework. It had IT databases, GPS, vetting, spot-checks, and Israeli veto authority. Hamas rebuilt some 500 kilometers of tunnels under its watch. The problem is structural. And no redesign of an inspection regime changes the fact that the entity receiving the cement is the entity building the tunnels.

The Institutions That Feed the Loop

UNRWA, Qatari cash transfers, and the Palestinian Authority are not failed solutions to Gaza’s reconstruction problem. They are load-bearing components of the system that guarantees reconstruction becomes rearmament.

Start with UNRWA. In April 2024, the Israeli government released evidence that at least 500 UNRWA Gaza employees serve in military positions in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, including senior positions. Terrorist infrastructure was found in at least 30 UNRWA facilities. In July 2024, Israel’s Foreign Ministry sent UNRWA a list of 100 employees identified as Hamas or PIJ operatives — described as a “small fraction” of the total. In February 2024, IDF troops discovered a Hamas data center underneath UNRWA’s main headquarters in Gaza City: a 700-meter tunnel, 18 meters deep, containing server racks, electrical rooms, and living quarters — with electrical infrastructure connected to the UNRWA headquarters above. In April 2025, IDF forces found Hamas weapons cached inside UNRWA-marked humanitarian aid bags near Rafah. UN Watch’s database, unveiled in November 2025, documented 490 UNRWA staff who are members of terrorist groups, with 889 connections between them and senior UNRWA officials. Nine employees were fired after the OIOS investigation found credible evidence of participation in the October 7 attacks — including Mohammad Abu Itiwi, a Hamas Nukhba commander who led the attack on the Re’im shelter, killing sixteen and taking hostages including Hersh Goldberg-Polin z”l.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized UNRWA as a “subsidiary of Hamas.” An accurate operational description. The Knesset banned UNRWA from operating within Israel in October 2024, effective January 30, 2025.

UNRWA’s structural problem runs deeper than infiltration. It is the only UN refugee agency that classifies refugee status as hereditary and permanent — a mandate unique among all refugee agencies worldwide. The perpetual classification is a political instrument. It maintains a population in permanent limbo. Prevents absorption by host states. And guarantees a constituency whose status depends on the conflict never ending. Every other refugee crisis in history produced resettlement. This one produces generations of managed grievance.

The evidentiary record since October 7 has only deepened.

Then: Qatar. In 2018, Qatar began transferring $15 million per month to Gaza in cash-filled suitcases delivered through Israeli territory with Israeli government approval. By 2021, annual aid had reached $360 million. Between 2014 and 2019, Qatar provided over $1 billion in reconstruction funds and stipends. Documents captured by the IDF showed Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh reportedly told Yahya Sinwar in 2021 that Qatar’s Emir had “agreed in principle” to “discreetly” fund Hamas military operations. Netanyahu’s office confirmed that beginning March 2022, Hamas diverted $4 million in Qatari funding to its military wing. The Shin Bet published a report in March 2025 identifying the flow of Qatari money to Hamas’s military wing as a reason Hamas was able to amass offensive power ahead of October 7. Former PM Naftali Bennett stopped the suitcase pipeline because — his words — “I believe that horrendous mistake — to allow Hamas to have all these suitcases full of cash, goes directly to reordering themselves against Israelis.” Qatari funding and policies “led directly to October 7.”

The PA? A 2023 opinion poll found 87% of Palestinians believed the PA was corrupt. The PA was violently expelled from Gaza by Hamas in 2007 and has not exercised effective security control in the territory since. Its forces have failed to contain armed groups even in Judea and Samaria — where it nominally “governs” — making their deployment in Gaza against Hamas operationally implausible. Every “day after” plan that places the PA at the center of Gaza governance is a plan written by people who have not spoken to the PA’s own security commanders. The PA is not a government-in-waiting. It is a fiction of governance that exists because the international community needs a letterhead for its reconstruction plans and a return address for its diplomatic cables.

Three institutions. One ecosystem. Hamas controls it. None of the three has an incentive — or the capacity — to change the fundamental dynamic. UNRWA’s perpetual-refugee mandate creates a permanent constituency for conflict. Qatari cash sustains the military apparatus behind that constituency. The PA provides the international community’s fig leaf while exercising zero coercive authority on the ground. Reforming these institutions is the international community’s preferred answer — and it is an answer that mistakes plumbing adjustments for structural engineering. The pipes all lead to the same place.

The Security Guarantee Nobody Will Provide

Assume — for the sake of argument — that dual-use materials could be monitored and institutional leaks could be sealed. Someone must still physically separate civilian recovery from militant reconstitution. That someone does not exist.

UNIFIL is both precedent and indictment. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon has operated in southern Lebanon since 1978 — a laughable forty-seven years as an “interim” force. Its mandate under Security Council Resolution 1701 was to support the Lebanese Armed Forces in establishing an area free of armed personnel, assets, and weapons other than those of the government and UNIFIL.

Under its watch, Hezbollah grew its arsenal from approximately 10,000 rockets in 2006 to an estimated 150,000+ rockets, precision missiles, and drones before the recent conflict — a fifteenfold increase under the supervision of the force tasked with preventing exactly that.

UNIFIL cost approximately $500 million annually. Three major wars erupted between Israel and militias in Lebanon during its mandate. It failed to pre-empt, prevent, or resolve any of them.

The US did not request congressional funding for UNIFIL in 2026. The UN Security Council voted to end UNIFIL’s mandate by December 2026. After forty-seven years, the international community finally acknowledged what anyone watching the rocket counts already knew.

Hamas knows the playbook — and wants to run it. When presented with the concept of an international stabilization force, Hamas leadership explicitly welcomed the deployment — viewing it as a restraint on Israel, not a mechanism for disarmament.

Mkhaimar Abusada, a Gazan political analyst, noted that Hamas sees an ISF as “restraining the Israeli army” rather than coming in “to disarm” the group. That is the UNIFIL model transplanted to Gaza. An international presence that constrains the defending state while the armed non-state actor builds freely behind its back. If you’ve been reading the Israel Brief, you know this is something I’ve been warning about for some time.

The disarmament proposal just presented to Hamas envisions a 90-day timeline for the organization to hand over heavy weaponry and tunnel maps. Hamas is widely expected to reject or counteroffer. Israel was “aware of the proposal” and did not object — believing it would be rejected anyway [which, to be clear, is not a disarmament strategy].

For a bit of context, on the first day of the October 2025 ceasefire, Hamas mobilized approximately 7,000 fighters to reassert control. More than half its tunnel network remained intact.

Five countries have pledged troops to the nascent International Stabilization Force. The force’s mission, rules of engagement, and relationship to Hamas remain undefined. PA security forces — the only Arab forces theoretically available — would be “extremely wary of fighting against Hamas in Gaza, where they would be seen as Israel’s agents.” PCPSR polling from October 2025 is unambiguous: 70% of Palestinians oppose Hamas disarmament. 68% oppose the deployment of an armed Arab force to disarm Hamas in Gaza.

Netanyahu stated in January that Israel is “focusing on completing the two remaining missions: dismantling Hamas’s weapons and demilitarizing Gaza.” That leaves exactly one actor with both the capability and the stated intent to disarm Hamas: Israel.

The international community will not willingly accept Israeli security control. No other state will provide it. The result is that no one provides it — and reconstruction proceeds under Hamas management. The trap closes.

When Separation Ended the Killing

The historical record of post-conflict population separation is consistent across a century of cases, six conflicts, and three continents. Where hostile populations were separated under organized frameworks, large-scale violence ended and durable stability followed. Where they remained intermixed without governance resolution, violence recurred. The pattern holds regardless of era, geography, or the moral discomfort of the observers.

The Greek-Turkish population exchange is a foundational case. The Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations was signed at Lausanne on January 30, 1923. Article 1 mandated the compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of Greek Orthodox religion and Greek nationals of Muslim religion. Approximately 1.2 million Greek Orthodox were transferred from Anatolia to Greece. Between 400,000 and 500,000 Muslims moved from Greece to Turkey. The total displacement: roughly 1.6 to 2 million people. A U.S. Army Command and General Staff College thesis concluded that the exchange “ended the conflict between Greece and Turkey” and “further prevented potential genocide of Greek Orthodox Christians living in Asia Minor.” The displacement was traumatic. The result was durable. Greece and Turkey did not fight another war over the exchanged populations. The border stabilized. Of course, tensions between Turkey and well everyone still remains, but we had a nice duration of “good years.”

The post-WWII expulsion of ethnic Germans is the largest case. Article XII of the Potsdam Agreement authorized the transfer of ethnic German populations from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary to the Allied occupation zones. Between 12 and 14 million ethnic Germans were expelled — the largest forced population transfer in modern history. Germany lost approximately 25% of its 1937 territory. The Allies’ explicit purpose was to prevent future conflicts arising from sizable German minorities within other nations’ borders. The result: no ethnic German insurgency emerged in Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary after the expulsions. The post-war borders held. Germany was rebuilt and integrated into the Western order.

The Jewish expulsion from Arab and Muslim-majority countries is seemingly the case the international community most refuses to discuss. Between 1948 and the early 1970s, approximately 850,000 to 900,000 Jews were expelled or fled from Arab and Muslim-majority countries. By 1972, 600,000 had relocated to Israel, another 300,000 to France, the US, and Canada. Land confiscated from Jews in Arab countries amounted to approximately 40,000 square miles — five times the size of Israel in 1948. Estimated value of confiscated assets: $250 billion. Israel absorbed this refugee population, nearly doubling its Jewish citizenry. Today, Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews and their descendants comprise more than half of Israel’s Jewish population.

This really ought to demolish the “uniqueness” argument against Palestinian resettlement. One side absorbed 850,000 refugees from across the Middle East and North Africa — into a country the size of New Jersey, in the first decades of its existence, with a fraction of the resources available to the Arab world.

The other side — with twenty-two states, vast territory, and immense oil wealth — deliberately refused to absorb a comparable refugee population, maintaining them in camps for political leverage.

UNRWA’s perpetual refugee mandate is the institutional mechanism that prevents absorption. The result is seventy-seven years of managed grievance — the one case where separation was not completed, and the one case where the conflict persists.

The India-Pakistan partition of 1947 involved the largest mass migration in history at the time — an estimated ten to twenty million people crossed the new borders. Communal violence during the partition killed hundreds of thousands. The displacement was accompanied by atrocities — massacres, abductions, sexual violence on a mass scale. No honest accounting of partition calls it humane. The analytical verdict is separate from the humanitarian one, though. Where separation was completed — in the core territories of India and Pakistan — large-scale intercommunal violence ended. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs who had been killing each other in mixed villages stopped killing each other once the populations were separated across a defined border. Where separation was not completed — in Kashmir, where the Muslim-majority territory’s accession to India left a contested population intermixed under disputed governance — violence continues to this day, nearly eight decades later. Three wars, an ongoing insurgency, and a nuclear standoff later, Kashmir remains the single most dangerous legacy of incomplete separation. The partition did not create peace. It created the conditions under which peace became possible in the territories where separation held — and demonstrated, through Kashmir, the cost of leaving it unfinished.

Cyprus follows the same pattern. After Turkey’s 1974 invasion, approximately 160,000 Greek Cypriots were displaced from the north and 50,000 Turkish Cypriots from the south. The island was partitioned along a UN-monitored buffer zone. The political status remains internationally unresolved — the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is recognized only by Turkey. The de facto separation ended the intercommunal killing that had plagued the island since the 1960s. The Green Line holds.

The Balkans reinforce the finding from a different angle. The Dayton Accords of 1995 ended the Bosnian War — which killed more than 100,000 and produced the Srebrenica genocide — by establishing ethnically defined entities within Bosnia-Herzegovina. NATO’s Kosovo Force deployed up to 50,000 troops after 1999 to enforce separation in Kosovo. The international community invested heavily in governance structures, refugee return programs, and integration initiatives. Where ethnic separation was enforced, violence declined. Where mixed populations were expected to reintegrate under shared institutions — as in parts of Bosnia — tensions persisted, frozen rather than resolved.

The Balkans case is the most instructive for Gaza because it demonstrates both the model’s power and its limits. Separation stops the killing, but the political architecture built on top of separation determines whether stability holds or merely delays the next round.

Six cases. Different eras, geographies, religions, and scales. The same pattern. Population separation, however painful, ended cycles of intercommunal killing. Populations left intermixed without governance resolution continued to experience violence. That is the historical record.

Now apply that record to Gaza. PCPSR polling from October 2025: 53% of all Palestinians said Hamas’s decision to launch the October 7 attack was “correct.” Nearly 70% oppose Hamas disarmament. 49% of those in Judea and Samaria view armed struggle as the most effective path to statehood. Across six polls since October 7, majorities have consistently endorsed the attack and opposed disarming the organization that carried it out. At the same time, almost half of Gazans said they would leave the Gaza Strip if they could.

The population-level alignment is not ambiguous. The desire to leave — among those living under the consequences — is not hypothetical. The historical precedent for what produces durable peace after intractable intercommunal conflict is not uncertain. The only uncertain variable is whether anyone is willing to act on it.

Scenarios: Four Paths, No Comfortable Exits

Every option that breaks the reconstruction-to-rearmament cycle is politically unacceptable to someone. The international community will choose the one option guaranteed to fail — because every alternative requires decisions no one is willing to make.

1. Security-first occupation
   Israel maintains full military control over Gaza, enforces demilitarization through sustained ground presence, and permits reconstruction only under direct Israeli security supervision.
   
   This is the post-WWII Germany and Japan model: long-duration occupation, complete disarmament of the defeated power, institutional rebuilding under the occupying authority’s direction.
   
   Israel already controls over half of Gaza along the yellow line. Netanyahu has stated Israel will maintain “security control from the Jordan River to the sea, including in Gaza.”
   
   The model has precedent. The cost — in troops, budget, international pressure, and political sustainability within Israel’s coalition — is enormous. No other country has offered to share it. The probability that Israel sustains a full occupation for the years required to demilitarize meaningfully — while simultaneously managing the northern front, Judea and Samaria, and the Iranian file — is low. The probability that a partial occupation accomplishes demilitarization is even lower. This path works in theory and strains under political gravity.

2. Governance replacement

   Strip Hamas of governing authority and replace it with an international or regional administration controlling security, services, education, and economic flows.
   
   The closest analogy is Kosovo post-1999 — UNMIK and KFOR, 50,000 NATO troops, a complete governance apparatus built from scratch.
   
   Hamas is already countering this with a shadow government: five district governors, all linked to the Al-Qassam Brigades, have been named. Hamas has ordered all files copied before any handoff to the new technocratic committee. The PA-linked National Committee for Administration in Gaza — headed by Ali Shaatt, operating under diplomat Nikolay Mladenov — exists on paper.
   
   On the ground however, Hamas operatives manage municipal services and run the tax system. Governance replacement requires force, funding, political consensus, and a willingness to fight Hamas operatives inside the territory. None of these conditions exist. No version of this has been attempted in the Middle East. The probability of meaningful governance replacement without a prior military defeat of Hamas — which is what the current war was supposed to accomplish — is near zero.

3. Organized resettlement

   Phased, voluntary emigration programs with international resettlement funding, drawing on the historical precedents established above. Multiple Arab and Muslim-majority states — Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Gulf states — have absorptive capacity.
   
   The constraint is political willingness, not economic capacity. Gulf states have absorbed millions of South Asian and Southeast Asian workers while refusing to resettle Palestinians. Again, Palestinian polling shows almost half of Gazans would leave if they could.
   
   International funding at a fraction of the $70 billion reconstruction estimate could finance resettlement infrastructure, housing, and economic integration in receiving countries.
   
   This is the option with the most consistent historical record of producing durable peace — the Lausanne exchange, the Potsdam expulsions, the Jewish absorption by Israel.
   
   It is also the option with the least political constituency. The word “resettlement” triggers reflexive condemnation from international institutions whose mandates depend on the conflict continuing.
   
   The Arab states that could absorb Palestinian populations have spent seventy-seven years refusing to do so precisely because the refugee population’s permanent status serves their leverage against Israel.
   
   The probability that organized resettlement occurs through international consensus in the near term is roughly nonexistent. The probability that it produces durable stability if it does occur is — based on every comparable historical case — high.

4. Managed recurrence

   Accept the cycle as permanent. Invest in containment — barriers, Iron Dome, intelligence networks — rather than resolution.
   
   This is what Israel did from 2007 to 2023. The underground border barrier cost $1.1 billion. Iron Dome intercepted thousands of rockets. Intelligence operations ran continuously. The containment model absorbed enormous resources — financial, military, and political — and it held, more or less, for sixteen years.
   
   On October 7, 2023, Hamas breached every layer of that model and we, sadly, know what happened when they did.
   
   The containment strategy failed because containment is a wager that the contained actor never innovates — and Hamas spent sixteen years innovating.
   
   Managed recurrence is the implicit current policy, rebranded as pragmatism. It is what the Board of Peace’s $17 billion buys — another cycle, another interim, another set of assurances. The Carnegie Endowment concluded the Board lacks capacity, accountability, and durability. Anyone with more than a single brain cell concludes likewise. That said, the Board does not need any of those things.
   
   Its function is to give the international community a vehicle for performing reconstruction while the reconstruction-to-rearmament pipeline runs underneath.
   
   This is the option every major institution will choose — because it is the option that requires no choice at all. It is also the option with a perfect record of producing the next war.

The “day after” conversation treats reconstruction as an endpoint — a post-war recovery that, properly managed, leads to stability.

Five cycles of evidence say otherwise.

Reconstruction in Gaza is not recovery. It is ignition.

The materials rebuild the tunnels. The institutions feed the loop. The security guarantees do not exist. The monitoring frameworks measure what they can and miss what matters.

And the one variable that could break the cycle — organized resettlement, backed by a century of precedent — is something that no international body, no donor conference, and no “day after” plan will discuss.

Every option that works is unacceptable. Every option that’s acceptable does not work.

The international community will choose managed recurrence — the familiar, the comfortable, the funded. It requires only a pledge, a monitoring framework, and a press conference. It will produce the next October 7. Because the model is designed to produce exactly that, and no one has redesigned it.

The operational window to contest Hamas’s structural re-embedding in Gaza is closing while every senior decision-maker watches Iran.

The residents of Netiv HaAsara and Kfar Aza — the ones monitoring events from their living rooms because official assurances of Hamas’s collapse stopped being credible — understand what the donor conferences, the pledging frameworks, and the stabilization proposals refuse to say.

The reconstruction is already underway. The armed operatives are already directing traffic. The 15% fee is already being collected. The tunnels are already being refurbished.

And somewhere in a conference room, someone is drafting the terms of the sixth reconstruction mechanism — the one that will work this time, they are sure, if only the monitoring is better and the pledges are larger and the will is stronger.

It has never worked. It will not work.

The question is not whether the model fails. The question is what the silence around the one option with a historical record of success costs — and who pays when the next cycle completes.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

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Shabbat shalom, friends.

On August 7, 1979 — six months after the Shah fled Tehran and three months after Ayatollah Khomeini established the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps by decree — Khomeini announced the creation of Jerusalem Day. Every last Friday of Ramadan, the faithful would march for the destruction of Israel. He called it a religious duty. He issued a fatwa declaring the elimination of the “Zionist entity” incumbent on every Muslim. He designated Israel the “Little Satan” and the United States the “Great Satan.” He meant all of it.

That was 46 years ago. Not a generation — a strategic lifetime. The regime built an army to prosecute the declaration, a constitution to enshrine it, a network of proxy franchises from Beirut to Sana’a to deliver it, and — when the West offered economic appeasement instead of confrontation — a nuclear program to guarantee it. What CNN and others call the “Iran crisis” and diplomats frame as a “regional escalation” is the fulfillment of a promise made before many of today’s policymakers were born.

The war between Iran and Israel did not begin on October 7th. Nor last summer. Nor even the 28th of February this year. It began in the first weeks of the Islamic Republic, with the ink still wet on Khomeini’s founding decrees, and it has not paused since.

Within days of the revolution’s triumph, Yasser Arafat became the first foreign political figure to visit Tehran. The former Israeli embassy was handed to the PLO. The IRGC was already standing. Quds Day was already declared. And the constitution was being drafted with a clause committing the state to exporting the revolution across the globe. Everything since — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the nuclear program, the proxy wars, the 608 dead American soldiers in Iraq, the missiles falling on Israel today — is logistics. The decision was made in 1979.

This Long Brief traces the architecture.

The Promised War

Islamism Declared War Before Iran Fired a Shot

Islamism is a totalitarian political doctrine with a god attached. Ignoring the political doctrine is the foundational analytical error that has crippled Western policy toward Iran for decades, and the Iranian regime exploits that confusion every time a critic is accused of bigotry for naming the political project by its actual name.

The intellectual architecture predates Iran’s revolution by decades. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian theorist executed by Nasser’s government in 1966, gave name to the framework in Milestones — a manifesto that divided the world between authentic Muslim governance and jahiliyya, the state of pre-Islamic ignorance that Qutb applied to every existing society, including Muslim-majority ones.

The prescription was revolutionary: a vanguard must seize the state, impose sharia, and expand. Not reform. Not proselytize. Seize and expand. Abul A’la Maududi, writing as early as 1926, articulated Islam as “a revolutionary ideology and program which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world.” Academic analysis classifies this doctrine as structurally analogous to Marxism and National Socialism — a totalitarian ideology that frames history as a cosmic struggle demanding total societal transformation. Christian Democracy participates in secular governance. Religious Zionism operates within a democratic state. Islamism rejects both models — the state exists to serve the ideology, and any state that does not serve its ideology is a target for revolutionary overthrow.

Khomeini took the Sunni Islamist blueprint and built a Shia state around it. His 1970 treatise Islamic Government argued that governance must be run under sharia by a supreme jurisprudent — the faqih — and that such governance could not be confined to one country. The divine mandate recognized no borders. When the revolution succeeded in February 1979, the theory became law with astonishing speed. The 1979 Iranian Constitution, approved by referendum that December, committed the state to the “continuation of the revolution both inside and outside the country.” Article 154 bound the Islamic Republic to support “the just struggles of the oppressed against the tyrants in every corner of the globe.” This was not aspirational language buried in a preamble. It was — and remains — the operating charter of the state. The doctrine of velayat-e faqih does not recognize geographic borders. It constitutionally endorses transnational expansion as a religious obligation.

The institutions followed the charter at a pace that should have alarmed every Western intelligence service. The IRGC was established in May 1979 — less than three months after the revolution — with a mandate distinct from the regular army: the Artesh defends Iranian territory. The IRGC defends the revolution. It reports directly to the Supreme Leader, not the elected president. And, remember, that revolution… not limited to Iranian territory. Quds Day followed on August 7. The hostage crisis began on November 4 — an act that was simultaneously ideological statement, strategic provocation, and domestic consolidation. Khomeini used it to order the creation of a twenty-million-strong civilian army. The students who stormed the embassy were the revolution in action, demonstrating to the world that the Islamic Republic recognized no diplomatic convention, no sovereign immunity, no international norm that conflicted with the ideological project. The revolution had been alive for nine months, and the regime had already built the guard force, declared the enemy, seized foreign hostages, and demonstrated that it would act without constraint.

Khomeini’s declaration:

We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no God but God’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.

was not performancative rhetoric. A speech analysis by the Tony Blair Institute examining seven Iranian leaders from 1979 to 2018 found that 100% of Khomeini’s speeches described the revolution as “Islamic” rather than “Iranian.” The state serves the revolution, not the reverse. Khamenei discussed exporting the revolution in 80% of the analyzed speeches. The language has been consistent for 46 years because the commitment has been consistent for 46 years.

The apologist line — that Iran’s constitution merely offers moral support to the oppressed — collapses under the weight of the text itself. Articles 152 and 154, and Khomeini’s own founding statement: “We must topple these unjust governments.” The Quds Force exists because the constitution requires it. The proxy network exists because the Quds Force requires it. The war exists because the ideology demands it. Everything after 1979 is its execution.

How the IRGC Turned Ideology Into a Proxy Empire

The IRGC is an ideological organization that acquired military capability — not the reverse. Understanding this distinction is the difference between treating the current war as a series of tactical escalations and recognizing it as the delivery phase of a strategic program that has been under construction since the revolution’s first year.

The Quds Force predecessor — the “Liberation Movements Unit” — had an explicit mandate. That was to provide military assistance to “Islamic liberation movements” abroad. That was folded into the Quds Force. By June 1982, the IRGC had deployed 1,500 Revolutionary Guard commandos to Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley to fight Israel and to train what would become Hezbollah. That deployment — less than three years after the revolution — was the first physical projection of the constitutional commitment into another sovereign nation’s territory. The Quds Force was formally constituted in 1988 after the Iran-Iraq War. Qassem Soleimani took command in 1998 and spent two plus decades transforming a clandestine support network into the most effective state-sponsored proxy architecture in modern warfare — until a US Reaper drone abruptly ended his career at Baghdad International Airport in 2020. His successor, Esmail Qaani, inherited a machine that no longer depended on any single operator.

The architecture is a franchise model engineered for redundancy. Iran does not simply arm proxies — it transfers blueprints, parts, and production techniques so proxies can manufacture locally, creating operational independence and deniability simultaneously. If a weapons shipment is intercepted, the factory remains. If a commander is eliminated, the production line continues. The funding is industrial-scale. Consensus estimates put Iran’s annual proxy upwards of $2 billion, though independent estimates that include broader regional operations range to $6–12 billion. Hezbollah receives an estimated $700 million to $1 billion per year. Hezbollah leader (at the time) Hassan Nasrallah admitted in 2016 that the entirety of Hezbollah’s budget, weapons, and rockets come from Iran. Hamas drew up to $300 million annually by 2008; the State Department estimated $100 million per year to Palestinian groups as of 2018. Houthi funding runs $100–200 million annually. Iraqi Shia militias draw $1–2 billion. The State Department estimated Iran spent over $16 billion supporting the Assad regime and its proxies between 2012 and 2020 alone.

Where does the money come from? Partly the state budget. Partly an economic empire that operates outside it. The IRGC controls an estimated $30–50 billion in annual economic turnover through construction, oil, telecommunications, and infrastructure. These are off-budget revenue streams that no sanctions regime has fully disrupted — because the IRGC is a conglomerate. And its economic activity feeds the proxy architecture without passing through any line item a Western auditor could easily flag. As recently as May 2024, IRGC and Quds Force commanders met with Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Tehran, affirming “continued struggle” as the regime’s top priority. In December 2025, Israel revealed a network of Hamas money-exchange houses in Turkey facilitating Iranian funding in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The result, by the eve of October 7, was a “ring of fire” — the IRGC’s own doctrine of “unity of arenas” made physical. Hezbollah with 150,000-plus rockets and 30,000–50,000 fighters on Israel’s northern border — the most heavily armed non-state actor in the world, built over four decades from those first 1,500 commandos in the Beqaa Valley. Hamas embedded in Gaza with a tunnel network that took a decade to build, funded by bothIranian money laundered through Turkish exchange houses and Qatari intermediaries and Western tax revenues. Palestinian Islamic Jihad operating as an IRGC franchise inside Judea and Samaria — smaller, less politically encumbered than Hamas, and more directly responsive to Quds Force command. Houthi forces capable of shutting down Red Sea shipping with Iranian missiles and targeting data, a franchise that went from impoverished tribal militia to strategic maritime threat in under a decade of Iranian investment. Iraqi Shia militias — Kata’ib Hezbollah, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, and others — positioned to strike US forces across the region at a command from Tehran. Every front activates in coordination, stretching Israeli and American defenses across multiple theaters simultaneously. The proxy empire is a single military architecture with one command authority — the Supreme Leader — one strategic doctrine, and one objective embedded in the constitution of the state that built it. As of February 28th, it was thrust into disarray, but continues to operate.

Israel Was Always the Target

Iran’s war against Israel is not a territorial dispute. It is not a response to Israeli policy in Judea and Samaria. It is not rooted in the “Palestinian” question. It is a structural requirement of the Islamist project — which needs an external enemy to justify domestic repression, legitimize transnational expansion, and sustain the revolutionary narrative that keeps the regime alive.

Before 1979, Iran and Israel maintained three decades of close cooperation. Iran was the second Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel, in 1950. The Shah encouraged Israeli advisors across military, agricultural, and construction sectors. Iran supplied up to 60% of Israel’s oil through the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline. El Al operated direct Tehran–Tel Aviv flights. A joint missile development effort — Project Flower — ran from 1977 to 1979. SAVAK, the Shah’s intelligence service, was partly trained by Mossad. A Shia-majority, non-Arab state had no territorial grievance, no historical claim, no organic hostility toward the Jewish state. The relationship was deep, functional, and mutually beneficial.

The revolution destroyed it overnight. To be clear, not because of anything Israel did. But simply because the ideology required it.

Within days, Arafat arrived in Tehran as the first foreign political figure to visit the new regime. The Israeli embassy was handed to the PLO. Diplomatic relations were severed. Khomeini designated Israel the “Little Satan” and called it a “cancerous tumor” that must be excised. Khamenei continued the line in 2015, declaring Israel would not exist in 25 years. A digital countdown clock was unveiled in Tehran’s Palestine Square in 2017. I’m not sure what time change Operation Epic Fury caused it, but let’s assume it’s at least been reset.

The “Palestinian cause” is the regime’s preferred packaging for Western audiences. The contents are something else entirely. MEMRI’s analysis of Iranian Quds Day statements found that regime officials barely mention Palestinian welfare — the rhetoric centers on the Islamic Revolution’s goals and Iranian-Shia hegemony. Palestinians are instruments, not beneficiaries. Khomeini’s motto — “The way to Jerusalem passes through Karbala” — reveals the priority hierarchy. The only real objective is Iranian-Shia dominance over regions under Sunni hegemony, with Palestine as the rhetorical vehicle that makes the campaign legible to Western sympathizers. When Iran funds Hamas, it funds a proxy that serves Iranian strategic depth in Gaza. When it claims to champion Palestinian rights, it deploys a narrative that Western audiences find sympathetic and Iranian dissidents find irrelevant. The gap between the two tells you everything about how seriously the regime takes Palestinian statehood as an end in itself [which is to say: not at all].

The eliminationist antisemitism embedded in the regime’s posture goes deeper than geopolitical calculation. Khomeini’s fatwa declaring Israel’s destruction a religious obligation drew on a tradition within Islamist thought — present in both Qutb and Khomeini’s own writings — that treats Jewish sovereignty as an affront to the divine order. Not Israeli policy. Not borders. Not settlements. Jewish sovereignty itself. The “Little Satan” formulation is not incidental — it positions Israel as a demonic presence in the Islamist cosmology. A spiritual contaminant that must be eradicated as a precondition for the ultimate triumph of the revolution. That dispute cannot be resolved by negotiation. You cannot offer territorial concessions to an ideology that rejects your right to exist as a theological principle. Treating it as a “conflict” between two parties with competing but equally legitimate claims is the analytical equivalent of calling arson a “heating disagreement.”

America Is Not an Ally in Someone Else’s War, It Is a Co-Target in the Same One

The “Great Satan” designation is, likewise, a constitutional commitment backed by a 46-year body count. And the Americans who want to know why this war is their problem? They ought to start by counting their dead.

The Iranian regime has killed more Americans than any other state sponsor of terrorism since 1979. Here’s a non comprehensive catalog of that timeline:

• April 1983: a Hezbollah truck bomb destroyed the US Embassy in Beirut — 63 killed, 17 Americans.

• October 1983: another truck bomb hit the Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport — 241 US service members killed, the deadliest single-day loss for the Marines since Iwo Jima. Declassified intelligence shows the attack was carried out at Iran’s direct command — US intelligence intercepted an Iranian directive on September 26, 1983, instructing Iran’s ambassador in Damascus to order the strike.

• June 1996: Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia — 19 US airmen killed.

• 2003 to 2011: Iranian-supplied explosively formed penetrators and militia support killed at least 608 US troops in Iraq, accounting for 17% of US deaths in-country during that period.

• January 2020: Iran fired 16 ballistic missiles directly at Al Asad Air Base and Erbil — 110 US troops suffered traumatic brain injury.

• January 2024: Tower 22 in Jordan — three US soldiers killed, 47 injured.

• Since October 2023, Iranian proxies have launched over 200 attacks on US forces in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan.

• As of March 2026, at least seven additional US service members have been killed in the current hostilities.

A CIA assessment from 1987 reported that Iranian leaders viewed the US withdrawal from Beirut as proof that “terrorism can break U.S. resolve.” Bin Laden later cited the same precedent when he planned his own campaign against American targets. The lesson the regime drew from 1983 has never been revised — and every subsequent American retreat, de-escalation, or diplomatic accommodation has reinforced it. The Islamic Republic learned in its fifth year that killing Americans works. Nothing in the 41 years since has taught it otherwise. Well, that is, until two and half weeks ago (and to a lesser extent, last summer).

The strategic interests extend beyond the body count — though the body count should be sufficient.

Houthi attacks in the Red Sea — executed by an IRGC franchise with Iranian weapons, Iranian training, and Iranian targeting data — caused a 90% decrease in container shipping through the Suez Canal between December 2023 and February 2024. Container ship transit fell from 2,068 in November 2023 to roughly 877 by October 2024. The Russell Group estimated $1 trillion in goods disrupted between October 2023 and May 2024. Freight rates between Shanghai and Rotterdam increased 80% between January and October 2025 compared to 2023 levels. Israel’s Eilat Port declared bankruptcy in July 2024 after an 85% drop in activity.

Every American consumer who has paid more for goods, fuel, or shipping since October 2023 has subsidized the cost of Western inaction against the IRGC’s maritime arm.

The Strait of Hormuz — through which approximately 20% of the world’s oil transits — remains under active Iranian threat. Currently, vessels are basically enjoined from passage. The cost, not yet fully calculated by economists.

The domestic question — “why is this our war?” — answers itself the moment you read the casualty list. But if 608 dead soldiers in Iraq and 241 dead Marines in Beirut do not satisfy the question, consider the inverse.

What happens if the IRGC’s proxy architecture survives more or less intact? The regime that built it will have demonstrated — for the second time since 1983 — that sustained warfare against the United States carries no existential consequences. The next authoritarian state calculating whether to attack American interests will note the result.

And this is where the nature of the ideology matters strategically. Secular anti-Americanism — Egypt under Nasser, Syria under Assad — is transactional. It responds to incentives. It can be managed, bought off, or deterred. Fine.

However, Islamist anti-Americanism is doctrinal. The “Great Satan” designation is embedded in the constitutional architecture of the Islamic Republic. It is taught in the seminaries that train the regime’s jurists, preached in the mosques that feed the Basij, and operationalized by the Quds Force that funds every proxy.

You cannot negotiate a regime out of a commitment that the regime exists to fulfill.

Every diplomatic effort that has tried — from Clinton’s overtures to Obama’s engagement to Europe’s persistence — has generated the same result. The regime takes the concession and accelerates the program. Deterrence credibility is the only thing standing between the current conflict and the next one. Defending Israel against the IRGC’s franchise network is forward defense of American lives, American shipping lanes, American energy security, and the credibility of American power — which, once lost, costs more to rebuild than any war costs to fight.

The West Didn’t Merely Fail to Stop the Project. It Funded It.

For 25 years — from the Clinton-era overtures through the Obama JCPOA to European diplomatic persistence that outlasted its own analytical shelf life — Western engagement with Iran rested on a premise: that economic integration would empower Iranian moderates, constrain the revolutionary project, and eventually pull the regime toward the international order. The premise was tested. It failed. And the cost of the failure is clear to anyone with a working eyeball or more than three neurons.

The JCPOA, signed July 14, 2015, was political self immolation for the west. Iran agreed to limit nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief worth tens of billions of dollars in frozen assets and resumed oil exports. Of course, they publicly stated they had no intention of honoring it. They lived up to that.

Prior to the deal, sanctions had deprived Iran of more than $100 billion in revenues in 2012–2014 alone. After the JCPOA took effect, Iran resumed exporting 2.1 million barrels of oil per day, approaching pre-sanctions levels. The theory was that prosperity would moderate behavior — that a regime given access to global markets would choose commerce over confrontation. Laughable.

The theory was tested immediately and it failed immediately. AIPAC’s post-deal analysis documented that Iran used sanctions relief to fund terrorism, regional aggression, and military expansion rather than meeting domestic needs. Tehran dramatically increased support to the Houthis during the JCPOA period, prolonging Yemen’s civil war. It launched the September 2019 Abqaiq strike against Saudi Arabia — temporarily halving Saudi oil production. Proxy funding rose. Missile development accelerated. Regional aggression expanded.

None of this was covered by the deal, because the deal was designed to address only the nuclear program — and it contained sunset provisions that meant even those restrictions would expire in 10–15 years. The JCPOA treated Iran’s nuclear ambitions as a discrete technical problem to be managed rather than as one output of an ideological architecture that the deal left entirely intact. It was the diplomatic equivalent of negotiating the size of the warhead while ignoring the ideology that built the missile.

Iran, predictably, failed to allow comprehensive inspections on declared facilities. And operated clandestine facilities to continue its endeavors.

Trump withdrew in May 2018 and reimposed maximum pressure sanctions. Iran’s economy deteriorated, but Tehran did not abandon the nuclear program — it began openly exceeding JCPOA limits, and by early 2023 had stockpiled enough enriched material for nuclear breakout in approximately 12 days.

Enrichment exceeded 60% purity — far above the JCPOA cap of 3.67%. The stockpile reached 30 times the permitted level.

In 2018, Israel revealed Iran’s secret nuclear archive, demonstrating conclusively that Iran had concealed its weaponization efforts in violation of its transparency commitments.

The archive proved what the deal’s critics had argued from the start: Iran signed an agreement it never intended to honor, used the relief to fund the proxy war the agreement ignored, and advanced the nuclear program the agreement was supposed to constrain.

The Biden administration inherited maximum pressure and immediately signaled willingness to re-engage. A concession which told Tehran that surviving American pressure long enough for a new administration was a viable strategy, that the cost of intransigence was finite, and that the next round of diplomacy would come with softer preconditions. Indirect negotiations dragged through 2021 and 2022 with no result.

Meanwhile, Iran continued enriching. Meanwhile, the proxy network continued building. Meanwhile, the Houthis were assembling the maritime strike capability that would shut down Red Sea shipping within two years. The engagement impulse — even when it produced no agreement — provided the temporal cover the regime needed to prepare.

The European E3 — UK, France, and Germany — triggered the JCPOA’s snapback mechanism in August 2025, resulting in reimposition of UN sanctions in September.

Iran formally terminated the JCPOA on October 18, 2025. The deal died having accomplished exactly what its defenders said it would prevent: a nuclear-threshold Iran with a fully operational proxy empire, fighting an open war against Israel and the United States.

The European intransigence in sustaining the deal’s diplomatic framework — years after the analytical case for it had collapsed — was, at best, institutional inertia. The E3 had invested so heavily in the engagement premise that abandoning it required admitting the premise was wrong from the start, and that admission carried costs no foreign ministry wanted to absorb. So, we’re all left with the fall out of incompetence and a clear lack of morals.

The engagement premise actively subsidized the war it was supposed to avert.

Every dollar of sanctions relief that flowed into IRGC-controlled economic channels. Every month of diplomatic cover that delayed a confrontation the regime was building toward. Were direct contributions to the proxy infrastructure now killing Israelis and Americans and others scattered throughout the Arab world.

Iran remains on the FATF blacklist — one of only two countries — because the regime blocked banking reforms that would have complicated proxy financing. The regime did not want integration. It wanted the revenue without the constraints. And for years, it got both.

The Discourse Poisons the Water

Every section of this argument has a discursive counterpart designed to prevent Western publics from seeing it clearly:

The ideological framework gets obscured by conflating Islamism with Islam.

The proxy empire gets euphemized into “resistance movements.”

The targeting of Israel gets reframed as a “cycle of violence.”

The targeting of America gets buried under “why are we involved?”

The policy enablement gets laundered as “diplomacy.”

This is the information warfare arm of the same project — and the regime has invested in it accordingly.

Iran launched Press TV in July 2007 — a state-funded English-language news channel under IRIB, employing over 400 people worldwide, designed to counter Western media narratives about the regime. It has broadcast coerced confessions of political prisoners and aired antisemitic conspiracy theories. That is the blunt instrument. The sharper ones operate through Western institutions directly.

In September 2023, Semafor and Iran International exposed the “Iran Experts Initiative” — a network of Western academics and researchers cultivated by Iran’s Foreign Ministry to advance Iranian interests in Washington’s policy ecosystem. Members staffed prominent think tanks. One served as a senior policy advisor at the US Department of Defense. In January 2021, the FBI arrested Kaveh Afrasiabi on charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Iran — he had received over $250,000 from the regime while lobbying US officials, including a congressman.

The National Iranian American Council has continuously coordinated with the regime coordination. During the Parsi v. Daioleslam defamation case in 2012, correspondence between NIAC founder Trita Parsi and Iranian officials was revealed in court. The case was dismissed. Regime-aligned Iranian intellectuals have explicitly discussed NIAC and Parsi as assets in building an “Iran lobby” in Washington. The regime cultivates Western-credentialed voices who then advocate for policies the regime benefits from.

Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes — in a New York Times Magazine profile that became infamous — admitted to constructing an “echo chamber” of sympathetic experts and nonprofits to manufacture public support for the JCPOA. The Atlantic Council’s 2020 report on Iranian digital influence describes Tehran as engaged in a “perennial information war” and traces Iranian sock puppet operations on social media dating back to at least 2010.

And a Western media ecosystem that frames every Iranian escalation as a “response” and every Israeli counterstrike as an “escalation” is a delivery system as reliable as any Quds Force franchise. And, maddeningly, we have allowed it.

The organizational infrastructure behind the loudest Western voices demanding restraint toward Iran — ANSWER Coalition, CodePink, The People’s Forum, NIAC, AMP, DSA — and their documented funding networks, including CCP money through Singham-linked entities, Hamas-pipeline dollars through the HLF/AMP/SJP chain, and NIAC’s own regime ties, was traced in detail in last week’s long brief The Machinery of Selective Outrage.

The architecture documented there is the production line for the framing analyzed here. When those networks generate “cycle of violence” discourse, when they demand Western disengagement, when they frame Israeli self-defense as aggression and Iranian proxy warfare as resistance — they are executing the discursive arm of a military campaign. That many participants believe their own framing does not change the function the framing serves.

Forget policy outcomes. The cost is measured in body counts.

Every year that the JCPOA survived on political life support, every round of sanctions relief that went uncontested in public debate, every op-ed that framed engagement with Iran as a diplomatic achievement rather than a strategic subsidy — these were downstream consequences of an environment engineered to prevent the obvious conclusion. Namely, a regime built to prosecute an ideological war cannot be negotiated into abandoning the war it exists to fight. It’s not very mysterious.

When “expert opinion” in Washington overwhelmingly favors engagement — because the experts were cultivated by the regime, or because the echo chamber rewarded agreement — the political cost of opposing engagement rises and the political cost of sustaining it falls. Sanctions got delayed. Enforcement got relaxed. Concessions got framed as confidence-building measures.

It succeeded in obscuring it — long enough for the proxy architecture to mature, the nuclear program to advance, and the war that Khomeini promised in 1979 to arrive on schedule.

The missiles falling on Israel and the proxy fire hitting American forces across the Middle East are the same war. Aimed at the same enemies. Executed by the same architecture. Funded by the same regime. And enabled, for decades, by the same Western refusal to name what was in front of it.

The Islamic Republic of Iran did not stumble into this conflict through miscalculation or provocation.

It built this war in the open, announced it in its constitution, funded it with Western money, shielded it with Western discourse, and delivered it on the timeline its founders set 46 years ago.

Khomeini promised the war. The IRGC built the war. The West financed the war. And the war is here.

The only remaining question is whether the West fights the ideology that produced it — or sits down at the next negotiating table with the men who promised to destroy it, and pretends the promise was never made. If you are unfortunate enough to have glanced at cable news or the mainstream Western media, you can already see what comes next.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

Shabbat shalom, friends.

One month ago, a quarter of a million people filled the streets of Munich. They carried the Lion and Sun flag — pre-revolutionary Iran, the Iran that existed before the mullahs — and they carried Israeli flags. In Toronto, 350,000 marched. In Los Angeles, 350,000 more. The crowds stretched across 73 cities in 30 countries. Iranian diaspora communities — men and women who fled or were born into exile — rallied behind a single demand: the end of the Islamic Republic. Inside Iran, millions echoed from rooftops and windows, answering Reza Pahlavi’s call for what he called “our final battle.”

Two weeks later, on February 28, the United States and Israel struck. And within hours — not days, hours — a different crowd appeared in the same cities. ANSWER Coalition. CodePink. The People’s Forum. Palestinian Youth Movement. NIAC. American Muslims for Palestine. DSA. Black Alliance for Peace. The banners read “Hands Off Iran.” The chants defended the regime that had just, in mere days, massacred tens of thousands of its own people.

Two crowds. Same streets. Opposite allegiances. One mourned thousands of dead Iranians gunned down by their own government. The other mobilized to shield that government from consequences. Police were forced to impose conditions to keep the two groups apart — the split screen made literal.

The question is not why one crowd showed up. The question is why the other did — and why it showed up only when power, not people, was threatened. The answer has nothing to do with humanitarianism and everything to do with a political architecture that has operated, with traceable funding and identifiable actors, for decades. It connects CCP-linked money in Shanghai to campus encampments in New York. It connects the Islamic Republic’s execution chambers to lobbying offices in Washington. It connects the 1979 revolution in Tehran to the “Hands Off Iran” marches of March 2026.

The Machinery of Selective Outrage

The Syrian civil war killed well over 580,000 people across thirteen years. The Assad government and its allies were responsible for virtually all (more than 90%) of civilian casualties — barrel bombs dropped on apartment blocks, chemical weapons deployed against civilians in Ghouta, systematic siege-and-starve operations across multiple cities. Fourteen million displaced. Six and a half million refugees scattered across the region and Europe. The scale was staggering. The Western protest response was negligible. No sustained campus movement. No encampments. No divestment campaigns. No organizational infrastructure activated to pressure governments into intervention. Assad massacred more than half a million people — much of it documented in real time on social media — and the organizations that would later shut down American universities over Gaza held no marches.

The Tigray war — November 2020 to November 2022 — killed an estimated 600,000 people in two years, making it the deadliest conflict of the twenty-first century. Haven’t heard of it? You’re not alone. Most people in the West haven’t — not that it happened, not what happened, not where it happened (Ethiopia). The EU pegs the toll at 600,000 to 800,000. The US Ambassador to the UN confirmed more than half a million dead. El País called it “incomprehensibly invisible” — more dead than Ukraine, and the Western public barely registered it. No SJP chapters organized solidarity actions for Tigrayans. No “progressive” NGOs launched BDS-style campaigns against Ethiopian institutions. The invisibility was total and undisturbed.

Over one million Uyghurs have been interned without legal process in Chinese camps since 2017 — the largest mass internment of an ethnic-religious minority since the Shoah. Birth rates in Uyghur regions fell 60% in three years — demographic engineering by the textbook definition. The United States declared it a genocide in 2021. At the twenty-eighth anniversary of the Ghulja massacre in 2025, a dozen activists stood outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

A dozen.

Now compare: after October 7, pro-Palestine protest activity appeared at over 525 academic institutions across the United States. More than 130 encampments. In basically every single state. Over 3,100 arrests. The Crowd Counting Consortium logged more than 3,700 protest-days. Roughly ten percent of American college students participated, with 45% expressing support. Campuses mobilized instantaneously for Palestine. But not for Uyghurs. Why then?

The infrastructure that powers these movements does not scale to suffering. It scales to utility. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: two million dead, no sustained Western protest against the perpetrators. Noam Chomsky spent the late 1970s downplaying the reports. Darfur: 300,000 dead, a brief flicker of campus activism in 2006–2008 that evaporated while the killing continued. Yemen: 377,000 dead from the war’s effects by 2021. Minimal Western mobilization — and most of what existed targeted the Saudi coalition, not the Houthi forces backed by Iran.

Review those numbers one more time. Syria: 580,000 dead over thirteen years — zero campus encampments. Tigray: 600,000 dead in two years — zero divestment campaigns. Uyghur genocide? A dozen activists outside an embassy. Gaza post-October 7? Before Israel even responded it started. 525 institutional protests, 130 encampments, 3,100 arrests, an entire academic year consumed by organizational mobilization. The protest infrastructure did not respond to the scale of human suffering. It responded to the identity of the accused.

Did ANSWER Coalition organize a single sustained action over Syria’s half million dead? Did CodePink launch a campaign against Ethiopian atrocities in Tigray? Did SJP’s 200 chapters hold a single die-in for Uyghur internees? The answer, in each case, is no — not because these organizations lack capacity, but because these conflicts do not serve the operational objective. Assad was an Iranian ally. Ethiopia is not a Western proxy. China funds the network. The selectivity is structural, and once you see the structure, the humanitarian framing collapses.

The question is why this disparity exists at such industrial scale — and the answer begins in Tehran in 1979.

1979: The Template

The Islamic Revolution was not a purely Islamist uprising. It was a coalition — clerics, nationalists, liberals, and Marxists united against the Shah, with Khomeini crafting rhetoric from his Parisian exile that appealed to each faction simultaneously. The Marxist organizations — the Tudeh Party, the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas, the MEK — provided essential revolutionary infrastructure: organizational capacity, student networks, educated cadres, and the secular legitimacy that a clerical movement needed to win over the Iranian middle class.

The arrangement was transactional and temporary. The Islamists needed the left’s organizational capacity. The left believed — with a combination of revolutionary romanticism and, frankly, delusion — that the clerics were a transitional vehicle, a useful front for a broader progressive revolution. Both sides understood they were using the other. The Islamists were better at it.

The MEK turned against Khomeini first, launching armed resistance in June 1981. The regime’s response was swift and total: within six months, 2,665 people were executed — 90% of them MEK members. Entire organizational networks dismantled. The Tudeh held on longer — tragically, absurdly longer — supporting the Islamic Republic in the hope that loyalty would earn them a seat at the table. Instead it earned them televised confessions: Tudeh leaders arrested, tortured, and paraded before cameras praising Islam and declaring the superiority of Islamic government over Marxism-Leninism.

Then came 1988. Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the mass execution of political prisoners —some 30,000 dead. The victims included Tudeh, Fedayeen, and MEK members — many originally convicted of offenses as minor as distributing pamphlets. Prisoners who had already served their sentences were re-interrogated, asked a single question about their political allegiance, and executed within hours.

There’s a template here. Marxists and Islamists unite to destroy a shared enemy. The Islamists consolidate power. The Marxists are liquidated. Every subsequent instance of red-green collaboration operates within this structure, and every Western intellectual who champions the alliance idiotically ignores the history. The Soviet Union understood the utility of the partnership before anyone else — supporting Islamist movements when they weakened Western-aligned governments, even when those movements were ideologically hostile to communism. The Cold War logic was clear. The enemy of my enemy is useful. That logic survived the Cold War. It survived the Soviet collapse. It is the operating principle of every organization documented in this piece.

Michel Foucault was the Western intellectual prototype. He traveled to Iran twice in 1978, met Khomeini at Neauphle-le-Château outside Paris, and published a series of articles in Corriere della Sera and Le Nouvel Observateur praising the revolution as “political spirituality.” He described Khomeini as “a man who stands up bare-handed and is acclaimed by a people.” His enthusiasm persisted after the regime began executing opponents.

Foucault was not an outlier. He was the archetype — the Western intellectual who sees in Third World revolution a redemptive force that his own societies have lost. The revolution doesn’t need to be democratic. It doesn’t need to be humane. It needs to be anti-Western. That framing — Islamist revolution as authentic resistance, Western criticism as imperial imposition — unfortunately did not die with Foucault. It festered. It migrated into our institutions.

The Alliance Reconstitutes in Western Institutions

The Soviet collapse in 1991 should have ended the red side of the alliance. It lost its state sponsor, its operational funding, and its claim to a viable alternative system. Instead, the Marxist left relocated — into Western universities, NGOs, and activist networks where postcolonial theory provided the intellectual scaffolding for a new kind of anti-Western politics that didn’t require Moscow’s imprimatur.

The mechanism was straightforward. Postcolonial and critical theory reframed the global order as structurally colonial. The West as permanent oppressor. The non-West as permanent victim. Moral authority automatically assigned to whichever side opposed Western power regardless of that side’s actual conduct. The framework absorbed Islamist politics without friction. Palestinian armed factions became “resistance.” Theocratic regimes became post-colonial states defending sovereignty against imperial aggression. Jihad became a liberation theology. The categories did the analytical work that evidence could not — and academic departments, generously funded, produced a generation of graduates who internalized this lens as baseline reality.

The Palestinian cause became the operational focus. It was the one issue where Marxist anti-imperialism and Islamist politics aligned without internal contradiction — the one cause that could mobilize both the campus left and Muslim student organizations, that could draw on both Marxist rhetoric about settler colonialism and Islamist rhetoric about Al-Aqsa. BDS provided the institutional vehicle. Students for Justice in Palestine — over 200 chapters in American universities, most active well before October 7 — provided the campus footprint.

The organizational lineage traces directly to the Muslim Brotherhood’s American infrastructure. CAIR was co-founded by individuals tied to the Islamic Association for Palestine, which was established with startup funds from Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook. AMP helped create SJP and dedicated a large portion of its budget to expanding student activism. At Columbia, a coalition of over 100 student groups organized under the banner of Columbia University Apartheid Divest — a coalition whose breadth demonstrates how deeply embedded the infrastructure had become before the first encampment tent went up.

Qatar accelerated the process from the outside. Qatar funneled money into Western university programs and Middle East studies departments — an investment designed to shape curricula, research agendas, and the intellectual formation of the next generation of analysts. Al Jazeera’s English-language operation provided a media pipeline that laundered Islamist framing into respectable journalistic register — professional production values, familiar formats, editorial choices that consistently framed Israel as aggressor and Palestinian armed factions as resisters. The Brookings (and you thought maybe they were exempt? ha!) Doha Center offered think-tank credibility. The investment strategy was patient, institutional, and deliberate. If you shape the intellectual environment in which a generation of journalists, policy analysts, and activists are trained, and the protest infrastructure takes care of itself. By the time a campus SJP chapter organizes a divestment vote, the faculty who supervise it, the journalists who cover it, and the NGO staffers who advise it have all been trained in the same framework — one that treats anti-Israel politics as baseline morality and dissent from that baseline as complicity.

The alarming Obama-era rapprochement with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood created a permissive environment in Washington. The policy framework treated Islamist actors as partners rather than adversaries, and the institutional apparatus that supported this realignment — think tanks, advocacy organizations, academic programs — embedded deeper into the foreign policy ecosystem. NIAC benefited directly. It positioned itself as the respectable bridge between Washington and Tehran, providing intellectual cover for engagement while its founder maintained documented ties with the regime. When the rapprochement collapsed under Trump, the infrastructure remained in place, now operating independently of any particular administration’s preferences — and oriented entirely toward opposing the administration that had rejected engagement.

The BDS movement, which became the institutional spine of campus anti-Israel activism after its formal launch in 2005, deserves specific attention as the operational vehicle that welded the alliance together in practice. BDS provided what neither the Marxist left nor Islamist organizations could alone produce. A single-issue campaign with institutional targets, measurable goals, and a moral framework that universities and corporations could engage with on their own terms. The campaign’s genius — from the alliance’s perspective — was its modularity. A student could support divestment from Israel without understanding the organizational lineage connecting their campus chapter to the Holy Land Foundation. A professor could endorse academic boycott without knowing that the infrastructure promoting it was funded through CCP funds. BDS laundered the alliance’s politics into the language of institutional governance.

What we now contend with is an institutional ecosystem where radical left and Islamist organizations share funding streams, campus infrastructure, legal support networks, and a common target set. The ecosystem does not require central coordination (though there’s plenty of that). It requires shared incentives — and those incentives have been stable since 1979.

The Network: Who Funds, Who Marches, Who Benefits

Start with the money.

The House Ways and Means Committee exposed the architecture for us. Neville Roy Singham and his wife Jodie Evans — the peripatetic co-founder of CodePink who pivoted from anti-China activism to pro-Beijing advocacy after marrying Singham in 2017 [at least the pivot was well-compensated] — donated over $20 million to The People’s Forum between 2017 and 2022, funneled through shell companies, donor-advised funds, and Goldman Sachs.

A February 2026 House hearing revealed a “coordinated $100 million system” moving funds from Singham through private LLCs to activist organizations including The People’s Forum, ANSWER Coalition, the International People’s Assembly, and the “Shut It Down for Palestine” campaign. Singham attended a Communist Party workshop in July 2023 about promoting the CCP internationally. He shares office space with Chinese state media in Shanghai. He worked as a Huawei consultant from 2001 to 2008. Representative Darin LaHood described “a sophisticated, multi-layered flow of capital funds that originate in Singham and Shanghai.” Senator Grassley asked the DOJ and FBI to assess whether The People’s Forum and CodePink should register under FARA.

Evans herself is a case study in how the money changes the politics rather than the other way around. She shifted from criticizing China in 2015 to defending it after marrying Singham, including defending the mass detention of Uyghurs.

Now follow the thread to Iran. NIAC — the National Iranian American Council, which presents itself as a civic organization representing Iranian Americans — and its founder Trita Parsi have operated for years as the Islamic Republic’s most effective American advocate. A federal judge found Parsi’s behavior “not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime.” Court documents revealed direct communications between Parsi and high levels of the regime. When NIAC sued journalist Hassan Daioleslam for reporting on its regime ties, NIAC lost — and was sanctioned by the DC Circuit for discovery abuses, including false declarations under oath. A former FBI special agent concluded NIAC “appears [to be] lobbying on behalf of Iranian government interests.” NIAC did not register under FARA.

Don’t worry, Hamas isn’t left out of this. AMP’s board includes at least two members — Salah Sarsour and Osama Abu Irshaid — with documented ties to the Holy Land Foundation, which was shut down after funneling millions to Hamas. Five HLF leaders were convicted and court documents described HLF as the fundraising arm for Hamas and IAP as its media entity, both created by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee. The Senate found at least nine AMP/AJP officers with past or present ties to Hamas-associated groups. AMP created SJP. SJP organized the encampments. The pipeline runs from Hamas through a Holy Land Foundation network to American campus activism, and it runs through documented organizational and financial channels.

The ANSWER Coalition descends from the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Workers World Party — self-described socialist organizations that Singham funds. ANSWER has organized the largest anti-Israel rallies in Washington since October 7. PSL’s ideology is explicitly anti-imperialist in the Leninist sense. To them, the United States and Israel are the enemies, and any force that opposes them — including theocratic regimes and jihadist networks — is objectively progressive. The intellectual gymnastics required to call a clerical fascist state an anti-imperialist ally would be impressive if they weren’t so suicidal. We’ve seen this before. The Tudeh made the same calculation in 1979. It ended in mass graves.

Follow the organizational chart: CCP money flows to Singham. Singham funds The People’s Forum, ANSWER, CodePink, and PSL. CodePink co-sponsors events with NIAC, AMP, and DSA. AMP funds SJP chapters on campus. NIAC provides the Iran-specific lobbying and messaging capacity. The network is traceable. The funding is documented— in congressional investigations and federal court records. The output is remarkably consistent. Mobilization against Israel and the West. Silence on every atrocity committed by allied regimes. It’s a system rather than merely a collection of independent actors who happen to agree.

October 7 Activated the Infrastructure

On October 9, 2023 — barely two days after Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis, and before any Israeli ground operation had begun — Columbia’s SJP and JVP chapters published an open letter expressing “full solidarity with Palestinian resistance.” Not with Palestinian civilians. With the resistance — the term of art reserved for armed factions — including Hamas.

Stanford launched an encampment on October 20, thirteen days after the attack and before any ground incursion into Gaza. It lasted over a hundred days. AMP co-sponsored over 300 rallies after October 7. The tone was set one day after the massacre when AMP New Jersey posted a rally announcement to “defend Palestinian resistance” alongside an image of a bulldozer breaking through the Gaza border fence. The bulldozer image was not ambiguous.

The Crowd Counting Consortium logged over 1,500 pro-Palestine campus protest-days before the Columbia encampment launched — two-fifths of all logged protest activity. The wave began almost immediately after October 7—some starting during the atrocities. Not after the ground operation. Not after the casualty figures climbed. During and after the massacre of Jews — which is the event these organizations chose to celebrate.

Columbia’s CUAD coalition grew more explicitly supportive of Hamas over the course of 2024, retracting its earlier condemnation of a student who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Within Our Lifetime leader Nerdeen Kiswani arrived at the Columbia encampment and called for liberation “by any means necessary.” The language tracked Hamas’s own operational framing. The organizations — AMP, SJP, CUAD, WOL — were not responding to events. They were executing a deployment plan that predated the events by years.

To be explicit, none of this was spontaneous. The organizational relationships were in place. The funding was flowing. The campus chapters existed. The legal support networks were operational. The media allies were ready. October 7 did not create a movement. It activated a system — a system that had been built, funded, and maintained for exactly this purpose. And the system’s true nature became visible not when it activated, but when it didn’t. When Iran’s own people were massacred and the same organizations went silent — the same infrastructure that shut down Columbia and occupied campuses in some forty-five states could not produce a single vigil for tens of thousands of dead Iranians.

Iran’s Crimson Winter Earned Zero Marches

In late December, Iranians rose against the Islamic Republic. By January, the regime responded with the deadliest repression in decades.

The scale was industrial. Iran International, citing classified IRGC documents leaked during the chaos, reported over 36,500 killed in the January 8–9 crackdown alone — a single forty-eight-hour period that represents the deadliest state massacre of the twenty-first century. Khamenei acknowledged “thousands” killed, blamed Trump, and called every protester a rioter and a terrorist. The regime did not deny the killing. It justified it.

Between 7,000 and 36,500 Iranians killed by their own government — a range that, even at its floor, exceeds the death toll that generated 525 campus encampments, 3,100 arrests, and a year of institutional upheaval across American universities when Israel was the actor.

Where were the marches?

ANSWER Coalition — the organization that mobilized thousands within hours of October 7 to champion “Palestinian resistance” — organized nothing. CodePink — which can generate a press release about an Israeli airstrike before the smoke clears — said nothing. The People’s Forum, which hosted rallies in Times Square to celebrate the breach of the Gaza fence, organized no vigils for dead Iranian protesters. AMP, PYM, DSA — the full roster — silent. NIAC, the organization whose founder a federal judge found behaved consistently with regime advocacy, produced no campaign, no petition, no institutional pressure to stop the Islamic Republic from killing its own people.

Two months of silence. Seven thousand to thirty-six thousand dead. Zero marches. Zero campus occupations. Zero institutional divestment campaigns. Zero open letters from the 525 universities that erupted over Gaza. The organizations that could mobilize 3,100 arrests in defense of Hamas could not produce a candlelight vigil for Iranians shot in the head by their own government.

Then February 28 happened. The United States and Israel struck Iran. And the machine reactivated. Instantly.

Within hours, the same organizations that spent two months silent over thousands of dead Iranians organized “Hands Off Iran” protests in Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. ANSWER, CodePink, People’s Forum, PYM, NIAC, AMP, Black Alliance for Peace, DSA — the complete network, the same coalition, the same organizations that could not muster a vigil for Crimson Winter.

CodePink’s statement deserves reading for what it reveals about the machinery’s operating logic. They framed the strikes as a “continuation of the US and Israel’s attempts to enact a bloody regime change.” They claimed that “what the protestors want is a better quality of life” — reducing an explicitly revolutionary, pro-Western, pro-Israel freedom movement to an economic complaint. In language indistinguishable from regime talking points. They called for lifting sanctions — the regime’s top diplomatic priority. They did not mention the 36,500 dead. They did not acknowledge that Iranian protesters had waved Israeli flags, chanted for regime change, and cheered the strikes. CodePink spoke for the regime while claiming to speak for the people, and the people were in the streets saying the opposite.

In London, over 50,000 joined anti-strikes protests organized by Stop The War, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Muslim Association of Britain, and Friends of Al-Aqsa. Police imposed conditions to prevent clashes between these marchers and Iranian diaspora rallies happening in the same city.

The behavioral data is dispositive. These organizations mobilized to defend a regime. They did not mobilize to defend a people. When the regime killed thousands, they said nothing. When the regime was struck, they said everything.

“Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, My Life for Iran”

The Iranian people delivered the verdict themselves — and they delivered it in a language the red-green alliance cannot misinterpret, though it will try.

At diaspora rallies across the world, Iranians replaced the Islamic Republic flag with the Lion and Sun at Iranian embassies in London, Canberra, Vienna, Copenhagen, Rome, Sofia, Oslo, Stockholm, Madrid, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Budapest, and Ljubljana. At least 168 diaspora protests in 73 cities across 30 countries during the January uprising alone — a global mobilization that dwarfed anything the “Hands Off Iran” coalition assembled.

The Lion and Sun flag was increasingly associated with Israeli and American flags — a direct, deliberate, public rejection of anti-Western framing. Neither ambiguous nor accidental.

Iranian protesters in dozens of cities, across multiple continents, chose to stand with Israel, chose to stand with America, and chose to wave those flags in cities where “progressive” activists insist that Israel is the region’s villain and American power is the root cause of Middle Eastern suffering.

The protesters — the actual oppressed people in this story — disagree. They disagree loudly, by the hundreds of thousands, and the Western left’s response has been to either ignore them or reframe their movement as something it is not.

Iranian Canadians submitted a petition to Parliament calling on the government to recognize Reza Pahlavi and the Iranian transitional team as legitimate representatives and support a transition to secular democracy. The movement is pro-Western, pro-Israel, and pro-freedom — a democratic revolution explicitly modeled on Western values, seeking Western support, and expressing solidarity with the Jewish state. It is everything the red-green alliance claims to want. And it is everything the red-green alliance actively opposes.

The chant that defined the movement — “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran” — is a surgical rejection of the regime’s entire strategic posture and, by extension, the Western alliance that shields it. It tells the mullahs: stop spending Iranian blood and treasure on proxy wars. It tells Hezbollah and Hamas: you are not our cause. It tells the rest of the IRGC’s franchise network — the Houthis in Yemen, the militias in Iraq, the operatives in Syria — that the Iranian people never authorized the empire being run in their name. And it tells the Western left: the “oppressed” you claim to speak for do not want your solidarity. They want freedom. They are waving Israeli flags to prove it.

After the February 28 strikes, Iranian diaspora communities held celebratory rallies worldwide. Not mourning. Celebration. The strikes targeted the regime that had been killing them, and they cheered. In the same cities, at the same times, the ANSWER/CodePink coalition marched to defend that regime.

In Los Angeles, the threat to the diaspora movement was already physical. On January 10, a terrorist drove a truck toward a gathering of Iranian diaspora protesters in Westwood — police intervention prevented serious injuries. The diaspora rallied anyway. 350,000 in LA alone.

Pahlavi at the Munich Security Conference stated the regime “has only one purpose which is to export this ideology.” He was describing the IRGC’s proxy franchise — Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, Hamas. But he was also describing, whether he intended to or not, the Western institutional apparatus that exists to protect that franchise from consequences. The organizations that marched under “Hands Off Iran” banners were doing the regime’s work in Western capitals while the regime’s forces did their work in Iranian streets.

The Iranian people broke the narrative. The red-green alliance claims to speak for the oppressed — and the oppressed are pro-Israel, pro-American, and pro-freedom. The alliance’s response was not solidarity. It was “Hands Off Iran.” To them, it was never about liberation. It was about opposition to the West— albeit, dressed in humanitarian language. And that disguise held for nearly half a century because no one ran the experiment this cleanly.

Iran just ran that experiment. A population rose against a theocratic regime. The regime massacred them. The Western protest infrastructure said nothing. The West struck the regime. The infrastructure mobilized in hours. The independent variable was not suffering — it was who caused it. When Iran’s people suffered at the hands of their own government, the machinery was silent. When Iran’s government suffered at the hands of the West, the machinery activated.

To be clear, the Western protest apparatus is not malfunctioning. It is performing exactly as designed. It is a political weapon aimed at Western democracies and Israel. Operated by an identifiable alliance with traceable funding, documented coordination, and a forty-seven-year track record from Tehran to Times Square. The machinery does not respond to atrocities. It responds to ideology. And when the Iranian people chose freedom, chose the West, chose Israel, the machinery did what it has always done: it protected the regime and told the people to sit down and shut up—or else.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

Shabbat shalom, friends.

On February 4, hundreds of dairy farmers drove tractor convoys into Jerusalem, poured milk onto Highway 1 outside the Finance Ministry, breached police barriers, and hurled a statue of a cow at the building’s entrance [at least it wasn’t gilded]. At least the theatrics were photogenic—albeit funded by a guaranteed income.

Every farmer who dumped milk that morning operates inside a regime that sets the price of raw milk, caps who can produce it, blocks foreign competition with 40% tariffs, and penalizes anyone who sells a liter above quota. The system has existed for decades. The farmers were protesting the possibility that the crisis — for consumers — might end.

The numbers behind the performance are brutal. Israeli dairy and eggs cost 64% more than the OECD average — second only to South Korea globally. Three companies — Tnuva, Tara, and Strauss — control 85% of the domestic dairy market and charge prices more than 50% above international equivalents. The farmer receives about NIS 2.85 per liter of raw milk; that same liter retails for approximately NIS 8.50. The gap is processing, distribution, and margins — all sheltered by a wall of regulation no competitor can breach.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich wants to tear the wall down. His reform — embedded in the 2026 state budget — would cut the regulated price of raw milk by 15%, eliminate protective tariffs, reduce the national production quota by one-third, and wind down the Dairy Board’s centralized planning authority. The Bank of Israel backs it. The arithmetic supports it. The OECD has urged it for years.

The farmers’ lobby is betting none of that matters and draws on a playbook older than the quota system itself. Invoke food security. Invoke the periphery. Invoke a century of Zionist agricultural mythology. And… wait for a prime minister to calculate that the political cost of reform exceeds the political cost of overpriced cottage cheese.

The February strike gave the lobby some of its best footage. It also gave the reform its best argument. The strike cut roughly 20% of Israel’s milk production and cost an estimated NIS 10 million per day. Supermarket chains imposed limits of two to three dairy items per customer. The same farmers who claim to be the guardians of Israel’s food security deliberately created a food shortage to extract political concessions.

The question is whether this government — or, really, any Israeli government — can dismantle a protected sector when the beneficiaries wrap themselves in tractors and flags.

The Milk Cartel Cracks

The Cottage Cheese Intifada Never Ended

The last time Israelis got angry enough about dairy prices to act? They won a battle, but lost a war.

In June 2011, cottage cheese prices had risen 43% over five years — from roughly NIS 5 to NIS 7 per container. A Facebook boycott drew over 105,000 participants. Consumption dropped 30%. Tnuva cut prices 12.5%. The government stepped in two years later and imposed price controls, declaring Tnuva’s pricing “excessive and unreasonable” and forcing a roughly 20% reduction.

A report by the beleaguered global consulting behemoth McKinsey, later seized by the Antitrust Authority, revealed the cynicism behind the original hikes. McKinsey had advised Tnuva to raise prices by 15% or more because consumer demand was inelastic — Israelis would pay whatever the cartel charged.

The boycott sparked the broader 2011 social justice protests, which spawned the Trajtenberg Committee. That committee identified the food sector as having the “greatest failures of competition” and recommended reducing subsidized product prices and increasing market entry. The recommendations were adopted “in principle.” Implementation was incomplete. Protest leaders called the results insufficient. They were right.

Here is the trajectory: dairy prices stood at 6% above the OECD average in 2005. By 2008 they had jumped to 44% above. By 2024 — thirteen years after the boycott, twelve years after the Trajtenberg report, and eleven years after the government declared Tnuva’s prices unreasonable — the premium had risen to 64% above the OECD average.

The Trajtenberg Committee joins a familiar Israeli institutional pattern. The Sheshinski Committee addressed energy royalties. The Brodet Committee addressed defense spending. The Strum Committee addressed banking. Each produced a report. Each was absorbed by the political system. Each failed to deliver structural reform. The dairy cartel survived 2011 the same way it survived everything earlier. By letting the anger peak. Accepting cosmetic adjustments. And simply waiting it out.

The narrative that “the boycott worked” is one of the dairy lobby’s most useful bits of fiction. The boycott generated attention. The attention generated a committee. The committee generated recommendations. The recommendations generated adoption “in principle.” And the prices climbed back — higher than before, year after year, with no structural mechanism changed. A temporary consumer rebellion was absorbed by a permanent institutional cartel.

Food prices in Israel were 3% below the OECD average in 2005. By 2017, they had flipped to 3% above. By 2024, they had reached 52% above. The dairy sector is the single largest contributor to that gap. Every year of inaction is a transfer from Israeli consumers to industry titans—remember we’re talking three major “competitors” shielded from real competition.

That consumer anger is back. The structural problem never left. The change now is we have a finance minister that has, for all his faults, staked his political credibility on doing what the Trajtenberg Committee recommended and the Knesset never delivered. Whether the system absorbs this attempt too depends on machinery most Israelis have never examined.

How the Quota Regime Actually Works

Israel’s dairy sector operates as a centrally planned economy embedded inside a market democracy. The Dairy Board — operating under the Milk Economy Planning Law — sets monthly production quotas that divide an annual national volume among 660 farms. The government determines the minimum farmgate price and maximum retail prices for regulated products. Farmers who deliver above quota are penalized immediately.

Kibbutzim hold 57% of the national quota. Moshavim hold 42%. Agricultural colleges hold 1%. Milk can only be sold to licensed dairies under annual contracts — direct sales to consumers are prohibited. The system prevents a true market from existing.

Layered on top of the quota is a tariff wall. Import duties of up to 40% on foreign dairy products ensure that no external competitor can undercut domestic prices — regardless of how efficient the foreign producer or how excessive the domestic margin. The quota fixes output. The tariff blocks alternatives. The Dairy Board sets the price. The consumer pays.

The results are extraordinary by any developed-country standard. Israeli consumers pay 50–60% more than Europeans for yogurt, cottage cheese, and staple dairy products — despite operating the world’s highest per-cow milk yield at 12,025 kg per year. Israel’s cows are the most productive on earth—Israel’s consumers, however, pay as though they are the least.

Only two other countries maintain comparable systems: Canada and Norway. Every other OECD member has dismantled centralized dairy planning. The EU abolished its quota system in 2015. New Zealand deregulated in 2001. Australia followed suit. Israel and Canada are the holdouts — and Canada’s dairy cartel is itself under sustained domestic criticism.

The 660 farms employ roughly 7 workers each. Total industry employment — including processing, distribution, veterinarians, feed suppliers, and truckers — is approximately 15,000. Agriculture as a whole employs 1.5% of the Israeli workforce. The dairy sector is economically marginal as an employer and structurally dominant as a price-setter — a combination that exists only because political protection has replaced market discipline.

The national milk quota has grown from under 1 billion liters in the early 1990s to approximately 1.6 billion liters in 2024 — but population growth has outpaced expansion. Annual production sits at approximately 1.53 billion liters, serving a population that has nearly doubled since the quota was introduced. The system that was designed to guarantee supply now guarantees shortage at premium prices.

Consider a farmer at a kibbutz in the Hula Valley and a farmer at a moshav in the Negev. They receive the same guaranteed price — regardless of efficiency, cost structure, or proximity to processing facilities. The target price adjusts for feed costs and inflation — it does not adjust for productivity. The world’s most productive cows generate the world’s most expensive milk because the pricing mechanism is designed to keep the least efficient farm solvent. Every competitive advantage Israeli dairy has built — the genetics, the cooling systems, the feed optimization — is neutralized by an artificial price floor that rewards the wrong things.

The Dairy Board’s governance compounds the issue. It is both regulator and industry representative — a dual role that is a textbook conflict of interest. The board allocates quotas, monitors compliance, and represents the interests of the farmers it regulates.

The Finance Ministry’s Case Is Correct

The reform embedded in the 2026 budget would eliminate the 40% protective tariffs on dairy imports, reduce the farmgate price by 15%, and dismantle Dairy Board centralized planning. A NIS 1 billion (~€250 million) buyout scheme would compensate farms that exit the industry, with individual packages reportedly ranging from NIS 2–3 million ($550,000–$850,000) depending on farm size. The Finance Ministry projects consumer price drops of 15–20% within just a few months.

The raw-milk price cut alone should produce an immediate reduction of roughly 7.5% on regulated products — raw milk accounts for 30–40% of retail price, so a 15% cut in input costs flows through at roughly half. The larger savings come from tariff elimination and import competition, which would force Tnuva, Tara, and Strauss to compete against European and international producers for the first time.

Smotrich’s reform follows a template the Finance Ministry has applied before — and the one time it was allowed to work, it transformed an entire sector.

In 2012, the Finance Ministry broke Israel’s three-company mobile telecom cartel by licensing Golan Telecom and Hot Mobile to enter the market. Barriers fell. Competition arrived. Mobile bills dropped by over 80%. Consumers saved NIS 5 billion in 2011–2012 alone. The average monthly cellphone bill fell from NIS 106–111 to NIS 82–89 within a year. Telecom prices now run 30% below the OECD average — the only Israeli consumer sector priced below the OECD benchmark.

The structural parallel is almost exact. Three dominant incumbents. Government-enforced barriers to entry. Tariff and regulatory walls preventing competition. Consumers overpaying by double-digit percentages. Incumbents claiming the market couldn’t sustain new entrants. The same arguments the telecom companies made then are the arguments the dairy lobby makes now. In telecom, the incumbents were wrong, the reform was right, and the consumer won.

Smotrich has been characteristically blunt about the comparison. He described the reform as targeting monopolies: “They had no incentive to compete or reduce prices. That is over.” During the February strike, he called the striking farmers “communists” and threatened to unilaterally abolish all dairy tariffs if production stoppages continued. In November 2025, he called the reform “a central component of the series of steps we are bringing in this budget to lower the cost of living” and described the industry’s opposition as a “false smear campaign” designed to “perpetuate the monopolies.”

Regardless of your thoughts about the messenger, the substance behind it holds. He issued temporary tariff waivers starting in August 2025, extending them through the High Holidays and into February 2026 — a live demonstration that imported dairy can enter the market without the supply chain collapsing. The temporary waivers are the reform’s trial run, and the trial has not produced the catastrophe the farmers predicted.

The critique that the reform was developed without an independent professional committee carries some procedural weight but misses the point. The Trajtenberg Committee already studied this. The OECD has published recommendations repeatedly. The Bank of Israel endorsed the dairy reform and urged the government to “adopt the necessary measures.” The analytical case is not in dispute. Really it’s just a matter of if the political will exists to execute it. Every year spent on “proper deliberation” is another year Israeli families pay 64% above what their counterparts in Berlin, Dublin, and Amsterdam pay for the same products.

The reform, isn’t perfect though. The reform targets the upstream structure — quotas, tariffs, the Dairy Board — but leaves the downstream concentration untouched. If Tnuva, Tara, and Strauss retain 85% market share after the tariff wall falls, they could absorb import price reductions into margins rather than passing them to consumers.

Periphery, Resilience, and the Farmers’ Real Leverage

The dairy lobby’s strongest argument has nothing to do with milk.

The Israel Cattle Breeders’ Association claims the reform threatens approximately 400 dairy farms, many along Israel’s borders. The framing is deliberate: dairy farms in the Gaza envelope, the northern border, and the Jordan Valley serve as civilian presence in contested areas. Eliminate the farms, and you eliminate the people who hold the land.

October 7 gives the argument visceral force. Hamas targeted dairy farms near the Gaza border during the massacre. Workers were killed during morning milking. At Kibbutz Alumim — four kilometers from the fence — 12 Thai farmworkers were murdered, 4 abducted, and dozens of dairy cows didn’t survive. The dairy continued production throughout the war. Amit Ifrach, chairman of the Israel Farmers Federation, framed the stakes in existential terms: “Farmers and dairy farmers are the Iron Dome of the food security of the State of Israel.”

The emotional resonance is real. The analytical claim is thinner than it appears.

First, the 400/660 figure — that roughly 60% of all Israeli dairy farms are “border farms” — comes exclusively from the farmers’ lobby. No IDF or Home Front Command assessment of dairy’s strategic value has been published. The claim conflates farms in the broad periphery with farms in actual security zones, and inflates the number of economically vulnerable operations into a count of farms that would close. The reform does not specify which farms shut down. Market dynamics would determine that.

Second, the October 7 supply disruption was in produce, not dairy. Gaza-area farms produced 70% of Israel’s tomatoes and 30% of its potatoes — those supply chains broke when roughly 3,000 of the area’s 4,000 Thai workers fled after the massacre. Dairy production held. The military banned farming within 4 km of the Gaza border fence, but the dairy-specific impact was modest compared to the agricultural sector as a whole.

Third the February 2026 supply disruption was not caused by an external security threat. It was caused by the farmers themselves. The strike cut 20% of Israel’s milk production and cost an estimated NIS 10 million per day. Major supermarket chains imposed rationing limits. The same people invoking “food security” created the shortage they warned about. The system they claim protects supply was weaponized against consumers as political leverage.

The periphery argument has a defensible core — civilian presence in border communities matters, and the government has a legitimate interest in maintaining it. A well-designed reform should acknowledge this. The NIS 1 billion compensation package may do so, though whether it specifically targets periphery farms or is farm-agnostic is unclear. Smotrich himself acknowledged the reform would harm small local dairy producers but promised statutory protection and compensation—and, to be frank, dairy farmers can pivot to producing something else, no one is taking land away from them.

The defensible core does not extend to the entire quota system, the tariff wall, or the Dairy Board’s planning authority. Dagan Yarel, director of the Israel Cattle Breeders’ Association, gave the game away when he argued that “the government prefers to harm dairy farmers around Gaza and reward dairy farmers in Poland.” Stripped of its emotional packaging, the statement means: Israeli consumers should pay 50–60% above European prices indefinitely so that domestic producers never face competition from more efficient foreign farms. “Rewarding Polish farmers” is what lower grocery bills look like from the cartel’s perspective.

Food Security Is Not Self-Sufficiency

Israel conflates two concepts that sound alike and require different policies.

Food security — as defined by the 1996 World Food Summit and the FAO — exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. The definition does not require domestic production. Food self-sufficiency means producing all your own food. One is a security strategy. The other is an economic ideology with a flag on it.

Israel already imports the majority of its staple foods. Grain, meat, produce, oils — all flow in from international supply chains that function in peacetime and wartime alike. The dairy sector’s claim to special protection rests on the premise that domestic milk is a strategic asset. That premise, applied consistently, would require autarky across every food category — a position no one advocates because the cost would be civilizationally stupid.

The country that has solved this problem most cleanly is the one with the most reason to worry about it.

Singapore imports over 90% of its food from 187 countries and ranks 28th on the Global Food Security Index despite less than 10% domestic self-sufficiency. Singapore’s strategy is “self-reliance” — diversified import sources, strategic stockpiles (a two-month rice reserve requirement for importers), and buffer production through its “30 by 30” goal of 30% local production by 2030. The local production target is a buffer, not a replacement for trade. Food security does not mean food self-sufficiency—which is a good thing since no country can be self-sufficient in all food products.

Autarky has its place in the Israeli system, to be sure. Milk is probably not that place.

Israel faces different strategic constraints than Singapore — it shares land borders with hostile actors and has experienced wartime supply shocks. These are reasons to invest in supply diversification, strategic reserves, and trade agreements with multiple dairy-exporting nations. They are not reasons to maintain a cartel that charges consumers 64% above OECD prices so that 660 farms can operate inside a guaranteed-margin regime.

The correct policy response to wartime vulnerability is redundancy. Israel maintains grain reserves. It diversifies energy imports. It builds desalination plants rather than mandating that every community operate its own well. The logic of strategic resilience — multiple sources, buffer stocks, rapid substitution capacity — applies identically to dairy. A strategic reserve of shelf-stable dairy products, combined with trade agreements with at least three or four exporting nations, would provide greater wartime resilience than a domestic cartel that can be shut down at a whim.

When the EU abolished its milk quota in 2015, production increased 4.4%, raw milk prices declined 10%, and butter and powder production rose 5–6%. Ireland — a small island economy with genuine supply chain vulnerabilities — became the most competitive dairy sector in Europe after quotas ended. New Zealand dissolved its single-desk export monopoly in 2001 and built a global dairy powerhouse. In every documented case, deregulation produced expansion, not collapse.

The farmers’ lobby warns that abandoning domestic milk production leaves Israel dependent on foreign supply during wartime. The argument would carry weight if Israel were generally self-sufficient in food. It is not. Dairy exceptionalism has no security basis that does not apply with equal force to grain, meat, and produce — sectors where import dependency is accepted without controversy.

The Political Kill Zone

Netanyahu instructed the coalition to support the dairy reform. Whether that decision holds — or whether Netanyahu trades dairy reform away as coalition currency when the pressure peaks — is the central political uncertainty.

The budget mechanics constrain everything. The 2026 state budget — NIS 662 billion — passed its first Knesset reading on January 29 by a 62–55 vote. Under law, at least 60 days must pass between first and final readings. The budget must pass second and third readings by March 31, 2026, or the Knesset dissolves automatically and elections move from October to June. The arithmetic gives the coalition zero margin.

The Arrangements Law was split in two in February to expedite passage. The dairy reform was kept in the prioritized half. The Knesset House Committee voted 8–7 to reject the Knesset legal adviser’s recommendation that the dairy reform be separated from the budget and advanced independently. And the reform was routed to the Public Projects Committee — chaired by MK Ohad Tal (Religious Zionist Party) — rather than to David Bitan’s Economic Affairs Committee, where it would have been buried.

