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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Shalom, friends.

Today is Christmas. In Israel, Christians are celebrating it openly—in Haifa, in Jerusalem’s churches, in the Old City, in towns and villages across the country. Pilgrims are here too, doing what pilgrims have done for two thousand years: walking, praying, singing, and lingering in the places where their faith was born. That is not a small detail. In much of the Middle East, Christian life has been hollowed out by civil war, jihadist violence, state hostility, and demographic flight. In Israel, Christian communities are present, public, and protected by law. You can argue about policy. You cannot argue about the contrast.

I wrote this after seeing the apartheid allegation once to many times in the same morning. Which is, on it’s face, absurd. It’s impossible, if you’ve ever been to Israel, to think the claim has any merit. A stroll through Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda shuk or, really, just about anywhere in this land, will fully dispel that idea. That most Israelis look like they’ve come from Poland is truly laughable.

I’ve already dismantled the apartheid libel in my book Rooted Truth: Israel’s Case Against the Deniers, but in an effort to make it more accessible—and to arm you against it—I tackle it a bit here.

Though, more than that, I wanted to share an examination of how minorities actually live inside the state. How they vote. Litigate. Serve. Build careers. Fight crime. Protest policy. Negotiate budgets, And argue with power from within the system that governs them.

Apartheid is a legal regime. Israel is a messy democracy under strain. Those two things are not the same—and confusing them has consequences, not only for Israel, but for the meaning of the word itself. And as someone who (when they were much younger) read the dictionary for fun, that’s something worth correcting.

Inside the Minority

Citizenship, identity, power, and friction in a society too plural for slogans

The word “apartheid” functions as an accelerant. People throw it on Israel the way arsonists throw gasoline. Not to illuminate, to burn. The accusation did not appear by accident. It sits in a lineage—Durban 2001 made it a global NGO project—and it keeps returning because it does its job. It recasts Israel as a moral abomination rather than a state facing enemies, dilemmas, and the obligations of citizenship.

The apartheid accusation runs on a rigid story. Jews as a ruling caste. Arabs as a permanently disenfranchised subject class. Policy as an expression of ethnic hatred.

It flattens national politics into a racial morality play. One in which there can be no context because context wrecks the script.

Real apartheid was not a vibe. It was a legal machine. South Africa codified separation into the bloodstream of daily life. Non-whites could not vote. They could not hold power. They could not live where they wished. They could not use the same entrances, schools, hospitals, or services. The state openly engineered a racial order and enforced it with law, police, and bureaucracy.

If Israel were running an apartheid regime over its citizens, we would see that architecture: universal political exclusion, formal racial classification, blanket bans on access to institutions, and a legal framework designed to keep one group permanently subordinate.

Israel does not have that structure. Arab citizens of Israel vote. They form parties. They sit in the Knesset. They work in public institutions. They study in universities. They shop, travel, sue, argue, and build careers in the same public sphere as Jewish citizens.

Arab and Jewish patients lie in the same hospital wards and receive the same care because the state’s medical system treats them as patients, not as a racial category to be contained.

The smear survives by treating any inequality as proof of apartheid. Inequality exists in democracies. Bias exists. Neglect exists. Underinvestment exists. Poor governance exists. None of that is apartheid.

The accusation also requires erasing internal plurality. “The Arabs” become a single undifferentiated bloc. In real life, Israel’s Arab citizenry contains competing political identities, religious currents, class divisions, and communal strategies. A state running apartheid prefers uniformity: one group on top, one group below, everyone locked into place. Israel’s minority reality is noisy, opportunistic, ambitious, angry, hopeful, cynical, and human—but it is definitely not one solid bloc.

One data point captures the problem for the slogan merchants. In 2021, Ra’am—an Arab Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas—joined the governing coalition. It was the first Arab party to become a formal part of an Israeli government. That coalition agreement channeled major budgets toward Arab municipalities and community needs. Apartheid systems do not invite the “oppressed” into the ruling apparatus as bargaining partners. They do not write coalition agreements that empower them.

Israel did, because Israel’s political system runs on votes and deals, not on racial exclusion.

Civic Architecture: Rights, Law, and the Limits of Power

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Shalom, friends.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve received a steady stream of emails that all circle the same frustration.

Some come from readers who follow Israel but aren’t well versed in the real operating system—just what filters through the media. A few come from Jewish readers who tell me, quietly, that they’re tired of hearing October 7 described as an “escalation” rather than an intention.

The questions are remarkably consistent.