These procedural moves indicate Smotrich and the coalition whips are serious. The committee routing alone is decisive in this instance.

The opposition is not the threat. Yair Lapid called the budget a vehicle for “crooks and draft dodgers” — standard rhetoric that attacks the budget frame, not the dairy reform specifically. No opposition party has articulated a distinct position on dairy reform. The consumer case is strong enough that opposing it openly would cost more than ignoring it.

The internal coalition tensions are the threat. Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter cast the only cabinet vote against the reform. Ben-Gvir and Eliyahu abstained. Multiple Likud MKs have publicly declared they will fight to remove the reform from the Arrangements Bill. The Haredi parties are a separate wild card. Degel HaTorah warned it was “not committed” to voting for the budget in second and third readings until the draft exemption law passes. Three Agudat Yisrael MKs voted against the first reading.

The legal flank is open but probably empty. The Dairy Board filed a High Court petition against Smotrich’s cheese import order, claiming violation of the sectoral agreement and the Milk Economy Planning Law. The budget timeline likely outruns the court’s calendar. Ongoing tensions make the court cautious about intervening in economic legislation — a rare instance where coalition friction on one front creates maneuvering room on another.

Smotrich’s personal exposure is high. His party hovers near the electoral threshold. The dairy reform is one of his most visible initiatives — a cost-of-living win he can point to before elections if it passes, or a leadership failure if the coalition strips it from the budget. He has threatened to unilaterally abolish all tariffs if farmers continue striking. Whether he has the legal authority to do so is contested.

Bibi, characteristically, has kept distance. He publicly states the government will serve its full term but privately instructed aides to prepare for possible June elections. If the budget fails — for any reason — the dairy reform dies with it.

Scenarios: How Dairy Reform Plays Out

Five paths. The odds for which is the likely outcome will fluctuate weekly. The first option is correct—though it’s a toss up between that or the second. The others are possible, but not particularly probable. I’d estimate the greater likelihood of an outcome to be 1 or 2 followed, in order, by 3, 4, and 5.

1. Full Smotrich

   
   Phased liberalization proceeds on schedule. Quotas wound down over 5–7 years, tariffs eliminated, the Dairy Board restructured into a regulatory body rather than a planning authority. Consumer prices drop 15–20% within a year. Periphery farms receive compensation packages. The sector consolidates around efficient producers and competes with imports.

   
   Preconditions: the budget passes by March 31 with the dairy reform intact; Netanyahu holds the coalition; Likud rebels are contained; no High Court intervention; farmer protests fail to shift public opinion. The reform survived first reading, the House Committee vote (8–7), and the committee routing. Bank of Israel endorsement and coalition whip discipline suggest the institutional machinery favors passage. The March 31 deadline leaves zero margin, and every coalition defection is existential.

   
   This is the outcome the arithmetic supports. Whether the arithmetic governs the politics remains to be seen.
   

2. Cosmetic Trim

   
   Tariffs reduced marginally — from 40% to, say, 25%. Quotas untouched or minimally adjusted. Both sides declare victory. The Finance Ministry claims a cost-of-living achievement. The farmers’ lobby preserves the structural cartel. Consumer savings are real but modest — single-digit percentage reductions instead of the 15–20% the Finance Ministry projects.

   
   This is the compromise Netanyahu defaults to when coalition noise exceeds his threshold. Likud MK opposition, cabinet dissent, farmer mobilization, and the 420-page complexity of the Arrangements Law all provide cover for quiet dilution. The mechanism is familiar from Israeli reform history: the headline survives, the substance erodes in committee, and the lobby gets enough of what it needs to stand down.

   
   Smotrich may refuse — he has staked personal credibility on the full reform and threatened unilateral tariff abolition — but his leverage depends on being willing to sink the entire budget, and that willingness has limits. He needs the budget to pass for fiscal reasons, for coalition survival, and for his own political future. The dairy reform matters to him. The budget matters more.
   

3. Wartime Freeze

   
   The reform shelved indefinitely under “national resilience” framing. Temporary tariff waivers extended. The quota system preserved. Prices remain at 64% above OECD average.

   
   This scenario requires a security escalation —and looking around, it seems we’re smack dab in the middle of one with the Iranian strikes — that shifts the national conversation away from cost-of-living and toward security. The farmers’ lobby has already laid the rhetorical groundwork: border farms, October 7, food security for the next war. The unverified 400-border-farm claim becomes politically bulletproof if rockets are falling.

   
   The risk runs in both directions. Cost-of-living pressure is the government’s other political vulnerability. Shelving the reform invites attacks on governing credibility from the same consumer base the coalition needs for October elections.

   If domestic politics stays focused abroad, this is a likely option.
   

4. Protest Capture

   
   Farmer mobilization forces a compensation package so large it negates consumer savings. The quota system survives with adjustments. The tariff reductions are paired with subsidies that preserve producer margins. The reform becomes a fiscal transfer from taxpayers to farmers, dressed as liberalization.

   
   The February strike demonstrated real leverage. Twenty percent of national production halted. NIS 10 million per day in losses. Supermarket shelves emptied. Purchase limits imposed. If the government reads the strike as a preview of what sustained mobilization looks like — and judges the visual of empty dairy aisles more dangerous than the visual of overpriced yogurt — the compensation calculus shifts.

   
   The irony: the strike also proved that farmers, not external threats, are the supply risk. If Smotrich frames the strike correctly — as an argument for reform, not against it — this scenario collapses.
   

5. Judicial Grenade

   
   The High Court strikes down the import order or the budget procedure, scrambling the timeline.

   
   The Dairy Board’s petition claims violation of the sectoral agreement and the Milk Economy Planning Law. The legal basis may have merit — the Knesset legal adviser’s recommendation to separate the reform from the budget could support a procedural challenge. But no interim injunction has been issued, and the budget’s March 31 deadline likely outruns the court’s calendar.

   
   Unless a hearing is scheduled in March, this scenario is dormant.

The bureaucratic default — what happens if no one acts — is stasis. Temporary tariff waivers expire. Quotas remain. Prices stay high. Periodic shortages continue during peak demand. The status quo is unstable but has persisted for decades, which is just fine for the dairy cartel. It has never needed to win the argument merely to outlast the reformer.

Every protected industry in Israel watches this reform. The ports, the agricultural cartels, the professional guilds, the defense contractors with cost-plus contracts, the construction regulators who keep housing supply artificially constrained. Each has its own version of the Dairy Board. Each wraps market distortion in public interest language. Each knows that the political system has great difficulty sustaining a structural reform against an organized lobby with access to the Knesset and the evening news.

The question is not whether Israeli consumers deserve lower milk prices — the arithmetic settled that years ago. The question is whether the Israeli political system can dismantle a protected sector when the beneficiaries know how to push every button. Security. Periphery. Wartime sentiment. Coalition fragility. Procedural delay. To say nothing of tractor convoys on Highway 1.

Smotrich has the Bank of Israel, the OECD, the telecom precedent, and a consumer base paying 64% above the developed-world average. The farmers have a lobby that weaponizes its own supply chain, unverified statistics, and a PM who has never met… well much of anything that he wouldn’t trade for coalition stability.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

This is the final installment of February’s four-part serialization of Holiday From History. This week closes the loop: institutional warfare, narrative control, deceptive diplomacy—and the return of history in its most explicit form. Full book: Holiday From History on Amazon

Shabbat shalom, friends.

This last installment of Holiday From History is about constraint as a weapon: how law and institutions get turned into handcuffs for democracies; how propaganda becomes operational; how negotiation becomes camouflage; and how the moral operating system of the West buckled under pressure.

It ends where analysis must end: with a prescription—what guardianship looks like when euphemism is no longer survivable.

Holiday From History:

The West’s Delusion of Peace and the Return of War

Chapter 19: Lawfare and Institutions

Modern war isn’t just fought with tanks. It’s fought in courtrooms, at the UN, and in the headlines. Lawfare is the deliberate use of legal systems, human-rights language, and international institutions to pin down democracies while their enemies fight with no rules at all. It turns the law from a shield into a sword.

The tactic is simple: flood courts and global bodies with accusations, however flimsy, the moment a democracy fights back. File suits in the most sympathetic forum, demand “urgent” injunctions, and push headlines that scream War crimes! before the facts are even known. Activists and lawyers coordinate with media campaigns so that the accusation itself becomes the punishment. Democracies, sensitive to public opinion and bound by their own laws, hesitate. Terror groups and authoritarian states ignore it all. That asymmetry is the heart of lawfare.

Israel has been the prime target. In 2009, activists in Britain secured a universal jurisdiction warrant against former foreign minister Tzipi Livni. It was a stunt—one magistrate, one partisan filing—but Livni had to cancel her trip. Israeli generals avoided European airports for fear of arrest. Hamas commanders, meanwhile, traveled freely between Damascus, Tehran, and Doha. No court threatened them.

In 2014, as rockets rained down on Israeli cities, the Palestinian Authority rushed to join the International Criminal Court. It pushed the prosecutor to investigate Israel while saying nothing of Hamas deliberately firing on civilians and using its own people as shields. The gambit worked: even before any evidence was reviewed, headlines declared Israel “under ICC investigation.” Diplomatically, that was leverage. Militarily, it was handcuffs.

This is why lawfare matters. Democracies—Israel, the U.S., Europe—try to live by rules. They investigate their own militaries. They care about legitimacy. That very decency becomes a weakness when enemies weaponize law. Putin shrugs off rulings. Hamas laughs at the Geneva Conventions. They exploit the fact that the West ties itself in knots to follow norms.

The institutions built to defend justice have too often become arenas of abuse.

UN councils packed with dictators pass endless resolutions against Israel while ignoring China’s gulags or Iran’s executions. Courts and commissions are bent into tools of propaganda. Lawfare is not about truth or justice—it is about bleeding democracies with paper cuts until they hesitate to defend themselves.

In theory, the United Nations treats all nations equally under law. In practice, it has become a stage for relentless campaigns against Israel while tyrannies skate free.

Between 2015 and 2023, the UN General Assembly passed roughly 154 resolutions against Israel—more than twice the number it adopted against all other countries combined. Not Syria as it gassed civilians, not North Korea’s gulags, not Iran’s hangmen—Israel, a democracy of under ten million people, was the punching bag.

The Human Rights Council institutionalized this bias. Since its founding in 2006 it has condemned Israel more than any other state and even created a permanent agenda item—Item 7—just for Israel. No genocide regime, no terror sponsor, enjoys that “honor.” Of thirty or so emergency sessions held by 2021, nine were devoted to Israel. The verdict is always assumed: guilty first, facts later.

Why? Because bloc politics rules the UN. The 56-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation pushes anti-Israel measures, often joined by the Non-Aligned Movement and by dictatorships keen to deflect attention from their own crimes. Western democracies often abstain or quietly go along. The result is a paper mountain of resolutions portraying Israel as the planet’s worst violator, providing cover for Iran, Russia, and others to sneer, “Even the UN says Israel is the problem.” The absurdity is endless: Syria, in the middle of dropping barrel bombs, won a seat on UNESCO’s human rights committee. Israel, meanwhile, was condemned by UNESCO for archaeological digs in Jerusalem. The UN’s Commission on the Status of Women once singled out only one state for oppressing women—Israel. Not Saudi Arabia. Not Iran. Israel.

UNRWA shows how humanitarian agencies can be turned into political weapons. Founded in 1949 to care for Palestinian refugees, it created a system where refugee status is hereditary. From 700,000 in 1949, the number has swollen to more than 5 million, many with citizenship elsewhere. That isn’t relief—it’s institutionalized grievance, preserving the claim that millions should “return” into Israel. Operationally, UNRWA runs schools and clinics, but those schools have doubled as Hamas armories and propaganda mills. Rockets were found in UN buildings in 2014 and dutifully “returned” to Hamas. Textbooks erase Israel from maps and glorify martyrdom. Staff have been caught praising Hitler or cheering massacres online. Donors grumble, but funding flows on—better UNRWA than Hamas, they say. Yet the effect is the same: militants exploit UNRWA’s halo. Every time a firefight damages a school, the headline reads UN school hit—the perfect PR trap.

International courts add another layer. In 2004, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion declaring Israel’s security barrier illegal, barely mentioning that it stopped a wave of suicide bombings that killed hundreds. The fence cut terror by 90 percent, but the court spoke as if Israel built it for spite. More recently, the General Assembly asked the ICJ to rule on whether Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria is “annexation” or “apartheid.” Everyone knows the purpose: secure a judicial-sounding condemnation to fuel sanctions campaigns.

The International Criminal Court is no better. In 2021 it declared “Palestine” a state for jurisdictional purposes and opened investigations into Israel. Hamas, which fires rockets at civilians and uses children as shields, faces no risk—its leaders will never be handed over. Israel, which actually investigates its soldiers, becomes the focus. The process is the punishment: headlines about “war crimes probes,” travel worries for Israeli officers, new ammunition for boycott campaigns. Russia and China laugh at the ICC; Israel and the U.S. denounce it but still feel the political sting.

This is lawfare through institutions: resolutions, agencies, and courts turned into weapons. They don’t stop war crimes. They don’t deter tyrants. They generate paper trails that delegitimize democracies defending themselves. The next chapter shows how NGOs and media pick up those rulings and resolutions, turning political theater into what the world soon treats as established fact.

Lawfare runs on a conveyor belt. NGOs feed it claims. Academia blesses those claims with footnotes. Media blasts them into headlines. The loop pressures courts, parliaments, and diplomats to treat advocacy as fact.

Follow the money and you’ll see how it’s weaponized. Gulf donors bankroll Western campuses and “centers” that reliably produce papers accusing the U.S. and Israel while looking away from Hamas or Hezbollah. EU ministries write big checks to “civil society” groups in Gaza and Ramallah whose core business is filing complaints and lobbying tribunals. Large foundations fund the same networks. Grants are framed as neutral. The outputs aren’t. If a university lab is endowed to study “occupation and international law,” you know where its conferences and conclusions will land. If a Gaza NGO is paid to count “civilian” deaths, you know the numerator and denominator will be curated. Many true believers fill these jobs. The selection effect still rules: money amplifies one story line.

Now watch one allegation travel. Step one: an NGO publishes a report. The photos are wrenching. The citations are opaque. Hamas-run ministries supply the baseline numbers. Context vanishes. Human shields are a footnote. Proportionality is redefined as “no civilian may ever die.” Step two: headlines. “War crimes,” “apartheid,” “indiscriminate bombing.” The brand name of the NGO stands in for evidence. Nuance does not trend. Step three: professors and pundits hold panels. Students are assigned the report. Op-eds declare that “we can no longer ignore” the crimes that yesterday did not exist. Step four: lawmakers cite the coverage. Petitions and court filings annex those same stories as “authorities.” An activist brief becomes a parliamentary talking point, then an exhibit in court.

Once embedded, the claim hardens. Corrections never catch up. In Gaza 2014, early “80 percent civilian” death tallies came from Hamas sources and their NGO partners. Months later, cross-checks showed far more combatants. Many names later celebrated by Hamas as fighters remained on NGO lists as civilians. Misfired Hamas rockets that killed Gazans were still blamed on Israel. None of that reversed the headline.

The pattern repeated in 2021. NGO lists labeled almost every dead adult male a civilian. Analysts then found those same men praised by Hamas and Islamic Jihad as “martyred commanders.” One “farmer” and his teen son turned out to be a field commander and a trainee in combat gear. A “passerby” was a Qassam Brigade operative near a training site. Rocket debris that killed a family was from a Hamas launch that fell short. By the time these facts surfaced, diplomats had moved on to condemning “disproportionate” response. The human shields tactic had worked again. If civilians deter a strike, Hamas wins. If civilians die and cameras roll, Hamas wins twice.

The “apartheid” label shows the laundering mechanism. A Palestinian NGO pushes the analogy for years. A large international NGO then adopts it, packaging the same talking points as a 200-page report. Media amplifies it. Campus activists adopt it. UN investigators cite it. The word becomes “common sense” in elite circles, detached from law and from Israel’s reality as a democracy with equal rights for its Arab citizens and a territorial dispute next door. One assertion. Five echoes. Instant orthodoxy.

UN inquiries add a seal of faux neutrality. After the 2021 war, the Human Rights Council created a permanent “root causes” commission led by figures with long anti-Israel records. One member even babbled about the “Jewish lobby” on tape and kept his post. Reports were prewritten in spirit. The logo did the rest. The Goldstone episode still instructs: the Council’s 2009 mission accused Israel of deliberately targeting civilians. Years later Judge Goldstone recanted the core claim. The retraction landed with a whisper. The original accusation is still quoted.

It all forms a closed loop. NGOs cite each other. Academics cite NGOs. Reporters cite both. Then NGOs cite the coverage and the “scholarship.” Try breaking the cycle with a sober rebuttal and you’ll get a page A17 brief long after the front-page blast. The record gets corrected in archives. The policy damage stays.

Lawfare is not just a foreign sport. It plays at home, in our courts, universities, HR offices, and payments platforms. The aim is simple: make critics of extremism shut up or pay dearly for speaking.

Start with SLAPPs. You publish evidence that a “charity” fronts for Hamas. Or you name a financier. Instead of a rebuttal, you get a lawsuit. Not to win on the merits. To bleed you on process and frighten everyone else. Rachel Ehrenfeld learned that the hard way when a Saudi billionaire sued her in London over a book sold almost nowhere in Britain. She refused to appear. Default judgment. Message received. Only after that stunt did New York and then Congress pass laws blocking foreign libel tourism. Europe still invites it.

The tactic scales. In the U.S., CAIR dragged critics through court for years. One case ended only when discovery threatened to expose records. In France, historian Georges Bensoussan was prosecuted for “incitement” after quoting an Algerian sociologist on antisemitism. He was acquitted. The trial did the work. Every journalist who watched took notes: risk your mortgage if you write plainly about Islamist realities.

Next comes speech policing. Democracies hate hate. Good. But “hate speech” codes and campus rules now often muzzle those who name jihadist ideology while leaving actual incitement to fester. A British cop will knock on a citizen’s door over a blunt tweet. A radical preacher who flirts with the line keeps his slot until after the damage. On American campuses, veterans of the IDF or reformist Muslims get labeled “unsafe” and disinvited. The point is not safety. The point is veto power over uncomfortable facts.

Add institutional leverage. Activists file professional complaints to shred reputations. Professors who document radicalization face inquisition letters. Lawyers who defend soldiers get harassed by regulatory bodies until they run out of hours. Banks and payment processors, spooked by campaigns, cut off groups that expose extremism with vague “terms of service” violations. A country that cannot move money cannot move arguments. At the same time, “charities” with clean logos and dirty partners keep their tax status and their accounts.

Process becomes punishment. The UK learned this after Iraq. A law firm solicited hundreds of abuse claims against British troops. Years and millions later, most “war crimes” collapsed as fraud. The lawyer was struck off. The soldiers were still dragged through a lost decade of suspicion. That is lawfare’s dividend: a demoralized military and a headline that lingers long after the retraction.

Visa games play, too. Reformist Muslim voices get bottled at the border after smear campaigns brand them “far right.” Firebrands slide in to rally crowds. Bureaucrats choose the quiet life and stamp accordingly.

The chilling effect is measurable. Reports unwritten. Courses redesigned. Editors who say “not worth the fight.” People who know better keep quiet, then tell themselves that silence is civility. It is not. It is surrender to a tactic designed to make you doubt that telling the truth is worth the trouble.

Accountability matters. Real wrongdoing by officials or soldiers must be punished. Lawfare is not accountability. It is punishment without proof. It is law used to hamstring those who defend liberal order, while those who despise it dance through the gaps.

International bias, the NGO–media echo, and domestic intimidation all meet on the battlefield. They shape commanders’ choices. They sap political will. They tilt the field against the side that plays by rules.

Name the tactic. Strip it of its mystique. Then set firm rules: robust anti-SLAPP laws, due-process discipline in universities and professions, viewpoint-neutral speech policies, financial rights for lawful advocacy, equal enforcement against genuine incitement.

Modern Western armies bring lawyers to war. They should. Law disciplines force. But lawfare turns that virtue into a vise. It pushes commanders past compliance into paralysis. That is the point.

Rules of engagement already require distinction and proportionality. Western forces honor both. Lawfare adds a shadow code: if a civilian might be harmed, don’t shoot or you will be tried on TV and in court. So pilots wave off strikes at the last second because a figure walks into the crosshairs. Special forces hold fire as a gunman sprints into a crowded home. Under the law, enemies who hide behind civilians bear responsibility. In practice, democracies still hold back. Terrorists learn the lesson. Use human shields and live to fight again.

A target package that once took hours now takes days. Intelligence locates a senior commander in an apartment. Lawyers model blast radii. Ministers game out the UN session and the ICC headline. The window closes. Hamas learned to surround decision-makers with women and children. Israel sometimes lets them go. Those men then direct the next salvo at Israeli cities. In Afghanistan, “courageous restraint” sounded noble. It often meant insurgents escaped to plant the roadside bomb that killed a family the next day.

Sometimes restraint costs more lives on the spot. In Jenin in 2002, the IDF cleared a terror redoubt house by house to spare civilians rather than use airpower. Twenty-three soldiers died in booby-trapped alleys. A “massacre” rumor raced around the world. It was false. About 52 Palestinians died, most of them fighters. The smear still shortened the operation and let gunmen melt away. Israel’s caution did not buy it mercy. Lawfare turned Israel’s morality against it.

Targets that lose legal protection still become untouchable for optics. A mosque used as an armory is a military site under the law. Strike it and the image detonates around the world. Insurgents exploited mosques in Iraq and the U.S. often held fire. Hamas buried a command complex beneath Shifa Hospital. Everyone in Gaza knew it. For years Israel avoided the place. When evidence finally forced a careful entry, outrage arrived on cue. Lawfare would keep a terror nerve center immune forever because it sits under sickbeds.

In 2014, as Hamas flooded the media with wreckage, Europe wobbled. London reviewed export licenses. Madrid talked embargoes. Washington slowed deliveries and leaned hard for a halt. Hamas read the room. If it could survive and generate enough photographs, allies would “rein in” Israel and call it balance. By day eleven in 2021, the cease-fire arrived. Hamas declared victory. Then it rearmed.

UN cease-fires lock in failure. Resolution 1701 ended the 2006 war with promises. Hezbollah kept its rockets and built more under the nose of UNIFIL. The terror statelet survived and grew. The pattern is not subtle. If the IDF or any Western military had unlimited time and no diplomatic choke chain, it could dismantle a militia that embeds in apartments and schools. It never has unlimited time. The enemy hangs on, sacrifices its own civilians wholesale, and counts on the world to stop the democracy first. Often it does.

Information war seals the deal. Get the legal labels into the bloodstream early and the accused fights uphill. “War crimes.” “Genocide.” “Apartheid.” Journalists ask spokespeople about indictments, not victory. Even when the facts flip, the narrative sticks. In October 2023, an explosion at a Gaza hospital compound became “Israel bombed a hospital.” Protests ignited. Within days, open-source evidence showed an errant rocket from Gaza likely caused the blast. The correction never caught the original lie. Politicians still cite the myth. Commanders take note. One image like that and the phones ring off the hook from friendly capitals. So they trim objectives or stop early. The enemy keeps breathing.

Lawfare forces short-term image over long-term security. It saves lives today to cost more lives tomorrow. Every “round” that ends with Hamas or Hezbollah intact guarantees the next round. Civilians pay again. Troops pay again. The same is true beyond Israel. In Afghanistan, rules that barred firing without perfect visual certainty saved a few at night and killed more the next morning. This is the brutal math. Lawfare pretends there is none.

It also erodes faith in law. Soldiers learn that the side that follows rules gets punished with process while the side that celebrates murder gets a pass. Veterans say “they wouldn’t let us win” and tune out the Geneva Conventions. Israelis who grew up with tohar haneshek ask why they should trust tribunals that ignore human shields and reward liars. That is dangerous. The answer is not to discard law. It is to reclaim it.

Reclaiming law means insisting on facts before verdicts. It means calling human shields what they are and assigning blame accordingly. It means allies backing each other when they fight terrorists who hide under infants. It means stiffening domestic spines against performative outrage. It means refusing to let a UN logo launder bias into binding “truth.” It means teaching editors and courts that a Hamas press release is not a casualty ledger.

Law should be a shield, not a trap. We built courts and treaties to guard life and liberty. Lawfare flips that purpose. It dresses propaganda as procedure and ties the hands of the people who actually defend free societies. Time to take the law back.

Start with the forums most easily gamed. If a UN inquiry cannot meet basic standards of impartiality, transparency, and equal scrutiny of all parties, it should not exist. No more “investigations” staffed by activists who declared the verdict on Twitter last year. No permanent agenda item singling out the only liberal democracy in the Middle East while serial abusers glide past the microphone. Donor states hold the purse. Use it. Condition UNRWA funds on vetting staff, fixing textbooks, and keeping rockets out of schools. If an agency will not reform, redirect aid to providers who will.

Armies must fight with law and with clarity. Publish plain-English urban warfare doctrines that explain how distinction and proportionality work when the enemy hides in hospitals and schools. Pre-declare lawful tactics for human shield scenarios. Collect and release evidence in real time. When a strike is lawful, show why. When a rumor is false, kill it within hours, not weeks. Create integrated legal-intel-comms teams that plan for the lawfare hit as carefully as they plan for the raid.

Stop playing only defense in court. File cases against the people who use human shields and fake surrenders. Submit their crimes to any venue that will hear them. Even when enforcement is limited, you shift the frame: not “state versus victims,” but “terrorist commanders versus law.”

Teach the basics again. Most citizens, journalists, and students have never been taught what the laws of war actually require. Distinction. Proportionality. Necessity. Perfidy. Human shields. These are not abstractions. They decide whether a neighborhood survives. Say clearly that the party who turns an ICU into a bunker bears moral and legal blame for the tragedy that follows. That is not spin. That is the law.

Chapter 20: Propaganda and Narrative Control

Modern wars are fought on screens first. If you can seize the storyline, you can make a democracy doubt its own right to defend itself while you launder aggression as justice. That is not a side show. It is a strategy.

A tiny emirate built a very loud mouth. Qatar bankrolls Al Jazeera and uses it as a strategic asset. The network’s Arabic channel did not simply “cover” the Arab Spring; it cheered Muslim Brotherhood movements and attacked their rivals. In 2013, enough staff in Cairo quit over the slant that the walkout itself became news. During the Iraq War, Al Jazeera looped civilian carnage and hosted Saddam’s spokesmen while saying little about Saddam’s decades of mass murder. It railed against the United States even as American jets launched from a U.S. base on Qatari soil. That two-step is the point: Qatar plays host and arsonist at the same time, and Al Jazeera supplies the fire.

On Israel, the pattern hardens. Hamas gunmen become “martyrs” and “fighters.” Israeli dead are “settlers,” if mentioned at all. Rocket fire is “resistance.” Israeli strikes are “massacres.” Context fades. Human shields vanish. The result is a moral universe in which only one actor can ever be guilty and only one cause can ever be righteous. It is propaganda sold as passion.

The effect is real. In every Gaza war of the past decade, Al Jazeera’s live shots of rubble and grief set the global mood before facts caught up. That coverage primed publics, fed UN chambers, and teed up “war crimes” claims within days. By the time evidence surfaced of rockets launched from courtyards or bunkers under clinics, the narrative high ground was already occupied.

Qatar did not stop at cameras. It bought classrooms. Since 2001 it has been the single largest foreign donor to American universities, with gifts and contracts measured in the billions. Cornell’s branch in Doha alone sits on roughly a billion and a half dollars. Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Northwestern, and others took huge checks to anchor campuses and programs tied to Doha. In Britain, Qatari money endowed chairs and centers. The funds are “restricted.” They steer agendas. Middle East centers dependent on Qatari grants do not usually host panels on Hamas repression or Doha’s patronage networks. They do mainstream Brotherhood fellow-travelers as “reformers” and recast Israel through the settler-colonial lens. Students marinated in that stew become the editors, NGO staffers, and junior diplomats who carry those frames into newsrooms and ministries.

You saw it on October 7, 2023. After Hamas’s massacre, student statements at elite campuses rationalized the slaughter as “decolonial resistance.” That vocabulary did not appear by magic. It was taught, funded, and laundered through prestige.

Watch the pipeline run in a day. Morning: Al Jazeera airs a child pulled from rubble, pins it on Israel, omits that a third of Gaza rockets fall short. Afternoon: the clip floods social feeds with “Genocide” hashtags. Evening: an emergency campus rally repeats the claims and live streams them. Night: NGOs and sympathetic scholars draft an open letter to the ICC. Next morning: lawmakers wave the letter in hearings and Al Jazeera reports the “global outrage” it helped to manufacture. The circle closes. The lie arrives first. Corrections limp behind.

Qatar’s fusion of media and money has built a narrative machine. Worse, the West’s own institutions carry its water. Our press prizes neutrality yet often adopts the aggressor’s lexicon. Our universities claim independence yet bank checks that purchase an angle. That is not an accusation of conspiracy. It is a description of incentive.

Even without a foreign patron, legacy newsrooms still lean into frames that punish democracies for defending themselves. Why do outlets that preach balance so often pick language and angles that serve the people firing at kindergartens?

Western newsrooms write the first draft of history. Lately, too many drafts lean the same way. The language is careful, the mastheads prestigious, the reporters often sincere. The pattern is still there: stories and headlines that legitimize grievance against the West and especially against Israel, while sanding down the edges of those who attack them.

Start with words. A bus is bombed in Jerusalem. Is it a “terror attack” or an “explosion”? Hamas gunmen butcher families. Are they “terrorists” or “militants”? The same outlet that rightly called the Bataclan murderers terrorists will describe Hamas or Islamic Jihad as “fighters,” and an execution as a “clash.” Israeli civilians shot in their home become “settlers” killed in “violence,” as if zoning status voids personhood. When you avoid naming the killer and downgrade the victim, you tilt the story before the second paragraph.

Headlines carry the habit. Palestinian casualties appear as “Israel kills X,” often sourced to the Gaza Health Ministry without caveat. Israeli casualties are recited later, or flattened into passive voice: “Y Israelis die.” That asymmetry is not neutral. It tells readers who acts and who merely suffers.

Pictures seal it. After an Israeli strike in Gaza, front pages run visceral images of blood and rubble, even when the target was a rocket team firing from a courtyard. After a Hamas massacre, the images are distant: ambulances, a long lens on a funeral, a single tearful relative. Sympathy is rationed by angle and crop.

The incentives push coverage in that direction. Western journalists are trained to “speak truth to power,” which in practice means grilling democracies. You win prizes investigating the Pentagon or the IDF. You do not win prizes exposing Hamas’s torture cells or Hezbollah’s theft of aid. Access flows through local stringers who live under Hamas or other armed groups. They know the rules. So do the editors back in London or New York. On deadline you run the line you can source, and the only official spokesman on the ground is the ministry controlled by the men firing the rockets. You add “Palestinians say” and hit publish.

None of this requires bad faith. It requires habits. A preference for passive voice when Israelis die and active voice when Israel fights. A reluctance to use “terrorist” when the victims are Jewish. A default to images that show the consequences of Western force and the abstractions of jihadi violence. A reliance on local sources who cannot safely tell the whole truth. A prestige economy where “holding your own side accountable” is heroic and confronting Hamas is inconvenient or dangerous.

Habits have consequences. News cycles shape public opinion in hours. Opinion shapes policy. The al-Ahli misreport altered a presidential trip and fueled riots before facts emerged. UN debates and European parliaments quote Western headlines as if they were affidavits. NGOs clip those headlines into “evidence” packets. The lawfare machine I described earlier feeds on this oxygen.

Bias here does not mean every story is false. It means the frame tilts. Democracies are interrogated; their enemies are contextualized. The words “disproportionate,” “cycle of violence,” and “apartheid” appear as common sense. The words “human shields,” “perfidy,” and “jihadist war crimes” are footnotes.

Some journalists push back. Some editors have learned to add “unverified” before running numbers from a Hamas ministry. Credit them. But the structural pressures remain. Our adversaries understand them. They package stories to flatter a newsroom’s sense of mission, then let virality do the rest.

If legacy media suddenly found perfect balance, would the problem end? No. Because even when a paper gets it right, the outrage economy gets there first. Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram are built to reward the most shocking, simplified tale. In that ecosystem, the truth arrives after the ad break, if at all.

Legacy bias sets the tone. Social platforms set the fire. Next, we walk into that blaze: how virality industrializes propaganda, and how extremists have learned to turn every atrocity into content and every child into a share.

In hours, a local incident can become a global crusade. X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Telegram turn every phone into a broadcast truck and every clip into a lever. The platforms are not neutral. Their code rewards whatever grabs attention, and attention skews toward outrage. In theory, that gives the weak a voice. In practice, it gives the ruthless a megaphone.

The incentives are perverse. If it is not shocking, it will not trend. ISIS understood this first. It filmed beheadings like movie trailers, cut to a nasheed, pushed the files across Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, and watched tens of thousands of recruits fly in. Horror was the hook. The message was simple: we are ascendant, you are helpless. Western publics recoiled. Many governments blinked. Platforms banned accounts, and the material poured into fresh ones. The lesson stuck.

Hamas learned it. On October 7, 2023, its gunmen wore GoPros. They live-streamed executions. They grabbed victims’ phones and posted the carnage on their pages so families would see. Within hours, Telegram channels had millions of views of murders filmed by the murderers. The goal was not denial. It was dominance. Shock Israelis. Thrill the jihadist base. Seize the first 24 hours before facts, law, or diplomacy can speak.

Then came the pivot. The same accounts that posted the slaughter flooded feeds with images of rubble and grief from Gaza. Some were real. Some were recycled from Syria or past wars. Some were synthetic. Different narratives for different audiences. One stream mythologized “the operation.” Another cast Hamas as pure victim. Social media’s silos made it easy. By week’s end, Hamas’s official channel had tripled its followers. The spectacle paid in attention.

Hashtags turn velocity into mass. One graphic, “All Eyes on Rafah,” ricocheted across Instagram and X tens of millions of times in days. It moved from feed to street. Rallies materialized in London, New York, Berlin. Politicians felt the heat before analysts had finished basic verification. TikTok explainers with glossy infographics told a compressed morality tale—Israel as colonizer, “resistance” as liberation. Those clips reached teenagers who get most of their news from vertical video. They spilled onto campuses and into city councils. The algorithm had done what cable news never could: convert a distant war into a local identity cause overnight.

Yes, social media can expose genuine crimes. Syrians smuggled out footage of Assad’s chlorine attacks. Iranians post the regime’s beatings. But the same mechanics supercharge lies. A miscaptioned photo travels faster than a forensic analysis. A violent rumor outruns a careful report.

Platforms are not built to referee this fight. Their moderation is whack-a-mole at scale. X slapped community notes on some false posts. Many stayed up long enough to do their work. Meta removed clips while users accused it of censoring one side or the other. YouTube’s bans lagged behind reposts to Telegram. Automated filters cannot parse a war in real time, and the brigades on both sides know how to game them with botnets, brigading, and fresh accounts.

Speed and scale change the policy tempo. The Overton window moves by lunchtime. Positions that would have been fringe last week—“genocide,” “intifada,” “from the river to the sea”—become campus slogans by Friday. Officials scramble to respond to trending storms while intelligence is still coming in. Diplomats find their phones lighting up with demands to act on headlines that are hours old and often wrong. As with markets, panic sells.

The first 24 hours now matter more than the next 24 days. Whoever frames an event first wins time, sympathy, and leverage. A state under attack that fails to put out verified facts immediately will spend the rest of the war rebutting screenshots. A terror group that floods feeds with shock and tears will set the moral terms before a single investigator arrives. An IDF press conference cannot compete with a minute-long TikTok montage set to mournful piano. That is not because the truth is weak. It is because the medium rewards drama.

There is a way to see this clearly without giving up on the tools themselves. Social networks have helped brave people get word out under dictatorships. But in wars that pit a law-bound democracy against an illiberal foe, the structural tilt favors the merciless. They manufacture content faster. They do not worry about lying. They weaponize their own civilian casualties and call it advocacy. Many Western users cannot tell an organic post from a coordinated campaign, and many do not try.

The fix starts with speed, clarity, and evidence. Get the raw video out. Tag the human shields. Name the rockets that fell short. Teach editors and citizens the basic law of armed conflict so “civilian casualties” is not lazily equated with “war crime.” Reward corrections with the same visibility as initial claims. Hard tasks, yes. But the alternative is to cede the battlefield of meaning to those who put murder on camera and call it justice.

The West cannot afford to be shy or slow. Not anymore.

Narrative as Weapon

A bomb levels a building. A story levels a country’s right to defend itself. In today’s wars, the side that seizes the story decides what is “allowed.” Propaganda, once it hardens into the dominant frame, powers everything else—sanctions, court cases, U.N. theatrics, arms hold-ups at the worst moment. This is not background noise. It is a battlespace.

Legislators read the feeds, not intel cables. If the story says an ally is committing atrocities, aid gets “reconsidered,” export licenses pause, and officials posture for cameras. City councils pass boycotts they barely understand. Student senates vote to divest from anyone who sells a router to Israel. Corporations flinch. A trending hashtag can move a boardroom faster than a briefing can.

Brands are soft targets. Ben & Jerry’s stopped sales in Judea and Samaria to please activists who will never like them anyway. Tech employees petitioned to cancel contracts tied to Israel. Ad buyers fled platforms accused of hosting the “wrong” posts, even when placement was algorithmic. HR writes statements in the vocabulary of the online mob. PR calls it values. It is surrender to a narrative campaign.

Why does this work? Because legitimacy is a strategic asset. In free societies, legitimacy determines who may fight and how long. If propaganda paints a lawful defense as evil, a democracy will stop itself. Allies peel off. Morale sags. Meanwhile terrorists launder murder as “resistance” and harvest recruits, cover, and time. Russia and China grasp this perfectly. They pump out lies about “neo-colonial” America and “apartheid” Israel to shrink Western room to maneuver while they bomb hospitals or herd minorities into camps with a straight face. They do not fear their press. Ours fears theirs.

The West’s long “holiday from history” made it easier. We wanted to believe grievance explains jihad, that disarmament breeds peace, that if we showed our best face the worst people would soften. Our enemies fed us exactly that story. They taught our media to repeat it, our universities to sanctify it, and our NGOs to litigate it.

Time to call things by their names. Terrorists are terrorists, not “militants.” Civilians used as shields are victims of the shield-holders. Teach the laws of war so the public stops treating any civilian death as a war crime. Fund independent verification. Expose foreign money on campus that launders Islamist propaganda as scholarship. Stop outsourcing morality to viral videos.

Chapter 21: Diplomacy and Deception

Diplomacy once meant hammering out terms to keep the peace. Today it is often war by other means. Authoritarians have turned the rituals of negotiation—summits, treaties, ceasefires, “confidence-building measures”—into camouflage for aggression. They speak the language of peace while laying mines under the table.

The technique is simple. Talk while you rearm. Sign when you need a pause. Offer a ceasefire to regroup. Open a “humanitarian corridor” that doubles as a smuggling lane. File a resolution at the U.N. that blames the victim, buying legitimacy for the aggressor. This is not diplomacy. It is deception practiced in diplomatic dress.

The history is familiar. In the 1930s, Hitler signed non-aggression pacts, joined disarmament conferences, and pocketed the Sudetenland at Munich. Each pledge bought him time. Each handshake disguised preparation for war. “Peace in our time” became license for conquest. It would be naïve to think that trickery died with the Reich. Today Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and their proxies know that Western publics crave process. If talks are happening, we assume progress is real. They exploit that weakness.

Iran has mastered the tactic. Endless nuclear talks in Geneva or Vienna gave it breathing space while centrifuges kept spinning. Each “interim deal” calmed the West and stiffened the regime. Hamas and Hezbollah play the same game with ceasefires. Agree to a pause, rearm in the shadows, then declare victory when the guns resume. Western diplomats, addicted to dialogue as an end in itself, mistake stalling for compromise.

The problem runs deeper. In liberal societies, diplomacy is treated almost as sacred ritual—a secular form of tikkun olam, repairing the world through words. That ideal makes sense between good-faith actors. Against those who see treaties as disposable paper, it becomes self-delusion. Our enemies understand that our reverence for process can substitute for actual defense. They keep us talking so we don’t act. And every hour spent in conference rooms is another hour for rockets to be moved, alliances to be forged, or tunnels to be dug.

Diplomacy is necessary. Deception is inevitable. The danger comes when we cannot tell the difference. Let’s look at the most skilled practitioner of talks as tactics, and a reminder that smiles across the table can hide the sharpening of knives.

No regime practices diplomatic warfare more fluently than the Islamic Republic. In Shi’a law, taqiyya permits concealing intent under threat. Tehran turned it into statecraft: dissemble at the table while advancing on the ground. The smiles are for Vienna. The work is in Natanz, Damascus, Beirut, Sana’a, and Gaza.

The pattern is old. In 2003, after Natanz and Arak were exposed, Iran signed a suspension with the EU-3. Western officials cheered. Iranian officials later admitted the point was time. While talks dragged, Isfahan came online and centrifuges multiplied. Sanctions were delayed. By 2005, Tehran walked away stronger.

A decade later, sanctions bit again. Secret backchannels produced the JCPOA in 2015. Iran accepted time-limited caps. Cash and oil revenues flowed. The Revolutionary Guard did not build factories. It built militias. Israeli operatives then exposed Iran’s nuclear archive in 2018: weapon designs preserved even while Iran swore it had none. Ballistic missiles marched on; they were outside the deal. The sunsets were baked in. Tehran only had to wait.

When Washington left the deal in 2018, Iran used the exit as pretext. It inched past stockpile limits. Then enriched to 20 percent. Then 60 percent. By 2021–2023, inspectors found particles near weapons-grade and access was throttled. Still the dance continued. “We are open to talks,” Iranian envoys said, as they slow-rolled the IAEA and ran out the clock.

Always the proxies moved with the diplomats. As Zarif posed for cameras, the Quds Force lifted Assad, embedded Hezbollah more deeply, and armed the Houthis. In Iraq, Iran’s militias swelled under the banner of fighting ISIS, then fired at U.S. posts and crushed Iraqi protesters. In Gaza, cash and expertise replenished Hamas and Islamic Jihad. During the 2021–2022 “revival” talks, rockets struck U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria. The message was clear: give us a deal, or our friends will make trouble.

Hostage diplomacy completes the kit. Tehran jails dual nationals on invented charges, then trades them for cash and concessions. In 2016, Americans came home as pallets of money arrived to settle an old claim. In 2023, five Americans were freed as $6 billion in oil revenues were unfrozen for “humanitarian” use. The signal to every security service was unmistakable: seize and swap. The business model works.

Strip away the choreography and the rule is simple. When Iran negotiates, it is buying time. It treats treaties as tactical pauses, not binding commitments. It will honor a clause while useful, then hollow it out, breach it in increments, or discard it altogether. The foreign minister brings the smiles. The Guards sharpen the knives.

Western officials too often confuse process with progress. They lean on the hope that dialogue tames ideologues. Tehran counts on that. It knows a certain kind of diplomat hears “verifiable limits” and stops watching the centrifuge count. It knows a certain kind of pundit hears “de-escalation” and forgets who escalated. The result is a nuclear program dangerously close to the line, a region ringed by Iranian firepower, and a West that mistakes paper for peace.

Talks without teeth invite deceit. Verification without consequence invites defiance. Iran’s record is not an academic dispute. It is twenty years of crisis, talks, pause, cheat, repeat. The costs are counted in enriched stockpiles, dead civilians from proxy rockets and drones, and hostages turned into bargaining chips. That is taqiyya by treaty.

And Iran is not alone in this game. A purported ally can play it too. Next up: Ankara.

It should be obvious, but alliances only work when members pull in the same direction. Turkey wears a NATO badge and talks like a partner. Under Erdoğan it often behaves like a revisionist power.

Ankara fuses hard-edged nationalism with Sunni Islamism. Its “Blue Homeland” doctrine claims wide swaths of the Aegean and Eastern Med, brushing aside Greek and Cypriot claims. Its friendships track the Muslim Brotherhood. Doha is close. Brotherhood figures find refuge in Istanbul. The pitch is neo-Ottoman: Turkey as patron of Sunni political Islam and heir to imperial reach.

The muscle is real. Since 2016 Turkish armor has crossed into northern Syria in a series of campaigns branded counter-terrorism. ISIS was a pretext. The priority was the Syrian Kurdish YPG, tied to the PKK. Turkish forces carved out a belt of control, installed councils, swapped curricula, and pushed the lira. Erdoğan floated “refugee resettlement” into these zones. Critics call it demographic engineering. Either way, the facts are not good, from a Western perspective.

Beyond Syria, Ankara flipped Libya’s war. In 2019–2020 Turkish advisors, Bayraktar drones, and Syrian mercenaries saved Tripoli and drove Khalifa Haftar back. A side deal with the Tripoli government drew a long maritime line across the Med that ignored Greek islands. Greek and French frigates shadowed Turkish survey ships. NATO mostly looked away.

In the Caucasus, Turkey backed Azerbaijan in 2020 with advisors and drones. Armenian armor burned. Nagorno-Karabakh’s map changed in weeks. A pan-Turkic win, delivered under the nose of Russia, with NATO silence.

Inside NATO, Ankara plays hardball. Sweden and Finland sought entry after Russia’s invasion. Turkey stalled. Extraditions of Kurdish exiles were demanded. Arms embargoes on Turkey were to be lifted. Washington was nudged toward approving F-16 sales long frozen after Turkey bought Russia’s S-400. Finland got in first. Sweden followed later. Erdoğan claimed victory on all fronts.

The EU learned a different lesson in 2016. Turkey took billions to hold back migrants. Each time Brussels scolds Ankara, Erdoğan reminds them he can “open the gates.” European leaders know what a million more arrivals would do to their politics. Money flows. So do concessions.

Soft power gets a security edge. The Diyanet funds mosques and ships imams across Europe. These serve communities. They also keep them tuned to Ankara. European services have tracked harassment of Turkish dissidents by networks tied to the state. State media and diaspora groups push the line that Turkey protects Muslims in Europe. It is influence work with a flag on it.

If a non-ally did all this, the West would call it hostile. As a treaty member, Turkey is shielded by the club’s deference and its own veto power. That is the trick. NATO becomes a sword when Ankara intervenes. NATO becomes a shield when allies protest.

The delusion is thinking shared membership equals shared ends. Erdoğan exploits that. He speaks the language of partnership when it pays. He escalates when it doesn’t.

If Iran shows how enemies use talks to buy time, Turkey shows how an ally can use an alliance to buy space. There is a second version of the same game in Doha. Turkey brings the flag. Qatar brings the wallet.

Qatar is tiny, rich, and very good at playing two games at once. It hosts thousands of American troops at al-Udeid, the biggest U.S. base in the region. It markets itself as a “fixer” who can talk to anyone. It also bankrolls and shelters Islamists who target the West and Israel. The trick is simple. Be the arsonist’s friend and the firefighter’s best contact. Make yourself indispensable to both.

Doha’s public face is mediator. Taliban talks? Held in Qatar. Lebanese factions in 2008? Qatar. Gaza ceasefire and hostage swaps? Qatar again. When Kabul fell in 2021, Qatari planes and diplomats helped the U.S. evacuate people. When Hamas took hostages in 2023, world leaders dialed Doha. All of that bought Qatar a reputation for “responsible” diplomacy and a steady stream of thank-yous from Western capitals. The American flag over al-Udeid seals the brand.

The private face is patron. Qatar has long backed the Muslim Brotherhood. It gave Hamas leaders safe haven and a platform. Khaled Meshaal and company lived well in Doha while Hamas dug tunnels and stockpiled rockets. Qatar moved hundreds of millions into Gaza over the last decade, billed as humanitarian money and civil-service salaries. Cash is fungible. Every dollar that kept Hamas’s bureaucracy afloat freed other dollars for bombs and concrete for tunnels. In Syria’s early war years, Qatari aid and weapons ended up with hardline Islamist factions. Doha insists that access enables mediation. It also confers legitimacy and resources on men who celebrate murdering Jews.

The 2017 falcon-hunting kidnapping exposed the method in one story. A Qatari royal party was seized in Iraq by an Iran-backed militia. The deal to free them reportedly involved huge ransoms and coordinated population transfers in Syria. Bags of Qatari cash moved to Shia militias like Kata’ib Hezbollah and to Sunni jihadists tied to Al Qaeda’s network. Doha denied paying terrorists. Gulf intelligence services told a different tale. The episode enraged Saudi Arabia and the UAE, helped trigger the 2017 blockade of Qatar, and then faded when Doha weathered the storm with U.S. ties and gas money. No course correction followed.

Qatar also wages narrative war. Al Jazeera is its most potent weapon. Arabic broadcasts praise “resistance,” launder Brotherhood politics, and pound Qatar’s rivals. English programming wears a liberal gloss for Western audiences. The aim is the same. Elevate Islamists and embarrass adversaries. During each Gaza war the formula repeats. Saturate airwaves with Gaza’s pain. Downplay Hamas’s rockets and human shields. Push the “war crimes” frame before facts settle. By the time corrections come, the outrage has done its work.

The money reaches classrooms and think tanks too. Doha has poured billions into Western universities. Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Texas A&M, Cornell, and others built campuses in Education City and took eye-watering sums. Grants and “centers” in Washington and London came with them. Patronage shapes agendas. Faculty and fellows steeped in Qatari funding are less likely to probe how Hamas pays its bills or how Al Jazeera scripts its segments. They are more likely to cast the Brotherhood as “moderate” and Israel as “settler colonial.” When campus groups cheer “resistance” after a massacre, you’re watching years of that drift bear fruit. A polite version of Al Jazeera now comes with a university crest.

This dual state gives Qatar leverage. To Washington, it says: we host your forces and can reach the Taliban or Hamas. You need us. To Hamas and other Islamists, it says: we give you money, airtime, and shelter. You need us too. Then, when a crisis breaks, Qatar collects diplomatic rent for brokering pauses, swaps, and “good offices.” In the 2023 war, the same capital that housed Hamas’s politburo also sold itself as the only channel to free hostages. Western leaders praised the middleman. The middleman kept the client and the contract.

It works because we let it. Better a problematic ally than no contact at all, the excuse goes. Meanwhile, American commanders run airlift schedules from al-Udeid while Hamas strategists sip coffee across town. Al Jazeera denounces “aggression” as Qatari money keeps Gaza’s rulers solvent. Think-tank panels applaud Doha’s “engagement” while Qatari cash keeps the panel lights on. Janus would be impressed.

None of this makes Qatar unique in playing both sides. It does make the West look naïve for indulging the act. Iran uses negotiations to buy time for its centrifuges and proxies. Turkey uses NATO to shield neo-Ottoman adventures. Qatar refines a niche: Islamist kingmaker with a U.S. base. All three exploit the same weakness. We confuse process with peace and logos with virtue. We reward the mediator and forget to ask who set the fire.

If diplomatic warfare thrives in that fog, it is because the forums that should clarify reality often do the opposite. The U.N., its agencies, and the “human rights” industry turn politics into paperwork and paperwork into cudgels.

The United Nations was built to restrain aggression and uphold law. Too often it does the opposite. Authoritarians and their clients have learned to use U.N. machinery to launder narratives, shield violence, and hamstring democracies that defend themselves.

Start with the General Assembly’s arithmetic. One state, one vote means blocs rule. The OIC and Non-Aligned combine with assorted autocracies to pass ritual condemnations of Israel while glancing at mass killers elsewhere. In a typical year the Assembly adopts a dozen-plus resolutions on Israel, and only a handful on all other crises combined. After Hamas’s October 7 massacre, the Assembly’s first big act was a Gaza “ceasefire” text that never named Hamas or affirmed Israel’s right to respond. That was a propaganda gift, not a moral judgment.

The Security Council is no sturdier. Vetoes paralyze action against Syria, Iran’s proxies, or Russia. Meanwhile the U.S. routinely blocks one-sided texts aimed at Israel. The message to aggressors is obvious: if you have a patron, you can violate norms and dodge penalties; if your victim is a U.S. ally, flood the docket with performative resolutions and win the headline war.

The Human Rights Council is worse. It keeps a permanent agenda item for Israel. No other country gets that treatment. It appoints rapporteurs and commissions with one-way mandates and investigators who have already pronounced verdicts. The reports they produce feed NGO campaigns and lawfare, all bearing the U.N. seal while barely mentioning terrorism’s role or context. At the same time, serial abusers sit on the Council and skate.

International courts have become another front. The ICC opened a “Palestine” file aimed largely at Israeli conduct even as jurisdiction is contested and terrorists remain untouchable in practice. The ICJ was handed a request for an advisory opinion designed to brand Israel’s presence over the 1967 lines as intrinsically unlawful. These products are non-binding, legally thin, and politically potent. They supply talking points, sanctions pushes, and boycotts dressed up as law.

The inversion reaches absurdity. Anti-racism conferences turn into anti-Israel rallies. Rights violators chair rights panels. “U.N. condemns X” becomes the news lead, and for millions that settles the morality play. Words like “occupation,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” are stretched to fit the script. Real atrocities fade. Self-defense is put on trial.

Iran uses the U.N. to stall accountability and muddy its nuclear record. Turkey exploits alliance forums while bullying neighbors and bargaining over refugees. Qatar poses as mediator on one stage while funding or sheltering Islamists on another, then points to U.N. praise for its “good offices.” They all know the system’s weaknesses and work them.

Process is deployed to gut principle. Dialogue becomes delay. “Humanitarian” becomes human shield. “International law” becomes a cudgel for those who ignore it against those who try to honor it. The West still treats these forums as referees. Our adversaries treat them as fields of maneuver.

That delusion has a cost. It blinds democracies to weaponized process and lures them into restraints their enemies never accept. If you want to stop diplomatic warfare, you must restore standards: name the aggressor, enforce symmetry, condition funding, demand transparent mandates, require due process. And when the U.N. cannot meet those basics, say so and act with allies outside it.

Diplomatic warfare is theater that lets the real war proceed offstage. Iran, Turkey, Qatar, and their larger friends in Moscow and Beijing put on talks, summits, handshakes, and U.N. theatrics. Western officials applaud the performance. While the cameras linger on podiums and communiqués, centrifuges spin, tunnels deepen, militias train, and missiles move.

The trick begins with narrative capture. Headlines trumpet “framework agreements” and “breakthroughs.” Editors love choreography, not centrifuge cascades at Fordow or convoy routes into Yemen. Years of haggling over Iran’s nuclear file filled pages while Iran quietly built hardened sites and shipped precision-guidance kits to proxies. Process became progress. Optics beat substance.

The second act buys time. Time is the hard currency here. Adversaries negotiate whenever they need a pause. Hamas used lulls to import cement and dig a city under a city. Russia used Minsk to rearm, then rolled into Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Talks froze the surface while the ground shifted. Western capitals declared “calm.” The other side built capacity.

The third act splits the audience. Democracies argue about tactics while autocrats run plays. Paris wants engagement, Warsaw wants deterrence, Washington wants unity, Brussels wants a communiqué everyone can sign. Tehran whispers different promises to each and pockets the contradictions. Ankara tells NATO allies it is indispensable, then squeezes Sweden until F-16s line up. Doha promises help with hostages, then hosts the men who took them. The more time spent parsing language, the less time spent stopping facts on the ground.

The finale trains publics to accept permanent limbo. “At least there are talks” becomes a lullaby. Words like victory, defeat, or even deterrence fade. Euphemism does the rest. Terrorists become militants, invasions become incursions, ceasefires become policy. A society that practices shmirah, guarding what matters, keeps its edge. A society that confuses dialogue with security loses it.

Reality eventually interrupts. Israelis woke on 7 October 2023 to the worst massacre of Jews since the Shoah after a stretch of “quiet” under cash-for-calm understandings. Europeans woke in 2022 to Russian armor crossing borders they thought treaties had locked. In both cases the mask slipped. The bill for earlier indulgence came due in blood.

Then comes the most perverse lesson. Instead of admitting the overdose of talk dulled deterrence, some insist the cure is more talk and more concessions. Even mid-attack, the reflex is a ceasefire, a quick return to mediation, a reprise of the last script that failed. Half-fought wars and half-kept peaces follow, each rewarding the aggressor’s timing.

Peace comes from reducing an enemy’s capacity and will to harm, then keeping them reduced. That means verification that actually verifies, timelines that bite, sanctions that cost, and a visible threat of force if cheating resumes. It means recognizing when a “mediator” is also a funder, and when an ally is using the alliance as cover. It also means telling voters the plain thing: sometimes the only way out is through. Our grandparents knew that. We forgot, or pretended to.

Diplomatic warfare does not operate alone. It feeds on propaganda and lawfare. Flood the zone with images and claims that invert aggressor and victim. Translate those claims into “legal” moves in friendly forums. Wrap it all in the U.N. flag. Then invite the West to negotiate on that tilted field. If we accept the terrain, we lose before we sit down.

The remedy is simple, not easy. Stop counting meetings as success. Match every round of talks with hard measures that change the calculus in the real world. Penalize stalling. Link aid to behavior, not promises. Condition U.N. funding on neutral mandates and basic due process. Call partners to account when they play a double game. If a friend hosts our airbase and an enemy’s political bureau in the same city, speak plainly and make choices.

The point is not to abandon diplomacy. It is to stop idolizing it.

Part Five: The Return of History

Chapter 22: The Pogrom Returns

Before dawn on October 7, 2023, Israelis in the south woke to sirens and gunfire. Hamas and allied militias blew holes in the border fence, rode motorcycles and pickups through the breaches, landed by sea, and floated over with motorized paragliders. A holiday morning, Simchat Torah, became an ambush. Under a sky filled with thousands of rockets, attack teams swarmed more than twenty sites in minutes. Israel’s first responders were outgunned, the army took hours to mass, and the killers had time to do what they came to do.

They hunted civilians. More than 1,200 people were murdered before noon, most of them in their homes, on the roads, or at the Nova music festival near Re’im. At that field, paragliders touched down as trucks rolled in. Gunmen set up kill zones along the exits, shot drivers in their cars, and walked tent to tent. Over three hundred young men and women were cut down. In Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, and other kibbutzim, terrorists went house to house, threw grenades into safe rooms, and torched family homes to smoke people out. Sderot’s police station fell, and civilians were executed in the street. Along the highways, roadblocks became traps. When Israel retook the towns, the killing was mostly over and the kidnappings had begun.

The cruelty was not incidental. It was the point. Victims were shot at close range, then finished with bullets to the head. Some were mutilated, an old pogrom habit updated with modern tools. Forensic teams later confirmed sexual assaults at multiple sites, including at the festival and inside shelters, a weapon of terror as old as Jew-hatred itself. Arson was systematic. Safe rooms designed to save lives became ovens when houses were set alight and the steel doors held the smoke in. When people ran from the flames, they were met by bullets.

Humiliation was part of the script. Bodies were desecrated for the camera. In Gaza, crowds beat and spat on the dead who were dragged across the border. One image seared itself into the country’s memory: the limp body of Shani Louk, stripped and thrown on a truck, men jeering and posing for their phones. The kidnappings were deliberate and wide. Around 240 hostages, from infants to grandparents, were hauled into Gaza as human shields and bargaining chips. Some were seized after their families were murdered in front of them. It takes a special kind of depravity to steal a baby and call it resistance.

None of this was spontaneous. It was planned. Israeli forces found detailed maps on dead attackers, with kibbutz layouts marked and routes to specific houses drawn. Hamas had built a mock village in Gaza to rehearse the assault and filmed its drills, room clearing and hostage taking included. The timing was chosen to catch soldiers at home and vigilance low. Communications towers were hit early to blind responders. Multiple factions participated under a single command, striking simultaneously to overwhelm the first line of defense. Hamas spent months pretending to seek calm, even pressing for more work permits for Gazans, while stockpiling breaching charges, fuel, restraints, and cameras. They smiled. Then they struck.

And they filmed it. Many wore body cams. Others used smartphones. Some live-streamed murders. A gunman called a victim’s family on her phone to boast. Within hours, official channels and sympathizers flooded Telegram and X with trophy videos, dead Israelis displayed like spoils. Modernity gave them better optics, not better morals. The goal was psychological war as much as physical. It worked. Israelis scrolled through horror in real time. Their enemies cheered.

By nightfall, entire communities lay in ruins. Over a thousand civilians were dead, among them babies and great-grandparents, foreign visitors and farm workers. Kibbutzim lost whole streets. First responders wept at what they saw: blackened cribs, a breakfast table stained red, cars riddled with bullets and filled with bodies. The national illusion that a fence and sensors guaranteed safety died with the victims.

Call it by its name. It was a pogrom. A genocidal pogrom. Tsarist mobs once raped and butchered Jews, burned homes and synagogues, and paraded their power through desecration. On October 7 the same hatred arrived with rifles, GoPros, and motorized wings. The pattern did not change, only the gear. The mission was not collateral damage in a fight with the army, it was the army bypassed to reach civilians. Internal Hamas papers later recovered laid it out plainly: kill as many civilians as possible, seize hostages, break Israel’s will.

For years many convinced themselves that such things lived only in history books. That modern life had sanded down the edges of hatred. That checks, permits, and “understandings” would keep the border quiet. Then the morning came. The delusion ended the way such delusions always end, with fire and blood. The reckoning that followed reached beyond Israel. It asked whether the West still recognizes evil when it films itself, and whether we still have the will to guard what we claim to value. A bitter answer: we had a holiday from history. History did not take one from us.

October 7 did not just take lives. It stripped away the stories we told ourselves.

Start with the biggest one. “Never Again” was treated as a ritual, not a policy. We held memorials, quoted Elie Wiesel, flew to Auschwitz, and assumed humanity had vaccinated itself. Hamas proved otherwise. A vow without power is a wish. Memory without muscle fails. It failed.

Another story collapsed with it: prosperity pacifies. Israel issued thousands of work permits to Gazans. Qatar sent cash. Concrete went in for “development.” The theory said a full fridge beats a full magazine. Hamas took the permits, pocketed the cash, poured the concrete into tunnels, and chose blood. You cannot bribe a movement whose end state is your end.

A third illusion died: that “understandings” could manage fanatics. Israel treated Hamas as containable. Periodic flare. Periodic “calm.” Suitcases of Qatari dollars. Promises of quiet. Deterrence by assumption. Hamas was not deterred. It was patient. Agreements with genocidaires are fine print on a burning page.

Then there was the hard fact of unpreparedness. Israeli intelligence missed the rehearsals, the stockpiles, the deception. Hamas trained in a mock kibbutz. It cut cell towers early. It knew safe rooms protect against rockets, not men with gasoline and wire cutters. The border sensors were blinded. The fence fell in minutes at multiple points. Local squads fought heroically and alone. Army units took hours to mass. Families who did what they were taught—wait for help—died because help did not come in time. The tech was excellent. The concept was wrong.

Worse, part of the West had gone soft in the head. Within a day of the massacre, the reflex kicked in: add context, search for balance, issue the familiar “both sides” script. Babies were not yet buried, and pundits were already explaining. Some could not, or would not, say the obvious: this was evil. Not a clash. Not a cycle. Not a tragedy with many authors. One side hunted civilians. The other buried them. Moral clarity should have been automatic. For too many it was not.

Jews recognized it instantly. We have seen it before. Pogroms were never “riots” that got out of hand. They were Jew hunts. The template did not change. The tools did. Motorized paragliders replaced horses. GoPros replaced rumors. The logic was the same: invade homes at dawn, rape, burn, mutilate, steal, display the dead, and boast. The killers filmed themselves and uploaded the proof. Modernity gave them better cameras, not better morals.

It was engineered. Maps were found on bodies, down to house numbers. Timing exploited a holy morning when soldiers were home on leave. Months of “we want calm” had been theater to lull a country that wanted to believe calm was real. While Israeli officials reviewed work permits, Hamas rehearsed room clearing and hostage taking. It stockpiled breaching charges, fuel, restraints, and camera mounts. It built an urban fortress under Gaza City with stolen aid.

It is the same jihadist theater we all know. ISIS choreographed beheadings for the lens. Al-Qaeda turned planes into live television. Hamas burned families alive and called it resistance. It kidnapped women, children, and the elderly for leverage and spectacle. It invoked God as it butchered. The family resemblance is not accidental. Hamas borrows from the same culture of atrocity, funded and trained by the same patrons. Iran’s money, missiles, and training camps are not rumors. Without Tehran and its vassals, Hamas could not have done this at scale.

And then there is the part no one likes to admit: the world helped pay for it. Concrete meant for rebuilding went into tunnels. Fuel meant for hospitals went into generators for command posts. Agencies meant for relief became human shields by policy and branding. Tunnels begin under schools for a reason: to bet that Israel will hold its fire, and if it fires, to cash in on the headlines. For years, many in the West pretended you can isolate Gaza as a terror enclave and still call it “de facto stability.” On October 7, that pretense collapsed under a pile of bodies.

The implications are unforgiving. “Never Again” must be enforced, not engraved. Borders must be guarded by more than cameras. Safe rooms save lives only if someone is coming. Aid must not be blind. Deterrence must be real, not a press release. And moral speech must be plain. When a pogrom is live-streamed, you do not reach for a seminar syllabus. You call it what it is and you act.

This clarity matters beyond Israel. Any liberal society that treats barbarism as extinct invites it home. Any cabinet that mistakes process for safety puts civilians at risk. Any newsroom that refuses to say “terrorist” when a terrorist boasts on camera becomes part of someone else’s war. Those who denied the reality of evil on October 7 told us more about themselves than about “context.” They showed how far the holiday from history had gone.

Jews did not experience October 7 as a mystery. We recognized it. We have a word for it. Pogrom.

In Israel that morning, the past walked through the door. Survivors reached for names their grandparents used. Kishinev. Farhud. Families in safe rooms understood, with terrible clarity, what happens when Jews are caught undefended among men who hate them. The country did not hunt for euphemisms. It called things by their names.

Jews remembered the past—the past the West tries to bury. They mobilized. Reservists showed up before their call sheets printed. Blood banks overflowed. Strangers fed strangers. Synagogues from Netanya to New York set watch lists and checks at the door.

Outside that memory, parts of the West stared at the same footage and reached for a fog machine. Headlines hedged. Statements blurred. Claims spread that the murders were staged or the rapes invented. Within hours a cottage industry of denial was up and running, complete with accounts that had never expressed skepticism about anything in Gaza except the existence of Hamas atrocities.

It was not only the fever swamps. A few of the most prestigious newsrooms in the world led with lines like “Violence Erupts,” as if violence were a volcano and not a decision. University presidents found their verbs missing. The Secretary-General of the United Nations chose to remind the world that the attacks “did not happen in a vacuum.” True in the way a calendar is true. Useless where a spine is required.

If the day taught anything, it is that enemies who chant your death and teach it to their children mean it. They meant it on October 7. They will mean it tomorrow unless they are stopped.

The West likes to believe in redemption by dialogue. Keep talking, and people will behave. Keep funding, and they will build playgrounds rather than bunkers. Keep “managing” the conflict, and you can live next to a death cult. That fantasy bled out on a festival field. Dialogue is not a shield. It is a tool. Use it when the other side wants a life. Do not hand it to those who want your death.

One last illusion ended with a thud: that the world would stand with Jews when it counted. Some did. Most did not.

Then came the celebrations. In Sydney, a crowd gathered at the Opera House and some chanted “Gas the Jews.” In London, thousands marched under the flag of an organization that had livestreamed a massacre two days earlier. In American campuses, student groups praised “resistance” and posted paraglider icons to honor the men who used paragliders to shoot unarmed kids in the back as they ran. Candy was handed out in parts of the West Bank. Sweets are for weddings. This was a choice.

For many Jews, this second shock felt like the first. The mask slipped. The so-called “polite” term “anti-Zionism” (though, let’s be clear, it’s just “Jew hate” with better branding) turned into applause for dead Jews in real time. People insisted they supported freedom, not murder, while holding up the iconography of murder. It turns out some neighbors did not forget. They learned different lessons.

None of this happened by accident. Years of activist catechism taught a generation that Israelis are colonizers outside the circle of empathy, that terror is “context,” that facts are optional if the narrative is pure. Feed that into an outrage algorithm and denial writes itself.

Chapter 23: The Streets Choose Sides

Two nights after the massacre, Sydney lit the Opera House in blue and white. A crowd gathered anyway to jeer the dead. Flares, flags, and chants that don’t need translation. Police stood between the steps and a mob that had decided a pogrom was cause for celebration. Australia’s leaders called it abhorrent. That was the polite word.

It wasn’t just Sydney. In Times Square the next day, while families in Israel still searched for their children, hundreds chanted “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea.” Some counted the rising Israeli death toll aloud, as if they had won a raffle. A handful of Israelis sang “Hatikvah” across the street. They were drowned out.

London scaled it up. A weekday embassy march became a citywide surge. By October 21, roughly a hundred thousand people filled the avenues from Marble Arch to Whitehall. The central chant erased Israel’s existence in seven words. Ministers warned that the slogan is eliminationist. Police watched, counted, and made very few arrests. Free speech, they said. British Jews watched, counted, and wondered who would protect them when the crowd turned a corner.

Paris chose state power first. The government banned pro-Hamas rallies and flooded the streets with riot police. Cannons and tear gas cleared the first illegal gathering at République. Courts chipped at the blanket bans within weeks. The marches returned, now with a grievance narrative about silenced voices. Berlin split the difference. Police broke up sweets-handouts in Neukölln on October 7, banned Hamas symbols, and shut rallies when the old “Khaybar” chant appeared. The crowds came anyway, rebadged as “solidarity.”

North America was not immune. Toronto’s first rally featured paraglider icons, a macabre tribute to the men who had used them to hunt teenagers in a field. Los Angeles, Chicago, Montreal echoed the same slogans. Many signs said “Ceasefire now.” Many mouths said “Intifada” and meant it.

The common threads were speed, scale, and language. The gap between atrocity and applause was measured in hours. The numbers were not fringe. The words were not the vocabulary of peace. They were eliminationist, and often openly antisemitic.

In London a family out shopping stumbled into a march, heard “Free Palestine” morph into threats, and fled by taxi because home suddenly felt conditional.

Authorities wobbled. Sydney police misread the moment and apologized after. London’s Met weighed hate speech against public order and mostly chose order. Paris and Berlin came down hard, which fed the story that Western states gag Muslim speech. Everyone claimed principle. Jews heard a message: you are on your own in this crowd.

Within days the data matched the streets. Britain’s Community Security Trust reported a spike in antisemitic incidents on a scale not seen in decades. The Anti-Defamation League tracked the same surge in the United States. Swastikas and “river to the sea” graffiti appeared on synagogues. Jewish schools got bomb threats. Strangers used “Free Palestine” as an epithet. It felt like a signal had gone out: the gate is open.

None of this was spontaneous. Networks built over years were ready. Slogans, banners, routes, marshals, and legal hotlines appeared overnight because they were not invented overnight. The choreography was transnational. The narrative was prewritten. A massacre flipped a switch and the machine switched on.

The point is blunt. Western streets chose sides before the bodies were buried. Many did it in the language of human rights. Many did it with chants that erase a nation and menace a minority. The choice told Jews something we would rather not have learned in public squares: the imported feud is now a local test, and basic solidarity with murdered civilians cannot be assumed.

If you want to know how we got to mass rallies that celebrate a pogrom within forty-eight hours, look at the soil: years of imported tribalism, activist catechism, foreign cash, and a media ecosystem that rewards outrage. The “spontaneity” was staging. The speed was infrastructure. The cruelty was ideology.

When atrocity meets applause in your capital, you are looking at a live stress test of your civic immune system. Ours flinched. Now we have to ask how we got here and who will guard the synagogues when the crowd comes back next weekend.

Diaspora networks, Islamist fronts, and student movements had built the scaffolding for years. Hamas’s slaughter provided the spark, and within hours the fuse was lit.

In London, New York, Berlin, Sydney, and Toronto, WhatsApp groups and mosque associations blasted out “Victory rally” calls. The flyers were ready, the chants rehearsed. By October 12, more than 200 American campuses held a “Day of Resistance,” complete with paragliders on the posters—an obscene tribute to the men who had flown into a music festival to butcher teenagers. In Europe, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and its allies set weekly marches, turning Saturdays into rolling anti-Israel carnivals. The imagery was identical across continents because the propaganda packets were identical: hashtags, graphics, chants, all cloned online and amplified. The choreography was global.

The symbolism made the import undeniable. Keffiyehs, shahada flags, even Hamas banners where they weren’t banned. Posters of “martyrs.” Chants once confined to the alleys of Ramallah now rang through Oxford Street and Times Square: “With our blood we will redeem you, Al-Aqsa.” “Globalize the Intifada.” “From the river to the sea.” It was less protest than tribal allegiance: Muslims in the West told to choose the ummah over the nation-state—and far too many accepted.

The fury didn’t stay rhetorical. Synagogues from Toronto to Paris were vandalized in lockstep with protest marches. In London, convoys rolled through Jewish neighborhoods shouting “Allahu akbar” and worse, threatening to rape Jewish daughters. In Berlin, Molotov cocktails were hurled at a synagogue. In Los Angeles, a shul was painted with blood-red graffiti. Across campuses, posters of kidnapped Israeli children were ripped down by students grinning for the cameras. The logic was simple: Hamas targets Jews in Israel, so the tribe targets Jews everywhere.

Even churches and civic institutions weren’t spared. In Vienna, a statue of a Christian saint was defaced during a Palestine march. In London, demonstrators tried to storm a church holding a vigil for peace. In Brussels, EU offices were besieged and splattered with red paint, as if European officials themselves were fair targets. Imported hatred metastasized into local intimidation.

Western authorities stumbled. London police let tens of thousands chant eliminationist slogans under the fiction of “different interpretations.” Paris tried bans, briefly, before capitulating to free-speech rulings. Berlin cracked down harder, raiding Hamas supporters and promising deportations, but still saw mobs in the streets. Sydney police blocked one march from approaching a synagogue after hearing plans to “confront” worshippers. Everywhere, Jews got the message: state protection is fragile, and vigilance must be our own.

By late 2024, the rhythm was routine. London saw weekly marches. American campuses staged walkouts at every turn of the war. Diaspora politics became civic theater. The West’s multicultural capitals revealed fault lines: loyalty to tribe eclipsed loyalty to country. The rhetoric of “peace” dissolved into chants of jihad.

Crowds generate momentum. The “high” of marching for intifada was addictive, especially for the young. Some called it the most alive they’d ever felt. That fervor would not stay in the streets. It was already pushing into universities, NGOs, and politics, where imported tribalism sought to shape laws, funding, and policy.

Before turning to those institutions, one point must be made plain: this wasn’t organic outrage. It was coordinated spectacle, built over years, dressed up as protest but aimed at power. A pogrom abroad became a festival at home because the networks were ready. And they will be ready again.

After October 7, one might have expected churches, universities, and human rights groups—the supposed moral backbone of the West—to condemn Hamas’s atrocities with clarity. A few did. The Church of England’s bishops, for instance, spoke of civilians “killed without mercy” in tones of genuine horror. But such moments were rare. Far more common was hedging, relativism, or outright adoption of the street’s narrative. Institutions that preach compassion instead provided cover.

Universities were the most glaring. At Harvard, 34 student groups rushed out a letter declaring Israel “entirely responsible” even as Hamas’s pogrom was still unfolding. The backlash was fierce, but Harvard’s leadership, under Claudine Gay, responded with bureaucratic mush—calls for civility, no mention of Hamas, no recognition that infants and Holocaust survivors had been butchered. Only after days of pressure did the administration muster a tepid condemnation. Columbia and Stanford struck the same pose, speaking vaguely of “gravity” and “hate” while avoiding the word Hamas. At Cornell, a tenured professor called the massacre “exhilarating.” His punishment? A short leave before returning to class. Across Middle East Studies departments, Hamas’s killers were dressed up as anti-colonial rebels.

The double standard was glaring. On campuses where misgendering someone could bring disciplinary action, chanting “From the river to the sea” or waving paraglider posters was tolerated as free expression. Jewish students at Cooper Union were barricaded in a library while a mob pounded the doors, and administrators insisted they weren’t in “immediate danger.” Safe spaces, it turned out, were for everyone but Jews.

Churches fared little better. The Vatican condemned hostages’ captivity—then immediately pivoted to Gaza’s suffering, blurring lines. The World Council of Churches issued statements so bloodless they could have been written by a UN press officer. In Philadelphia, a Quaker meeting house hosted a speaker who called October 7 “legitimate resistance.” Other denominations held vigils demanding ceasefires without ever naming Hamas or mourning Israeli victims. Saying the word Hamas, apparently, was too costly.

Secular NGOs followed suit. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch devoted most of their early energy to Israel’s counterstrikes, describing October 7 blandly as “an attack… resulting in civilian deaths.” City councils in Europe passed motions accusing Israel of “genocide” in Gaza while ignoring the pogrom that triggered the war. In New York, the Democratic Socialists of America co-sponsored a Times Square rally that glorified Hamas. Major unions and cultural institutions soon echoed the same slogans. The chants of the street—“genocide,” “resistance,” “apartheid”—were laundered into official resolutions.

This collapse of moral clarity has consequences. When those who shape public ethos respond to beheadings and rapes with euphemism, they signal to society that perhaps the atrocity was understandable. Perhaps the killers “had a point.” That corrosion emboldens mobs and ensures the cycle will repeat.

Not everyone failed. A handful of presidents and pastors called Hamas’s actions terrorism outright. Some clergy insisted there is “no justification under heaven for butchery.” But the wider pattern is unmistakable: institutions that should have been guardians of conscience instead enabled the mob’s worldview. The street’s barbarism was washed, softened, and repackaged as policy discourse.

Protest slogans turned into council motions, campus rules, even legal filings. What began as a chant of elimination was entering the bloodstream of governance. The street had become the state. The sequence was blunt: atrocity, celebration, institutional hedging, then policy that echoed the chants. What was shouted in plazas on Saturday showed up in council chambers on Monday and in UN halls by month’s end.

Local politics moved first. In Britain, councillors and backbench MPs began parroting placard language. “Immediate ceasefire.” “Genocide.” Motions denouncing Israel as a war criminal sailed through boroughs whose members had marched days before. In Brighton, activists packed a meeting, drowned out dissent, and turned their slogan into a city resolution. The pipeline from megaphone to motion passed without friction.

In Washington, the progressive bloc lifted the same vocabulary into the Congressional Record. Accusations of “apartheid” became boilerplate. Aid to Israel became a target. One member posted “From the river to the sea” and defended it with the same euphemisms heard outside Downing Street. When censure was proposed, dozens of colleagues balked. A chant debated as hate speech on Friday was defended as free expression by legislators on Tuesday. That is a shift in the culture, not a quirk of Twitter.

City councils in San Francisco, Seattle, Cambridge and beyond followed suit. They debated texts accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and elevating “resistance” as a right. Watered-down versions sometimes passed, but the Overton window had moved. You could feel it in the room: moral clarity was out; activist jargon was in.

Courts bent next. In France, blanket bans on pro-Palestinian rallies fell after civil liberties suits. In the UK, police faced threats of litigation if they tried to draw lines around eliminationist chants. The message landed: institutions would accommodate the movement rather than restrain it. Law became a shield for the loud, not a guardrail for the common good.

Campuses translated slogans into policy. Student governments passed measures that treated Zionism as bigotry and demanded boycotts of Israeli scholars. At Berkeley, bills denounced Zionism and sanctified “resistance by any means.” Jewish students who objected were told they endangered free speech or acted as foreign agents. Even attempts to classify “Zionist ideology” as discriminatory reached faculty committees at some schools. Most failed when exposed to daylight. The fact they advanced at all tells you who is shaping the next cohort of lawyers, editors, and diplomats.

International forums mirrored the street almost word for word. The General Assembly called for an immediate truce in Gaza without naming Hamas or the massacre that started the war. Western delegations split, and more than a few diplomats admitted the protests at home shaped their votes. By late 2024, even Washington began pressing for “humanitarian pauses,” careful not to use the marchers’ rhetoric but clearly responding to their pressure.

Lawfare marched alongside. Coalitions of NGOs dumped accusations of “genocide” into the International Criminal Court’s in-tray, citing the same language that filled city squares. The Human Rights Council did what it always does: commission inquiries aimed at Israel while whispering about the terrorists who made the war. Anyone paying attention could have drafted the findings in advance.

Polls confirmed the ground was moving underfoot. The under-30 cohort in the West adopted the protest frame at far higher rates than their parents. Fewer of them found the October 7 massacre flatly unacceptable. More of them framed it as “context.” These are the interns in newsrooms, junior litigators at advocacy shops, editorial assistants at publishing houses. Today’s chant is tomorrow’s style guide and next year’s policy memo.

Trust cratered accordingly. Older citizens watched legacy outlets sand down the barbarity of October 7 while amplifying every Gaza headline. They concluded the press had lost its moral nerve. Younger readers concluded the opposite and drifted deeper into activist feeds convinced mainstream media protected Israel. Two realities hardened. Institutions found themselves chasing both.

The street, then, was not ephemera. It was a bellwether. If you wanted to know what a council would say next week, read last week’s signboards. If you wanted to guess the next university resolution, listen to the chants in the quad. Politicians felt the wind and trimmed. So did museum boards, NGO directors, and bishops. Most told themselves they were lowering the temperature. In practice they translated the mob’s posture into policy.

That should unsettle anyone who cares about liberal democracy. We want public opinion to influence policy. But what happens when the loudest bloc cheers barbarism and demands the language of elimination? Do institutions hold the line or move the posts? After October 7, the pattern was too often the latter. The mob shouted. The keepers of the moral order hesitated. The rulebook was rewritten to accommodate the noise.

This chapter traced the progression: massacre, celebration, normalization. A terror attack in Israel exposed long-dormant tribal loyalties in the West. Those loyalties spilled into the streets. Then the streets instructed the institutions. Councils codified the choruses. Courts adjusted around them. Campuses became echo chambers that minted credentialed versions of the same claims. International bodies lent the UN’s blue tint to the street’s red lines.

That sequence is a civilizational warning. When a society cannot unify to condemn evil, it is not neutral. It is unmoored. When it hosts carnivals that celebrate a pogrom and then adjusts its compass to their slogans, it is not compassionate. It is confused.

From here, the question is whether leaders resist the translation or ratify it. The next chapter follows that choice at the highest levels of power. Spoiler: too many chose appeasement disguised as prudence. The street spoke. The elites translated. Now we see what that costs in a world where history has returned and demands a reply.

Chapter 24: The Collapse of Moral Clarity

After October 7, the institutions charged with guarding civilization did not just equivocate—they enshrined equivocation as policy. Instead of drawing a bright line between aggressor and victim, they blurred it. In the General Assembly, in the Hague, in the Human Rights Council, terror was proceduralized into grievance and self-defense recast as crime. Deterrence weakened, allies doubted their security, and enemies rejoiced. Western leaders, heirs to the vow of “Never Again,” found themselves brokering ceasefires with kidnappers and endorsing resolutions that whitewashed the worst massacre of Jews since 1945.

In October 2023, as Israelis buried their dead, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution ES-10/21: 121 in favor, 14 opposed. It demanded a ceasefire but never mentioned Hamas. A U.S. amendment to condemn Hamas by name failed. The UN Secretary-General told the Security Council the atrocities “did not happen in a vacuum,” a phrase heard as victim-blaming. In the court of world opinion, Israel was the defendant simply for showing up.

The pattern hardened. In December, Resolution ES-10/22 passed 153–10, again demanding Israel halt operations, again refusing to name Hamas. Even traditional allies—Canada, Australia, New Zealand—broke with Washington. By year’s end the General Assembly had condemned Israel more times than the rest of the world combined. The “guardian of peace” had become prosecutor of the one democracy that fought back.

The Human Rights Council carried the inversion further. Its Commission of Inquiry, long staffed by officials with records of open hostility to Israel, accused Jerusalem of genocide while barely mentioning Hamas. Navi Pillay and her colleagues produced reports that presumed Israeli guilt while downplaying the charter of Hamas, which openly calls for extermination of Jews. Another UN mandate-holder, Francesca Albanese, went further: dismissing reports of Hamas’s mass rapes as propaganda, declaring Israel had “no right” to wage war on Hamas in Gaza, and eventually accusing Israel itself of genocide. The United States sanctioned her. Israel barred her entry. Yet she remained a UN “human rights” expert, proof that bias had become the system.

In December 2023, South Africa hauled Israel before the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide—while Hamas still held Israeli hostages. The ICJ moved with breathtaking speed, issuing provisional measures against Israel within weeks. The Court demanded reports from Jerusalem as though the victim state were the perpetrator. Iran, whose leaders call openly for Israel’s destruction, faced no such scrutiny.

The International Criminal Court followed. In May 2024, Prosecutor Karim Khan sought arrest warrants not only for Hamas chiefs Sinwar and Deif, but for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister—the first time the ICC moved against the sitting leader of a democratic ally. Britain threatened to quit the court; the U.S. warned cooperation on Ukraine cases would suffer. None of it stopped the warrants. On paper, terrorists and Israeli leaders were “treated equally.” In reality, only the Israelis faced the risk of handcuffs if they traveled abroad. Hamas leaders in Doha and Beirut sipped coffee; Israel’s elected officials were branded as outlaws.

For Hamas, Hezbollah, and Tehran, it was a gift. The aggressor gained cover; the defender was shackled. As Israel’s UN ambassador warned, these one-sided resolutions “gave terrorists a free pass.” He was right.

This was more than bias. It was complicity. The institutions built after World War II to ensure “Never Again” had inverted their mission. They made a democracy fighting for survival the accused, while the genocidaires were granted immunity. That collapse of moral clarity emboldened every jackal watching. But it isn’t actually shocking. It’s just part of what the UN has been doing for decades.

UNRWA was sold as neutral relief. In Gaza it functioned as infrastructure for a terror army. After October 7, that was no longer an Israeli talking point. It was documented fact.

The UN’s own watchdog confirmed it. In August 2024, an internal UN inquiry found that at least nine UNRWA employees likely participated in the October 7 massacre. They were fired on the spot. The probe examined 19 staff in total; two were already dead. Israel had initially flagged a dozen names and later added more. Separately, Israel warned that hundreds of UNRWA workers in Gaza were members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. UNRWA denied the scale. It could not deny the core: men on its payroll helped butcher civilians and kidnap children.

The buildings told the same story. In February 2024, the IDF exposed a Hamas command complex tunneled under UNRWA’s Gaza City headquarters. Engineers found server rooms, power feeds tapped into the UN compound, bunks, and access shafts. Cables from Hamas hardware ran up into UN wiring. The intent was obvious. Build under a UN flag and dare Israel to strike. Elsewhere, UNRWA clinics and schools doubled as depots and command posts. At Nuseirat, Israeli intelligence struck a Hamas control node operating on UNRWA school grounds; several of the dead were UNRWA staff. In Lebanon, an UNRWA school principal and teachers’ union chief turned out to be Hamas’s leader in the country. He was eulogized by Hamas after an Israeli strike. Investigations later named dozens of UNRWA teachers in Gaza as registered members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, many with weapons training. One organizer of the Kibbutz Re’im massacre had been a longtime UNRWA employee. Neutrality had collapsed.

Western donors reacted hard for about five minutes. In January 2024, sixteen countries froze funding. The European Commission paused new money and demanded audits. The UN appointed an outside review. UNRWA promised reforms. By March, the spigot was back on. Canada resumed funding. Sweden followed. The European Commission transferred tens of millions. Germany reinstated aid in April. By May, Brussels boasted that all EU donors had returned. The UK rejoined in July. Only the United States held back, and only because Congress imposed a one-year ban. Even then Washington rerouted support through other channels and signaled UNRWA could be back after “reforms.”

So the lesson landed: embed in humanitarian systems and the world will blink. A handful of dismissals, an audit, and the money flows again. No restructuring. No replacement. No accountability commensurate with the breach. UNRWA kept its monopoly on Palestinian relief after proven infiltration by the militants it claimed to oppose.

When a UN agency’s facilities, staff, and budgets become dual-use assets, “humanitarian” turns into armor for the aggressor. Hamas reads that signal clearly. So do Hezbollah and Tehran. Aid becomes leverage. Civilians become shields. The laws of war are inverted. The party firing rockets is protected by the logo on the roof. The party trying to stop those rockets is condemned for any civilian harm that follows.

Israel warned about this for years. After October 7 the evidence lay under the floorboards, literally. Western governments looked, paused, and then shrugged under the banner of necessity. That choice makes the next war deadlier and the moral ledger emptier.

Having seen how the “neutral ground” was captured, we turn to how Western capitals codified appeasement as policy—pressuring an ally to stop mid-fight while rewarding those who hide behind UN walls.

After October 7, Western leaders stood before microphones and said the right thing: Israel has the right to defend itself. Within weeks, that clarity dissolved. The refrain shifted to “restraint,” “proportionality,” and “humanitarian pauses.” The effect was unmistakable: Israel could strike, but not decisively. It could bleed, but not win.

Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin all mouthed support while warning Jerusalem not to go too far. President Biden cautioned Israel against being “consumed” by rage, as if Hamas’s pogrom had been a bar fight. Secretary Blinken flew shuttle after shuttle, each time pressing Israel harder to calibrate, pause, and soften its blows. In Europe, Macron demanded a ceasefire almost immediately. Brussels bureaucrats floated words like “collective punishment” within weeks. When Israel’s army finally closed in on Hamas leadership in Gaza City, Western calls to ease the pressure reached their peak.

Words soon hardened into policy. Allies imposed informal arms embargoes. Spain passed one outright, tearing up contracts. Italy froze deals. Belgium and the Netherlands announced no new export licenses. Even Canada and Japan pulled back. The UK debated joining them. Only Washington kept the supply line open, but with caveats: certain munitions delayed, bunker-busters withheld, conditions tied to humanitarian “windows.” Israel received enough to fight, but not enough to finish.

The double standard was glaring. Ukraine, facing Russia, received heavy weapons, long-range missiles, and unwavering political cover. Civilian casualties in Donbas or Crimea drew little rebuke. Israel, facing Hamas and Hezbollah, was hectored about every shell, every strike, every statistic dribbled out by Hamas’s own “health ministry.” The same capitals that armed Riyadh for its war in Yemen now wrung their hands over Israel defending its citizens.

Iran, meanwhile, skated. Tehran’s fingerprints were everywhere—funding Hamas, arming Hezbollah, egging on the Houthis. Yet no new sanctions regime emerged. The EU still balked at designating the IRGC a terror group. Washington still released frozen funds in hostage swaps. Even as Iranian proxies hit U.S. bases more than eighty times, the American response was pinprick raids on empty warehouses. Tehran got impunity. Israel got lectures.

The appeasement was most visible in ceasefire diplomacy. Hamas kidnapped hundreds of Israelis, then bartered them for pauses. Israel, desperate to bring its people home, agreed. Each pause gave Hamas time to regroup, smuggle weapons in with the aid trucks, and reposition fighters. Western leaders, instead of backing Israel to finish Hamas, pressed to extend the truces. Babies in tunnels became bargaining chips not just against Israel, but against the entire West. And it worked.

All the while, Hezbollah fired across the northern border, killing soldiers and displacing entire towns. Yet Washington leaned on Israel, not Lebanon. “Don’t escalate,” the message went, as if Hezbollah’s rockets were acts of nature rather than Iranian policy. In the Red Sea, the Houthis hurled drones at ships until commercial traffic itself was threatened. Only then did the U.S. and UK strike back—and even then, only at the proxies, never at Tehran.

The lesson could not have been clearer. Hostage-taking paid. Rocket fire from Iran’s clients carried little cost. The real risk lay in defending yourself too forcefully. That lesson was written into Western policy not by accident, but by design: appeasement dressed as prudence.

For Israel, the consequences were brutal. It fought under constant foreign constraint, ordered to show compassion for enemies who celebrated child murder, restrained while its citizens lived in shelters. For its enemies, the signal was just as clear: the West’s red lines were written in pencil.

And allies elsewhere noticed. From Kyiv to Taipei, capitals asked the obvious: if Israel, after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, was told to hold back—what would the West tell us?

Ukraine saw the shift first. As Gaza dominated airtime, U.S. aid to Kyiv stalled in Congress, European stockpiles thinned, and familiar voices demanded “talks” and “compromise” just as Russian missiles kept falling. Ukrainians asked the obvious: if sympathy for Israel evaporates the moment war turns ugly, what happens when we fight for Donbas or Crimea—where the images will be uglier still? The rumor that “we need these shells for Israel” mixed with plain fatigue. The result was delay, doubt, and a déjà vu of broken assurances.

Taiwan drew the darker lesson. Afghanistan had already rattled Taipei. Now it watched a close U.S. ally get lectured mid-fight and saw weapons to the island delayed behind Ukraine and Israel. Beijing sent record numbers of warplanes. Polls slid: fewer Taiwanese believed American troops would really come. So they argued for more of their own missiles, more sea mines, more grit. China’s propaganda machine did the rest: “Look at Israel,” they told the region. “Washington wavers.”

On NATO’s front line, the mood hardened. Poles and Balts—who know what occupation tastes like—backed Israel and Ukraine without flinching. They also took note of Western Europeans scolding Israel for defending itself. In the Gulf, hedging accelerated. A year earlier, Riyadh was inches from a U.S.-brokered deal with Jerusalem. Hamas torched that track. The Saudis pivoted to tamp down with Tehran—insurance against a hesitant Washington. Beijing happily played “peace-broker,” sold drones, and collected chits. Watch what the region does, not what it says. Publics shifted too. In Europe, “neutrality” began to poll well—not because evil vanished, but because moral fog grew. If leaders condemn Israel for defending itself, voters wonder whether any fight is worth the noise.

Adversaries smelled blood in the water. Moscow gloated about “Western hypocrisy,” hosted Hamas, and backed one-sided resolutions to box the U.S. at the UN. Beijing pointed to American vetoes and European splits and sold itself as the steady hand. The subtext to the Global South was simple: America’s support is loud until it’s costly. We won’t lecture; we’ll deal.

Credibility is the coin of the realm. We spent it cheaply. The bill will come due in places with fewer Iron Domes and longer runways.

Chapter 25: Guardianship or Delusion

Peace is not the default. Maintaining peace requires three things: constant awareness of danger, the willingness to act, and the discipline to sustain protection. It covers fences and fortifications, but it also covers memory, law, and civic will. Tikkun olam, repair of the world, assumes danger. You cannot repair what you do not first guard.

We have traced the West’s complacency after the Cold War. Many treated peace as entitlement. That was a delusion. Every stable order in history was secured by guardians. Those who stand down invite predators. The lesson is brutal and simple. Guardianship prevents catastrophe.

History yields the evidence. Czechoslovakia trusted guarantees in 1938 and paid for it. Finland girded itself and preserved independence in 1939. Guardianship makes the difference between survival and annihilation.

It presumes that life, family, liberty, and truth matter enough to defend. No treaty, no court, no wishful thinking will replace the citizen who stands watch.

Three pillars follow. This chapter examines them: military guardianship, cultural guardianship, and legal guardianship. Together they form a modern duty of protection. Either societies take up that duty or they watch their institutions decay. There is no middle ground.

Strength That Prevents Worse Wars

The first pillar is military strength. Armed force is not an indulgence. It prevents greater violence. Deterrence requires capability, will, and clarity. Capability means weapons, trained troops, logistics, and stockpiles. Will means the resolve to use those tools when lines are crossed. Clarity means announcing red lines so enemies cannot miscalculate.

Israel practices this. It cannot afford illusions. The Israel Defense Forces rest on a people’s army model: a compact standing force plus reserves. On October 7, 2023, roughly 360,000 reservists answered the call. Think of people leaving offices and meals to suit up. That rapid mobilization is deterrence lived. Adversaries know a strike will meet a swift, heavy response. That knowledge prevents some wars.

Technology matters. Israel’s layered air defenses—Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow—reduce civilian casualties and blunt escalation. Hardened shelters, alert systems, and emergency plans form part of the shield. Defense is not only tanks and jets. Civil resilience counts. Schools built with reinforced rooms save lives. Citizens trained in first aid deny attackers the victory of breaking societies by terror.

Alliances multiply strength. Israel and the United States share intelligence, technology, and exercises. That raises the price of aggression for Tehran or its proxies. NATO, when credible, performs the same function for Europe. A guardian who stands alone can be overwhelmed. Guardianship works best in company.

Concrete metrics matter. Defense budgets must match risk. Stockpiles of munitions must meet demand for intense combat. Mobilization timelines should be measured and short. Air and missile defenses need coverage for cities and critical sites. Hardening infrastructure and secure communications are nonnegotiable. These are technical choices with moral consequences. Running out of shells in a crisis is a policy failure.

Small, determined societies offer models. Finland and Israel live by shmirah. Finland’s total defence integrates citizen service, stockpiles, shelters, and logistics. Its society treats preparedness as civic habit. Israel’s reserve system binds the nation together. Both avoid transforming life into uniformity. Citizens remain merchants, artists, parents. They also become guardians when duty calls. That is the modern dimension of patriotism.

A common objection runs like this: arming up provokes war. History answers. Aggression thrives where guardianship is weak. Predators test soft targets. Strength deters. That truth held through the Cold War and holds now. Investing in defense is prudence, not rage.

Guardianship costs money and discipline. It demands resilient supply chains, surge production capacity, and years of steady funding. That is the tradeoff: modest inconvenience now for survival later. The comfortable West must relearn thrift in favor of resilience. That is not romantic. It is realism.

Military guardianship ends where culture begins. Unless a society values itself, hardware alone becomes decoration. Tanks without civic will are expensive rust. The next pillar is cultural guardianship: how to cultivate a people who will bear the cost of defense without losing their liberal soul. We must strengthen the story of civilization so citizens will fight for it gladly, not resentfully.

A final note of Jewish practicality. Guardianship contains a wry humility. We trust in God and we tie the camel. We respect human rights and we prepare for the unspeakable. That balance—moral clarity plus hard readiness—is what shmirah asks. It will be the West’s test in the years ahead.

Memory, Meaning, and the Will to Fight

Weapons and war plans mean nothing if the people holding them lack conviction. Societies must practice raising citizens who know their history, value their freedoms, and understand that some things are worth dying for. When prosperity dulls memory, societies forget the price of their security. They drift into cynicism or self-hatred, sneering at the very idea of sacrifice. That is civilizational suicide. No drone, no tank, can compensate for a culture that has no chest. Cultural shmirah guards memory and moral clarity. It keeps the will to endure alive.

The first defense line is teaching history—real history. Not sanitized fairy tales, not endless flagellation, but the full ledger: the horrors of fascism and communism, the failures of appeasement, the gulags and killing fields, alongside the courage of 1776, the sacrifice of 1944, and the civil rights struggle that demanded liberty’s promise be kept. Students should read Anne Frank and Natan Sharansky, Frederick Douglass and Churchill, the Psalms and the Declaration of Independence. They should know that peace is never natural. It is earned and defended.

A society with shallow roots topples in the first storm. A society with deep roots can bend but not break.

Memory must also be ritualized. Israel’s Yom HaShoah siren stops traffic; an entire nation stands still, remembering six million murdered for being Jews. October 7 will take its place in Jewish memory as another day of reckoning. Americans recall September 11 the same way: the smoke, the sacrifice, the clarity that evil must be confronted. Healthy societies don’t perform these rituals out of nostalgia. They do it so the next generation knows: Never Again requires vigilance, not sentiment.

Moral clarity about force must be part of this memory. Children raised to think “all violence is wrong” will be paralyzed when confronted with predators. They must learn the difference between a soldier defending innocents and a terrorist butchering them. Both carry rifles; only one acts justly. A culture that can’t tell that difference will sympathize with the butcher and condemn the guardian. That is madness. Just War thinking—proportionality, defense, mercy—should be taught plainly.

Communities and families carry this guardianship too. Strong kehilla, strong churches, strong civic groups are shock absorbers when the state falters. A child who hears her grandfather’s story of exile will value freedom differently than one who thinks history began last decade. Neighbors who know and trust one another respond to crisis better than strangers. Civil society is a resilience engine. Ignore it and you discover, too late, that government can’t fill the gap.

Today, the information front is as dangerous as the physical. Propaganda is a weapon. Citizens must learn to spot it. Media literacy is cultural armor. Teach children how to dissect lies, how to spot taqiyya, how Russia and China run troll farms, how Iran and Qatar pay “human rights” influencers to launder terror as justice. Show them Nazi posters and modern memes side by side. They’ll see the continuity of deceit. Without that inoculation, the next information war will be lost before it begins.

Finally, culture is carried in art and story. A civilization that only produces narratives of self-loathing should not be shocked when its youth feel nothing is worth defending. We need epics, films, memorials, novels that remind us courage, loyalty, and sacrifice are virtues. During WWII, Hollywood churned out corny war films. Corny, yes—but they stiffened spines. Today, our storytellers mock those virtues as cringe. That is unseriousness bordering on decadence. It is time to fund, celebrate, and teach works that keep moral courage alive.

Closing the Gates We Left Open

Military power is the sword. Culture is the spine. Law is the shield. If the shield is full of holes, the rest fails. Our laws and institutions should keep enemies out and hold saboteurs to account. Instead, we left the gates ajar and taped a welcome note to the door. Time to lock up.

Start with who gets in and who stays. Open society does not mean open season. Vet visas, residency, and citizenship with rigor. If someone has praised Hamas, called for killing Jews, or pushed jihad online, they do not belong inside our borders. That is not xenophobia. That is common sense. For foreign nationals already here who incite violence or support terror, due process and then a fast ticket out. Free speech is not a foreigner’s right to agitate for murder on our streets.

Sanctuary rules cannot shield extremists. Protect the law-abiding immigrant family. Do not protect the Hamas fanboy hiding in a dorm. Jurisdictions that block lawful cooperation on national-security cases should lose funds. Hospitality is not a suicide pact.

Refugee policy must be both compassionate and hard-headed. Screen well. Expect integration. Language, civics, equal dignity of women and men, no antisemitism—not as slogans, as requirements. Tie permanent status and benefits to completing that path. If a resettled person later signals support for a terror group, revoke status and remove. Charity is not blind.

Follow the money. Adversaries use charities, NGOs, shell firms, and crypto to move cash and buy influence. End anonymous ownership. Publish real donors, not front foundations. Enforce anti–money laundering with teeth. Prosecute charity fronts that funnel “aid” to militants. Seize assets. Prison time. Make the examples memorable. Terror finance should be a career-ending choice.

Clean up universities and think tanks. Authoritarian money has flooded Western campuses for years. Universities, instead of being bastions of cultural strength, too often act as sieves for foreign influence and megaphones for hatred. That must end. No more Gulf or Chinese money hidden in “donations.” No more mobs chanting for intifada while Jewish students hide in libraries. A university that cannot distinguish free inquiry from incitement is no longer a university. Free speech is sacred, but praising terrorism is not speech. Expel students who celebrate murder. Cut funding from departments that sell their integrity to autocrats. If universities don’t have the will to guard truth, they must be forced to by law and public will. Require full public disclosure of all foreign gifts above a low threshold. Cap what a single foreign state can give. Force foreign-agent registration where appropriate. Academic freedom is not for sale, especially not to Beijing or Doha.

Stop paying for our own subversion at the UN. Fund agencies only if they meet neutrality standards we can verify. If a UN body employs militants or stores rockets under classrooms, funding stops until reforms stick. When the Security Council is paralyzed, form coalitions of democracies and act. The “international community” is not permission from your adversary.

Shield our soldiers and officials from lawfare. Extend anti-SLAPP laws to protect reporters and researchers who expose extremists from ruinous nuisance suits. Create legal-defense frameworks for troops and commanders acting within rules of engagement. Push back when politicized tribunals target democracies while terrorists stroll free. If necessary, sanction the sanctioners.

Enforce the laws we already have on our streets. Harassment, stalking, incitement, material support to terror—prosecute them. Peaceful protest is protected. Praising banned terrorist groups is not protest. It is recruitment. Make a few arrests and the rest will get the message. Protect houses of worship and community centers with real, on-site police protection not just grants for security—they’re not experts on how to use it, don’t force them to become one. Share threat data across agencies. Catch patterns before they turn into funerals.

Update statutes where gaps remain. If glorifying terrorism is not a crime, make it one, narrowly tailored and tied to intent to encourage support. Require foreign propaganda outlets to register as foreign agents. Close loopholes before they become mass-casualty lessons.

None of this betrays liberal values. It defends them. Screening out those who seek to destroy us is liberal governance 101. Enforcing laws against intimidation protects real free speech. Transparency in universities protects genuine inquiry. Coalition action when the UN fails protects human rights in the real world, not on glossy stationery.

We left keys under the mat and called it enlightenment. The bill arrived: infiltration, influence buying, legal harassment of our soldiers, and mobs testing the limits. Enough. Shut and lock the gates. Keep faith with our principles while we do it. Sentimental law is unusable law. Serious law keeps a free society alive.

The “holiday from history” is over. Reality has returned, and it demands a choice. Guardianship or delusion. Survival or decay. We cannot defer it to our children. We must decide now.

History never ended. Evil doesn’t retire. Peace is not the air we breathe but a garden only tended when watchmen stay awake. The choice will decide whether free civilization stands or collapses.

Choose strength. Choose duty. Choose life. Or lose them all.

That’s the full February book—four Long Briefs, one argument: peace is guarded, or it’s fiction. If you want the complete, unified volume (and to share it beyond Substack), the book is here: Holiday From History on Amazon.

If you have a moment, I’d appreciate you considering adding a review on Goodreads and/or Amazon. Toda raba!

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

February Long Briefs continue our four-part serialization of Holiday From History. This week covers the great-power chapter of the story—then pivots into the first two “new weapons” shaping the battlefield now.
Full book: Holiday From History on Amazon

Shalom, friends.

This installment is about capability, will, and method: how revisionist powers test borders, how nuclear extortion becomes a regime survival strategy, and how the U.S. signal has drifted from clarity to churn.

Then the lens tightens: terror is not random violence—it’s staged pressure—and demography is not a statistic—it’s leverage.

Holiday From History:

The West’s Delusion of Peace and the Return of War

Part Three: Great Powers Unmasked

Chapter 12: Russia’s Return

The West imagined a “normal” post-imperial Russia in the 1990s and booked a peace dividend on that premise. It was a pleasant delusion. From Chechnya to Crimea, cyberattacks to gas blackmail, Moscow behaved like what it is: a wounded empire biding time. Ukraine ripped off the facade.

The red flag came down in 1991; the center–periphery logic stayed. Tsarist and Soviet habits—rule from the core over diverse borderlands—didn’t evaporate with a change of colors. National questions were frozen, not solved. As the West toasted an “end of history,” Russia grappled with imperial aftershocks—often with artillery.

In 1991 Chechens declared independence. Yeltsin answered with tanks in 1994. Grozny was turned into kindling; tens of thousands died. Russia withdrew in humiliation in 1996—briefly. In 1999, amid apartment bombings and a militant incursion into Dagestan, Vladimir Putin returned to war. His promise to “wipe out terrorists in the outhouse” translated into massed firepower and a flattened capital. “Chechenization” installed the Kadyrov clan to terrorize on Moscow’s behalf. The message was unmistakable: no piece of the federation would leave. Call it counterterrorism if you like. It was imperial reconquest.

Beyond formal borders, the toolkit matured. In the 1990s Moscow helped carve out Transnistria in Moldova, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia—then parked “peacekeepers” who never left. When Georgia turned West under Saakashvili, Russia tested its doctrine. In August 2008, after skirmishes in South Ossetia, Russian armor smashed across the border, bombed near Tbilisi, and pushed to Gori. Thousands of Georgians fled. Moscow then “recognized” Abkhazia and South Ossetia, installed bases, and paid in rubles. It was the first post-1991 overt border change by force in the former USSR. Western response: statements and a pause in NATO outreach. The Kremlin learned that revanchism, carefully dosed, carried a low price—especially outside NATO’s walls.

In 2015 Russia projected power beyond its near abroad for the first time since Afghanistan. Under the banner of fighting ISIS, it built Khmeimim airbase, expanded Tartus, and bombed Assad’s rebels—including Western-backed factions. It saved a client, gained a Med foothold, blooded its forces, and showcased new kit. The cost to Syrians was obscene: hospitals, markets, and apartment blocks hit as a matter of method; Aleppo starved and shelled into submission. The global headline was different: Russia was “back,” acting decisively while Washington hesitated. A regional balance shifted because Moscow moved and the West blinked.

Thread these together and see what the obvious. Chechnya reconquered a province. Georgia amputated a neighbor. Syria reasserted great-power reach. The justifications—counterterrorism, protecting “citizens,” stopping “genocide”—were pretexts. The motive was consistent: preserve a sphere, punish apostasy, gain leverage. The West compartmentalized each as a local issue. The Kremlin saw them as steps in one campaign.

Russia’s neo-imperial drive isn’t only about tanks and pipelines. It’s a story Moscow tells itself—about a civilization, a church, and a mission. Two ideas matter most: Russkiy mir (the “Russian World”) and Moscow as the “Third Rome.” Together they turn expansion into destiny.

Russkiy mir—the Russian World. After 1991, some 25 million ethnic Russians woke up outside Russia. The Kremlin decided they were still its responsibility. In 1999, a “compatriots abroad” law declared a duty to protect Russian speakers and former Soviet citizens wherever they lived. In 2007, the Russkiy Mir Foundation launched to fund language centers, schools, and networks from Riga to Almaty. On the surface, this looked like soft power. Subtext: build a constituency that sees Moscow as patron and arbiter.

By the 2010s, Russkiy mir hardened into a claim: wherever Russian language and Orthodoxy reach, Russia has a special right to “protect.” That is why “compatriots” in Estonia, Crimea, or Donbas are framed not as citizens of those states but as members of a civilizational community under Moscow’s care. The term rossiyskiy (civic, multiethnic) serves at home; russkiy (ethno-cultural) serves abroad. The regime toggles between them as needed—one nation for minorities inside, an ethnic crusade outside.

The religious counterpart completes the picture. Since the 16th century, Russian clerics have preached: “Two Romes have fallen; the third stands; there will be no fourth.” Moscow, heir to Byzantium, is the last bastion of true Orthodoxy—charged to protect the faith and the peoples of Holy Rus. Patriarch Kirill has revived this openly, in lockstep with the state. Church and Kremlin trade favors: power and money for pulpits and legitimacy. The myth turns Kyiv from a neighbor into a cradle; Crimea from a peninsula into a baptismal font. If Kyiv is the mother of Rus and Chersonesus the site of Prince Vladimir’s baptism, then “reunifying” these places reads as redemption, not conquest.

The most effective tool this ideology has used has been passportization. Moscow mass-issued Russian passports in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the 2000s, then claimed a duty to defend its “citizens” in 2008. It did the same in Donbas after 2014, accelerating in 2019 by decree; by 2022 hundreds of thousands had Russian papers. Crimea’s residents were handed passports wholesale. Diaspora policy, funded through ministries and church networks, stitched an extraterritorial Russian constituency across the post-Soviet space. Media and schools did the rest.

At home, state television and the security services weave a continuous story: baptism at Kyiv, empire, the Great Patriotic War, and today’s struggle against a decadent West and its “color revolutions.” Patriarch Kirill blesses the war as moral resistance—at one point even casting it as a stand against “gay parades.” The fusion is seamless: Orthodoxy becomes raison d’état; patriotism becomes liturgy.

Through this lens, Crimea in 2014 was not theft; it was the “gathering of Russian lands.” Donbas was not subversion; it was protection of compatriots. The 2022 invasion was pitched as the reunification of Holy Rus and defense of Orthodoxy against a NATO-run “Nazi” regime. To Western ears, this sounds deranged. To audiences primed by grievance and catechism, it sounds like duty.

Strip the vestments and you see imperialism. Leave them on and you see a mission. That’s the point. The Kremlin’s ideology turns neighbors into wards and conquest into sacrament—so that when Moscow redraws borders, it does so with a crucifix in one hand and a passport in the other.

All these threads—imperial grievance, coercive precedent, civilizational zeal—cross in Ukraine. Here the Kremlin’s project is existential. What began as a masked intervention in 2014 exploded in 2022 into the largest European war since 1945. The arc from Crimea to full-scale invasion is the story of Russia’s ambition and the West’s belated wake-up.

When Yanukovych ditched an EU pact under Kremlin pressure, Ukrainians filled Kyiv’s Maidan demanding a European future. Police gunfire turned protest into revolution. After more than a hundred were killed, Yanukovych fled. Moscow called it a Western coup and moved. Unmarked Russian troops seized Crimea’s levers of power, staged a sham referendum at gunpoint, and annexed the peninsula. Putin wrapped the theft in myth—Crimea as “the spiritual source of the Russian nation.” The West sanctioned, protested, and stopped. Crimea stayed stolen.

Even as the world stared at the map, Russia lit Donbas. Masked gunmen led by Russian operatives seized buildings in Donetsk, Luhansk, Slovyansk. “People’s republics” were proclaimed. Unlike Crimea, the state in the east fought back. An undeclared war followed. When Kyiv’s forces threatened to roll the fronts, regular Russian units crossed the border. The downing of MH17 with a Russian Buk killed 298 innocents and briefly pierced complacency. Sanctions tightened. The war froze under Minsk I and II. A line of contact cut Donbas. Moscow held a slice of Ukraine and a lever on Kyiv. Many in the West treated it as a containable nuisance. Putin treated it as phase one.

In late 2021 Russia massed forces around Ukraine and issued impossible demands: NATO retreat, a veto over Ukraine’s future. On 24 February, Putin announced a “special military operation” to “demilitarize and denazify” a democratic neighbor. Missiles hit at dawn. Columns drove from Belarus toward Kyiv, from Kharkiv’s border, from Crimea toward Kherson and Mariupol. The plan was a decapitation strike. Seize the capital. Install a puppet. End Ukraine in days.

It failed. Zelenskyy stayed. “I need ammunition, not a ride.” Territorial defense units and regulars ambushed convoys, wrecked armor, and held the approaches. Airborne troops were beaten back at Hostomel. Around Kharkiv, Russian battalions stalled and bled. By early April, the invaders retreated from northern Ukraine. In Bucha, the withdrawal exposed mass murder. Putin scaled down his rhetoric. The “liberation of Donbas” became the new line.

Mariupol fell in May 2022 after a savage siege. The Azovstal last stand tied down brigades while the city was pulverized. Russia gained a land bridge to Crimea and a symbol. In the summer, Russia pounded Severodonetsk and Lysychansk to rubble and took Luhansk province yard by yard. Then momentum flipped. In September, Ukraine struck thin Russian lines in Kharkiv oblast. Izium fell. Thousands of square kilometers were liberated in days. In November, Kherson—the only regional capital Russia captured—was retaken after Ukraine methodically cut bridges and depots. A place Putin had annexed on paper weeks earlier cheered Ukrainian troops in the streets.

The front hardened into attrition. Bakhmut became a meat grinder where Wagner’s convicts died by the thousands for a shattered town. Ukraine hit deep: the Moskva sank; depots blew up; drone boats slashed at Sevastopol; rails and HQs burned. In 2023 Ukrainian forces pushed on layered defenses in Zaporizhzhia, breaching lines around Robotyne, while Russia hurled armor at Avdiivka and lost it by the battalion. Drones and electronic warfare defined the air; artillery defined the ground.

The West responded harder than in 2014: bank sanctions, reserve freezes, export controls, corporate exits, oil embargoes, and a torrent of weapons for Kyiv. Europe raced off Russian gas. NATO rearmed in a hurry. Finland joined; Sweden moved. Germany finally moved money and kit. Still, Russia did not collapse. It rerouted oil to Asia, patched chip shortages through intermediaries, mobilized industry, and pulled tanks out of storage. Iran supplied drones. North Korea sent shells. China hedged and traded. The ruble wobbled and steadied. The economy shrank and adapted. Putin doubled down, betting that propaganda and repression at home plus time abroad could outlast democracies’ patience.

Ukraine fought on as a nation under arms. Its economy crashed and survived on aid. Its people—millions displaced, millions abroad—kept supporting the fight. Ukrainian industry improvised. Western kit—155s, HIMARS, air defenses, tanks—arrived and mattered. So did small drones, sappers, and NCOs. Ukraine learned fast. It had to.

This war obliterated the illusion that Europe had “moved past” history. It is industrial war with trenches, massed fires, and cities erased. It exposed how shallow Western stockpiles were and how soft our assumptions had become. It also stripped Russia of its “normal partner” mask. The empire never accepted the loss of its borderlands. Given the chance, it chose bombardment over coexistence.

Moscow did not lean on tanks alone. It learned to fight in the gray zone and to win while pretending not to fight at all. Energy, cyber, covert violence, disinformation, mercenaries, proxies. Each tool exploits Western openness and the gaps in our laws. For years we treated them as nuisances or crime. They are policy.

Gazprom was never just a gas company. When Europe bought a third of its gas from Russia, the Kremlin bought leverage. In 2006 and 2009, Moscow cut winter flows through Ukraine and let Italy and the Balkans shiver. Nord Stream to Germany bypassed “unruly” transit states and deepened Berlin’s dependence. Cheap gas in peacetime became a choke chain in crisis. In 2022, the valve turned and Europe scrambled. Prices spiked. Inflation roared. The pipelines that were supposed to anchor peace turned out to be siege engines.

Russian services use keyboards like artillery. NotPetya in 2017 started in Ukraine and knocked out systems worldwide, costing billions. In 2015 and 2016, linked hackers switched off parts of Ukraine’s grid. Western utilities then found Russian code probing their own networks. Space systems were hit at the outset of the 2022 invasion. Off the screen, bombs turned up at munitions depots in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. Undersea cables and pipelines became objects of quiet dread. Gray-zone attacks let Moscow hurt adversaries while keeping a layer of deniability—though they aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.

Enemies of the regime are not safe in London, Berlin, or Kyiv. Litvinenko died from polonium in his tea. Skripal survived Novichok on his doorknob, while an innocent Briton did not. A Chechen exile was shot in a Berlin park at noon. Inside Russia’s near abroad, journalists, defectors, and Ukrainian officials have been gunned down or blown up. The signature is deliberate. It intimidates and advertises reach. The Kremlin does not conceal its message: we can touch you anywhere.

They operate further in the cyber shadows as well, troll farms masquerade as locals, pick at every scab, and flood the zone with lies. In 2016, Russian hackers stole and leaked emails in the United States while the Internet Research Agency amplified division and boosted a candidate Moscow preferred. In France, Macron’s campaign got hit. In Britain, Kremlin outlets and bots cheered Brexit talking points. Far-right and far-left parties took loans or favors. The point is not persuasion. It is corrosion. If citizens cannot agree on basic facts, they cannot act together. That is victory enough.

Though, they’re not afraid to have shadowy operatives in the real world doing their bidding. Wagner, until its owner flamed out, was Russia’s expeditionary arm in denial-friendly form. It fought in Donbas, bled in Syria, traded guns for gold in Africa, and terrorized where useful. If atrocities surfaced, Moscow shrugged. “Volunteers,” it would say. In Moldova’s Transnistria, in Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in Ukraine’s Donbas, local “people’s republics” carry Russian badges under local flags. Proxies extend reach, buffer risk, and blur responsibility.

Put the pieces together. Energy weaponized trade. Cyber turned infrastructure into targets. Assassins turned allies’ streets into crime scenes. Disinformation hollowed out trust. Mercenaries and proxies turned wars into fog. Everything stayed just under the threshold that would force NATO to act as one.

In 2022 the mask slipped, but the hybrid war did not stop. As tanks rolled, cyber teams hit Kyiv’s networks. Trolls tried to panic civilians. Shelling in Donbas manufactured pretexts. The gray and the kinetic moved together.

This is the sober lesson. While the West took a holiday, Moscow drilled in the gaps. It treated markets, media, laws, and pipelines as battlefields. We treated them as neutral ground. That asymmetry was the point.

The West spent three decades treating Russia as a problem partner who would, in time, settle into the international order. We invited Moscow into the G8, built pipelines under the Baltic, toasted trade as peace, and assured ourselves that history’s sharp edges had been filed down. It was a comfortable illusion, and it blinded us to the empire stirring on the other side of the table.

The faith in commerce was seductive.

German leaders, from Kohl through Merkel, made cheap Russian gas the foundation of their industrial strategy and even called it a bridge to renewables. The phrase was “Wandel durch Handel,” change through trade. In practice, it became dependency through pipelines. Schröder joined Gazprom’s payroll, Nord Stream bypassed Poland and Ukraine, and Europe congratulated itself on pragmatism.

When Putin invaded in 2022, the leash around Europe’s neck was yanked. Factories slowed, households paid staggering bills, and the Kremlin pocketed windfalls from price spikes. Trade did not civilize Russia; it subsidized rearmament and handed Moscow a weapon.

Meanwhile NATO grew complacent.

Budgets shrank, arsenals thinned, production lines closed. The United States fought small wars far from home; Europe dismantled heavy brigades and treated mobilization planning as an anachronism.

By 2022, Ukraine was firing thousands of shells a day while NATO stockpiles emptied in months. Germany discovered its tanks could not roll east at short notice. Air defenses were scarce, artillery plants idle, and ammunition scarce. Deterrence without mass and readiness is theater. Putin saw the hollowness and gambled that NATO lacked the will and the magazines for a grinding land war. He wasn’t wrong.

The bigger miscalculation lay in the fantasy of partnership.

The West convinced itself that Russia wanted stability and prosperity, that grievances could be managed with dialogue, that Putin would respond to inclusion. After Georgia in 2008 came the “reset.” After Crimea in 2014 came sanctions, but also new overtures. Russian money coursed through London banks and French shipyards nearly delivered carriers to a navy already seizing neighbors’ land. It was easier to believe Moscow shared our goals than to admit we faced a regime animated by grievance and imperial memory.

Fear of escalation sealed the pattern.

Russia was the alarm clock. China is the exam. Beijing has studied every hesitation and every half-measure. It advances more quietly than Moscow but toward a similar goal: rewriting the order. The indulgence we showed Russia cannot be repeated. Shmirah—guardianship—means preparing in peace, not scrambling in war. History never ended; we did. Now we rejoin it, with no excuse left for blindness.

Chapter 13: China’s Patience

China’s rise was sold in Western capitals as a “peaceful rise,” a bet that trade and engagement would transform a one-party dictatorship into a responsible stakeholder. In reality, the Communist Party used that very engagement as cover for disciplined preparation. While the West took a holiday from history, Beijing converted grievance into mission and built the power base for a return to primacy.

The Party’s narrative of the “Century of Humiliation”—from the Opium Wars through Japanese invasion—is not treated as distant history but as scripture. Every student learns that weakness invited foreign domination, that division opened the door to occupation, that only the Party restored sovereignty in 1949. Patriotic museums and textbooks drive the point home: forgetting humiliation means reliving it. The lesson is clear—unity under the CCP is the sole guarantee that China will never again be carved up by outsiders.

Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” of national rejuvenation takes this memory and turns it into a timetable. By 2049, on the centenary of the People’s Republic, China must be restored to wealth and power, not as an aspiration but as destiny. Disputes in the South China Sea or over Taiwan are not portrayed as new claims but as the correction of old injustices. The Party insists it is not expanding but undoing theft. The result is a strategic culture conditioned to patience, willing to bide decades, confident that history is on its side.

Each generation of CCP leadership has carried a piece of the project. Mao secured sovereignty. Deng built prosperity. Xi projects power. Hong Kong’s 1997 handover was staged as the closing of a colonial wound. The Belt and Road Initiative of 2013 is sold as proof that China is reclaiming its rightful place as a global hub. When an international tribunal dismissed Beijing’s South China Sea claims in 2016, the Party simply ignored it—humiliation, after all, must never be repeated.

This disciplined march—from humiliation to rejuvenation—advanced while Western leaders clung to the belief that peace was inevitable. They mistook China’s patience for moderation, when in fact it was calculation. Beijing remembered. It consolidated at home, waited abroad, and steadily prepared to test a complacent world. The great delusion was to think China had joined the post–Cold War holiday. In truth, it was marking the calendar to end it.

China did not step onto the world stage in 1949 ready to confront the order. It first rebuilt its house. Mao Zedong’s priority was sovereignty. He drove out foreign influence, crushed rivals, and stitched the country back together. The result was a unified, independent, but impoverished state.

Deng Xiaoping changed course. Starting in 1978, he shifted from revolution to growth. His maxim was simple: hide your strength, bide your time. He opened China to trade and investment, welcoming factories and capital while softening ideology in practice. “Black cat, white cat—as long as it catches mice” became shorthand for this pragmatism. Growth was the goal, and the Party delivered. By the 1990s, China was the world’s factory. Joining the WTO in 2001 gave it access to global markets on a scale Mao could never have imagined. Beijing shelved disputes, kept its head down, and let compounding growth do the work.

By the time Xi Jinping took power in 2012, the waiting period was over. He consolidated authority with an anti-corruption purge that removed rivals and cowed the bureaucracy. At home he tightened Party control; abroad he announced a “New Era.” Unlike Deng, Xi did not want to wait. He wanted China to press its advantage.

The military was his showcase. Defense budgets soared. The People’s Liberation Army shed its image as a bloated infantry force and retooled into a high-tech competitor. The navy churned out ships at record speed; it now has more hulls than the U.S. Navy. Carriers, destroyers, submarines—all built in numbers that stunned observers. The air force fielded stealth fighters. The Rocket Force deployed precision missiles designed to keep American carriers at a distance. Chinese hackers probed networks abroad, while its space program developed tools to disable satellites. By the 2020s, China had a military designed to push the U.S. back in the Pacific and to project power globally.

Xi also expanded China’s economic and technological reach. The Belt and Road Initiative, unveiled in 2013, funneled loans and construction projects into more than a hundred countries. Ports, highways, and power plants extended Beijing’s leverage far beyond Asia. At home, industrial policy aimed to dominate advanced sectors—robotics, aerospace, semiconductors. “Made in China 2025” rattled Western capitals, but the program continued under less conspicuous branding. Xi paired this with a drive to boost domestic consumption and innovation, insulating China against external shocks.

The arc is unmistakable. Mao secured unity. Deng built wealth. Xi wields both. For decades, China chose capacity before confrontation, betting that strength would make confrontation unnecessary—or winnable. That patience has run its course. With power in hand, Beijing now presses its claims openly, above all on Taiwan, the issue that fuses its sense of history, its military buildup, and its ambition for primacy. The groundwork laid across three generations now points toward a single objective that could define China’s next era.

Taiwan is the point where China’s long patience collides with hard power. The Communist Party has made unification central to its legitimacy. In its telling, the nation cannot be “rejuvenated” while Taiwan remains separate, a reminder of past weakness. The island is not just symbolic. It is the world’s leading producer of advanced semiconductors, and it sits astride the First Island Chain, the natural barrier that has hemmed in China’s navy for generations. Control of Taiwan would open the Pacific to Beijing’s fleet, threaten Japan’s southern flank, and shake the entire security order of Asia.

Beijing prefers to coerce rather than to fight outright. Its military keeps the island under constant pressure. Chinese jets and bombers cross into Taiwan’s air defense zone almost daily. Warships drill in encirclement maneuvers. In 2022, after a senior U.S. official visited Taipei, the PLA fired missiles over the island to show it could blockade or strike at will. Chinese leaders repeat that they reserve the right to use force if Taiwan moves toward formal independence, leaving the threat always hanging.

The campaign is not only military. Beijing wages political and economic war to isolate Taiwan. It has whittled down the handful of states that still recognize Taipei, blocking it from the UN and even the WHO. It manipulates trade and tourism to punish governments in Taipei that resist its line, banning imports of Taiwanese goods or cutting Chinese visitors overnight. It runs media and cyber campaigns aimed at sowing doubt among Taiwan’s people, cultivating voices that argue unification is inevitable.

China has advanced its power not through blitzkrieg or tank columns but by operating in the gray zone, the space between peace and war. Each move is small enough to avoid open conflict, yet together they redraw the map. The tactic is patient, deniable, and cumulative.

The South China Sea shows the method in action. In the early 2010s, dredgers turned specks of reef into man-made islands. Airstrips, ports, and radar sites soon followed. Beijing insisted it was building civilian infrastructure on its own territory, though no serious legal body recognized the claim. In 2016, an international tribunal flatly rejected China’s sweeping “nine-dash line.” Beijing ignored the ruling, but by then the facts had changed. Runways were finished, missile shelters built. Possession became its own argument.

Control is enforced daily by swarms of “fishing boats” that double as maritime militia and by massive coast guard cutters that shove aside neighbors’ vessels. The result is de facto sovereignty without a declared war. A similar pressure campaign plays out near Japan’s Senkaku Islands, with Chinese ships and aircraft establishing a permanent presence in disputed waters.

Economic coercion fits the same pattern. In 2010, Beijing quietly blocked rare earth exports to Japan during a diplomatic clash. In 2020, it slapped tariffs on Australian goods after Canberra called for an inquiry into COVID-19’s origins. Each time, officials denied political intent. Each time, the point was clear: cross China, pay a price.

The gray zone also extends into technology and influence. Huawei’s 5G networks, offered cheaply, embed Chinese systems into foreign infrastructure. AI-driven surveillance tools exported abroad normalize Beijing’s model of control. United Front organizations court elites, fund Confucius Institutes, and cultivate sympathetic voices overseas. The campaign is subtle, but the aim is not. By embedding itself in other nations’ information, political, and technological systems, China expands its reach without firing a shot.

Case Study: Mischief Reef

Mischief Reef was once nothing more than a shoal barely above water in the Spratlys, claimed by the Philippines and ignored by most of the world. In 1995, China put up a shack there, claiming it was for fishermen. Twenty years later that shack had become a concrete island with a runway, radar domes, and missile shelters. Beijing had turned a reef into a fortress without firing a shot. Manila protested, but what could it do? To challenge the new base meant risking war.

This is the gray-zone empire in practice. No open invasion. Moves dressed up as civilian projects, or justified by Beijing’s “historic rights.” Each step small enough to avoid a crisis, but cumulative enough to create one. By the time outsiders object, the facts are already in place: airfields, harbors, garrisons. A fait accompli.

China repeats this method everywhere—coercion that stops short of war, deniability that blurs the line between normal and aggressive, incremental gains that add up to a strategic shift. Coast guard ships and fishing militias swarm contested waters, trade gets weaponized, legal claims are pressed in international forums, propaganda shapes the narrative. Each domain—military, economic, legal, informational—works in tandem to grind down resistance.

The result has been a changed reality across Asia, achieved without conventional war. But this success has also woken others. The United States, Japan, Australia, and regional states now track these maneuvers closely and are trying to push back. The gray zone is not just a sideshow to China’s military rise; it is a central theater of competition. Understanding how Beijing uses patience, pressure, and ambiguity to advance its reach is essential to understanding the new era of rivalry we live in now.

Mistakenly, the West believed prosperity would pacify China. Policymakers bet that trade, investment, and WTO membership would turn Beijing into a “responsible stakeholder.” They projected liberal assumptions onto an illiberal regime, convinced that economic modernization would usher in political reform. But the Chinese Communist Party saw wealth and technology as tools to entrench one-party rule and expand national power. Engagement changed China’s capabilities, not its character.

What did change was the West. Globalization turned rivals into partners on paper, but in practice it made democracies hostage to Chinese leverage. Multinationals with fortunes at stake lobbied against policies that might anger Beijing. Governments muted criticism of repression in Xinjiang or the strangling of Hong Kong because their economies were entangled with Chinese trade. Hollywood bent scripts to satisfy censors. Universities softened their voices to keep tuition and funding flowing. By the 2010s, democracies had become dependent on Chinese markets and supply chains, often choosing business over principle. The “holiday from history” had blinded the West to the reality that China was using commerce not to converge with liberal norms but to bankroll its military, sharpen its technology, and prepare for confrontation.

Yet China’s rise is not limitless. Its population is aging, its debt burdens are mounting, and growth is slowing. These domestic pressures complicate Beijing’s ambitions, even as it continues to project confidence. Externally, China’s assertiveness has awakened counterbalances: Japan rearming, India edging closer to Western partnerships, Australia arming for long-range strike, and the U.S. and its allies cutting off China from advanced semiconductor tools vital for military and AI power. Above all, Beijing knows war could derail its entire project. An invasion of Taiwan would be perilous, with no guarantee of success and high odds of foreign intervention. The PLA may be modern, but it has not fought a war in over four decades, and amphibious assaults are among the hardest of all military operations.

This restraint, however, carries its own danger. Nationalist rhetoric and confidence in China’s momentum could breed overreach. A naval collision in the South China Sea, a miscalculation over Taiwan, or an accidental escalation could spiral into a crisis if neither side yields. Patience can give way to rashness under pressure. Beijing has avoided reckless action so far, but the risk of unintended war hangs in the background.

China’s long game remains unchanged. It aims for regional dominance and global stature, no matter the obstacles. The West misread China once, mistaking trade for peace and patience for moderation. It cannot afford to repeat that error.

Chapter 14: India and Pakistan

If anyone still believes peace is humanity’s natural state, India and Pakistan should cure them. Born in 1947 out of Britain’s hasty retreat, these two states emerged from a blood-soaked caesarean. Partition did not simply create borders—it tore apart communities, ignited massacres, and left two nations convinced the other wanted it dead. Today both sit on nuclear stockpiles, their rivalry a standing reminder that history never ended, and peace never keeps itself.

Partition was chaos incarnate. As the British sliced provinces with the Radcliffe Line, 10 to 15 million people scrambled to flee ancestral homes. Hindus and Sikhs ran east, Muslims west. What followed was less migration than mutual slaughter. Trains pulled into stations stacked with corpses. Refugee caravans were ambushed and butchered. Villages in Punjab burned. Some British officers, hardened by the liberation of Nazi camps, admitted the horrors of Partition were worse. The statistics—roughly a million dead—barely capture it. Pregnant women cut open, children roasted alive, whole families vanished in minutes. Partition was not a peaceful divorce; it was a double genocide.

One story tells it all. Seven-year-old Nasim Fatima, living in Delhi, trusted her neighbors. They had promised to shield her Muslim family. When the frenzy came, those neighbors turned on them. Nasim watched her father pray as attackers broke in. She was struck unconscious. When she awoke, every member of her family—parents, grandmother, four siblings—was hacked to pieces. She survived alone. For her, that counted as fortune. Millions of others were not so “lucky.”

The new states inherited not only refugees but trauma. India’s camps filled with Hindu and Sikh families demanding vengeance. Pakistan absorbed waves of penniless Muslim muhajirs who carried their own stories of slaughter. Both societies built founding myths around grievance: Indians spoke of vivisection, Pakistanis of attempted strangulation. Each nation insisted it had been the greater victim. From day one, insecurity was institutionalized.

Britain’s hurried mapwork made things worse. Hundreds of princely states were told to pick India or Pakistan. Most did. A few resisted. Hyderabad and Junagadh were quickly absorbed by India, but Kashmir—Hindu ruler, Muslim-majority people—was left unresolved. That wound never closed. It metastasized into war after war, an arms race, and finally, a nuclear standoff.

Partition did not end in 1947. It lives on, pulsing through every crisis between Delhi and Islamabad. In the West, people imagine 1945 as the beginning of peace. In South Asia, 1947 proved the opposite: when empires cut and run, they leave behind fires that still burn.

If partition was the wound, Kashmir became the scar. This Himalayan valley—sold in tourist brochures as paradise—has been a battlefield since 1947.

The trouble began with a ruler out of step with his people. Maharaja Hari Singh, a Hindu prince ruling a state three-quarters Muslim, tried to stay independent when India and Pakistan were born. Pakistan had other ideas. Tribal militias, armed and abetted from across the border, poured in that autumn. They looted, raped, killed. The Maharaja panicked. He signed Kashmir’s accession to India, and New Delhi flew in troops just in time to save Srinagar. The first India–Pakistan war was on.

By 1949, the guns fell silent under a UN-brokered ceasefire. Kashmir was sliced into two: India held the lush valley, Jammu, and Ladakh; Pakistan grabbed the western mountains. The promised plebiscite—where Kashmiris would choose their future—never came. Instead, a ceasefire line hardened into a frontier. Families, farms, and villages were split by it. The line became permanent.

Every decade since has seen the wound reopen. In 1965, Pakistan tried to spark an uprising in Indian Kashmir with Operation Gibraltar. Locals didn’t join in. India struck back, and a full war followed—tanks in Punjab, dogfights over Lahore. After weeks of bloodshed, both sides limped to a Soviet-brokered truce.

1971 brought a different cataclysm. Pakistan tore itself apart in civil war, India marched in, and Bangladesh was born. Ninety thousand Pakistani soldiers surrendered in Dhaka. Humiliation on a scale no state forgets. In Kashmir, fighting raged but the real shift came at the peace table in Simla. The ceasefire line was renamed the Line of Control, and India declared the dispute settled. Pakistan never accepted that. For Islamabad, Kashmir remained unfinished business.

The LoC became one of the world’s most militarized frontiers: 740 kilometers of bunkers, barbed wire, and minefields. Villages live under the daily threat of mortar fire. Children grow up doing homework in bunkers. Farmers plow under the sights of snipers. A million soldiers face each other across those mountains, waiting.

Sometimes the conflict veered into the absurd. In 1984, India seized the Siachen Glacier, a frozen desert at 20,000 feet where more men have died of frostbite and avalanches than bullets. Yet both sides keep soldiers posted there, burning fortunes to hold a block of ice.

The political fight inside India kept the fire alive. Kashmir was granted special status under Article 370 of India’s constitution—a fragile compromise to keep it tethered to the Union. Pakistan pointed to that clause as proof that Kashmir was not “really” part of India. Hindu nationalists in Delhi despised it. In August 2019, Narendra Modi’s government revoked Article 370 and split the state in two, placing it under direct federal rule. Troops poured in, the internet was cut, and local politicians were locked up. For Delhi, it was sovereignty asserted at last. For Pakistan, it was annexation. For many Kashmiris, it was betrayal.

The result is a valley tighter under India’s grip than ever, but angrier than ever too. Property laws have changed, outsiders can now settle, and the fear of demographic engineering hangs in the air. Delhi touts new investments and lower violence. Detractors see only silence enforced at gunpoint.

Kashmir today is less paradise than powder keg. Pakistan calls it the heart of its Muslim identity. India calls it proof of its secular one. Both sides insist it is existential. That is why the scar never heals. And since 1998, when both countries tested nuclear weapons, every skirmish along the LoC carries not just the echo of Partition but the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

Deterrence that Breeds Crisis

On May 11, 1998, the desert shook in Rajasthan. India had tested nuclear weapons again, this time openly—five blasts in three days. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared India a nuclear power. Pakistan answered two weeks later with its own tests in the hills of Chagai. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told the world, “We have settled the score.” South Asia now had two rivals, three wars behind them, Kashmir unresolved, both holding the bomb.

The optimists reached for Cold War logic. Mutually assured destruction had kept Washington and Moscow from total war, so maybe it would work in Delhi and Islamabad. In one sense, it did: since 1998 there has been no full-scale Indo-Pak war. But the bomb didn’t bring peace. It brought what strategists call the “stability–instability paradox.” Stability at the top—neither side dares Armageddon. Instability below—each side feels freer to poke, prod, and launch smaller fights, counting on the other to pull back before things spiral. It’s like two men brawling on a cliff edge. Neither wants to fall, but they still throw punches.

The story began earlier. India tested a “peaceful nuclear explosion” in 1974, not long after the 1971 war that created Bangladesh. Pakistan, humiliated by that defeat, sprinted for its own bomb. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto vowed Pakistanis would “eat grass” if necessary to match India. A.Q. Khan delivered the means—uranium enrichment technology, blueprints, even Chinese assistance. By the late 1980s, both sides had working devices, though undeclared. The world glimpsed how close they were in 1990, when a Kashmir crisis spurred frantic American diplomacy to prevent a nuclear misstep.

Once the 1998 tests made it official, doctrines diverged. India declared “no first use,” promising massive retaliation only if struck first. Its arsenal is relatively lean, its warheads stored separately from missiles. Pakistan rejected restraint. Outgunned conventionally, it embraced “full-spectrum deterrence”—weapons of every size, from strategic missiles to battlefield nukes. In 2011 it unveiled the Nasr missile, a short-range system designed to nuke Indian tank columns even on Pakistani soil. The message was clear: don’t think you can fight a “limited war” against us. To Indian planners, that meant any conventional clash could turn nuclear in hours.

This balance hasn’t stopped the violence; it has warped it. India and Pakistan now fight in the shadows—terror attacks, cross-border raids, airstrikes—while relying on nuclear fear to keep the other from escalating too far. Each crisis ends before the cliff’s edge, which perversely breeds confidence that the next one can also be managed. It’s a deadly habit. In 2019, after a suicide bombing in Kashmir killed 40 Indian paramilitary troops, India struck a militant camp inside Pakistan. Days later, Pakistani jets bombed Indian territory. Fighter planes clashed; an Indian pilot was shot down and captured. Missiles on both sides went on alert. For a few nights, the world wondered if nuclear war was about to begin—over a terrorist attack. Then, as before, both pulled back. The pattern repeated: kick hard, stop just short, call it deterrence.

Command and control add another layer of risk. Missiles can cross the border in minutes. False alarms, technical failures, or a forward commander misreading orders could trigger catastrophe. In March 2022, India accidentally fired a cruise missile into Pakistan. It didn’t explode. Pakistan stayed calm. But what if it had hit a city? What if the other side had assumed the worst and launched in response? The margin for error is vanishingly thin.

Nuclear weapons were supposed to make South Asia safer by making total war impossible. Instead, they made every crisis more dangerous. The peace they enforce is not trust, but terror. The Torah teaches pikuach nefesh—preserving life is paramount. In Delhi and Islamabad, leaders gamble with lives every time they test the nuclear leash. Deterrence has worked—until the day it won’t.

And when nuclear weapons can’t shield pride or ideology, Pakistan turns to something cruder: proxy jihad. The bomb stops armies. It doesn’t stop a teenager with a Kalashnikov or a suicide vest. That is where this story turns next.

On a November night in 2008, ten men stepped off a rubber dinghy and walked Mumbai into hell. They split, hit the station, the Taj and the Oberoi, a café, a hospital, a Jewish center. For three days the city burned. One hundred sixty-six people were murdered. Lashkar-e-Taiba ran the operation from Pakistan by phone, coaching the killers in real time. Investigators traced handlers, training, money, and safe houses back across the border. The fingerprints were familiar. So were the denials.

Pakistan’s security establishment built and curated a stable of jihadist proxies to bleed India where the bomb cannot be used. The logic is brutal. If you cannot win a conventional war, you keep one going in the shadows. You normalize infiltration across the Line of Control, you seed car bombs and fidayeen squads, you internationalize Kashmir with each headline. When caught, you shrug: these are freelancers, we suffer terrorism too. Sometimes you even arrest a leader on a finance charge, park him at home for a while, and let the machine keep humming under a new name.

Indo-Pak crises never stay indoors. Every time the two trade fire, a third party is checking the angles, often nudging the table. Start with China. For decades Beijing has treated Pakistan as its cutout against India. The romance is not subtle. In the 1960s China began feeding Islamabad fighters and tanks. Later came blueprints and kit for missiles and the bomb. The point was strategic arithmetic: lock India in a two-front problem and keep it preoccupied at home.

CPEC made the embrace visible. Launched a decade ago as Belt and Road’s showpiece, it promised roughly $60 billion for roads, power plants, pipelines, and a deep-water port at Gwadar. It also ran straight through Gilgit-Baltistan, which sits inside India’s legal claim to Jammu and Kashmir. Delhi protested the sovereignty violation. Beijing shrugged and kept pouring concrete. The effect is simple. If India fights Pakistan, Chinese money, personnel, and interests sit in the line of fire. Since 2020, after deadly clashes in Ladakh, Indian planners live with the reality that a flare-up in Kashmir could rhyme with pressure along the Line of Actual Control. A squeeze from two sides is no longer a thought experiment; China and Pakistan literally meet on ground India says is its own, from the 1963 Shaksgam cession to China’s hold over Aksai Chin.

China’s pipeline comes with steel teeth. It sells Pakistan armed drones and precision rockets. It shares intelligence. It floods Pakistani ministries with “consultants” and security contractors to guard projects insurgents keep targeting. Each attack brings more Chinese demands for protection and more Pakistani troops detached to babysit CPEC. At the same time, Beijing plays arsonist and fire marshal. It quietly enables Pakistan’s needling, then publicly calls for restraint when tempers spike. War would wreck trade and risk a collision with the United States. Mischief without conflagration suits Beijing fine.

West of Pakistan, Afghanistan remains Rawalpindi’s backyard and India’s lost bet. The Pakistani army has long wanted “strategic depth” to its west so it never faces India with a hostile Kabul at its back. In the 1990s it achieved that by midwifing the Taliban. After 2001 the United States threw them out and Delhi invested heavily in the new Afghan government, building roads, clinics, and goodwill. Then came August 2021. Washington left. The Taliban marched in. India’s footprint evaporated in days. Pakistan’s generals congratulated themselves. Their clients were back in the palace.

The hangover came fast. The Pakistani Taliban, sheltered by their Afghan cousins, revived and resumed killing Pakistani police and soldiers. Refugees flowed. Borders frayed. Pakistan discovered again that jihad is not a precise instrument. India, meanwhile, did not disappear. Its diplomats reopened channels to the Taliban, looking for leverage and hedges. Kabul is once more a chessboard where pressure on one square produces movement on another. Turn the screw in Kashmir and you may feel a twist back from Nangarhar. None of this is tidy. All of it is linked.

The quietest, most dangerous lever is water. The Indus system is the bloodstream of both countries, especially Pakistan. The rivers rise in Himalayan glaciers, run through Kashmir and Punjab, and feed tens of millions. In 1960, with World Bank help, the two countries cut a deal that remains a minor miracle. The Indus Waters Treaty gave India rights to the three eastern rivers and Pakistan to the three western rivers, while permitting India limited non-consumptive use on the western side for power projects. A standing commission kept talking even when the armies were shooting. Water kept moving. For six decades, the treaty outlasted wars and coups. It is the most successful piece of statecraft the subcontinent has produced.

Stress is building. Populations have quadrupled. India has finally begun to exploit the run-of-river space the treaty allows on the Jhelum and Chenab. Pakistan worries Delhi can game the timing of flows and in a crisis hold back or dump water to punish farmers downstream. Indian leaders sometimes talk tough after terror attacks, promising to “review” the treaty. In early 2023 India served notice seeking changes to dispute procedures after years of stalemate over dam design. Climate change sharpens the edge. The glaciers that feed the Indus are retreating. Monsoons are growing erratic. Floods like Pakistan’s in 2022 and deep droughts could both become more frequent. The treaty’s design has kept the peace because it created predictability. If that predictability cracks under political pressure or climate stress, the accusations will write themselves. “They are stealing our water” is a sentence that can ignite a country.

Layer great-power competition on top. During the Cold War the United States often played fire brigade, flying envoys to cool tempers in 1990, during Kargil in 1999, and throughout the 2001–02 standoff. The map has changed. India is now a key partner for Washington in balancing China. Russia, once India’s armory, sits in Beijing’s camp. China anchors Pakistan’s economy. An Indo-Pak crisis today will not be a closed loop. It will be a node pulled by larger forces. In the worst version, American and allied capitals quietly back India, Beijing leans hard on Islamabad, and everyone prays no one misreads a radar return.

Why do Delhi and Islamabad keep poking the same bruise? Because the fight is not just across a border, it is inside their politics and their stories about who they are. Each capital plays to an audience that rewards chest-thumping and punishes restraint. That is why rational caution loses to performative fury so often on the subcontinent.

Start in Rawalpindi. Pakistan’s army is not a stakeholder, it is the state. Generals have ruled directly for half the country’s life and dominated the rest through vetoes, budgets, and fear. Their alibi never changes: India is an eternal threat, therefore the army must be the permanent guardian. A cold peace with India would shrink the army’s political halo and its share of the treasury. A managed hostility keeps both intact. The preferred temperature is neither war nor peace, just hot enough to justify control, never so hot the house burns down.

Narrative power matters. Schoolbooks and television sell a civilizational frame in which Pakistan is a besieged fortress of Islam and India the implacable aggressor. Compromise looks like betrayal inside that script. Elected leaders who reach for détente risk a coup or a crisis out of nowhere. Ask Nawaz Sharif. Journalists who ask the wrong questions risk something worse. Ask Saleem Shahzad. When the army needs unity, the media provides it, flag-waving on cue. It works. A public raised on this story backs hard lines and salutes limited war as self-defense.

Now look at India. For decades the official posture was secular, developmental, a little weary of the neighbor but focused inward. Mumbai 1993, Parliament 2001, Mumbai 2008, and the long attrition in Kashmir changed the public mood. The BJP rode that change. It campaigned on a simple promise: no more turning the other cheek. Under Narendra Modi, the tone hardened and, crucially, the government learned to stage-manage force. The 2016 cross-LoC raids were not just operations, they were programming. Video clips, studio panels, anniversary “surgical strike days.” In 2019, after the Pulwama bombing, India hit a Jaish camp in Balakot, across the international border. The dogfight that followed nearly derailed the election script; Pakistan shot down an Indian jet and captured the pilot. Islamabad returned him quickly, the crisis ebbed, and the domestic message in India stuck: we crossed, we punished, we kept our nerve. Voters noticed. Tough talk pays at the polls.

There is a limit. Indians cheer a clean hit, not a prolonged war with body bags and soaring prices. That forces New Delhi to calibrate, visible punishment without uncontrolled escalation. It is politics in a minefield. The military remains firmly under civilian control, but prestige matters, so governments rush new kit after a setback and praise the forces loudly. The nightly noise on television does the rest, boxing leaders into action after each outrage.

Identity hardens the edge. In Pakistan, the two-nation theory is foundational; if Muslims and Hindus can live as one nation inside India, the ideological ground under Pakistan’s feet shakes. Peace that looks too normal threatens the story. In India, Hindu nationalists treat Pakistan as a bloody mistake of history and a serial offender. Talk of another partition in Kashmir is heresy; talk of loosening India’s grip invites charges of treason. When identities are cast in opposition to the other, compromise becomes apostasy.

Hard men outside the state play their part. Pakistan’s jihadist ecosystem is not a switch the army can flick on and off; it has constituencies, madrassas, money, and street muscle. When the generals move against favored groups under pressure, angry clerics mobilize, and the state blinks. India has no equivalent terror lobby, but it does have loud hardliners who will torch any leader who even whispers about autonomy or a joint mechanism in Kashmir. Manmohan Singh once edged toward a backchannel deal with Musharraf; then Musharraf fell and India’s opposition pounced. Moderates were left isolated, again.

Add cynical use of crisis. Both governments face big domestic headaches, from inflation to unemployment to corruption. A quick spike against the arch-enemy unifies the base and drowns out uncomfortable questions for a few news cycles. It is an old trick. Leaders everywhere use it. In this rivalry, it is practically a budget line item.

Are these countries trapped by their politics? Not entirely, but the incentives are ugly. Leadership can still bend the curve. The result of all this posturing is a well-rehearsed climb up the same ladder. A bomb goes off, anchors shout, leaders promise payback, jets fly, diplomats scramble, families on both sides pray. Then, at the edge, someone blinks. The crowd cheers, the market calms, and everyone waits for the next round. The intervals are getting shorter. The decision loops are getting faster. The audiences are louder. That is the danger. We have been lucky. But. Luck is not a strategy.

Why This Matters Beyond South Asia

Treating India and Pakistan as a distant quarrel is lazy thinking. Their rivalry is a live fault line that can shake the planet. Two nuclear states with a shared trauma, tangled borders, and hair-trigger politics do not stay “regional” for long.

Start with the unthinkable. A nuclear exchange in South Asia would not stay in South Asia. Markets panic at the speed of a push alert. The nuclear taboo, unbroken since 1945, would crack, and every threshold elsewhere would suddenly look lower.

Great powers are already threaded through the theater. China is not a bystander. It arms and shields Pakistan, invests across the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, and needles India on a live Himalayan front. In a crisis, Beijing can squeeze while Islamabad swings. Washington, betting on India as a counterweight to China, does not get to sit it out. One bad week could feature Indian and Pakistani jets over Kashmir, Chinese exercises in Ladakh, and a U.S. carrier group signaling in the Indian Ocean. That is not a tidy scenario. That is four nuclear arsenals in the same frame.

Terror does not respect borders either. Pakistan’s proxy strategy built an ecosystem that feeds global jihad. Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed trained with the same networks that birthed Al Qaeda. The 2008 Mumbai killers targeted a Chabad house as well as hotels. When South Asia burns, the embers drift to Copenhagen and New York.

The economic hit would be immediate. India is a top-five economy and a pillar of global services. Pakistan sits astride sea lanes and energy routes. War would spike insurance in the Arabian Sea, scramble shipping, shock oil prices, and punch holes in supply chains from Bangalore to Basel.

Institutions do not come out looking good either. The UN has watched Kashmir for seven decades and delivered platitudes. The non-proliferation regime adjusted to two de facto nuclear states outside the NPT and then normalized it. That teaches a bleak lesson: persistence beats rules. If tactical nukes were ever used and the world shrugged, the copycats would take notes.

If you still think this is a distant feud, picture a morning where CNN opens on twin mushroom clouds over the subcontinent and the Dow drops two thousand points before your coffee cools. History never went on vacation in South Asia. It waited in the mountains and learned new tricks. The job now is to keep it from teaching the world a lesson no one survives.

Chapter 15: North Korea

North Korea is the most successful failed state in modern history. Three generations of the Kim dynasty have turned famine, fear, and isolation into the foundations of survival. The mythology of juche—“self-reliance”—tells citizens their country needs no one. In truth, Pyongyang has leaned on Soviet subsidies, Chinese patronage, and Western aid packages for decades. What juche really means is obedience to the Kim family. Statues, portraits, and endless propaganda sermons enshrine their near-divine status, and every child grows up knowing their life depends on loyalty to the dynasty.

Kim Jong-il added another layer: songun, “military first.” In the 1990s, when floods and economic collapse produced famine, the army ate while peasants foraged for weeds. Half a million or more starved to death during the so-called “Arduous March.” The state cut off rations to entire provinces, blocked people from traveling in search of food, and punished those who slipped across the border to China. Hunger itself became a weapon of control. Survivors learned that only black-market deals or total submission might keep them alive.

Behind the spectacle stands an apparatus of total surveillance. The Organization and Guidance Department watches the elite; the Ministry of State Security polices ordinary people. Neighbors denounce neighbors; entire families vanish into camps if one member mutters the wrong words. A defector’s description rings true: in North Korea, you are born a hostage of the Kim family.

Markets emerged during the famine, but only because the regime could no longer supply food. These jangmadang became lifelines, tolerated as long as bribes flowed upward. When the state feared traders were growing too bold, it crushed them—most dramatically in 2009 when a sudden currency reform wiped out private savings. Rare protests forced Pyongyang to backtrack. The lesson was clear: limited capitalism could be allowed as a pressure valve, but never enough to loosen the state’s grip.

The system is simple in its cruelty. Information is sealed: radios locked to government frequencies, foreign media punished by prison. Movement is chained: travel permits required even between nearby towns. Food is rationed as reward and punishment. Fear is constant: public executions, sudden purges, show trials. And yet, the stick is always paired with just enough carrot—an extra sack of rice for loyal workers, a new apartment for model citizens, mass rallies that stir pride even in misery.

The regime survived famine by treating its people as expendable. Kim Jong-il reportedly said he would rather let a million die than lose power. His son governs with the same creed. The succession to Kim Jong-un proved continuity: immediate executions of rivals, new waves of propaganda, a fresh personality cult.

Having perfected extortion at home, Pyongyang exported the method abroad. Nuclear brinkmanship and missile theatrics are the external version of ration cards and prison camps: threats of catastrophe to extract concessions. The same state that starves children without hesitation has no qualms about rattling nuclear sabers to force aid or recognition. North Korea’s genius—if we can call it that—has been to monetize risk, to weaponize desperation, and to survive by keeping both its citizens and its neighbors permanently hostage.

North Korea learned that a missile test feeds more diplomats than a harvest feeds peasants. By the 1990s, Pyongyang had perfected a cynical choreography: test, trigger crisis, open talks, pocket concessions, and repeat. Each launch or underground blast sent the same message—pay us, or risk chaos. And time after time, the world paid.

In 1994, Washington thought it had solved the problem with the Agreed Framework. North Korea froze its reactor program, and in return it got fuel shipments and promises of modern reactors. But the regime kept the plutonium it had already extracted, likely enough for a bomb or two. Four years later, it fired a Taepodong missile over Japan, terrifying Tokyo and jolting Washington. The outrage yielded what Pyongyang wanted: sanctions relief and new talks.

By the early 2000s, the pattern hardened. When U.S. intelligence uncovered a secret uranium program in 2002, North Korea walked out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and booted out inspectors. In 2006 it detonated its first nuclear device. Within a year, aid was flowing in again, and Pyongyang theatrically blew up a cooling tower in front of cameras. But it never gave up the bombs it already had. When talks stalled in 2009, it tested again.

Kim Jong-un inherited this playbook and added flair. He timed tests to foreign elections or U.S. inaugurations, ensuring maximum leverage. In 2016–2017, he fired off long-range missiles and claimed a hydrogen bomb. The world braced for war, only to watch in 2018 as he shifted to smiles, sending athletes to the Winter Olympics and then striding across the DMZ. A few months later, he shook hands with Donald Trump in Singapore, standing before American flags like an equal. Trump cancelled major joint exercises with South Korea, while Kim offered little beyond vague promises and a few staged demolitions of already useless tunnels.

The cycle is almost farcical in its predictability. After every escalation, North Korea collects something: fuel oil, cash, food aid, sanctions eased, or the prestige of summits once unimaginable for a small, starving state. Each “deal” lasts only until Pyongyang decides it needs another payday. And each time, Western leaders congratulate themselves for “reducing tensions,” even when nothing changes on the ground.

North Korea thrives on spectacle. A missile launch on America’s Independence Day. A nuclear test just before a South Korean election. A cooling tower blown to rubble on live TV. The regime understands that dramatic theater matters more to the West than real disarmament. Diplomats and headlines cheer the performance, while the weapons programs continue.

North Korea’s racket survives because everyone involved lets it. Pyongyang builds bombs to insure the Kim dynasty and to sell “concessions” later. Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo buy quiet because the alternative is a mass-casualty war on a modern metropolis. Beijing and Moscow prop up the problem because it serves their larger game. That is the ugly equilibrium.

For Kim, the logic is simple. Saddam shelved WMD and died. Gaddafi bargained and died. Kim keeps nukes and lives. A credible ability to threaten Seoul, Tokyo, and now parts of the United States deters regime-change talk. It also creates inventory for diplomacy. Freeze a reactor for oil. Blow a tunnel for sanctions relief. Promise a pause for a summit photo. The core arsenal stays.

Democracies reward optics. When alerts sound in Japan and markets wobble in Seoul, politicians reach for the fastest de-escalation. A meeting, a communiqué, a pause in exercises—anything that turns headlines from “crisis” to “talks.” Voters breathe. Stocks rebound. Hard problems get punted to the next term. Pyongyang banks that preference for process over outcomes. It has been right for thirty years.

China guarantees the floor. It does not want war on its border, a flood of refugees into Liaoning, or a unified, U.S.-aligned Korea. So it calibrates pressure and protection. It votes for UN resolutions, then relaxes enforcement enough to keep North Korea afloat. Oil trickles. Grain crosses the Yalu. Sanctions bite, but not fatally. The message to Kim is clear: stay troublesome, not terminal.

Russia plays spoiler. Isolated by its own wars, Moscow welcomes any partner that needles Washington. It has shielded Pyongyang at the UN, tolerated North Korean labor on its turf, and reportedly taken shells from Kim for use in Ukraine. In return, it offers cover and maybe technology. It costs little. It complicates U.S. planning. It fits the Kremlin’s goal of eroding a U.S.-led order.

Add the math in Seoul and Tokyo. Artillery, not nukes, can kill tens of thousands in hours. Missile defenses are better than they were, but not perfect. Any strike plan risks a regional economic shock and civilian carnage. Leaders know it. They choose management over confrontation because management, however distasteful, is survivable.

Put together, the incentives line up for stalemate. Pyongyang will not disarm; it would be suicide. Washington and its allies will not preempt; the costs could be catastrophic. Beijing and Moscow will not squeeze to collapse; a pro-U.S. Korea would be worse for them. So the can gets kicked. Only the can is now a warhead.

That trajectory hardens with time. Each test increases leverage and normalizes the program. Each summit that trades optics for substance teaches Kim what to demand next. Each Chinese and Russian veto signals that punishment will be capped. The result is a poorer, more dangerous status quo that still somehow pays.

There is a lesson here for anyone still clinging to the post-Cold War lullaby: regimes that survive by coercion at home will practice coercion abroad. They read our incentives better than we read theirs. They bet on our fear of risk and our love of process. They collect.

Breaking that cycle will take discipline the West rarely shows: no payoffs for theater; tighter, enforced sanctions that Beijing and Moscow cannot casually blunt; steadier allied military posture; and a public told the truth that “calm today” often buys “crisis tomorrow.” Absent that, the missile will keep sending the message, and we will keep receiving it.

Regional Repercussions

North Korea has dragged the neighborhood back into hard power. A regime that cannot feed its people has forced some of the richest democracies on earth to rearm, rewrite doctrine, and rehearse for the worst.

Japan felt the first shove. In 1998 a Taepodong flew over Honshu and sirens wailed. Tokyo rushed to field Aegis ships with SM-3s and Patriot batteries. Each test from Pyongyang pushed policy another inch. After the 2017 barrage over Hokkaido, the dam broke. Japan set a path to double defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, approved “counter-strike” options, bought Tomahawks, and funded long-range missiles of its own. Constitutional taboos gave way to new security laws that let the Self-Defense Forces aid allies under fire. Aegis Ashore died; sea-based alternatives took its place. Kim’s launches wrote Japan’s budget.

Seoul never had the luxury of pacifism, but it has hardened. South Korea built a Kill Chain to preempt launches, a layered missile shield, and a doctrine that names the leadership in Pyongyang as a target if nuclear use looks imminent. THAAD went in despite Chinese punishment. The arsenal grew to include F-35s, high-end ISR, and heavy conventional missiles after range caps were lifted. The nuclear debate, once taboo, now polls with majority support. That is North Korea’s doing.

Alliances shifted with the threat. Washington now treats extended deterrence in Korea as a live plan, not a talking point. Bombers fly in, ballistic-missile submarines show the flag, and large exercises resumed after the photo-op pause of 2018–19. Pyongyang used that pause to keep building. The allies noticed.

The missile arc also bent Tokyo and Seoul toward each other. In 2023 the United States hosted a Camp David summit that locked in trilateral cooperation. Real-time missile warning will be shared. Defense planning is no longer two parallel tracks with a grudge in the middle. That is new. It is also overdue.

North Korea is not just a menace at home; it has long exported instability abroad. Missiles, nuclear know-how, and sanctions-evasion tricks have become its most reliable exports.

From the 1980s onward, Pyongyang sold Scud derivatives to anyone willing to pay. Iran used them as the base of its Shahab series. Pakistan imported Nodongs, renamed them Ghauri, and bartered back uranium enrichment technology through the A.Q. Khan network. Syria, Yemen, Libya, and others bought hardware or components. In 2002, a North Korean freighter carrying concealed Scuds was caught en route to Yemen—just one of many shipments that slipped through. These sales not only filled the regime’s coffers; they franchised Pyongyang’s designs across multiple arsenals in the Middle East and South Asia.

North Korea even dabbled in nuclear proliferation. Its fingerprints were all over the Syrian reactor destroyed by Israel in 2007, a Yongbyon-style plant rising in the desert. Payment mattered more to Pyongyang than the global nonproliferation regime. The message was clear: while the West congratulated itself on the “end of history,” North Korea was undermining the nuclear order in real time.

The learning has gone both ways. Iran and North Korea have mirrored each other’s negotiating tactics—protracted talks, incremental concessions, never giving up the core capability. Tehran studied Pyongyang’s brinkmanship; Pyongyang noted how Iran won sanctions relief in 2015 and drew its own lessons. No formal alliance exists, but the behavioral echo is unmistakable.

Sanctions were supposed to strangle North Korea. Instead, they forced innovation. Pyongyang runs webs of front companies in China, Southeast Asia, and Africa to procure alloys and electronics, laundering them through cut-outs before they reach missile plants. To sell banned coal or buy oil, its ships rendezvous at sea, transloading cargo and sailing under false flags. Names, paint jobs, and registries change constantly; the UN blacklists one vessel, another appears.

Cyber theft has become the regime’s newest revenue stream. North Korean hackers stole $81 million from Bangladesh’s account at the New York Fed in 2016. Since then they have looted cryptocurrency exchanges on a massive scale—an estimated billion dollars in 2022 alone. Those funds help bankroll missiles that threaten Tokyo and Los Angeles. It is nuclear extortion paid for with stolen Bitcoin.

Traditional crime continues too: counterfeit dollars, meth smuggled by diplomats, poaching, arms sales to African regimes. Reports now suggest artillery shells flow from Pyongyang to Moscow for use in Ukraine. Whenever one door closes, North Korea finds a side door—or smashes a window.

None of this works without enablers. Chinese border towns thrive on illicit trade. Shipping firms in far-flung registries reflag North Korean ships. Offshore havens launder funds. The international community condemns, but plenty of actors quietly profit.

The lesson to other rogue states is obvious. Isolation need not mean collapse if you have weapons to bargain with and a willingness to cheat. North Korea walked out of the NPT, shredded every bilateral pledge, and still survived. Each broken promise erodes faith in arms control everywhere. Hawks in Washington or Jerusalem can point to Pyongyang and say: dictators don’t keep deals. And they are right.

The West keeps misreading North Korea because it keeps choosing theater over results. Process becomes the prize. A meeting is hailed as progress. A photo op is dressed up as peace. After Singapore in 2018, Washington waved around a few vague sentences and called it a breakthrough. There was no definition of denuclearization. No timeline. No verification. Pyongyang conceded nothing it could not reverse by lunchtime. We applauded anyway. North Korea learned, again, that a handshake buys time and relief.

Sanctions have the same whiplash. Right after a test, capitals thunder about “maximum pressure.” The UN tightens the screws. Then talks start and enforcement loosens. Trucks roll over the Yalu at night. Coal moves by ship-to-ship transfer. Chinese tourism resumes. Moscow shrugs at the UN. Western officials bite their tongues so the “positive atmosphere” survives. Pyongyang pockets the oxygen and lights another match when it suits.

Deterrence has drifted. To lure Kim to the table, allies paused major exercises. North Korea treated that as proof that threat works. Washington and Seoul have also sent mixed signals. One year the line is “strategic patience.” The next it is “fire and fury.” Then it is love letters. Kim studies our politics. He tests on anniversaries and transitions. He watches a president vow to “never allow” an ICBM and then do nothing when the launch occurs. He learns our red lines are erasable.

Wishful thinking does the rest. Well-meaning policymakers keep offering an “off-ramp” to normality. Build reactors in 1994. Send cash and factories under the Sunshine Policy. Offer a “bright future” if Kim disarms. The regime takes the money and tightens control at home. It builds ski resorts for elites and prisons for dissidents. It pockets hard currency from Kaesong while workers see a fraction. It learns that Western aid can fund repression as easily as reform. We pretend this time will be different. It never is.

The record is a string of soft landings for hard behavior. In 2008, North Korea won removal from the U.S. terror list for a flimsy declaration, then stonewalled and tested again. In 2012, the “Leap Day” deal promised a test moratorium for food aid. Weeks later Pyongyang launched a rocket and claimed a satellite exception. In 2018, summits paused ICBM and nuclear tests while shorter-range missiles multiplied and fissile material stocks grew. The liaison office built by Seoul as a symbol of goodwill was blown up on camera in 2020. Message received.

This pattern is a symptom of a larger delusion. After the Cold War, many in the West convinced themselves that every conflict had a diplomatic exit if we just tried hard enough. That no regime would choose isolation over prosperity forever. That we were always one summit away from sanity. North Korea thrives on that story. The Kim dynasty wants a permanent enemy to justify permanent tyranny. It wants a permanent arsenal to guarantee survival. It likes the leverage of threat. It likes the spotlight. It will not trade those for World Bank seminars.

Our inconsistency also echoes far beyond Pyongyang. When we bless a thin deal as success and ease pressure for optics, others notice. Hamas notices. Beijing notices. Tehran notices. Moscow notices. They learn that a U.S. administration can be satisfied with symbols. They learn that a “red line” may be a press release. They learn that Western deterrence can be negotiated by narrative.

For three decades North Korea has used our hope as a weapon. It has turned paper promises into cash and time. It has taught a master class in exploiting a “holiday from history.” The lesson is not that diplomacy is useless. It is that diplomacy without leverage is charity, and charity to a mafia is tribute. End the tribute. Bring back leverage. Then talk. And judge those talks by what is dismantled, not by what is announced.

Chapter 16: America’s Drift

The Cold War gave America strategic clarity. George Kennan’s doctrine of containment defined the Soviet Union as the paramount threat to freedom, and Washington built everything around that premise. NATO, founded in 1949, bound the free world to U.S. leadership. Tens of thousands of American soldiers stood watch in West Germany, South Korea, and Japan. The presence was physical, visible, and credible.

Statecraft blended principle and pragmatism. The Marshall Plan revived Europe and knit together an alliance of democracies. U.S. support rebuilt Japan, creating the foundation for a Pacific system that still exists. Allies trusted America because they saw it put skin in the game—money, soldiers, ships.

The arsenal matched the mission. The Navy kept the seas open, the Air Force sustained fleets of bombers and missiles, and the nuclear triad promised devastating retaliation if Moscow crossed the line. Defense spending reflected public acceptance of sacrifice. In the Korean War years, the U.S. devoted over 10 percent of GDP to defense. Even in the 1980s, after decades of grinding containment, America still spent 6–7 percent. Today’s 3–4 percent looks modest by comparison.

Leaders also framed the struggle in moral terms. Truman’s pledge to support “free peoples resisting subjugation,” Kennedy’s vow to “bear any burden,” Reagan’s blunt description of the USSR as an “evil empire”—these were not throwaway lines. They cast the Cold War as a moral fight, not a mere chess match of great powers. That moral clarity sustained public will through the Berlin Airlift, Vietnam, and the arms race. Americans accepted the draft, higher taxes, and even civil defense drills because they understood the cause and the cost.