• “Are Hamas and ISIS actually that different?”

• “Why does Hezbollah get treated as political while ISIS is treated as theology?”

• “Why does ‘moderate Islam’ never seem to moderate the outcome?”

• “And why do Western explanations keep collapsing the moment reality intrudes?”

This Long Brief is my answer to those questions.

Not as a catalog of atrocities. Not as a moral performance. Not as a debate about intentions. Just my attempt to map the system underneath the violence—the shared logic, doctrine, and incentives that link actors Western discourse insists on treating separately.

You know that jihadi violence is real and you already know the headlines. Let’s try to understand why the same analytical failures keep repeating, regardless of which group is in the news.

If you’ve ever felt that our language about jihadism keeps changing while the outcomes stay the same, this brief is for you.

Jihadism as a Civilizational System

We aren’t going to inventory the atrocities. The bodies are already counted.

Jihadism is a civilizational project—not the string of isolated malfunctions the news might have you believe. Nor is it a mood, a grievance stack, or a sociological tantrum. It is a coherent ideological enterprise that understands itself as world-ordering. Its end state is explicit: Islamic rule enforced by sharia, culminating in submission.

The caliphate mindset is not metaphorical. Jihadist movements describe their mission with clarity Western journalists analysts often refuse to hear. They speak of a single goal rooted in Islam itself: global dominion under divine law. It is simply the continuation of a long tradition of religiously sanctioned empire. A century ago, Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi stated the premise plainly: Islam seeks the earth in its entirety, not a negotiated portion. That logic did not expire. It metastasized.

Understanding jihadism at this level requires abandoning several habits that have repeatedly produced strategic failure.

The first is compartmentalization. Western policy culture treats Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and aligned state actors as discrete problems with local etiologies. Each is given its own peace process, its own euphemisms. This approach mistakes symptoms for unrelated diseases. The ideological bloodstream connecting these groups is ignored because acknowledging it would require confronting Islam as a political theology rather than a private spirituality occasionally hijacked by madmen. And let’s face it, there’s too much money to be made by appeasing them. But at what cost?

The second habit is theological denial. Western leaders have spent decades insisting that jihadist violence has nothing to do with Islam—even as jihadists saturate their rhetoric with Quranic citation, hadith, and juristic precedent. It would be laughable if it weren’t quite so dangerous. From post-9/11 assurances that “Islam is peace” to later claims that ISIS is not Islamic, this posture has been less about accuracy than comfort. It contradicts the enemy’s own explanations of himself. When a movement grounds its violence in scripture, law, and prophetic tradition, dismissing that claim is not tolerance. It is analytic malpractice. It is, frankly, suicidal.

The third error is tone-based moderation. Movements that trade fatigues for suits, or suicide vests for ballot boxes, are granted the label “moderate” so long as they speak politely and condemn rival factions. Doctrine becomes secondary to optics. This is how explicitly Islamist movements committed to sharia governance are described as secular simply because they participate in elections or speak the language of diplomacy. The terror group Muslim Brotherhood has benefited most from this laundering. Its texts and offshoots aim for the same end state as more openly violent actors.

Let’s reject the fiction that these distinctions are morally or theologically meaningful.

Across the spectrum, jihadist actors share a common ideological core. They differ in organizational form, sponsorship, and tactical patience. Some operate as insurgent networks. Others function as proxy armies for state patrons. Some revel in spectacle. Others prefer deniability. None of this alters the underlying creed.

Counterterror analysts have long acknowledged that despite tactical variation, these movements pursue the same objective: an Islamist order governed by what they define as God’s law, advanced through jihad (so called “holy war”) against perceived enemies of Islam—the West especially. Israel might be the “little Satan” but the United States is the “big Satan.”

The beheading video and the policy platform sit on the same continuum. One communicates through terror theater. The other through institutional capture. Both want you dead.

Western governments have occasionally gestured toward this reality—though generally they hedge their terminology out of cowardice. When disparate groups are named together as a single threat set, it reflects a belated recognition that nationalist branding does not negate ideological alignment. The banners change. The engine does not.

Western discourse still resists logic—perversely becoming victimized by language. No one wants to be “Islamophobic,” right? A phobia is an irrational fear. It’s not irrational to fight for your culture and to deny an enemy from murdering you.