This combination—defined adversary, credible force, trusted alliances, and moral framing—anchored U.S. power. The “arsenal of democracy” was more than a slogan; it was a system, industrial and political, designed to surge when needed. The contrast with the decades that followed is stark. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, America’s clarity bled away. The drift since then stands out because the baseline of the Cold War was so sharp, so focused, so unified.

With the Soviet collapse, America traded clarity for complacency. Leaders convinced themselves that history had turned a corner, that war among great powers was over. Washington spoke of a “peace dividend,” and the military was gutted to cash it in.

Defense spending fell from roughly 6 percent of GDP in the late Cold War to barely 3 percent by decade’s end—the lowest in modern times. The Army dropped from 18 divisions in 1990 to 10 by 1996. Reagan’s dream of a 600-ship Navy shrank toward 300. The Air Force and Navy retired fleets of fighters without buying replacements. Base closures rolled through round after round of BRAC. Procurement slowed to a crawl. It was a holiday from hard power.

The industrial base, once the arsenal of democracy, withered. Tomahawk cruise missiles and Stingers stopped rolling off assembly lines. Fighter production lines shut down as the Air Force lost interest in new F-15s and F-16s. Major contractors merged to survive lean years, leaving fewer suppliers. By 2000, the average U.S. fighter was over twenty years old, and much of the Navy still sailed ships launched in the 1970s. America was burning through Cold War stockpiles while betting that no serious challenger would emerge.

The drift was not just material but intellectual. The 1990s were the decade of “end of history” triumphalism. Markets and democracy were supposed to march inexorably across the globe. Policy followed that script. China was given permanent normal trade relations and ushered into the WTO. Russia was bankrolled with Western aid and treated as a partner in a “new world order.” The wager was that prosperity would soften dictatorships faster than armored divisions ever could.

Faith in international law and multilateralism soared. Arms control treaties multiplied. U.S. officials celebrated the Chemical Weapons Convention and pushed nonproliferation regimes. Clinton’s foreign policy spoke of “enlargement”—expanding the democratic market order—and treated old-fashioned great-power rivalry as extinct. In that mood, it was easy to believe the UN, global courts, and “coalitions of the willing” could police the remaining trouble spots: terrorism, rogue states, ethnic wars.

The prevailing attitude could be summed up as: markets will tame Moscow and Beijing. Why maintain heavy divisions in Europe when McDonald’s and oil pipelines would knit East and West together? Why fund new missile defenses when trading partners were presumed friends in the making?

This mindset demobilized the nation both militarily and mentally. On the surface, America in the 1990s looked untouchable. Underneath, vulnerabilities accumulated while new threats stirred. The long peace was never as solid as it seemed.

September 11, 2001 ended America’s post-Cold War holiday. For a brief moment, clarity returned. The enemy was Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. The mission was to destroy them. The public rallied, NATO invoked Article V for the first time, and within weeks the Taliban were toppled and Al Qaeda’s camps leveled. It looked like decisive action had worked.

Then the mission sprawled. Instead of declaring victory and leaving, Washington stayed to remake Afghanistan. Counter-terrorism became counter-insurgency, then nation-building. Hunting terrorists morphed into reforming Afghan politics, building an army, even crafting social policy. Allies grew wary, insurgents regrouped, and the war slid into a grinding stalemate.

Iraq made the overreach worse. In 2003, the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein in three weeks and proclaimed “mission accomplished.” But disbanding the Iraqi army and purging officials fueled insurgency and sectarian violence. By 2004, American troops were battling militias and suicide bombers in Baghdad and Fallujah. The 2007 surge stabilized things briefly, but the full withdrawal in 2011 left a vacuum. ISIS filled it, and by 2014 the U.S. was bombing Iraq again.

The cost was staggering. Over 6,000 Americans killed, tens of thousands wounded, trillions spent. Equipment wore out. Helicopters, armored vehicles, rifles, and entire formations ran to the ground in endless deployments. Billions went to mine-resistant trucks and body armor while future programs—stealth fighters, next-gen ships, missile defense—were shelved. The Air Force stopped the F-22 line at 187 planes, convinced counter-terrorism, not dogfights, was the future. The Army trained to police villages rather than fight peer adversaries.

At home, unity fractured. The Iraq invasion’s failed WMD premise bred cynicism. By 2006 most Americans called the war a mistake. Even Afghanistan, once the “good war,” bled public patience. Anti-war politicians rode the backlash. “Nation-building at home” became a rallying cry.

By the 2010s, exhaustion defined U.S. strategy. America had proved it could crush regimes in weeks. It had also proved it could not sustain decade-long occupations without bleeding its forces and fracturing its politics. Reluctance set in. The U.S. hesitated to commit troops anywhere new. Adversaries noticed—and began testing the limits of American will.

By the 2010s, America’s hesitation was flashing across the world like a warning light. Adversaries read it as opportunity. Allies read it as doubt.

Take Syria in 2013. President Obama said chemical weapons were a “red line.” Assad crossed it with sarin gas in Damascus, killing more than a thousand civilians. U.S. forces were poised to strike. Then Washington pulled back, accepting a Russian-brokered deal instead. Diplomats called it a success. To allies, it looked like retreat. France had fighters in the air, waiting for American leadership. Instead, they were left hanging. In Moscow, Putin saw a chance and stepped in as Assad’s patron. Within two years, Russian warplanes were bombing Syria. The lesson was obvious: U.S. warnings could be bluffed aside.

Then came Ukraine in 2014. Russia seized Crimea, lit the Donbas on fire, and dared the West to stop it. Washington imposed sanctions but withheld weapons. No Javelins, no real deterrent. Sanctions bit, but not enough to reverse aggression. The message was that the U.S. would punish but not fight for a non-ally. For Putin, it was confirmation that small bites could go unchallenged. The bite turned into a feast in 2022.

The Kabul withdrawal in 2021 sent the clearest signal of all. The Taliban swept into the capital as American helicopters lifted off rooftops. Afghan allies clung to planes and fell from the sky. NATO partners fumed that Washington had barely consulted them. British MPs called it betrayal. In Beijing, propaganda outlets taunted Taiwan: “This is your future.” The images mattered more than the arguments about ending a long war. What the world saw was chaos, abandonment, and the enemy parading with U.S. rifles.

Even quieter signals mattered. By the time Russia launched its full invasion of Ukraine in 2022, America’s vaunted arsenal of democracy was struggling to keep pace. Stocks of Stingers and 155mm shells ran low. Factories that once churned out tens of thousands of rounds a month were down to a trickle. Critical supply chains had withered. The U.S. could still supply Kyiv—but only while scrambling to rebuild its own capacity. Adversaries took note: America’s will might still be there, but its muscle had grown thin.

By the early 2020s, the pattern was unmistakable. Red lines blurred and disappeared. Commitments seemed conditional, short-lived. Capability lagged behind rhetoric. Allies asked whether Washington would truly stand firm. Adversaries gambled that it would not. And they did not have to wait long to test it.

Iran has tested U.S. resolve with remarkable confidence. Its Revolutionary Guards arm Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis with rockets and drones. Those drones have struck Saudi oil fields and international shipping, while militias fire at American bases with little fear of reprisal. On the nuclear file, Tehran enriched uranium well past agreed limits, inching toward weapons-grade with little more than Western hand-wringing in response. Its hostage diplomacy has worked too—foreign citizens seized, then traded for cash or prisoners. The absence of decisive pushback has taught the mullahs that Washington is desperate to avoid new Middle East fights.

North Korea has taken its share as well. Kim Jong Un tested ICBMs that can reach American cities, fired missiles over Japan, and openly expanded his arsenal. When Washington was distracted in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Ukraine, Pyongyang used the breathing space to perfect its weapons. Now it even trades shells to Russia for help of its own, shrugging off U.N. sanctions that no one bothers to enforce.

These regimes are not bound by treaty, but their actions rhyme. They prefer a world where the U.S. is checked and their regional ambitions run free. They study each other’s defiance, share cover at the U.N., and quietly prop one another up—Chinese purchases of Russian oil, Iranian drones over Ukraine, North Korean munitions for Moscow’s war. Together they stretch American bandwidth across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, betting that the superpower cannot answer all at once.

The result is a chorus of opportunism: Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang advancing in step, if not in formal alliance. They are probing every seam of the order the West once assumed permanent. They know a superpower cannot lead by looking backward. So they are driving straight through the gaps America has left open.

Of course these gaps aren’t only about Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran. It’s also about Washington.

Polarization and procedural chaos have hollowed out the steadiness a great power needs. Long wars demand long focus; we’ve delivered whipsaw and gridlock. Allies notice. So do enemies.

The policy churn is constant. One administration signs a major deal; the next torches it. The Iran nuclear accord was inked in 2015 and abandoned in 2018. The Trans-Pacific Partnership was negotiated as the economic pillar in Asia and then dropped on day one. NATO is dismissed as “obsolete,” then praised as “indispensable” the next year. This zigzag tells friends to hedge and adversaries to wait us out. Even support to frontline partners now gets dragged into partisan trench warfare. Aid to Ukraine went from consensus in 2022 to bargaining chip in 2023. The message abroad: our commitments can flip with the news cycle.

Congressional dysfunction makes it worse. Shutdown roulette and month-to-month “continuing resolutions” keep the Pentagon stuck in last year’s plan, unable to start new programs or shift money to urgent needs.

Meanwhile, the arsenal of democracy let its toolroom rust. After the Cold War, production lines slowed or died. Many never came back. Today, too many supply chains rest on one foundry, one chemical plant, one machine shop. Many times, they rely on something outside our borders. Surge capacity? Thin. It turns out you can’t reconstitute an industrial base with a press release.

After twenty years of counterinsurgency, a recession, and a political knife fight without end, the country’s appetite for long, hard projects has thinned. Fewer citizens serve. Fewer engineers remember Apollo. Too many executives treat national power as someone else’s problem.

Yes, our innovators still produce miracles—AI, software, space launch—but the Pentagon still buys like it’s 1998. Requirements take years; by award time the tech is obsolete. “Checks and balances” to prevent waste have morphed into paralysis that kills speed—which, in a contest with Iran or China, is its own form of waste.

This isn’t terminal. The United States still has the capital, the talent, the allies, and the legal order that lets free people build at scale. We can fix the budget farce, lock in multiyear procurement, expand shipyards, reopen energetics plants, clear the clearance backlog, and make it easier for cutting-edge firms to sell to the warfighter in months, not years. We can restore predictability to foreign policy by anchoring key commitments in law and broad coalitions, not in press statements.

We can choose to treat defense production like a strategic industry again, not a hobby that resumes only after a crisis.

Strip away the handwringing and one fact remains: when the United States leads with clarity, the free world holds the line.

The dollar still sets the rules of trade and banking. When the U.S. Treasury designates a bank or a regime, the world’s compliance officers jump. That leverage pinches aggressors far beyond what any single ally could do. Pair it with American signals and cyber intelligence, shared in real time, and you get a force multiplier. Kyiv’s air defenders and European governments did not guess Russian plans; they were told.

Then there is the glue. Coalitions are hard. The U.S. makes them stick. NATO works not only because Europe is capable, but because Washington is the anchor that keeps thirty capitals aligned when the siren songs start. After 2022, a firm American stance catalyzed Germany’s pivot, hardened the East, and focused the rest. In Asia, the same pattern holds. When the U.S. reassures Tokyo, Seoul, Canberra, Manila, and lines up the Quad and AUKUS, Beijing thinks twice. When that reassurance wobbles, partners hedge or arm in lonely ways that make the region less stable. Convening power is not a slogan; it’s the ability to get twenty defense ministers on a secure call tonight and have ships moving tomorrow.

None of that works without a moral center. At our best we speak plainly about right and wrong and then act in ways that match the words.

Yes, our record is uneven. Allies remember Kabul’s chaos and Syria’s erased red line. They also see what happens when the U.S. gets it right: firm lines, steady supply, coherent diplomacy, and the patience to outlast a bully. That combination is rare. No other state can substitute for it.

The world of 2025 is not forgiving. Russia is openly revisionist. China is impatient. Iran and North Korea sell menace by the kilogram.

Part Four: The New Weapons of Conquest

Chapter 17: Terror as Theatre

Terrorism is never random. It is staged violence, scripted to shock, recorded to spread, and performed for an audience far larger than those who fall under the bullets or bombs. A plane driven into the Twin Towers. Hamas gunmen live-streaming the murder of Israeli families on October 7. These are not just attacks; they are productions designed to hijack the world’s attention.

Jihadist groups understand they cannot defeat Western armies in open battle. Their power lies in spectacle. Each assault is crafted to command headlines, fracture societies, and pressure governments. The metric of success is not ground gained but minds unsettled: how many millions watched, how many panicked, how many politicians blinked.

The theater has evolved. Early terrorists often wanted attention more than mass casualties. Today’s jihadists want both. The Islamic State’s beheading videos in 2014 were propaganda as much as execution. Hamas planned its October 7 massacre for a Jewish holiday and the Yom Kippur War anniversary, knowing history would magnify the resonance. The Mumbai gunmen in 2008 moved hostages based on live TV coverage, prolonging the drama. ISIS attacks in Paris and Brussels deliberately struck crowded nightlife spots at peak hours, ensuring a captive global audience.

Spectacle works. It multiplies fear beyond the crime scene. Parents in Moscow, concertgoers in Manchester, commuters in Madrid—all imagined themselves next. This erosion of normalcy corrodes trust in government protection and fuels suspicion between neighbors. At the same time, among sympathizers, every atrocity becomes proof of divine favor, an advertisement for recruitment and donations. A single GoPro clip can inspire thousands.

The West often responds poorly, falling back on clichés: “senseless violence,” “mindless crime.” But there is nothing senseless here. The violence is calculated, its broadcast meticulously planned. Terror as theater is communication by massacre. The true battlefield is not just the street or the school but the screen—and the narrative that follows.

That is why we must stop misdiagnosing it as chaos. It is organized war by other means, with cameras rolling and audiences watching. Pretending otherwise only leaves us unprepared for the next act.

If terror is theater, Iran is its largest producer and director. For four decades, the Islamic Republic has armed and trained a cast of proxies to carry its script abroad: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Shi‘ite militias in Iraq and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen. The Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force bankrolls and equips them, turning what might be ragtag cells into disciplined militias with arsenals many states would envy. The result is industrialized terror—quasi-armies designed not to win battles outright but to perform chaos on cue.

Hezbollah is Iran’s crown jewel. Born in the 1980s with Guard support, it has become the most heavily armed non-state actor on earth. In 2006 it fired nearly 4,000 rockets into Israeli cities in a month, forcing millions into shelters. Today it holds more than 100,000 rockets and precision missiles—enough to overwhelm air defenses and blanket Israel’s cities in fire. Hezbollah’s goal in any future war is not conquest but trauma: millions of Israelis under bombardment, the world glued to screens showing sirens and rubble.

In Gaza, Iran has invested in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, supplying money, designs, and technical aid. Thousands of rockets have been churned out locally, often hidden under schools and hospitals. Hamas fires from civilian neighborhoods precisely so Israel’s counterstrikes will generate the grisly footage it needs—collapsed buildings, crying children, funerals. The goal is the inversion of reality: Hamas provokes, hides behind civilians, then parades their deaths as “Israeli aggression.” Cameras are as essential as launchers.

In Yemen, Iran transformed the Houthis from local rebels into a missile and drone power. They have struck Saudi oil plants, airports, and even U.S. ships. One drone fire at an oil facility can shake global energy markets. In 2023, as Israel fought Hamas, the Houthis expanded the stage further, attacking Red Sea shipping and forcing American destroyers into live intercepts. A Yemeni militia, directed by Tehran, was suddenly threatening global trade.

Iran teaches its proxies not just how to fire weapons but how to choreograph the aftermath.

Hezbollah runs its own TV network; Hamas its social media brigades. Rocket stockpiles are placed under apartment blocks, tunnels dug under hospitals. If civilians die—and many do—that carnage is pre-scripted into the performance. The intended headline is never “terrorists use human shields,” but “Israel massacres innocents.” And too often, the global press obliges.

Iran and its clients cannot defeat Israel, Saudi Arabia, or the United States outright. But they can raise the costs of self-defense until coalitions fracture. If Israel strikes Hezbollah, a hurricane of rockets rains down. If Riyadh resists Tehran, oil infrastructure burns. If America intervenes, its warships are suddenly under fire in crowded shipping lanes. The point is to make counterterrorism too politically and economically expensive, forcing ceasefires that leave the proxies intact.

The 2006 Lebanon war revealed the method. Hezbollah provoked, Israel retaliated, Hezbollah survived. Civilians on both sides suffered, but Hezbollah claimed a “divine victory” simply by firing until the ceasefire. Strategically it lost ground; perceptually it won stature across the Arab world. Iran studied the lesson well: survival and spectacle can outweigh battlefield reality.

State sponsorship means bigger budgets, better weapons, professional direction, and diplomatic cover. The Guards coordinate from Tehran to Beirut, Gaza, and Sana’a, ensuring the show runs on multiple stages at once. Iran has built not just a terror network but a long-running production company—its proxies rehearsed, armed, and ready to perform on command.

While Iran runs a centralized empire of proxies, ISIS built something different: a brand. At its height in 2014, the so-called caliphate declared itself the center of global jihad and immediately franchised its flag. Local militants from Sinai to Nigeria rebranded themselves as “provinces,” gaining the cachet of the ISIS name in exchange for loyalty, spectacle, and a cut of propaganda airtime.

The model was cheap and effective. A Sinai insurgent group became ISIS-Sinai. Boko Haram split, with one faction swearing allegiance as ISIS-West Africa. Fighters in Mozambique, the Sahel, and the Philippines followed suit. Each remained locally rooted, but under a shared logo of brutality. A massacre in Nigeria or a church bombing in Mindanao could be broadcast worldwide as proof the caliphate lived on.

ISIS offered what these groups craved: a grand narrative, a sense of belonging to something larger than their own quarrels, and access to the slickest propaganda machine in jihadist history. The “central office” in Raqqa churned out videos and magazines that magnified even minor attacks. A guerrilla raid in the desert could suddenly become part of a global holy war.

The playbook was consistent. Pledge allegiance. Stage a bloody spectacle. Record it. Survive the retaliation. Repeat. In 2015, ISIS’s Sinai affiliate bombed a Russian airliner, killing 224 tourists. In 2017, its fighters held Marawi, a Philippine city of 200,000, under siege for months. In West Africa, ISIS’s branch turned Boko Haram’s local carnage into a multi-state insurgency that still bleeds Nigeria and its neighbors.

Franchising worked best in weak states—places where corruption, poverty, and ethnic strife already burned. ISIS poured its ideology onto these embers, and the fire spread. Even after the caliphate’s territory was destroyed in 2019 and Baghdadi was killed, its branches kept fighting. They need little more than a signal of approval and access to encrypted apps. The hydra lives on.

For the West, the effect is exhausting. Intelligence services must track not one terror group but dozens of semi-autonomous cells scattered across continents. There is no single headquarters to destroy, no leader whose death ends the story. Each time one front goes quiet, another flares—Niger, London, Kabul. The show keeps running because the franchise model guarantees a steady stream of spectacles.

That is the genius, and the curse, of ISIS’s brand: it multiplies terror at low cost, sustaining the illusion of ubiquity. Even in defeat, it projects menace. It leaves free societies reacting to the script, stagehands in someone else’s theater of war.

And by any cost-benefit measure, terror pays. Al-Qaeda spent about half a million dollars on 9/11; the attacks cost America trillions and nearly 3,000 lives. In 2023, Hamas sent a few hundred fighters across Israel’s border and ignited a regional war. A tiny investment produced outsized havoc. For groups that cannot win in open battle, the logic is irresistible.

But terror endures not only because of its efficiency. It thrives on how democracies react. Open societies, bound by law and public opinion, often respond in ways that encourage more violence. Leaders treat each attack like a crime scene, tighten airport security, and vow to “bring perpetrators to justice.” All necessary, but inadequate. Terror is not crime; it is war by design, part of a transnational movement that shifts tactics as soon as defenses adapt.

At times, democracies even reward violence without meaning to. In 2011, Israel freed more than a thousand prisoners to bring home one soldier, Gilad Shalit. The humanitarian impulse was noble; the strategic message was disastrous. Hamas learned that kidnapping works. In 2023, it abducted around 200 hostages, confident Israel would be pressed into a deal. It was right: Hamas gained time, propaganda, and bargaining chips.

Ceasefires create another perverse incentive. Militants fire the first shots, provoke retaliation, then hide behind international calls to “stop the fighting.” Wars in Gaza and Lebanon repeatedly end before the terrorist leadership is crushed. Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in multiple rounds since have survived, declared “victory,” and rearmed for the next war. The lesson is clear: start a fight, endure until the world intervenes, live to fight again.

The “proportionality” debate compounds the problem. Terrorists launch massacres from civilian areas; when democracies respond, civilian casualties follow. Cameras roll, outrage shifts from the massacre to the counterstrike, and pressure mounts on the defender to hold back. Israel has seen this cycle repeatedly: external calls for restraint stop campaigns short of eliminating Hamas. Half-finished wars guarantee the next one.

Safe havens further insulate terror. Al-Qaeda had Taliban Afghanistan. Hamas entrenched itself in Gaza. Hezbollah runs southern Lebanon as a state-within-a-state. ISIS offshoots exploit lawless corners of Africa and Asia. Behind them stand patrons: Iran arming Hezbollah and Hamas, Pakistan shielding the Taliban. Borders and sovereignty give these groups the space to recover. Western armies rarely pursue them into every sanctuary. Survival becomes regeneration.

Finally, terrorists exploit the very virtues of democracy. Western militaries hesitate to strike hospitals or apartments—so jihadists put their rockets there. Free societies allow open platforms—so extremists broadcast propaganda globally. Rule-of-law states investigate their own soldiers—so militants file false atrocity claims to tie them up. Terrorists ignore every norm and pay no price. The asymmetry erodes will, which is precisely the point.

Indulging terror—whether with lopsided swaps, premature ceasefires, or rhetorical hedging—only guarantees more of it.

Modern jihadist terror is not “senseless.” It is a calculated performance aimed at our minds and our decisions. It feeds on attention, exploits restraint, and waits for us to blink. To defeat it, we must stop playing along.

Chapter 18: Demographics as Strategy

The West once convinced itself that demography had ceased to matter. Migration was treated as enrichment, birth rates as trivia, and assimilation as automatic. That holiday from history is over. In the 21st century, fertility, migration, and settlement patterns have become weapons—quieter than tanks, but no less powerful. Numbers don’t carry passports, but they do carry politics.

Arithmetic rules. A community that grows faster than its neighbors eventually shapes the culture, the law, and the ballot box. In France, one out of five births today is to an immigrant mother. In England and Wales, roughly a third of babies are born to mothers from abroad. In Frankfurt, two-thirds of children now have at least one foreign-born parent. Classrooms foreshadow politics: the composition of maternity wards today is the composition of parliaments tomorrow.

Immigration compounds the trend by skewing age structures. A graying Europe admits migrants in their twenties; the math guarantees more children sooner. That influx can fill jobs and pay pensions—but it also shifts the cultural center of gravity. In London, Paris, Brussels, Malmö, and Rotterdam, the youngest cohorts are already majority-minority. These kids will vote, protest, and define the mainstream in a single generation.

The strain is visible. Schools stretch budgets for language and remedial programs. Police confront gang activity among alienated youth. Housing and healthcare systems creak under pressure. None of this is destiny; gradual change can be managed. But when numbers move faster than institutions—or faster than the national story about identity—politics fractures.

Demography also redraws maps. In Birmingham, mosque councils now carry as much political weight as trade unions once did. In Brussels, Muslim voters can tip local elections and set municipal agendas. In Rotterdam, Turkish and Moroccan immigrants even formed their own national party. Mainstream parties adjust, softening rhetoric on foreign policy or religious accommodation. Meanwhile, regions left behind—French towns hollowed by youth flight, German provinces with stagnant economies—swing hard to populist, anti-immigration movements. Numbers don’t just shift culture; they flip constituencies.

And this is only what happens when change is organic. When intent is added, the effect accelerates. States and movements have learned that people can be used as instruments. Mass migration, high birth rates, and tightly knit enclaves can achieve what armies cannot: control of territory, institutions, and law. It is cheaper to send people than tanks, and harder for democracies to resist.

Precision matters. “No-go zone” is a caricature, but “areas of parallel authority” are real. In parts of Western Europe, local leaders enforce religious rules that contradict secular law. In others, police tread lightly or not at all. These are not accidents of diversity. They are the product of demographic weight leveraged into political clout.

Numbers shape power, and power shapes nations. If left unmanaged—or deliberately manipulated—they can transform a society in a generation. The next sections trace how waves of migration, communal enclaves, and explicit calls for demographic jihad have been wielded as strategy. Quietly, quickly, and often under the guise of compassion, numbers have become one of the most effective weapons of our time.

Europe briefly woke from its slumber in 2015. More than a million people crossed its borders in two years. They came by dinghy and footpath from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa. The moral impulse to shelter the persecuted was real. So was the policy improvisation. Processing collapsed. Camps meant for weeks became semi-permanent. Young men vanished into gray markets. Families arrived later under reunion rules and quietly doubled the numbers. What began as one million edged toward two.

People do not disperse evenly. They cluster where rents are lower and kin networks exist. Paris’s Seine–Saint-Denis. Brussels’s Molenbeek. Malmö’s Rosengård. Berlin’s Neukölln. East London. These districts filled fast. Shops switched languages. Satellite dishes faced Ankara and Damascus. Mosques, ethnic associations, and fixers became the main interface with daily life. The state receded into paperwork and waiting rooms. Diversity can be vibrant. Without integration, it calcifies into parallel society.

A parallel society runs on its own norms while the national framework fades. It starts as mutual aid. It becomes an infrastructure. In London, Sharia councils have mediated family disputes for years. In parts of Germany, clan “peace judges” settle feuds. Mosque networks offer after-school care, charity, even neighborhood watch. None of this is illegal on its face. The problem is substitution. If residents trust the enclave’s mechanisms more than courts, the rule of law becomes optional.

Sometimes the challenge is overt. In Wuppertal, Salafists in orange vests declared a “Sharia-police” zone and lectured youths on dress and nightlife. No knives. No beer. German prosecutors hesitated. Was it a crime to patrol with pamphlets? After an acquittal and public outrage, a retrial yielded a slap on the wrist. The lesson landed anyway: a parallel moral authority tested the state and found it slow and unsure.

Policing adapts, then retreats. In “sensitive zones” of France or “especially vulnerable areas” of Sweden, officers roll heavier and later. Ambulances wait for escorts. Fire crews face bottles. No interior ministry will publish a “no-go” map. Talk to street cops and they will describe “problem districts” where single-unit patrols do not enter after dark. That is contested sovereignty, meter by meter.

Security spillovers follow. Several November 2015 Paris attackers grew up in Molenbeek. Salah Abdeslam hid there for weeks. Neighbors did not call. Fear, sympathy, or indifference—pick your explanation. The effect is the same. A terrorist vanishes in the capital of the European Union thanks to social cover. Similar clusters appeared in the Toulouse banlieues, in Birmingham, and in Berlin’s Salafi circles. Intelligence services mark the dots. The dots overlap with the same neighborhoods officials insist are simply “diverse.”

Organized crime feeds on the same ecology. Lebanese and Kurdish clan networks in Germany built empires of shisha bars, extortion, and cash businesses. They enforced contracts with cousins, not courts. Witnesses stayed quiet. Berlin police finally raided villas and seized Ferraris owned by men listed as unemployed. They also found how long the state had looked away.

This is not about caricatures of “Sharia mini-states.” It is about a real loss of state presence and trust in slices of major cities. Alarmists exaggerate. Apologists deny. Both are wrong. Parallel societies exist. They are fertile ground for radicals, enforcers, and foreign patrons. Europe learned that during the 2015 wave and then chose, in many circles, to talk about anything else.

Parallel societies do not stay neutral. They import foreign feuds. They pressure host norms. They bend local politics. The next section shows how transplanted tribalism—Turk versus Kurd, Sunni versus Shi’a, Islamist agitators versus liberal Muslims—now plays out on Western streets. When the state yields space, someone fills it.

Tribalism Transplanted

Berlin on referendum day: Turkish flags draped from balconies, convoys honking for Erdoğan, Kurds counter-protesting with their own banners. Police in the middle. That scene has played out more than once. The Turkish–Kurdish feud did not stay in Anatolia; it re-planted itself in Germany. In 2017 German authorities even barred Turkish ministers from campaigning, fearing clashes. Street fights still broke out in Cologne and Frankfurt. When Ankara bombs Kurds in Syria, diaspora Kurds march in Europe, and nationalists confront them. Local police end up refereeing someone else’s war.

The Sunni–Shi’a divide has followed too. Britain hosts large Pakistani and Indian Muslim populations. Abroad, sectarian violence in Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan rippled into the diaspora. Ashura marches in London and Birmingham are sometimes harassed by Sunni hardliners. Online militants even call Shi’a mosques “legitimate targets.” Actual bloodshed has been rare, but the threat is enough to rattle communities and police alike.

In French banlieues, North Africans and sub-Saharans clash over housing, council seats, or street turf. Old colonial hierarchies re-emerge. In Spanish migrant camps and Italian street markets, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, or Maghrebis have fought over jobs and corners. Immigration does not erase old tensions; it imports them.

Money and media keep the links alive. Remittances flow not only to families but to clerics, factions, even militants. Diaspora Turks fund Ankara-aligned groups or Gülenist opposition. Tamil émigrés once bankrolled the Tamil Tigers from London and Toronto. British Shi’a send donations to Najaf or Qom. At the same time, satellite TV and YouTube preachers ensure a young man in Malmö can still be radicalized by Cairo’s controversies or Karachi’s sectarian vitriol.

Mayors face pressure to raise foreign flags, pass BDS motions, or declare solidarity with faraway causes. In Brussels, Moroccan-origin politicians push to recognize Islamic holidays in schools. In London, pro-Palestinian groups forge alliances with left-wing NGOs, turning a regional grievance into a campus battleground over “colonialism.” Turkish and Kurdish lobbies compete for influence. Activists repackage sectarian or ethnic agendas as universal “rights” claims and recruit local allies who often miss the endgame.

Wuppertal’s “Sharia Patrol” in 2014—men in orange vests declaring a “Sharia-controlled zone”—copied Saudi and Taliban morality squads and forced Germany to assert that only secular law governs the street. Kurdish–Turkish clashes in Stuttgart and Hannover during Turkey’s Afrin campaign required riot police. In London, Sunni petitions tried to ban Ashura parades. In Paris in 2014, pro-Palestinian demonstrators besieged a synagogue while worshippers barricaded inside. In 2016 in Normandy, two ISIS-inspired youths slit a priest’s throat at the altar. These were not isolated; they were echoes of imported tribal conflicts erupting on European soil.

The results are predictable. Communities under pressure close ranks, hardening parallel societies. The broader public watches foreign flags flying in their squares and wonders whether integration has failed. Populists seize the imagery: “They fight their wars here because they are not really part of us.” That spiral of mistrust feeds itself—minorities withdraw, majorities resent, the state looks feeble.

Numbers do not just change neighborhoods. They bend politics, law, and identity. When rival tribes settle in the same cities but play by imported loyalties, the host nation ends up an unwilling stage for someone else’s conflict. The next step is sharper still: when demographic change is not just organic but weaponized, when birthrates and migration are turned into tools of conquest. That is where the story goes next.

Demography as Jihad

Islamists themselves have said the quiet part out loud. They write about hijra and fertility as tools of conquest. They preach patient penetration of Western institutions. They call it duty. We should take them at their word.

Hijra matters. In Islam’s history it is the Prophet’s flight from Mecca to Medina and the birth of a polity. Modern Islamists recast it as a strategy for the West: move, embed, do not assimilate, build parallel authority, shift the law over time. The target is not private faith. The target is the liberal order.

The Muslim Brotherhood has long pushed da’wa and community capture in non-Muslim lands. Its 1991 memorandum, found in the United States, spoke plainly of “civilization jihad” to undermine Western systems from within. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s star cleric, predicted Islam would “return to Europe as a conqueror,” not by the sword but by proselytization and ideas. The plan is gradual. The objective is political.

Autocrats and strongmen have joined the chorus. Erdoğan told Turks in Germany that “assimilation is a crime against humanity.” In 2017 he told Turks in Europe to “have five children,” and declared “you are Europe’s future.” He backs the line with hard power: the Diyanet funds mosques across Europe, appoints imams, and mobilizes voters for Ankara. Loyalty is exported with the passport.

States also weaponize migration. In 2021 Belarus flew in Middle Eastern migrants and shoved them at the Polish and Lithuanian borders to punish EU sanctions. Guards forced families toward the fence and blocked their return. The point was chaos and leverage. Moscow looked on approvingly. During Russia’s Syria campaign, refugee flows toward Europe were a feature, not a bug.

Money is another vector. Qatar and other Gulf donors bankroll mosques and Islamic centers across Europe. The funding often brings imported imams and a conservative script. Sermons preach a transnational identity that resists integration. In France, investigators traced foreign cash to local associations that pushed illiberal norms. This is not charity. It is influence.

The push is legal as well as social. Brotherhood-linked NGOs campaign for shari’a “arbitration” in family law, for “religious hatred” statutes that chill speech, for blasphemy by another name. The method is familiar: frame concessions as civil rights, then demand the next concession. Step by step, one law for all gives way to many laws for many tribes.

Rhetoric does its own work. Radical preachers boast that Europe will be won by the womb. “They have one child, we have five.” The taunt fires up their base and provokes the far right, which then confirms the script by embracing its own replacement rant. The extremes feed each other and squeeze the liberal middle. Only one side, however, seeks to write religious law into European codes.

None of this indicts Muslims as such. Most came to escape tyrants and to build a normal life. Islam is not the enemy. Islamism is. It is the political program that rides on ordinary migration and hides behind rights language. It does not need secret meetings. It thrives in daylight, through councils, charities, and polite petitions that add up to parallel authority.

Other powers use people too. Russia hands out passports to ethnic Russians in neighbors, then claims a duty to “protect compatriots.” Belarus manufactures crises. China leans on diaspora networks for espionage and tech transfer. Demography is a tool in the kit.

Numbers bend norms. Then ballots, budgets, and by-laws start to move. That is the next phase: turning headcount into rules. If we refuse to see intent where ideologues declare it, we will wake up to a legal order we did not vote for. Time to stop pretending.

If the West wants to remain a liberal civilization, it needs to shift its mindset. Not purity. Not panic. Guardianship.

Start where every serious state starts: borders. A refugee policy without capacity is not compassion. It is bureaucracy feeding chaos. Set a yearly intake that matches housing, schools, and jobs. Move asylum decisions fast and clean. Protect the truly endangered within weeks. Return the ineligible within weeks. Strike repatriation deals and use them. Stop the Belarus model of “migrants as battering rams” by hardening frontiers, sharing watchlists, and helping transit states police smugglers. Control the gate or someone else will.

Let in fewer people than you can integrate and then integrate them. Language is not a lifestyle choice; it is civic oxygen. Tie residency extensions and benefits to demonstrated proficiency. Teach a common civic course that covers the constitution, equality before the law, free speech, and the country’s history without airbrushing. Require an oath for long-term residency, not only for citizenship. If community forums try to arbitrate criminal acts or bury domestic abuse, prosecute the organizers. Keep religious arbitration voluntary and confined to civil matters with informed consent. One secular law must govern the public square. That protects everyone, especially the weak.

Geography matters. Enclaves harden into parallel rule. You cannot order people to move, but you can stop building policy around concentrations. Assign public housing with diversity in mind. Site new reception centers where the social fabric can actually absorb them. Redraw school catchments so five-year-olds do not spend twelve years inside a linguistic silo. Improve transport so enclaves are not islands. Aim for everyday contact. Integration starts on playgrounds.

Security must be steady and visible. Put trained officers back on foot in the places where trust has collapsed. Keep them there. Target the gangs and clan networks that run protection rackets in the shadows. Seize assets. Fund witness protection so testimony survives. Protect synagogues, Jewish schools, churches, mosques, and community centers with professionalism, not theater. Monitor and disrupt Salafi recruitment and other extremist pipelines early, with counseling if possible and legal action if necessary. You either enforce the law everywhere or you teach citizens that the law is optional.

Rebuild cultural confidence. You cannot ask newcomers to respect a set of principles you are embarrassed to name. Teach the national story honestly. The triumphs of liberty and the failures of prejudice belong in the same lesson. That honesty earns the right to say: these are the non-negotiables. Free speech includes the right to offend religion. Men and women are equals in public life. There is one law for all. That is not exclusion. That is inclusion with a spine.

Celebrate the citizens who make this work. The Syrian doctor in Cologne. The Pakistani-British kids topping their exams in East London. Tell those stories often. They prove that loyalty is a choice and that the West’s civic creed can be shared by anyone who wants it. Then be clear about the other side of the ledger. If a resident agitates for the destruction of the constitutional order, tries to impose private coercion, or commits political violence, there are consequences. Loss of privileges. Prosecution. Deportation if not a citizen. Tolerating intolerance is not tolerance. It is suicide.

Budgets need to reflect reality. Fund language and civic training that actually delivers results. Resource police and intelligence so they can keep order without lurching from crisis to crisis. Audit grants so public money does not flow to front groups for extremism. Measure programs by outcomes, not press releases.

None of this requires cruelty. It requires clarity. Europe sleepwalked into a demographic revolution and then wondered why its laws bent and its politics snapped. It can still correct course.

Demography is a force. Policy decides whether it becomes a weapon. Islamists and authoritarians have used numbers to pry open our guardrails. Liberal democracies can strengthen freedom and shut the door on those who come to dominate it.

Next week is the hard end: lawfare, propaganda, and diplomatic deception—then the case study that ended the holiday in blood, and the choice that follows: guardianship or delusion.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

February Long Briefs = a four-part serialization of Holiday From History. This week is Part 2: the imperial afterlife—why borders hold on paper while peoples keep score in blood.
Full book: Holiday From History on Amazon

Shalom, friends.

Part 2 is structural history with direct operational implications: conquest patterns, post-empire fractures, and the durable loyalties Western policy keeps ignoring.

This installment explains why “nation-state” is often a veneer—why governance collapses into kinship, militia, and sect when pressure hits—and why that reality keeps defeating diplomatic language.

Holiday From History:

The West’s Delusion of Peace and the Return of War

Part Two: Empires and Their Ruins

Chapter 6: The First Conquests

By 600 CE, the Near East was a battlefield of two exhausted giants: Byzantium in the west and Persia in the east. They had just bled each other dry in a final war that ended in 628. Emperor Heraclius clawed out a victory, but the decades of fighting left both empires hollow. Bubonic plague had already torn through their populations. Economies were wrecked, armies thin, treasuries bare.

Byzantium looked mighty on a map, stretching from the Balkans to Egypt. Persia ruled from Mesopotamia to Central Asia. In truth, both were brittle. Byzantine Christians weren’t even united: Egyptian and Syrian believers resented Constantinople’s orthodoxy and taxation. Many saw imperial officials as occupiers. Persia had its own fractures—Zoroastrian in theory, but also home to large Christian and Jewish communities. Jews fared better there than under Byzantine rule, where persecution and forced conversion flared.

Both empires leaned on Arab allies to guard their frontiers. Byzantium had the Ghassanids in Syria. Persia had the Lakhmids in Iraq—until it foolishly dismantled that buffer in 602, just as new forces stirred beyond the desert.

Heraclius’s crowning moment came in 630, when he paraded the restored True Cross into Jerusalem. Yet only eight years later, that same city yielded to Arab Muslim armies. The reversal was shocking but not miraculous. Local populations, weary of Byzantine tax collectors and theological enforcers, often welcomed the new rulers. Arabs demanded less gold and, at first, showed little interest in dictating Christian doctrine. In Alexandria and Jerusalem, gates opened with barely a fight. A change of masters seemed better than more imperial fatigue.

The late antique order was not toppled by a blank-slate revolution. It was already fractured, waiting to be replaced. Arab conquerors did not build from nothing; they absorbed the machinery of Byzantium and Persia, retooled their hierarchies, and draped them in the language of revelation. Into a weary, divided world came a movement that claimed both divine sanction and political destiny.

The Arab conquests began at home. When Muhammad died in 632, Arabia was anything but united. Tribes that had pledged to him quickly bolted, some rallying to rival prophets. The first caliph, Abu Bakr, called it what it was—apostasy—and crushed the Ridda revolts without mercy. By 634, his armies had broken the back of tribal separatism. The Arabs, once fractured clans, were now welded into a single war machine bound by faith, plunder, and discipline.

Their eyes turned north. The Byzantine and Persian empires had just bled each other white. Into that exhaustion rode Arab generals, none more formidable than Khālid ibn al-Walīd. In 634, Muslim forces broke a Byzantine army at Ajnādayn in Palestine. Two years later, at the Yarmūk River, they destroyed Rome’s hold on Syria. That same year, Arab troops smashed the Persians at al-Qādisiyyah and stormed Ctesiphon, the jewel of the Sasanian kings. The Shahanshah fled; his empire began its death march.

The pace was relentless. Jerusalem surrendered in 638. Egypt slipped from Byzantine hands by 641. In 642, the Persians met the Arabs at Nihāwand—the “Victory of Victories” for Islam, the end for Sasanian Persia. Within a decade, Arab cavalry had raced from Libya to Afghanistan. By 650, a new superpower straddled the Mediterranean, the Nile, and the Oxus. Ancient empires collapsed; Arabia’s tribes now held the world by the throat.

Why did they succeed? Partly, the Arabs were hardened by desert war. Their mobility outmatched lumbering Byzantine legions and weary Persian garrisons. Their enemies were broken by decades of war and plague. But zeal alone doesn’t explain empire. Caliph ʿUmar built a state to sustain conquest. He created a register of warriors, paid them stipends from booty and new taxes, and bound their families’ fortunes to further expansion. Governors kept Byzantine and Persian bureaucrats in place, collecting taxes now for the caliph. Even coins were recycled, stamped with new inscriptions but carrying imperial weight. Faith and pragmatism worked hand in glove.

In a single generation, the Rashidun caliphs transformed Arabia from a marginal backwater into the center of a new order. Conquest was only the beginning; the next test would be turning victories into permanence, and revelation into rule.

Conquest wins land. Empire keeps it. The early caliphs understood that.

They parked the army in new garrison cities—Kufa and Basra in Iraq, Fustat in Egypt, later Kairouan in North Africa. These amṣār kept Arab troops concentrated and ready, while limiting friction with locals. ʿUmar made the pivotal call on land: don’t seize the farms; tax them. Christian and Zoroastrian cultivators stayed on their fields and paid kharāj. Revenue flowed. An Arab landlord class did not take root.

Administration was light and shrewd. Byzantine and Persian officials kept their jobs—now reporting to Muslim governors. Greek handled Syria. Pahlavi handled Iraq. Only later, under ʿAbd al-Malik, did Arabic become the state language. He minted a new Islamic coinage in the 690s, replacing crosses and fire-altars with Qur’anic text. Identity followed currency.

A bargain defined the social order. Non-Muslims—dhimmīs—kept life, property, and worship, paid the jizya poll tax (and usually kharāj), and stayed out of the army. Rates were fixed from older tax registers. In return, the state left communities to their bishops, patriarchs, and rabbis, who delivered taxes and discipline. It was hierarchy, not anarchy. And compared to late-antique extraction, many peasants found the burden lighter. The taxman often arrived faster than the preacher.

Law and rule grew together. Islamic jurisprudence formed over generations, but the spirit was there early. The so-called Pact of ʿUmar—likely compiled later, reflecting earlier practice—spelled out minority limits: no new churches, no loud bells, no bearing arms, distinct dress, deference in public. Protection, yes; equality, no. It set the tone for centuries of managed difference.

By the end of the first century of Arab rule, the outlines were clear: Arabic spreading as the imperial tongue; coinage and records marked by Islam; sharīʿa germinating as a universal law; a state that ran on taxes, not chaos. This was not a secular empire with a creed tacked on. It was an imperial system built around a faith—and built to last.

Order at the core did not dull the edge. The Caliphate kept pushing.

From Egypt, the Umayyads drove across Roman North Africa. Kairouan rose in 670 as a launchpad. Carthage fell and was razed in 698. Berber tribes converted (sometimes sincerely, sometimes not) and swelled the ranks. In 711 Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād crossed at Gibraltar. Visigothic Spain crumpled. Within years, al-Andalus was born. A Frankish victory at Tours in 732 checked further raiding north; the Pyrenees and the Atlantic drew a practical line. The Muslims consolidated in Iberia. Córdoba glittered.

Arab armies climbed into Armenia and pressed beyond the Oxus into Transoxiana. Qutayba ibn Muslim took Bukhara and Samarkand by 715, opening Silk Road arteries to the caliphs. In 751, at Talas, a Muslim-led force beat back a Tang Chinese expedition—securing Central Asia and (legend has it) paper-making tech. In the same pivotal year as Gibraltar, 711, Muḥammad ibn al-Qāsim entered Sindh, seized Debal, defeated Raja Dahir, and planted the first flag of Muslim rule in India’s northwest.

Constantinople remained the anvil that would not break. A long Arab pressure campaign (674–678) failed before Greek Fire. A massive siege in 717–718 failed again—winter, Bulgars, and Greek Fire shredded the army and fleet. The frontier settled into fortified districts and near-annual raids. The ribāṭ culture took hold: a militarized border where warriors pursued jihād against the Dār al-Ḥarb beyond. At sea, the balance shifted. After a naval win at the Battle of the Masts (655), Muslim fleets ranged Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, and Sicily. The Mediterranean ceased to be a Roman lake.

Rebuked at Constantinople or Tours, the caliphs turned elsewhere. For roughly a century, the default setting of the empire was advance.

For the conquered, daily life changed slowly, then decisively.

Jews often found early Islamic rule less hostile than Byzantium or Visigothic Spain. In 711, many in Iberia welcomed the Arabs after years of persecution. Across the caliphates, Jews became vital traders, physicians, translators. The Exilarch and rabbinic academies in Babylonia carried on; later, Baghdad’s community flourished. In al-Andalus, a fragile golden age produced statesmen and poets. Yet status remained dhimmī—taxed, constrained, contingent. Under the Almohads in the 12th century, the noose tightened: convert, flee, or die.

Christians endured in many forms. Copts in Egypt kept their church and identity even as Arabic replaced Coptic in administration and conversions mounted. Syriac Orthodox and the Church of the East persisted; the latter sent missionaries to China under Abbasid cover. Humiliations came with the status—distinct dress, quiet bells, no arms—and revolts brought crackdowns. In the Maghreb, Latin Christianity withered. Cut off and outnumbered, North Africa’s church largely vanished by the 12th century. Tolerance had limits; demographics and incentives did the rest.

Pushback never disappeared. Berber grievance exploded in the Great Revolt of 740, inspired by Khārijite zeal; Arab garrisons were massacred, breakaway imāmates rose in the Atlas, and Umayyad control frayed. Khārijite uprisings roiled Iraq and Persia. Byzantium stabilized after 718 and raided back when Muslim civil wars opened gaps. In Iberia, Pelayo’s stand at Covadonga seeded the Reconquista. Small at first, stubborn over time.

Identities bent, adapted, sometimes disappeared. Arabic spread; sharīʿa and tax defined hierarchy; conversion rewarded; resistance simmered. Memory kept score—especially among Christians. Those memories would fund future campaigns to take back what was lost—slowly in Spain, more dramatically with the Crusades. Conqueror and conquered were now bound: dominance, accommodation, and the promise of another round.

Historians have argued about the early Islamic conquests for a century. The chronicles praise divine favor and zeal. Modern scholars press harder. No single key fits the lock. Several do.

One school stresses hard facts on the ground. Patricia Crone and Michael Cook pointed to plunder, drought, and the end of Byzantine–Persian subsidies. Arabia was poor. The neighbors were rich and exhausted. Raiding scaled into conquest when no one could stop it. In this view, Islam at first served as a banner for Arab expansion more than a finished creed. Crone and Cook pushed the thesis too far in places, but they were right about motive power: land, status, and pay mattered.

Others put faith back at the center. Fred Donner described an early “community of Believers” that cut across tribes and welcomed fellow monotheists as junior partners. The mission was righteous rule, not mass conversion. That ethos could lower resistance. A simple, universal monotheism carried a sense of destiny and supplied legitimacy. Soon, the language of jihād gave the campaigns a moral architecture that raiding alone cannot sustain.

A third line focuses on institutions and commanders. Hugh Kennedy’s work highlights Khalid ibn al-Walid’s maneuver warfare, the caliphs’ creation of the dīwān and stipends, and the integration of Byzantine and Sasanian fiscal systems. The armies were small, mobile, and hard. The state learned fast. Byzantium and Persia, bled by decades of war and plague, could not match that combination of speed and organization.

Revisionists ask how much of the standard story is back-projection. Gerald Hawting and Robert Hoyland remind us that most Muslim chronicles were written later, under Umayyads and Abbasids with agendas. Contemporary non-Muslim sources often call the invaders “Arabs,” not “Muslims,” and notice a new religion only gradually. Early identity likely crystallized over time. The lesson is caution. Do not reduce victory to “fanaticism.” A mix of tribal solidarity, pay, charisma, and an emerging creed can be potent.

One point draws broad agreement: continuity made conquest stick. The Arabs kept the tax registers, hired the clerks, and stood on the old thrones. Governance ran on existing rails while Arabic and Islamic norms spread. Many subjects found the new rulers tolerable, sometimes lighter on taxes, often less intrusive on doctrine. That acceptance gave the caliphs room to focus outward.

Conversion came later. In the first century of Muslim rule, most Egyptians, Syrians, and Persians remained non-Muslim. Converts trickled in for practical reasons—lower taxes, social mobility—and then accelerated over generations. Some Umayyad officials even preferred slow conversion to keep the revenue flowing. By the ninth and tenth centuries, demographics tipped in many regions, not from mass compulsion but from steady incentives and cultural gravity.

Add it up and the picture clarifies. Two empires left the door ajar. Arab armies, tied together by pay and belief, pushed through. Good generalship, a lean state, exhausted opponents, and tolerable rule did the rest. The Caliphate fused sword and scripture in a way that made conquest durable and governance credible.

Call it “just another empire” if you like. It had armies, taxes, governors, and laws. It expanded by force and kept order by pragmatism and fear. That is exactly the point. Religion did not suspend the rules of history. It sharpened them. A universal creed gave a conqueror’s state reach and staying power. Its legacy would shape the Mediterranean, the Silk Road, and eventually Europe’s own intellectual revival.

The story does not end with one surge. Christendom reeled, regrouped, and answered. The next chapter turns to that counterstroke—the Crusades—another religiously armed bid for dominion, born from the same world of empires and their ruins.

Chapter 7: The Crusades in Context

The Crusades did not burst out of nowhere. They came after shocks on a frontier where Christian and Muslim powers had wrestled for centuries. In 1071, at Manzikert, Seljuk Turks smashed the Byzantine field army and captured the emperor. Anatolia—Byzantium’s heartland—fell open. An empire that once shielded Europe now faced ruin. Desperate, Emperor Alexios Komnenos swallowed his pride and asked the Latin West for help.

Alexios wanted mercenaries under his command. Pope Urban II offered something far larger. At Clermont in November 1095, Urban turned a Byzantine request into a call for an armed pilgrimage. He spoke of Eastern Christians in peril, of Jerusalem profaned, of pilgrims harassed. He promised remission of sins to those who “took the cross.” Warfare and penitence fused. The cry “Deus vult” echoed across Europe.

People answered. Great lords, petty knights, peasants, monks. Faith moved many. So did opportunity. Younger sons sought land. Italian merchants eyed ports. Strategists saw a collapsing frontier. Reports of danger to pilgrims had trickled in for years. Al-Hakim’s destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009 still burned in memory. By 1095, the routes to Jerusalem looked fragile again.

The timing favored the venture. The Muslim world was divided. Seljuk sultanates quarreled. The Fatimid caliphs of Egypt were their rivals and held Jerusalem. A unified counterstroke was unlikely. Western fleets from Venice, Genoa, and Pisa saw a chance to break old trade chokepoints. Urban wrapped hard politics in sacred language and sent milites Christi east.

The launch was messy. In early 1096, a People’s Crusade of zealots marched ahead of the princes, looting their way across Europe. The real armies followed that summer in separate contingents. Alexios was alarmed by the flood of armed Franks at his gates. He provisioned them and extracted oaths to return Byzantine lands. In spring 1097 the uneasy allies crossed the Bosporus. Nicaea fell. Antioch followed after a brutal siege. In July 1099, Jerusalem was taken in blood.

The arc that followed is familiar. Edessa fell in 1144 and sparked the Second Crusade. At Hattin in 1187, Saladin destroyed the army of Jerusalem and retook the city, calling forth the Third Crusade. In 1204, the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople and shattered East–West trust. In 1291, Acre fell to the Mamluks. The last crusader stronghold in the Holy Land was gone.

The First Crusade began as a blend of devotion and realpolitik. It answered a spiritual summons and a strategic crisis. It built fragile states on a contested shore, balancing coercion and cooperation among peoples who did not forget who the newcomers were—or why they came.

The First Crusade should have failed. Instead, by 1099 its armies had taken Jerusalem and planted four Latin principalities on the eastern Mediterranean: Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli, and Jerusalem itself. Tiny islands of feudal Europe now sat in the Levant, ruled by a few thousand Frankish knights over millions of locals. They survived through grit, castles, and opportunistic diplomacy—sometimes cutting deals with Christian sects, sometimes with Muslim rivals.

Life in these states was layered. The Franks formed the ruling elite, but Greeks, Armenians, Syriacs, Maronites, Muslims, and Jews made up the bulk of the population. The conquerors had neither the numbers nor the interest to force mass conversion. They taxed, tolerated, and managed. Armenians and Maronites often allied with the newcomers; Muslims paid tribute much as they had to previous rulers. Courts and laws were split: Franks under their Assizes, locals under their own traditions. Dhimmi status flipped—now Muslims were the tolerated minority.

Castles defined the landscape. Krak des Chevaliers, Belvoir, Kerak—fortresses that dominated valleys and caravan routes. From their halls, a handful of knights ruled vast countrysides. Permanent armies were small, so the Franks relied on truces, tributes, and above all the new military orders. The Templars and Hospitallers combined monastic vows with soldiering, manning frontier castles and caring for the sick. They became both the garrisons and the bankers of Outremer, answering only to Rome.

Economically, these states became trading hubs. Italian republics carved out quarters in Acre and Tyre. Sugar from the Jordan Valley, spices from India, silk from Persia—all passed through their ports. Pilgrims brought coin as well as prayers. In Jerusalem itself, the Dome of the Rock became a church, Al-Aqsa a royal palace, and the Temple Mount the headquarters of the Templars. For nearly ninety years no Muslim call to prayer echoed there.

And yet, despite moments of coexistence—even local feasts shared between Frankish lords and Muslim neighbors—the Crusader states were never secure. They relied on constant reinforcements, on sea routes controlled by Italians, on fragile alliances. Their openness made them wealthy, but also vulnerable. The Muslim world, fragmented in 1099, would not remain so. In time it would answer with its own unifying jihad. Outremer’s castles and ports were strong, but not invincible.

The Crusades were preached as penance and fought as war. They carried hymns and banners—and left mass graves. There is no “clean” holy war in the record. Medieval warfare was savage; crusading added theology to the sword.

The blood started at home. In 1096, before a single Frank reached Jerusalem, mobs in the Rhineland turned the “armed pilgrimage” against their Jewish neighbors. Speyer saw killings despite a bishop’s protection. Worms and Mainz became slaughterhouses. Thousands died—men, women, children—some choosing martyrdom rather than forced baptism. Jewish chronicles called it kiddush ha-Shem and recorded parents who killed their own children to deny baptizers their prize. These were pogroms, not battles. The main crusade leaders condemned them later, but the wound remained—and remains.

Jerusalem in 1099 brought a second abyss. After siege and hunger came the sack. Muslim civilians were cut down in streets and sanctuaries. Chroniclers boasted of blood to the bridles. Jews who gathered in a synagogue were burned alive. A few princes, like Tancred, tried to protect those who surrendered; their banners did not save them from undisciplined allies. When the killing ebbed, crusaders walked barefoot to the Holy Sepulchre and wept with joy. The juxtaposition still staggers: liturgy over carnage.

Not every church voice cheered. Some bishops sheltered Jews. St. Bernard of Clairvaux thundered against a rogue preacher inciting new attacks during the Second Crusade. Popes issued letters threatening excommunication for violence against “the Jews who are to be left in peace.” Motives mixed—concern for potential converts, fear of moral stain—but the record shows conscience and conflict inside Christendom.

The Fourth Crusade sealed another indictment. A campaign aimed at Egypt detoured—first to Christian Zara, then to Constantinople. In 1204 Latin soldiers sacked the greatest church city in the East, looted Hagia Sophia, and installed their own regime. The breach with the Orthodox world yawned. Nicetas Choniates wrote that even Muslims treated holy places with more respect. He had a point.

The Jewish story under crusader rule was not one note. After the 1099 sack, Jerusalem barred Jews; yet later, in coastal cities like Acre, Jewish merchants worked and paid taxes under Frankish protection. Antioch kept a Jewish community on tribute. It was life by sufferance—taxed, exposed to the next wave of zeal—and sometimes safer than the crossfire of passing armies. Under Muslim rule, Jews lived as dhimmīs: second-class, taxed, generally tolerated. Between sword and tax they chose survival.

The legacy is twofold. First, a stir of conscience. Some churchmen asked whether indiscriminate slaughter could ever be God’s will. Hildegard of Bingen warned that pride and cruelty would draw divine punishment. Second, memory. Jewish laments marked 1096 alongside the worst exiles. Eastern Christians and Muslim historians preserved accounts of Frankish brutality that later hardened into rallying cries. Violence begets memory; memory recruits the next army.

The Islamic world would answer the crusade with its own moral language—jihād—and with leaders who forged unity from fracture. That counterstroke is where the story turns next.

Jihad and Counter-Mobilization

The First Crusade landed in a fractured Middle East. The answer took time, then gathered force. By the mid-12th century, jihad had become a rallying idea and a practical program—first under Zengi and Nur al-Din, then under Saladin, and finally under the Mamluks—until the Crusader states were surrounded and erased.

Disunity made the Crusader breakthrough possible. Seljuk realms splintered; Fatimid Egypt opposed Sunni Syria; warlords cut deals as needed. The Franks exploited every seam—truce with one emir, raid another; take supplies from Cairo while fighting the Turks; then seize Jerusalem from the Fatimids. That game could not last.

Zengi changed the stakes. From Mosul and Aleppo he beat the Franks at Edessa in 1144—the first Crusader state to fall. Europe reeled and called a Second Crusade; the Muslim world saw proof the Franks could bleed. Zengi’s son, Nur al-Din, built on that moment. He unified much of Syria, patronized jurists and preachers, and made jihad a public ethic as well as a military aim. He also fixed his sights on Egypt, where the Shi‘a Fatimids limped to their end.

Enter Saladin. Sent as Nur al-Din’s lieutenant, he took the vizierate in Cairo (1169), abolished the Fatimid caliphate (1171), and founded the Ayyubid dynasty. After Nur al-Din’s death, Saladin seized Syria in the name of unity for jihad. Now one ruler held Cairo and Damascus. The Crusader advantage—Muslim division—evaporated.

Hattin finished the illusion of Frankish invincibility. In July 1187, Saladin lured the kingdom’s army onto the plains below Tiberias, cut it off from water, and destroyed it. The True Cross was taken. Cities fell in a cascade: Acre, Jaffa, and, in October, Jerusalem. This time there was no 1099 massacre. Saladin ransomed most, enslaved some, and let Eastern Christians remain. He invited Jews to return. The Muslim world exulted; the West called a Third Crusade.

Saladin died in 1193. Ayyubid unity frayed. Then came the Mamluks—slave soldiers who seized Egypt in 1250, stopped the Mongols at ʿAyn Jālūt (1260), and turned to finish the Franks. Baybars took Antioch in 1268 and Krak des Chevaliers in 1271, mixing siege craft with relentless propaganda. Qalāwūn crushed Tripoli in 1289. His son al-Ashraf Khalīl stormed Acre in 1291. The last stronghold fell; the kingdom died.

Muslim writers charted the arc. Early chroniclers described the Franj with curiosity and contempt. After Jerusalem’s loss, the tone hardened. Preachers under Nur al-Din and Saladin rooted the war in Qurʾanic language and cast al-Quds as a sacred trust. Saladin installed Nur al-Din’s long-prepared minbar in al-Aqṣā and staged the victory as both justice and restoration.

There were ironies. Jihad rhetoric often legitimized struggles among Muslims as much as against Franks; Saladin fought fellow Sunnis to build the very unity he then deployed. “Pan-Islam” was a slogan before it was a fact. The Mamluks made it fact by force. Unlike earlier emirs who tolerated tributary Franks, they chose total expulsion.

With Acre’s fall, the military story ended. Memory did not. Jihad against the Franks became a template: a fragmented realm can rally under a religious banner and drive out intruders. Later empires—above all the Ottomans—would inherit both the ground and the script. In time they would take Constantinople itself. The sword had turned.

The battlefield now shifts to its long afterlife. Modern ideologues still invoke “Crusaders” and “jihad” to conscript the living into old wars. That propaganda matters—and we will see how it distorts policy again today.

Nine centuries on, the Crusades still march. Not as armies, but as words. “Crusader” remains a live insult in the Middle East—a shorthand for Western invasion, imperial arrogance, and civilizational contempt. Jihadists use it obsessively. So do state media and politicians when it suits them.

Bin Laden called America and Europe the “Crusader–Zionist alliance.” After 9/11, when President Bush used the word “crusade” off the cuff, propaganda factories lit up: proof, they claimed, that the West had declared a new holy war. Flyers, sermons, and videos cast Western troops as armored Franks, crosses glued onto Kevlar by Photoshop. The point was not accuracy. It was mobilization—turn the present into a rerun of 1187 and call for a defensive jihād.

This trope isn’t confined to the underground. Nasser used it in 1956. Saddam used it in 1991. Iran’s clerics still deploy it. In 2003, leaflets in Iraq warned that “the Franj” had returned. Israel is routinely smeared as a “Crusader state,” an alien fortress destined to fall like the medieval Latins did—inshallah. The subtext is simple: history guarantees your eviction; Saladin is waiting just offstage.

The West’s memory has swung from romance to repentance. Nineteenth-century Europe painted chivalric canvases and wrote Walter Scott. Post-1945, the tone flipped: apologies from popes, curricula that emphasize fanaticism, pogroms, and greed. Yet fringe Western ultras still play dress-up, posting Templar memes and shouting “Deus vult” at rallies. Jihadists call Western soldiers crusaders as an insult; a handful of Western extremists answer, “Gladly.” Myth meets counter-myth, and neither side reads a footnote.

In Arab classrooms, the Crusades are not antique. They are lesson plans in invasion and redemption. Saladin’s Hattin is canon; nuance is not. Crusader violence is taught as the opening chapter of colonialism. The message bleeds into the street. Posters show knights routed. Chants revive medieval slogans—“Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews”—as if time has no seams. A crowd in Ramallah declares, “The Crusaders thought they would stay forever; Saladin sent them home—Jews, expect the same.” History becomes a brick.

The echo carries back into Europe. Islamist recruiters pitch alienated youth on a simple story: you live under Crusader rule; join the line of defenders. Some Western bigots oblige the script, branding themselves latter-day crusaders defending “Christian Europe.” Both sides agree, perversely, that we are replaying a medieval clash. It’s useful for them. It is deadly for us.

Words move policy. Call a deployment a “crusade” and you set fires you cannot put out. Station foreign troops near holy sites and bin Laden’s narrative writes itself. Meanwhile, regimes slap the label on any Western action to score at home. Diplomats who ignore the power of the trope lose ground before they speak.

The Crusades ended on the ground. They did not end in the imagination. Today’s agitators summon their ghosts to recruit, radicalize, and simplify. Recognize the script when you hear it. When a leader invokes Saladin or “Crusaders,” he is not giving a history lecture. He is loading a weapon.

The myth rallies flags, licenses hate, and fogs judgment. In the next chapters we follow how the Ottoman ascent reshaped the field—and, later, how modern propaganda keeps medieval labels, and libels, alive. If we understand the memory war, we are harder to manipulate. If we forget, we march in circles behind banners from a millennium ago.

Chapter 8: The Ottoman Aftermath

By the 19th century the Ottoman Empire was running on fumes. Europe called it the “Sick Man”—and not without reason. The sultans scrambled to modernize: new law codes, railways, telegraphs, even a constitution in 1876. The Tanzimat reforms promised equal rights for non-Muslims. But reform collided with reality: corruption bled the treasury, governors acted like warlords, and nationalists from the Balkans to Arabia demanded independence. Meanwhile, the empires of Europe circled like predators. Russia pressed south under the banner of protecting Orthodox Christians. Austria-Hungary swallowed Bosnia. Britain and France bought Ottoman debt and then seized control of the empire’s finances. By 1881, Istanbul’s tax collectors worked for European bankers.

Defeat piled on defeat. War with Russia in 1877–78 cost the Ottomans vast Balkan lands. Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria slipped free. Italy took Libya in 1911. A year later, the Balkan League struck, and by 1913 the Ottomans were nearly driven out of Europe altogether. Desperate reformers—the Young Turks—seized power in 1908, promising revival. But their timing was fatal. In 1914 they tied the empire’s survival to Germany. The First World War gave them Gallipoli, yes, but also disaster in Arabia, Syria, and Palestine. Worse still, it gave the world the Armenian Genocide: mass deportations and killings between 1915 and 1917, a stain that still marks history.

By 1918 the “Sick Man” was on life support. Allied troops occupied Constantinople. The Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 proposed to carve Anatolia itself into Greek and Armenian states, foreign zones, and protectorates. It was empire’s obituary.

But resistance flickered. Mustafa Kemal—later Atatürk—refused to accept partition. His nationalist army defeated the Greeks, forced the Allies back to the table, and secured the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. A sovereign Republic of Turkey rose from the ruins. The Sultanate and soon the Caliphate were abolished. After six centuries, the last great Muslim empire was gone.

The Ottomans had held together a vast mosaic of peoples: Greeks and Armenians, Arabs and Kurds, Jews and Christians of every denomination. Their millet system kept the peace through separation and hierarchy. When the empire cracked, the buffer vanished but the divisions remained. The Balkans exploded first, earning the title “powder keg of Europe.” In the Middle East, old sectarian and tribal rivalries resurfaced. The empire had kept the mosaic in the frame; when the frame splintered, the shards cut deep.

When the Ottomans pulled out of the Balkans, the lid came off. Centuries of suppressed rivalries—Serb, Bulgarian, Greek, Albanian—erupted the moment imperial authority receded. Everyone wanted independence. Everyone wanted more land than the others. The result was blood, fire, and a lesson that would echo later in the Middle East.

In 1912, four Balkan states—Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro—pounced. Their armies smashed the remaining Ottoman garrisons and swept through Macedonia and Thrace. Skopje, Salonika, and other cities long under the crescent banner fell within months. For the first time since the 14th century, the Ottomans were nearly erased from Europe, holding only the ground around Constantinople.

Victory, though, turned the allies into enemies. In 1913, Bulgaria—unhappy with its share—attacked its former partners. Serbia, Greece, and Romania hit back, and the Ottomans re-entered the fray to claw back a slice of Thrace. The Second Balkan War was nastier than the first. Villages were torched, civilians massacred, and borders redrawn in blood. Muslims bore the brunt. Turks, Albanians, and Bosniaks were slaughtered or expelled in waves of ethnic cleansing. Well over a million Ottoman Muslims vanished from Europe in those years, uprooted after centuries of life there. The word “Balkanization” entered the lexicon as a synonym for violent fragmentation.

Then came Sarajevo. In June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a young Serb nationalist, shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Bosnia had only recently been Ottoman land; now it was Austro-Hungarian turf, and Princip dreamed of uniting South Slavs under Serbian leadership. His pistol shot ignited a world war. Behind that moment lurked the Ottoman ghost: when the imperial stabilizer left, a vacuum of nationalisms filled the space, and it took only one act of violence to set Europe ablaze.

Patterns emerged that mattered far beyond the Balkans. Old medieval claims were dredged up to sanctify modern borders. Towns, monasteries, and mountain passes became symbols of eternal destiny. And attempts to align nation-states with ethnic realities turned into campaigns of forced migration and mass killing. The Balkans proved that empire’s collapse does not bring peace—it multiplies wars.

What happened in Europe’s southeast corner previewed what would soon unfold in the Arab provinces. When the Ottomans withdrew from the Levant and Mesopotamia, the same forces—conflicting identities, competing claims, sectarian revenge—were unleashed. The Balkans had already shown the script: without an imperial frame, the mosaic cuts deep.

Middle East Fragmentation

When the Ottomans vanished, they didn’t leave nations. They left compartments. Millets, provinces, sects, tribes—kept apart under an imperial cap—suddenly faced the same question: who rules whom now. The pluralism the empire managed through hierarchy fractured once the cap came off.

Ottoman order ran on communal lines. Muslims ruled; recognized millets—Orthodox, Armenians, Jews—kept their own courts and schools. That insulated peace prevented religious wars; it also hardened identities. The Tanzimat tried to create equal “Ottoman citizens.” It never took. People remained Sunni, Shi‘a, Maronite, Druze, Alawite, Armenian, Jew—Ottoman subjects second. When the empire fell, those lanes became fault lines.

Nowhere was the mosaic more obvious than the Levant and Mesopotamia. “Greater Syria” was an administrative patchwork: Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut, and a separate Jerusalem district. Sunni Arabs dominated city halls; Druze and Alawites kept to mountain redoubts; Christians clustered in their quarters; Kurds and Turkmen held the north. The imperial method—acknowledge differences, balance, and rule from above—kept the lid on.

Remove the lid and every community asked: who protects us. In Syria, the French mandate literalized Ottoman logic—sub-states for Alawites and Druze, separate city-states for Damascus and Aleppo—then recruited minorities (especially Alawites) into their army. Decades later, Alawite officers took the state. The Sunni majority—long the urban elite—found itself ruled by a sect it once kept at arm’s length. The Assad regime is the Ottoman mosaic turned authoritarian: a minority pillar propping up a state against a resentful majority. The war since 2011 runs along that seam.

Iraq shows the same DNA in different colors. The British stitched Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra—three Ottoman vilayets—into one crown. North: Kurds. Center: Sunni Arab elites in Baghdad. South: Shi‘a Arab tribes tied to holy cities and to Iran. The Ottomans ran them separately. The British crowned Faisal and called it Iraq. The result: a Sunni-led state over a Shi‘a majority and a Kurdish nation that never consented. The first national act was revolt in 1920. The pattern—legitimacy crises, sectarian contests, Kurdish autonomy—has repeated ever since.

The French expanded the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate into “Greater Lebanon,” grafting Sunni coastal cities and Shi‘a Bekaa onto a Maronite-Druze mountain core. Independence came with the 1943 National Pact: Maronite president, Sunni prime minister, Shi‘a speaker, quotas all around. It held until it didn’t. The 1975–1990 civil war pitted militias along those same lines; today Hezbollah runs a “state within a state” for the Shi‘a—millet logic with rockets.

Palestine moved from imperial management to collision. Under the Ottomans, Jerusalem was a special district with a status quo for holy sites; Zionism and Arab nationalism grew under the umbrella, mostly contained. When Britain took over, it layered competing promises—Arab independence, the Balfour Declaration, and imperial control—onto the same small land. The result was a triangular fight: British vs. Arab vs. Jew.

One mechanism was constant: remove the sovereign, and people rally to kin, creed, and clan. The empire had been coercive and exploitative; it also kept knives sheathed. Its collapse invited a free-for-all. Into the vacuum stepped mapmakers in London and Paris. They poured concrete—Sykes–Picot lines—over a living mosaic and called it order. That froze divisions in place and invented new ones.

The post-Ottoman order began with coercion, not consent. While Britain and France measured mandates at San Remo, locals reached for rifles.

During the war, London promised Arab independence to Sharif Hussein even as Sykes and Picot secretly carved zones for France and Britain, and Balfour pledged a Jewish national home in Palestine—all on overlapping land. By 1920, the mandates were allocated: France took Syria and Lebanon; Britain took Iraq and Palestine. Emir Faisal’s bid for Syrian independence was crushed at Maysalun. The paper peace ignored the people who had fought for it.

Iraq exploded first. In 1920, Shi‘a clerics called jihād against British rule; Sunni officers joined; tribes rose. The revolt spread across the Euphrates. Britain answered with biplanes and punitive bombing. By fall, the uprising was broken—at great cost. The lesson was blunt: direct rule would not stick. London installed Faisal as king in 1921 and shifted to “indirect” control. The monarchy stabilized the surface; the fractures stayed. The Iraqi template—questions of legitimacy, sectarian balance, foreign influence—was set on day one.

Syria followed. The French ejected Faisal, sliced the mandate into sectarian and city-states, and faced the Great Syrian Revolt in 1925–27—Druze fighters under Sultan al-Atrash, Sunni nationalists in Damascus, peasants and urban rebels together. France shelled Damascus and exiled leaders. It later recombined units and offered limited self-rule, but the message lasted: foreign rule would be met with arms, and communal balances would shape future power.

Palestine ignited in rounds—Jerusalem and Jaffa riots (1920–21), then the Arab Revolt (1936–39) against both British rule and Jewish immigration. Britain poured in troops and armed the Haganah, deepening the divide. Unlike Iraq and Syria, the fight was triangular from the start, with incompatible views crashing inside one mandate.

By the late 1920s, a state system existed—Turkey, Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon. None had a painless birth. All carried Ottoman habits and colonial fingerprints. The borders held; the identities did not. The Ottomans had managed conflict; they had not erased it. European cartography did the rest—freezing a messy mosaic into brittle frontiers.

Two errors still cloud the story. One is nostalgia: the Ottomans did not preside over interfaith harmony. Peace was enforced and hierarchical, with grievances banked for later. The other is reduction: Sykes–Picot is not the sole culprit. The mosaic itself was mixed; the lines made it rigid. The millet system planted the seeds; European mapmakers poured the concrete.

As for “neo-Ottomanism,” it isn’t just nostalgia. Modern Turkey invokes empire’s ghosts in policy and propaganda. The echo matters. Next, we trace how the British retreat, French designs, and these revived ambitions harden today’s dividing lines—and why Israel, uniquely, refuses to fit the imperial script.

A century after the empire fell, its shadow still moves. Turkey wraps itself in Ottoman memory and projects power into old imperial zones. The region’s conflicts still run along the sectarian grooves the Ottomans carved.

Ankara has made nostalgia a program. Schools and screens glorify sultans. Hagia Sophia is a mosque again. Turkish troops sit in northern Syria and northern Iraq. They run protectorate zones where the lira circulates and Turkish curricula are taught. They ship drones to Libya and proclaim a “Blue Homeland” in the Aegean and East Med that collides with Greek and Cypriot claims. This is not a formal map revision. It is an imperial reflex, dressed in modern clothes.

The Kurdish question is the empire’s unfinished business. Kurds were sliced among Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. None of those states built a durable compact with them. Ankara bans, then permits, then trims Kurdish culture. Baghdad gassed Kurds in the 1980s, then grudgingly tolerates a semi-state in Erbil. Syrian Kurds raised a self-rule flag and met Turkish armor. A people denied a state at the Ottoman sunset still bleeds for one.

Ottoman design still structures who rules whom. Lebanon’s sectarian bargain is millet logic by another name. Hezbollah runs a parallel order for the Shi’a with schools, courts, clinics and a foreign policy. The state lets it be. Syria remains a minority regime. The Alawites, once a mountain sect outside the Ottoman Sunni mainstream, hold the capital through guns and patronage while a Sunni majority mutters that history has been inverted. Iraq divides offices by quota. President Kurd. Prime Minister Shi’a. Speaker Sunni. It stabilizes nothing. It hardens lines.

In Palestine, the Ottoman frame masked a deeper truth. Jews are the indigenous people of Judea and Samaria and of Jerusalem. They prayed toward Zion for two thousand years and returned in waves long before a British mandate. Ottoman officials managed the province as an imperial possession. Arab and Islamist elites opposed Jewish return for a simple reason: to keep Jews subordinate and to keep the land inside an Islamic dominion. The program was not civic. It was about domination. The violence that followed the empire’s fall aimed to prevent Jewish sovereignty and to fold the territory back into an Arab or Islamic project.

That posture continues. Calling Israel a “Crusader state” is not analysis. It is a threat. It declares Jews foreign in their own homeland and promises eviction once the balance of force allows. The language is Ottoman-era supremacy updated with modern slogans. It is why compromise has been so hard. One side asserts ancestral claim and builds a liberal state under law. The other side too often treats Jewish self-rule as an insult to be erased.

Neo-Ottoman gestures intersect with this posture. Turkey positions itself as patron of Sunni causes across former vilayets while denouncing Israel with the old imperial contempt. Tehran plays the Shi’a heir to Safavid power and arms its proxies from Beirut to Gaza. The result is a map that still obeys imperial muscle memory. Sect alliances. Militia fiefs. Borders that pretend to be nations.

The lesson is not nostalgia for empire. It is clarity about its afterlife. The Ottoman order trained peoples to look up to sect leaders and out to imperial patrons, not across to equal citizens. Remove the sovereign and you get militias, patrons, and outside hands. Add modern ideologues who still talk in the language of conquest and you get a permanent veto on Jewish sovereignty and a permanent war against Israel.

The ghosts are not subtle. They sit in Turkish bases from Afrin to Bashiqa. They preach on satellite channels from Tehran to Beirut. They chant in Ramallah that Jews must be pushed out like “Crusaders.” Name them. Then build policy that refuses their script and defends Jewish indigeneity and liberal self-rule in the one place on earth where both belong.

Chapter 9: The British Retreat

Britain’s exit from India was a sprint when it needed a marathon. Exhausted after World War II, London decided to quit the subcontinent quickly. Lord Mountbatten pulled independence forward by almost a year. He gave a British barrister, Cyril Radcliffe, five weeks to invent borders for Punjab and Bengal. Radcliffe had never set foot there. He drew lines on maps. He sealed the award until after independence. Then he flew home.

The fuse had already been lit. In August 1946, the Muslim League’s “Direct Action Day” in Calcutta spiraled into mass killing. Thousands died in a few days. The Raj kept marching toward the door anyway. When Partition came in August 1947, panic met fury. Punjab turned into a killing field. Villages emptied in the night. Long columns of refugees moved along dusty roads. Trains arrived with no living passengers. Bengal bled as well.

The numbers stagger. Ten to fifteen million people fled their homes. Around a million were murdered in the frenzy that followed. No one will ever know the full count. Bodies disappeared into ditches and dry riverbeds. Ancient towns lost their minorities in a matter of weeks. A red pencil in London produced a permanent wound.

Kashmir exposed the worst fault in the new map. A Muslim-majority state ruled by a Hindu maharajah did not fit the scheme. In October 1947, Pakistan-backed tribal fighters poured across the frontier. The maharajah signed accession to India in exchange for protection. Indian troops flew into Srinagar. Pakistan accused fraud and sent its own regulars into the fight. The first India–Pakistan war began three months after independence.

It ended where so many bad maps end. A ceasefire line in 1949 froze the contest. A promised plebiscite never came. Two states claimed the same mountains and valley. More wars followed in 1965 and 1971. A high-altitude clash at Kargil erupted in 1999. Each round hardened the division and deepened the hate.

Then came the bomb. India tested in 1974. Pakistan answered in 1998. Partition’s error now sits under a nuclear shadow. Soldiers glare at each other across the Line of Control. Artillery duels echo in the snow. A boundary sketched by a British lawyer is now one of the world’s most dangerous fault lines.

This is what hurried decolonization looks like. Haste. Bad maps. A legacy of blood that outlives empire.

The pattern did not end in Asia. Britain carried the same mix of grand promises and sloppy cartography to the Middle East. In Palestine, the British Mandate tried to square the circle it had drawn with its own hand. Jews, the indigenous people of Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem, were returning to rebuild sovereignty in their homeland. Arab and Islamist elites opposed that return, not from any legitimate legal claim, but to keep Jews subordinate and to fold the land back into an Islamic dominion. London’s double talk and late retreat poured fuel on that fire. The consequences were as explosive as the line Radcliffe drew.

From the subcontinent’s trains of death to the Levant’s streets, the story is the same. When imperial powers draw lines without understanding the peoples they sever, they do not end history. They plant mines.

Britain promised the same land to three different interests and called it policy. In 1917 Balfour endorsed “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. At the same time London courted Arab leaders with hints of independence everywhere the Ottomans fell. It had already signed Sykes–Picot with France to carve the region for themselves. Three promises. One country. A fuse.

San Remo in 1920 made Balfour law. The League of Nations gave Britain the Mandate for Palestine and charged it with helping the Jewish national home. Then London shrank that home at once. In 1921 Churchill handed everything east of the Jordan to Abdullah. Transjordan was born and closed to Jews. Four fifths of the Mandate gone with a meeting in Amman. The Jewish home was now the land west of the Jordan, a sliver on the map. The contradiction was baked in.

Jews returned in growing numbers. They drained swamps, built towns, formed institutions. The yishuv prepared for sovereignty in the one place on earth where Jews are indigenous and where their state belongs. Arab elites watched and mobilized. Their claim was not legal or ancestral. It was the same claim they had made for centuries under Islamic rule: keep Jews subordinate and keep the land in an Islamic dominion. Riots followed in Jerusalem and Jaffa. Then the Arab Revolt of 1936–39.

Britain wobbled. The Peel Commission in 1937 concluded the Mandate had failed and proposed partition. The Zionists, painfully, said yes in principle. The Arab leaders said no to any Jewish state of any size. London folded. Two years later, the 1939 White Paper slammed the door. Jewish immigration capped. Land purchases strangled. Independence promised within ten years under Arab control. On the eve of the Holocaust, Britain locked the gates of the Jewish homeland and called it prudence. Ships of survivors were turned back at gunpoint. The Exodus saga was not Britain’s finest hour.

After World War II the yishuv forced the issue. Jewish undergrounds fought to open the country and to end the Mandate. Broke and bloodied, Britain handed the problem to the United Nations and announced it would leave. UNSCOP recommended partition. On 29 November 1947 the General Assembly voted. The Jews accepted Resolution 181 as their best chance. The Arab states and the local Arab leadership rejected it outright. They refused any Jewish sovereignty on any line.

Britain’s endgame was abdication. It would not enforce the UN plan. It would not keep order while it withdrew. Civil war erupted the next day. British forces guarded their bases and let the country burn around them. British officers still commanded Jordan’s Arab Legion even as the mandate wound down.

On 14 May 1948 the Jews declared the State of Israel in the territory they held. On 15 May five Arab armies invaded, announcing their goal: erase the Jewish state at birth. They failed. Israel survived and extended its lines. Jordan seized Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem. Egypt took Gaza. No Arab “Palestinian” state was created. There had been no interest in building one. The object had been to prevent Jewish sovereignty and to keep Jews under the heel.

Britain left behind two peoples and zero trust. For three decades it had told Jews their homeland would be rebuilt and told Arab notables their dominance would continue. It never built a mechanism for compromise because it never chose a goal it would enforce. When the Union Jack came down over Jerusalem, war was guaranteed.

One more correction needs to be said clearly. The Jewish state is not a colonial implant. Calling Israel a “colonial project” in this landscape is a dodge. The Jewish state restored an indigenous nation in its homeland. The truly colonial borders are the straight ones that still fail from Nigeria to Yemen. Those lines were drawn to serve empire. Israel was built to end exile. It is the restoration of an indigenous nation acknowledged in international law in 1920 and vindicated in blood in 1948. The tragedy is that Britain did not defend truth when it mattered and did not prepare the Arab public for coexistence. It indulged the old imperial habit—promise everyone, leave fast, blame history.

From here the conflict widened. Superpowers piled in. Propagandists rewrote the map. But the core remains simple. Jews returned to their homeland to rule themselves. Their neighbors tried to stop them for reasons that had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with subjugation. The British retreat did not end that contest. It set it ablaze.

Straight Lines, Crooked Futures

European mapmakers loved rulers. They drew borders across deserts and forests as if people were tidy. The lines looked clean in London and Paris. On the ground they cut through peoples, sects, and tribes. When the soldiers left, flags could not paper over the fractures. Civil wars, coups, and secessions followed hard on independence.

Nigeria shows the pattern. The British fused a Muslim north and a Christian–animist south in 1914 for administrative ease. Two different worlds—emirs and sharia in the north, mission schools and commerce in the south—were bolted into one colony. Independence came in 1960. Six years later came coups, pogroms, and then Biafra. The war starved a generation and killed up to a million. The map that forced antagonists together delivered blood, not unity.

Sudan followed the same script. Anglo-Egyptian rule treated the Muslim Arab north and the mostly black African south as separate planets. Independence in 1956 handed power to Khartoum. The south revolted almost immediately. Two civil wars killed an estimated two million. In 2011 the south broke away, and then fell into its own civil war. Darfur burned. The colonial bundle—north, south, and Darfur in one state—came apart exactly as designed.

Iraq is imperial carpentry at its most brittle. Britain glued Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra into one kingdom under a Hashemite king. Kurds in the north, Sunni Arabs in the center, Shi’a Arabs in the south—a tripod that never stood without force. The monarchy fell. Strongmen ruled. Saddam gassed Kurds and crushed Shi’a. After 2003 the state nearly tore itself to pieces along the same joints Britain carved. Even Kuwait’s saga traces the ruler’s edge. Kept separate under British protection, it was later invaded by Saddam as a “lost province.” A line in the sand became a casus belli.

Yemen is another shard. A British colony in Aden to the south. An Ottoman, then independent, imam in the north. Two states emerged after Britain’s pell-mell exit in 1967. They united in 1990 and then fought again. Today Yemen hosts a multi-sided war of Houthis, Islamists, southern separatists, and foreign patrons. The old divide never healed because it was never natural.

Lebanon is sectarian engineering set in concrete. France built “Greater Lebanon” by adding Sunni and Shi’a areas to Mount Lebanon’s Maronite core. Power was allocated by confession. It worked until it didn’t. From 1975 to 1990 militias fought along sect lines while Syria and Israel intervened. Today Hezbollah runs a state within a state. The constitution still assigns offices by sect. The millet logic persists under a new flag.

Sykes–Picot is shorthand, but the mindset mattered more than the map. Europe sliced the Levant to suit itself. Kurds, promised self-rule on paper, were split among four states. Straight lines produced countries that could not carry their weight. Across the Sahel and the Horn, imperial borders sliced clans and fields alike. The Tuareg span five states; the Somalis straddle several. The lines stayed after empire left. The fights stayed with them.

The lesson is not complicated. Empires loved maps. Maps outlived empires. And where the lines ignored lived realities, they left behind brittle states and permanent wars.

Britain’s Legacy of Instability: Method, Myth, and Exit

Britain ruled by splitting. It empowered one tribe to manage another, drew borders for convenience, and called the result “order.” The goal was extraction and control, not nation-building. Identities were tools. When the Union Jack came down, the divisions stayed.

The empire sold a myth of the benevolent map. Lines would civilize. Administrators believed their borders would outlast their gunboats. They did not. In crisis after crisis, London stalled, then bolted. It left paper constitutions, thin police, and rival elites staring at each other across a new flag.

India showed the cost. A hasty partition, a lawyer’s line, and a million dead. Kashmir froze into a permanent quarrel. Two nuclear states glare across a frontier Radcliffe sketched in five weeks.

Palestine exposed the method. Britain promised Jews a national home in their ancestral land and told Arab notables they would rule. It then shut the gates to Jewish survivors on the eve of the Holocaust, and walked away while two publics, primed by British duplicity, went to war. Israel fought for its life and won. Arab leaders rejected partition because the program was never coexistence; it was subjugation under Islamic dominion. London’s exit lit the fuse and looked back in sorrow at the smoke.

Aden was worse. Britain fled in 1967 without a handover. Chaos took the port, and the country split into rival Yemens that still bleed. Cyprus, the India–China frontier, and a dozen African borders carry the same cartographic fingerprints. Straight lines hid crooked futures.

Across Africa and the Middle East, imperial unity became post-imperial fracture. Nigeria’s amalgam split under the strain and birthed Biafra’s famine. Sudan’s forced union yielded two civil wars and a partition, then more killing. Iraq’s British carpentry—Mosul, Baghdad, Basra—held only under monarchy and dictators. When force eased, the seams opened: Kurd against Arab, Shi’a against Sunni, everyone against the map.

The empire taught a false lesson: maps can replace social reality. For a while gunboats enforced that illusion. After withdrawal, tribes, sects, and nations reappeared with knives. Some former colonies found stability; many did not. Local leaders chose war or peace, yes—but they inherited poisoned chalices: states built to fail.

The pattern would reappear when the Soviet Union cracked. Suppressed nations surged back. Borders shifted. Frozen conflicts thawed into blood. Different ideology, same delusion—that imperial ink can erase history.

Britain liked to remember empire as a gentle retirement. The record says otherwise. It sowed partitions and left tinderboxes. India and Pakistan’s nuclear standoff. Arab–Israeli wars born in a mandate of contradictions. African coups and insurgencies along lines London drew. Weak states ripe for proxy wars, terror, and lawfare.

The verdict is not “blame Britain for everything.” It is this: drawing lines without the consent of the peoples inside them, then exiting fast, manufactures instability. Empires end; their maps linger. And where the lines deny reality, they become battlefields.

You cannot holiday from history. Britain tried. The bill came due.

Chapter 10: The Soviet Unravelling

On June 19, 1992, less than a year after the USSR died, Russian T-64s of the former 14th Army rolled across the Dniester into Bender. They shelled Moldovan positions, broke the lines, and “peacekeepers” declared a frozen end to a fresh war. The empire had left the stage. Its props never left the theater. The Cold War did not end conflict. It thawed everything the Soviets had kept on ice.

The 1991 collapse set loose forces Moscow had buried for decades. Borders the USSR drew for convenience, not identity, became battle lines. Old nations and faiths reappeared with demands. Wars flared from Transnistria to Abkhazia to Tajikistan. Most ended in ceasefires, not in settlements, with Russian troops standing between the sides. Moscow discovered a method: keep conflicts unresolved and you keep leverage.

Ukraine sits at the center of that story, but the pattern is larger, and familiar from Ottoman and British endings. Lift the imperial lid and the mosaic pushes back.

The Soviets froze fault lines, they did not erase them. The “friendship of peoples” masked a multi-national empire run from Moscow by coercion and co-optation. Republics and autonomous regions were drawn across ethnic seams. Russian became the lingua franca from Tallinn to Tashkent. Peoples were moved—sometimes by choice, often by cattle car. Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and others were dumped in exile under Stalin and “rehabilitated” later. Churches, mosques, synagogues were shuttered. Identities went underground. When Gorbachev loosened the lid, they resurfaced.

Nagorno-Karabakh was a dormant volcano. In 1988 Armenian crowds demanded union with Armenia for a largely Armenian enclave assigned to Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1920s. Pogroms followed in Sumgait. The Soviet center faltered. By 1991 the USSR was gone and war was on. Armenians won the first round by 1994—holding Karabakh and occupying adjacent Azerbaijani districts, displacing hundreds of thousands of Azeris. The conflict “froze” under Russian oversight. It thawed in 2020 when Azerbaijan, flush with oil money and Turkish drones, retook key ground. It ended in 2023 when Baku imposed a lightning capitulation. Over 100,000 Armenians fled Karabakh in days. A war born at Soviet cartography’s fault line ended in flight.

Chechnya showed what happens when an imperial center refuses to let go. Stalin deported the entire Chechen nation in 1944. Memory did not forget. In 1991 Dzhokhar Dudayev declared independence. Moscow invaded in 1994. The First Chechen War burned out in street fights in Grozny and ambushes in mountain passes. By 1996 Russia limped out, having lost thousands of men and its aura of control. The Second Chechen War began in 1999, now under Putin’s ascent. Grozny was flattened by artillery and air strikes. Villages were “cleansed.” Tens of thousands died. By the mid-2000s open rebellion was crushed and Ramzan Kadyrov ran a loyalist satrapy. Chechnya remained inside Russia, pacified by fear.

Central Asia’s Fergana Valley exposed how Soviet lines pitted kin against kin. In 1990, Osh erupted as Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities fought over land and status. Hundreds died. In 2010 Osh burned again after a Kyrgyz revolution. Hundreds more were killed. Hundreds of thousands fled. The border that split a valley three ways did not stop mobs or bullets.

Not every post-Soviet story was war. The Baltics broke the pattern. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania restored independence with discipline and speed. There were ugly clashes in early 1991, but no civil war. Identity and leadership mattered. They integrated with the West while managing large Russian-speaking minorities without state collapse. Exceptions prove rules. Most of the Soviet periphery followed the imperial-fall template we have seen before.

Two lessons run through these cases. First, Soviet rule suppressed, it did not solve. When the lid lifted, claims returned. Armenian vs Azeri. Chechen vs Russian. Kyrgyz vs Uzbek. Second, Moscow learned to weaponize the aftermath. In the 1990s it was often reacting, as in Chechnya. By the 2000s it was cultivating “frozen conflicts”—Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia—as levers against neighbors. Keep the wound open and you can dictate the temperature.

Ukraine is the culmination. Independence in 1991. Two revolutions. A war launched in 2014 with Crimea’s seizure and Donbas proxies. A full-scale invasion in 2022 aimed at erasing the very idea of Ukrainian nationhood. The rhetoric is tsarist dressed in Soviet nostalgia—Orthodox glory, the “Russian World,” imperial borders restored. The method is the same as in the periphery: redraw lines by force, then stall, then freeze what you cannot hold.

Empires do not retire from history. They relapse. The Soviet collapse matched the Ottoman and British endings in one hard respect: imperial maps outlived imperial power. Where those lines cut across living identities without consent, they left powder in the seams. Russia has spent three decades learning to light and snuff those fuses at will.

The West declared the “end of history” in 1991 and took a holiday. The lands the USSR ruled never did. The cracks under the ice were always there. Now they are surface features on the map. The next chapters follow Russia’s return in full—the ideology, the frozen wars, the open ones—and how those tools fit into the new weapons of conquest. The lesson stands: when empires fall, the past comes back armed.

The Kremlin’s Toolkit: Frozen Conflicts by Design

When the first post-Soviet wars cooled, Moscow learned a new craft. Do not end the fight. Freeze it. Lock a ceasefire in place with no settlement and no justice. Insert “peacekeepers.” Hand out passports. Control the gas valve. Then keep the gray zone alive as leverage. It worked across the 1990s and 2000s. It still works.

Transnistria, the prototype. In 1992 Russia stopped Moldova from reuniting its own territory. The 14th Army fought for separatists, then stayed as “peacekeepers.” A ceasefire fixed the front along the Dniester. Transnistria ran its own show in Tiraspol, unrecognized by anyone. Moscow mailed in citizenship by the hundred thousand and guarded the Cobasna depot with 1,500 troops and twenty thousand tons of munitions. Whenever Chișinău tilted West, the Kremlin raised the temperature. Moldova had sovereignty on paper, not in fact.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the Caucasus template. As Georgia tried to stand on its feet, the Kremlin helped split it. Wars in 1991 to 1993 threw out Tbilisi’s authority. Abkhaz forces, backed by Russian arms and “volunteers,” drove out more than 200,000 Georgian civilians. Russian troops moved in as monitors, in reality as anchors. By the mid-2000s, most residents in both regions held Russian passports. When Georgia tried to retake control around Tskhinvali in August 2008, Moscow invaded openly. Tanks rolled toward Tbilisi. Air strikes hit military sites and towns. The war lasted five days. After the ceasefire, Russia recognized both enclaves, built bases, and began “borderization,” pushing razor wire deeper into Georgian land. One fifth of Georgia remains beyond its reach. NATO membership stays out of reach while Russian troops sit inside its borders.

Donbas before 2022, the slow burn. Ukraine moved toward Europe in 2014. Russia seized Crimea with unmarked troops, then lit an insurgency in Donetsk and Luhansk. The “people’s republics” were not spontaneous. They were organized, supplied, and led in part by Russians. Ukraine fought back, then faced Russian regulars at Ilovaisk and elsewhere. The Minsk deals in 2014 and 2015 froze the line but settled nothing. Moscow handed out passports, armed proxies, and called itself a mediator. The front simmered for years. The freeze bled Ukraine, blocked NATO, and gave the Kremlin a dial it could turn up or down at will.

Energy as a weapon. Gas cutoffs in 2006 and 2009 told Kyiv and Europe who held the tap. Prices punished unfriendly governments and rewarded compliant ones. Winter shortages underlined the point. For a decade, pipelines were as political as tanks.

The method repeats. Find a fault line. Arm a breakaway. Stop the war at a favorable moment. Park troops as “peacekeepers.” Flood the enclave with Russian passports and subsidies. Use gas, trade, and vetoes in international bodies to keep the status in limbo. Then call this stability.

It is leverage that looks like calm. It is also preparation. A state that cultivates limbo and half conquests eventually reaches for full conquests. The frozen conflicts were not an end state. They were a staging ground.

The Ideas That Endured

Why did post-Soviet Russia keep acting like an empire after communism fell. Because the imperial software never uninstalled. Three overlapping ideas kept it running: Third Rome, Russkiy Mir, and Eurasianism. Different eras. Same message. Russia is not a normal state. It is a civilization with a mission and a sphere to command.

Third Rome. After 1453, Moscow cast itself as Byzantium’s heir. First Rome fell. Second Rome fell. Moscow would stand as guardian of true Orthodoxy. Tsars used that creed to bless expansion. The post-Soviet bargain revived it. Church and Kremlin embraced each other. Cathedrals rose again. Patriarchs supplied moral cover. The state supplied privilege and reach. Conflicts were framed as sacred duty—defending Orthodox peoples, defending “Holy Rus,” defending tradition against a decadent West. Crimea and Kyiv became not just territories but holy places. Putin wrapped power in liturgy and nostalgia and called it history.

Russkiy Mir—the Russian World. Where Russian is spoken and Russian culture is lived, there lies a community Moscow must “protect.” Language as frontier. Passport as weapon. After 1991 millions of Russian speakers lived outside Russia. The Kremlin built institutions to bind them back—grants, media, schools, churches, passports by the stack. Then came the legal fiction: citizens abroad require protection. South Ossetia in 2008. Donbas after 2014. The rhetoric insisted Ukrainians and Russians are “one people.” Ukrainian nationhood was smeared as artificial. When Kyiv moved West, Moscow claimed it was rescuing its compatriots from Nazis. Culture mutated into casus belli.

Eurasianism. Geography as destiny and excuse. Russia is neither West nor East. It is a third thing—Eurasia—entitled to its own pole of power. The empire’s fragments are not truly foreign. They are a natural sphere. Old émigré theorists dreamed it in the 1920s. New ideologues dressed it up for television. The deliverable was practical: a Moscow-led economic bloc; talk of “multipolarity”; red lines around neighbors; a veto over their alliances. The subtext was blunt. NATO and the EU are trespassing on civilizational ground. Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus, Central Asia—these belong under Moscow’s umbrella.

Stitched together, these ideas supplied continuity from Tsar to Soviet to silovik. They replaced Marx with incense, but the map they wanted was the same. They also explain the ferocity over Ukraine. Kyiv is the baptismal font of the Rus. Ukraine’s soil fed the Tsars and Soviet armies. Its people are bound by family and language across the border. Losing Ukraine to Europe is—inside this worldview—spiritual amputation, strategic defeat, and a civilizational fracture. Hence the insistence that Ukrainians are “one people” with Russians. Hence the fury when Ukrainians refuse.

Western analysis often shrinks this to NATO anxiety or gas. Those matter. They are not the engine. The engine is a story Russians told themselves long before the USSR and long after it. Third Rome grants purpose. Russkiy Mir grants clients. Eurasianism grants a frame that turns neighbors into dependents and conquest into restoration.

From Chechnya to Crimea to Donbas, the pattern held. Sacred language blessed force. Passports and propaganda manufactured “compatriots” in need of rescue. “Peacekeepers” froze wars that Moscow could thaw at will. Treaties were tools, not limits. The goal never changed: keep the periphery in gray zones until it bends back toward the center—or break it and take what you can.

These ideas are not abstractions. They are mobilizers. They move elites. They move crowds. They make risks look holy. They make wars look like reunions. That is why the collapse of the USSR did not end Russia’s imperial behavior. It freed it to wear an older crown.

If you fail to see the doctrine behind the tanks, you miss the tanks’ destination. Ukraine is not a border problem in this story. It is the heartland of a myth. That is why Moscow gambled on full-scale war. It did not misread a map. It obeyed one.

Ukraine’s story kills the myth that 1991 ended history. The second-largest Soviet republic walked out of the empire, held a referendum, and chose independence by over 90 percent. It inherited a huge army and the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. Then it made a fateful bet. In 1994, under the Budapest Memorandum, Kyiv gave up its nukes for security assurances from Russia, the United States, and Britain. Borders would be respected. Force would not be used. Paper for deterrence. It looked enlightened. It was reckless.

The 1990s were survival. Ukraine built a state in a depression-level collapse. Oligarchs fed. Corruption spread. Russia pressed through gas, fleets, and proxies. Disputes over Crimea’s bases were patched in 1997. Gazprom’s leverage never slept. Still, Ukraine held a balancing line—sovereign, tilting West, but careful.

In 2004 the balance broke. The Orange Revolution put hundreds of thousands in Kyiv’s Maidan for a clean vote after a poisoned campaign and obvious fraud. The Supreme Court ordered a revote. Viktor Yushchenko won. Ukrainians chose transparency over the post-Soviet fix. The Kremlin took notes. Color revolutions became a Kremlin nightmare. Punishment came as price hikes and a winter gas cutoff in 2006. The West shivered. Ukraine endured. Internal divisions and oligarch knives blunted the Orange camp. In 2010 Viktor Yanukovych returned through the ballot box.

His rule ended the pretense. He leaned Moscow’s way, then tried to play both sides with an EU association deal. In November 2013 he caved to Putin’s pressure and dumped the EU path. Ukrainians flooded the square again. Euromaidan lasted a winter. Police and snipers killed more than a hundred. Yanukovych fled. Moscow struck.

Crimea fell first. In February 2014 unmarked Russian troops seized the peninsula, boxed in Ukrainian bases, staged a sham vote, and annexed it by March. The border in Europe moved with barely a shot. Donbas followed. Russian officers, agents, and mercenaries catalyzed “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine fought back, then faced Russian regulars in August 2014. The Minsk deals froze the line in 2014 and 2015. Moscow handed out passports, armed proxies, and called itself a mediator. Donbas bled. NATO woke partway, sanctioned Russia, rotated battlegroups east, and talked about 2 percent defense spending. Much of Europe went back to business. The freeze was wrongly treated as stability.

On 24 February 2022, the holiday ended at 4 a.m. Russian missiles hit cities across Ukraine. Columns rolled from Belarus, Russia, and Crimea toward Kyiv, Kharkiv, and the south. The objective was decapitation and occupation in days. Putin denied Ukraine’s nationhood and called his victims Nazis. Ukraine stood. President Zelenskyy stayed in Kyiv. The army, rebuilt since 2014 and armed by the West, stopped the spearheads in the suburbs and forced a retreat from the north by April. Russia shifted to an attritional campaign in the east and south. Mariupol was destroyed. A land bridge to Crimea was carved in blood. Ukraine struck back in the fall, liberating Kharkiv oblast and Kherson city.

The war settled into trenches and artillery. Russia targeted civilians with missiles and Iranian drones, trying to freeze cities into surrender. War crimes surfaced with each liberation. In Bucha, civilians lay shot with hands tied. In Izium, mass graves. Reports of torture, filtration camps, kidnapped children. Millions fled abroad; millions more were displaced inside the country. Russia’s army bled. Western estimates by 2023 put Russian casualties—killed and wounded—well above 200,000. Mobilization fed the front and spurred flight from Russia.

The West finally moved. NATO rediscovered purpose. Finland joined and doubled NATO’s land border with Russia. Sweden queued. Poland raced past 3 percent of GDP on defense. Germany declared a Zeitenwende, scraped over 2 percent, funded rearmament, and sent weapons long held back. The United States poured tens of billions in arms, training, and intelligence. Europe severed its gas leash. Nord Stream died. LNG terminals sprang up. Sanctions froze Russian reserves, cut banks from SWIFT, and choked tech imports. Russia muddled through with China and other non-Western partners, but the long-term damage is real.

Three truths sit in the rubble. First, Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament for “assurances” was a strategic error of the first order. Deterrence cannot be outsourced to signatures. Second, Russia is not a status-quo power that misreads NATO, it is a revanchist empire acting on doctrine—Third Rome piety, Russkiy Mir solidarity, and Eurasian spheres—weaponized through frozen conflicts and open war. Third, the “end of history” was a Western lullaby. The largest land war in Europe since 1945 arrived on schedule once we stopped looking.

Ukraine’s fight is not only for itself. It is the front line of a wider contest: whether a state can erase a neighbor’s identity with artillery and slogans, and whether the West has the will to arm free nations fast enough to matter. The answer in 2022–2025 has been uneven but real. NATO is alive. Europe is waking. Ukraine is wounded, angry, and unbroken.

The war continues. Its end will not be neat. But one delusion is finished. Peace is not normal. Peace is the pause between campaigns. On 24 February 2022, at 4 a.m., the pause ended. History walked back into Europe in combat boots.

Aftershocks in the Periphery

The Soviet collapse did not stop at Europe’s edge. It shook Tajik valleys, Kazakh streets, and the Caucasus ridgelines. Where Moscow’s grip loosened, old fractures reopened and new patrons moved in.

Tajikistan’s civil war, 1992–1997. The poorest Soviet republic slid straight into bloodletting. A communist elite from the west faced an alliance of Islamists, reformers, and marginalized regions from Garm and Gorno-Badakhshan. Militias formed, villages burned, outsiders meddled. Uzbekistan backed the government, Afghan fighters crossed the border, tens of thousands died, hundreds of thousands fled. Russia held the ring, kept its 201st Motor Rifle Division in place, branded Islamists the common enemy, and brokered a “peace” that restored the regime under Emomali Rahmon. Stability returned with a price tag: basing rights for Russia and a compliant autocracy in Dushanbe.

Kazakhstan, January 2022. A fuel price spike ignited protests that tapped years of anger at corruption and inequality. As buildings burned in Almaty, President Tokayev called the CSTO for help. Russian paratroopers landed within days, guarded key sites, and left after the crackdown. The message was clear. Friendly regimes in Central Asia can still dial Moscow for backup. Kazakhstan noticed the bill and has since hedged toward China and the West, but the reflex remains.

Armenia–Azerbaijan, 2020–2023. Karabakh was frozen for a generation, then technology and timing thawed it. In 2020 Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey and Israeli and Turkish drones, broke Armenian lines and took Shusha. Russia imposed a ceasefire and sent peacekeepers to the Lachin corridor. After 2022, with Moscow bogged down in Ukraine, Baku pressed again. In September 2023 it finished the job in a day. Russian troops stood aside. Over 100,000 Armenians fled. The self-proclaimed republic dissolved. Turkey’s weight grew, Iran probed, Armenia looked West. The old arbiter in the Caucasus looked smaller than at any time since the 1920s.

The pattern holds. Empire falls, the vacuum pulls. Russia intervenes where it can, freezes what it cannot fix, and calls it peace. As its bandwidth shrinks, other powers step in. China buys influence with roads and loans. Turkey projects hard power and kinship. Iran guards its flank. Local strongmen trade sovereignty for survival.

Imperial collapse is not an isolated event. It is a long series of aftershocks. Three decades on, the ground from the Black Sea to the Tian Shan still moves.

The Soviet collapse did not break the pattern. It confirmed it. Empires suppress differences. They do not solve them. When the lid lifts, the map lies and peoples endure.

Borders that were once internal lines became frontiers overnight. Stalin’s cartography cut across nations and sects. Moscow froze fault lines with coercion and propaganda. In 1991 the freeze ended. Karabakh, Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Donbas—each reopened a quarrel the empire had only buried.

We have seen this script before. The Ottoman retreat left a sectarian mosaic that fought as soon as the center vanished. The British rush for the exits left partitions and permanent crises from Punjab to Palestine. The Soviet end produced ethnic wars, “frozen” conflicts, and vacuums others rushed to fill. The names change. The pattern holds.

Moscow adapted. If it could not restore a formal empire, it would manufacture leverage. Freeze wars. Insert “peacekeepers.” Hand out passports. Control pipelines. Jam the information space. Hire mercenaries. Hack and leak. Invoke law when useful, ignore it when not. The goal stayed imperial: control neighbors, block their alliances, punish defiance. Hybrid war was not innovation. It was thrift.

All roads still lead to Ukraine. The ideas that powered Russia’s return—Third Rome piety, Russkiy Mir identity, Eurasian spheres—turned maps into doctrine. Ukraine is not “a borderland” in that worldview. It is the heart of a myth. Hence the seizure of Crimea. Hence the eight-year slow burn in the Donbas. Hence the decision in 2022 to try a decapitation strike and force a nation to kneel.

Western debate often misread the driver. It fixated on NATO process stories and gas contracts. Those mattered. The engine was older: a civilizational claim wrapped in grievance. Russia did not stumble into conquest. It chose it.

The echoes reach beyond Slavic Europe. In Central Asia, war and intervention restored strongmen and Russian bases. In the Caucasus, a frozen conflict thawed when Russia was busy elsewhere and Turkey stepped in. China buys influence across the steppe with rail and credit. Iran probes in the south. Where an empire retreats, others advance.

This is the frame you must carry forward. Imperial maps outlast imperial power. Where those lines cut against lived reality and consent, they become battlefields. The West declared an end to history in 1991 and went on holiday. The lands the USSR ruled did not. They remembered.

After 1991, the West forgot and stopped keeping watch. It treated ceasefires as peace and gas as a peace dividend. It let a frozen war pass for stability. It mistook Russia’s pause for surrender. History moves on many fronts because we pretended it would not.

Stop mistaking armistice for order. Stop outsourcing deterrence to signatures. Treat frozen conflicts as traps, not settlements. Arm friends before the first barrage, not after the third. Sanction malign power while it still counts. Call things by their names.

History did not end. It was frozen. We fell asleep at the watch.Chapter 11:
Tribes Endure, States Collapse

At sunrise in a village on the edge of war, elders gather under a mud-brick portico. Two young men—cousins in a blood feud—kneel before them. A courthouse sits a few miles away, but no one goes there. Everyone knows the real verdict will come from the tribal jirga. After sharp debate, the elders order apologies and a payment of livestock. By dusk, the families share a meal. The state never entered the picture.

This could be Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia—anywhere the state’s writ is thin. The lesson is blunt: tribes, clans, and sects endure when states crumble. Kinship, faith, and custom are stronger than constitutions written in distant capitals. Modern borders and ministries are often thin skins stretched over older loyalties. When stressed, the skins tear. The bonds beneath remain.

To understand today’s wars, we cannot trust the neat lines on maps. We must see the deeper allegiances that govern life and death. States rise and fall. Tribes endure.

What do we mean by tribe or sect? A tribe is a community bound by blood, custom, and reciprocal protection. A sect is a community bound by faith and ritual, often crossing ethnic lines but functioning like a super-tribe. Both provide justice, identity, and security—often more reliably than the state.

Empires knew this. The Ottomans ruled through the millet system: patriarchs, bishops, and tribal chiefs governed their people’s daily lives while the Sultan took taxes and loyalty. The British perfected indirect rule: administrators in Delhi or Lagos left real authority in the hands of sheikhs and chiefs, who kept the peace and collected the Crown’s revenue. Maps looked neat; power on the ground remained tribal.

That legacy lingers. In strong states, centuries of centralization forged a civic identity. The French stamped out feudal loyalties until people called themselves citizens first. But in much of the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, borders drawn by outsiders created patchwork states with little shared nationhood. Flags and anthems did not turn strangers into compatriots. Trust still flowed to kin, clan, and creed. The farther from the capital, the more the word of an elder outweighs the decree of a judge.

Justice, security, welfare—all the functions of government—are handled by tribe or sect when the state is weak. That is why even colonial rulers rarely tried to uproot these structures. They were too deeply embedded. The borders are a surface. Beneath them lie the real communities that decide who lives together and who fights.

Case I: A Nation Without a State

The Kurds—more than 30 million strong—are the world’s largest nation without a state. Their homeland stretches across the mountains of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, yet no sovereign Kurdistan exists. Instead, they have endured as a nation inside other nations, preserving language, culture, and identity despite every effort to erase them.

Kurdish society has always been tribal as well as national. Clans and confederations led by aghas and sheikhs struck deals with sultans and shahs, but daily life remained Kurdish. They were accustomed to running their own affairs, even under foreign empires.

After World War I, they nearly gained statehood. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres promised a Kurdish referendum. Three years later, the Treaty of Lausanne killed it. Atatürk’s Turkey, Britain’s Iraq, France’s Syria, and Persia all carved up Kurdistan. The Kurds were left stateless, betrayed by the very powers that recognized their claim.

The century that followed was bloody and consistent. Every host state tried to assimilate or suppress them; every time, Kurdish identity endured. Turkey called them “Mountain Turks” and banned their language. Rebellions were crushed; the PKK insurgency triggered decades of war. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein unleashed the Anfal campaign: whole districts razed, 180,000 killed, chemical weapons in Halabja. In Iran and Syria, Kurdish activism brought arrests, executions, cultural erasure. None of it worked. Ask a Kurd from Diyarbakır, Erbil, or Qamishli who he is, and the answer is simple: Kurd first, passport second.

Whenever central authority faltered, Kurdish autonomy surfaced. After the Gulf War in 1991, Iraq’s north slipped from Saddam’s grip. Under Western protection, the Kurdistan Regional Government was born, with its own parliament, budget, and the peshmerga. By the 2000s, the KRG was a de facto state, cutting oil deals with Turkey, hosting diplomats in Erbil, and proving more reliable than Baghdad’s army.

In Syria, the civil war opened space for the YPG and later the Syrian Democratic Forces. While Damascus fought rebels and Islamists, the Kurds built their own councils, courts, and police. They became America’s indispensable ground partner against ISIS, functioning as a state without recognition.

The Kurds’ persistence was clearest in 2017, when Iraqi Kurdistan held an independence referendum. Ninety-two percent voted yes. The neighbors and great powers all said no. Baghdad, backed by Iran and Turkey, retook disputed areas like Kirkuk. Yet even that crackdown did not end Kurdish autonomy—or Kurdish determination.

The Kurds have forced the world—willingly or not—to deal with them directly. Western armies discovered the only way to fight jihadists was to arm the peshmerga and SDF. Turkey and Iran, despite opposing Kurdish independence, still negotiate with Kurdish leaders to secure their own borders. Reality bends to Kurdish endurance.

The Kurds prove that maps lie but nations endure. Denied their state, they remain a people too strong to erase, too coherent to ignore.

Case II: A Border Stronger Than the State

The Durand Line cut a people in half. In 1893 British officials drew a frontier through Pashtun country and called it final. On the ground it never was. Pashtun kinship, code, and mountains ignored the ink. Kabul and Islamabad could stamp passports. The tribes kept their own map.

Pashtuns sprawl across the Afghan south and east and the Pakistani northwest, from Kandahar and Ghazni to the Khyber and Waziristan. Major confederations like Durrani and Ghilzai straddle the line. So do clans like Afridi, Wazir, and Yousafzai. Village to village, customs match more closely across the border than with either capital. Afghan governments long refused to recognize the Durand Line. Pakistan fenced parts of it in recent years. Smugglers, shepherds, refugees, and fighters still slip through passes their grandfathers used.

What binds the people is Pashtunwali and the jirga. Pashtunwali is law before law: honor, hospitality, refuge, revenge, and restitution. When disputes flare, elders convene and decide. The jirga enforces its rulings with social power that no distant court can match. Pashtun officials themselves often defer to it because they must live with its verdicts. In practice there are two legal orders in Pashtun lands. The one on paper in the ministry ledger. The one that works in the village.

The Taliban rode these bonds. The movement began among Pashtun madrasa students in the 1990s. It carried a hard-line Islamist program but moved through tribal networks. Commanders were placed where kin, marriage ties, and patronage anchored them. The code of refuge protected fighters across the line. When pressured in Afghanistan after 2001, cadres faded into Pashtun districts in Pakistan, where elders offered asylum and recruits flowed. Many locals did not see the Taliban as foreign or abstract jihadists. They saw cousins defending honor against outsiders and corrupt city men. Technology could not sever those human links. Drones kill. Kinship endures.

Afghan state-building broke on the same rock. Western money and advisers erected ministries, courts, and a national army. On paper it was a modern republic. In the districts, authority still sat with elders, khans, and commanders. When Kabul’s orders collided with local interest, they were ignored. The Afghan army’s collapse in 2021 was not a mystery. Village elders cut deals, units surrendered intact, and men chose the safety of their families over a state few believed in. The Taliban’s shadow courts and tax collectors had been operating for years. They were faster and often less corrupt than the official ones. Where the people already live by a code, imported institutions are theater.

Islamabad learned the same lesson at home. For decades the state treated its “tribal areas” as a buffer to be managed, not integrated. Militancy, smuggling, and parallel governance thrived. Reforms and fences came late. The border remained porous because the society across it remained one. When the Pakistani army moved into Waziristan or Swat, it did not enter an empty space. It entered a social order that could bargain, hide, or fight as one.

None of this romanticizes tribal rule. Jirga justice can be rough. Honor codes can fuel blood feuds. But it explains power. In Pashtun country, legitimacy flows from kin and code. States survive only when they work with those facts rather than against them. Foreigners who tried to build Kabul first and buy the village later failed. They should have flipped the order. Policy follows from reality. If you want to change outcomes where the Durand Line runs, you do not start with a map. You start with the elders who can enforce a bargain and the commanders who listen to them. You do not pretend a fence will stop a people who marry across it. You invest where the local consensus can carry the change. You apply force where the code accepts it and where the community will sustain it. You stop mistaking ceremonies in capitals for control in valleys. Blood and oath beat legal ink. The map may say Afghanistan on one side and Pakistan on the other. The people who live there keep living by Pashtunwali either way.

Case III: The Sect as Super-Tribe

A seventh-century fight over succession hardened into two communities that still organize war and politics. Sunni and Shiʿa are not just theologies. In crisis they behave like super-tribes, binding people across borders, commanding first loyalty, and pulling in patrons.

The split began in 632, then deepened. Sunnis vested authority in the community’s scholars and rulers. Shiʿa vested authority in the line of Ali and, later, in a clerical hierarchy awaiting the Hidden Imam. Over centuries the divide gained saints, rituals, shrines, and martyrs. Karbala is not a footnote. It is a living wound. Where Sunnis ruled, Shiʿa often learned solidarity through persecution. Where Shiʿa ruled, Sunnis became suspect. That memory structures today’s alliances.

Iraq shows the fault line plainly. A Shiʿa majority, long ruled by a Sunni regime, took power after 2003. Sunnis, suddenly out, birthed insurgencies, including al-Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS. By 2006, Baghdad’s mixed districts were cleansed block by block after the Samarra shrine bombing. Security forces wore national uniforms, yet many acted as sect militias. The U.S. tamed part of the Sunni revolt by enlisting tribal “Awakening” fighters. Iran armed and guided Shiʿa formations that later formalized as the PMF. Today a prime minister sits in Baghdad, but in many districts a militia boss or cleric decides who lives in which neighborhood and who gets paid.

Syria became a sectarian proxy war. An Alawite-anchored regime fought a revolt in a Sunni-majority country. Iran’s Guards flew in men and money. Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon to fight as shock troops. Iraqi and Afghan Shiʿa militias followed. Gulf money and foreign jihadists flowed to Sunni factions. Cities like Homs were carved along confessional lines. The state’s ministries became shells. Real rule devolved to gunmen who could mobilize a sect.

Lebanon made sectarianism constitutional. The presidency, premiership, and speakership are assigned by confession. Hezbollah built a state within a state, larger than the army, funded and armed by Iran, and free to start wars against Israel. Other sect leaders tend smaller fiefdoms. Ministries stall because every decision is a sect bargain. Daily life runs through the sect’s clinic, patron, and militia, not through a neutral state.

Yemen adds a twist. Zaydi Shiʿa and Sunnis coexisted for centuries. The Houthi movement began as a local revolt, then widened into a war with sect overtones once Iran backed the Houthis and a Saudi-led coalition intervened. The front hardened roughly along communal seams. The capital fell. The state splintered. The map now shows rival governments. Reality shows militia zones loyal to imam, sheikh, or warlord.

Across these arenas the pattern is the same. Paper states persist, but networks command. A defense minister signs orders. A militia commander implements or ignores them. A police force wears the flag. Neighborhoods trust the man with the sect’s ring. Security, justice, and welfare flow through mosques, husseiniyas, tribal councils, and party offices. Ministries are letterhead.

Treating “Iraq” or “Syria” as coherent actors, while ignoring the sect machines inside them, fails. Iran has shown how to win influence: build through Shiʿa parties and militias, not through slogans about national unity. Gulf patrons do the same on the Sunni side. Western talk of “inclusive governance” means little if people expect the other sect to dominate and punish. Durable arrangements require explicit guarantees for each major community, backed by force and money that reach their ground networks. Otherwise the super-tribes will decide outcomes, and outsiders will discover they negotiated with ministries that could not deliver.

We have seen ethnic nations endure without states and tribal codes overrule borders. We now see a sect that acts as a nation-sized tribe. The lesson is blunt. In a crisis, people follow clerics and commanders before they follow a flag. Any strategy that forgets this will be broken by the first phone call from a mosque.

The reason tribes outlast states in fragile places is simpler: they work. When crisis comes, people reach for what protects them, judges fairly enough, feeds them, and gives them dignity. In much of the world, that is not the ministry. It is the kin network and the sect. In weak states, the first responder is family, not a distant army. Cousins set checkpoints. Clan militias deter raids. If you want to survive the night, you trust the watchman you know.

Kurds relied on the peshmerga when Baghdad’s army folded. Sunni tribes in Anbar fought al-Qaeda when the capital could not. Shiʿa quarters in Baghdad guarded their streets when the national police wore the wrong patch. Shmirah—guard duty—only matters if the guard shows up.

Formal courts are often slow, corrupt, or alien. A jirga, church court, or mosque committee can settle a land fight by tomorrow and make it stick through social pressure. Blood debts get contained through compensation. Defy a tribal verdict and you face ostracism. Defy a state ruling and you hire a fixer.

Many borders were drawn by empires with rulers and pens. They split coherent peoples and fused rivals. Colonial powers governed through chiefs and sect leaders, institutionalizing the very loyalties modern states later tried to erase. Strongmen froze these seams by force for a while. When the heavy hand lifted—Ottoman, British, Soviet—the mosaic reemerged and fought.

The result: tribes outlast because they supply daily necessities in ways a paper state cannot. This is not some nostalgia or romantic notion—to be clear, tribal justice can be exceedingly harsh. Sect leaders can be thieves. But when the formal institutions fail—and in many places they fail often—people revert to the systems that kept their grandparents alive.

Western policy stumbles here because it keeps mistaking maps for societies. It funds “inclusive governance” without power-sharing guarantees that make each major community feel safe. It builds police stations where the jirga still settles homicide. If you want to change outcomes in the lands of strong tribes and weak states, start with the loyalties that endure. Otherwise, your strategy will be theater, and the curtain will fall the first time the lights go out.

Sadly, the West keeps aiming at capitals while, as we have seen, the real power sits in councils, mosques, and living rooms. It speaks to ministries, funds uniforms, prints ballots—and wonders why the village ignores it. The mistake is structural: treating the state as the actor when tribe, sect, and militia are the script.

Diplomats are trained, sadly, to see only states. They know maps, embassies, UN seats. So when trouble starts, they bet on the palace. In Kabul, Washington poured legitimacy and money into a government that never owned the districts. In early Iraq, the U.S. shunned tribal sheikhs to avoid “undermining sovereignty,” then learned the hard way in Anbar that sovereignty was already an illusion. The decisive actors were never the ministers; they were the men with kin and guns.

Build an army, a police force, courts, ministries—repeat until stable. That was the catechism. It produced brittle shells. The Afghan National Army disintegrated in weeks in 2021. Iraq’s army fled Mosul in 2014. Training, rank, and buildings could not conjure legitimacy. People kept going to jirgas and clerics because those forums worked and belonged to them. While the West built Lego sets, the locals kept the house standing with rope and habit.

Engage the authorities that exist. Talk to sheikhs, elders, clerics, militia commanders—the people who can deliver or block. The Anbar Awakening worked because the U.S. finally enlisted Sunni tribes to kill al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan, deals at the district level often held longer than decrees from Kabul. You cannot stabilize an area if you refuse to speak to the men who actually control it.

Don’t try to bulldoze customary systems overnight. Build compacts that stitch them into the state with guardrails. Recognize limited jirga jurisdiction for civil disputes bounded by basic rights. Use federalism and revenue-sharing where resources sit on communal land. The KRG’s autonomy kept Iraq from flying apart for years because it made sense on the ground.

Fund what works. If a respected religious charity feeds people, support it with oversight. If local police only function with elder buy-in, structure programs around that buy-in. Quietly back effective sub-state administrations when the center is a fiction—Erbil, Puntland, Somaliland—while curbing warlords and extremists. Leaving the field to Iran, Turkey, or Russia because of legal squeamishness is not virtue; it is abdication.

Uphold borders, yes. But use the law’s flexibility—autonomy arrangements, special statuses, power-sharing—to reflect the mosaic inside them. Stop pretending a capital rules places it hasn’t visited in a decade.

This is messy, morally fraught work. Tribal systems can be harsh; sectarian militias commit crimes. But ignoring them hasn’t made them vanish. It has let wars grind on and invited less scrupulous powers to move in. Engagement does not have to be an endorsement—it can just be leverage.

Next week: modern power in plain view—Russia, China, nuclear blackmail, and America’s drift—followed by the opening of the new weapons: terror-as-theater and demography as strategy.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

Through February, Israel Brief’s Long Briefs will run a four-part serialization of Holiday From History: The West’s Delusion of Peace and the Return of War. Each week we’ll send out one installment—built to be evergreen, reference-grade. If you’d rather read the full book now you can get a copy of Holiday From History on Amazon.

Shalom, friends.

This first installment lays down the diagnostic. How the West talked itself into believing war was obsolete—and built a culture that treats process as protection.

You’ll see the doctrine (End-of-History thinking), the rituals (paper promises), the structural fog (maps that lie), the ideological blindfold (multicultural complacency), and the elite echo chamber that enforces euphemism as virtue.

Holiday From History:

The West’s Delusion of Peace and the Return of War

Preface: The Idol of Peace

The West treated 1989 as if history itself had surrendered. The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet empire folded, and pundits announced “the end of history.” Liberal democracy and free markets, they insisted, had triumphed forever.

That confidence hardened into dogma. Peace stopped being understood as a fragile achievement. It was declared the natural state of mankind. Leaders rushed to cash a “peace dividend,” cutting defense budgets and boasting of new spending on welfare schemes. NATO expanded on paper, but its armies withered in practice. Between 1990 and 2000, Europe’s average defense spending dropped from roughly 2.5 percent of GDP to 1.8 percent, and it kept sinking. Germany fell from 2.6 to 1.4. Italy slipped to 1.6. Canada shrank to almost nothing, around one percent. Politicians congratulated themselves while their militaries hollowed out.

Strategy documents of the 1990s read like sermons to this new idol. Great-power conflict was declared “unthinkable.” Treaties multiplied. Conferences bloomed in a “spirit of partnership.” Globalization was the buzzword. Geopolitics was considered passé. Security services relaxed, convinced that fascism and communism had been buried for good.

But peace had not become normal. The West only convinced itself it had. And the West prayed to its idol of peace while much of the world lived inside borders drawn in imperial sand.

Old empires collapsed, and what remained was a wreckage of maps. Diplomats in Washington and Brussels treated those lines as sacred. On the ground, tribes and sects remembered their ancestors long before any “nation-state” was imposed on them.

Look at the Middle East. Sykes–Picot in 1916 carved the Ottoman corpse into Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The rulers ignored every ethnic and religious fault line. For a time, colonial officers and later dictators held the lid down. Once the grip loosened, the fractures split wide. Iraq was always an arranged marriage of Sunni, Shia, and Kurds. When the strongmen weakened, civil war erupted. Syria’s “mosaic” of Alawites, Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians did not melt together. It shattered. Empires draw maps. Tribes wait.

The pattern is not confined to Arabs. In 1947, Britain fled India. Partition left rivers of blood, millions displaced, and a permanent duel between India and Pakistan, now nuclear. The border was drawn in haste; the hostility has lasted three generations.

And in the Holy Land: the British Mandate ended with a “partition” that satisfied no one. Israel came into being and fought for survival. Its enemies have never accepted it. The borders changed; the war did not.

The lesson is brutal. Maps can be redrawn in a night. Tribes endure for centuries. Western officials congratulated themselves on diplomacy while ignoring the fires left to smolder. When colonial officers and Soviet commissars withdrew, they left behind frozen wars that thawed quickly. From the Balkans to Judea and Samaria to the Caucasus, the years after 1989 were not an age of peace. They were the return of history through the ruins of empire.

Islam’s Long War

The West’s blindness shows most clearly in how it misunderstands Islamism. For Muslims, history has always been both inward and outward struggle. The Arab conquests of the 7th century built empires that lasted for centuries. The last caliphate, the Ottomans, collapsed only a hundred years ago. The institution died. The dream never did.

Modern Islamism is not a novelty. It is the continuation of a civilizational ambition: restore power, impose sharia, wage jihad against infidels and against Muslims judged insufficiently pure. The Muslim Brotherhood founded in 1928 preached revival through discipline and political power. Khomeini’s revolution in 1979 gave that dream a state, an army, and oil revenues.

Today’s Islamists see the world in binary terms: the ummah—the Muslim community—against the unbelievers. They prosecute this war on five fronts. Terror: violence as spectacle and intimidation. Demographics: migration and fertility as tools of conquest. Lawfare: bending Western courts and the UN to hobble their enemies. Propaganda: networks from Al Jazeera to TikTok pouring poison into public debate. Diplomacy: deals and “dialogues” that mask the same goal of civilizational dominance.

Hamas declares it openly. Hezbollah boasts of it. Tehran funds it. The West, still worshipping peace as normal, refuses to believe them.

Great Powers Did Not Retire

Russia looked finished in the 1990s. Western Europe imagined Moscow might become a partner, even a democracy. Instead, Russia brooded. Putin rebuilt the army and the will to dominate. In 2014, he seized Crimea. The West muttered. By 2022, tanks rolled into Ukraine in the first open conquest of European land since 1945. Cities shelled. Trenches dug. The illusion collapsed. History was back in blood and rubble.

China never stopped playing the long game. While Western pundits praised “peaceful development,” Beijing studied Western wars and prepared its own. It built missiles, fleets, cyber units. It strangled freedom in Hong Kong. It points at Taiwan. It builds islands in the South China Sea and dares neighbors to object. Through Belt and Road it ties Asia, Africa, and Europe into economic chains. Engagement did not liberalize China. It fortified the Party. Beijing never declared the Cold War over because it never believed it was.

South Asia stayed hot. Partition’s wound still bleeds. India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998 and turned every skirmish into a nuclear gamble. Kashmir smolders. The 2008 Mumbai massacre proved the fuse is always lit. Western leaders offered “confidence-building measures.” Nothing built confidence. The frozen war remains one misstep from catastrophe.

Then North Korea. The dynasty chose famine over surrender and fed its people to missiles. Western aid talks bought time for nuclear tests. By the 2010s, Pyongyang had nukes and rockets that could hit continents away. A starving cult with ICBMs—yet Western elites still spoke of peace as the human norm.

Russia. China. South Asia. North Korea. Different stories, one pattern. When the West stopped guarding, others seized the field. Old empires and new tyrants didn’t retire. They regrouped, rearmed, and stepped back onto the stage.

If the West wants to endure, it must relearn something old: goodness requires defense. Jewish life expresses this through two paired ideas. Tikkun olam means repairing the world. Shmirah means guardianship. The one without the other is hollow.

For decades, Western elites clung to a secular tikkun olam stripped of shmirah. They preached about abolishing war, dismantling borders, banning nuclear weapons. Noble slogans, useless without defense. Jews never had the luxury of such illusions. We pray for peace but hire guards at the synagogue door. After the Holocaust, Israel absorbed millions of refugees and built a flourishing society, but it also built an army.

Christian traditions once spoke with clarity about just war and spiritual struggle. Many of their institutions now confuse “love your enemy” with “pretend you have none.” This rot produces compassion without protection. Wolves are indulged as lambs. An ethical spine holds both compassion and strength. Feed the poor, but lock your doors. Forgetting Auschwitz, forgetting 9/11, forgetting October 7 invites repetition. Evil waits for amnesia (and flourishes, relishes in it).

After the Cold War, the West convinced itself that peace was permanent and required no effort. That fantasy disarmed minds and militaries. It left us blind to the rise of Islamism, to Moscow’s revanchism, to Beijing’s ambitions.

The chapters ahead move from diagnosis to action. First, how the peace delusion took hold in the 1990s. Then, the forces that advanced while we slept: jihadists, authoritarian regimes, the collapse of empires and the return of tribes. Next, how our own institutions—media, universities, governments—helped these enemies by denying they exist. From there, case studies of war’s return: rockets out of Gaza, trenches in Donbas, threats in the Taiwan Strait. And finally, a path forward: how to rebuild the ethic of shmirah, strengthen our defenses, and form alliances rooted in clarity instead of wishful thinking.

This is not a chronicle of terror. It is not a lament. It is a rallying cry. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Hamas’s pogrom in 2023 were not “incidents.” They were thunderclaps warning us that history has returned. My promise is blunt: no euphemisms, no hedging. We have enough of that already. What follows is evidence, argument, and solutions, guided by the belief that free societies are worth defending.

We are at a civilizational crossroads. Either we shatter the idol of false peace or history will shatter us. The time for illusions is over. The time for guardianship has come.

Introduction: October 7, 2023

At dawn the sky over southern Israel was clear and still. It was Simchat Torah, the last day of the harvest festival. On the kibbutzim near Gaza, families lingered in holiday calm. In the desert fields by Re’im, thousands of young people were wrapping up a night of music at the Nova festival. Then the sirens wailed.

At 6:30 a.m. Hamas launched thousands of rockets at towns from Ashkelon to Sderot. For locals, rockets meant a sprint to shelters—ugly, but routine. This time, the rockets were cover. Minutes later came the sound Israelis never expected to hear inside their own communities: automatic gunfire.

Dozens of Hamas squads breached the border in trucks, motorcycles, even paragliders. They blew holes in the fence with explosives and bulldozers, then poured through. At Be’eri and other kibbutzim, men in fatigues kicked in doors, firing grenades and rifles into homes. People drinking morning coffee were executed in kitchens. Holocaust survivors were murdered in their beds. Parents tried to hide children in closets and baskets. Some were saved. Many were not. Houses were torched with families trapped inside. Terrorists shot pets, cars, even water tanks to leave only wreckage.

At Nova, paragliders landed near the stage and gunmen opened fire on the crowd. Panic swept through the fields. Hundreds ran; many fell. The attackers hunted among the cars and tents, dragging women away, finishing off the wounded, laughing as they did it. By the time the killing stopped, 260 festival-goers were dead.

That morning stripped away every illusion of safety. Israel had not faced a pogrom of this scale since 1948. The West could pretend history was over. Hamas proved it was not.

The Hamas assault was no riot. It was a planned military operation aimed at civilians. Hamas called it Operation al-Aqsa Flood. Iran bankrolled and trained it. Israel’s complacency made it possible.

It began with rockets—over 3,000 in an hour—meant less to kill than to saturate Iron Dome and drive Israelis into shelters. While people ducked for cover, Hamas moved to its real objectives at the border.

Small drones dropped explosives on Israeli cameras and gun positions. Surveillance towers went dark. Communications were jammed. For the first crucial hour, many communities could not even call for help.

Then came the breaches. Teams blew holes in the fence with explosives. Bulldozers shoved gaps wider. Convoys of trucks and motorcycles poured through. In one grotesque trick, attackers used a truck painted like an IDF vehicle to ambush a border outpost. They carried maps of kibbutzim, down to the location of nurseries and dining halls. The precision showed months of rehearsal.

Within minutes, Hamas gunmen were inside homes. Some used megaphones in Hebrew, pretending to be Israeli soldiers. Families who trusted the lie stepped out and were slaughtered. Others were burned alive in houses set on fire. The cruelty was not incidental. It was the point.

Iran’s hand was visible. The rockets and drones were Iranian-made. Hamas commanders had met Iranian and Hezbollah officials in Beirut weeks before the attack. Tehran wanted Israel distracted, and its proxies delivered.

Hamas also came ready to take hostages. Fighters carried zip ties, handcuffs, even food for captives. By late morning, more than 200 Israelis—babies, teenagers, the elderly—had been dragged into Gaza. Some were paraded through the streets to cheering crowds before being hidden in tunnels. Hostage-taking was not improvisation. It was part of the battle plan.

By the time the army regained control nearly two days later, over 1,200 Israelis were dead. Entire kibbutzim were wiped out. Soldiers fell fighting to retake villages. Hamas celebrated what it called a victory. In truth, it was a massacre carefully engineered in advance, designed not only to kill but to tear at the very sense of safety in the Jewish state.

October 7 ended the fantasy that Hamas could be managed. For years, officials in Israel and the West spoke of “rounds” of conflict as if they were weather patterns—ugly but predictable. Hamas was said to be pragmatic, tied down by salaries and sewage pipes, unwilling to risk its little kingdom in Gaza. Deterrence was supposed to hold. It didn’t. Hamas proved it was willing to bring ruin on Gaza and itself if it meant murdering Jews. Containment collapsed with the fence.

The attack exposed Hamas’s real creed. Many outsiders dismissed its calls to destroy Israel as bluster. They imagined Hamas as a nationalist militia, a political actor angling for leverage. October 7 tore that mask off. The butchery—the rapes, mutilations, toddlers shot, grandmothers executed—wasn’t military action. It was a pogrom with modern weapons. This was genocide in intent and practice, kin to ISIS and to the worst chapters of Jewish history. Israelis saw with searing clarity: this is not a rival to negotiate with. This is an enemy that wants you gone because you are a Jew.

It also revealed a failure inside Israel. A country famed for the best intelligence in the region, a nation that prides itself on constant readiness, was blindsided. Warnings were missed. Unusual movements were brushed aside. The assumption—that Hamas was deterred, more interested in permits and cash than in slaughter—had sunk deep into the security system. On that morning, the guardians of Israel were looking the wrong way, lulled into the same delusion of peace they used to mock abroad. The reckoning that followed cut to the bone.

Outside Israel, the attack broke another illusion: the lazy language of a “cycle of violence.” For years pundits used that phrase to suggest symmetry, as if Hamas rockets and Israeli responses balanced out in a grim rhythm. October 7 obliterated that narrative. It was not a cycle. It was a massacre. The scale, the cruelty, the intent demanded moral clarity. Yet much of the world flinched. Some tried to fit the carnage back into their old templates. Others excused it outright. Their reaction proved almost as revealing as the attack itself.

The days after October 7 should have brought moral clarity. Some governments lit landmarks in blue and white. Citizens sent messages of support. But another current surfaced fast: rallies that excused or celebrated slaughter. The West looked in the mirror and saw fracture lines.

In Sydney, the Opera House glowed with Israel’s flag. On its steps, crowds waved “Palestinian” banners, lit flares, and shouted chants that reeked of pogrom. The image was jarring: one of the world’s great symbols of culture split between solidarity and hate.

London erupted within 48 hours. Marchers paraded with Hamas insignia and chanted “From the river to the sea”—a slogan that erases Israel. Some praised the massacre outright. British Jews, stunned by events in Israel, now felt unsafe in their own capital.

Across the Atlantic, the rot was academic. At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed a letter blaming Israel entirely. No mention of murdered babies or raped women—just a neat inversion that could have been drafted in Hamas’s press office. Employers withdrew offers. Alumni recoiled. The administration muttered a late, tepid disavowal. At Cornell, a professor called the massacre “exhilarating.” That word alone told us what ideology had done to the academy.

Media wavered too. Headlines spoke of “clashes,” as if Hamas and toddlers were equal combatants. The BBC refused to call Hamas terrorists, clinging to its style guide while Israelis buried children. At the UN, even a resolution condemning Hamas met resistance. Delegates wanted “context,” as if context could sanitize butchery.

For Hamas, this was victory. The killers knew Western elites had marinated students and activists in a story of oppressors and oppressed. They knew enough would cheer or equivocate. On October 7, they tested the West’s moral spine. Too many bent. Some snapped.

Peace is a pause; never a promise. October 7 proved it. In a few hours, the fantasy that the West had outgrown barbarism collapsed in smoke and blood.

Hamas’s massacre was a shatter point. It exposed the same delusion that left Israeli kibbutzim undefended, Europe dependent on Moscow, and the free world scrambling to contain Beijing. The belief that history’s wars were over led to mental and moral disarmament. Those who never stopped believing in war—jihadists, autocrats, fanatics—took their chance.

Hamas is not an exception. It is the latest expression of a long war. Russia’s conquest of Ukraine and China’s threats to Taiwan are not relics. They are reminders. “Never again” is not a guarantee. On October 7, genocide tried to return. The peace after the Cold War was only an interlude, maintained by the strength of the past. Once the West convinced itself history was tame, history struck back.

This book argues for shmirah—guardianship—as the condition of peace. Without vigilance, peace rots. Tikkun olam, repairing the world, is empty without defense. Peace must be built, guarded, and guarded again. Israel paid the price of neglect on October 7. The West will pay a far higher price if it fails to learn the lesson.

What follows is not a call to despair or to militarism. It is a call to sober realism. War and rivalry remain history’s constants. Pretending otherwise is suicide. The holiday is over. The test is how we face history’s return.

This book deals in clarity. Euphemism and hedging have crippled the West’s ability to see danger; they won’t appear here. When Hamas carried out a massacre, that is what it was—not “militants” clashing, not “unrest.” Terrorists murdered Jews. We will call it by its name. The same bluntness applies to our own societies. Western leaders who stumbled, even with good intentions, will be judged plainly. Papering over failure guarantees we repeat it.

The method is simple: history, politics, ethics, examined together. We move from ancient empires to modern battlefields, from policy data to Jewish ideas. Concepts like shmirah—guardianship—and tikkun olam—repair—give us words English often lacks. They are not sermonizing. They are lessons forged in Jewish experience that the West urgently needs.

Every claim here is grounded in evidence. No conspiracy theories. No lazy generalities. The tone is blunt because equivocation has already cost us too much. Clear words are the first step toward clear choices. The story ahead is grim at times, but not hopeless. Realism is not despair. It is the precondition of renewal. What follows is written with open eyes and moral confidence. The holiday from history is over. The only way forward is to face what returned.

Part One: The Myth of Order

Chapter 1: Fukuyama’s Folly

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet empire cracked, and the West told itself a story. Liberal democracy had triumphed. Communism was finished. Peace was at hand.

Francis Fukuyama gave the mood its slogan: “the end of history.” Not the end of events, but the end of mankind’s great ideological struggles. Liberal democracy and free markets had won. Everyone else, sooner or later, would converge. There might be quarrels, but no more civilizational clashes.

Elites embraced this as gospel. The Cold War was over, therefore war itself was over. They acted as if the hard work of defense, vigilance, and memory could be abandoned. It was seductive. It was also a delusion. History had not ended. It had only paused, waiting for the West to look away.

Fukuyama’s thesis, first an essay in 1989 and then a 1992 book, argued that liberal democracy was the final stage of political development. Future wars, he suggested, would be peripheral, manageable. That claim leapt from seminar rooms to statecraft. In the 1990s, “End of History” became shorthand for the new normal. Leaders cashed in a “peace dividend.” Defense budgets shrank.

The cuts were real. Germany went from 2.6 percent of GDP on defense in 1990 to about 1.2 percent a decade later. Canada slid to barely 1 percent. Britain slashed its army by a quarter and retired ships early. A reunified Germany cut its forces from roughly 600,000 to under 350,000. The United States joined in. Active-duty troops fell by a third, from 2.1 million to 1.4 million. Army divisions dropped from 18 to 10. Spending sank to 3 percent of GDP by 2000. Republicans and Democrats alike called this responsibility. In truth, it was a holiday.

The spirit went beyond budgets. Globalization was hailed as the new security architecture. Pundits mocked old geopolitics and cheered a “flat world” where markets trumped armies. NATO expanded, the EU deepened, and Russia was labeled a “strategic partner.” China entered the global trade system. Davos panels and State Department briefings sounded the same: history’s conflicts were over, institutions and commerce had secured peace. Even pop culture joined in with the “Golden Arches Theory”—no two countries with McDonald’s would fight each other.

Reality disagreed. In 1993 a truck bomb tore through the World Trade Center. In 1994 Rwanda’s genocide killed 800,000 in three months. In 1998 al-Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200. In 2000 a suicide boat nearly sank the USS Cole, killing 17 sailors. Each outrage was treated as an aberration, a crime, a tragedy—not a warning that history was stirring. Policymakers still insisted the default setting was peace.

Into this atmosphere walked a heretic. If Fukuyama’s “End of History” was gospel, he argued the opposite. History was not over. It was gathering. His name was Samuel P. Huntington.

In 1993, Harvard’s Samuel Huntington published “The Clash of Civilizations?” He dropped the question mark in his 1996 book. His claim was blunt: the great divides of the post–Cold War world would not be ideological or economic. They would be cultural. Religion, history, and language would mark the front lines. Nation-states would still matter, but the bitterest wars would erupt along civilizational fault lines—Western, Orthodox, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, and others. History wasn’t over. It was alive and dangerous.

Western elites hated the message. Critics accused Huntington of essentialism, of stoking self-fulfilling wars. His focus on Islam’s “bloody borders” was denounced as crude and bigoted. In the triumphant 1990s, globalization and interdependence were the preferred gospel. Huntington’s thesis was dismissed as a relic, too grim for the liberal age.

And yet the decade unfolded exactly along his map. The Balkans split into Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Bosnian Muslims, with atrocities fueled by old resentments. In Chechnya, Russia fought two savage wars against Muslim separatists, and foreign jihadists poured in to help. In Nagorno-Karabakh, Christian Armenians and Muslim Azeris clashed again. Each conflict bore the mark of civilizational fault lines.

Israel stood at the crossroads. The Oslo euphoria of 1993 collapsed into the Second Intifada by 2000, marked by suicide bombings and Islamist rhetoric. What had once been framed as nationalist struggle revealed itself as civilizational confrontation. Hamas and other jihadists tied the “Palestinian” cause into a global Islamic war narrative. Al-Qaeda recruited fighters by invoking Bosnia, Chechnya, and Palestine in one breath. Huntington’s schema fit like a glove.

Then came September 11. Nineteen jihadists struck New York and Washington, targeting the symbols of Western finance and power. It was the clearest proof yet that parts of the Islamic world did not accept the West’s claim to universality. Western leaders still refused to call it a civilizational clash—President Bush took pains to say America was not at war with Islam—but the reality was obvious.

The 2000s should have silenced Huntington’s critics. Instead, many doubled down on the End of History faith. Afghanistan and Iraq were recast as laboratories to prove liberal democracy inevitable. Nation-building would cure jihad. History, they insisted, still bent toward peace. Huntington had already warned otherwise.

Islamism Fills the Vacuum

When communism fell, many in the West assumed no rival ideology remained. One did. Islamism—political Islam as a program for rule—stepped forward. Not Islam the faith. An ideological project to impose strict sharia through revolution, terror, and state power.

Its roots were ready. The Muslim Brotherhood (founded 1928) preached revival by discipline and politics. Sayyid Qutb supplied the doctrine of purification by jihad. In 1979 Khomeini proved a theocracy could seize a modern state and keep it. By the late 1980s the Sunni stream matured too. In 1988, veterans of the Afghan war around Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda to carry the fight beyond Afghanistan and toward a restored caliphate.

The 1990s brought warning shots. In 1993 a truck bomb hit the World Trade Center. In 1996 a truck bomb killed 19 U.S. airmen at Khobar Towers. In 1998 twin truck bombs destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing 224. In 2000 a suicide craft tore open the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailors. Each time, the response treated jihad as crime, not war. Files were opened. Indictments were drafted. Networks kept breathing.

Then 9/11. Nineteen al-Qaeda operatives turned airliners into missiles and struck New York and Washington. The United States toppled the Taliban that sheltered al-Qaeda and reorganized for a long fight. Yet even then, many in Washington tried to redeem the End of History by nation-building. Democratize Kabul and Baghdad and the fever would break. It didn’t.

Iran advanced while we argued. The Islamic Republic and its IRGC-Quds Force built a state-backed jihad network from Beirut to Sana’a. Hezbollah matured into a hybrid army and political machine, financed and trained by Tehran and routed through Damascus. In 1994 its operatives bombed the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires. By the 2000s Hezbollah held the south of Lebanon and stockpiled rockets by the tens of thousands. Tehran also funded Sunni proxies when useful. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad drew money, weapons, and training despite the sectarian divide. The common goal—erase Israel—made the partnership easy.

Western policy in the 1990s and early 2000s misread the picture. Leaders clung to a “law-enforcement paradigm,” as if terror were a tactic without an ideology. Agencies stovepiped intelligence. Known extremists learned to fly; no one fused the dots. We spoke about “terror” in the abstract and avoided the word Islamism in public. The enemy did not return the favor. Bin Laden issued fatwas declaring war. Tehran chanted “Death to Israel. Death to America.” They meant it.

The idea kept spreading. In 2014 ISIS overran large parts of Syria and Iraq and declared a caliphate the size of Britain. Thousands of recruits streamed in from Europe, North Africa, and beyond. Affiliates sprouted from the Sahel to the Philippines under the ISIS banner. Meanwhile Iran armed its proxies with rockets and drones and poured money into the Assad war and the Houthis. Estimates placed annual support at roughly $700 million for Hezbollah and at least $100 million for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, on top of broader regional spending. That is not a hobby. It is a strategy.

Islamism filled the ideological vacuum because the West left it open. While we congratulated ourselves on a world without grand struggles, our enemies built one.

In July 2006 Hezbollah ambushed an Israeli patrol, killing and kidnapping soldiers. Israel struck back. Hezbollah answered with a month of rocket fire and dug-in combat that stunned the world. Over 34 days, the group launched about 4,000 rockets into northern Israel. A million Israelis spent weeks in shelters. Cities shut down.

Hezbollah was no ragtag militia. Its fighters were drilled, bunkered, and armed with advanced Iranian and Syrian weapons. They fired anti-ship missiles that hit an Israeli naval vessel and used Kornet anti-tank missiles to disable Merkava tanks. Of the 120 Israeli soldiers killed, many fell in direct clashes against entrenched units in south Lebanon. Israel bloodied Hezbollah, but it did not destroy it. Among supporters, the group claimed a “divine victory.”

The war revealed something new. A state-backed militia could fight a modern army to a standstill. Hezbollah began with an arsenal of around 15,000 rockets—more than many national militaries—and sustained daily barrages of 100 or more. Its tunnel and bunker networks blunted Israel’s airpower. It blended terrorism, guerrilla tactics, and conventional arms into a hybrid force that neutralized much of Israel’s technological edge. For Western observers, this was the future: non-state actors wielding the firepower of small states. Hezbollah only grew stronger after 2006. Today its arsenal is estimated at over 130,000 rockets, including precision-guided missiles.

For Israel the lesson was bitter. Complacency and faith in technology left it unprepared for the scale of Hezbollah’s buildup. For the West, the parallel was obvious. While democracies congratulated themselves on the end of history, their enemies stockpiled strength. Hezbollah 2006 was a preview of the world we now live in—where ideology, state sponsors, and patient preparation can shatter illusions of peace in a single campaign.

The peace dividend was real. Budgets shrank, armies withered, and capabilities rotted away. Germany cut defense to around 1.2 percent of GDP and let its force structure collapse. By the 2020s, the Bundeswehr could field maybe 200 tanks, down from 7,000 at the Cold War’s end. A German audit found ammunition on hand for two days of high-intensity combat. Britain slashed its army and discovered it had only weeks of missile stocks. In NATO exercises, German crews once strapped painted broomsticks to vehicles to simulate machine guns. It became a symbol of the age—an alliance that congratulated itself on “progress” while hollowing out its ability to fight.

The United States also drew down. From the late ’80s to the late ’90s, active forces fell by a third, Army divisions from 18 to 10. Spending dropped to three percent of GDP. Even after the War on Terror build-up, Washington cut back again in the 2010s. The assumption—shared across parties—was that no great-power war loomed. History was supposedly finished.

This complacency extended to diplomacy. Treaties and frameworks multiplied: Oslo, the Agreed Framework with North Korea, the Budapest Memorandum, endless Balkan accords. Process became fetish. Paper was treated as power. Adversaries treated those papers as invitations. Russia pocketed Ukraine’s denuclearization guarantees in 1994, then annexed Crimea in 2014. North Korea signed pledges while racing for the bomb. Hamas signed Oslo, then launched the Second Intifada. Western capitals preferred signatures to vigilance.

Warnings were brushed off. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the USS Cole, embassy bombings in Africa—handled as crimes, not acts of war. Russia’s cyberattack on Estonia in 2007, its invasion of Georgia in 2008—met with token sanctions and quick resets. China’s island-building and military surge were waved away with the mantra that commerce would civilize Beijing.

Behind this was moral vanity. Elites believed history bent inevitably toward peace. Anyone warning otherwise was mocked as paranoid, warmongering, or Islamophobic. Vigilance was treated as a vice. In Jewish terms, tikkun olam—repairing the world—was pursued without shmirah, without guardianship. It was noble, and naïve.

The result was a West unready in mind, military, and spirit. It cut weapons, ignored threats, and shamed those who urged vigilance. Adversaries noticed. They never thought history had ended. They prepared while we vacationed.

A civilization that declares history over is one that invites its return—with force.

Chapter 2: Paper Promises

In the 1990s the West took a holiday from history. The Cold War’s end convinced leaders that liberal democracy had won forever, that peace was now the default setting of mankind. Confident in this illusion, they turned diplomacy into ritual.

Wars were treated as paperwork problems. Hold a summit, draft an accord, stage a photo-op—then declare peace achieved. Treaties became talismans. Ink on paper was supposed to erase centuries of strife.

It never worked that way. From Oslo to the Iran nuclear deal, Western leaders celebrated the signing ceremony while violence raged on the ground. Agreements became shields for aggressors, not restraints. Paper without power doesn’t end war. It invites it.

On September 13, 1993, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn. Cameras framed it as history. Israel recognized the PLO. The PLO said it recognized Israel and renounced terror. A Nobel followed. On paper, peace had begun.

In reality, Oslo built a process and a bureaucracy, not peace. Israel handed governance in Gaza and in major towns of Judea and Samaria to Arafat’s new Palestinian Authority, allowed exiled leaders to return, and armed PA police. Donors poured in billions to build institutions. The “peace industry” bloomed. Violence did too.

Arafat spoke in two languages. In English, “peace of the brave.” In Arabic, a different message. In May 1994, at a Johannesburg mosque, he likened Oslo to Hudaybiyyah—a tactical truce to be broken when strong enough. The point was plain. Use the accord to gain time, funds, and leverage. Keep the war alive.

Incitement never stopped. PA media glorified “martyrs.” Textbooks erased Israel. Maps lied. Sermons dehumanized Jews. Streets and camps were named for bombers. The PLO charter’s promise to end the armed struggle never truly materialized. Senior figures signaled the conflict was not over. “We reserve the right to return to resistance,” Mahmoud Abbas said years later.

The “revolving door” policy did the rest. Under pressure, PA police detained Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives, then released them or gave them soft custody. Bomb workshops operated under PA noses. Off-duty Fatah men moonlighted as gunmen. Terror climbed. In the six years after Oslo’s signing, roughly 300 Israelis were murdered in attacks. Buses and cafés in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem exploded. Then came 2000. Camp David collapsed after Ehud Barak offered a state in Gaza and most of Judea and Samaria, a capital in parts of East Jerusalem, and creative arrangements for holy sites. Arafat said no and offered nothing. The Second Intifada followed—organized shootings and suicide bombings, many run by Fatah-linked cells. In 2001 more than 200 Israelis were killed. In 2002 about 450. Most were civilians: buses, restaurants, a children’s pizzeria.

International indulgence masked accountability. Arafat toured world capitals, praised as a partner, while donors kept the PA solvent—even as salaries reached Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. The UN stacked resolutions against Israel, year after year, while “Pro-Palestinian” terror drew no special sessions. Israel’s self-defense was litigated; the murder of Israelis was rationalized as a “cycle of violence.”

Israel ended the slaughter by force, not by paper. It built a barrier to stop bombers, dismantled terror infrastructure in Operation Defensive Shield, and targeted commanders. Arafat died in 2004, confined to Ramallah. The bombs dwindled because deterrence returned, not because the process worked.

Oslo’s lesson is hard and simple. Paper that is not backed by changed intent and hard power rewards aggression. It created ministries and photo ops. It normalized the PLO without transforming it. It gave Arafat medals and money. It did not end the dream of “from the river to the sea.”

The same faith in documents would surface again—in a nuclear deal that promised stability while the threat matured. After Oslo’s mirage came the paper shields.

In July 2015 diplomats signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in Vienna and declared the Iran problem solved. President Obama called it hope over fear. Many in the West exhaled, as if a war had been averted. The relief was political. The danger remained.

The JCPOA narrowed one file and ignored the rest. It capped uranium stockpiles at about 300 kilograms, held enrichment to 3.67 percent, limited older centrifuges at Natanz, paused Fordow, and rearranged Arak. Inspectors got more access to declared sites. Breakout time stretched to roughly a year—on paper.

The deal left Iran’s missiles and its regional war machine untouched. The UN’s language on missiles “called upon” Tehran to show restraint. Tehran ignored it. The IRGC and Quds Force kept arming Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, and kept building militias in Iraq and Syria. Nuclear physics sat in one box. Everything else raged outside it.

Sunset clauses made the box temporary. Arms embargoes expired in 2020. Missile restrictions lapsed in 2023. Advanced centrifuge work expanded after year eight. Quantitative limits phased out after year ten. By year fifteen, core constraints vanished. Iran unplugged machines and stored them, waiting for the clock. Knowledge stayed. Infrastructure stayed. The pause favored the patient.

Cash arrived fast. Sanctions relief unlocked tens of billions. Oil exports surged. Military spending jumped. The IRGC got paid. Within weeks Qassem Soleimani flew to Moscow in defiance of a UN ban and coordinated the Syria campaign. Iran and Russia rescued Assad, built permanent positions in Syria, and pointed them at Israel. Hezbollah’s arsenal swelled into six figures, with precision projects underway. In Iraq, Iran-backed militias fought ISIS, then entrenched as a parallel state. In Yemen, Iranian-designed missiles and drones hit Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. The region absorbed the cost of our “success.”

Supporters said the deal bought time. It did. Iran used the time to get stronger. In 2018 Israel exposed a secret nuclear archive that proved Tehran had lied about never pursuing weapons work and had saved the plans. Inspections never offered no-notice access to military sites. Procurement networks kept hunting dual-use gear. Compliance was technical. Strategy was hostile.

When Washington left the deal in 2018, Tehran showed how quickly it could shed restraints. It spun advanced centrifuges, blew past stockpile limits, and enriched up to 60 percent. Breakout shrank. Regionally, nothing moderated. U.S. positions in Iraq took rocket fire. Iranian drones struck Saudi oil facilities. Israel hit IRGC sites in Syria while Hezbollah sat on a precision-guided powder keg.

The JCPOA repeated Oslo’s mistake at scale: celebrate signatures while adversaries bank leverage. Paper provided cover. Aggression advanced. The nuclear file became a trophy of multilateralism that insulated Tehran from pressure on missiles, terror finance, and proxy wars. Western officials warned allies not to “spoil the deal.” Iran spoiled the region.

If Oslo was a mirage that a handshake could end a century-old war, the JCPOA was a mask that a 150-page document could civilize a revolutionary regime. Both rewarded process over power. Both told enemies that patience beats promises. The next question is obvious: why do our institutions keep doubling down on process even when outcomes collapse?

How did we end up worshiping process? A class of officials and experts decided that meetings equal progress. If people kept talking, something good must be happening. Failure meant schedule another round. The goal became the communiqué, the framework, the photo at the podium. Reality on the ground was treated as a rude interruption.

Bureaucracy helped. A peace industry grew up around the table: envoys, NGOs, think tanks, conference circuits. Careers and budgets depended on keeping talks alive. Inputs replaced outcomes. Hours logged beat results achieved. In this world, engaging an adversary is virtue enough, even when the adversary uses the pause to reload.

Listen to the language and you hear the creed. Summits “reaffirm,” “urge,” and “commit to further dialogue.” Verbs that bite—disarm, dismantle, defeat—vanish. “Confidence-building measures” multiply while confidence in reality evaporates. The prose gets elegant as the content gets empty. It reads like poetry for people who fear nouns.

Authoritarians learned the script. Show up. Smile. Stall. Pocket concessions. If a democracy balks, accuse it of “sabotaging peace.” Western diplomats, terrified of being the spoiler, pressure allies to “be flexible.” The result is a process that rewards delay and punishes candor.

The record is brutal. UN Security Council 1701 ended the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah war on paper. It promised a Hezbollah-free zone south of the Litani and UN enforcement. Hezbollah rearmed to the teeth. UNIFIL watched. Tunnels crept toward Israel. The paper tied Israel’s hands while Iran’s proxy sharpened its knives.

The Budapest Memorandum persuaded Ukraine to surrender the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal for “assurances.” In 2014 Russia took Crimea. In 2022 it invaded outright. The memorandum did not keep the peace. It advertised the prey.

Minsk I and II froze Russia’s first incursion in Donbas. They also locked in Moscow’s gains, forced Kyiv into talks with its own occupiers, and bought the Kremlin seven years to rebuild for a larger war. Europe mistook a slow burn for a stable ceasefire. Then the house went up.

There is a counterexample, and it proves the rule. Dayton worked in Bosnia because NATO first imposed facts with airpower, then enforced the agreement with 60,000 troops. Paper memorialized power. It did not pretend to replace it.

The point is not to sneer at diplomacy. It is to restore sequence and spine. Talk after you have leverage. Sign when you can enforce. Do not confuse a press conference with a settlement. In Jewish terms, shalom is a value, but shmirah—guardianship—keeps it alive. Without guardianship, process is paint over termites.

Paper without power invites predators. We saw it with Arafat’s “process,” with Iran’s nuclear “compliance,” with Hezbollah’s “ceasefire,” with Putin’s “mediation.” The predators understood the cult better than its priests.

Enough liturgy. If you want peace, bring strength to the table and a clock the enemy does not control. Otherwise, you are not negotiating. You are feeding the meter.

Chapter 3: Maps and Masks

In 1915 a British official traced a neat line across a wartime map and proposed a border “from the ‘E’ in Acre to the last ‘K’ in Kirkuk.” A finger flick. A future. Imperial cartography worked like that: rulers and pens in London and Paris, peoples and consequences somewhere else.

Europe had long confused states with nations. A state is a government with borders. A nation is a people with shared identity. In Europe the two brawled their way into rough alignment. In the Ottoman East, officials tried to conjure nations by decree. They assumed identities would kindly grow to fit the lines.

They did not.

In 1916 Britain and France signed Sykes–Picot, a secret plan to divide the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Oil, canals, rails, prestige—those were the motives. The lines cut across tribes and sects with cheerful indifference. After 1918, San Remo and Cairo turned the sketch into mandates. Britain took Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine. France took Syria and Lebanon. These were administrative inventions wearing national costumes.

Iraq. Ottoman Iraq had been three provinces: Mosul, Baghdad, Basra. London fused them into one kingdom to secure Mesopotamian oil and a land bridge to the Mediterranean. The result bundled Sunni Arabs, Shi‘a Arabs, and Kurds under one flag. A Sunni monarchy sat atop a Shi‘a majority and a large Kurdish minority. The state functioned when force was abundant and identity suppressed. When Saddam fell in 2003, the mask slipped. Civil war followed. The Kurds moved toward de facto independence. ISIS thrived where the map had never matched the people.

Syria. France split the mandate into sectarian and regional mini-states—Damascus, Aleppo, an Alawite enclave, Jabal Druze—then stitched them back together. The military became a ladder for rural minorities. In 1970 Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite, seized power. The regime spoke Arab nationalism but ruled through sectarian networks and security organs. In 2011, when authority cracked, the country fractured along the lines the French once drew. The Kurds carved an autonomous zone. Iran and Hezbollah armed the regime. The map held only where force returned.

Lebanon. Paris carved Lebanon from coastal Syria in 1920 as a Maronite-led state and added Muslim hinterlands to make it viable. Independence in 1943 froze sectarian balance in law: Maronite president, Sunni prime minister, Shi‘a speaker. Demography shifted. Refugees arrived. The fiction collapsed into civil war in 1975. Syria occupied. Iran’s proxy Hezbollah entrenched as a state within the state. Today a militia outweighs the national army. The confessional pact survives on paper. Power lives elsewhere.

The pattern is consistent. The farther a colonial border strayed from lived identities, the more violence was required to keep it in place. Maps are masks. They cover tribe and sect only while bayonets hold. Remove the force and the old faces return.

Partition of India: Drawing Blood into a Border

In 1947 Britain rushed out of its empire’s crown jewel and left behind two states—and a human catastrophe. India and Pakistan were born not from careful planning but from a hasty compromise. A single British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, who had never set foot in India, was given a few weeks to carve Muslim-majority Pakistan from provinces where Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs had lived side by side for centuries. The line he drew, the Radcliffe Line, was law by August 15. It was faster than a census. The dead supplied the rest of the data.

Violence followed immediately. Punjab and Bengal erupted. Trains pulled into stations packed with corpses. Refugee columns were ambushed. Villages were torched. Neighbors turned executioners. Between 12 and 15 million people were uprooted in the largest forced migration in history. At least a million died—some estimates run higher. Punjab was cut in two: Lahore emptied of Hindus and Sikhs, Amritsar emptied of Muslims. Bengal too was split, setting off decades of flight, pogrom, and eventual war.

And then there was Kashmir. A Muslim-majority princely state ruled by a Hindu Maharaja, caught between India and Pakistan. When Pashtun tribesmen backed by Pakistan invaded in October 1947, the ruler acceded to India in return for protection. The first Indo-Pakistani war began. By 1949 Kashmir was divided, and the UN called for a plebiscite that never came. The fuse had been lit. Later wars in 1965, 1971, and 1999 all returned to Kashmir. The insurgency that began in the late 1980s still smolders. By the 1990s, both India and Pakistan had nuclear weapons. A border drawn in haste had become a potential nuclear flashpoint.

Partition proved the peril of trying to slice through mixed populations with a ruler. A British pen created two states and one permanent war. The borders of Punjab, Bengal, and Kashmir bleed still. National identities eventually took root in India and Pakistan, but the price was staggering. The Radcliffe Line, like so many imperial lines, did not resolve rivalries—it froze them into frontlines.

This was not an isolated case. From the Middle East to South Asia, the maps of empire left brittle states and permanent crises. In the next chapter we turn back to the Ottomans, whose collapse multiplied such fractures across the region. The lesson remains the same: paper lines without legitimacy are masks. And masks crack.

The Palestine Mandate: Promises in Conflict

No land shows the curse of imperial map-making more than Palestine. Under the Ottomans it was a minor province. Under Britain it became the stage for impossible promises. To Arabs, London whispered of independence if they rose against the Turks. To Jews, it pledged a “national home” in their ancestral land. The Mandate born in 1922 wrapped both commitments into one legal instrument—and guaranteed collision.

Britain worsened the contradictions. In 1921 it lopped off four-fifths of the Mandate to create Transjordan, closing it to Jewish settlement and handing it to a Hashemite client. West of the river, Jews built the Yishuv, laying the institutions of a state. Waves of immigrants fleeing antisemitism and then Nazism arrived. Arabs, galvanized by both Zionism and colonial rule, coalesced into their own nationalist cause. British officials tried to play both sides: White Papers to placate Arabs, quiet waivers to satisfy Jews. Neither trusted the Crown.

The Arab Revolt of 1936–39 exposed the Mandate’s fragility. Britain crushed it, then in 1939 shut the gates on Jewish refugees at the moment of Europe’s genocide. For Zionists it was betrayal; for Arabs, too little too late. By war’s end the Mandate was collapsing. Britain, exhausted, dumped the problem on the United Nations.

The UN Partition Plan of 1947 offered two states, one Jewish, one Arab, with Jerusalem internationalized. The Jews accepted. The Arabs rejected. War broke out even before independence. On May 14, 1948 Israel declared statehood; the next day five Arab armies invaded. Israel survived and expanded its lines. Jordan took Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem. Egypt held Gaza. No Arab Palestinian state emerged. Refugees were created on both sides: some 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled, and in the following years hundreds of thousands of Jews were driven out of Arab lands, many absorbed by Israel.

In the decades since, Israel has often been painted as the region’s colonial implant. The irony is obvious. The Middle East’s map is littered with borders scrawled in Europe. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon—each carries the fractures of imperial design. But only Israel is treated as illegitimate. The Mandate years planted this distortion: Britain issued overlapping promises, then walked away, leaving Jews and Arabs to fight over the contradictions.

Paper promises without power breed lasting mistrust. Britain imagined it could patronize both sides, then abandoned both. Israel, against all odds, built a sovereign state. Arab society, denied a state of its own and fed a narrative of endless grievance, remains fractured. The Mandate’s ghost still haunts the conflict. And the mask of empire—lines on a map, contradictory declarations—has left blood and bitterness in its place.

Tribes, Sects, and Peoples Without States

Across the Middle East and South Asia, the map never settled the question of identity. States were proclaimed. Nations were assumed. The older loyalties did not vanish. They endured, often strengthened by the resentment that came with imposed borders.

Take the Kurds, roughly 30–35 million people across Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. After World War I, Sèvres dangled a state. Lausanne erased it. Ankara crushed revolts. Baghdad gassed villages. Tehran and Damascus repressed language and culture. Yet Kurdish identity held. Iraqi Kurdistan now functions as a near-state with its own parliament and Peshmerga. Syrian Kurds carved out autonomy during the civil war. Turkey has fought the PKK for decades. When central authority weakens, Kurdish self-rule resurfaces. The imperial mask slips. The people beneath do not.