Contrary to “polite” Western discourse: Poverty does not drive jihad. Education does not inoculate against it. Data repeatedly shows that recruits are often educated and economically stable. The claim that jihadists are hijacking an otherwise peaceful faith collapses under the weight of canonical sourcing. These movements do not invent their justifications. They cite them. And when Muslim actors speak candidly among themselves, the language is not about root causes or cycles of violence. It is about honor, faith, and inevitability. That gap between internal discourse and external presentation is strategic and you would be a fool to believe it.

Occasionally, a regional leader breaks the script. When Egypt’s president challenged clerics at Al-Azhar to confront the theological problem directly, he was acknowledging what polite Western forums avoid: that the doctrine itself requires interrogation. Such statements are rare precisely because they expose the scale of the problem. Other religions had their… more extreme days, but moderated. Islam has not had that transition period yet. Let’s hope they do, but for now we must not let our glasses be fogged. We must look at this as a real threat. Because it is.

What “Jihadist” Means in Its Own Grammar

Jihadist is not a journalistic smear or a lazy synonym for “bad Muslims.” We are using this term the way the movements and clerical ecosystems around them use it: as a legal-theological category with a long paper trail—text, precedent, and a lot of blood. Far, far too much.

Strip the theology out of jihad and you do not become nuanced. You become ignorant.

Start with the boring part, because the boring part kills. The Arabic root j-h-d means “to strive.” Everyone knows that fact, and it gets weaponized into a hall pass. In the classical legal tradition, jihad is not a motivational poster. It is a doctrine with subcategories, rules, conditions, and consequences. Across the major Sunni legal schools, the central operational meaning remains armed struggle in the service of expanding or defending Islamic rule. And to be clear, not every Muslim is a jihadist. Our issue is with those trying to forcibly make us submit to Islam or die. The term jihad has a definable content, and jihadist movements are not making it up as they go along.

The canon they cite is not obscure. Quranic commands to fight until submission, and to impose a subjugated status through jizya, sit at the core of the legal conversation. Hadith literature adds the propulsion: Muhammad’s reported command to fight “until” confession of faith, the repeated promise of paradise attached to armed struggle, the sanctification of violence as worship. Jurists then do what jurists always do: they systematize. They argue over thresholds, exceptions, authority, timing. They do not argue that armed jihad is meant to be symbolic. They merely debate its administration.

This is why the modern Western habit of calling jihad “really about inner struggle” does not function as coherent analysis— though it functions as public relations. The famous line about returning from “lesser jihad” to “greater jihad” is commonly treated as a cornerstone in Western sermons and interfaith panels. In the mainstream hadith tradition it is weak at best, and it does not sit in the primary Sunni collections. Meanwhile, armed jihad appears repeatedly across the Quran, hadith, and the legal manuals with granular detail about permissible targets, protected categories, taxation, slavery, and the status of conquered populations. The “spiritual jihad” framing is not the tradition’s center of gravity. It is the modern attempt to move the furniture because the room is morally radioactive.

Here is the hard point that Western discourse keeps refusing to touch: modern jihadist movements operate inside the inherited tradition, not outside it.

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Shalom, friends.

Picture three Israelis in the same living room shouting the same word — “democracy” — and having absolutely nothing in common. One means “the Court saves us from these lunatics.” One means “61 seats means I get to govern, not the Bar Association.” One means “I sat in a cockpit over Rafah while you blocked highways in Kaplan, you don’t get to lecture me about the rule of law.” Now add October 7, an ongoing war on multiple fronts, a shattered sense of trust, and a judicial system that wrote itself into the role of final guardian without anyone ever signing at the bottom.

We’ve spent years screaming about “coup,” “dictatorship,” “reform,” and “resistance,” while the real story sat in plain sight: Israel has run for nearly eight decades without a completed constitutional order. The High Court filled the vacuum by turning Basic Laws into a de facto constitution. The political class outsourced its hardest fights to that court and then woke up furious that it actually used the power they handed it.

This brief lays out the architecture, the fault lines, and the choices that now demand decisions instead of slogans.

The Unfinished State

How Israel’s Half-Built Constitutional Order Collided With Judicial Activism, Political Power, and the Aftershocks of October 7

Israel runs a modern state with only a partial operating manual. There’s no formal constitution. No second legislative chamber. No presidential veto. No federal structure. No entrenched, enumerated bill of rights. Power concentrates in one place: a Knesset majority that controls the government. That majority is checked by a single institution—the High Court—whose authority grew not from a founding pact nor Knesset bill, but from layering judicial decisions onto other judicial decisions time and again.