Consider the Pashtuns. The Durand Line of 1893 cut their world in two. Afghanistan on one side, British India on the other, later Pakistan. The line never matched village or clan. Pashtuns fought the Soviets, then became the backbone of the Taliban. After 2001 the war flowed across the frontier because the society itself spans it. Islamabad tried to wield Pashtun Islamists as tools in Afghanistan and discovered it had sharpened a blade that cuts inward. Kabul refuses to legitimize the line. The mountains keep their own ledger.

The Sunni–Shi‘a divide crosses every colonial boundary. It is older than any modern state and more durable than most of them. Iraq showed what happens when force no longer smothers it. Once the Ba‘ath grip broke, sectarian militias turned cities into killing grounds until deterrence returned. Lebanon’s French-made balance produced a system where Shi‘a were marginalized, then rose through Amal and Hezbollah to dominate large parts of the state. Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy rules a Shi‘a majority under constant tension. Yemen’s war is messy, but Iran and its partners cast it as another front in a transnational sectarian struggle. These alignments are not abstractions. They are networks of protection and memory that people trust when states fail.

Diasporas carry these arguments abroad. Berlin has seen Kurdish rallies met by Turkish nationalists. London has witnessed Sunni–Shi‘a taunts at religious processions. Most of it remains contained, but the pattern is telling. People remember who they are even when the passport changes. A Kurd from Diyarbakır and a Kurd from Erbil do not need a seminar to recognize kinship in Berlin. Partition stories sit at Sikh kitchen tables in Southall. The map on the wall says one thing. The family archive says another.

Colonial powers imagined they could nationalize tribes and smooth out sects. They produced flags and anthems and hoped identities would file neatly underneath. Some did, especially where a state delivered security and a sense of common purpose. Many did not. These loyalties went masked, then returned when the state faltered. They will keep returning as long as paper borders deny human geography.

This matters for what follows. Empires collapse and leave behind lines no one believes in. Demography shifts. Lawfare and propaganda stretch across those lines. If you misread the durable identities, you misread the conflict. The lesson is stark. Borders can tell you which government claims your village. They do not answer the older question: who is your people.

A century after Sykes–Picot and Partition, the pattern is obvious. When central power weakens, the identities maps tried to bury come roaring back. The border is a veneer. Scratch it and the old loyalties rise.

Iraq proved it after 2003. Saddam fell and the sectarian fault lines split open. By 2006, Sunni and Shi‘a militias were cleansing neighborhoods in Baghdad. Tens of thousands died. Millions fled. The army fractured along sect lines. ISIS grew from the chaos, seized Mosul in 2014, and declared a caliphate that erased the border with Syria on the ground. The Kurds made their move, secured their zone, and even voted for independence in 2017. Baghdad pushed the referendum back, but the message held: the “unitary” Iraq of imperial design survives mostly on paper.

Syria went further. Protests in 2011 met bullets. The state cracked into sectarian and tribal fiefs. Assad’s Alawite-led regime held Damascus and the coast. Sunni rebel groups took swaths of territory. The Kurds built Rojava in the northeast and partnered with the U.S. against ISIS. Russia and Iran saved Assad. Turkey invaded to cage the Kurds. By the mid-2010s, Syria was a mosaic of armed zones with foreign flags on the edges. Half a million dead. Half the country displaced. Borders remained on maps. Power lived in militias and outside capitals.

Lebanon’s mask slipped slowly. After 1990, the civil war ended but the system stayed sectarian. Syria enforced a cold order until 2005. Hezbollah refused to disarm and, in 2008, pointed its guns at Beirut to prove who decides. Since 2019 the economy has collapsed, the port blew up, and the state shrank to a letterhead. Hezbollah rules its turf. The government pretends to rule the rest. Lebanon remains a single country in name, a patchwork in fact.

Kashmir shows how a hurried line becomes a permanent fuse. In 1947 the princely state split under fire and a UN ceasefire froze a front. Wars followed in 1965, 1971, and 1999. An insurgency flared in the late 1980s, fueled by Pakistani support. In 2019 a suicide bombing killed dozens of Indian troops; India struck inside Pakistan. That same year New Delhi revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy and imposed a lockdown. Two nuclear states glare across a line neither trusts. The valley waits.

The lesson is blunt. Where identity and border diverge, war is patient. It pauses when force compels it, then resumes when the guard relaxes. The tragedies of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Kashmir were not surprises. They were the bill for maps that ignored human geography and for a West that convinced itself those maps were final.

Chapter 4: Multicultural Blindfold

In the 1990s and 2000s, Europe convinced itself that migration would dissolve into harmony. The EU opened its doors wide—first to new member states in the east, then to asylum seekers and refugees from far beyond its borders. The reigning faith was that once inside Europe, people would naturally converge on liberal democratic norms. It was an optimism that ignored history and underestimated identity.

Freedom of movement inside the EU moved millions east to west. At the same time, asylum rules loosened. Sweden built a reputation for generosity. Germany joined in, most dramatically in 2015 when Angela Merkel suspended EU asylum rules and declared, Wir schaffen das—we can do it. That year over a million migrants and refugees entered Europe, the largest influx since World War II. Germany alone registered more than a million. Sweden, with fewer than ten million citizens, received 163,000 asylum applications. Camps and cities strained under the weight. On Lesbos, a facility built for 3,000 held more than 10,000. In Germany, school gymnasiums were turned into shelters. A small Austrian town suddenly received 5,000 refugees in a single day—more than its own population.

The numbers tell the story. In 2014, there were 280,000 illegal border crossings into the EU. In 2015, 1.82 million. Syrians, Afghans, and Iraqis led the flow, but large numbers also came from Africa and South Asia. Some sought refuge from war. Many sought opportunity. Once in Europe, rejected applicants often disappeared into the cities.

Urban Europe changed fast. By 2019, Brussels was 35 percent foreign nationals. London counted 40 percent born abroad. In Paris’s Seine-Saint-Denis, immigrants made up more than 30 percent of residents. In Malmö, 36 percent. In Stockholm’s Rinkeby, more than 80 percent of residents had immigrant backgrounds. The new arrivals concentrated in particular districts, often alongside older diasporas, creating parallel neighborhoods where integration was more aspiration than fact.

Immigration has enriched Europe in many ways. But the volume and speed of this intake, combined with weak assimilation policies, produced strain. Governments relied on a doctrine of multiculturalism that discouraged pressing newcomers to adopt national norms. Tolerance became a shield for practices that undermined the very liberal order Europe thought it was spreading. Those who raised concerns were branded intolerant. And so the blindfold stayed on.

This set the stage for what followed: not only demographic change, but a cultural doctrine that insisted the cracks should not be discussed.

Europe made tolerance into a creed. In theory, admirable. In practice, it often meant tolerating the intolerant. By the 2000s, “multiculturalism” became official doctrine. Governments subsidized cultural associations, offered translation instead of insisting on integration, and avoided pressing newcomers to adapt. Assimilation was recast as chauvinism. The result was a blindfold: authorities hesitated to confront practices that flatly violated liberal norms.

Criticism carried a price. A teacher warning about extremist sermons risked being labeled racist. A journalist writing about crime in immigrant-heavy districts was accused of fueling xenophobia. The loudest censors were not always in government but in media and academia, eager to prove moral superiority. The effect was a chilling silence. Islamist preachers thrived in the vacuum, while liberals inside Muslim communities—women, secularists, gays—were left exposed and ignored.

Some leaders eventually admitted the obvious. Merkel declared in 2010 that “multikulti” had failed. Cameron and Sarkozy said much the same. But policies barely shifted. Police avoided certain neighborhoods unless violence spilled out. Informal legal pluralism set in: sharia “councils” and clan arbitration tolerated, forced marriages overlooked, female genital mutilation prosecutions rare. Hate speech laws were applied asymmetrically: a journalist who criticized Islamist ideology risked prosecution, while an extremist imam calling Jews “apes and pigs” was brushed off as community rhetoric.

The consequences piled up. In Wuppertal in 2014, Salafists patrolled nightlife streets in orange vests marked “Sharia Police.” A local court acquitted them, ruling the stunt not intimidating enough. In Britain, entire grooming gangs exploited underage girls for years while authorities looked away, terrified of being accused of racism. In France, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, some classrooms in the banlieues refused to observe a minute of silence. Teachers stayed quiet, fearing backlash. Samuel Paty showed cartoons in a civics lesson; he was murdered. Even then, officials hesitated to speak plainly about Islamist separatism.

This was not liberalism. It was abdication. True liberalism protects the vulnerable and enforces one law for all. Europe’s “tolerance” often meant leaving minorities at the mercy of their own extremists. Jews, Christians, secular Muslims, women—they paid the first price. Society at large pays it later. That is the cost of a blindfold.

Europe put on a blindfold in the name of harmony. The first to feel the edge were Jews and Christian communities. When Islamist propaganda spread or the Middle East flared, the hatred landed here. Jews were the canary. Churches soon felt the draft.

Antisemitism surged. In France—home to roughly half a million Jews—annual antisemitic incidents ran in the hundreds. In some years Jews, under 1 percent of the population, made up around half of recorded racist acts. Synagogues were firebombed during the Second Intifada. In 2012 a jihadist murdered a rabbi and three children at a Toulouse school. In 2014 rioters in Paris tried to storm a synagogue. In January 2015 four Jews were murdered at the Hypercacher supermarket because they were Jews. Many stopped wearing a kippah in public. Many left.

Britain saw record highs. In 2021 the Community Security Trust logged 2,255 incidents—its worst year—spiking during the Israel–Hamas war. Car convoys drove through Jewish neighborhoods hurling abuse. Street assaults rose. A third of incidents referenced Israel explicitly, showing how imported rage targets local Jews.

Germany’s numbers climbed as well. Police recorded thousands of antisemitic offenses yearly. Neo-Nazis remain a threat, but so do imported hatreds. In Wuppertal, Palestinian youths firebombed a synagogue; a court once called it “protest.” In Berlin, kippah wearers have been attacked by assailants shouting “Yahud.” The security services now track Islamist milieus for virulent antisemitism because it is a gateway to violence.

Churches came under pressure too—vandalism, arson, and terror. France logs hundreds of anti-Christian acts a year. In 2016, two ISIS adherents slit Father Jacques Hamel’s throat at the altar in Normandy. In 2020 a Tunisian Islamist murdered three worshippers in the Nice basilica. Many other attacks never make headlines: smashed statues, burned altars, graffiti promising more.

Why target churches? In the jihadist narrative, they are “Crusader” symbols and easy, unguarded targets. The same ideology that calls Jews the first enemy reserves the next blow for Christians—“Saturday people, then Sunday people.” The pattern is visible from Gaza to Seine-Saint-Denis.

The Middle East offers the grim baseline. Jews have been driven out of nearly every Arab country. Christians are next where Islamists rule. Bethlehem’s Christians have dwindled from a strong majority to a sliver amid pressure from Islamists and local clans. Gaza’s tiny Christian community has nearly vanished under Hamas. Pluralism dies when jihad governs.

The warning is simple. When a society tolerates intolerant ideologies, Jews take the first hit. Churches are next. Then everyone else. Europe learned this in blood at Toulouse, Paris, Nice, Berlin, Madrid, and London. The canary has been singing for years. It should not have to scream.

Imported Rivalries, Transplanted Tribalism

Migration moves people. It also moves loyalties. Europe did not just receive workers and refugees. It received unfinished wars. Turks and Kurds. Sunnis and Shi‘a. Islamists and secular Muslims. Clan feuds from the Maghreb and the Caucasus. The multiculti blindfold insisted these fractures would dissolve on contact with Europe. Many didn’t.

Turkish–Kurdish clashes made the point early. Germany hosts millions with roots in Turkey, including Kurds. When Ankara’s war with the PKK flared in 2015, streets in Frankfurt and Berlin flared too. Kurdish rallies met Turkish nationalist counter-marches. Riot police separated brawls in Celle where iron bars and machetes appeared. DİTİB-linked mosques were accused of surveilling Kurds and Gülenists for Ankara. Erdoğan urged the diaspora to mobilize. German politicians felt pressure to pick sides in a NATO ally’s domestic fight—inside Germany.

Sectarian fault lines traveled as well. London has both large Sunni and smaller Shi‘a communities. Ashura processions drew hecklers. Salafist groups celebrated Riyadh’s execution of Sheikh Nimr online. In Sweden and Germany, Yazidi refugees reported harassment by Islamists who had hunted them in Iraq. Some of the persecuted discovered their persecutors living down the block in Europe.

Clan feuds filled the vacuum where the state looked away. Sweden’s gang wars often track back to extended families and imported networks. Grenades and drive-bys in Stockholm suburbs are not “random youth crime.” In Södertälje, Assyrian/Syriac clans fought for rackets. Somali clans clashed in Gothenburg. In Dijon in 2020, Chechen men mobilized by social media drove in from across France to punish North African gangs after an assault—48 hours of private militia rule on French streets while police scrambled.

Parallel governance followed. Witness cooperation collapsed in some neighborhoods; fear and loyalty trumped law. Disputes went to clan elders or imams, not courts. Sharia councils and “family mediations” handled debt, marriage, even violence. The state noticed only when a truce failed and blood hit the pavement. Equal citizenship shrank to a slogan.

Democracy felt the strain. Bloc voting hardened. Mosque networks acted as machines. In the Netherlands, parties like Denk rode ethnic solidarity while echoing Erdoğan. In Tower Hamlets, London, Lutfur Rahman’s 2014 mayoralty collapsed under a tribunal’s findings of fraud and undue religious influence. Imams endorsed ballots. Grants flowed to client groups. The line between community leadership and machine politics blurred.

Foreign policy got tugged by diaspora strings. Gaza wars, Turkish-Kurdish clashes, India–Pakistan spikes—European streets filled with opposing flags. Violence sometimes followed. Parliaments faced lobbying to import positions from abroad. The arena moved, not the fight.

All of this signals a failure of shmirah—guardianship. The state’s duty is one law for all, enforced everywhere. Europe tried vibes instead of citizenship. It outsourced authority to patriarchs, preachers, and foreign consulates, then called it “community engagement.” The result was fragmentation dressed up as diversity.

The fix isn’t denial. It’s integration with teeth: shared civic norms, language, equal rights paired with equal duties, and the courage to shut down parallel systems. Without that, the old wars will keep replaying on new streets.

Integration is not complicated in theory. It means joining the civic, economic, and cultural life of the country where you live. Speak the language. Work. Send your kids to school. Accept the rules of liberal democracy—gender equality, free speech, equal law. By those measures, Europe’s record in the multicultural decades was poor. Many migrants and their children flourished anyway, but far too many did not. Parallel norms grew where the state refused to set expectations.

The numbers tell the story. In Sweden, barely half of working-age refugees from the 2000s had jobs even a decade later. Welfare dependence became generational. In France and Germany, immigrant-heavy schools lagged badly in language and test scores. Banlieues turned into dropout factories. Segregation deepened.

Social boundaries hardened too. Intermarriage rates between Muslims and non-Muslims remained low. Many communities enforced endogamy with pressure or ostracism. It was not unique to Muslims—lots of groups prefer marrying in. But in this context, it signaled walls, not bridges.

Attitudes revealed even sharper divides. A 2016 survey found 52% of British Muslims thought homosexuality should be illegal; nearly half did not want a gay teacher in the classroom. Almost a quarter favored sharia replacing British law in “some areas.” In Germany, research showed up to 60% of Muslims said Islamic rules mattered more to them than the law of the republic. In France, polls picked up higher levels of antisemitism among Muslims than the wider public. The terrorists who murdered Jewish children in Toulouse or kosher shoppers in Paris were not aberrations—they came out of that milieu.

Not every immigrant shared these views—far from it. Many recoiled at extremism and paid the price for resisting it. Muslim reformers, secularists, and women who wanted equal rights often found themselves targeted as “not Muslim enough.” They, too, were abandoned by the blindfold.

Policy only worsened the drift. Germany waited until 2005 to create serious integration courses, then watched them drown under the 2015 migrant wave. Sweden handed out welfare checks while telling itself time alone would “integrate” people. The UK assumed the market would handle it. France preached republican assimilation while letting banlieues rot. Across the board, leaders avoided pressing for language mastery, civics, dispersal, and one standard of law. Sharia councils, “honor” violence, and intimidation festered.

Yes, there are success stories: Syrian doctors in German hospitals, Bangladeshi entrepreneurs in London, Moroccan teachers in Marseille. Second generations often do better than their parents. But these gains happened in spite of the blindfold, not because of it. Progress came when reality forced change—when police finally cracked down on extremist mosques, or when public outrage forced justice in honor-killing cases.

In Jewish thought, shmirah means guardianship: the duty to protect what matters. Applied to Europe, it means guaranteeing that a girl facing a forced marriage is protected as much as any other girl; that a Jew can wear a kippah without fear; that a working-class native doesn’t feel abandoned in their own suburb. Integration requires that kind of guardianship, not appeasement.

The multicultural blindfold wasn’t just naïve rhetoric. It created parallel societies by excusing them. It left neighborhoods unpoliced, schools disengaged, and debate silenced. The result was fractured societies where common ground shrank. Europe now knows integration must be rebooted—with clear expectations, enforcement, and partnership with those who want in.

The lesson is blunt: celebrating diversity is fine; denying reality is lethal.

Chapter 5: The Elite’s Echo Chamber

Elite campuses built a moral script that excuses aggression against the West and Israel while branding vigilance as bigotry. When Hamas butchered Israelis on October 7, many universities did not find clarity. They found a rationale. Student groups and some faculty recast the massacre as “resistance,” blamed “colonialism,” and treated Israel’s self-defense as the real offense. Jewish students were jeered, isolated, and told to check their humanity at the door.

This did not appear overnight. Years of postcolonial catechism and administrative indulgence primed the story: Israel as settler oppressor; Islamist movements as understandable reactions; Western security as a sin. So when the blood was still fresh, Harvard student organizations issued a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible.” The administration equivocated. Donors balked. On other quads, crowds chanted “Intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” then insisted it was just rhetoric.

Columbia turned into a pitched culture war within days. Vigils for the murdered faced rallies that celebrated “resistance.” Harassment followed. Leadership issued generic condemnations of “all hate,” careful to balance antisemitism and “Islamophobia” as if the threat were symmetrical. It was not. At Cornell, a student was arrested for threats to kill Jews. In Washington, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT were asked whether calling for genocide violates campus rules. They answered with “context.” The country heard the subtext: even that line could not be drawn.

By spring 2024, encampments and building takeovers spread. Police cleared tent cities; faculty defended them as free speech. Jewish students asked the most basic question: who will protect us on our own campus. In 2025, Harvard released twin task-force reports—one on antisemitism, one on anti-Muslim bias. The antisemitism report documented a climate of one-sided coursework and open hostility. The companion report insisted pro-Palestinian speech was over policed. The two documents contradicted each other, and the university tried to appease both. Paralysis dressed as evenhandedness.

Curricula reinforced the drift. “Settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” “indigenous resistance”—the buzzwords became dogma. Islamist theocracy received “context.” Naming Hamas or Hezbollah as antisemitic and illiberal drew charges of orientalism. Calling for Israel’s erasure passed as edgy activism. Bureaucracies sealed the frame. DEI offices that claim to protect minorities often excluded Jews from their concern, filing them as privileged. After October 7, some diversity staffers praised “resistance” online. Administrators mumbled about nuance. The message was received.

The data matched the feeling. Free-speech surveys placed elite schools at the bottom of the pack. After October 7, a large majority of Jewish students reported harassment or worse. Many hid identity markers. Some reported faculty complicity. That is not a marketplace of ideas. It is an ideological cartel.

Money and networks helped it along. Gulf funding, especially from Qatar, saturated programs and centers, nudging campus discourse toward narratives Al Jazeera could applaud. National groups coordinated campaigns like BDS and “Apartheid Week,” training organizers who flowed straight into NGOs, newsrooms, and think tanks. Slogans born on the quad migrated to op-eds and UN podiums with depressing speed.

Why does this matter beyond the gates. Because universities mint elites. If a generation learns that Western self-defense is oppression and that Israel is uniquely illegitimate, they will carry it into media and government. The campus supplied the slogans and the fig leaves. The broader echo chamber will broadcast and weaponize both.

Universities wrote the script. The media turned up the volume.

In the first hours after October 7, even jaded newsrooms showed moral clarity. Hamas had massacred civilians. The footage was undeniable. Then the frame snapped back to “cycle of violence.” Headlines drifted from active to passive voice. “Violence erupts.” “Clashes.” The agent disappeared when Israelis were murdered. It reappeared when Israel struck back: “Israel bombards Gaza.” Perpetrator and victim quietly traded places.

Content analysis caught what readers felt. Over seven months of New York Times coverage, stories that humanized only Palestinians outnumbered those humanizing only Israelis by roughly four to one. Headlines criticizing Israel drowned criticism of Hamas by more than twenty to one. Sympathy for Palestinians led the front page a majority of days; sympathy for Israelis barely registered. The floodlight pointed one way.

How does this happen. First, the “both sides” reflex that flattens cause and effect. Second, language games: Hamas “fighters” and “gunmen” “mounted a raid,” while Israel “kills” and “refuses.” Third, asymmetric skepticism: Israeli claims about atrocities were treated as “allegations” pending verification; casualty figures from Hamas-run ministries were printed as fact. The Al-Ahli Hospital story showed the machine at work: an explosion, a rush to blame Israel, a headline world tour, then quiet corrections after the damage was done.

Social media supercharged the tilt. TikTok and X reward emotion, not context. Viral clips of rubble and wounded children saturated feeds within hours, often stripped of sourcing or time stamps, sometimes recycled from other wars. Newsrooms under pressure let trending posts set the agenda. Activist-journalists in Gaza became de facto stringers; their captions framed the facts before editors touched a keyboard. Meanwhile, graphic proof of Hamas’s crimes was throttled as “sensitive content.” The attention economy did the rest. David-versus-Goliath imagery always outperforms a paragraph about murdered kibbutz families.

Frames harden into “common sense,” then into policy. A hashtag becomes a headline, becomes a floor speech, becomes a resolution at the U.N. The sequence is familiar: viral claim → sympathetic headline → protests → diplomatic condemnation → demands for a ceasefire—often before the original claim is verified. Hamas designed for this. It wanted the world’s outrage aimed not at its pogrom, but at Israel’s defense. The echo chamber obliged.

Inside newsrooms, there was dissent. The BBC wrestled over whether to say “terrorist.” Some staff accused their own outlets of being too pro-Israel even as coverage showed almost wall-to-wall grief from Gaza. But the output the public saw carried one dominant story line.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s selection, emphasis, grammar, and speed. Shine a floodlight on one side’s suffering and keep the other in shadow, and you don’t need a memo to get a result. The press became the amplifier; NGOs and “experts” provided the sheet music. That is where we turn next.

Universities minted the slogans. Media amplified them. Think tanks and NGOs laundered them into “expert consensus.”

That is how a campus chant becomes a 100-page “apartheid” report with footnotes and a press tour. Once stamped with institutional logos, the claims move from rallies to briefings, from op-eds to court filings. Lawmakers cite them. Diplomats wave them. Policy bends.

Follow the money. Gulf cash—especially Qatari—has soaked Western institutions. Brookings ran a Doha branch. Senior figures courted Doha so eagerly one landed under investigation as an undeclared agent. Qatar funds academic centers and policy shops that reliably stress “root causes,” soften Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood ties, and urge “engagement.” No contract says “echo our line,” but you don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Progressive Western foundations add their weight, bankrolling BDS-adjacent NGOs and “international law” outfits whose dockets fixate on Israel and Western militaries, not ISIS or Assad.

What do they produce? A steady stream of narratives dressed as research.

“Apartheid” and “genocide.” HRW and Amnesty rolled out “apartheid” labels in 2021–22. After October 7, “genocide” accusations against Israel spread faster than facts. Open letters, rapporteurs, and NGOs hurled the charge at the country trying to stop a genocidal enemy. The inversion was the point.

Ceasefire manifestos. Policy briefs called for “immediate ceasefire” and “lifting blockades,” barely mentioning 200+ Israeli hostages in tunnels or Hamas’s open vow to repeat October 7. Reward the tactic, get more of it. The papers read like strategy memos for Hamas wrapped in conflict-resolution prose.

Lawfare. Legal NGOs sprinted to the ICC with dossiers built on partisan testimony and Hamas-run data. The aim is stigma, not justice: keep Israeli leaders under a cloud, intimidate allies, seed headlines—“Israel accused of war crimes”—that then loop back into politics. Meanwhile, the ICC file on Hamas gathers dust.

UN machinery. UNRWA textbooks and staff glorifying jihad; facilities used for rockets and tunnels; periodic donor “shocks,” then business as usual. The Human Rights Council’s “independent” commissions staffed by members who prejudged Israel as apartheid—and one who mused about the “Jewish lobby.” Each report generates the next headline, then the next resolution.

Doha’s policy arm in Washington makes the model explicit. The Arab Center DC—funded by its Qatari parent—hosts panels on “Gaza genocide” and publishes pieces justifying October 7 as a “message.” An advisory board of anti-Israel academics supplies quotes to newsrooms and talking points to Hill staff. It looks like scholarship. It functions like propaganda.

The laundering loop is simple. Activist claim becomes an NGO white paper. That then becomes a prestige media citation and lands in a parliamentary speech. Inevitably, it becomes a UN resolution and goes back to media as “international concern.” Along the way, Hamas’s casualty tallies become scripture. NGO pressure instructs editors to treat those numbers as gospel and any skepticism as cruelty. When the IDF shows a tunnel under a hospital, “human rights” spokespeople sow doubt on cue. The frame holds.

Legal and philanthropic networks also shield the campus flank. Well-funded “civil liberties” groups rush to defend BDS and encampments as free speech while Jewish and pro-Israel speech is labeled “provocative.” The asymmetry is systematic, not accidental.

None of this requires a conspiracy. It is alignment: donors with interests, institutions with budgets, activists with ready-made copy, and officials who want to outsource moral judgment to “experts.” The result is a manufactured consensus: distrust Israel’s account, trust its enemies’, treat Western force as suspect, view jihadists through a victimhood lens.

Consensus shapes policy. It restrains allies who fight terrorists. It blurs the line between defense and aggression. It turns shmirah—guardianship—into a thought crime. And it hands our adversaries a strategic win without firing a shot in the West.

When universities write the creed, media sings the chorus, and NGOs certify the hymn, denial becomes doctrine. The cost is not academic. It is paid in deterrence lost, wars prolonged, and citizens left unguarded.

A society that cannot name its enemies cannot defend itself. The elite echo chamber—campus, newsroom, NGO, think tank—has installed a cultural operating system that punishes vigilance and rewards denial. The cost shows up in policy, security, and morale.

Policy first. Marinated in consensus prose and “expert” reports, governments reach for paper instead of power. Lawfare against Israel becomes normal. While a democracy fights for its life, allies open investigations into its conduct. Ceasefires, conferences, roadmaps, and U.N. rituals multiply as if documents could tame jihad. Qatar and Turkey are cast as neutral “mediators” while they host Hamas leaders. The referee is in one team’s huddle, and we pretend the game is fair.

Security next. Briefings scrub terms like “Islamism” and “jihad” to avoid offense. Training on ideological drivers of terror gets canceled. Mosques and networks that merit scrutiny get a pass because publicity is risky. Analysts learn to self-censor. Warning signs go unspoken. This is not sensitivity. It is sabotage.

Morale follows. Soldiers and police watch their own elites brand them the villains. IDF reservists who buried friends in 2023 opened their phones to headlines casting them as butchers. Western officers hear city councils condemn “insensitivity” while radical preachers call for their deaths. Why enlist, why serve, if home will call you a criminal for doing your job.

The social climate corrodes. Slogans that once lived on the fringe now fill capitals: “From the river to the sea.” Kaffiyehs as fashion, eliminationism as justice. Antisemitism surges under the cover of “anti-Zionism.” Jews who wear a kippah in Paris, London, or Berlin are glared at, cursed, sometimes attacked. Synagogues hire more guards—again. Churches and Hindu temples find themselves targeted when imported feuds spill over. Barbarism finds apologists; victims are told to understand their killers’ “context.”

Adversaries read it as weakness. As Israel was pilloried for fighting Hamas, Iran’s proxies escalated, and Russia amplified the chorus. The knew that the West doubts itself. They decided to press harder.

We must say plainly what Hamas is. Say plainly what Israel is. Teach officers the enemy’s ideology without apology. End the habit of outsourcing moral judgment to NGOs funded by those who champion our enemies. Back allies when they fight terrorists. Use law for justice, not to cripple self-defense.

We do not need censors. We need referees who remember rules. Universities that teach facts, not catechisms. Newsrooms that report cause and effect, not vibes. NGOs that practice neutrality or admit advocacy. Think tanks that disclose funding and accept scrutiny. Cultural leaders who can still say, without asterisks, “This is evil.”

History is testing us again.

Next week: the deeper layer—empires, ruins, and the identities that outlive statecraft. When the imperial lid lifts, history doesn’t end. It resumes.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

Shalom, friends.

This is perhaps, on the surface, a little less timely than some of our Long Briefs, but it was inspired by a conversation with a Christian pilgrim at Ben Gurion a few weeks ago. They were relatively opposed to Israel observing Shabbat. More kvetching about it than one would anticipate, but that’s ok. However, it led me to realize just how different people’s perception of the matter could be, so I want to take this opportunity to dive into how Israel deals with “Jewish time.”

I first really noticed how different it was a couple of years ago on my first visit to Israel. Back before Aliyah was even on my radar. It was during a Friday afternoon in Tel Aviv.

The city was loud, impatient, caffeinated. Horns. Deadlines. What else is new? You probably know that familiar Israeli hum that feels just one traffic jam away from combustion. Then, almost without warning, it softened. Shops pulled shutters. Phones went quiet. Someone, passing by, wished us a Shabbat shalom and tried to give us a box with a pair of tea lights. The hands on the clock had turned, and the country turned with it.

No one asked what I believed. Well, almost no one. Some Chabadniks asked if I was Jewish and if I had wrapped tefillin that morning. No one checked where I was going. The overcrowded shuk cleared out. The streets cleared. Families drifted home. Some to synagogue. Some to dinner tables. Some to the beach.

I’ve heard arguments against this slowing down. Many of them in fact. Usually from people who have never step foot in the country. Those whose views of multiculturalism have been made toxic. Those who think that slowing on Saturday is anathema—though who have no trouble with the same thing happening on a Sunday.

That moment—watching a modern, secular society slow itself down on purpose—stuck with me. Not as religion. With coordination. As a nation choosing how it lives in time.

This brief is an attempt to explain that moment properly.

A Jewish calendar, not theocracy

How Israel structures national life around Jewish time without enforcing belief—and why this is normal, democratic, and historically grounded.

Israel’s public life runs on Jewish time. The work week bows to Shabbat, school vacations align with Passover, and on Yom Kippur the country falls eerily quiet.

To critics, this looks like the trappings of a “Jewish theocracy.” But the reality is more subtle and deeply secular. The state’s calendar is Jewish, yet the society remains largely secular in practice. No one is compelled to pray or believe. Only to allow for pause, collectively, on the nation’s holy days.

This pause is a civilizational framework—paralleling how Christian-derived calendars quietly structure life in the West without making those nations theocracies.

In neither case are citizens forced into houses of worship or faith, yet in both cases a dominant historical religion bequeathed the template for communal time.

Israel’s use of the Hebrew calendar is codified in quasi-constitutional form. In 2018 the Knesset passed the Nation-State Basic Law, declaring the “Hebrew calendar is the official calendar of the State” and that the Jewish Sabbath and festivals are the legally established days of rest. What Israel’s laws mandate is a shared weekly pause and recognition of Jewish civil holidays — not a state religion. Work ceases on Saturday much as it does on Sunday in many Christian-coded democracies. Shops close on Yom Kippur as they do on Christmas Day in secular Western cities. The Israeli government notably lacks any power to enforce personal religious practice.

And tellingly, secular Israeli Jews — many of them non-believers — overwhelmingly defend and cherish the structure of Jewish time even as they ignore or redefine its religious content.

In a land of many internal divides, the Hebrew calendar provides a rare common rhythm, one that arguably stabilizes society much as the weekend does everywhere. Far from being a tool of clerical rule, Israel’s calendar is a conscious choice to live in Jewish time after generations when Jews could not.

Calendars as Power Structures

Time is never just time in human society. Every modern state operates on a structured calendar that encodes historical and cultural priorities. In sociological terms, time is a public institution. Nations tell their story through the rhythm of workweeks and holidays. As historian Benedict Anderson suggested in describing how calendars foster imagined communities, a shared sense of time is part of what makes a nation cohere. It coordinates millions of individual lives and signals collective priorities.

Consider the concept of the weekend. Why a seven-day week, with a two-day weekend on Saturday and Sunday (or Friday and Saturday, or Sunday alone in older practice)? There is nothing inevitable about that cycle. The seven-day week itself is of biblical origin, transmitted via Judaism and later adopted by Christianity and Islam. The very notion of a weekly day of rest, now enshrined in labor codes worldwide, comes straight from religious tradition.

By the mid-20th century, most industrialized countries settled on a five-day workweek with a common rest on Saturday-Sunday. This was neither a neutral nor a natural choice. But it was embraced for its social and economic benefits.

Likewise, revolutionary France sought to de-Christianize time itself in the 1790s with the French Republican Calendar, imposing a 10-day week to break the grip of Sunday. People resisted the new cadence, and Napoleon abandoned the experiment after a dozen years.

Inherited religious calendars are the norm. Nations have secularized the meaning of thems without discarding the structure. Whether it’s Sunday in Europe or the long Christmas-to-New Year’s break in the United States, ostensibly secular states still follow patterns set by majority faiths.

Time as coordination is distinct from time as worship. An atheist can appreciate a Sunday off or enjoy a Christmas market. A non-Christian in America still likely gets Christmas Day as a holiday simply because the nation has arranged itself that way.

In Israel’s case, a secular Jew (or a Christian or an Arab Muslim, for that matter) benefit from the slower pace of Shabbat — perhaps going to the beach or reading a book — without any rabbinical intrusion.

The state’s interest is in the pause itself, not how one spends it. Uniform days of rest are seen as a matter of “secular goals” like social welfare, not as acts of religious establishment.

No state manages to be all things to all people at all times. Instead, a dominant cadence is chosen and minorities are given carve-outs or parallel observances. This is exactly what the British Mandatory government did in Palestine. Article 23 of the Mandate mandate (1922) required recognizing “the holy days of the respective communities in Palestine as legal days of rest for the members of such communities.” In practice, that meant Shabbat for Jews, Friday for Muslims, Sunday for Christians — a pluralistic scheme under an overall British administrative week. Israel inherited parts of this approach, but as a Jewish-majority sovereign state it naturally elevated Shabbat to the primary national rest day.

The Christian Calendar in Secular Western Life

Walk through an American town early-ish on a Sunday morning, and you might notice the stillness. Stores open late or not at all, streets empty out in residential neighborhoods, and “Sunday quiet” reigns. A weekly pause that Americans take for granted. Come Christmas Day, that stillness becomes nearly universal. Businesses close. Families mostly stay at home (or the home of a relative). Highways unusually sparse. Officially, the United States has no state religion. But its rhythms betray its heritage. The Christian calendar quietly organizes much of American life, just as it does across Europe. This happens without any formal establishment of religion, due largely to historical momentum and legal allowances for “tradition.” By exploring how this came about, we can see that what Israel does with the Jewish calendar is a variation on a very common theme.

In the United States, Sunday rest was enforced by law for centuries in the form of “blue laws.” These were regulations banning most commercial activities on Sundays, dating back to the colonial era. Initially overtly religious in purpose (to ensure church attendance and Sunday piety), over time they were reframed as secular statutes promoting a common day of rest. American courts upheld these laws even as they acknowledged their religious roots. The landmark case was McGowan v. Maryland (1961), where the U.S. Supreme Court faced a challenge to Maryland’s law that prohibited Sunday retail sales of various goods. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the majority, conceded that “the original laws which dealt with Sunday labor were motivated by religious forces.” Yet he observed that “over the course of years, the purpose and effect [of Sunday laws] became secular — to provide a uniform day of rest for all.” The Court ruled that contemporary Sunday closing laws did not violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause, precisely because their primary rationale had become civil in nature. “The present purpose and effect of most of our Sunday Closing Laws is to provide a uniform day of rest for all citizens,” and the fact this day is Sunday, “a day of particular significance for the dominant Christian sects, does not bar the State from achieving its secular goals.” In other words, as long as the state’s intent is rest and relaxation rather than religious observance, the law stands — even if, practically, it aligns with Christian custom.

This ruling, and several companion cases, form a fascinating mirror to Israel’s situation. In Braunfeld, Orthodox Jewish storekeepers in Pennsylvania argued that a law forcing them to close on Sunday (when they already closed on Saturday for religious reasons) put them at unfair economic disadvantage. The Supreme Court sympathized but ultimately upheld the law, effectively saying that the inconvenience to religious minorities did not make the Sunday law unconstitutional. The Court noted that the law “had a secular basis and did not make any religious practices unlawful.” One justice acknowledged it was “a cruel choice” for an Orthodox Jew to pick between livelihood and Sabbath, yet the majority deemed it an unfortunate side effect of a general law not aimed at religion. Such reasoning shows how deeply ingrained the notion of a common rest day was.

Over time, many blue laws were relaxed or repealed under commercial pressure, yet remnants persist. As of today, numerous U.S. states still prohibit certain activities on Sundays. For example, car dealerships are famously closed by law on Sundays in about a dozen states, a holdover from blue laws that legislators defend as providing an industry-wide day off. Some jurisdictions bar hunting on Sunday or restrict alcohol sales on Sunday mornings. In strongly churchgoing regions, these laws enjoy broad support from even non-devout people who simply like having a quiet Sunday morning. Culturally, sports leagues avoided scheduling major events on Sunday mornings for decades, and even the NFL (which plays on Sunday afternoons) long treated the early hours as off-limits out of respect for church time. It’s changing now, but the echo of a Christian sacral calendar remains just beneath the surface of American daily life.

Europe presents an even starker example. Most Western European countries have national laws or customs enforcing Sunday as a day of rest, often tied to historical church influence. Germany puts this in its constitution and its courts have struck down attempts to liberalize Sunday shopping. As recently as 2009, Germany’s highest court upheld the primacy of Sunday rest by nixing a Berlin law that allowed too many Sunday openings. The rationale given wasn’t “because God said so,” but because protecting Sunday ensures social and spiritual well-being.

Perhaps the most illustrative comparison is how Western societies handle religious holidays as national holidays. Christmas Day is a public holiday across the Western world, including in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia — even in countries with significant non-Christian populations. This is done under the secular veneer of it being a cultural holiday, a time for family, giving, Santa Claus and reindeer. But of course, it’s Christmas — literally a Christian holy day — being observed nationwide. No one is forced to attend Mass or believe in the Nativity, yet effectively an entire society changes rhythm for a religious festival. The sky doesn’t fall on pluralism because of this. Non-Christians take the day off work like everyone else.

One might ask: does this cause resentment among non-Christians or secular people in those countries? Generally, no — because the expectation to believe isn’t there. That isn’t so say some cranks won’t complain. Atheists can celebrate a secular Christmas (many do, calling it a season of goodwill, or just enjoying the cultural festivities). Jews and Muslims in Christian-majority countries often adapt by doing their own thing on those days, but they rarely call for abolishing Christmas as a holiday. Everyone understands it’s part of the national framework. Minorities do ask, rightly, for their own major holidays to be respected (for example, in the U.S. many cities now declare Eid or Yom Kippur school holidays in districts with large Muslim or Jewish populations, and employers increasingly allow personal days for them). This is all workable.

Jewish Time in the Diaspora: Private and Suppressed

For nearly two millennia before Israel’s re-founding, Jews lived as minorities in other peoples’ societies. This meant that the Jewish sense of time — the cycle of Sabbath and festivals commanded by Torah — often ran up against the dominant calendars of Christian and Muslim civilizations. The story of Jewish life in diaspora is, in one respect, the story of navigating a dissonant clock.

From medieval Europe’s strict Sunday observances to the Islamic world’s Friday-centric week, Jews had to find ways to honor their own Sabbath on Saturday while not falling afoul of (or economically behind in) societies that did not stop for it.

The result was frequently painful compromise, creative workaround, or outright suppression of Jewish time. Publicly sanctifying the Sabbath was usually impossible or restricted. Frequently the best option available to Jews was to keep it privately—if they were willing to pay the price (sometimes literally in fines or lost income, sometimes in social marginalization).

This context underscores a key point: the privatization of Jewish time was an artifact of Jewish powerlessness, not some voluntary secular ideal. When today’s critics suggest Israel should just let Sabbath observance be a private matter, they may not realize that such privatization historically was forced upon Jews by hostile or indifferent host societies. Zionism’s impulse to restore the Jewish Sabbath to public life was in part a reaction to that history of suppression.

In Christian Europe, especially after the rise of strong church influence on civil law, Sunday was a legally mandated day of rest and worship. For a Jew in, say, 17th-century Poland or 19th-century France, this meant that even if they strictly observed Saturday as their Sabbath (not working, closing their shop), they were still required to close on Sunday by law. They thus lost two days of productivity where Christian competitors lost one, a severe economic handicap.

Many Jews in Europe could not afford that and ended up working on their own Sabbath to survive, or violating Sunday laws to gain an edge — either choice entailing penalty of conscience or penalty of law.

There were also instances of deliberate calendar conflict used as a tool of oppression. In parts of medieval Europe, local lords or guilds would schedule market days on Saturday, essentially forcing Jews (who were often traders) to either violate the Sabbath or lose out on crucial business. In some cities, Jews petitioned for relief, sometimes granted by enlightened rulers who allowed them to trade on Sunday instead or have a corner of the market open on Friday. Other times the policy was intentionally punitive to reduce Jewish competition. In the Russian Empire of the 19th century, a common plight for Jewish craftsmen and merchants was the six-day workweek. Factories ran Monday through Saturday, and Sunday everything stopped. If a Jewish worker refused to work on Saturday, he could be fired. If a shopkeeper closed on Saturday, he had to remain closed on Sunday as well. Many Jewish immigrants to America in the late 1800s described how “inhospitable” the economic environment was to Shabbat observance.

Under Muslim rule, the dynamics were somewhat different but had parallels. Classical Islamic societies did not enforce a universal day of rest to the same extent as Christendom did — historically, markets in the Muslim world might open every day, though Friday midday was reserved for the congregational prayer (jumu’ah) when shops would close for a bit.

However, Jews under Islam often still needed to navigate the clash between Jumu’ah (Friday) and Shabbat (Saturday). In many places, the main trade day would be Friday or Saturday. In some Muslim regions, authorities explicitly forbade Jews (and Christians) from making any public display of their religious days. While Muslims were somewhat tolerant of “People of the Book” practicing privately, a Jew could not insist that a Muslim court respect Saturday as a reason for absence or contract default, for instance.

In the modern era, before political Zionism, public Jewish time scarcely existed. It was all underground or behind ghetto walls. The one place and period it had partial expression was in certain autonomous shtetl communities in Eastern Europe or the Ottoman millet system. In those contexts, Jews ran their internal affairs and of course closed their shops on Shabbat within the Jewish quarter. Even then, come Sunday the outside world’s rules would apply.

A poignant illustration can be drawn from the memoirs of 19th-century Jewish immigrants: they describe arriving in New York and being shocked to see Jews openly violating Shabbat (because they had to to survive economically). Some wept that in the old country, the Cossacks might harass them but at least the whole shtetl still respected Shabbat. In “free” America, freedom ironically meant freedom to break Shabbat since societal constraints had shifted to pure market forces. The sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel pointed out that in diaspora, Jews experienced “private time” as separate from “public time,” having to mentally live in two temporal orders – the Jewish calendar at home and the general calendar at work. This split was unnatural to traditional Judaism, which envisions an integrated life where the Sabbath is a societal institution, not just an individual choice.

Zionist thinkers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were acutely aware of this distortion. As early as Theodor Herzl, there were musings on what the time culture of a future Jewish state would be. Herzl himself, in Altneuland, imagined a secularly governed Jewish society but one where Shabbat was a delightful universal day of relaxation. One of the early labor movement’s paradoxes is that atheist kibbutzniks often insisted on observing Shabbat as a collective day off – not out of piety, but out of both respect for heritage and plain practical rest. The influential cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am wrote an essay titled “Shabbat and Zionism” where he argued that “More than the Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.” In diaspora, Shabbat was the sanctuary of time that preserved Jewish identity when no public institutions did. He believed in a Jewish national home, Shabbat could blossom into its full public glory, not enforced by rabbis but by national consensus of identity.

All told, by 1900, the image of a fully Jewish public calendar was a distant dream — last experienced in antiquity. Zionist ideologues, aware of this, spoke of the need for a “Yom Menucha Le’umi” (a national day of rest) that would be Shabbat in a Jewish state. They argued it was not about forcing religion, but about restoring health and wholeness to the nation’s life. They frequently contrasted their vision with the diaspora reality. In exile, Jews had to beg for time off or break their religious laws. In a homeland, the Jewish rhythm would set the tone. And those who didn’t observe religiously would still benefit from a unified day off aligned with their heritage rather than someone else’s.

Zionism and the Restoration of Public Time

Long before Israel’s independence in 1948, the seeds of a public Jewish calendar were being sown in the yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in the Holy Land).

Zionist leaders, thinkers, and institutions had to decide: what role would Shabbat and religious holidays play in the society they were building?

The answers were not obvious or unanimous. Zionism was a diverse movement, with secular socialists, bourgeois liberals, and religious traditionalists all in the mix.

Though they often clashed on religion-state issues, on one point there emerged a surprising consensus: the Jewish national home should mark Shabbat as its day of rest. Even resolute secularists agreed that the Hebrew calendar would provide the common schedule. The debates were about the degree and manner of observance, not the basic principle of Shabbat being the day off.

This consensus was solidified in the famous Status Quo Agreement of 1947, a letter from David Ben-Gurion (head of the Jewish Agency, soon to be Israel’s first Prime Minister) to the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Yisrael party. In it, he assured religious Jews that the future state would honor certain fundamental elements of Jewish tradition. Chief among them: “The legal day of rest in the Jewish state will be Shabbat.” This line has been quoted endlessly since. Importantly, it did not spell out what kind of Shabbat regime would be enacted, just that Saturday would be the official weekend day.

But establishing that fact was itself momentous. It meant the workweek of the nascent Israeli society would differ from the surrounding Arab world (where Friday was the main day off) and from the British rulers’ system (who, in Mandate times, had generally observed Sunday as a government holiday). It would be distinctly Jewish.

Within the Zionist movement, ideological splits existed:

• Labor Zionists (the dominant Mapai party under Ben-Gurion) were secular in belief but understood the need for a common day of rest. Many were influenced by socialism’s respect for workers’ rights and by the cultural idea of Shabbat as social welfare. The Histadrut (general labor federation) from early on included the Saturday day off in its workers’ agreements. Histadrut-owned enterprises (like the bus cooperative Egged and others) did not operate on Shabbat, largely due to internal policy. Partly this was to appease religious segments, partly to avoid dividing the workers, and partly because the leftist ethos valued “the worker’s right to a day off” (and Saturday made sense given Jewish tradition). So ironically, one of the largest secular institutions enforced a quasi-halakhic norm for essentially secular reasons.

• Revisionist Zionists (the center-right-wing movement under Jabotinsky—a sort of pre-cursor to Likud) tended to be more liberal in terms of individualism and less inclined to religious compromise for its own sake. Jabotinsky himself was an atheist and a westernizer. He at one point suggested maybe Sunday should also be a day off in the future state to sync with the Christian world and give two days (like a modern weekend). His movement’s successor, the Herut party (later Likud), in early state years was relatively secular in outlook. Yet even they did not oppose Shabbat as the official rest day — they just fought against broader religious control. Menachem Begin, a deeply traditional (though not personally strictly observant) leader, famously defended the Jewish character of the state including respect for Shabbat. There’s a story that in the 1980s Begin insisted on stopping a security cabinet meeting before Shabbat started because he wouldn’t desecrate Shabbat in the official schedule (despite the urgent matters at hand). He said Israel managed to survive with Shabbat observance before, it will survive now.

• Religious Zionists (Mizrachi party and others) of course saw the state as the fulfillment of Jewish destiny and strongly wanted halakhic observance in public life. They pushed for as much Sabbath strictness as possible (e.g. no public transportation, no official events on Shabbat, etc.) However, unlike Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) non-Zionists, the religious Zionists were willing to compromise in some areas to work with secular partners, as long as core symbols were preserved. For them, Shabbat as state day of rest was non-negotiable. But they would have liked more — ideally legislation declaring Shabbat’s sanctity, not just its status as a day off. They didn’t get everything on their wish list, but they got enough to satisfy for a while, thanks to Ben-Gurion’s concessions.

It’s notable that Ben-Gurion’s 1947 letter to Agudat Yisrael kept things vague. “It is clear that the legal day of rest will be Shabbat,” he wrote. But he did not detail what “rest” entails. The religious would read into it a hope that the state would outlaw public desecration. The secular read it as meaning simply no official work on that day. That ambiguity was intentional. For better or worse, that’s a classic Ben-Gurion tactic to forge consensus—while postponing the hard specifics.

Another domain of Zionist debate was transportation on Shabbat. During the British Mandate, some public transit did run on Saturdays (the British didn’t enforce a stop, and Jews needed to get around). In Haifa, a city famed for Jewish-Arab coexistence and a more secular workers’ character, the local buses historically ran on Shabbat even under early Israeli rule. Haifa is often cited as an exception where, due to a strong labor union agreement and mixed population, buses continued operating on a limited basis on Saturdays. Jerusalem, by contrast, had no public buses on Shabbat from early on. This was later formalized in the Transportation Ordinance, which codified the ban on running public bus lines during “rest days” unless exceptions apply.

That law instructs the Minister of Transport to consider “Jewish tradition” regarding the ban on motor vehicles on the Sabbath, effectively enshrining the no-bus practice into regulation. It does list exceptions: routes to hospitals, or to predominantly non-Jewish towns, or essential security routes can be approved.

For instance, some Arab towns have bus service on Saturday because their residents are not Jewish, and that was explicitly allowed. Also, certain remote kibbutzim or military installations had limited transit for necessity. The takeaway: the Israeli state deliberately preserved a Shabbat public atmosphere largely free of official traffic, again not to force people to synagogue but to mold the new society’s rhythm and respect the sentiments of the traditionalist segment. To new immigrants and visitors, a Jewish city with empty streets on Shabbat was a powerful cultural statement. It says “this place runs on Jewish time.”

It was, however, never absolute. There were always those who chafed. Secular liberals in cities like Tel Aviv wanted more freedom — the ability to grab a convenience item or go to the cinema on Friday night. On the flip side, religious hardliners wanted tighter restrictions (e.g., shutting down El Al (achieved eventually), or banning all sports events on Shabbat (a battle that went on for decades, since many Israeli soccer matches were traditionally held on Saturday afternoon; compromises were made such as not starting until Shabbat ended during winter, etc.)). The first few decades saw a series of “Shabbat wars” — protests, political fights — but interestingly, these were often resolved by municipal discretion.

The national government set the broad rule (no work, no (or limited) official transport), but municipalities were left to enforce or allow certain leisure activities.

Thus, Tel Aviv since the 1970s had many cafes, pubs, and movie theaters operating on Friday nights and Saturdays. This wasn’t strictly legal under national law (workers were involved), but the city more or less winked at it. They would fine a few places occasionally or require businesses to register as “members-only clubs” to circumvent laws, a legal fiction often used.

Jerusalem, in contrast, enforced closure of almost everything in Jewish areas, with the notable divide between West Jerusalem (Jewish, closed on Shabbat) and East Jerusalem (Arab-majority, where shops might open on Friday but close Friday mid-day for mosque and open on Saturday normally).

Haifa continued to allow not just buses but also had an active commercial scene on Shabbat relative to other cities—a reflection of its pluralistic makeup.

Municipal by-laws commonly forbade commerce on Shabbat but exempted places of entertainment and restaurants. This was part of the de facto status quo: you couldn’t legally keep your store open, but a cinema or cafe could operate (since those were seen as leisure, not making others work too strenuously, and meeting secular needs).

By the 21st century, the compromises of early days have both eroded and held. Shabbat is still officially the day of rest — no Israeli would schedule a government meeting or a school day on Saturday. That’s taken for granted. Public transit still largely doesn’t run (though some municipalities run limited lines. Some have started free shuttle services on Shabbat, since they aren’t charging a fare, they exploit a loophole to not violate the Transport Ministry restrictions).

Many malls and shops stay closed — but some open, technically illegally, and pay fines as a cost of doing business, especially in secular areas. Enforcement fatigue has set in.

Huge malls outside city centers began opening on Saturdays from the 1990s onward (e.g., the Haifa mall, the Ayalon mall near Tel Aviv, etc.), drawing crowds and forcing small retailers to either open illegally or suffer. This “commercialization” of Shabbat troubles both the religious (for obvious reasons) and some secular social activists (who see it exploiting workers and eroding the common family day).

It’s instructive to compare how Zionist leaders treated other religious questions versus Shabbat. On marriage and personal status (which we discussed in-depth in Sacred Authority), Ben-Gurion ceded full control to the Rabbinate, a decision that remains contentious and burdensome for secular Israelis (e.g., no civil marriage in Israel). That was a sphere he and others felt they could sacrifice to keep the peace with religious factions, perhaps thinking it affected fewer people day-to-day or could be circumvented by marrying abroad.

But on the calendar, the secular Zionists themselves deeply cared. They did not hand the calendar entirely to rabbinic authority. Instead, the state took ownership of the calendar. The Knesset declares holidays, government offices close on Shabbat by law, and the like. A striking aspect is that Israel’s determination of the Hebrew date and leap years etc. is done automatically by the ancient fixed calendar rules, not by any new religious pronouncements. Unlike in Temple times when the Sanhedrin would proclaim new moons, the modern state just follows the calculated Hebrew calendar.

The Chief Rabbinate’s role in this is to simply announce things like “the holiday begins at sundown…” for public awareness, same as a calendar on the wall would. So one might say the Zionist state nationalized the Jewish calendar, taking it out of exclusive rabbinic hands and making it a civil matter. That’s why the Knesset can legislate, for instance, that Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day) is on 5 Iyar unless that’s a Friday or Saturday then move it, etc. — yes, Israeli law actually adjusts some holiday observances (national, not religious ones) for convenience.

Ok, so, what does Israel enforce or not enforce about Shabbat? It doesn’t enforce synagogue attendance (contrast this with some European countries centuries ago which had church attendance laws). It doesn’t send officers to knock on doors to see if you’re watching TV or smoking (there is no equivalent in Israel to Iran’s ridiculous morality police —it simply doesn’t exist). It doesn’t fine people for cooking a meal or using electricity. Private domain is entirely free. For example, an Israeli who wants to mow their lawn or hammer nails on Saturday? Legally, they can. Though if it’s a shared building, neighbors might resent the noise, but that’s a civil matter of courtesy, not religion. In Tel Aviv, you’ll see people jogging, blasting music on the beach on Shabbat — normal weekend activity.

The notion of “no pluralism” on Shabbat is laughable if you look at the social reality. In secular enclaves, Shabbat is experienced as a fun weekend day. Beach. Brunch. Bike rides. In religious enclaves, it’s experienced as prayer and rest. Each lives and lets live largely, as long as one group’s behavior doesn’t intrude on the other’s space. Of course some take extreme efforts to enforce their view on others—like Haredim littering the streets at the entrances to their neighbourhoods in Jerusalem with dumpsters, mattresses, and the like to prohibit secular Israelis and tourists from driving through.

Israelis themselves have mixed but often moderate views on Shabbat policy. Surveys consistently find a majority (including many secular) support “preserving the special character of Shabbat” in public — meaning they don’t want it to be a day like any other. Most citizens believe Shabbat should “have a unique character and give expression to Jewish tradition,” and they worry that full commercial activity on Shabbat would harm social and family life. At the same time, many want some services available — especially entertainment and transport in secular areas.

This has led to proposals for a new “Shabbat compact” — like making Sunday an additional day off so that businesses could close on Shabbat without losing much, and allowing more leisure activity on Shabbat. No such broad reform has passed yet, due to political gridlock. But the sentiment is revealing: Israelis aren’t neatly split religious vs secular on this; there’s a large in-between that is secular-traditional (often called masorti) who keep aspects of Shabbat culturally (family dinner, no work) but not religiously (they’ll watch TV, drive to see relatives). They generally appreciate that Israel slows down on Shabbat. It’s part of their Israeli identity, even if they personally are not strict.

There is also a cultural vs. religious framing to Shabbat in Israel. Many secular Israelis describe their Friday night dinner with family as “almost sacred” — not in a religious sense, but as a cherished ritual. Sociologically, it functions as Israel’s version of a Thanksgiving family dinner in the West, only weekly. They might light candles and say kiddush out of respect for grandma or just nostalgia, then proceed to enjoy a big meal without necessarily following other religious rules. This widespread practice means Shabbat maintains a cultural presence in even non-observant homes.

The Israeli state’s involvement is mostly at the level of ensuring a day of rest and preventing open commerce that would destroy that rest. It does not mandate attending synagogue or resting in the halakhic sense (Israelis can and do go to the beach, drive cars, watch movies on Shabbat if they choose). The public sphere is quieter, yes, but not uniformly pious. The only thing the state ensured is that neither religious nor secular has to be at work or school at that time and that the buses aren’t generally running (so the club-goers will take a shared taxi and the worshippers will walk). It’s a compromise that has held together, more or less, nearly eight decades.

Jewish Holidays as Civic Memory

Every nation has a calendar of holidays that tell its story. In Israel, that calendar is overwhelmingly Jewish — not in a theological sense, but in historical and cultural significance. The Jewish holidays observed as public holidays in Israel fall into a few categories:

1. Biblical-Historical Holidays: These are festivals with ancient origins that also often tie into national themes. Examples: Passover (Pesach), Shavuot (Pentecost), Sukkot (Tabernacles), Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). These come straight from the Hebrew Bible and have been celebrated by Jews worldwide for millennia. In Israel, they are days off and widely marked, but the state’s interest in them is not to enforce worship — it’s to uphold national tradition and continuity.
   
   For instance, Passover is both a religious festival of freedom and a commemoration of the Exodus story, which is essentially the mythical birth of the Israelites as a people. In Israeli civic culture, Passover resonates as a festival of liberty, spring, and the idea of homeland (the Seder ends with “Next Year in Jerusalem”). Schools teach the Exodus story as part of national heritage. The Ministry of Education prepares breaks and curricula around it, focusing on themes of freedom from slavery, etc., rather than doctrine. Passover is a public holiday week. Businesses close, families gather, parks are full of picnickers. The state does do one coercive thing during Passover: historically, a Chametz Law (Hametz) prohibited display and sale of leavened bread in public during the 7 days (to respect tradition of eating matzah only). This law, passed in 1986, is mild (it exempted non-Jewish areas and private consumption), but was meant to preserve the holiday’s atmosphere. Enforcement was again lax — it mostly prevented big bakeries from hawking bread openly. Many secular Israelis actually follow the no-bread custom out of family tradition anyway. That’s an example of the fine line between tradition and law. A court recently narrowed the chametz ban’s scope, calling it more symbolic than practical.
   
   For all these sorts of holiday you should note the absence of belief enforcement. No one is checking if you eat matzah or bread in your home on Passover (though many secular do adhere to eating matzah — about 67% of Israeli Jews avoid leaven, which is a voluntary cultural adherence). No one punishes you if you skip fasting on Yom Kippur — plenty of secular folks quietly eat at home, they just don’t flaunt it in public out of respect. The state’s stance is to provide the days off work/school and let society’s norms do the rest.

2. Modern-National Holidays: These are unique to Israel’s modern history, instituted by the state. Chief among them: Independence Day (Yom Ha’atzmaut) and Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers (Yom Hazikaron) immediately the day before Independence Day. Also Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah). These days have no religious origin. Rhey were created by Knesset laws in the to commemorate pivotal events. The tone and observance of these days are instructive about how Israel uses calendar for civic memory:

   1. On Memorial Day (for soldiers and terror victims), a 2-minute siren sounds nationwide in evening and morning, and people stand at attention. It’s a secular ritual with almost religious reverence. The state organizes ceremonies in cemeteries, broadcasts sad music on radio, and basically the whole country enters a somber mode. Workplaces might close early or have memorial gatherings. This is akin to Americans observing Memorial Day or Brits on Remembrance Sunday, but even more intense because Israel is small and nearly everyone has been touched by these losses. There’s zero religious content mandated. The ceremonies are nationalistic and reflective (though they often include reciting Yizkor, the Jewish memorial prayer, which is more or less cultural at this point). It’s about national solidarity and sacrifice, not theology.

   2. Independence Day is a joyous holiday, but notably Israeli Independence Day does get a slight religious nod. The Chief Rabbinate declared it should have a prayer of thanksgiving and some see it as quasi-religious event (comparing it to ancient deliverances). However, the state ceremony on Independence Eve is thoroughly civil. Flag raisings. Torch lightings. Military bands, etc. Many families barbecue (it’s basically the Israeli version of Fourth of July with hummus rather than hot dogs). It’s a day off work. Fireworks, not prayers, dominate the night.

   3. Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) memorializes six million murdered Jews. The day’s observances: a morning siren for 2 minutes, where traffic stops on highways as people stand silent. A spontaneous civil ritual that’s become iconic. Restaurants and entertainment venues close the night before in respect. Television broadcasts Holocaust documentaries. It’s deeply emotional nationally, but again, non-religious. In fact, the bulk of the ultra-Orthodox initially did not like Yom Hashoah’s date (they prefer the religious mourning day of Tisha B’Av) — but the secular state’s date stuck and even Haredim now largely observe it. This is an example of the state forging a new civil holiday that became sacrosanct in civil religion terms, without any halakhic origin.

   There are other state holidays: Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day, marking reunification in 1967) and Yom HaAliyah (honoring immigration, recently added) and others commemorating things like Begin’s or Rabin’s memorial days.

   
   All these modern days transmit specific collective memories: heroism, tragedy, identity, unity. None involve requiring religious practice (though religious people might integrate prayer – e.g., some say Hallel psalms on Independence Day in synagogue to thank God, though that’s a personal choice). The state events remain secular/national in character.

3. Religious Minority Holidays: By law and practice, Israel lets non-Jews take their own holidays. For example, Muslims in Israel have days off for Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. Christians for Christmas and Easter (the government calendar for Christian Arabs often uses the Eastern Orthodox dates, since many are Greek Orthodox or Catholic). These are not national holidays for everyone, but they are officially recognized for those communities. Arab schools close. Arab soldiers can get leave. Et cetera. This parallels how Western countries might treat, say, Jewish holidays — not national holidays but allow Jews to take off.

It’s vital to note that no one in Israel is penalized for not observing a religious ritual on a holiday. On Yom Kippur, secular often bike – fine. On Passover, plenty of secular quietly have pizza. No chametz police are barging in—such an entity doesn’t exist. On Sukkot, building a sukkah (booth) is a mitzvah for religious — many secular don’t, and nothing happens to them.

State broadcasting schedules also adapt to holidays, in ways reminiscent of how Western media adapt to Christmas etc. On religious holidays, Israeli TV might broadcast traditional songs or films like “The Ten Commandments” (an old tradition, much as U.S. TV plays “The Greatest Story Ever Told” at Easter). On Yom Hashoah, channels air Holocaust testimonies or Holocaust-themed movies continuously. On Independence Day, the channels air the torch-lighting and then a lineup of comedy skits and concerts — shaping the mood. These are subtle tools of national cohesion. The whole country, religious or secular, tunes into similar content and thus shares the experience. In diaspora, Jews celebrated holidays mostly in their homes or synagogues, isolated from general culture; in Israel, these days dominate the public airwaves and space, making them part of everyone’s consciousness.

Take Hanukkah for example. A minor religious holiday that has become culturally huge in Israel. Schools are closed for a Hanukkah break, kids light candles each of 8 nights, and there are public menorah lightings in city squares (often by Chabad rabbis, but also secular institutions do it). For Israelis, Hanukkah’s story of the Maccabees (Jews fighting for freedom in 2nd century BCE) is taught as a proto-Zionist tale of national liberation and cultural resilience. The Education Ministry’s curriculum emphasizes the historical fight for independence and cleansing of the Temple, less the miraculous oil. So again, a holiday’s religious miracle aspect is downplayed; the national liberation aspect is highlighted. It’s used to instill pride and continuity with ancient Judea’s sovereignty. While in diaspora Hanukkah became big to compete with Christmas, in Israel it stands on its own as a heroic history festival. The state sponsors massive youth events (torch relays, etc.). None of this requires believing the oil burned 8 days by miracle; it’s about celebrating Jewish heroism and identity.

The Jewish holiday cycle in Israel has been adapted into a state civic calendar that reinforces Jewish peoplehood and Israeli nationhood.

Secular Israel and the Participation Paradox

Israel calls itself a Jewish state, yet a substantial portion of its Jewish population is secular or non-religious. This creates a fascinating paradox: many who don’t personally observe Jewish law still partake in Jewish time-based rituals and traditions at incredibly high rates. The society is at once secular in outlook and traditional in practice. How can that be? The answer lies in the complex identities Israeli Jews hold — where faith, identity, participation, and habit are distinct strands.

First, let’s quantify “secular” in Israel. Surveys typically categorize Israeli Jews roughly as: about a third or so as secular (Hebrew: Hiloni), another third or so as “traditional” (Masorti, meaning moderately observant or just attached to tradition), with the remainder split more between religious Zionist (Dati), and ultra-Orthodox (Haredi). The specific figures vary, but secular are the largest group, often around half—sometimes incorporating the non-religious masorti. However, “secular” in Israel doesn’t usually mean devoid of all Jewish practice. It usually means not religiously observant in a halakhic sense (they don’t strictly keep kosher, don’t pray daily, etc.). Yet most seculars still celebrate major holidays and observe certain cultural customs. Surveys show that the majority of Israeli Jews say they always or usually light Shabbat candles. Even among the self-declared secular subset, about a third of them light Shabbat candles and a significant amount (maybe one-fifth) keep kosher at home.

Almost two-thirds of Israeli Jews keep kosher at home (meaning they avoid non-kosher foods at least at home, though some might eat non-kosher out). This includes a good chunk of seculars who for family peace or upbringing still don’t bring pork or shellfish into the house. They may not care religiously, but “that’s how mom did and I continue.” So practice can be situational — cultural at home, freer outside. It shows habit and identity (kosher home feels Jewish-ish) vs personal belief (they don’t think it’s sinful to break it, they just choose tradition at home). Israeli sociologists have long noted Israel is a very traditional society even as it’s not very religious.

Why do secular Israelis defend Jewish time? Partly because it’s tied to national identity — giving it up feels like eroding Israel’s Jewish character, which even secular Zionists cherish as a unique identity (distinct from being generic Western or from the Arab Middle East). There’s also an element of simply loving the social aspects. Shabbat dinner with family, the calm of Yom Kippur’s nearly car-free day, the fun of Purim costumes. These experiences are pleasurable or meaningful independent of religious conviction.

So, secular Israelis understand and defend Jewish time often in civil terms. They’ll say: “Of course Saturday is our day off — we’re a Jewish country and that’s our tradition. But I want a bus to go to the beach.” They don’t see it as all-or-nothing. They appreciate a slower Saturday but also want options for personal freedom. That debate is internal but rarely do secular voices call to, say, switch the national day off to Sunday (once in a while it’s proposed as adding Sunday as second day, but none say drop Saturday as rest — that’s basically off the table). So even the most anti-clerical Israeli tends to be fine with the idea that Yom Kippur should be respected publicly or that state ceremonies have biblical references; they just don’t want religious parties deciding civil laws like marriage or budgets disproportionately.

Diaspora Projection and Misreading

It is often in the eyes of outsiders, particularly Diaspora Jews in liberal Western societies, that Israel’s blend of secular governance and Jewish public culture gets cast in alarmist terms. Words like “theocracy,” “religious coercion,” and “slippery slope” surface in American Jewish op-eds and organizational statements whenever Israel’s religion-state issues flare up. These reactions reveal more about diaspora psyches than Israeli realities.

American and European Jews, accustomed to being minorities in Christian or secular countries, carry historical fears of religious dominance. They tend to conflate Israel’s civil Judaism with the kind of coercion they have known or dreaded as minorities.

When Israel’s government makes a decision influenced by Orthodox parties — say, attempting to legislate more Shabbat restrictions or maintain the Western Wall’s Orthodox prayer rules — diaspora Jewish leaders sometimes react as if Israel is on the brink of turning into a Jewish Iran. We see headlines like “Beware the creeping theocracy in Israel” or “Religious coercion threatens Israel’s democracy.” For instance, there was talk of a Haredi-backed bill to shut down more businesses on Shabbat nationwide, major American Jewish organizations voiced deep concern that Israel was abandoning pluralism and that secular Israelis’ rights were under siege. To Israelis on the ground, this sounded overblown — in practice, such laws either don’t pass or are weakly enforced, and daily life remains diverse. But to diaspora observers, even the symbolism rang alarm bells.

Why this hypersensitivity? American Jews, especially, live in a country founded on separation of church and state. They have seen how being a small minority in a Christian-dominated culture could lead to pressure to assimilate or exclusion. Historically, they faced Sunday laws that penalized them economically (like those blue laws we discussed earlier). They carry collective memory of quotas, of prayers in school that were Christian, of the need for a secular public square to feel equal. So any state endorsement of religion is suspect to them. So diaspora Jews sometimes assume any entanglement of synagogue and state must mirror the oppression or marginalization they have fought in gentile lands.

Diaspora commentary sometimes fails to make that distinction. The minority memory of always being on the short end of religious establishment fosters a knee-jerk alarm when any religion is established, even if in Israel’s case it’s the Jews themselves doing it democratically. For example, older generation American Jewish leaders often invoked the specter of Israel turning into a Halachic state like Iran whenever ultra-Orthodox influence grew. In the 1990s, as Haredi parties gained clout, some diaspora voices said Israel risked alienating secular Israelis and Western Jews with “religious zealotry.” Things secular Israelis themselves would never accept en masse. Which isn’t to say that the Haredi don’t push too far. Fortunately, democracy holds. Those alarmist predictions have never quite materialized (Israeli cafes still serve shellfish to those who want it, Tel Aviv clubs still open on Friday nights). But diaspora discourse remained anxious.

Shared Time, Not a Theocracy

Israel’s story is not one of theocracy. The Jewish state has drawn on ancient rhythms to structure modern life, but it has steadfastly not enforced theology. In Israel, no inquisitors come to your door on Friday night, no “Shabbat police” patrol the streets. What Israel enforces is a pause, a shared cadence. It is, in fact, analogous to what virtually every democracy does. Namely, privileging a majority cultural calendar for the common good.

Israel does not enforce Jewish belief. There is no law compelling anyone to profess a faith nor to don tefillin. No one is there to enforce observance of kashrut at home. A secular Israeli can live their entire life without a hint of religious observance and face no legal penalty or social ostracism beyond perhaps a kvetching grandmother.

The state’s Basic Laws (a sort of quasi-constitution we talked about in The Unfinished State) explicitly protect freedom of conscience and freedom from religious coercion. The High Court has struck down attempts at overreach. One can sleep in, hit the beach, binge Netflix or pray in shul — it’s your own business.

The evidence is overwhelming that you can have a culturally particular calendar without mandating religion. Indeed, Israel’s public sphere is if anything less religiously regimented than that of some Western countries.

Six days a week, Israel is a wonderful, rambunctious “hi-tech” (I’m sorry but that phrasing really grates on me), up-all-night, argue-about-everything democracy. But on the seventh day, a quiet descends. Not by force of ayatollahs, but by the consent of the governed and the weight of tradition. That pause gives even the secular Israeli a chance to unplug (figuratively if not literally) in a way few other hyper-modern societies do. It binds families. The institution of Friday-night dinner, nearly sacrosanct across Israeli society, keeps generations in touch in an age of virtual everything. It binds the nation: at 11 AM on Memorial Day, when sirens wail and motorists stand still, Israelis feel a profound unity of experience — a cadence that reaffirms that “we are in this together.”

Some of the common pitfalls in discussing Israel often come from treating “religion” as a bogeyman or a binary. Israel is unabashedly Jewish in public culture and vigorously liberal in personal freedoms. It means that Israel on Shabbat looks a bit like America on Sunday in the 1950s — mostly closed, family-focused — yet without requiring anyone to go to church (or shul).

And that, ultimately, is at the heart of it. Israel’s cultural language is infused with Judaism. Whether Shabbat rest, Exodus liberty, ancient mourning and joy transposed into modern life. It is spoken in the streets and understood by all, whether uttered as prayer or as joke or simply as silent assent. Israelis have chosen to speak the language of Jewish time in their civic life. In doing so, they have not made their state less democratic or less free.

Israel’s Jewish calendar is the scaffolding of national culture, as Sunday is for the West. It is, in essence, the embodiment of Israel’s dual identity: at once Jewish and free.

Every Friday, the same thing still happens. Things slow down and then come to (more or less) a stop for Saturday—regardless of what the tourist family might want on their next visit. Not because a rabbi ordered it. Not because belief was enforced. But because a society decided that shared time matters—that a people who spent centuries living on borrowed calendars would finally live on their own.

I don’t begrudge the family their annoyance at sites they wanted to visit being closed or harder to reach. Or restaurants closed. In that situation, it’s not exactly convenient. That said, I hope they found some meaning in it.

Tomorrow is Friday, so I’ll wish you an early Shabbat shalom and hope you too manage to take a break from the cacophony of daily life and find some rest—in whatever way speaks to you.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

Shalom, friends.

I remember the first time it clicked for me.

It wasn’t during a war briefing or a security conference. It was while standing in a small apartment in central Israel during a rocket escalation (Hezbollah? Houthis? hard to remember), but the electric kettle was turned on, my phone was charging, the Wi-Fi still working, water pressure steady. Sirens outside. Life continuing inside. It must have been before Iran’s ballistic salvo in July, since I didn’t feel the need to go to the shelter. Oops.

The missiles were meant to terrify. They didn’t. What struck me instead was something far less cinematic and far more decisive.

Someone had planned for this. Not rhetorically. Not symbolically. Physically. Mamads (bomb shelters). Pipes. Wires. Backup systems. Redundancy layered on redundancy. The country wasn’t holding together because of slogans or speeches. It was holding because systems were still running.

That moment explained something many people don’t clearly articulate. Israel’s real power isn’t just its formidable military. Part of is infrastructural. And it was designed that way.

This long brief is an attempt to map that reality—without romance, without boosterism, and without pretending it’s neutral.

Infrastructure as National Power

How Israel’s water, energy, and digital systems function as instruments of sovereignty

Israel’s survival has never hinged on diplomacy alone. It rests on an infrastructure built for siege conditions. Water, energy, and digital systems engineered to function even if (when) the world turns hostile. Israeli leaders treated aqueducts and algorithms as strategic weapons—often more decisive than tanks or treaties. The foresight in hardening national systems has made the state uniquely resilient.

Quietly, Israel has turned former dependencies into one-way dependencies of others on itself. Nowhere is this clearer than water and gas. The nation that once had to import energy from neighbors is now a net exporter. In 2021 Israel agreed to double the water it sells to parched Jordan—a lifeline that Jordanian leaders are well aware their country cannot survive without. Egypt, which supplied Israel with gas in the 2000s, today has to import (considerably more expensive) gas from Israel to keep its lights on. The 2018 gas export contract with Egypt was considered the most important deal between the two countries since the 1979 peace treaty—to say nothing of the recent 2025 agreement. Europe, reeling from dependence on Russian fuel, is courting Israeli gas as part of its diversification.

In tech, the world’s largest companies rely on Israeli innovation. Intel’s Israeli factories produce critical chips (accounting for 5.5% of Israel’s high-tech exports by value), and Israeli engineers designed core components in everything from the Intel Centrino to Mobileye’s autonomous driving systems.

Western militaries depend on Israeli defense tech (e.g. Trophy armor systems on US tanks, or Israeli drones in NATO service).

This asymmetric dependency is often unspoken — no ally will trumpet that it can’t do without Israeli know-how — but it shows up in trade flows and covert cooperation. Israel has made itself needed in ways that transcend sentiment. Allies may not love Israel, but they sure need Israel. That’s without even getting into the value that Israel gives to other countries by sharing the fruits of its sprawling intelligence apparatus.

If the world were rational, turning desert to bloom and keeping enemies’ lights on would earn goodwill. But of course we know that it’s not.

Israel’s infrastructure feats have generated cynical narratives — accusations of theft, apartheid, or nefarious intent — that overshadow the facts.

Consider water. NGOs and UN bodies regularly accuse Israel of “water theft” and deliberate deprivation of Palestinians.

Never mind that Israel provides the Palestinian territories more water than it is obligated to by treaty (in fact far beyond its obligation under Oslo II).

Groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch harp on disparities and omit that Israel’s faucets flow primarily thanks to Israeli-built desalination and recycling, not some unfair siphoning. They have even campaigned to boycott Israel’s national water company Mekorot — leading the Dutch firm Vitens to cancel a cooperation project under activist pressure.

Likewise on energy. When Jordan struck a $10 billion deal to import Israeli gas, domestic opponents blasted it as “stolen gas” financing the “Zionist entity,” leading to street protests and parliamentary motions against the deal. Jordan’s government kept the contract, knowing it had little choice, but certainly no grateful public kudos resulted.

In the digital realm, Israeli cyber prowess is spun as sinister. The same offensive cyber tools that great powers routinely use are labeled uniquely evil when they’re Israeli. A good case in point is the global furor over NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, while equivalent American or European exploits are shrouded in silence.

The bottom line: Israel’s infrastructure success stories are often met not with applause but with an avalanche of what can be called narrative warfare. Which is a fancy way of saying that it’s propaganda to recast strength as illegitimacy.

In an era of hybrid warfare and climate stress, a state that cannot ensure continuous electricity, water, internet, and food supply loses its autonomy even without foreign action. Israel grasped earlier than most that infrastructural resilience makes national power possible in modern times.

When Iran’s Revolutionary Guards tried to poison Israeli civilians by hacking water control systems in April 2020, pumping in dangerous levels of chlorine, Israel’s swift cyber defense and backup protocols averted disaster.

Sovereignty meant mothers in Israel never even knew their tap water was under attack. When COVID-19 hit and shattered global supply chains, Israel rapidly repurposed factories to produce masks and ventilators, and leveraged its high-tech clout to secure early vaccine stockpiles. Which meant not having to beg others for PPE or shots.

When Systems Collapse, States Follow

Modern history underscores that failure of infrastructure correlates more directly with state collapse than battlefield defeat. The fall of the Soviet Union, for instance, was presaged by a hollowing of its economy and systems (bread lines and rusting power grids) more than by any direct military loss.

In contrast, states that lost wars but maintained functional systems (Germany and Japan after WWII, for example) were able to rebuild swiftly as sovereign actors. The emerging consensus is that when governments talk deterrence, they usually mean weapons, yet modern power rests equally on the infrastructure that sustains a nation under stress.

In the 21st century then, national power is a tripod. Military, economy, and infrastructure. With the latter providing the foundation.

Because infrastructure is such a linchpin, it has long been a bullseye for enemies. Total war doctrines from WWII onward embraced strategic bombing of power plants, railways, dams, and the like in the hopes of cracking the enemy behind the front.

Today’s adversaries have broadened the toolkit: kinetic attacks (missiles, sabotage) on critical sites, legal warfare (international campaigns to block infrastructure projects or arms deals), and narrative delegitimization (propaganda painting civilian infrastructure as unlawful, as with claims that Israeli desalination plants “steal Palestinian water”).

Water Before Borders

For everyone, water is life. For Israel it was also nationhood.

Long before statehood, Zionist leaders treated water infrastructure as the very precondition for sovereignty in the Land of Israel.

David Ben-Gurion famously said Zionism’s success required “making the desert bloom”—which meant what? Water. Lots of water.

In the early 20th century, the land of Israel (then Mandatory Palestine) was water-poor and population growth was limited by it. British Mandate officials warned that the region could only sustain at most a couple million people on its available water resources.

Zionist visionaries refused to accept this Malthusian cap. From the 1920s, they launched a concerted effort to map and harness every drop of water — an effort fundamentally and explicitly entwined with national security.

British surveys in the 1940s noted that any large influx of Jewish refugees (both survivors of the Holocaust and those that were getting kicked out of Arab lands) would demand new water development. Indeed, the joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946 recommended that the government “acquire powers to investigate fully the extent of the country’s water resources, to control the use of underground water” — implicitly acknowledging that water could be the limiting factor for the nascent state.

Jewish institutions took matters into their own hands. The Mekorot water company was founded in 1937 by the Jewish Agency, long before Israel’s independence, precisely to develop new water supplies. Its first managing director was Levi Eshkol, later he would serve as Prime Minister, illustrating how water development was seen as nation-building at the highest level. Mekorot’s early projects included laying pipelines to bring water to new farming villages and drilling wells in the Negev desert.

During the 1948 War of Independence, these engineers-turned-soldiers performed a miracle under fire. Mekorot constructed an emergency water supply line to besieged Jerusalem, as Arab forces had cut off the city’s traditional pipelines. This makeshift pipeline, built through rough terrain amidst shelling, kept Jerusalem’s Jewish population from dehydration and forced surrender.

After independence, Israel wasted no time in executing a national water plan. Throughout the 1950s, new pipelines and reservoirs came online, often doubling as defense projects. The flagship was the National Water Carrier, completed in the 1960s— a monumental canal and pipeline system channeling (and elevating) water from the Sea of Galilee south to the dry core of the country. The project was so strategic that its announcement prompted military threats from neighboring Arab states, leading to border clashes in the early 1960s as Syria attempted to divert water sources feeding Israel. By the time it was done, the National Water Carrier was delivering about half of Israel’s total water needs and enabling flourishing agriculture in the Negev.

Choosing Desalination Before Crisis

If the National Water Carrier was the marvel of the mid-20th century, seawater desalination became the keystone of Israel’s water strategy in the 21st. Israel embraced large-scale desalination proactively, before absolute crisis hit. By the 1990s, Israel faced recurring droughts and a growing population. Rather than hope for rain or fight over rivers, the government in 1999 decided to initiate a long-term, large-scale reverse osmosis desalination of seawater program. Notably, this was a strategic choice made when water scarcity was a concern but not yet a cataclysm. The mid-90s had been relatively wet.

The program rolled out as a public-private partnership model, reflecting Israeli pragmatism. In 2002, construction began on the first major plant in Ashkelon by private firms under government tender. As drought conditions worsened in the early 2000s, Israel rapidly scaled up targets. Initial plans for 50 million cubic meters per year were upped to 230 million, then 505 million, and ultimately aiming for 750 million cubic meters annually by 2020. For context, 750 MCM is a volume approaching Israel’s entire natural freshwater yield in an average year.

Israeli government pressed on even while facing strong headwinds from a variety of sources: Economists who fretted about cost (though the costs dropped with new tech). Environmentalists who worried about brine discharge into the Mediterranean and high energy use. And ideologues who argued Israel should first cut consumption or use more treated wastewater rather than build more machines.

An epic drought (between 2008 and 2010) brought the Sea of Galilee to its “black line” (dangerously low level), Israel’s desal plants were just ramping up. There were tight water rations and farmers had a tough time. But after that close call, the new desalination capacity came online in force.

By 2013, Ashkelon and Hadera plants were operating, and the massive Sorek plant (the world’s largest) opened in 2015. The turnabout was dramatic: Israel went from fearing running out of water to a state of surplus within a few years.

Israel now has five large coastal desalination plants (Ashkelon, Palmachim, Hadera, Sorek, Ashdod) with more on the way, supplying the majority of domestic water needs.

Today Israel has strategic redundancy, If rainfall is low or a neighbor cuts off a shared stream, Israelis won’t go thirsty because the desalination faucets can be opened wider.

From Survival to Leverage

Israel had achieved what once seemed like science fiction for the dry, middle eastern nation: water independence. It is a remarkable statistic that Israel not only secures 100% of its own drinking water needs but even has a water surplus in many years, which it uses to replenish natural lakes and export to neighbors.

Thanks to desalination and aggressive wastewater recycling, Israel’s per capita water availability has actually increased even as the population grew. Over 80% of Israel’s sewage is treated and reused for agriculture, the highest rate in the world by far (the second place, Spain, reuses under 20%).

This effect of which is that Israel’s farmers can maintain output during droughts by relying on recycled water for crops. Through the 2010s, even when the rains failed, Israel’s agricultural yields remained stable — no small feat in a region where drought routinely devastates harvests. A Food and Agriculture Organization analysis showed Israel’s crop yields fluctuating far less year-to-year than neighboring countries, a testament to irrigation buffer and stable supply.

This surplus has become a tool of regional diplomacy (and leverage). Under the 1994 peace treaty, Israel committed to provide Jordan 50 million cubic meters of water per year; in practice it has provided much more.

In 2021, with Jordan facing a dire water crisis, Israel agreed to double the supply for that year. Jordan, in turn, is cooperating with Israel and the UAE on a plan where Jordan will supply solar power to Israel and get additional desalinated water back (the “water-for-energy” deal brokered in 2021). Amman’s very stability relies in part on Israeli water—something Jordan needs far more than Israel needs anything from Jordan (something the Kingdom loves to grumble about).

Similarly, the Palestinian Authority depends on Israeli water networks. Under interim agreements, Israel provides about 70 MCM annually to Palestinian enclaves in Judea and Samaria. Which Israel has upped in recent years to try to alleviate shortages in Palestinian cities. Gaza, though ruled by Hamas, still receives Israeli water and electricity.

This puts Israel in the paradoxical position of being attacked by Palestinians, even as Israel is the primary supplier keeping their taps flowing. It’s worth noting that Israel sells water to the PA at (or often below) cost. And even during conflicts has repaired lines into Gaza that were damaged by either fighting or, frequently, intentionally by Hamas—as they steal the pipes to turn into rockets which are then fired back into Israel!

The War Over Water Narratives

A staple claim is that Israel is “stealing Palestinian water” or denying Palestinians their fair share. NGOs often cite that per capita water use by Israelis is higher than that of Palestinians as ipso facto evidence of oppression.

What they omit is context: Israel’s higher usage comes from its augmentation of supply via desalination and reuse, not simply division of a fixed natural pie. In fact, under the Oslo Accords, Israel and the PA agreed on water allocations and cooperative development. Israel has consistently exceeded its agreed supply to the Palestinians — providing 70 MCM yearly (or significantly more) when the agreement obligated about 30 MCM.

As NGO Monitor documents, “Israel’s supply of water to the Palestinians is actually far beyond its obligation,” while Palestinian authorities have failed to develop the wells allocated to them or to curb waste.

Moreover, Israel hasn’t cut Palestinian water even during security crises. Nonetheless, slogans like “Israel cuts water to ‘West Bank’ villages” circulate widely (often based on instances where Palestinian water thieves illegally tapped lines, causing pressure drops — a nuance lost in headlines).

Another narrative: that Israel “weaponizes” water by withholding it from Gaza. The truth is that Gaza’s water crisis is self-inflicted (over-pumping of its aquifer and mismanagement by Hamas) and by the cruel facts of geography (Gaza sits on a tiny coastal aquifer with a huge population).

Israel actually supplies water to Gaza each year and has at times offered to give more, but Hamas has rebuffed higher reliance on Israel.

In 2016, a consortium of donors including Israel even planned a major desalination plant for Gaza, but it stalled due to politics. Tellingly, some pro-Palestinian activists opposed that desalination project on the grounds it would “accommodate the occupation.” Preferring, of course, Gaza remain thirsty so as to defend a talking point. As NGO Monitor highlighted, the Palestinian NGO EWASH openly rejected a new desalination plant for Gaza because it might reduce pressure on Israel politically.

Israel finds itself in a no-win scenario. If Gaza lacks water, Israel is blamed. If Israel helps provide water, it “normalizes occupation.” Despite this, Israel continues quiet cooperation. For instance, fixing Gaza’s power lines and pipes during and after conflicts—in addition to piping over water.

This egregious water theft narrative also gets amplified in international fora. The UN Human Rights Council has heard reports accusing Israel of denying Palestinians the right to development via control of [the Israeli] Area C in the West Bank, where major aquifers lie.

Nevermind that Israel has increased water deliveries to Palestinians in Judea and Samaria over time as their population grew. Technical data rarely makes it into these discussions. It falls on Israel to constantly publish joint water committee minutes, figures of drilling permits granted, etc., to debunk myths.

For example, when activists claimed Israel refuses to let Palestinians drill new wells, Israel pointed out it had approved numerous wells but donor countries didn’t fund them or the PA didn’t execute them (documented in Civil Administration reports).

Even after the 2005 disengagement, Israel supplies water to Gaza purely as humanitarian gesture. But entrenched propagandists will continue to claim that if a Palestinian village has a water shortage, it’s by Israeli malice, not, say, a burst pipe or mismanagement by their municipality.

Keeping the Lights on in War

If water was Israel’s first infrastructure battle, electricity has been its second. Israel’s electricity sector has been consciously designed under the shadow of war, just like its water system. The goal is to keep the grid online, or restore it fast, even under missile barrages or isolation. Over decades, Israel moved from fuel import dependency to domestic energy sources, built redundancies into generation and transmission, and developed rapid repair units for wartime.

A Grid Built to Be Hit

Geographically, Israel’s national electric grid is relatively small. It spans a country only about 500 km long and 100 km across at its widest. This compactness is a double-edged sword. It’s easier to interconnect for redundancy, but also easier for enemies to attack with rockets or other weapons.

Recognizing this, Israel adopted a highly centralized yet defensively oriented grid architecture. Historically, a handful of large power stations supplied most of the electricity: the Orot Rabincoal plant in Hadera, the Reading plant in Tel Aviv, Eshkol in Ashdod, and later gas-fired plants like Gezer and Ramat Hovav. These were all coastal or near critical infrastructure. The grid was built as a tight mesh so any plant could send power anywhere in the country. But the flip side: knock out one or two, and a huge chunk of generation drops.

In recent years, Israeli planners have grown concerned about this centralization. A 2025 study warned that “the national grid remains highly centralized, so damage to a major power station or a single gas platform could cause disruptions.” That is a vulnerability — one successful missile on a gas rig could halt fuel supply to power plants, causing widespread blackouts. The Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) has thus been working on contingencies: maintaining dual-fuel capability at plants (so they can burn diesel if gas is cut), stockpiling at least 30 days of diesel on-site, and dispersing fuel reserves.

Another protective measure: hardening and redundancy. Key substations, the nodes that switch high-voltage power, are fortified or have backup sites. Most are underground or in reinforced concrete structures. Transmission lines are looped so that if one line is severed, power can flow from the other direction. Israel also has emergency mobile generators that can be dispatched to power critical facilities if grid supply fails. For example, the Home Front Command and IEC have generator convoys ready to light up hospitals or command centers in blackouts.

Crucially, the grid is designed expecting disruption, not peace. To paraphrase an Israeli engineer: “We assume war will come, so we build so the grid bends but doesn’t break.” Israel’s ethos: plan for the worst case.

It’s telling that every power plant has an IDF liaison officer and a defense plan. New infrastructure must be approved by the Home Front Command for protective measures.

Repair as Doctrine

How has this grid fared in actual conflicts? The record is impressive, though not flawless. During the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi Scud missiles rained on Israel. Some hit near power infrastructure (one struck a Tel Aviv area and temporarily knocked out a substation). Yet power was restored within hours in most cases.

Fast forward to the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets at northern Israel daily. Some hit around Haifa, where major oil refineries and a power plant reside. In one instance, rockets damaged distribution lines causing outages in parts of Haifa. IEC crews, wearing helmets and flak jackets, went out to reroute and fix lines often while sirens were still sounding. They restored power sometimes within minutes to critical sites by switching feeds. As a result, even as sirens wailed, most Israelis not in the immediate impact zone had electricity. The government later reported that no large-scale blackout occurred despite over a thousand rocket strikes. Outages were localized and typically repaired the same day.

In the numerous Gaza conflicts (2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2023-present), Hamas rocket fire at Israeli cities sometimes struck infrastructure. For example, in 2014 a rocket hit a high-voltage line near Ashkelon, causing a cut that also ironically halted power to parts of Gaza (since Israel supplies Gaza power via that line). Israel fixed the line in short order. In May 2021, rockets from Gaza reached as far as Tel Aviv’s outskirts, lightly damaging some electric infrastructure. Again fixed within hours. The resilience was such that Israeli life behind the front largely continued normally in terms of utilities. There were no multi-day electricity outages for Israeli citizens in these wars, an astonishing achievement in wartime.

However, one must not get complacent. The October 7, 2023 Hamas attack caused some more serious issues: militants physically attacked some power substations near the Gaza border, plunging several kibbutzim into darkness as part of their assault. This compounded the chaos as communications failed too. It took the IDF and IEC a day or two to fully restore stable power in those areas after the militants were expelled.

On the immediate front lines, continuity can break for a time. But notably, the national grid was never in jeopardy. The lesson learned was to better secure small rural substations (perhaps by placing them underground or behind better fortifications). Already, there’s been movement toward hardening border-area infrastructure.

Fuel, Redundancy, and Freedom of Action

Electricity doesn’t come from the ether. And Israel’s sources of fuel have dramatically shifted in the past 20 years, bringing new strengths and some constraints.

Up until the 2000s, Israel was almost entirely dependent on imported coal and oil for electricity. This meant vulnerability. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo, for example, hit Israel hard (though Iran under the Shah quietly supplied it then).

To avoid such leverage against it, Israel diversified suppliers and built up stockpiles. By law it maintains a 90-day strategic reserve of oil. But real relief came with the discovery of natural gas offshore in the 2000s. By the mid-2010s, gas from domestic fields supplied the majority of Israel’s electricity generation. This was a game-changer. Suddenly Israel had a local, secure energy source not subject to foreign whims.

Dependence on a few gas rigs creates a single-point risk. Which is something Israel mitigates by maintaining dual-fuel plants and exploring new fields (like the smaller Karish-Tanin fields).

It also keeps some gas in a reserve called the “security stock” rather than exporting it all. Moreover, as part of big export contracts to Egypt, Israel ensured clauses that in an emergency, domestic needs get priority. Essentially, Israel will turn off exports before it ever has to brown out its own people for lack of gas.

Another element is renewables. Israel is very sunny, yet solar power was slow to take off due to land and storage issues. In the last few years that’s changing. Solar now can provide 10-15% of midday power on a good day. The strategic value of solar is that it’s indigenous and not easily attackable (it’s distributed over thousands of panels). The strategic downside is intermittency. Still, Israel’s 2050 energy plan targets a high share of renewables, which will further immunize it from fuel embargos or price shocks.

The energy mix shift also opened new diplomatic doors for regional energy cooperation. Israel’s gas exports to Egypt and Jordan, as discussed, bind those countries into mutual benefit and create a lobby against destabilizing Israel (their own energy security would suffer). This is a twist on the old oil weapon. But now Israel wields gas as a carrot. That said, Israel’s leaders know energy ties alone won’t buy loyalty — public opinion in Cairo and Amman remains hostile. But it raises the cost for those governments to allow a rupture in relations.

Gas Changes the Map

In strategic terms, gas has been both an empowering asset and a complex new variable for Israel. It has bolstered energy security and opened diplomatic channels, yet also introduced new vulnerabilities (big offshore rigs to guard, export politics to navigate).

The Offshore Breakthrough

In the late 1990s, few would have bet on Israel striking major hydrocarbons. Then, in 1999, a modest field (Mari-B) was found off Ashkelon, supplying some gas to Israel’s first gas-fired power station by 2004 . But the game-changer came a decade later. In 2009, a consortium led by Noble Energy confirmed the Tamar field in the eastern Mediterranean, with reserves of about 8 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of gas. Enough to fuel Israel for decades. A year later, lightning struck again. The Leviathan field, roughly double Tamar’s size (~16 TCF), was discovered deeper offshore. Suddenly, Israel had more gas than it could have hoped for. The timing was poetic — just as Egyptian gas imports were faltering due to Sinai pipeline attacks (more on that soon), Israel found its own gas salvation.

The discoveries were met with euphoria but also intense internal debate. On one hand, energy independence was a dream come true. The Israeli public saw dollar signs and cheaper electricity. On the other hand, policymakers realized this windfall came with decisions to make. How to tax it. Whether to export. How to secure it. How to integrate it without corruption. The government convened the Sheshinski Committee in 2010 to examine the royalty and tax regime. Its conclusion in 2011 was to substantially raise the state’s take (up to ~60% of profits). Ultimately Israel did increase taxes on gas profits and created a sovereign wealth fund to invest the proceeds for the future.

Another debate: how much gas to earmark for domestic use vs export. Here, security considerations loomed. The Zemach Committee (2012) advised ensuring at least 50% of reserves are reserved for domestic consumption to guarantee 25-30 years of supply . The government initially approved something like a 60/40 split (60% for Israelis, 40% can be exported), trying to balance long-term energy security with the desire to monetize via export. Some argued for hoarding it all (energy hawks saying who knows if fields might deplete faster), others for exporting most (free-market types wanting to seize high prices while they could). The compromise leaned cautious. In other words, to prioritize Israel’s own energy independence first.

Security assessments identified a glaring vulnerability. Big offshore platforms in the Mediterranean that could be targeted by Hezbollah or even Iranian cruise missiles. Almost immediately, the Israeli Navy was tasked with expanding to protect the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Billions of shekels were invested in new Sa’ar 6 corvettes equipped with advanced radars and anti-missile systems to guard the gas rigs. Israel has stationed permanent defenses at Leviathan and Tamar (combination of naval patrols, drones, and on-rig interceptors).

Lebanon claimed Leviathan might extend into its waters (it doesn’t, but the issue of EEZ borders led to a years-long dispute). Hezbollah issued threats that it wouldn’t allow Israel to “plunder” maritime resources — effectively trying to scare off companies. But Israel stood firm and also courted international involvement (the drilling consortium included an American company Noble and later major investors like Chevron, which adds a layer of U.S. interest in stability).

When Dependence Explodes

In the mid-2000s, riding on the new peace with Jordan and warmer ties with Egypt, Israel agreed to import natural gas from Egypt via a pipeline through Sinai. For a time (2008-2011), this Egyptian gas provided around 40% of Israel’s natural gas needs, fueling its power plants cheaply. Strategically, it seemed a win-win. Egypt earned revenue and cemented peace economics. Israel got affordable gas and diversified from coal. But the arrangement was only as stable as Egypt’s Sinai security and politics — which, as you could have guessed, proved shaky.

After President Mubarak’s ouster in 2011, the pipeline came under relentless attack by Sinai jihadis. Over two dozen bombings hit the pipeline from 2011 to 2012, repeatedly interrupting gas flow. Each time, Israel had to scramble to switch power plants back to costly diesel or fuel oil to avoid blackouts. The writing was on the wall: reliance on Egyptian supply had become a strategic liability. The situation got so untenable that in 2012 the Egyptian supplier EGAS unilaterally canceled the contract (ostensibly a business dispute, but really they couldn’t guarantee delivery). Israel suddenly had a gaping hole in its energy supply — a minor crisis.

Israel managed by upping production from its small domestic fields and using more expensive imported fuel. This pinch underscored the importance of developing Tamar ASAP, which fortunately came online in 2013 just in time to save the day.

By 2014, Israel no longer needed Egyptian gas. It had its own from Tamar. The pipeline, lying dormant, became a symbol of how external dependence can literally blow up in your face. But here’s the twist: within a few years, the pipeline found new life — in reverse. In 2018, Israel signed a $15 billion deal to export gas to Egypt using that very same Sinai pipeline. Israel’s Delek Group and its partner Noble even bought a stake in the pipeline to ensure its operation. Gas began flowing from Israel to Egypt in early 2020, making Israel a net energy exporter for the first time. In February 2020, ISIS-Sinai blew up a section of pipeline. However, by then Egypt had alternate routes and storage, so the impact was minimal and fixed quickly.

Pipelines as Alignment

Israel’s gas discoveries coincided with similar finds by Cyprus and Egypt, creating a shared interest in developing these resources and exporting to Europe. This led to the formation of the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF) in 2019, headquartered in Cairo, with members including Israel, Egypt, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. The forum’s existence is a minor miracle. It’s one of the few multilateral bodies where Israel sits alongside Arab states (sans direct US/EU mediation). The EMGF aims to coordinate policies, build regional pipelines, and ensure each gets a piece of the pie. Notably, Turkey was excluded (much to Turkey’s anger), solidifying a Greece-Cyprus-Israel-Egypt alignment. As analyst Hugh Lovatt observed, “Israel no doubt sees the creation of the EMGF as an important step… The exclusion of Turkey, and the deep animosity shown towards [it] by members, are a welcome bonus for Israel,” since Turkey backs Hamas and harasses Israel’s allies.

Israel’s ability to export gas to Europe (even if relatively modest amounts) raised its profile. In June 2022, the EU signed a memorandum with Israel and Egypt to increase gas imports from the East Med. Europe’s hunt to replace Russian gas turned Israel from an irrelevant player (in EU eyes) to a potential contributor to European energy security. It’s not a game-changer (volumes are relatively small), but it’s a foot in the door of strategic dialogues that Israel wasn’t part of before.

Natural gas has undoubtedly strengthened Israel’s hand, but it is not an all-powerful trump card.

The Systems Nation

Israel is often dubbed the “Startup Nation,” but increasingly it’s morphing into what we might call the “Systems Nation.” Where an integrated ecosystem of military, academia, and industry drives cutting-edge digital infrastructure.

Military R&D as National Engine

For a country of fewer than 10 million, Israel punches absurdly above its weight in technology. The roots of this go back to its founding. Necessity drove innovation (radios, codebreaking, aerospace), and a culture that prized education and tachles (practical results) nurtured many engineers. But the key accelerator was the integration between the IDF’s technological units, Israeli universities, and a burgeoning private tech sector. Over decades, this integration has become seamless, creating a pipeline of talent and ideas that constantly rejuvenates Israel’s digital infrastructure.

One emblematic engine is Unit 8200, Israel’s elite signals intelligence and cyber unit, often likened to America’s NSA. Veterans of Unit 8200 have spawned countless startups and cybersecurity companies. What began as a trickle of 8200 alumni founding companies in the 1990s and 2000s is now a torrent.

According to recent estimates, hundreds of startups have roots in 8200, and more broadly IDF tech units (including Unit 81 for hardware, Air Force tech, etc.) are a training academy for Israel’s entire innovation economy.

This synergy essentially means Israel’s digital infrastructure — from cybersecurity firms guarding global banks to healthcare AI — often originates in military R&D labs or is accelerated by skills learned there.

Israel’s defense-tech sector has nearly doubled in size since October 7, 2023, growing from roughly 160 companies to more than 300 active start-ups in recent days. Veterans returned from the battlefield with ideas for better drones, sensors, AI battle management, and immediately started new companies to fill those needs.

The government and IDF, far from keeping everything in-house, increasingly tap these startups for solutions, often embedding them in projects from the early stages.

A young Israeli might serve in a cyber unit at age 19, be solving complex problems with top-notch tools, finish service at 23, then found a startup using similar techniques to solve a civilian problem, all while perhaps still doing reserve duty where she stays abreast of the latest military tech. This cycle constantly cross-pollinates knowledge.

The outcome of all this is not just successful companies, but a robust digital infrastructure within Israel that supports national power. Think of critical areas: communications, banking, transportation, government IT — Israeli tech secures and optimizes them in a very self-reliant way. Israel famously has backup communications methods (like an independent satellite network, AMOS, after relying on foreign satellites proved risky). Its government networks are defended by a lattice of local cyber firms and the cyber units.

Israel doesn’t depend on foreign IT contractors for sensitive systems — it leverages its own. Even during crises, Israeli digital networks have proven resilient (e.g. despite massive cyber attacks by Anonymous and Iran during conflicts, Israel’s internet and finance system never suffered catastrophic failure; quick isolations and backups were in place).

Where the World Depends on Israel

One might ask: how does Israel’s digital prowess translate into global dependence or influence? The answer lies in key industries where Israel is a node that the world economy or security ecosystem quietly relies on.

Surprising to some, tiny Israel is a giant in the chip world. Intel has operated in Israel since 1974 and today has major chip fabrication plants in Kiryat Gat. These produce advanced microprocessors — including many of Intel’s Core PC chips and the latest Mobileye autonomous driving chips. In fact, an estimated 10-15% of all new Intel computer chips worldwide are designed or manufactured in Israel (Intel Israel’s exports hit $9 billion in 2022, about 1.7% of Israel’s GDP and 5.5% of its high-tech exports). If something were to disrupt those plants, Intel’s global supply chain would feel it.

Apple, AMD, Nvidia all have R&D centers in Israel working on next-gen chips. Nvidia’s newest AI chips (crucial for training large language models) have key components designed by its Israeli teams. Simply put, Israel’s chip engineers are embedded in most major tech firms’ product development. If Israel’s tech workforce were cut off, product cycles in Silicon Valley would stumble. This gives Israel intangible leverage — companies like Intel and Apple have a stake in Israel’s stability and will lobby albeit usually behind closed doors to ensure Israel is supported.

Israel was a fast adopter of AI, especially in defense and surveillance (which draws criticism from civil liberties advocates, but has kept Israel ahead of adversaries in tech).

Israeli startups are leaders in computer vision (used in autonomous drones, border security), predictive analytics (for cyber defense, finance, etc.), and natural language processing for intel.

Much of the AI talent comes out of places like Unit 8200’s data science divisions. Globally, Israel’s AI algorithms permeate — from algorithms in Microsoft’s cloud security (thanks to Microsoft’s big Israel R&D center) to image recognition in many smartphones (Apple’s FaceID’s foundations are from an Israeli acquisition, PrimeSense). Moreover, Israel’s data sets (e.g. years of drone surveillance, combat scenarios) have been used to train AIs that allied countries employ. Also, Israel’s early warning and missile defense AI is now integrated with U.S. systems (e.g. the United States has bought Iron Dome batteries, and the algorithms and radar integration came along).

Trust comes into play here. Certain Western allies trust Israeli tech enough to incorporate it in their sensitive systems—something they couldn’t do with, say, Chinese tech. For instance, Britain uses Israeli UAVs in its military, and Germany is buying Israel’s Arrow-3 anti-ballistic missile system for European defense. These involve software/AI trust.

Conversely, Israel also trusts a select few allies to share technology with under export controls (the U.S., and increasingly India, etc.). Israel is careful not to sell cutting-edge cyber or AI to adversaries of the West (after a brush with China on an airborne radar sale in 2000 that the U.S. nixed, Israel recalibrated its export oversight).

Israel’s role in defense tech exports is crucial. It’s among the top 10 arms exporters globally, specializing in things like drones, anti-missile systems, electronic warfare, and cyber tools. Many countries’ militaries depend on Israeli kit. India’s military is a major client (Israeli radar and missiles on Indian ships, Israeli drones patrol Indian borders).

EU states (even the overtly antisemitic and hostile ones like Poland) just bought hundreds of Israeli loitering munitions.

Even some Arab states quietly use Israeli surveillance tech (as leaks about Pegasus spyware showed, several Gulf and other governments used it — which, controversy aside, indicates they saw Israel as an integral part for their own cyber arsenals).

That said, dependence doesn’t equal affection or diplomatic alignment.

Many EU countries that buy Israeli arms still vote to condemn Israel in UN forums. Israel knows this, so it doesn’t overestimate influence from exports. But it does create an undercurrent of pragmatic relationships.

For example, when the EU was weighing labeling goods from Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria, Israel subtly reminded that some of those “goods” were components in tech that European companies use — a minor factor perhaps, but every bit of interdependence adds reluctance to wholly alienate Israel.

For a period, China became a major market for Israeli tech (notably in surveillance and AI). China is certainly no ally of Israel politically — it votes against Israel often at the UN. Yet it covets Israeli innovation. Israel had to scale back sales to China under US pressure (e.g. no advanced defense sales), but tech investment continues in the civilian sector. So China extracts value from Israel’s ecosystem while still arms-length diplomatically. That has pushed Israel to be more guarded. Sovereignty in tech also means being careful who you share it with. Israel learned that giving China too much could anger the US and possibly come back to harm Israel’s own qualitative military edge. So Israel tries to align with Western export controls on critical tech, even though it costs some business.

One could argue a hostile but pragmatic country might say “We’ll just replicate Israeli tech ourselves if Israel is gone.” But replication isn’t trivial. The decades of know-how and unique security-driven perspective Israel’s tech minds have cannot be instantly cloned. That’s why even superpowers find value in Israeli innovations (e.g. the US military incorporated Israeli active protection systems on tanks because the US hadn’t developed one as good yet).

Continuity in the Digital Domain

If water and electricity keep Israel’s body alive, cyber is the neural network keeping its brain and nerves functioning. Israel’s cyber infrastructure encompasses defensive measures to protect its critical systems and offensive capabilities to deter or disrupt enemies. It is another realm where Israel has innovated a doctrine of continuity: ensuring that even under cyber attack, essential services continue, and that Israel can hit back to make adversaries think twice.

On the defensive side, Israel has a National Cyber Directorate (INCD) that works closely with the IDF Unit 8200 and civilian sectors. They have developed a multi-tiered approach: securing government networks (the Cyber Dome program), assisting the private sector to harden key industries, and running nationwide drills (like the “Cyberstorm” exercises) to simulate major cyber attacks. The 2020 attempted Iranian cyber attack on water systems was a wake-up call. Israel’s response was to immediately upgrade the isolation of its water SCADA controls and enforce two-factor authentication and other best practices across all utility control systems. The head of INCD admitted that the attack’s goal was to sicken civilians by altering chlorine levels — a blatant attempt at mass harm. That crossed a line. Though the attack was thwarted by failsafes (or luck), it propelled Israel to institute what one might call a “zero trust” approach on critical infrastructure: assume breaches and limit their impact via fail-safes (e.g. if a chemical injection command is suspicious, system defaults to shutdown rather than execution).

Cyber resilience also means backup modes. Israel reportedly retains manual overrides for many systems— meaning if hacking knocks out automation, operators can fall back to analog control. This was an advantage of having a mix of older and newer tech; not everything in Israel is fully digitized (Israel’s water system still had manual valves which is partly why the 2020 hack didn’t succeed). Additionally, Israel invests heavily in cyber intelligence to catch attacks in planning. Being a top-tier cyber power, Israel often has visibility into adversaries’ capabilities.

On the offensive side, Israel has used cyber as a strategic tool in its deterrence kit. The most famous example: Stuxnet (2010), widely attributed to Israel (with US help), which sabotaged Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges. That was a milestone: a cyber attack causing physical damage to a strategic program. It delayed Iran’s nuclear drive without a single bomb dropped.

Israel keeps its offensive cyber units mostly in the shadows, but their reputation is well known. Unit 8200 is believed to have an array of cyber weapons and a dedicated mission of foiling terror and WMD plots via hacking. One published case: 8200 reportedly foiled an ISIS plan to bomb a passenger plane in 2017 by hacking into ISIS comm channels, info which Israel passed to Australia to stop the bombers at the airport. That kind of intelligence coup via cyber saves lives and wins Israel immense goodwill from allies. It also underscores that Israel’s offensive cyber is not just for destruction but also for surveillance and preemption.

Cyber resilience for civilian continuity is another focus. Israel sees its civilian population as part of the war effort (the “home front”), so keeping their morale and daily life going is vital. Therefore, critical civilian services — power, water, finance, telecom — are protected almost like military assets in cyber terms. There’s close coordination between companies and the state. For example, major banks in Israel regularly do joint drills with INCD for cyber crisis, making sure an attack on financial networks won’t crash the economy or at least that recovery is quick. In 2017, when a global ransomware (NotPetya) hit many countries, Israel had minimal impact because its agencies had warned companies to patch systems (based on intel gleaned by Unit 8200).

During the recent war surges, there have been massive attempts by state actors (Iran, Turkey, China, Russia, etc.) and hacktivists to take down Israeli government websites and critical infrastructure. Some succeeded briefly (a few .gov.il sites were down for hours due to DDoS attacks). But Israel had backup domains and cloud mitigation, so services were restored.

The adaptation even mid-crisis — shifting some sites to Israeli CloudFront instances and using geo-blocking — showed agility. Hacktivists did breach some peripheral systems. But no core infrastructure was compromised.

Supply Chains Under Siege

Infrastructure doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s part of an overall national system that includes trade networks, supply chains for essentials like food and medicine, and the information battles that swirl around them.

Planning for Blockade

For a country that imports over 90% of its grain and a large share of raw materials, Israel takes supply chain security very seriously. There’s a national grain reserve (usually a few months’ worth of wheat stored in silos). Fuel reserves we mentioned (90 days requirement). During the 2020 pandemic, Israel was quick to airlift supplies and ramp up local production of things like masks and ventilators. The government realized during COVID that global just-in-time supply can fail, so they started initiatives to encourage local production of some essentials.

Israel’s agriculture is highly efficient (fruits, vegetables, dairy, and poultry are largely self-sufficient). But as an OECD report noted in 2025, Israel is “a consistent net-importer of agro-food products” especially grains, oilseeds, beef, and fish.

Recognizing vulnerability, Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture recently launched a National Food Security 2050 program. It aims to diversify import sources, increase local production where possible (like encouraging some grain cultivation in the Galilee or Negev using resilient crop strains), and importantly, monitoring global risks in real-time. This came after October 7, 2023 war when there were calls to boycott Israel goods or refuse shipping. “The events of October 7 highlighted that Israel cannot rely on imports as an alternative to local production, given increasing boycotts and climate change effects,” the Agriculture Ministry stated bluntly. Thus they’re building a system to ensure “functional continuity in the face of blocked supply routes.”

They’re even working on concrete infrastructural fixes. Israel has Ashdod and Haifa as main ports, but also smaller ports in Eilat and nascent private operations also in Ashdod, Haifa, and under consideration elsewhere — multiple entry points so a closure of one (due to conflict or boycott) doesn’t choke trade. Also, after seeing some foreign shipping companies hesitate during conflicts, Israel developed a modest national shipping capacity (through Zim, partly Israeli-owned, which in crisis prioritizes Israeli needs). Air freight can also be a lifeline: El Al famously flew on Shabbat in the Yom Kippur War to bring emergency arms. For COVID it flew to China and back for medical gear.

Israel has one of the world’s most self-contained defense industries for a country its size. Of course, it does buy high-end fighters from the US, etc., but often customizes them with Israeli avionics. This reduces vulnerability to arms embargoes. Today, if one pipeline of arms is cut, Israel has alternatives or its own interim solutions. However, it has a way to go towards autarky— a needed development, since at present, Israel relies to heavily on U.S. goodwill (something that historically has not been guaranteed).

However, there are still weak spots. Israel, as noted, imports most of its animal feed. If global grain markets seized up (like if the Black Sea grain deal collapses completely), feed costs soar — affecting local poultry and dairy output. Climate change could also hit its supply partners and even local farming (though Israel is somewhat cushioned by advanced irrigation). The key is Israel is openly planning for these eventualities.

What Collapse Actually Looks Like

To appreciate Israel’s durable systems, it’s instructive to contrast with places where infrastructure was misused or collapsed, yielding true fragility or state failure. These cautionary tales put into relief the smart choices Israel made.

Venezuela, once one of the richest per capita countries in Latin America due to oil, nationalized and politicized its infrastructure. The electric grid was starved of investment and staffed by loyalty over expertise. Result: massive blackouts in 2019 and onward. Public transport and communication systems collapsed with losses above $875 million from one week-long blackout. This contributed to an exodus of millions of citizens and essentially a failed state. (To say nothing of the current upheaval in the wake of Maduro’s capture by the U.S.) Why? Infrastructure was treated as a political tool (for patronage) not as a national backbone.

Since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, basic services there deteriorated. They prioritized tunnel building and rockets over water plants and power. Gaza’s sole power plant often is offline due to lack of fuel or maintenance. Its water aquifer is over-pumped causing salinity and sewage issues. Hamas even dug up water pipes to make rocket casings. This is a stark example of ideology trumping infrastructure — and it’s resulted in misery for Gazans (12-hour daily blackouts are norm, water is undrinkable without filtering). Hamas also has attacked Israeli infrastructure (like trying to blow crossing pipelines) that supply Gaza. Infrastructure fragility has made Gaza more dependent (on international aid, on Israel’s goodwill for fuel), undercutting Hamas’s supposed “resistance” posture.

Lebanon, Hezbollah’s fiefdom, has what is effectively a failed electric grid (even before the 2020 economic meltdown, Beirut had daily generator hours; now state power is maybe 1-2 hours/day). This collapse came from decades of sectarian mismanagement and corruption in infrastructure, plus Hezbollah’s parallel illicit economy. Lebanon can’t project power or stability and is at mercy of fuel donors and diaspora remittances. Lebanon’s internal sovereignty eroded as its infrastructure did.

The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine illustrates how infrastructure becomes the battleground. Russia bombs Ukraine’s grid to break morale. Ukraine innovates (using Israeli supplied generators among others) to keep lights on, and amazingly Ukraine’s state hasn’t collapsed after years of infrastructure targeting. It underscores that continuity of systems under attack can decide a nation’s fate. We also see Russia suffering logistics issues due to corruption in its military infrastructure — again, how internal rot of systems (maintenance, supply chain) cripples battlefield performance.

The Fantasy of Collapse

From its founding, Israel’s adversaries have comforted themselves with a belief that Israel is a temporary aberration. A “crusader state” that will eventually crumble. One hears Iranian leaders say Israel is a “cancer” that will be removed.

In 2000, after IDF withdrew from south Lebanon, Hezbollah’s Nasrallah gloated that Israel had become as feeble as a cobweb. He argued that Israeli civilians have no stomach for sacrifice — break their infrastructure or comfort, and they’ll flee. They amassed rockets aimed at Israeli cities thinking a barrage would send Israelis panicking and the state imploding. The 2006 war and subsequent conflicts have empirically disproven this. Israel has endured barrages, mourned losses, but did not collapse. Nasrallah told an interviewer that he was amazed how in 2006 Haifa residents under rockets still went about some daily business and the army kept fighting strong. Good riddance to him.

Palestinians refer to Israel as an “artificial entity” bound to disintegrate — pointing to internal divisions or emigrant Israelis as evidence of rot. These beliefs perhaps serve to sustain hope in the face of Israel’s military might. They bet on an implosion from within. Indeed, encouraging that is a strategy. Hence Iran and proxies wage psychological war, pushing narratives of Israeli society breaking (for instance, Hamas on Oct 7 aimed to project that their brutal attack had Israelis fleeing or soldiers melting away, which was false — within hours Israel mobilized 360,000 reservists, the opposite of collapse).

After October 7th, a narrative in some circles was “this is Israel’s 9/11, it will overreact and implode” or “Israelis have lost faith in their security, the society will fracture.” It’s a renewal of spider web theory. But then Israel’s systems kept functioning: yes, politics in Israel is heated, but water, power, economy all humming (some wartime dips but no breakdown). External attacks usually unite Israelis (at least short-term) more than divide them.

Israel’s flourishing high-tech and global integration have created facts that contradict fragility narratives. The myth of fragility sometimes leads foes into strategic mistakes — underestimating response or overestimating how a blow will crumble Israel. Hamas, on Oct 7, thought Israeli Arabs would rise against the State and IDF reservists wouldn’t respond. Instead, the opposite.

What Endures

Continue turning scarcity into surplus. More renewable energy so if gas rigs are threatened, it’s ok. More food tech like drought-resistant crops to be food secure during climate stress. Also remain flexible — a lesson of infrastructure as power is you must adapt it as conditions change. For instance, when AI can predict maintenance issues, that should be deployed to pre-empt infrastructure failures.

The Eastern Med is heating and drying. Israel’s Water Authority models predict a significant drop in natural water recharge by 2050. However, more extreme weather (flash floods, heatwaves) could strain electricity demand and physical infrastructure. Israel’s electric grid must handle peak loads under heatwaves that push A/C use to the max. To this end, Israel is deploying smart grid tech and storage to shave peaks. Also, rising Mediterranean sea levels might affect coastal power plants by mid-century. Israel has begun fortifying and considering more inland generation. Regionally, neighbors face worse climate stress, which could cause further instability, as well as Arab-world migrations. Israel might find its desalination and solar tech in even higher demand as countries seek to adapt. Conversely, if neighbors collapse under climate pressure, Israel may need contingency plans (perhaps quietly helping via third parties to prevent total chaos next door, as it already does by occasionally supplying water or fuel to south Syria villages in covert humanitarian ops).

The world is in an AI arms race. Israel is extremely well placed, with dozens of top AI startups and AI integrated in everything from military intel to agri-tech. But AI also poses threats — deepfakes, cyber attacks enhanced by AI, etc. Israel’s cybersecurity strategy explicitly now accounts for AI-driven threats (like AI that can find zero-day exploits faster). To maintain resilience, Israel will likely invest heavily in AI for cyber defense (already Unit 8200 uses AI to triage cyber anomalies) and for optimizing infrastructure (predictive maintenance in rail, smart traffic grids to avoid one route failure jamming entire city, etc.). Quantum computing could, in a decade, break today’s encryption — so Israel is working on quantum-resistant cryptography for its secure communications networks.

Models for Middle East stability in next 10-20 years vary, but most foresee a continued struggle between Iran’s camp and a US-Israel-Arab camp, plus non-state chaos in failing states. In that worst case, one would expect heavy damage to northern Israeli infrastructure. Israel’s strategy is to shorten such war by massive offensive, but it’s also enhancing redundancy (e.g., prepping southern Israel hospitals to take patients if northern ones are bombed beyond their capacity, etc.). Israel runs regional and nationwide drills (like turning off power in a city to simulate outage recovery). Israel expects the unexpected and is racing to ensure that even if some infrastructure goes down, alternatives kick in within hours.

If global supply lines reorient (less reliance on China, etc.), Israel could benefit by stepping in with trusted supply in certain niches. But also, if a recession hits allies, there could be less investment flowing to Israeli innovation. Israel should thus keep diversifying markets (courting Global South, etc.).

Sovereignty by Design

From the first pipelines and power stations of the 1930s to today’s cloud servers and gas rigs, Israel consciously designed infrastructure as instruments of national power.

Even today, the roll-out of 5G or fiber is tied into secure networks for defense and economic robustness. Nothing in Israel’s infrastructure is truly neutral — it’s all imbued with a mission of keeping the state viable under threat.

Enemies have tried to terrorize the Israeli public with rocket barrages, intending to create chaos and psychological defeat. But when rockets are met with interception (Iron Dome and its associate systems) and immediate restoration of any damaged utilities, the attempt to break continuity fails. In cyber terms, when Iran’s attempt to poison water was countered and responded to with a more humane cyber counter-punch on their port, it likely deterred them from escalating cyber attacks to critical Israeli systems since they know Israel can absorb and hit back.

The very capacity of Israel to absorb shocks and continue to function removes adversaries’ incentives to use infrastructure attack strategies.

It’s unfortunate but undeniable that Israel’s advancements have not mellowed its enemies, but often enraged them further. Israel’s emergence as a gas exporter led Lebanon to posture harder on maritime claims until a deal was mediated. The more Israel disproves the fragility myth, the more some hostile actors double down on trying to find other angles (legal, narrative) to undermine it. This means Israel cannot expect its humanitarian or constructive efforts alone to change deeply ingrained hostility. As Israel’s indispensability grows, some hostility will wane pragmatically, but the core ideological enemies will actually intensify efforts out of frustration.

Israel’s continuity of governance and services through wars, intifadas, and isolation attempts shows a level of sovereignty that few countries facing similar threats have ever maintained. Israel’s projection of power — diplomatic, military, economic — is entirely undergirded by the resilient systems at home that free it to act independently.

Israel, through its infrastructure-as-national-power strategy, has earned a reputation even among adversaries as “hard to kill.” And so it will remain.

I keep thinking back to that apartment.

Same kettle. Same wiring. Same pipes. Same country—after wars, elections, protests, and pressures that were supposed to crack it.

Israel’s enemies still talk about fragility. About inevitability. About collapse just around the corner. They’ve been saying it for decades.

Meanwhile, the water keeps flowing. The grid holds. The networks route around damage. The systems endure.

That doesn’t make Israel perfect. It makes it real.

And in this century, sovereignty belongs to the states that can keep functioning when others want them to fail.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

Shalom, friends.

I keep running into the same exchange.

It happens after talks. Late dinners. Long flights. Someone serious, informed, sympathetic leans in and asks something along the lines of: “But what were they supposed to do?”

Sometimes it’s phrased more gently. “There was never a real choice.”

I used to answer that carefully. Too carefully. With layers of qualification meant to sound humane.

Too much reading cured me of that habit.

Primary documents. Leadership speeches translated from the original Arabic—not what they openly say in English. School curricula. Budget line items. Donor audits. Internal PA records. Political charters. Prisoner payment schedules. Polling that doesn’t get quoted on campus.

What replaced caution wasn’t cynicism.

It was clarity.

A pattern snaps into focus. Not a tragedy. A system. One built deliberately. One that rewards grievance, penalizes reform, and makes self-defeat a rational strategy for elites.

This long brief comes out of that reckoning. It is not written to flatter activists. It is not written to absolve jihad. And it is not written to soothe Western illusions. It is written to answer a single question without euphemism:

How did a national movement with unprecedented global sympathy end up politically paralyzed, economically stagnant, and strategically isolated—largely by its own leadership’s design?

Before we proceed, we need a shared operating framework.

• Self-defeat refers to repeatable policy and governance choices that reliably worsen outcomes for the population over time, independent of stated intentions. In the Palestinian case, this means leadership decisions that entrenched corruption, rejectionism, and violence even when alternative paths were available.

• Inculcation describes the sustained, institutional transmission of belief through education, media, ritual, and incentives. Here, grievance is mobilized. Children are taught duty, not history. Resistance is framed as identity. Compromise as treason.

• Rejectionism is the doctrine that partial outcomes are illegitimate by definition. All or nothing—which usually just means nothing. For the Palestinians, rejection hardened into a loyalty test and survival strategy for those making millions off of their masses.

• Violence as governance means the use of armed action to rule, intimidate, suppress dissent, and substitute for administration. Rockets replace referendums. Militias replace institutions. “Resistance” replaces accountability. Civilians absorb the cost.

A necessary clarification.

Critiquing Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, or Hamas leadership is not an indictment of every Palestinian civilian. Many civilians live under coercive systems they did not choose.

That said, illusions help no one.

Recent polling shows roughly 70 percent of Palestinians support Hamas, and even more endorse the October 7 pogrom. The minority who oppose Hamas are not, by and large, voting blocs for Western liberal democracy. They overwhelmingly support other jihadist or rejectionist currents. Mass opinion did not restrain leadership choices. It reinforced them.

Intent matters less than outcome. Rhetoric matters less than policy. External pressure matters less than internal continuity.

Israel’s policies have varied sharply across decades. Palestinian leadership behavior has not.

Rather than neutralizing evil or blurring agency in the foolish quest to political correctness, let’s look instead at how grievance was operationalized, how refusal became rational, and how a leadership class preserved power by ensuring that failure remained permanent.

Manufactured Palestinian Self-Defeat

How grievance, rejectionism, and violence were institutionalized as governance—and why civilians paid the cost?

Palestinian self-defeat does not originate in failed summits. It is manufactured long before leaders sit at tables they already intend to overturn.

The production line runs through classrooms, media studios, mosques, and public rituals. It is reinforced by budgets, stipends, promotions, and punishments. The objective is obedience. Intellectual rigor? Out the window. Each generation is trained to treat compromise as treason and violence as virtue—so that rejection becomes reflex, not debate.

This is political infrastructure. The Palestinian Authority’s (to say nothing about Hamas or UNRWA versions that do much the same, sometimes even more egregiously) school system functions as a centralized conditioning mechanism.

Multiple independent reviews, including EU-commissioned evaluations, converge on the same findings across years and revisions. Israel is erased or abstracted. Jews are demonized and stripped of historical presence. Jew-hate is taught. Negotiation disappears. Violence remains.

Israel is rarely named. It appears as “the Zionist occupation,” uniformly aggressive and illegitimate. Jewish historical ties to Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem, or Gaza are denied or omitted. Maps erase Israel entirely. From the river to the sea is presented as a single unresolved entitlement.

Peace agreements are excised. References to Oslo, Camp David, and Annapolis vanish from textbooks—insomuch as they were ever mentioned even obliquely. So does any sustained treatment of non-violent conflict resolution. A Palestinian child can complete primary and secondary education without encountering coexistence as a legitimate option. They cannot make it that far without being taught to hate Jews and the West, however.

Children memorize poems pledging their lives to “the revolution.” First-graders learn “martyr” as a neutral noun. Arithmetic problems count prisoners. Geography teaches total territorial claim. Haifa and Jaffa are framed not as neighbors but as future objectives.

This is intentional, authorized, and subsidized (by tax dollars from the West) radicalization.

PA officials have openly defended this content, arguing that recognition of Israel and removal of militant symbolism must wait until political demands are met. In plain language: indoctrination continues until victory arrives.

Victory never does.

The result is that a population taught that compromise is betrayal cannot sustain pragmatic politics. Rejection is preloaded before proposals exist.

What those classroom plant, media and public space harvest.

PA-controlled and affiliated outlets repeat a fixed lexicon—resistance, steadfastness, martyrdom, revolution. These words define moral boundaries in the culture.

Terrorists are honored. Attacks on Israeli civilians are framed as “operations.” Funerals become political theater. Official statements after atrocities impose solidarity—and often call for more atrocities.

The pay-for-slay payment systems completes the loop. The PA allocates substantial funds to stipends for imprisoned terrorists and families of attackers. Officials defend these payments as honor, not welfare. Palestinians—including one whom I sat on his living room floor in his village in Judea—deny it exists or, when pressed, will try to pass it off as welfare to an outsider. However, when you listen to their media or view their group chats, it is clear that violence is not merely excused—it is incentivized.

Schools, camps, tournaments, and squares bear the names of mass murderers. Dalal Mughrabi—who led the 1978 Coastal Road massacre killing 38 Israeli civilians, including children—remains institutionalized as a role model. Funding freezes may come and go. The names stay.

The message is unambiguous: killing Jews earns status and salary.

Nakba commemorations frame 1948 as reversible error, not history. Loss is ritualized without resolution. Progress is replaced by grievance maintenance. UN resolutions substitute for governance. The population is fed symbolism while leadership feeds on permanence and diverts Western funds offshore for their luxe retirements.

This system persists because institutions enforce it.

Education ministries, media authorities, clerical bodies, and NGO ecosystems are aligned to preserve the narrative. Careers depend on compliance. Budgets reward repetition. Dissent threatens livelihoods.

Foreign aid has sustained the structure. Billions flowed with limited conditionality. Paying salaries for educators who teach incitement and broadcasters who glorify terror.

When internal critics surface, enforcement follows.

In Gaza, Hamas arrests journalists and anyone engaged in dialogue with Israelis. Treason charges are routine—though due process is often just flicking off the safety switch.

In Judea and Samaria, tolerance is marginally wider and sharply bounded. Critics of corruption or incitement face detention or death. The Palestinian I met with? If he was identified, he and his family would face severe consequences.

He would, relative to his society, be considered a “peace activist.” Of course, that means he’s willing to acknowledge Jews aren’t going anywhere—at least in a private setting. Publicly? Not a chance. In our conversation, he wasn’t particularly pro-PA, but he couldn’t quite get around to condemning them either.

Western discourse leans on a comforting fiction: civilians are moderate, leaders are the problem. The visit I just described erases it and contemporary polling dismantles it.

Roughly 70 percent of Palestinians express support for Hamas. Even more support the October 7 pogrom. Those who oppose Hamas do not coalesce around liberal democracy. They largely support alternative jihadist or rejectionist currents.

Decades of indoctrination produce a public that mirrors it. The feedback loop hardens. Reform becomes politically suicidal.

Rejection as Regime Logic

Across decades, Palestinian leadership has treated partial outcomes as illegitimate by definition. Not as insufficient. Illegitimate. The result is not a series of tragic miscalculations. It is a repeatable pattern in which leadership prefers permanent conflict over any settlement that would end the struggle—and with it, their political utility.

In 1947, the UN proposed partition: two states, Jewish and Arab. The Jewish Agency accepted. Palestinian leadership rejected outright, unwilling to tolerate any Jewish sovereignty. The rejection led directly to war, defeat, and the loss of territory they might otherwise have held. Maximal denial replaced imperfect compromise. The lesson went unlearned.

In 1967, after Israel’s victory, the Arab League issued the Khartoum Resolution—no peace, no recognition, no negotiation. The PLO embraced it fully. Its charter declared Israel null and void. They elevated armed struggle as the only path. Egypt and Jordan later exited this framework and secured (albeit tenuously) peace and stability. Palestinian leadership did not.

By the late 1980s, rhetorical cracks appeared. The PLO nominally accepted a state in Judea and Samaria and Gaza. Internally, nothing changed. The rejectionist narrative remained intact. The acceptance functioned as diplomatic access rather than an ideological revision.

Oslo exposed it plainly. While the Palestinians recognized Israel on paper. In Arabic discourse, education, and media, Israel’s legitimacy remained denied. Arafat spoke peace abroad and hudna at home. The groundwork for reversal stayed in place.

Camp David, in 2000, was an inflection point. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, backed by President Clinton, offered a Palestinian state. It would have sat on roughly 91–97 percent of Judea and Samaria, all of Gaza, and it would have had the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem for its capital. To say nothing of a framework for refugees involving compensation and return.

Arafat, privately, intimated he would sign. Instead, when it was time to make a decision, he said no. No counteroffer. No alternative map. No closing effort.

Arafat “said no to everything,” according to President Bill Clinton. Dennis Ross concluded Arafat never intended to end the conflict. Within weeks, the Second Intifada launched. Rejection moved from diplomacy to bloodshed.

The Clinton Parameters that followed met most Palestinian demands again. Israel accepted with reservations. Arafat rejected them as well. Even Arab leaders (albeit for Western consumption) warned him not to walk away. He did anyway.

The pattern repeated again. In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas an even more expansive deal: near-total withdrawal, land swaps, a divided Jerusalem, international administration of holy sites, symbolic refugee return. Abbas rejected it outright. No counterproposal. No referendum. Silence.

Since then, the reflex has held. Interim autonomy plans. Economic frameworks. Proximity talks. All rejected or ignored. When the Trump administration proposed an economic conference in Bahrain, the Palestinian leadership did not merely reject the political plan. It boycotted the economic discussion entirely and threatened Palestinians who attended. Normalization itself became treason.

Palestinian leadership lacks democratic legitimacy. Elections have been avoided for nearly two decades. The common consensus is that authority flows from revolutionary posture, not consent. In reality, it’s just a manifestation of the tribal nature of most peoples who didn’t go through the Enlightenment. In either case and in this environment, compromise threatens survival.

Any leader who signs a final deal must explain concessions on refugees, Jerusalem, and the end of armed struggle. That explanation collides with decades of indoctrination. It collides with the theological framework shared by the militant Islamic world. It invites accusations of betrayal. It risks assassination. Yasser Arafat reportedly told Clinton he feared ending up like Sadat.

Let’s look at Hamas. Their entire brand rests on the claim that Fatah sold out. Polling reflects the effect. Even after over two years of war that they started on October 7th, the vast majority of Palestinians support them! Even more support the October 7 pogrom and want to see it repeated. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah-linked militias retain the capacity to derail any deal with violence. Leaders know it. They act accordingly. Better to say no and blame Israel than say yes and face internal war. They’re too comfortable with their armored limousines, mansions, and really fat offshore bank accounts.

They feed those accounts out of Western coffers. Permanent conflict sustains aid flows, diplomatic attention, and, in turn, elite privilege. A resolved conflict ends the grievance economy. For those at the top, that not a reward.

During Oslo implementation, billions flowed for institution-building. Arafat chose militias over monopoly of force and patronage over governance. Corruption flourished. The soil was poisoned before final talks began.

In 2005, Israel withdrew fully from Gaza. The opportunity was there. The Palestinians need only to govern and build credibility. Instead, chaos followed. Greenhouses were looted. Power generation plants were left to moulder. Rockets flew—built out of civilian infrastructure Israelis left behind. Hamas framed withdrawal as victory of violence. Abbas declined confrontation. Two years later, Hamas seized Gaza at the polls.

In 2014, Kerry’s framework offered another opening. Abbas stalled. When momentum faded, he pivoted to symbolic UN recognition. The ground situation did not change.

Coercion as Statecraft

One of the most perverse manifestations of Palestinian self-defeat is the extent to which violence has been allowed to substitute for normal governance. In healthy political systems, leaders seek to monopolize force under rule of law and provide services. In the Palestinian system, leaders and factions use violence instead of law and services. This phenomenon of violence as governance has had devastating consequences. It entrenches warlordism. It scares off investment. But for the power players, it offers advantages. Intimidation of dissent. Media attention when attacking Israel. Maintenance of a revolutionary aura.

The Palestinian arena is defined by overlapping armed hierarchies masquerading as politics. The lines between “military wing” and “political leadership” are deliberately blurred. Fatah, the dominant party in the PA, historically had its Tanzim militia and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (responsible for many attacks in the Second Intifada). Hamas, ruling Gaza, has the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades — essentially a standing army in all but name. Even smaller groups (Islamic Jihad, Popular Front, etc.) maintain armed cells. Instead of building a single national army accountable to a civilian government, the Palestinian leadership landscape is a patchwork of parallel power structures. For example, in the West Bank, the PA has multiple security services, but there are also armed clans and Fatah-aligned gangs who operate semi-autonomously.

In Gaza, Hamas resolved the question decisively. After winning elections, it executed rivals, threw opponents from rooftops, and institutionalized one-party rule under armed supervision. Since then, Hamas security organs are the government. Courts follow the gun. Dissent is criminalized as treason. Even with all that, smaller parties still get support. Unfortunately, many of them are more militant than even Hamas.

In Judea and Samaria, the arrangement is messier but no less coercive. Fatah holds the PA in the West Bank partly by suppressing Hamas activists there (with the help of Israeli security, ironically). The Palestinian Authority maintains multiple security services while tolerating armed clans and factional militias. When protests target corruption or repression, PA forces respond with batons and detention.

Armed veto power shapes every strategic decision. Any serious political compromise risks internal violence. Leaders know it. Militias know it. The system adjusts accordingly. Agreements stall. Initiatives die quietly. Blame is exported to Israel.

Violence is not external to politics. Violence also functions outward.

Palestinian leadership—especially Hamas—has learned that bloodshed buys attention. Suicide bombings. Rocket wars. Pogroms. Each triggers emergency diplomacy, UN sessions, media saturation, and aid pledges. Calm produces silence. Violence produces relevance.

These lessons hardened during the Second Intifada. Arafat’s circle believed escalation would extract better terms than Camp David. It failed strategically but succeeded tactically. The world refocused. Pressure mounted. And the lesson stuck.

Hamas refined it. Each war with Israel brings devastation to Gaza—and renewed cash flows, eased restrictions, or mediated ceasefires. Reconstruction becomes a revenue stream. Civilian suffering mere diplomatic capital.

The October 7 pogrom represented this logic stripped of restraint. The leadership calculated that escalation would reset the regional agenda. The cost to civilians was irrelevant. Polling afterward confirmed the moral collapse. The society, basically en masse, supported the attack—regardless of the devastation it wrought on either Israel or on Palestinians as Israel was forced into war.

Violence pays domestically too. Even as costs accrue. The internal damage is severe and compounding.

Economically, violence has been catastrophic. The Second Intifada slashed Palestinian GDP per capita by nearly forty percent. Gaza’s repeated wars flattened neighborhoods, wrecked infrastructure, and erased investment horizons. Capital fled. Talent followed.

Between 2007 and 2017, over 100,000 Palestinians emigrated and youth flight accelerated. Doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs exit first. The society bleeds its future.

Budgets reflect priorities. Enormous sums flow to security organs and “martyr” payments. Productive sectors starve. Palestinian schools in Judea and Samaria? Most are down to giving instruction three days per week. Don’t worry, they’re still teaching Jew-hate. History? Chemistry? Not so much. The private economy shrinks under instability and ideological suspicion. Workers lose jobs in Palestinian society and in Israel—as Israeli security organs correctly block permits to Palestinians who are engaged in espionage for terror groups or are themselves part of those groups.

Civil society withers. Journalists self-censor—to say nothing of the many confirmed cases of journalists literally working in an operational capacity for the terror cells of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others.

Psychologically, generations grow up inside permanent emergency. Trauma accumulates. Violence normalizes itself. Clan feuds rise. Crime follows. Law recedes.

This is not collateral damage from Israel’s actions. It is damage inflicted by a leadership that chose coercion over governance.

Frozen Authority, Managed Decay

It is no surprise that the Palestinian political system today is essentially frozen in time. Elections are rarely held (and when planned, often canceled), governing institutions have atrophied, and legitimacy is nonexistent. This political paralysis is a direct result of the leadership choices and doctrines we’ve discussed.

Meanwhile, corruption has become both a symptom and a stabilizing tool of this stagnation — a way for elites to buy loyalty and placate key constituents without undertaking real reform.

The Palestinian Authority was supposed to be a temporary administrative body until statehood, with democratic underpinnings. It held a few credible elections early on (the legislative election of 2006 being the last). But since then, all democratic processes have been essentially shut down.

President Mahmoud Abbas was elected in January 2005 for a four-year term. Two decades on, no new presidential election is in sight. The PA parliament (Palestinian Legislative Council) was elected in 2006 (when Hamas won a surprise majority). That parliament never really functioned after the Hamas-Fatah split, and Abbas dissolved it. Elections scheduled for 2010, 2014, 2018, etc., were repeatedly postponed or canceled under various pretexts. In 2021, Abbas announced legislative and presidential elections — only to “postpone” them indefinitely a few months later, citing Israel’s refusal to allow voting in East Jerusalem. Critics widely noted the real reason was Fatah’s internal splits and fear of losing to Hamas.

Hamas called the cancellation a “coup against national consensus,” and indeed Palestinian analysts across factions saw it as Abbas clinging to power rather than risking humiliation at the ballot box. As it stands now, the Palestinian leadership is unelected and unaccountable, ruling by decree and factional deal-making.

The PA issues laws via presidential decrees. There is no functioning legislature to check or debate these laws. The judiciary doesn’t meaningfully exist.

Polls show a majority of Palestinians don’t trust their leaders and want Abbas to resign, but he ignores those polls. Without elections, the political class grows old and sclerotic. Abbas is 87. Many of his circle are in their 70s and 80s.

In truth, the status quo of no mandate suits the incumbents. Abbas and his cronies enjoy their perks and power. Israel who is as hands-off of Palestinian affairs as is pragmatic, understands the devil they know is better than the electorate empowering Hamas (or G-d forbid, an even more militant group) in the heart of Israel. So, everyone tolerates the corruption.

Indeed, corruption has become the grease that keeps the wheels of this stagnant machine turning. Arafat notoriously ran a patronage system where he doled out cash to loyalists and kept a secret budget. An IMF report in the early 2000s found he’d diverted $900 million of public money to a special account under his control. Abbas’s era… well, it’s no better. A European Court of Auditors report in 2013 identified “significant shortcomings” in how the PA spent $2.7 billion of EU aid — noting that Europe had little control over where the money went, and high-level corruption went unaddressed.

Foreign donors periodically complain, but then they usually keep the aid flowing (fearing PA collapse otherwise), so the cycle continues. A U.S. House Foreign Affairs hearing in 2012 even described the PA as a “chronic kleptocracy” and singled out Abbas and his family. Palestinian watchdog groups have documented scores of officials living well beyond their means—with fancy villas and VIP trips abroad—while average people struggle.

Perhaps the most damaging result of all these trends is the complete fragmentation of Palestinian governance, but without any healthy pluralism or competition.

There are effectively two regimes now: the PA/Fatah in parts of Judea and Samaria, and Hamas in Gaza. They operate as separate, authoritarian fiefdoms. This split that occurred in 2007 has never been healed.

Both Fatah/PA and Hamas claim to represent the people’s will. They routinely delegitimize each other. Hamas calls Abbas an illegitimate stooge whose term expired, Abbas calls Hamas a coup regime in Gaza. They arrest each other’s members. Hamas jails Fatah activists in Gaza. The PA jails Hamasniks in Judea and Samaria. A house divided cannot stand, said Lincoln. In this case, it cannot negotiate effectively either.

On TV, Palestinian leaders all speak of one state, one people. It’s a charade that fools no one, but they keep it up. Hamas seems content to run its Islamist faux-state in Gaza and waits for Judea and Samaria to fall into its lap someday. The PA seems content to govern its shrinking enclaves and blame Hamas for the lost Gaza. Neither prioritizes reuniting their national project, because that would require concessions (Hamas would have to share or relinquish power, Fatah the same) which neither will do.

Economic Stagnation by Design

Economic development is often thought to be a universal goal of any leadership. Who doesn’t want prosperity for their people? Astonishingly, in the Palestinian case, the leadership’s ideological choices have actively undermined economic progress, to the point one can say the stagnation is by design. The dominant ethos has been ambivalent or even hostile to traditional development. Why? Because the pursuit of prosperity has been cast by hardliners as a form of “normalization.” In other words, Palestinian politics views too much comfort as morally suspect and a betrayal of the struggle.

As a result, efforts that could improve living standards — joint economic projects with Israel, foreign investments requiring stability, private sector empowerment — are mostly shunned. The leadership benefits from an aid-dependent status quo that gives them patronage power without building indigenous capacity.

The outcome: a perpetually weak economy that keeps the populace financially miserable and dependent on largesse. This too feeds self-defeat: an impoverished society is less resilient and more prone to extremism, which then justifies further outside control, and the cycle continues. If you’re wondering if it’s because the Islamist world wants it that way, you’d be correct.

Early on, a myth took hold in Palestinian discourse: economic improvement equals acquiescence. This was amplified after Oslo, when Israel sometimes floated ideas of “economic peace” — making efforts to boost the Palestinian economy in an effort to dissuade further terror attacks.

Many Palestinian leaders recoiled at that, fearing it was a trap to make people forget about independence in exchange for jobs and shopping malls. And so the leadership took it to an extreme of framing prosperity itself as suspect, as if poverty keeps the revolutionary fire burning. Yasser Arafat said in the 90s, when asked to curb corruption, “Why would I make them rich? So they can forget Palestine?” The PA under Arafat did little to foster a productive economy. It was more interested in consolidating political control and milking the donor aid. Progress towards transparent institutions (courts, financial oversight) was slow or reversed, partly because backroom dealing was more useful to reward loyalists.

After Hamas came on the scene, the ethos hardened. Hamas openly rejects “economic normalization.” They see any cooperation with Israel — even to improve livelihoods — as collaboration unless tied to political gains. A vivid example: In 2019, the U.S. convened a workshop in Bahrain to propose a $50 billion investment plan for the Palestinian territories (as part of the ill-fated Trump peace plan). The PA and Hamas both boycotted outright. Palestinian businesspeople who considered attending were threatened and condemned.

The plan indeed had political strings attached that Palestinians found unacceptable — but note, they refused to even discuss how that economic vision might be molded or how funds might flow under different political terms. It was a reflexive rejection of “money over rights,” which plays well domestically. In more everyday terms, the PA has sometimes limited its own economic options to avoid “normalization.” They have at times banned Palestinian laborers from working in Israeli communities (while not being able to provide alternative jobs).

Meanwhile, any Palestinians who do try private initiative sometimes face hurdles from their own authorities. I’ll give a small anecdote: A few years back, a group of young Gazans found ways to freelance online (tech work) to bypass unemployment. Rather than celebrate this, Hamas imposed new taxes on them and scrutinized them for contacts abroad. In the West Bank, if a businessman gets too close to Israeli counterparts in joint ventures, he may be interrogated (or worse) by PA security for “normalizing.”

The Palestinian territories have a young population — about 30% are 15-29 years old. This should be an engine of growth. Instead, youth unemployment is astronomical: roughly 40% in Judea and Samaria and over 60% in Gaza in recent years. Thousands graduate from universities each year to find no jobs. The education system still produces capable graduates (literacy and basic education rates are high), but the economy can’t absorb them.

Some of them choose to leave. The brain drain further undercuts chances of building competent institutions or a vibrant economy, making their goal of statehood even less likely.

The rest? Well, they join the rulers. Some for hopes of scraps. Others for ideological reasons. The net result? An emboldened Hamas with bitter troops to feed their violence machines.

If nation-building were a three-legged stool of political, security, and economic development, the Palestinian leadership sawed off at least one leg (economic) themselves, and severely damaged the others through intransigence and factional conflict.

The result is a wobbly project that hasn’t stood up on its own — and it’s not hard to see why. Perhaps some in the leadership truly believed that keeping their people economically weak would prevent “normalization” and keep international pressure on Israel. If so, that strategy has backfired spectacularly: Israel’s economy boomed in the same period, while Palestinians became more isolated, not Israel.

Narrative Exhaustion, Strategic Abandonment

Palestinian strategic isolation did not arrive suddenly. Decades of grievance-first governance, rejectionism, internal repression, and violence eroded credibility with allies who once treated the Palestinian cause as sacrosanct. Sympathy remained. Confidence did not. Patience ran out.

What persists today is rhetorical support without strategic investment. It is undergirded by public support driven by Qatari-fueled indoctrination of the West.

Leadership claims, for Western consumption, commitment to a two-state solution. All the while their education systems, media, and official discourse in Arabic glorify total victory and erase Jewish legitimacy.

Foreign audiences noticed.

European parliaments began conditioning aid. The European Parliament formally condemned PA curricula for incitement. U.S. legislators tied funding to terror payments.

Then, the West forgot to check that changes were made before funding flows resumed.

International fatigue set in because engagement produced no real reforms. It was easier just to sign the checks.

Donors watched funds disappear into unreformed systems. Mediators watched negotiations implode on familiar scripts. Diplomats heard maximalist rhetoric disconnected from governing capacity.

Violence hasn’t really accelerated the erosion of support, however. Hamas’s wars with Israel and its October 7 pogrom should have hardened international perception irreversibly. For the neighbors of Palestinians, the massacre removed any remaining ambiguity. But Western capitals responded not by isolating Hamas or sidelining the PA—their anti-Israel rhetoric ratcheted up, they “recognized” the “State of Palestine,” and they kept buying Israeli arms and collecting Israel’s intelligence. The disconnect couldn’t be more clear.

For decades, Palestinian leadership relied on moral urgency to compensate for political failure. Occupation. Apartheid. Genocide. Resistance. The vocabulary did not change. The outcomes, for any relevant party, did not improve.

The problem was not that grievances were invented. Though they are. The problem is that grievance became the product. Repetition replaced strategy. Symbolism replaced progress. Each UN speech recycled the same accusations without offering a path forward.

Hyperbole accelerated the decline. Holocaust inversion. Genocide claims detached from fact. Nazi analogies. These rallied activist bases while alienating mainstream audiences who understood the difference between war and extermination.

The Palestinian narrative froze in time. A ritual. A museum exhibit.

The contrast with other post-conflict movements sharpens the isolation.

Egypt recovered Sinai through negotiation. Jordan secured peace and stability. Gulf states pursued normalization and growth. Kosovo, Rwanda, Northern Ireland—all moved from struggle to governance.

Palestinian leadership is not willing to. The Arab world—regardless of public English-facing rhetoric—supports them. They fund it. They lend legitimacy. They provide diplomatic cover.

A leadership that refuses to prepare its society for compromise cannot deliver peace. Ever. A movement that glorifies violence cannot claim surprise when it isn’t greeted by their neighbors with open arms.

The world did not abandon Palestinians. Indeed, much of public discourse stands by them. The world has forgotten its history lessons. Thinkers in the West, however, abandoned the pretense that Palestinian leadership would change without both internal and external pressure.

What remains is symbolic support without leverage. Statements without stakes. Sympathy without strategy.

Enablers Without Accountability

Palestinian self-sabotage did not occur in a vacuum. It unfolded inside an international ecosystem that rewarded grievance, subsidized failure, and punished Israel for defending itself. Palestinian leaders bear primary responsibility for their choices. The scandal is how many external actors worked overtime to remove consequences.

The United Nations and its satellite NGO universe did not merely misread the conflict. They deliberately entrenched it. They enabled it. They support it.

For decades, UN bodies and aligned NGOs laundered rejectionism into humanitarian language. Agencies like UNRWA became permanent political instruments masquerading as relief organizations. A refugee crisis from 1948 was deliberately frozen in time. “Refugee” status was inherited, expanded, and weaponized. Great-grandchildren were classified as refugees not to solve a problem, but to preserve a claim. Resettlement was treated as heresy. Integration was forbidden. The “right of return” remained untouchable because it functioned as a veto against peace and a cudgel against Jewish sovereignty.

UNRWA employed tens of thousands inside a political culture saturated with incitement—scores of whom were literal Hamas terrorists, being supported by the West’s tax dollars. It tolerated Hamas infrastructure embedded in its schools, its hospitals, and its other facilities. When exposed, the institutional response was denial, deflection, and accusations against Israel. Accountability never arrived.

The broader UN system followed the same script. Israel was subjected to more resolutions than any other country on earth. More so than all serial human-rights abusing countries and genocidal regimes combined. Palestinian violations were treated as background noise, if ever even acknowledged. Incitement, terror stipends, child soldiers, and systematic repression triggered no sanctions. The message was unmistakable. Jews defending themselves would be prosecuted. Jihadist violence would be contextualized and excused.

NGOs amplified the distortion. Many adopted openly antisemitic frameworks while hiding behind the language of human rights. “Lawfare” replaced law. Reports were written first, facts selected later. Hamas atrocities were minimized. Israeli counterterror operations were labeled crimes. NGOs rebranded jihadist terror as “resistance” when Jews were the target.

This asymmetry was not accidental. It reflected ideological capture. It also reflected a softer pathology: the bigotry of low expectations. Palestinian leadership was treated as a permanent ward of the international system—incapable of agency, immune to standards, entitled to indulgence. Israel, a functioning democracy fighting for survival, was treated as uniquely illegitimate.

Arab states played a different game. For decades, they used the Palestinian issue as a shield for their own failures. Palestinians were kept stateless in Arab countries to preserve the grievance. Rejectionism was encouraged so long as it served regional politics. Then priorities changed.

Iran, Islamist insurgency, economic modernization—these became more urgent than preserving a stagnant cause. The Palestinian leadership failed to adapt. The Abraham Accords exposed the reality. Arab capitals were done waiting. Normalization with Israel (they’d get back to the jihad later) advanced regional stability and prosperity. Endless Palestinian refusal offered neither.

The response from Ramallah was predictable: accusations of betrayal. The response from the region was unambiguous: we’ll do what we want for our people and prosperity, but you must remain locked in this perpetual struggle against Israel’s existence.

Israel’s role in this ecosystem was constant but not causal. Israeli governments changed. Offers were made. Withdrawals occurred. Risks were taken. Terror followed. From Rabin to Sharon to Olmert to Netanyahu, the pattern held. When Israel extended concessions, Palestinian leadership banked them and escalated. When Israel defended itself, it was condemned.

Benjamin Netanyahu internalized this reality and his insistence on security first is not ideological obstinacy. It was empirical judgment. For those who haven’t kept up, Gaza after the 2005 withdrawal became the proof of its necessity. Rockets, tunnels, pogroms. October 7 was the end of the argument.

Netanyahu’s approach—contain threats, reject illusions, expand regional alliances—reflected the world as it is, not as diplomats wished it to be. The Abraham Accords validated that strategy. Palestinian leadership was sidelined not because Israel demanded it, but because it earned it.

External actors normalized and enabled Palestinian dysfunction. They insulated leaders from consequences. They turned antisemitism into policy language. They punished Israel for surviving.

Regime Preservation as Strategy

The persistence of Palestinian dysfunction is not a mystery. It is a system that works exactly as designed—for those who run it.

From Ramallah to Gaza City, the governing logic is survival, not statehood. The leaders of it do not misunderstand the damage they inflict. They calculate it. Reform threatens them more than stagnation. Peace endangers them more than war.

At the top of the Palestinian system sits a political class that has learned one lesson well: permanent struggle guarantees permanent relevance.

Mahmoud Abbas governs without a mandate because elections are dangerous. Hamas rules through terror because ballots are optional when force decides outcomes.

Conflict justifies emergency rule. It suspends elections. It excuses corruption. It explains repression. It attracts donor money. It deflects blame onto Israel.

In this environment, failure is rewarded.

Yasser Arafat grasped this instinctively. Signing an end-of-conflict agreement would have stripped him of revolutionary legitimacy and reduced him to a mediocre president forced to answer for schools, jobs, and sewage. Keeping the struggle alive preserved his myth and his power. Abbas inherited the same calculus, minus the charisma. As long as the conflict persists, he remains indispensable as gatekeeper of aid and interlocutor to a credulous world. Peace would render him obsolete.

Hamas takes the logic further. Its entire identity depends on perpetual jihad. Its “legitimacy” is built on bloodshed. Disarmament would mean ideological collapse. That’s why “Phase 2” is a laughable folly.

The narrative trap is absolute. Palestinian leadership spent decades teaching that every inch of the land is Arab, every Jew is a colonizer, and every compromise is betrayal. That messaging cannot be unwound without detonating their own authority.

Any leader who tells the truth—that Israel is permanent, that Jews are indigenous, that return is symbolic, not literal—signs his own death warrant.

They know it. Their followers know it. The indoctrination worked too well.

Their fear is not abstract. Moderates were murdered in the past. Sadat was assassinated. Hamas executes dissenters routinely. Abbas governs behind armed guards and still cannot risk elections. The majority of Palestinians reject the PA (to be clear the PA is still a terror organization) as too moderate.

The Palestinian public is not a peace constituency waiting to be unlocked. It is a radicalized public that punishes moderation.

Leaders respond rationally to that environment. Better to say nothing. Better to stall. Better to issue speeches at the UN and collect donor funds than confront the mythology they built.

Then there is the money. A lot of it.

Permanent conflict sustains a grievance economy. Aid flows. NGOs proliferate. Security budgets swell. Patronage networks thrive. Elites travel on VIP permits, own foreign properties, and move money offshore. Peace would bring audits. Peace would bring elections. Peace would bring competitors—including educated Palestinians from the diaspora who might actually govern competently.

War, by contrast, is profitable. Reconstruction contracts. Terror stipends. NGO salaries. Media relevance. Conflict keeps the cash moving and the questions away.

Hamas would rather rule a destroyed Gaza than share power. Abbas would rather preside over a decaying authority than risk defeat. Each faction fears the other more than it fears condemning its own people to endless misery.

So they wait. They stall. They blame Israel. They invoke international law while violating every principle of governance.

And until that incentive structure breaks, nothing else will.

Implications for Reality, Not Illusions

This record explains, with uncomfortable clarity, why three decades of conferences, roadmaps, summits, envoys, and donor pledges failed. Not stalled. Failed.

The core error was structural: external actors tried to solve a pathological religious war with modern assumptions. They mistook diplomacy for transformation and money for reform. They assumed Palestinian leadership wanted a deal and merely lacked the right incentives. The evidence shows otherwise.

Peace initiatives collapsed because they were built on false premises.

Every major framework—from Oslo through Camp David, Annapolis, the Quartet, and the Trump plan—assumed that if borders were drawn, security guarantees offered, and aid pledged, Palestinian leadership would do the rest. They would prepare their public. They would dismantle terror networks. They would accept finality. They would govern. Of course, they did none of that.

In Oslo, the Palestinian Authority was entrusted with territory, funds, and legitimacy on the assumption it would suppress violence and build coexistence. Instead, it preserved militias, escalated incitement, and used ambiguity to keep maximalist claims alive. Terror followed. Trust collapsed. The accords failed not because Israel sabotaged them, but because the Palestinian leadership never wanted them to succeed.

As long as Palestinian politics rewards rejection and punishes compromise, any signed paper is decorative.

Economic aid failed for the same reason.

Western capitals believed prosperity would soften ideology. They believed jobs would replace jihad. They believed infrastructure would crowd out incitement. So they funded industrial zones, budget support, salary pipelines, and reconstruction cycles. Even Netanyahu convinced himself that this was the way to quiet Hamas’s terror tendencies.

The result? Predictable.

Aid flowed into systems that taught children that peace is treason and Jews are devils. Militias retained veto power. Terror payments continued. Corruption metastasized.

Gaza became the most heavily subsidized failed territory on earth—and one of the most radicalized.

Money cannot repair a political culture that teaches death as virtue and compromise as betrayal.

Western diplomats compounded their error by projecting their own rationality onto Palestinian leadership. They assumed leaders wanted peace but feared domestic backlash. They assumed incitement was tactical noise. They assumed terror was a bargaining chip, not a worldview.

They were wrong.

Mediators repeatedly ignored what Palestinian leaders said in Arabic and focused on what they said in English. They accepted condemnations of terror abroad while tolerating martyr glorification at home. They treated jihad as “internal politics” and Israeli security as obstruction.

Each new envoy arrived convinced they would succeed where others failed. Each rediscovered the same reality. The leadership did not want a deal.

This miscalculation cost countless lives. Israelis. Arabs. Jews. Muslims. Christians. Druze. Atheists. Buddhists.

No summit can substitute for cultural transformation. No aid package can override indoctrination. No mediator can manufacture a peace constituency where one does not exist. This is not a latent Western polity waiting to emerge.

For Israel, the conclusion is operational, not emotional. Every Israeli understands—whether they want to believe it or not—that there is no peace partner where jihad retains legitimacy and elections are existential threats. Israel learned the lesson the hardest possible way. After Gaza. After the First Intifada. After the Second Intifada. After October 7. There is no credible partner for comprehensive peace under current conditions. Policy must reflect that reality. Containment, deterrence, regional integration, and defensive strength are not ideological preferences. They are necessities.

For the West, the implication is equally stark. Repeating the same formulas while expecting different results is self-deception. Supporting Palestinian civilians does not require indulging Palestinian leadership. In fact, it requires the opposite.

Indicators of Breakage, Not Hope

Real change in the Palestinian system will not arrive through speeches, summits, or donor conferences. It would announce itself through behaviors that directly threaten the existing power structure. That is the standard. Anything less is theater.

There is no roadmap. So we can just identify the signals—observable, costly, and internally destabilizing—that would indicate the self-defeating system is finally cracking rather than cosmetically rebranding.

A serious rupture would begin with Arabic-language messaging that tells the truth Palestinians have been systematically shielded from. Israel is permanent. Jews are indigenous. Partition is final. Violence failed. There is no return to Safed or Haifa. There is only coexistence or continued ruin.

That message would not appear once, in English, for Western consumption. It would be repeated domestically. In schools. In mosques. On television. In textbooks. It would dismantle martyr glorification, not rename it. Terror stipends would end, not be relabeled. Clerics preaching jihad would be removed, not defended. Incitement would be punished even when politically costly.

Such a shift would provoke backlash and be easily visible.

Political behavior would follow. Elections would be held even at risk of defeat. Opposition would be tolerated even when embarrassing. Corruption prosecutions would target the top, not the expendable middle. Courts would constrain the executive branch. Security forces would answer to law, not tribal faction.

In Gaza, that would mean something even more radical: disarmament. Not rhetoric. Not “long-term truce.” Actual monopoly of force. Hamas would have to choose between governance and jihad. Historically, it has chosen jihad every time. Their charter is pretty clear on it. Any deviation from that pattern would be unmistakable—and internally explosive.

Economic signals would be equally revealing. Prosperity would cease to be treated as treason. Cooperation with Israel would be framed as necessity, not betrayal. Joint infrastructure projects would proceed without apologies. Entrepreneurs would be protected, not extorted. Aid dependency would shrink instead of metastasizing.

When leaders prioritize infrastructure over slogans, something has changed.

Civil society would breathe. Journalists would criticize leadership without disappearing. Teachers would teach history without erasure. Peace activists would operate openly instead of in whispers. Children would learn chemistry without being taught Jew-hatred as a prerequisite.

Violence would be confronted honestly. Not managed. Not excused. Renounced.

That means no more “popular resistance” euphemisms. No more rocket rationalizations. No more intifada nostalgia. A reformed leadership would say, clearly and repeatedly, that terrorism harmed Palestinians more than Israel—and that it is over. Full stop.

The most telling signal would be accountability for past failure.

Palestinian leaders have never admitted error. Not 1947. Not the Intifadas. Not Gaza. Not October 7. Blame is always external. Israel. America. Arabs. Fate.

Until then, announcements mean nothing. Unity deals mean nothing. New committees mean nothing. Ceasefire agreements mean nothing. Reforms that do not threaten incumbents are camouflage.

There is no evidence whatsoever such changes are imminent. Current leadership structures are incapable of initiating them. The incentive system forbids it. Change, if it comes, will come from fracture—generational, institutional, or catastrophic.

History allows for pivots. But they are never painless. Japan and Germany needed total defeat. The IRA needed exhaustion and internal revolt. None reformed because outsiders asked nicely.

So, I cannot predict any change is coming. I can tell you, though, it will come with a heavy price.

Anything short of these indicators is not transition. It is continuation by another name.

These are the facts, bleak as they may be. One hopes that shining light on them might, eventually, help to break the vicious cycle — for the sake of Palestinians most of all.

When people ask me, “What were they supposed to do?” I understand the impulse behind the question.

It assumes good faith. It assumes tragedy without agency. It assumes the story is too cruel to interrogate.

But history doesn’t work that way. And neither does responsibility.

The Palestinian leadership made choices. Bad ones. Repeatedly. Predictably. And those choices narrowed the future available to their own people far more than any speech at the U.N. ever expanded it.

That doesn’t make all Palestinian civilians guilty. Though, for sure, it doesn’t excuse any who have acted to promote this system. They are the primary victims of a system that sold struggle as destiny and paralysis as virtue. That system has produced other victims, too. Mostly Israelis and Jews. Also the West to a lesser extent.

Until that system is named honestly, nothing changes. Not diplomacy. Not aid. Not peace plans. Not slogans.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

Tip? Share it securely via Signal (@Uri.30) or ProtonMail (Uri.Zehavi@Proton.me).

Shalom, friends.

There’s a moment I keep coming back to regularly as I read news and receive too many WhatsApp pings.

A few months ago, I was on a call with a Jewish communal professional — smart, serious, deeply committed. We weren’t talking ideology. We weren’t talking theology. We were talking budgets. Security budgets. Insurance. Donor fatigue. And at one point, almost offhandedly, she said something like: “We’re fine. We’re relevant. People need us.”

She didn’t mean morally. She didn’t mean spiritually. She meant economically. Institutionally. Politically.

And it stuck with me — not because it sounded reassuring, but because it sounded familiar. Too familiar. Too naive.

Those words could have been uttered in medieval Frankfurt. Or early modern Vienna. Or Berlin in 1928. Over the course of history, some version of it has been said many times before. Whether quietly, proudly, or desperately.

This long brief started as an attempt to interrogate that instinct — not to flatter it, not to dismiss it, but to examine it honestly. When has Jewish economic relevance actually protected Jews? When did it merely delay catastrophe? And what happens when relevance disappears?

What follows is not a celebration of success, and not a catalogue of victimhood. It’s an attempt to trace a pattern — uncomfortable, durable, and deeply instructive — from the Diaspora to the State of Israel.

Jewish Industry and Collective Security

How economic relevance became a hedge against Jewish vulnerability — and why it was never enough on its own

For over a millennium, Jews have learned the hard way that mere tolerance is a fickle shield. Jewish vulnerability increases whenever Jews become economically irrelevant or removable — and conversely, that being useful (or better yet, self-sufficient) has been a hedge against annihilation. Jewish economic concentration emerged primarily from constraint, not preference. And economic usefulness historically bought Jews only conditional protection, not equal rights. Modern antisemitism twisted this dynamic: in the 19th–20th centuries Jewish utility was reframed as a threat. The trope of the parasitic or conspiratorial Jew. Crucially, the Zionist movement internalized these lessons.

Constraint as Catalyst

Jewish economic roles became concentrated in particular sectors largely due to external constraints — legal bans, guild exclusions, landownership restrictions — rather than innate preference. When Jews were barred from normal livelihoods, they adapted by specializing in whatever niches were left open.

Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period, Jews in Christian Europe lived under a maze of legal disabilities. They were prohibited from owning land, from joining most artisan guilds, and from holding public office in most realms. In many cities, Jews could reside only by special permit, often confined to segregated quarters or ghettos. They were heavily taxed and vulnerable to expulsion at the ruler’s whim. These structural barriers meant that before even considering what occupations a Jew would choose, they must first list those from which they were forbidden. Guild charters explicitly excluded Jews— often requiring oaths of Christian faith as a condition of membership. The result was that Jews were locked out of the predominant economic activities of feudal society — agriculture and guild-regulated crafts — irrespective of their personal talents or inclinations.

Jews obviously then gravitated into the few permitted roles. Often, they were essentially pushed into moneylending, petty trade, peddling, tax collecting, and similar intermediary occupations. Church law discouraged Christians from lending money at interest (usury), so medieval authorities tacitly allowed or even invited Jews to fulfill that “un-Christian” but economically vital function. Likewise, noble landlords in central and Eastern Europe barred Jews from farming but used them as estate managers, tax collectors, and liquor tavern operators — roles shunned by or off-limits to the Christian majority. By the High Middle Ages Jews were excluded from many trades and often barred from all occupations but money-lending and peddling, with even those sometimes forbidden.

The documentation of these constraints is extensive. Medieval charters and canon law records detail land ownership bans and special “Jew taxes.” The Holy Roman Empire’s statutes referred to Jews as Kammerknechte (serfs of the chamber), implying they were under direct royal protection/exploitation and largely barred from regular society. In 1215, the Church’s Fourth Lateran Council not only imposed the infamous yellow badge on Jews, but reinforced earlier prohibitions on Jews holding civil or military authority over Christians. When guilds defended their Christian monopolies, they did so in frankly religious and economic terms: outsiders (Jews) were seen as both infidels and unwelcome competition. Taken together, these measures effectively narrowed Jewish existence to a few economic arteries.

Had Jews been free to farm or act as artisans, some surely would have. (Indeed, wherever small exceptions existed — say, a Polish prince allowing Jews into the cloth trade — Jews took those opportunities.) But on the whole, constraint was the catalyst for the distinctive occupational profile of Jews in the Diaspora. Over generations, this imposed specialization yielded both remarkable communal skills and pernicious stereotypes. Jews gained expertise in finance, trade, and literacy, which made them useful to rulers. But it also made them visible targets of popular resentment. This was the tragic irony of the medieval Jewish condition: they were despised for the very functions they were forced to perform.