Into that vacuum the Court turned itself into the guardian of “democratic norms.” It stepped into every gap the founders left open. It interpreted Basic Laws as constitutional chapters, reviewed legislation and appointments, and treated almost any government act as fair game for judicial scrutiny. No popular referendum ever approved that role. No Basic Law spelled it out. The Court claimed the authority on its own. Governments lived with it because they preferred to avoid hard fights.

The reform clash that exploded months before October 7 sits on that architecture. It didn’t appear out of nowhere. It is what happens when a single-chamber parliamentary system, with no written constitution and no entrenched limits, collides with a Court that has taken on the job of final arbiter over almost everything. Every actor can wrap itself in “democracy.” The government says it has the votes. The Court says it protects rights and the system’s basic conditions. Protesters point to majoritarian excess. Coalition supporters point to unelected elites blocking the will of the people. All of them use the same word and mean different things.

So now we have a half-built constitutional order that has met a government determined to reset the balance in favor of the elected branches, and a Court determined not to surrender the powers it accumulated.

There is no agreed rulebook to settle the fight. That is the heart of the crisis.

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Shalom, friends.

While the world argues slogans about “two states” and “occupation,” the state is doing something far more important to reality. It is deciding, in concrete and budgets, which communities Israel cannot afford to lose and which ones it can afford to neglect. Those decisions are being made right now — in the Gaza envelope, the Galilee, the Negev, and across Judea and Samaria.

Since October 7, the stakes shifted. Iran’s proxies are pressing on every front. The government is rebuilding the south, reinforcing the north, advancing roads (and, fingers crossed, builds) in E1, and hardening the ridge. At the same time, some development towns are still struggling, parts of the Arab and Bedouin sectors remain lawless and under-governed, and the official “priority” lists still fail to match the real threat landscape. If we don’t understand how National Priority Areas actually work, we miss the story of where the country is going — and what the state is preparing for.

We were asked by a family from shul, in the States, about some of these areas: Who would want to live there? And raise children? Why would anyone? They’ve been to Israel and plan to go back. They consider themselves Zionists. Yet, it’s hard for people to see past the narrative in the Western press. This is meant to address that somewhat. Some of those questions require personal answers. The answers herein are meant to be more of why it is necessary. Not from a religious perspective (though that can give many reasons), but out of practical needs—of both individuals and the state.

This Long Brief lays out the logic beneath the slogans: how Israel built artificial depth where none existed, how incentives and infrastructure become instruments of sovereignty, how Judea and Samaria sit at the center of the priority system whether diplomats like it or not (spoiler alert: they don’t), and what happens when the state loses the discipline that kept it alive. If you want to understand where Israel will still be standing in twenty years — and which communities will be carrying the line for the rest of us — this is something you need to read.

Geography as Destiny and the State’s Countermove

Israel doesn’t get to pretend geography is neutral. The country sits on a strip of land so narrow that a jogger could cross it. The coastal plain holds most of Israel’s people, industry, and infrastructure. It is overlooked by the high ground of Judea and Samaria. That ridge has shaped every war, every deployment, and every national decision since 1948. A hostile force sitting there can watch the entire coastal region and tear through it. Israel has no natural depth, so it has spent 75 years building artificial depth through people, towns, roads, and stubborn presence.

National Priority Areas are the state’s quiet answer to this problem. Rather than just a budget gimmick, they’re strategic placement instructions. When the government classifies a region as an NPA, it is sending a signal: these communities matter more because the country cannot survive without them. That signal drives tax relief, subsidized mortgages, roads infrastructure, and education budgets. It shapes migration. It tells the bureaucracy where to act first and, by extension, where the IDF can rely on civilians as anchors. The entire apparatus is a national triage system. Limited resources. Unlimited threats. Choose wisely.

NPAs sit at the crossroads of security doctrine, demographic strategy, and social cohesion. Ignore any of the three and the whole system buckles. You cannot secure the Galilee without Jews living there. You cannot stabilize Jerusalem without strengthening its flanks. You cannot claim strategic necessity in Judea and Samaria while starving those communities of infrastructure. Presence is security. It is deterrence. It is continuity.

This is why Judea and Samaria sit inside the priority logic regardless of public opinion on the international stage. Regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, every Israeli knows that Judea and Samaria are integral to their security. Successive Israeli governments—left, right, and unity—treated the high ground east of the Green Line as vital terrain, even when they avoided the formal NPA label. They understood that losing those heights invites danger into the country’s core. They understood that Jerusalem’s security begins miles east of the city, not at its municipal boundary. They understood that the E1 corridor between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim is not a development idea but a strategic hinge linking the capital to the Jordan Valley and the country’s eastern shield.

Israel cannot afford to let geography dictate vulnerability. So the country fights back with demography, infrastructure, incentives, and the one thing its enemies underestimate—Israelis who insist on living where the state needs them most.

The priority map is the discipline that turns exposed frontier into defensible homeland. And if the country wants to endure the next twenty years, that logic must remain sharp, unapologetic, and grounded in the same simple principle Ben-Gurion understood on day one: the state survives where its people stand.

How the State Built Depth Where None Existed

Israel didn’t stumble into the priority system. It engineered it under fire. The first governments faced a problem no Western state had encountered: a newborn country with no strategic depth, no resources, and a flood of immigrants equal to its entire existing population. Geography was hostile. Borders provisional. Neighbors were armed and waiting. The state had to decide—immediately—where Jews would live so that the country itself could live.

Early leadership understood that survival wasn’t only about winning battles. It was about putting people in the right places. Ben-Gurion kept reading the map like a battlefield. The Galilee was thin. The Negev was empty. The frontier towns were too few and too fragile. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Jews—Holocaust survivors, Jews expelled from Arab lands—were sitting in transit camps crowding the center. Leaving them there would be malfeasance. So the state moved them. Built towns for them. And, through them, anchored the periphery. Statecraft in the most literal sense.

Those development towns—Dimona, Beit She’an, Kiryat Shmona—were civilian outposts designed to hold the borders while Israel built an army, a government, and an economy. Every new neighborhood was a bet against encirclement. Every school built in the desert was an act of national insurance.

Then came 1967, and with it, a complete recalibration of vulnerability. Basically overnight Israel gained the defensive terrain it always lacked—the mountain ridge of Judea and Samaria, the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley. For the first time, Israel could look down at the threats instead of up at them. That changed everything. You don’t need a PhD in geopolitics or advanced training in warfare to see the implications. Whoever controls the ridge controls the heartland. Whoever holds the Jordan Valley controls the eastern gateway. Whoever secures Jerusalem’s flanks keeps the capital from returning to a frontline ghetto.

Israel acted accordingly, and—contrary to later political mythology—it was the Left that codified this logic first. The Allon Plan laid out the contours: Israeli communities on the valley floor, Israeli presence along the hilltop arcs, and defensible lines that would not bend to diplomatic fashion. Rabin reaffirmed this openly in 1995. A united Jerusalem, Ma’ale Adumim included. Israeli control of the Jordan Valley “in the broadest sense.” Jewish presence on key highlands. Survival instructions delivered on the floor of the Knesset.

The difficulty came not from strategy but from optics. Formally designating Judea and Samaria as NPAs would have handed Israel’s adversaries an easy propaganda victory. So the state adopted a different method: priority without declaration. It built roads, extended utilities, incentivized families, and quietly treated the strategic blocs as essential organs of national defense. While the paperwork broadly avoided the words, it’s clear the policy did not.

By the 1980s and 90s, NPAs finally entered the bureaucracy as formal categories. Dozens of government resolutions divided the country into Priority A and B zones, each with its own suite of benefits. But even then, the real map lived outside the documents. Successive governments—regardless of where they fell on the political spectrum—slid Judea and Samaria communities onto the priority tracks through parallel budgets, special exemptions, and the Settlement Division. The courts might quibble with the classifications. Diplomats would grumble. The state kept building.

The result is what Israel operates with today: a priority system that grew out of necessity, was formalized reluctantly, and functions as a hybrid—part law, part doctrine, part improvisation. The Jerusalem/Ma’ale Adumim/Jordan Valley corridor sits at its center. It was Rabin’s axis of security. It remains the backbone of national planning. It tells you more about Israeli statecraft than any ministerial press release.

The state understood that it could not afford passive geography. So it created active geography—settlement as shield, demography as strategy, infrastructure as sovereignty. The early governments built a country under siege. And they left behind a template that still guides the system. Hold the high ground. Populate the frontier. Deepen the periphery. Secure Jerusalem. Never allow emptiness where enemies could stand.

If Israeli leaders forget why the system was built, they risk unraveling the logic that kept the country alive. The priority map wasn’t invented to win arguments. It was invented to prevent funerals.

The State’s Resource Engine and Command Signal

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We spend a lot of time here talking about rockets, militias, Iran’s money pipelines, and the ridge over Ben Gurion. That is still the main story. It probably always will be. Though, I’d love, one day, to just send a single line: “All is ok, read something else.” Not sure that’s a likely outcome.