By the early modern era (16th–18th centuries), some of these restrictions began to lift in Western Europe, but not before deeply engraving into the public psyche. In central and eastern Europe, Jews were invited in for their commercial acumen even as laws forbade them from landownership and guild work. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, for instance, granted Jews charters to run mills, distilleries, and tolls (the arenda system), because the nobles wanted skilled managers. Yet those same Jews were barred from the gentry and subject to separate jurisdiction. They were useful—and thus tolerated—but not emancipated.

Literacy Without Protection

From antiquity, Jewish culture has been uniquely text-centered. By religious mandate, Jewish males were encouraged (even required) to learn to read Hebrew and study scripture. By the medieval period, virtually every Jewish community maintained a cheder or school for boys, and many girls were educated as well. The result was literacy rates far above the surrounding peasantry. While exact figures are elusive, contemporary accounts frequently remarked that even poor Jewish tradesmen could read and write, whereas the Christian lower classes could not. Hebrew literacy (and later, adoption of local languages in writing) meant that Jewish merchants could maintain accounts and letters, preserving trust over time and distance. In an era when a majority of Europeans were illiterate, a community where most adult men (and many women) could read business letters and keep ledgers had a clear advantage in commerce.

This literacy fed directly into contract enforcement and trust via a shared network. Jewish law and communal structures provided mechanisms to uphold agreements even across borders. For example, widespread religious study imbued Jewish businessmen with a common legal vocabulary and ethical framework. Merchants separated by thousands of miles — say, a trader in Alexandria and another in Yemen — could strike deals via letters, knowing that if one party cheated, the tight-knit Diaspora information web would ruin his reputation. Surviving correspondence from the Cairo Geniza (a trove of medieval documents) shows Jewish merchants routinely acting as each other’s agents, shipping goods on consignment and extending credit purely on the strength of a written letter and communal accountability. In an age with no instant banking or reliable lawsuits across countries, such trust-based networks were extremely valuable. A Jewish trader from Venice could send a shipment to a cousin in Salonica with confidence that profits would be split fairly — and if not, the offender would face communal sanctions.

Further, Jewish merchants benefited from multilingualism and dispersion. A Jew from Baghdad could show up in Amsterdam or Cochin and find a co-religionist community, however small, where he could speak Hebrew (the common tongue of prayer and study) or a Judeo-local dialect (such as Yiddish or Ladino), and tap into local know-how. These far-flung connections acted as a proto-“credit rating” system and a distribution channel for news. It allowed Jews to move capital and even physically relocate with relative ease compared to rooted peasant populations. If expelled, they could appeal to kin in another country. If persecuted in one port, they might divert goods to another where a friendly Jew would handle sales. Medieval Jewish wealth often took the form of jewels, gold coins, or debts recorded on paper —forms that one could carry or transmit, since owning land or heavy assets was risky when the threat of expulsion loomed. Jewish refugees from Spain in 1492 famously sewed gemstones into their clothes and re-established businesses in the Ottoman Empire within years. Generations of such experiences taught Jews to make their wealth mobile and their skills transferable.

Yet we must not romanticize these advantages. Literacy and global networks made Jews useful, but also vulnerable. On one hand, a Jewish merchant’s ledger and community connections could sustain trade that transcended political boundaries. On the other, no state would reliably enforce his contracts or protect his assets if a powerful debtor chose to default. Rulers and church officials often viewed Jewish wealth as fair game. A Jewish banker might have meticulous records proving a king owed him money. Though that could never stop that king from expelling the banker and invalidating the debts. In fact, sometimes the records made it easier to appropriate Jewish assets, as the crown could seize the account books and collect the debts for itself. The very cosmopolitanism that allowed Jews to thrive outside the feudal hierarchy also meant that, in a crisis (an unfortunately not uncommon occurrence), they had few local allies.

Useful, Not Secure

In early modern Europe, Jewish financiers and traders became linchpins of state economies — financing wars, provisioning armies, managing mints — and in return received patronage and protection. However, this protection was personal and precarious. It lasted only so long as the Jew was useful to his prince. When political or fiscal winds shifted, even the most indispensable Jews would be cast out or just murdered.

The phenomenon of the “Court Jew” illustrates this vividly. In the 1600s–1700s, many German principalities and Habsburg lands relied on Jewish businessmen to sustain their war efforts and luxury consumption. These were the Hofjuden, Jews who lent money, supplied armies with food and munitions, managed taxes, and generally greased the wheels of absolutist economies. Men like Samuel Oppenheimer in Vienna or Joseph Süß Oppenheimer in Württemberg became as crucial to their rulers as any general. They could mobilize far-flung Jewish trading networks to provision an army on campaign, or raise large loans at short notice when Christian creditors were reluctant. As historian Howard Sachar recounts, 17th-century dukes “continually engaged in bitter dynastic wars” needed supplies from all over Europe, and “the purveyors and factors who provided those supplies were almost invariably Jews.” They also were not bound by guild regulations or church scruples about profiteering.

The reward for these risky services was conditional privilege. Successful Court Jews received precious rights denied to ordinary Jews: permission to live outside the ghetto, exemptions from wearing the badge. Princes dangled these incentives because they needed their Jewish purveyors highly motivated. Indeed, the chance to dwell freely at court “with the privileges of Christian courtiers” was dazzling for a Jew normally confined to the ghetto’s shadows. In exchange, the Court Jew put his fortune and often life on the line.

The Court Jew’s usefulness to the prince often made him hated by the populace. He was seen as an enforcer of high taxes, a confidant in shady royal deals, a symbol of foreignness at the heart of power. Christian courtiers, jealous and bigoted, constantly whispered against these upstart Jews and seized any pretext to attack them. Popular antisemitic tropes adapted. No longer was the Jew only a moneylender in the ghetto, now he was the secret power behind the throne. Their elevation did not normalize Jewish status in the eyes of society, and it arguably inflamed antisemitism further.

The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) ravaged Central Europe, and afterwards many princes literally could not fund their armies without Jewish credit. The Habsburg Emperor Leopold I turned to Samuel Oppenheimer in the late 1600s to finance and provision his wars against Ottoman Turkey and Louis XIV of France. Oppenheimer assembled a syndicate of Jewish financiers across Germany (Frankfurt, Mainz, etc.) to extend massive loans and deliver supplies on credit. When Oppenheimer died in 1703, the Viennese court nearly went bankrupt because the empire’s finances were so entangled with his operations. The Habsburgs’ solution was simply to find other Jewish purveyors to fill the breach. In one sense this demonstrates Jewish indispensability. These states might not have functioned (or won wars) without the credit and logistical talents of their Jewish service elite. Rulers certainly valued these Jews—many an edict of protection was issued to keep a Court Jew safe from the Inquisition or mob, because the treasury needed him. The Holy Roman Emperor, for example, would sometimes issue a Generalprivilegium granting a Court Jew freedom of worship and movement, overriding local anti-Jewish laws, purely because he was useful to imperial finances.

Yet, crucially, none of this translated into security for the broader Jewish population. The masses of Jews remained in the ghettos, and often they paid the price for their protector’s prominence. If a Court Jew fell from grace, sometimes local people took revenge on the entire community. Moreover, even at their height, the Court Jews were isolated phenomena. Indeed, the pattern was often cyclical: extraordinary tolerance and favor in one generation, followed by backlash and expulsion in the next.

Expulsions in the early modern era often correlated with shifts in state power or finance. When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, part of the context was that after the Reconquista, Ferdinand and Isabella had new sources of revenue and felt they no longer needed their Jewish and converso advisors — many of whom had already been undermined by jealous courtiers and churchmen. Once kings figured out how to tax their nobles and merchants directly (or found Christian bankers), the Jews’ special usefulness evaporated and with it their fragile immunity. Edward I’s expulsion of England’s Jews in 1290 came only after he had wrung them dry and instituted new taxes on the broader population. When the Jews lacked the funds to continue lending the king money, they were dispensed with.

The Integration Trap

After centuries of enforced separateness, the Enlightenment and liberal revolutions of the 18th–19th centuries opened new doors for Jews in Europe. Suddenly, in theory, Jews could attend university, join professions, live where they pleased, intermix. By the late 19th century, Jewish families that for generations had been peddlers or ghetto bankers sent their sons (and some daughters) to universities and cities. The result was a strikingly quick integration of Jews in the modern white-collar and intellectual elite, especially in the relative “golden age” from about 1870 to 1914. In the German Empire, for example, Jews were only about 1% of the population, yet they came to occupy a disproportionately large share of professional positions. By the Weimar era (1918–1933), roughly 16% of Germany’s physicians were Jewish, 15% of its dentists, 25% of its lawyers, and an astonishing 50% of theater directors. In Berlin’s vibrant cultural scene, Jews managed or edited a majority of major newspapers and played leading roles in literature, music, and science. Vienna showed similar numbers: in interwar Austria, Jews (3.5% of the population) made up 27% of university professors.

Jews had long honed skills in finance and trade. Now they could found modern banks and industrial companies, which many did. Families like the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Mendelssohns, and others were pivotal in developing European capital markets in the 19th century. Likewise in academia and the arts, Jewish talent that was once channeled into Talmudic scholarship or liturgical music now flowed into secular fields, producing luminaries (Freud, Einstein, Mahler, to name a few) who fundamentally shaped modern thought. In Germany, Jewish scientists and businessmen were at the forefront of industrialization and innovation. By the 1920s, one could plausibly argue that German Jewry was a cornerstone of the nation’s intellectual and economic life. A Jewish foreign minister (Walther Rathenau) negotiated major treaties. Jewish professors taught in prestigious faculties (until purged). Jewish bankers helped stabilize the shaky post-WWI economy.

Yet this very success fed a poisonous narrative among antisemites. To the diehard chauvinists and racial theorists, Jews appeared not as dedicated patriots (though many were) but as a “foreign body” thriving at the host’s expense. The trope of the Jew as “rootless cosmopolitan” or international puppet-master took root. German cultural antisemites were unnerved that Jews, who constituted a tiny fraction of the people, were so visible in public life. They fixated on numbers and names. How many Jews in the academy? How many in the press? And spun statistics into conspiracy. For instance, an antisemitic pamphleteer in Weimar might rant that while Jews comprise less than one precent of Germany’s population, they “control” law and medicine to a grossly “disproportionate” extent.

The newly unified German Empire initially embraced Jewish emancipation. And many German Jews were fervent patriots who fought in World War I for the Kaiser. But alongside official tolerance grew an ugly undercurrent. By the 1880s, an organized antisemitic movement had emerged, with figures like Wilhelm Marr openly warning that the Jews, with their press and finance influence, were conquering Germany from within. Marr’s 1879 pamphlet “The Victory of Judaism over Germandom” proclaimed that Jews had become a “world power” and that naive Germans were essentially enslaved to them. He wrote in dramatic despair, announcing “Finis Germaniae!” (the end of Germany) at the hands of triumphant Jewry. Marr’s secular, racial antisemitism reframed Jewish “usefulness” as infiltration. Jews weren’t outsiders to be kept down, in his view. They had “won” and now ruled behind the scenes, which he found intolerable. “Israel has become a world power of the very first rank,” he sneered, urging Germans to wake up to their subjugation. This new antisemitic ideology explicitly painted Jewish emancipation and success as a national menace. A sharp reversal from the earlier notion that a useful Jew might earn tolerance. Now it was precisely the most successful Jews (bankers, journalists, ministers) who were seen as the most dangerous.

In the culture of late Imperial Germany and Austria, Jews thus walked a tightrope. Caricatures in Viennese and Munich newspapers depicted hook-nosed financiers manipulating markets or effeminate Jewish writers corrupting German art. The infamous composer Richard Wagner had already, in 1850, written an essay “Jewry in Music” arguing that Jewish influence was inherently degenerate in German culture. By the turn of the century, such ideas moved from the fringes toward respectability. It was a trap, though. Jews did everything a society asked of a minority. They learned the language. They served in the military. They contributed disproportionately to economy and arts. And yet this very prominence was twisted into proof of disloyal overreach.

During the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the trap snapped shut. Weimar was Germany’s most liberal era, and Jews flourished in it. They held cabinet positions, dominated sectors of the Berlin cultural avant-garde, started film studios, and so on. But Weimar was also chaotic, with economic crises and political polarization. Antisemites scapegoated Jews for everything from the defeat in World War I (the “stab-in-the-back” myth often singled out Jewish socialists for blame) to hyperinflation in 1923 (since some bankers and speculators were Jewish, all Jews were tarred with profiteering). Far-right propagandists railed against the “Jewish-Bolshevist” threat on one hand and the “Jewish capitalist” threat on the other — a contradictory conspiracy theory that nevertheless resonated. Jewish indispensability to modern German society was spun as a kind of alien grip that needed breaking. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement capitalized on these tropes to devastating effect. Hitler incessantly spoke of Jews as a parasitic race controlling Germany’s press, economy, and government. In Mein Kampf, he described the Jew as having “wormed his way” into key positions, intent on undermining the Aryan nation from within.

The experience of Germany (and similarly Austria, Hungary, etc.) by 1933 demonstrated that no degree of Jewish contribution or patriotism could fully immunize against antisemitism. If anything, the more Jews became visibly woven into the fabric of national life, the more elaborate the antisemitic fantasies grew to justify ripping them out. In stable, liberal environments, Jews did thrive and antisemitism receded to the margins. But the moment crisis hit — be it war, depression, or social upheaval — those old-new hatreds could be activated with a vengeance.

Erasure Before Extermination

When Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, Jews in Germany still held many prominent positions — a legacy of Weimar integration. Within months, laws and decrees began expelling Jews from the civil service, judiciary, academia, and journalism. The April 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service summarily dismissed Jewish government employees (except some war veterans) from their posts. Similar edicts soon barred Jewish doctors from state hospitals and Jewish lawyers from bar associations. The effect was swift: Jewish judges, professors, schoolteachers, prosecutors? All gone by the mid-1930s. In private-sector, boycotts and Aryanization pressures mounted. On April 1, 1933, the Nazis orchestrated a nationwide boycott of Jewish-owned shops and businesses, with Stormtroopers standing menacingly at doors. An opening salvo to intimidate Aryan customers away.

Jews were banned from stock exchanges, from owning farms, from advertising in newspapers, from receiving certifications in myriad trades. Many Jews saw the writing on the wall and tried to sell their businesses “voluntarily” at distress prices. This was the first phase of what the Nazis called Aryanization—transferring Jewish property to non-Jewish ownership. By the regime’s design, these transfers were effectively legalized theft. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in early 1933 Germany had about 100,000 Jewish-owned businesses. Through a mix of terror, propaganda, and discriminatory laws, about two-thirds of these enterprises were gone by 1938 — either shuttered or sold off for pennies on the dollar to “Aryan” buyers. Jewish owners who agreed under pressure to sell their life’s work might get perhaps twenty percent of its value, if even that. Many accepted such deals simply to be able to emigrate or because their business had been run into the ground by Nazi boycotts.

After the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, Nazi policy shifted from slow strangulation to outright plunder. In its aftermath, rather than punish the perpetrators, Nazi authorities doubled down to finish the economic destruction of German Jewry. Hermann Goring chaired a meeting that resulted in decrees to completely eliminate Jews from the economy. One decree forbade Jews from owning retail stores, sales agencies, or engaging in trade. All remaining Jewish businesses were to be forcibly Aryanized or liquidated. Jewish employees were to be dismissed. A collective fine of 1 billion Reichsmarks was imposed on the Jewish community (supposedly to pay for the damage of Kristallnacht, which the Nazis themselves caused), crippling whatever capital was left to Jewish hands. The “Decree on the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic Life” essentially completed the erasure: by January 1939, a Jew in Germany could not legally run a business or practice a profession at all. Nazi records show that at least two-thirds of Jewish businesses had already been transferred by 1938, and the rest were finished off in the ensuing months. Trust administrators were appointed to manage forced sales, often pocketing huge fees that left Jewish sellers with nothing.

Nazi laws stripped Jews of citizenship (the Nuremberg Laws of 1935) and basic rights. By the late 1930s, Jews couldn’t even attend public schools or go to a movie theater, let alone own a radio or a car. The purpose was clear: reduce Jews to a non-people within Germany, isolated and penniless, so that when physical removal began, few non-Jews would still view them as neighbors or colleagues. Indeed, many Germans by 1939 had never met a Jewish doctor or teacher. Those Jews had been purged years prior.

The Nazis themselves saw economic “Aryanization” as a precondition to dealing with the “Jewish question” once and for all. Nazi official Hans Frank bluntly stated in 1939, “The Jews must be done away with… wherever we catch one, it’s his end.” But first, as in Poland, they forced Jews into ghettos and seized their property. Raul Hilberg, the preeminent Holocaust historian, described the process as one of definition (classification of Jews), expropriation (taking their property), concentration (ghettoizing and deporting), and finally annihilation. By 1939, however, Jews in Germany were largely pauperized, dependent on dwindling Jewish charity. They had been made into a separate caste with which ordinary Germans had minimal contact. Thus, when mass deportations from Germany to ghettos and death camps started in 1941, they occurred in a society already conditioned to see Jews as outsiders with no role or place. The machine of genocide ran smoother because the victims had already been economically nullified and socially excised.

Notably, this pattern extended in the Nazi-conquered territories as well. In Austria after the 1938 Anschluss, Nazis immediately implemented Aryanization at lightning speed. Within mere months, Vienna’s Jews were divested of most businesses and many apartments. In occupied Poland, even before the mass killings, Nazis confined Jews to ghettos and systematically stole their businesses, property, and even basic possessions (down to kitchen utensils and winter coats). By the time the Nazis began deporting Polish Jews to Treblinka and Birkenau, those Jews had been living on starvation rations in sealed ghettos, with no assets left. They were, in both Nazi and Polish collaborator eyes, completely disposable. It reduces resistance (hunger dulls fight) and it reduces sympathy from the surrounding population (“these beggar Jews carry disease and contribute nothing” — a common refrain engineered by the Nazis).

The fact that most Germans saw Jews as an anathema and burden by 1939 eased the path to genocide. When Jews lose all leverage and utility in the eyes of their neighbors, their vulnerability is total.

Zionism as Economic Security

Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, is often remembered for his diplomatic and political vision (chartering a state, gaining international legitimation). But even Herzl, in The Jewish State, devoted considerable attention to the economic blueprint of a future Jewish polity.

He envisioned a “Jewish Company” that would systematically transfer people and capital to the new land, creating infrastructure and agriculture. Herzl knew that a state needed an economic base, not just ideology. The Labor Zionists — figures like A.D. Gordon, Berl Katznelson, and David Ben-Gurion — turned the idea of Jewish labor into a near-religious ethos. Gordon preached that Jews in their homeland must redeem themselves by working the land with their own hands, after generations of being barred from soil and confined to middleman trades. “We lack the habit of labor,” he warned in 1911, meaning productive, physical labor connected to nature.

Concrete policies reflected this doctrine from the earliest Zionist settlements. The First Aliyah (1880s–1900) of Zionist pioneers, and even more so the Second Aliyah (1904–1914), prioritized agriculture. They established moshavim (farming villages) and later kibbutzim (collective farms) with the explicit aim that Jews become a nation of farmers and workers, not just traders and scholars.

By working as pioneers, Jews were training themselves to fill every role a society needs. Ben-Gurion later said that the yishuv (pre-state Jewish community) had to create a “working class, an intellectual class, an army — all strata of a normal nation.” In effect, Zionism was trying to short-circuit the centuries-old cycle of Jews as a narrowly specialized minority. No more just “People of the Book” or finance. In the new old land, Jews would be farmers, soldiers, builders.

The emphasis on manual labor and agriculture was striking given many pioneers were urban intellectuals. They were deliberately turning themselves into peasants and proletarians. Why? Partly for moral or spiritual reasons — to reconnect with the earth and shed the “unnatural” Diaspora livelihood profile — but also as a strategic hedge. If you wield a hammer and rifle, a mob hesitates to attack. Zionism’s early literature is replete with this kind of reasoning. For instance, the Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson wrote that the tragedy of European Jewry was having “no share in the physical defenses or food production of the nations.” When those nations turned on them, in his view, Jews were helpless.

We see this doctrine in action in the Jewish Yishuv of the 1920s–1940s. The community built the Histadrut (General Federation of Hebrew Workers in Eretz Israel) in 1920, which quickly became not just a labor union but a vast economic engine organizing workers, running companies, and providing services. The Histadrut founded a construction firm to build roads and public works (thereby training Jewish builders and literally laying the country’s foundations). It started Tahal (water engineering), Tnuva (an agricultural marketing co-op for Jewish farms), and even a shipping company. By the 1930s, the Histadrut ran its own health insurance (Kupat Holim) and owned a bank. It was, as one historian put it, a “state within a state” that helped create a self-contained Hebrew economy. Indeed, the 1945 British White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration and land purchase, led the Yishuv to intensify its autonomous institutions rather than wither. By the eve of independence, the Jewish sector in Palestine had farms producing food, factories weaving textiles and refining sugar, its own electricity company (founded by Pinhas Rutenberg in the 1920s), and even armaments workshops working clandestinely. In short, Zionism by 1948 had largely realized its goal of an integrated Jewish economy.

The leaders of the Yishuv saw the coming struggle for statehood against potentially all the surrounding Arab states. Economic resilience would be as important as battlefield wins. Ben-Gurion in particular was fixated on developing industrial and military capacity. Under his leadership, even before statehood, the Yishuv set up the Haganah’s arms industry — secret factories producing bullets (like the famous underground “Ayalon Institute” bullet factory) and guns. They did this because they couldn’t count on foreign arms suppliers in times of need. Labor Zionist writings often invoked the siege mentality — not paranoid, given actual sieges like Jerusalem in 1948 happened. In their view, a Jewish community must be as self-reliant as possible to weather hostility.

The prioritization of industrial capacity alongside farming became more pronounced after the 1930s. Initially, Zionism was agrarian-romantic, but reality dictated diversification. The Yishuv leadership facilitated the creation of enterprises to absorb them: textile mills, metalworks, chemical plants. Seeds of what would become Israel’s industrial base. There was also ideological adaptation. The Revisionist Zionists under Jabotinsky emphasized the need for a Jewish “iron wall” of defense and self-sustenance. While the Labor Zionists, somewhat utopianly, spoke of cooperatives, they too believed in building heavy industry. In the 1940s, the Jewish Agency (the quasi-government of the Yishuv) drew up economic plans anticipating statehood — including development of mineral resources from the Dead Sea, expanding the port of Haifa, and establishing energy independence.

The Zionists internalized lessons of catastrophe even before 1945. Every weakness — inability to leave when borders closed, inability to arm themselves, reliance on gentile society that turned hostile — had been exploited by the Nazis. Zionism sought to remedy each of those weaknesses. It’s no coincidence that Israel’s Declaration of Independence explicitly mentions the Holocaust and the need for a Jewish state in its wake, implicitly promising that never again would Jews be dependent on others for their right to live. A Jewish homeland with farms to feed its people, factories to equip them, and an army to protect them. In other words, a homeland where Jews would never be economically irrelevant or superfluous.

Industry as Defense

In the State of Israel, economic and industrial development — especially in defense, science, and technology — has been pursued with an eye toward national survival. Facing existential threats and frequent embargoes, Israel built indigenous defense industries to ensure it could arm itself even if cut off from suppliers. Though, frankly, it has much more to do in this regard. Additionally, by exporting military and technological products, Israel has woven itself into global economic networks and subtly constrained the behavior of would-be adversaries and allies alike. Israeli industry became an extension of the nation’s defense doctrine, creating deterrence through capability and interdependence rather than through sympathy.

In 1948, the fledgling nation fought its War of Independence with a hodgepodge of arms, many smuggled or improvised. Indeed, early on Israel did manage to buy arms from abroad (Czechoslovakia in 1948, then France became a primary supplier in the 1950s–60s). But the lesson was reinforced dramatically in 1967, on the eve of the Six-Day War, when France — then Israel’s main source of fighter jets — imposed an arms embargo. President de Gaulle abruptly halted delivery of Mirage V aircraft that Israel had paid for, due to shifting French interests in the Arab world. The French arms embargo “shocked the IDF into rethinking its… exclusive reliance on imported munitions” and led to a new policy of “Munitions Independence.” In practice, that meant Israel redoubled efforts to produce major weapons systems at home henceforth. Sadly, this idea seemed to have been forgotten over time.

Already by the mid-1960s, Israel had established core defense companies: Israel Military Industries (IMI) for firearms, ammo, etc., Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) for aviation, and Rafael for advanced weapons research. These steps laid groundwork, but the post-1967 push was to make truly indigenous designs. Israel realized it might need to build its own fighter jets, missiles, naval craft — big-ticket items usually reserved for superpower industries.

And they did. Within a decade of the French embargo, Israel’s IAI rolled out the “Nesher” and then “Kfir” fighter jets, essentially copies/upgrades of the Mirage, with domestic modifications and a U.S. engine. The Kfir entered service in the 1970s and was even exported to countries like Colombia. When Israel’s Navy faced new Soviet-supplied Arab missile boats, Israel innovated by building its own missile boats and equipping them with Gabriels — resulting in decisive naval victories in the 1973 Yom Kippur War where Israeli boats sank multiple Egyptian and Syrian vessels with these homegrown weapons. Israel also embarked on its own main battle tank, the Merkava, in the 1970s. By the 1980s, Israel had a full-spectrum defense industry, producing small arms, artillery, electronics, drones (pioneering unmanned aerial vehicles early on), and high-tech systems like the Arrow anti-missile radar.

Israel’s focus on R&D and industry was to constrain the enemy’s options. By having domestic missile capabilities, Israel negated certain Arab naval advantages. By having a nuclear reactor, Israel introduced existential deterrence that has arguably prevented some more all-out wars. Technology became Israel’s answer to being outnumbered. Ben-Gurion encapsulated this in his doctrine of “qualitative military edge” (QME) – Israel must always have better equipment and training to offset the quantity of adversaries. Since foreign suppliers might not always guarantee that edge, Israel secured it by building key pieces itself.

Indeed, enemies were often fighting an Israeli force whose capabilities they did not fully comprehend, thanks to domestic innovation kept under wraps until used. This is deterrence by uncertainty – a product of industrial prowess.

Another dimension is how Israeli tech exports create strategic ties. From the 1970s onward, Israel became one of the world’s leading arms exporters. By the 1980s it was exporting billions of dollars of arms per year. Countries purchasing Israeli weapons or technology ranged from India to Turkey to Western nations. For example, Israel’s sale of military drones and radar to India in the 2000s helped cement a quiet alliance. India became much friendlier as it valued Israeli tech for its own security needs. This meant that even nations that might not “love” Israel were nonetheless entangled in mutually beneficial deals and it subtly constrained their willingness to isolate Israel.

Even major powers: the United States benefits significantly from Israeli innovation—whether arms, technology, or intelligence. (Though the U.S. and Israel are close allies now, it’s important to remember that has not always been the case, and Israel must continue to safeguard its arms production in case the U.S. turns away.) Europe too, despite the bloc’s rhetoric, buys Israeli security tech.

Thus Israel managed to transform itself from a poor client state in 1948 to an indispensable supplier in certain global markets by the 21st century.

Everything from drip irrigation technology (vital for agriculture worldwide) to Intel processors designed in Israel (half of Intel’s new chips come via its Israeli R&D centers) means that many economies have a stake in Israel’s stability. This economic integration creates a diffuse deterrent. Nations or actors considering extreme actions against Israel must consider fallout on themselves. The deterrence without affection concept fits here. You might not love Israel, but you need its tech or fear the market consequences of instability. Even regional adversaries feel this. Take China, which politically supports anti-Israel positions at the U.N. but simultaneously buys Israeli technologies (like agri-tech, artificial intelligence) and thus maintains functional ties. Or Arab Gulf states, which have quietly engaged Israeli cybersecurity firms because they value the know-how, leading in part to the Abraham Accords normalizations in recent years. Israel’s prowess turned it from pariah to partner in their eyes, when confronting common threats like Iran.

Israeli industry — forged initially from that Labor Zionist ideal of self-reliance — evolved into a strategic asset on multiple fronts. Capability constrained enemies. Israel’s independent arms deterred attacks (enemy pilots knew Israelis might have better electronics, enemy tank crews faced Israeli-made missiles like Spike, etc.). Exports constrained allies’ behavior: friends and semi-friends became more cautious about isolating Israel knowing they benefit from its exports (and Israel can seek other markets). And economic integration created deterrence without affection: countries intertwined with Israel economically may still criticize it, but they have concrete reasons not to push too far (sanction calls fizzle when your own industries would suffer).

The Accusations Return

In the late 19th century, Jews finally coming out of ghettos gave us modern political antisemitism. In the 1940s, even stateless, powerless Jews were exterminated due to a lie about their “power” over Germany’s loss in WWI. Today, with Israel strong and diaspora Jews influential in the West, new theories abound. Antisemitism is an irrational shapeshifter: evidence is molded to fit the pre-determined conclusion that Jews are to blame. If Jews are poor and powerless, they are despised as parasites. If they are successful and influential, they are feared as conspirators.

The core tropes of antisemitism have remained remarkably consistent even as they shift forms. Modern antisemites weaponize Jewish visibility and success to peddle conspiracy theories of disproportionate Jewish power. It is critical to differentiate actual Jewish influence (which exists in some realms, as for any successful minority) from the mythologized control portrayed by hate propagandists.

Another modern incarnation is the “Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG)” conspiracy beloved by neo-Nazis and white supremacists. This vile theory asserts that Jews (often specifically via Israel or “Zionists”) secretly control ostensibly gentile governments like the US, using puppet politicians. It’s basically a rehash of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious czarist-forged text that purported to be minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders plotting world domination. The Protocols, though debunked a century ago, continues to circulate globally, from the West to the Middle East, fueling beliefs that events are orchestrated by a Jewish cabal. We hear about AIPAC, for example, in countless conspiracy theories. In truth it’s a small and not particularly well funded domestic lobbying organization. But the conspiracies leap to demonic heights, depicting it as an all-powerful entity pulling strings worldwide. The content of the Jew-hater’s accusation adapts to the times (from “they poison wells” to “they run the media” to “they control the government”), but the structure is constant. In their minds Jews are orchestrating behind the scenes for malign ends.

When something happens. Be it a financial crisis, a war, a pandemic, whatever. In certain circles the reflex is to “find the Jew.” It is almost formulaic: increased Jewish visibility or involvement in any major sector (pharma, high finance, etc.) invites twisted attributions of omnipotence.

Political rhetoric even at high levels has indulged these tropes. In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s government ran billboard campaigns vilifying George Soros as an enemy of the people (dog-whistling on anti-Jewish sentiments). In the US, terms like “globalist” have been used by some politicians as code. Take just one example where President Trump’s close advisor Steve Bannon explicitly described the media as dominated by a cosmopolitan clique.

When Jews fight back or succeed, the antisemites pivot their narrative but keep the Jew as villain. In medieval times, Jews were accused of arrogance and impudence if they became wealthy (“insolent usurers” etc.). In modern times, when Jews gained a nation-state (Israel) and a military, antisemitism adapted by painting Israel as the global bully. “The Jew among nations” as some call it. This isn’t to deflect legitimate criticism of Israel’s policies, but to note that a lot of what circulates crosses into familiar antisemitic territory: e.g., cartoonists drawing Israeli politicians as puppeteers of American presidents (straight out of the Protocols imagery), or depicting a hooked-nose Netanyahu killing children for blood (a literal blood libel motif). The “global elite” accusation often lumps Jewish billionaires, Hollywood figures, bankers, and Israel all together into one grand conspiracy of a “New World Order.” On the extreme left, it merges with anti-capitalism (Jews as arch-capitalists controlling Wall Street) or anti-imperialism (Jews as the masterminds of American imperial policy). In both, real Jewish individuals in high places are cherry-picked as “proof.” Whether that’s a Fed chairman here, a Hollywood studio head there, a few influential neoconservatives in the Bush administration — to weave a tale that “the Jews” as a collective run the show.

Antisemites interpret any Jewish power as inherently nefarious and vastly overstate it. They also scapegoat Jews for outcomes with many causes. An economic crash? Blame Jewish bankers. Social changes? Blame Jewish media owners. They collapse complex systems into a single Jewish causation, which is exactly what the Protocols did. Portray Jews as omnipotent puppet-masters of anything bad. In many Muslim-majority countries, state propaganda and clerical rhetoric frequently demonizes “al-Yahud” (the Jews) far beyond any reality. In Iran, the regime pushes the notion that an “American-Zionist” cabal (basically Jews and their dupes) orchestrate sanctions and wars. So the Jew-as-global-manipulator motif is truly universal at this point.

This dynamic underscores that antisemitism does not disappear with progress; it mutates. In the extremist cesspools—whether on the left or the right—memes about “Happy Merchant” (a derogatory cartoon of a Jew rubbing hands) circulate widely, linking any event to Jewish scheming. The Tree of Life synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh (2018) believed Jews via HIAS (a Jewish refugee aid group) were responsible for mass immigration and thus for “white genocide.” So, naturally, he massacred Jewish worshippers. On the left, campus movements have slid from criticizing Israel to peddling age-old stereotypes (like painting Jews as collectively privileged or dual-loyalty suspects). The patterns are old. The medium is new. The violence is here already.

Diaspora Under an Umbrella

Diaspora Jews have built extensive institutions (philanthropic networks, schools, defense leagues, political lobbies, to name but a few) to protect their interests and vibrancy. There is an unspoken understanding that if the worst happens, Israel is the insurance policy for Jews worldwide. In effect, the existence of a sovereign Jewish industrial-military power provides a collective security umbrella under which diaspora Jews operate—even if they seldom acknowledge it directly (or prepare to shield themselves with it).

Jewish communities, especially in North America and Europe, pour significant funds into security and continuity. After a spate of attacks (like the 2015 Paris kosher supermarket shooting or 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting), Jewish organizations stepped up spending to harden targets. In the UK, the Community Security Trust (CST) is a major charity that works closely with police to protect Jewish sites, funded by communal donations and government support. Instead of pleading with kings, Jewish groups now deploy professional security consultants and lobby for hate-crime legislation. Education is another pillar. Keeping Jewish identity strong through day schools, camps, Hillels on campus, etc., to ensure the community remains cohesive and can advocate for itself. And indeed, day school enrollment and birthright trips to Israel (10-day Israel trips for young Jews subsidized by philanthropists) are aimed at fostering a sense that Jewishness is worth preserving.

However, one must candidly note that professional and geographic concentration can be a double-edged sword. Many diaspora Jews are concentrated in certain urban centers and fields (e.g., law, medicine, finance, academia, media). It’s not the 1930s, but echoes remain. Yet integration and success are not things one can or should roll back.

Importantly, diaspora Jewish well-being today is entwined with Israel in less obvious ways. In the back of many Jewish minds is the assumption that Israel’s Law of Return offers them a passport to safety should things deteriorate drastically—though many would be hard pressed to be able to avail themselves of it in less than a year or two’s notice. An assumption of a luxury that their beleaguered ancestors never experienced.

After the 2015 Charlie Hebdo/HyperCacher attacks in Paris, Israeli PM Netanyahu invited French Jews “home” to Israel and indeed aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) from France spiked in the years since. While most French Jews stayed, it was widely understood that if France became intolerable, Israel is a lifeboat.

American Jews seldom contemplate making aliyah (they feel safe in the US historically—its worth noting that many Jews felt the same but ultimately regretted it). But even they draw comfort from Israel’s existence. And it’s Israel’s industrial-military strength that makes that promise credible. It airlifted Jews in distress from Ethiopia, rescued Jews in Entebbe, and will absorb many more when it has to.

However, reliance on Israel comes with complexities. Some worry diaspora communities might become complacent (“if anything, we have Israel”). Also, the association with Israel can itself spark localized antisemitism, especially when Israel is at war. Nonetheless, the strategic link is evident and diaspora leaders often quietly coordinate with Israeli officials on security. At the highest level, Israel sees itself as responsible for Jews worldwide— which occasionally causes friction — but in dire scenarios it’s a reassurance.

One interesting evolution: diaspora institutions have mimicked state-like behavior on a small scale. There are Jewish emergency networks, volunteer patrols (e.g., Shomrim in Orthodox neighborhoods) functioning as quasi-police for their own community. Thus, continuity programs (Birthright, Honeymoon Israel, etc.) are indirectly part of collective security — making sure the next generation stays Jewish and supportive of Jewish causes, including Israel.

What History Teaches

Looking back over this expanse of history, certain blunt lessons stand out. As we articulate them, it’s not to celebrate struggle but to candidly acknowledge what has and hasn’t worked in ensuring Jewish continuity.

Economic relevance is not the same as assimilation or acceptance. Jews often thought (or hoped) that being useful to their neighbors or rulers would translate into safety. The moment a society decided it could do without Jews, whatever grudging tolerance existed evaporated. Having leverage (financial, commercial, etc.) protected Jews to a point, but it never meant they were loved or truly seen as one of the “in-group.” A Court Jew could live in a palace, dine with princes, even hold a noble title. But he would still be executed or expelled when tides turned. In modern times, Jews became fully integrated Germans, Frenchmen, Poles — winning medals in WWI for their countries — yet this patriotic assimilation did not prevent vicious antisemitism from labeling them outsiders and destroying them. Being relevant or even seemingly indistinguishable culturally does not guarantee security. It might delay hatred’s worst expression, but it doesn’t cure it. As the historian Salo Baron noted, the “less conspicuous” Jews tried to be, sometimes the more shocking the outbreak when scapegoating seized on them as the hidden hand.

Goodwill is a fickle shield—structured power is a far safer bet. Time and again, Jews benefited from periods of tolerance or philo-semitism. A golden age in Muslim Spain, Enlightenment-era emancipation, the benevolence of certain kings or presidents, feeling well integrated in the United States. But if that goodwill wasn’t backed by durable institutions and if Jews lacked their own means of self-defense, it proved fleeting. Sentiments change with economic or political stress. The only times Jewish security held firm was when it was underwritten by concrete power. E.g., the post-1948 scenario where Israel’s survival doesn’t depend on anyone’s mood but on the IDF and the nation’s strength. In the diaspora too, what truly protects Jews in, say, America is not that Americans inherently adore Jews (more and more surveys show they don’t); it’s that the American system has up until recently enforced anti-discrimination laws. “Never again” is underwritten by fighter jets and alert intelligence services, not by hopes that humanity has morally evolved. Structural guarantees, whether legal or military or economic, matter more than sweet words at interfaith banquets.

Institutions matter more than sentiment. Jews have survived and thrived when they built robust communal institutions. When crisis hits, it’s the institutions that mobilize protection or response, not general sympathy. For example, Eastern European Jewry in the late 1800s faced pogroms. What helped more than pleas for mercy were new institutions like the Jewish press to alert the world, proto-defense groups, and eventually Zionist groups that gave Jews collective voice and options. A lone family or small shtetl is easily victimized. An organized community with networks can exert pressure and find refuge. On the grand scale, Israel itself is the ultimate Jewish institution: a state. It treats global Jewry as citizens in absentia to some extent. The existence of that state has literally altered outcomes for threatened Jews (e.g., airlifting Ethiopian Jews facing famine and regime collapse in 1980s).

Relevance reduces vulnerability but never erases hatred. Put plainly, it’s better for Jews to be needed than to be expendable. Utility can stave off the worst. We saw that in various cases where rulers shielded “their” Jews from slaughter because they filled the treasury. In modern democracies, being productive citizens and major contributors to culture and economy certainly helps mainstream acceptance. But as I try to underscore here, it doesn’t erase the hatred. It never has. It never will. It simply pushes it to the margins or mutates it (in the U.S., into coded talk about “Hollywood elites” or conspiracies about Federal Reserve). And if a society’s cohesion cracks, those old toxins can flood back in, regardless of how many Nobel Prizes or civic awards Jews have won. So yes, it’s better to be relevant: it beats being a powerless pariah easily scapegoated with no allies. But one must always be aware that indispensability can be fleeting and will breed envy.

Survival, Engineered

Perhaps the clearest overarching truth: Jewish survival is a story of agency, not passively outlasting persecutors. No one handed us survival on a silver platter. Often, world powers actively tried to destroy us. Jews have survived by grit, ingenuity, and adaptability. Our people have learned foreign languages, mastered new trades, migrated across continents when needed, formed alliances where possible, and resisted (culturally, politically, spiritually, and at times physically) when no alliance was there.

This is the antithesis of the antisemitic portrayal of Jews as puppet-masters. Jews were more often scrappy underdogs hacking the system of the day to carve out breathing room. The “collective security” Jews enjoy today (relatively robust communities, a sovereign state) is not a fluke of history or simply pity after the Holocaust. It was built, piece by piece. From Herzl’s diplomacy to farmers draining malaria marshes. From lobbying for minority rights in new nations after WWI to investing in education and science to ensure Jews excelled. In every era, Jews who cared about their people’s future did something to secure it. A banker negotiated a loan to stop a pogrom. A rabbi established a school to empower youth. A Zionist worked a quarry to literally lay foundations.

It hasn’t been an easy or linear journey. It’s been fraught with cruel setbacks. But the Jewish people bent the arc of their history through will and work.

I keep thinking back to that conversation — to the confidence embedded in those words: “We’re relevant. People need us.”

History says that sentence is neither foolish nor sufficient.

Relevance has saved Jewish lives. It has postponed violence. It has created leverage where none should have existed. But it has also bred resentment, myth, and accusation. And when relevance was stripped away — deliberately, methodically — extermination followed. Whether that was before or after Hitler’s Shoah.

Zionism understood this not as a moral failure of others, but as a structural reality of history. Israel wasn’t built to be admired. It was built to be necessary. And more importantly, to be unremovable.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

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Shalom, friends.

Over the past months, I’ve been asked about the Rabbinate a number of times—by email from readers, from friends from shul, from family. So, this long brief is my attempt to answer that with some structure.

There’s also a personal reason this subject refused to stay theoretical.

My spouse and I are in the middle of our own aliyah process. Nefesh B’Nefesh and the Jewish Agency have been professional and supportive throughout. The delay has come from the Ministry of the Interior. Our file has been stalled for nearly a year. No clear timeline. No substantive explanation. Just silence.

When we applied, the ministry was under Shas. Personal-status questions and discretionary authority tend to slow under that portfolio. With Shas out of government, there is—finally—some cautious hope.

I’m sharing this not to step into the spotlight, but because it clarified something central to this brief: for many, the Rabbinate and its adjacent bureaucracies are not encountered as guardians of meaning. They are encountered as a disfunctional and sprawling bureaucracy. Clerks. Files. Authority without explanation.

That experience—scaled up across marriage, divorce, conversion, burial, and diaspora relations—is what this Long Brief examines. Not theology. Power. Not faith. Governance.

If you’re a reader with a topic you’d like us to examine at this level—deep structure, not headlines—email me. Many of our strongest briefs began exactly that way.

Sacred Authority

The Chief Rabbinate and Israel’s Unresolved Sovereignty Question

The Chief Rabbinate sits at the center of one of Israel’s oldest internal fights because it is not symbolic. It is a state-backed hurdle. It decides who may marry. How divorce proceeds. What counts as “kosher.” Who passes the conversion chokepoint with a stamp the state treats as determinative in daily life. People experience it as a clerk with coercive authority hiding behind religious vocabulary.

It is how the system is encountered in practice. Even would-be citizens—people already cleared by national institutions tasked with facilitating aliyah—can find themselves stalled for months, if not longer, inside opaque administrative loops, with no explanation beyond jurisdiction and discretion. When authority operates this way, legitimacy erodes quietly.

In Israel, you can ignore the Rabbinate for years—until you need it, and it reminds you it never ignored you.

A century ago, Rav Kook imagined a national rabbinate that could harmonize a rebuilding society. That vision had grandeur. A hundred years later, the reality is… less grand. Politicization, bureaucracy, and periodic scandal have come to define an institution that behaves more like a regulatory cartel which forgot it serves the public.

Israel never wrote a full constitution because its leaders could not agree where Jewish law ends and civil law begins. The Rabbinate sits on that deferral. It occupies a gray zone between synagogue and state, wielding legal authority from the state while claiming legitimacy from tradition.

The 2023 constitutional crisis dragged religion into the center of the storm. In ICLRS’s “Talk About” series, Gila Stopler described the regime transformation effort as marking “the start of an intra-Jewish religious war,” explicitly tying the constitutional struggle to the religious dimension of Israeli identity and governance. Even when the formal arguments are about judicial power, the practical stakes often include religion-state authority. Who controls conversion frameworks. How religious courts relate to civil rights. What kinds of exemptions become law. Whether the state slides toward a thicker Orthodox public sphere through legislation—rather than persuasion, as a norm in a democratic society.

The Chief Rabbinate is not a religious institution the state happens to fund. It is a state institution that governs in religious language.

Which explains the outsized anger. Many rage because the Rabbinate turns Judaism into enforcement—and enforcement might just be the worst marketing strategy in Jewish history. The public’s posture, even as it pushes back against the Rabbinate, is “We want Jewishness. Just without humiliation, extraction, and overt politics.” The polling is quite clear: Israelis can be both deeply attached to tradition and still want the Rabbinate cut down to size—especially among traditional non-religious Jews. And when Israelis rate religious institutions as corrupt at striking levels, they are not offering a theological critique. They are describing an institution they experience as compromised.

Every attempt to “just manage the status quo” keeps producing the same output: cyclical crises, mutual suspicion, and a public that increasingly treats the Rabbinate as something to evade rather than respect.

Inherited Governance: Millet Logic to Mandate Centralization

Israel did not wake up in 1948 and decide it wanted a centralized religious authority with legal powers. The architecture that undergirds it arrived much earlier, shaped by empires who governed diversity the way bureaucracies often do: by outsourcing identity management to clergy and calling it stability.

Under the Ottoman Empire, Jews lived inside the millet system. It was a bargain that offered internal autonomy without political power. Communities ran their own schools, charities, courts, and communal collection mechanisms under a recognized religious leadership. Halacha governed personal status for Jewish subjects—marriage, divorce, inheritance, family disputes—so long as no Muslim party was involved. The state reserved the right to have the last word and kept the monopoly on force.

The Sultan recognized a Hakham Bashi as head of the Jewish millet. In Palestine, the title attached to the Sephardi Rishon LeZion in Jerusalem. On paper, a single representative existed—in reality, it was a patchwork. Long-established Sephardi families held communal authority in the old neighborhoods. Ashkenazi immigrants built parallel kehillot with their own synagogues, schools, charitable networks, and rabbinic leadership. By the early twentieth century, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews often ran side-by-side systems. The Ottoman-recognized figure carried formal standing with the authorities, though not universal obedience inside the community.

When Britain took Palestine after 1917, it inherited the millet machinery and kept it running. The Mandate preserved communal autonomy in personal status across the recognized religious communities. Muslims remained under sharia courts. Christians under their churches’ legal systems. Jews under rabbinical jurisdiction. Marriage and divorce stayed in religious hands. No civil marriage emerged. This was merely a colonial preference for predictable channels of control.

Herbert Samuel moved to establish a formal Chief Rabbinate in 1921. The design was a political compromise with a managerial purpose. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook was appointed as the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi alongside the Sephardi Chief Rabbi, Yaakov Meir, the existing Rishon LeZion. The dual Ashkenazi–Sephardi structure did not descend from heaven. It answered demographic and communal needs. Two major Jewish publics operated in parallel, and neither would accept subordination to the other—yet the British wanted a single representative. The result was two chief rabbis at the top and a consolidated institution underneath them.

The British created recognizable religious elites they could work through. They did it with Jewish institutions. They did it with Muslim leadership structures in the same era. The Mandate’s own descriptions of the Jewish community treated the elected Chief Rabbinate and its council as proof of organized national life—useful to British administration and meaningful to the Yishuv.

The Chief Rabbinate in the Mandate period acted primarily as an administrative and representative body, not a sweeping enforcer of personal piety. It oversaw marriage and divorce through rabbinical courts, dealt with religious services including kashrut supervision, maintained registries, arbitrated personal status questions, and served as a liaison between the Yishuv’s religious needs and the government. Its coercive reach was narrow. If you wanted a legal marriage, you had to go through the system because no civil alternative existed. Beyond that, it relied on persuasion, social standing, and communal expectation. The modern Israeli state had not yet arrived to fuse religious gatekeeping with state bureaucracy.

Samuel framed the arrangement as a milestone in Jewish self-governance, emphasizing its electoral basis and its revival of communal political agency after centuries. In one sense, that’s a true statement. And it was also true that the same arrangement gave the Mandate a stable partner to manage Jewish affairs. Both can be true. In that tension sits the pre-state DNA of Israel’s later religion–state battles.

Zionists, Haredim, and the Price of Unity

Contested and tolerated by people who distrusted it, resisted by people who rejected the entire Zionist project, and embraced by a third camp that saw in it a ladder toward a Torah-shaped state—the Chief Rabbinate was not a shared Zionist dream.

Start with the secular pioneers. Labor Zionism built a new Jew and preferred to do it without clerical permission slips. Its leaders carried a deep suspicion of rabbinic authority—not because they were ignorant of Jewish tradition, but because they were trying to replace diaspora social structure with sovereign institutions. Army. Courts. Unions. Schools. A civil calendar that could survive the Middle East, not the shtetl. In that worldview, a state-backed rabbinate looked like a rival chain of command.

On the other side stood the ultra-Orthodox leadership. Large parts of the Haredi world opposed political Zionism on theological grounds. They did not want a human-led return to sovereignty before messianic redemption. They feared nationalism would replace Torah as the organizing identity, and they feared a “Jewish state” would turn Judaism into a flag—proud. yet empty.

Secular Zionists worried that religion would control the state. Haredim worried that the state would control religion.

That second fear produced immediate institutional behavior. When the British established the Chief Rabbinate in 1921, the anti-Zionist Old Yishuv did not line up to salute. It built parallel structures to avoid the new official rabbinic hierarchy. The Edah HaChareidis emerged out of this refusal. Separation from Zionist institutions, rejection of the British-created Zionist-aligned rabbinate, and the creation of an independent rabbinical court and communal framework in Jerusalem.

In June 1947, with the state still unborn and international politics closing in, Ben-Gurion sent what became the “status quo” letter to Agudat Yisrael. The letter promised core public concessions: Shabbat as the official day of rest, kashrut in state institutions, autonomy for religious education networks, and—most consequential for everything that follows—marriage and divorce under rabbinical jurisdiction. Purely transactional, this effort was Ben-Gurion’s attempt to pull the Haredi parties inside the tent. At least enough to prevent a public rupture that would weaken the Jewish case before the UN and fracture the Yishuv at the worst possible moment.

Ben-Gurion did not want multiple Jewish legal regimes competing for loyalty. He feared a future in which Jews would become two peoples living under one flag: separate marriage systems, separate definitions of Jewish status, separate communal authorities strong enough to resist state cohesion. So he chose a single, state-recognized Orthodox framework. Give religion a defined domain, keep it quiet, prevent fragmentation, move on to security and absorption. He thought he was building a firewall. Unfortunately, he was just stoking a fire.

Religious Zionists approached this arrangement with a different ambition. They did not view the Rabbinate as a necessary nuisance. They viewed it as a national organ. In their imagination, a state-sanctioned rabbinate could help fuse sovereignty with Torah and gradually shape the public sphere toward halachic norms. Where the secular camp wanted a limited clerical enclosure, and the Haredi camp wanted insulation from state contamination, the national-religious camp saw the Rabbinate as a legitimate instrument of national renewal—something closer, in spirit, to a modern echo of older Jewish governing bodies.

When the Knesset debated the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction law in 1953, proponents framed civil marriage as a recipe for schism, a split between “halachically valid” Jews and everyone else. Opponents heard something else: a modern state choosing to chain basic citizenship rights to one religious gatekeeper.

In all of this tumult, Israel was supposed to produce a constitution. It didn’t. Instead, the Knesset adopted the Harari Resolution in June 1950, committing Israel to legislate “chapters” of a future constitution as Basic Laws, without resolving the core religion–state fight at the root of the disagreement. The ambiguity became policy. The policy became habit. The habit became structure.

There were people who warned, early, that a state-run religion would rot religion and poison the state at the same time. Yeshayahu Leibowitz argued in 1959 that nothing degrades religion more than turning it into a government department—religion with the same standing as police, sanitation, post office, customs. He understood what Ben-Gurion tried to finesse: once religion is administered through politics, it becomes politics, and politics becomes the public face of religion. Faith loses its authority. The state gains a new coercive vocabulary. Everyone loses the ability to speak honestly.

Secular lawmakers also registered alarm in real time. In those 1953 debates, Mapai MK Beba Idelson warned the Knesset that “we live in 1953 and not in the Middle Ages,” objecting to empowering a system that would drag modern citizens back under clerical jurisdiction.

Ben-Gurion himself eventually admitted the problem. In July 1970, he complained that the religious parties had misused the arrangement, then said, flatly, that the time had come to abolish it and establish that Israel is “a nation of law and not of Halacha.” He was not confessing a sudden secular revelation. He was acknowledging that a contained concession had turned into a mechanism for expanding control through coalition leverage.

The Rabbinate’s power grew because secular state-builders traded defined religious monopolies for unity, religious Zionists invested the institution with national religious meaning, and Haredi parties learned to treat the arrangement as an interest-protection system they could exploit without ever granting it full spiritual legitimacy.

From Rabbinic Authority to Regulatory Apparatus

Israel created a government ministry for religious services and plugged the Rabbinate into state’s bureaucracy. Local religious councils turned community rabbinates into municipal infrastructure.

The public met the system through forms, fees, office hours, and enforcement.

Kashrut became the flagship domain of that transformation because it sits at the intersection of identity, commerce, and state coercion. Over time, Israel anchored official kashrut in the Law against Kashrut Fraud, which restricts who can grant a kosher certificate and constrains how businesses can present their kashrut status to the public. If a business wants to market itself as kosher inside the state’s framework, it needs certification from the authorized bodies. If it tries to signal kashrut outside that authorization, it risks fees, fines, and forfeitures.

Kashrut supervision becomes a system of certificates, supervisors, inspections, and payments. It also becomes a political asset because it produces appointments, influence, and leverage. Everyone who has dealt with Israeli bureaucracy knows what happens next.

Public criticism of the kashrut system has been persistent and detailed—and it has not been limited to secular activists looking for culture-war victories. Media reporting around State Comptroller findings described widespread mismanagement and structural problems in the supervision process, with responsibility falling on both the Chief Rabbinate and the local religious councils. The system’s design invites predictable pathologies: inconsistent enforcement between municipalities, opaque standards, weak oversight of supervisors, and incentives that tilt toward preserving the apparatus rather than serving the public.

The result is how Israelis experience “the Rabbinate.” They do not meet it as a beit midrash. They meet it when they register a marriage, navigate divorce jurisdiction, certify a kitchen, run a café, or bury a parent. The interaction is not with a sage offering guidance. It is with an institutional machine that issues approvals or withholds them.

Demographic Stress Tests and Institutional Rigidity

Israel’s Chief Rabbinate was built for a certain kind of Jew and a certain kind of state. Then the country filled up with Jews who did not fit the mold the framers had in mind. But the state kept trying to force it all to fit. The result is predictable. A state-backed identity system that prefers uniformity, punishes ambiguity, and reacts to human complexity the way bureaucracies always do—by tightening forms, raising thresholds, and calling it “standards”—doesn’t handle a messy reality very well.

The first test arrived almost immediately after independence. Between 1948 and the 1980s, Israel absorbed roughly 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardi immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. They were not strangers to Judaism. They were not seeking permission to be Jewish. Many lived traditional lives that were thick with practice. Yet the Chief Rabbinate they met had been shaped by European Zionist state-building and European rabbinic habits. The state’s religious establishment spoke a dialect that often sounded Ashkenazi even when it wore a Sephardi title.

Cultural mismatch does not always explode, it can just corrode. It can reveal itself in small humiliations. In a sense that the people behind the counter do not recognize you as the default Jew. Then it shows up in law.

In the 1990s, more than one million immigrants arrived from the former Soviet Union. By the early 2000s, this wave made up around fifteen percent of Israel’s population. Many were eligible under the Law of Return because they had a Jewish parent or spouse—yet a significant portion were not halachically Jewish under the Rabbinate’s definition. Estimates hold at roughly thirty percent of that wave—hundreds of thousands of people living as Jews socially and nationally, while the Rabbinate treated them as… well, you can guess.

Israel invited these families in as part of the Jewish national project. The Rabbinate sat at the marriage and burial chokepoints and informed them that citizenship and belonging are not the same thing. Without formal conversion under the Rabbinate, these immigrants and their children faced hard barriers. They could not marry Jews through the official system. They could be blocked from Jewish burial. Many came from secular or atheist backgrounds and had no interest in a strict Orthodox conversion process that demanded lifestyle transformations they did not believe in. The conversion system was designed for small numbers of candidates who actively sought Orthodox observance. It was not designed for a mass ingathering where the state itself created the category of “Jew enough to enter, not Jewish enough to marry.”

The government tried to solve the problem by detouring around it. In 1999, it established a National Conversion Authority and special conversion courts headed by Rabbi Chaim Druckman, a Religious-Zionist with a more integrative approach. Conversion programs expanded, including pathways in the IDF. The state needed a conversion mechanism that could actually integrate a large population into the Jewish collective without breaking the country into parallel tribes that can’t marry each other.

The Rabbinate’s internal politics turned that solution into a crisis. Haredi authorities (who dominated key judicial positions) distrusted leniencies and saw the program as both a halachic threat and an institutional challenge. The confrontation peaked in 2008 when the rabbinical court system issued rulings that cast doubt on, and in practice tried to nullify, large numbers of conversions done under Druckman’s framework. One case became especially notorious: a judge retroactively annulled a conversion after seventeen years, turning a woman and her children into question marks.

The Supreme Court intervened and ultimately upheld the validity of those conversions in 2012, criticizing the damage inflicted on converts who had acted in good faith. The legal outcome mattered, to be sure. But the bigger issue (at least on a societal level) was the reputational outcome for the Rabbinate. The episode taught Israelis a lesson they did not forget. The Rabbinate is not a stable institution. It is a political one—just with halachic vocabulary—which is capable of changing the rules midstream.

Another demographic challenge tested the Rabbinate’s moral authority even more sharply, because it involved Jews whose observance often exceeded that of native-born Israelis: Ethiopian Jewry.

The Beta Israel aliyah forced Israel to confront a painful truth about centralized authority. Even a Jewish community with deep devotion can be treated as suspect when it does not arrive with the right paperwork, the right lineage assumptions, and the right rabbinic endorsements. In 1973, Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ruled that the Beta Israel were Jewish, a decision that helped open the door for their inclusion under the Law of Return. The Rabbinate still imposed a “giyur lechumra,” a symbolic conversion meant to remove doubt, requiring immersion and formal acceptance. Technically, it was framed as caution. Socially, it was experienced as humiliation—your grandparents kept Torah under conditions Israeli Jews cannot imagine, and you land at Ben-Gurion Airport to be told you need a ritual to become fully acceptable.

Under pressure, the Rabbinate eventually dropped blanket conversion requirements for Ethiopian Jews. The Kessim, Ethiopian spiritual elders, were not authorized to conduct marriages or divorces, forcing Ethiopian Israelis into a rabbinical court system that did not speak their religious language. Then came publicized cases where local rabbinate offices demanded extra proofs of Jewishness from Ethiopians, refused to register marriages, or pushed couples to other jurisdictions. Even when the Rabbinate insisted such discrimination violated policy, the damage was done.

Only decades later, in 2020, did the Chief Rabbinate formally reaffirmed recognition of the Beta Israel as Jews—while maintaining a tighter stance toward the Falash Mura, who face conversion requirements.

Israel is a state of ingathering. The Rabbinate is a system of gatekeeping. Those two facts can coexist for a while. Then the gates start jamming. People start climbing around them. And the country discovers that national cohesion cannot be manufactured by uniformity decrees and identity audits. It has to be earned, which is inconvenient for bureaucracies and fatal for monopolies.

Political Capture and the Haredi Turn

By the early 1980s, the Chief Rabbinate had already become a state bureaucracy with monopoly points and predictable incentives. Then Israeli politics supplied the missing ingredient: a disciplined party that understood religious infrastructure as power infrastructure.

Shas entered the system in 1984 with a clear mission and a charismatic authority structure anchored in Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. It presented itself as a Sephardi social revolt against an Ashkenazi establishment that had spoken in European tones while governing a society that was increasingly Middle Eastern in texture. Shas did not treat the Rabbinate as a symbol to be admired. It treated it as an institution to be controlled.

From that point forward, Chief Rabbis were chosen through deals. Support from Shas’s leadership, or from Ashkenazi Haredi counterparts, became the practical condition for winning. The public might still pretend the process was about scholarship, but the political class held no such illusions. The last several elections for Chief Rabbi positions consistently produced winners aligned with ultra-Orthodox party backing—often at the expense of national-religious candidates who once viewed the Rabbinate as their natural Zionist instrument.

Shas converted electoral strength into control of the machinery underneath. The ministry portfolio. The local religious councils. The appointments pipeline into rabbinical courts. The budgets that keep the system breathing. Draft exemptions. Coalition negotiations routinely treated the religious portfolio as a tradable asset, and secular-led governments often handed it over to religious parties because it looked like a contained concession. Foolish.

As Shas entrenched itself, the Rabbinate’s image shifted from national institution to party instrument. That shift did not require ideological argument, just appointments. When key posts look like rewards, the public assumes they are rewards. When family names recur, the public assumes the system is dynastic. The 2013 chief rabbi election made this perception almost unavoidable. Both chief rabbis elected that year were sons of previous chief rabbis. It might not have been illegal, but it wasn’t very subtle either. In a country allergic to aristocracy, the Rabbinate began to look like one of the few places where lineage still closes deals.

Shas brought Sephardi pride into the heart of Israel’s religious establishment and shattered the old assumption that the state’s religious voice should default to Ashkenazi elites. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s halachic authority also produced moments of remarkable inclusion, including rulings that mattered for immigrants and for communities treated as suspect by other rabbinic factions. Shas was not simply a hardline machine. It carried a memory of humiliation and a genuine religious worldview. Unfortunately, that legacy was left behind when Shas made a choice that shaped everything that followed.

Shas aligned itself with the most conservative ultra-Orthodox factions for institutional survival and political partnership. That alignment pulled the Rabbinate’s center of gravity toward stringency, even more (!) gatekeeping, and a posture of suspicion toward anything that looked like accommodation.

The conversion battle in 2008, where the rabbinical court attempted to cast doubt on conversions conducted under Rabbi Chaim Druckman’s state conversion framework, was not a random scandal. It was a display of power by a faction that viewed leniency as erosion and viewed rival conversion structures as a threat to its own authority.

Even though the legal system forced a retreat, the Rabbinate, under Haredi dominance, showed it could turn identity into a weapon even against converts who had followed state-approved pathways.

The Rabbinate increasingly reflected a Haredi worldview that never fully embraced the Zionist state as a religious project and often treated state authority as a tool to protect a separatist community rather than to build a shared national culture.

Meanwhile, the rest of the public saw the predictable downstream effect. A politicized Rabbinate is less like a religious service and more an extension of Knesset bickering. Clerical decisions are political decisions wearing a black hat. Bureaucracy already irritates citizens. Bureaucracy with sanctimony irritates them faster. Traditional Israelis who love Jewish rhythm but hate being mistreated by cranky clerks do not differentiate between “the Rabbinate” and “the parties that control it.” They experience one fused system that issues demands and collects fees.

Shas turned the Rabbinate into a reliable node of power inside Israel’s coalition system, and in the process accelerated the institution’s transformation from national symbol into partisan apparatus.

By the 2010s, the Rabbinate had achieved a rare Israeli feat. It managed to be distrusted by secular Israelis as coercive. Distrusted by liberal Jews as exclusionary. Distrusted by national-religious Israelis as hijacked. Distrusted by parts of the Haredi world as spiritually bankrupt—contaminated by state entanglement. In other words, it became a monopoly without neither moral nor durable political constituency.

Identity Chokepoints and Mass Circumvention

Most Israelis will not interact with the Rabbinate weekly, or even yearly. Many will never need it at all. Then, suddenly, they do—at moments rife with emotion—marriage, divorce, conversion.

These three chokepoints define how Israelis experience the Rabbinate, and they explain why resentment runs so far ahead of actual usage. A single blocked wedding, a single chained divorce, a single denied conversion radiates outward. Through families, workplaces, WhatsApp groups, and dinner tables. People do not need to be victims to absorb the message. The system feels brittle. It feels coercive. It feels uninterested in people. It feels obsessed with compliance. Over time, that perception becomes the Rabbinate’s public identity.

Marriage is the most visible pressure point because it is the most universal. Israel offers no civil marriage. Jewish couples must marry through an Orthodox ceremony under Rabbinate authority or not at all—at least not at home. For decades, this arrangement survived on inertia and habit. That has changed. Large numbers of Israelis now openly reject the idea that the state should dictate how they form a family. Polling reflects this shift. A decisive majority of secular Israelis say they would avoid an Orthodox Rabbinate wedding if alternatives existed, and nearly half of all Jewish Israelis say they would choose a civil or non-Orthodox ceremony if allowed. The gap between law and preference has widened into something visible.

Behavior followed opinion. Marrying abroad became routine. Over the past two decades, tens of thousands of Israeli couples have flown out, married civilly, and registered their marriages back home—fully legal, fully recognized, fully absurd. Many of those couples were halachically eligible to marry through the Rabbinate and chose not to. Cyprus is not only an escape hatch for those blocked by religious law—it is a rejection by people who could comply and decline to do so.

Israelis joke that it is easier to get married as a Jew in Cyprus than in Tel Aviv. Which, absurdly, is true. Organized group weddings, chartered flights, cruise weddings, even online weddings conducted over Zoom have developed into rituals of defiance. The Rabbinate became the only institution in the Jewish state that pushes Jews to leave the country in order to exercise a basic civil act. Not a very sustainable optic.

Divorce deepens the damage. Even Israelis who accept religious marriage recoil when they see how divorce works. Under Orthodox law, a woman cannot be divorced without her husband’s consent. The Rabbinate has legal tools to pressure recalcitrant spouses (including sanctions and imprisonment), but the system moves unevenly and slowly. The result is the phenomenon of agunot—women chained to marriages long after they have ended in every meaningful sense.

These cases surface repeatedly, with familiar details: years of delay, extortion demands, judges hesitant to escalate pressure, women paying with time, money, or dignity to exit relationships already recognized as dead. Public reaction is ferocious and consistent. Across the political and religious spectrum, Israelis reject a system that leaves women trapped. Surveys show overwhelming majorities—secular, traditional, and even many religious—calling the current divorce regime unacceptable.

Israelis may argue about security, budgets, borders. They do not argue much about whether abused women should be freed from marriages. When rabbinical courts hesitate in cases involving domestic violence or clear coercion, the damage is immediate and lasting.

Conversion is the third chokepoint, and the most symbolic. It touches fewer people directly, yet it unsettles far more. Conversion answers the question Israel never finished debating: who decides who belongs. The Rabbinate answers it narrowly, stringently, and with little interest in social reality. Under current arrangements, only Orthodox conversions recognized by the Rabbinate fully count for personal status inside Israel. Hundreds of thousands of citizens—many from Russian-speaking families—live as Jews in every public sense while remaining unrecognized for marriage and burial.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are officially registered as having “no religion,” despite Jewish ancestry, military service, Hebrew fluency, and full participation in civic life. The conversion system processes only a few thousand people a year, at standards that demand strict Orthodox observance—which many candidates do not believe in and do not intend to adopt. The math does not work. The tone does not help. Public statements by senior rabbinic figures describing immigrants as opportunists or questioning conversions retroactively have seared themselves into public memory. Each such episode reinforces the impression that the Rabbinate views conversion less as an act of joining and more as a test of obedience.

Courts intervene periodically, forcing recognition for limited civil purposes. The Rabbinate complies minimally. Israelis absorb the message.

Taken together, these chokepoints produce a multiplier effect. Most Israelis do not personally experience all of them. Almost everyone knows someone who has. Stories circulate faster than statistics: the couple who flew to Cyprus, the woman waiting years for a get, the soldier who cannot marry his partner, the Ethiopian bride asked for proof she should never have been asked to produce. Workarounds have become normalized responses.

The Rabbinate’s reputation teaches Israelis that if you want freedom: go around the system. Over time, a monopoly that teaches people to evade it loses something more important than compliance. It loses consent.

A Society That Wants Judaism Without Clerical Rule

Israeli society does not reject Judaism. It rejects being managed by it.

That distinction explains almost every polling contradiction that confuses outside observers. Israelis light candles, crowd seder tables, fast on Yom Kippur, argue about Torah portions on the radio, and expect the state calendar to reflect Jewish time. At the same moment, they recoil from clerics exercising civic authority. They want a Jewish public sphere and a non-theocratic state. When Israelis use the phrase kfi’ah datit—religious coercion—they are not rejecting tradition. They are rejecting compulsion backed by law.

Secular Israelis are the most vocal critics, and the most consistent. Roughly half of Jewish Israelis define themselves as secular. They see the Rabbinate’s authority as a civil rights problem, not a theological debate. Marriage and divorce monopolies strike them as anachronistic. Conversion gatekeeping feels arbitrary. Kashrut enforcement looks like a tax dressed up as faith.

Traditional Israelis complicate the picture, and in doing so, they expose the Rabbinate’s strategic failure. Masorti Jews—roughly a third of the Jewish public—are culturally devout without being strictly observant. Many keep kosher at home. Many mark Shabbat. Many feel deep attachment to Jewish heritage. Politically, they reject clerical dominance almost as strongly as secular Israelis do. They want Jewish symbols without religious policing. They respect rabbis but resist rabbinates.

This group matters because it sits at the heart of Israeli society. It is largely Mizrahi. It votes across party lines. It carries the intuition that Judaism thrives through practice and community. When traditional Israelis oppose religious coercion, the Rabbinate loses the argument that resistance is merely secular rebellion. It becomes something else: a broad civic refusal to let one institution define Jewishness for everyone else.

Religious Zionists occupy the most uncomfortable position in this landscape. In theory, the Chief Rabbinate was built for them. It was supposed to be the mechanism that wove Torah into sovereignty without surrendering the state to anti-Zionist instincts. For decades, this camp treated the Rabbinate as a national asset. Now many see it as a liability.

Religious-Zionist rabbis criticize the Rabbinate publicly while working inside it privately. They launch parallel initiatives—friendlier marriage registration, alternative conversion frameworks, competing kashrut certifications—while insisting they are trying to save the institution, not replace it. Many in this camp believe Israel needs a state Jewish authority. Fewer believe the current one deserves loyalty.

The ultra-Orthodox position is the most paradoxical. Haredi parties are the Rabbinate’s strongest political defenders. Haredi society is among its least enthusiastic users. Many ultra-Orthodox Jews rely on their own rabbinic authorities, their own kashrut standards, their own marriage and divorce frameworks, even as their political representatives fight to preserve the Rabbinate’s monopoly over everyone else.

The Rabbinate offers Haredi leadership leverage over the public sphere, budgets for religious infrastructure, and a barrier against non-Orthodox recognition. Whether Haredi families personally need Rabbinate services is almost beside the point. Control matters more than usage. The institution functions as a brake on pluralism and a shield against dilution of halachic authority in state law.

There is also quiet dissent inside the Haredi world. Some rabbis understand that state-enforced religion produces backlash that weakens respect for Torah. They have said so, sometimes bluntly. But Haredi politics is disciplined, and the external threat of losing institutional control outweighs internal misgivings. If there is going to be a state Jewish authority, Haredi leaders insist it must reflect their standards, not anyone else’s.

The Rabbinate consistently ranks near the bottom of Israeli institutions in credibility. Most Israelis do not see it as a relevant spiritual authority in their lives. Many see it as an obstacle they must navigate or avoid. When an institution charged with defining Jewish identity is viewed as alien by a Jewish majority, it’s time for reform.

Diaspora Collision and Exported Authority

Israel’s religion-state machinery does not stay domestic. It travels. It lands in boardrooms, federation meetings, campus Hillels, synagogue sanctuaries, and family conversations across the globe. It turns into a foreign-policy problem because the Chief Rabbinate does not only regulate Israelis. It implicitly grades the Jewishness of millions of Jews who bankroll Israel’s soft power, defend it in hostile arenas, and teach their kids that Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people.

In North America, the basic demographic fact is simple: most affiliated Jews sit in non-Orthodox movements. Reform and Conservative Judaism are not fringe phenomena there. They are the mainstream. Israel’s official religious gatekeeper treats them as, at best, second-class. The Rabbinate refuses to recognize their conversions for personal status. It rejects their rabbis as legitimate authorities in the public sphere. It treats their religious life as a sentimental hobby rather than a binding covenant. For diaspora Jews who grew up being told Israel belongs to all Jews, they get the message: Israel wants your loyalty, your money, and your political cover, then tells you your Judaism is not real enough to count.

The Western Wall crisis in 2017 did not erupt because diaspora Jews suddenly discovered pluralism. It erupted because Israel negotiated a compromise for an egalitarian prayer space at the Kotel, publicly framed it as a breakthrough, then froze it under pressure from ultra-Orthodox coalition partners. The Kotel is not a marginal symbol. It is the shared shrine of a people that lives on symbols. Diaspora leaders described it as betrayal because it was betrayal. A deal made, celebrated, and then shelved to keep a coalition intact.

The fallout was immediate and unusually sharp. Federations warned openly that Israel was shredding the idea that all Jews have a home there. The Jewish Agency itself protested. American Jewish leaders who normally spend their time smoothing tensions stopped smoothing. Israelis watching from inside the country often missed the point. They saw “prayer arrangements.” Diaspora Jews saw status. They saw Israel telling them, in the most symbolic location possible, that their religious life doesn’t count.

Conversion intensified the collision because it sits at the heart of peoplehood. In 2017, Israel advanced legislation that would have strengthened the Chief Rabbinate’s hold over conversions, including moves that threatened to block even private Orthodox conversions outside its system. The line sold to Israelis was familiar: one standard, avoid splits, preserve unity. Diaspora leaders heard something else: the state hardening a monopoly that already delegitimizes the majority of their religious world. They also understood the slippery reality of Israeli politics. A bill that starts by policing conversions in Israel can easily end up pressuring recognition of conversions abroad. Even if the Law of Return stays broad on paper, the Rabbinate’s influence leaks into the social and legal fabric. People make aliyah under one definition of Jewish belonging, then run into a different definition at marriage and burial.

This is where Israel’s internal contradiction becomes visible to Jews abroad. The Law of Return embraces a wider definition of Jewish connection. The Rabbinate enforces a narrower definition of Jewish status. A person can be Jewish enough for the state to grant citizenship—yet not Jewish enough for the state’s religious gate to allow a wedding. Immigrants from the former Soviet Union live inside that contradiction every day. Diaspora Jews see it and recognize a deeper argument: Israel has not decided whether it is the nation-state of the Jewish people or the nation-state of a specific religious regime within that people.

Diaspora response has not been limited to op-eds and angry speeches. It has touched money, advocacy, and emotional commitment. After the Kotel reversal and the conversion fights, reports circulated of donors threatening to halt support, federations warning of backlash, and leaders questioning whether they could keep selling unconditional solidarity to communities that feel rejected by the state they defend. Even the threat matters. Israel relies on diaspora political capital in arenas where Israel’s own diplomats cannot vote, donate, or organize.

There is also a cultural gap. Israelis experience the Rabbinate as bureaucracy, coercion, and coalition extortion. Many secular Israelis want less of it and feel little sympathy when diaspora Jews fight over prayer spaces they themselves rarely use. Diaspora Jews experience the Rabbinate as something different: a state institution claiming to speak for Judaism while invalidating the Judaism they actually live. The same institution triggers different injuries. Israelis feel misgoverned. Diaspora Jews feel disowned.

The deeper clash is not about a partition at the Kotel or a specific bill. It is about authority. Israel is a sovereign state and has the right to legislate. The Jewish people are not only a state. They are a civilization spread across continents with multiple religious languages. A state-backed monopoly that insists on one way to be Jewish collides with the lived reality of world Jewry.

Every time the Rabbinate tightens its grip, the state exports the message that Israel belongs to Jews, but, really, only to some Jews.

Israel does not need diaspora Jews to agree with every policy, but it does need them to feel included in the story.

Coalitions, Courts, and Sovereignty Drift

Israel never wrote a clean rulebook for religion and state. It wrote workarounds. Then it treated the workarounds as sacred text. That is why the Chief Rabbinate’s authority keeps getting argued in courtrooms and coalition talks instead of in a settled constitutional framework.

It happens in cycles, predictable and exhausting. A government forms. Coalition agreements define the live borders of religious authority for that term. A minister announces “reform.” The Rabbinate and the Haredi parties treat the move as an assault on Jewish continuity. Civil society treats the move as a long-overdue correction of monopoly. The High Court hovers in the background as both referee and enemy, depending on who is speaking. Then the government falls, a new coalition arrives, and yesterday’s reform becomes today’s heresy to be reversed.

Kashrut is the cleanest case study because it sits in the marketplace, not only in the synagogue. For years, the official certification regime functioned as a monopoly with municipal tentacles: local religious councils, inspectors, fees, and a public that learned to treat the “kosher” label as both religious signal and bureaucratic stamp. Reform efforts did not try to abolish Orthodox standards. They tried to change the state’s role from sole provider to regulator, to allow competition inside an Orthodox framework—to reduce routine abuse. The fiercest opposition came because opening the system threatens the underlying asset: control. Once control shifts from monopoly to regulated pluralism, the apparatus loses its ability to punish, reward, and extract with the same ease.

Civil burial is a quiet example that reforms can exist in principle and still fail in practice. Israel formally recognized a right to alternative burial decades ago. On paper, a citizen should be able to choose a civil burial without being forced into Orthodox rites. In reality, availability remains limited, uneven, and often dependent on activism, litigation, and local improvisation. Families discover the gap at the worst moment possible. Courts have pushed the state to reimburse families or to comply with statutory duties. The state responds slowly. The Rabbinate’s monopoly softens slightly at the edges, then reasserts itself through scarcity.

Even when the Knesset passes a reform, implementation becomes a second battlefield. Ministries delay. Regulations stall. Budgets shift. The public is told the law changed. Then they discover the clerk still has the same stamp, the same incentives, and the same ideology.

The High Court sits in the middle of this because the state left it there. When the Knesset refuses to resolve identity questions cleanly, litigation becomes the substitute arena. Petitioners push for civil rights, recognition, access, equality. The Court issues rulings that sometimes widen the space for pluralism or protect minorities from bureaucratic cruelty. Religious parties interpret those rulings as judicial overreach and demand tools to override them.

The Rabbinate survives this turbulence because it is not sustained by popularity. It is sustained by law and coalition incentives. Reformers keep trying to treat it like a public service that can be improved. Its defenders treat it like a strategic asset that cannot be surrendered. Courts keep trying to patch the worst harms without owning the constitutional question they were never elected to answer. The public keeps adapting by going around the system.

Five Viable Futures for Sacred Authority

The Chief Rabbinate will not drift gently into irrelevance on its own, nor will it magically recover legitimacy without structural change. The system is already moving. The only question is whether the movement will be deliberate or accidental, managed or chaotic, negotiated or imposed by social reality.

There are a few visible paths through this.

The first is a reformed centralized Rabbinate that survives by surrendering power. This scenario keeps a national rabbinic body but strips it of coercive authority. Marriage, divorce, and conversion cease to be legal monopolies. The Rabbinate becomes advisory rather than regulatory, a body that speaks in moral and theological language instead of issuing licenses and penalties. In theory, this preserves a symbolic Jewish center while ending daily friction. In practice, it requires something close to political heresy: asking those who benefit most from monopoly power to vote themselves out of relevance. Ultra-Orthodox parties would resist ferociously. The current leadership would not go quietly. The idea appeals to secular and traditional Israelis, and to parts of the national-religious camp that want a unifying Jewish voice without compulsion. No coalition has yet been willing to pay the price required to dismantle the Rabbinate’s enforcement abilities while preserving its institutional shell.

The second path decentralizes authority without abandoning Orthodoxy. Instead of one gate, multiple Orthodox gates operate under a state regulatory framework. Kashrut, marriage, and conversion are handled by competing Orthodox bodies. The state verifies standards and registration, not theology. This model already exists in fragments. Independent kashrut certifications operate alongside the Rabbinate. Zionist rabbinical courts perform conversions that the Rabbinate refuses to recognize. The logic here is pragmatism. Israelis choose rabbis who fit their lives. Halacha remains the language though monopoly disperses. The risk is fragmentation. Different standards create uncertainty about recognition across communities. Defenders argue that fragmentation already exists in practice and that regulation can contain it. Critics fear a slow-motion schism, with no single authority trusted by all. Though, to be fair, there is no single authority trusted by all. Politically, this path is easier than civil marriage and harder than cosmetic reform. It weakens the Rabbinate without abolishing it. That makes it attractive to moderates and alarming to hardliners.

The third path breaks most cleanly with the past: civil marriage and voluntary religion. The state exits the marriage business entirely. Couples marry civilly by default. Religious ceremonies become optional overlays rather than legal gateways. This aligns Israel with the democratic norm and with the clear preferences of most Jewish Israelis. It also resolves the most emotionally charged grievance in one move. The cost is immediate confrontation. Ultra-Orthodox parties view civil marriage as an existential threat. They warn of a divided people, incompatible lineages, and irreversible damage to Jewish unity. Those warnings carry weight inside parts of the religious world. Politically, this path requires sidelining the Haredi veto. That means a coalition willing to govern without them and to absorb prolonged unrest. No such coalition has yet held long enough to finish the job.

The fourth path produces a different kind of rupture: a distinct national-religious halachic authority rises to compete with, or replace, the Haredi-dominated Rabbinate. Which is already happening informally. Religious-Zionist rabbis perform conversions, officiate weddings, and supervise kashrut outside the Rabbinate’s framework because they no longer trust it to serve the national interest. Formalizing this path would mean state recognition of alternative Orthodox institutions aligned with Zionist values and Israeli social reality. The upside is ideological coherence: halacha remains central, the state remains Jewish, coercion softens, and immigrants find doors instead of walls. Haredi authorities would not recognize the outcomes. The downside is explicit schism.

The fifth path requires no legislation at all. It is already underway. The Rabbinate collapses in practice through circumvention. Israelis marry abroad, online, or not at all. Businesses use private kashrut. Converts go elsewhere. Courts patch individual cases. Politicians posture. The law stays on the books. The public walks around it. This is the path of least resistance and maximum cynicism. It produces freedom without clarity. It rewards those with resources and connections. It leaves the vulnerable exposed. It also triggers backlash: every expansion of circumvention invites new attempts to reassert control, tightening enforcement, criminalizing alternatives, and deepening resentment. A de facto collapse satisfies no one fully, but it keeps the system moving without forcing a national decision. That makes it the most likely short-term trajectory.

These paths are not mutually exclusive. Israel is already living inside a hybrid. Partial decentralization here. Circumvention there. Occasional reform followed by reversal. The danger is not that Israel will choose the wrong path. The danger is that it will refuse to choose at all, allowing a two-track society to metastasize: one governed by an aging monopoly, another operating entirely outside it.

Managed pluralism or enforced uniformity. Advisory authority or coercive monopoly. Deliberate reform or accidental decay. Israel can live with disagreement. It cannot indefinitely live with a system that teaches its citizens that the only way to be free is to leave the system behind.

Pluralism, Power, and the End of Postponement

The Chief Rabbinate did not create Israel’s crisis over religion and state. It reveals it.

For decades, Israelis treated the Rabbinate as the problem because it was the most visible irritant: the office that says no, the clerk who blocks a wedding, the court that delays a divorce, the certificate that decides who counts. That focus misses the deeper truth. The Rabbinate is not the cause. It is the symptom of a country that never resolved who holds sovereignty over identity.

Israel fused two different projects at birth and never finished the weld. One was national: a state of the Jewish people, open to Jews everywhere, protective, inclusive by design. The other was religious: a Jewish polity anchored in halacha, wary of fragmentation, allergic to plural standards. The founders postponed the collision. The result is a state that operates with two definitions of Jewishness at once—broad for citizenship, narrow for personal status—and pretends the contradiction can be managed indefinitely.

It cannot.

Israel governs religion and state through leverage, not law. Ultra-Orthodox parties learned early that ambiguity favors discipline. Coalition bargaining can secure outcomes a constitution might block. Secular leaders learned that postponement buys quiet, at least for a term. Courts learned that silence pushes them into the role of referee, whether they or the politicians want it or not. The system runs on vetoes, not consent.

That design worked when society was smaller, more deferential, and more homogeneous. It works poorly in a country that is larger, more assertive, more diverse, and less willing to accept clerical authority without legitimacy.

The choice Israel faces is managed pluralism or enforced uniformity. A state that trusts its citizens to choose their Jewish lives, or a state that delegates identity to one gatekeeper and enforces compliance. The middle path has expired—that path has produced inequality, cynicism, and institutional decay.

The Rabbinate will either be transformed, sidelined, or hardened. Those are the real options. What it cannot be is what it is now: a powerful institution with collapsing consent.

Sacred authority will be defined—or it will continue defining Israel by default.

— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief

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