That said, there is another front where the same enemies reach for you without crossing a border, without smuggling a rifle, without sending a single “activist” down your street. They don’t need to. You already walked into range with your phone, your inbox, your child’s school newsletter, your synagogue’s website.

That front is the digital battlefield.

You do not have to be a public figure to be on it. You only have to exist as a Jew, an Israeli, or a visible supporter of the Jewish state in an age where everything about you leaks through a screen.

So let’s pull the camera back.

This Long Brief maps how hostile states, terror groups, extremists, and bored cowards on message boards turn ordinary digital life into a hunting ground. We will walk through what they want, how they look for it, the shortcuts they take, and what you can do to make their job harder.

Think of this as a field brief for people who assume they are “too small” to matter. You are not.

If Hamas can reach a conscript in an army base through a fake Instagram account, if an Iranian front can dump the medical records of strangers in Tel Aviv, if a doxxing mob in Boston can publish a spreadsheet of Jewish preschool teachers, then the distance between “online” and “my front door” is already gone.

The goal here is simple: clarity, then action.

What is this battlefield. Who fights on it. Where normal people are exposed. And how you harden your life without turning into a hermit.

The Digital Battlefield:

How Jews, Israelis, and Zionists Get Targeted One Click at a Time

In Judea and Samaria, the fight often begins with arguments over names. “West Bank” turns a three-thousand-year Jewish history into a generic edge of a river. The label itself shifts everything. Online, something similar happens, but with your life.

We talk about “content,” “activity,” “engagement,” as if the internet were just entertainment. Underneath the marketing fluff sits a harsher truth: every post, every like, every sign-up form is a piece of terrain. Someone can stand on it, shoot from it, or build a road across it.

Your Instagram feed that shows which café you visit on Fridays. Your LinkedIn that lists your employer or your campus. Your synagogue’s bulletin posts your name on the “Welcome New Members” page is there for all to see. Your high school alumni list that mentions you attended a Jewish day school. Your mother’s Facebook post brags about your IDF service.

None of that feels dangerous. It feels normal. That is the problem.

Modern digital life produces three kinds of ground.

First, the open street. Public profiles, tweets under your real name, event flyers, news articles that quote you. Anyone can see them without logging in. This is where most attackers start. A search box and some patience are enough.

Second, the back alleys. Semi-private group chats, mailing lists, password-free “members’ areas,” cloud documents that were meant to be internal but sit one careless click away from public. You might think you are in a tucked-away hallway. Chances are that you’re not.

Third, the hidden rooms. The data you never see but others store. Databases at companies, schools, charities, airlines. Data brokers who buy and sell lists of names, phones, and addresses. Government files. Once those are breached or sold, strangers know more about you than your neighbors.

States, terror groups, and freelance haters operate across all three. They walk the street, peer into alleys, and break into rooms. You experience the result as a single hit: a flood of threats, a hacked account, your name on a map.

If you imagine the internet as neutral territory where “everyone is just posting,” you will never build the right defenses. This is not neutral. It is contested ground.

The Adversaries: Who Is Hunting

The actors on this front are not random. Some wear uniforms and medals, some banners and ski masks, some hoodies and anonymity. Their motives differ; their interest in you does not.

First, state regimes that see the Jewish state and Jewish communities as fair game.

Iran sits at the top of that list. Tehran’s security services run hackers, proxies, and fake “activist” brands that stretch from the Gulf to European capitals. They do classic intelligence work—spear-phishing diplomats, trying to get into defense networks—but they also aim lower. They go after journalists, academics, small-time Israeli businesspeople abroad, anyone whose kidnapping or humiliation would pay a political dividend.

In several cases, Iranian operatives posed as scholars and NGO staff, using LinkedIn and email to invite Israelis and Jews to “conferences” in friendly cities. The real itinerary ended with a kidnapping squad waiting at the airport. Those plots were foiled, but the method tells you everything. The regime looked at professional networking as a hunting tool, not a business utility.

Groups with names like Black Shadow and Moses Staff, widely linked to Iran, breached Israeli companies, then dumped stolen data not for ransom, but for pain. Medical records, LGBTQ dating profiles, ID card scans. The victims were not generals. They were ordinary citizens told by a hostile power: we hold your secrets, and we can humiliate you on demand.

Second, terror organizations that have learned to fish in the digital pond. Hamas is not a meme factory. It is an armed Islamist movement that happens to be very comfortable on Android.

For years, its cyber unit has run a simple, effective play against Israeli soldiers: build fake personas of attractive women, send friend requests, start flirtatious chats, join WhatsApp groups, and eventually offer some app to “share photos” or “boost phone performance.” Once installed, that app turns the phone into a sensor. Camera, microphone, GPS, contacts, stored photos—the whole lot. The IDF has publicly described rounds of these operations, each time finding new spyware in soldiers’ phones.

The stakes are obvious. A single infected phone in a combat unit is a live feed into tent life, vehicles, and briefing rooms. It reveals patterns: when a base is busy or quiet, when a platoon rotates, which road they use home. That is targeting data.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad also use basic social engineering elsewhere. Fake NGOs contacting activists. “Journalists” seeking comments. Telegram channels run by handlers disguised as supporters, trying to pull in Israelis and diaspora Jews.

Third, extremist networks on the far-right, the far-left, and the jihadist fringe.

White supremacists in the United States have been using the internet to target Jews since dial-up. The template is familiar. A neo-Nazi site picks a target—say, a Jewish woman who had a dispute with a prominent racist—and posts her phone, email, and family information with a call for a “troll storm.” Hundreds of men then hammer her with calls, voicemails, emails, and messages about ovens, gas, and bullets. They trawl through her social feeds for photos of her children, then mention those kids by name in threats.

A digital mob aimed at breaking a person psychologically. The ease with which it happens rests on the amount of information the target left available.

On the far-left and within some “anti-colonial” circles, the language changes, not the method. Activists build so-called “mapping projects” that present Jewish charities, schools, and even arts organizations as nodes in a sinister Zionist network. Each node includes names, addresses, and staff roles. The call to arms is wrapped in academic jargon, but the message is simple: these people live here, go deal with them.

Islamist extremists add a religious gloss. For them, a Jewish journalist in London or a synagogue president in Paris is not just a political opponent; he or she is an enemy of God. That matters when you decide how seriously to take their threats.

Fourth, hacktivists and freelance doxxers. They might not answer to a state or cell. They do answer to the dopamine hit they get from “exposing” someone. Students who compile “Zionist watchlists” on campus. Anonymous accounts that trawl LinkedIn for employees of Israeli companies and post their faces under slogans about genocide. Self-appointed vigilantes in Boston who decide that every Jewish preschool is fair game for an interactive “map of oppression.”

These operators often use openly available tools: OSINT search engines, facial recognition services, public registries. The barrier to entry is low. Ten minutes on Google and a petty grudge can turn into a full doxx.

The lines blur. A doxxing list produced by anonymous activists might later be scraped by an Iranian intelligence unit, then shared with a Hamas-run Telegram channel, then land on a neo-Nazi forum. Once your details are out, you do not control who uses them or why.

How They Work: From Footprint To Target

Digital targeting rarely feels like a spy movie. It feels boring, then shocking.

Most attack chains begin the same way: someone looks for an easy mark. That means an exposed footprint and a clear payoff.

A Jewish student posts under her full name about Israel on a public account. A synagogue publishes a PDF membership directory with names and emails. A small Jewish nonprofit leaves its website admin panel with a default password. A soldier accepts a friend request from a stranger with a pretty profile picture. A LinkedIn profile shows “IDF reserves, intel background” in the bio.

From there, the attacker meanders a simple path.

First step: collection. They search your name, screenshot your posts, right-click your photos, dig through followers and friends. They try people-search sites. They check if your email appears in any data breaches. They note your job, school, or shul.

Second step: connection. They contact you or move closer. A DM, an email, a fake job invite, a “journalist” query. Or they skip talking to you and approach your employer, your university, your landlord, your neighbors, armed with “evidence” curated from your online life.

Third step: action. That could be doxxing—posting your info with a call to harass. It could be a phishing email designed around your habits. It could be malware delivered through a convincing pretext. It could be sending messages to your friends trying to scam them out of money. It could be an attack on your bank account. It could be a kidnapping plan using your travel schedule.

A few concrete patterns show up again and again. You’re never too small to be at risk.

Digital mobbing and doxxing

When Hamas attacked on October 7th, the information war lit up in parallel. In North America and Europe, Jewish students and professionals who took even mild pro-Israel positions found their inboxes flooded. Anonymous posters built “Zionist lists” with names and photos harvested from campus club pages and LinkedIn. Those lists often included contact details. One man in Philadelphia who spoke about Hamas online ended up with his email and address blasted out; harassers then called him fifty times an hour and sent death threats. That is what turning a digital footprint into a weapon looks like.

In Australia, activists infiltrated a WhatsApp group for Jewish creatives and academics. They leaked the entire chat history and member list online. Hundreds of Jews who thought they were talking among friends suddenly saw their names, emails, and in some cases addresses exposed to a hostile world. Some were threatened. Some were vandalized. One group of strangers captured the private life of six hundred people because someone clicked “join chat.”

Hack-and-leak intimidation

The Black Shadow breach in Israel, backed by Iran, followed a related pattern at a higher level. Hackers broke into a web host, pulled massive amounts of customer data from a gay dating app, a travel insurer, and a clinic, then dumped the data publicly, taunting victims.

They didn’t want to scam them for money —not much at least. No. They wanted to make people anxious and afraid. Gay Israelis were outed to families and employers. People saw their ID scans and medical files posted on Telegram channels run by clerics in Tehran who consider them fair game. The message from the regime was blunt: we can reach into your private life with a keystroke.

Honey traps and social engineering

The Hamas honey-trap operations against IDF soldiers are a masterclass in low-tech human hacking. Some of the apps they used were custom, but the rest were almost insultingly simple. Fake women’s accounts, flattery, patience, and a promise of more intimate content if the soldier installs an app, clicks a link, or just sends another selfie from their unit.

Hostile actors exploit ordinary desires and loneliness. Once the phone is infected or the WhatsApp group compromised, the soldier’s unit becomes a set of dots on a map. The operator on the other end can watch, listen, and take notes. Which base has poor discipline. Which patrol route repeats. Which corner of a staging area holds sensitive gear. How to disable or operate a tank.

Iran’s lures to pro-Zionist activits and former Israeli officials abroad follow the same logic. You get a polished email from a think tank offering a paid speech in Istanbul or Dubai. The invite references your real work. The logo is real. The “organizer” has a LinkedIn profile with dozens of connections. Very few people would suspect that behind the keyboard sits an intelligence officer whose goal is to hand your room number to a hit team.

Harassment as theater

In the United States, a neo-Nazi site owner handed out a Jewish woman’s personal information and told his followers to “send a message.” They did. Gunshot sounds on the phone. Promises that her child would be thrown in a gas chamber. Hundreds of messages over weeks. No one needed advanced skills. They needed a target, a phone number, and encouragement.

On campuses, the same pattern plays out with more progressive branding. Anonymous posters distribute flyers naming Jewish students as “supporters of genocide.” Online, those names get tied to petitions, boycott calls, and coordinated shaming. Many of the participants tell themselves they are engaging in “accountability.” In practice, they are participating in the same kind of swarm the neo-Nazis run, just with different slogans.

Mass panic messaging

During the current war, Israelis have received spoofed SMS messages claiming their loved one has been captured, or that their bank is about to freeze accounts unless they click a link. Some of these campaigns trace back to Hamas or allied hackers, who used bulk texting tools and caller-ID spoofing to mimic Israeli numbers.

The aim is to sow chaos and distrust. If you cannot trust the message from an official app or a familiar number, every siren and every buzz becomes suspect. That erodes resilience long before the first line of code does technical damage.

The theme through all of this: attackers do not need to break a bank’s vault. They can walk through the unlocked side door of your digital house. The easier you are to map, the easier you are to reach.

What It Looks Like From The Couch

It is one thing to talk about tactics. It lands differently when you imagine it as part of your own life.

Picture a college student in the United States. She runs her campus Hillel’s Instagram. The account posts Shabbat dinners and joint events with Black and Hispanic student groups. After October 7th, she posts a simple Israeli flag with a short message about grief.

Within a day, the comments fill with abuse. Some accounts are real classmates. Others are anonymous or foreign bots. A Tumblr blog springs up listing “Zionists on campus,” and her photo—scraped from her personal account—sits near the top. Her university email appears next to it. Soon she gets threats: some juvenile, some detailed. A fake journalist writes asking for comment “before we publish what we know about you.” She has an exam the next morning.

Or think about a suburban family in New Jersey. The local paper runs a story on a solidarity rally after a synagogue is vandalized, and quotes the father, David, as a volunteer leader. His name hits Google. A white supremacist forum picks up the article and posts his name and city under a thread about “Jew enemies in small towns.” An eager user spends ten minutes on a people-finder site and posts David’s full address and a Google Street View shot of his house.

Within days, David’s voicemail fills with accusations and threats. Someone starts ordering pizzas and deliveries to his home as a “joke.” His teenage kids find their TikTok accounts spammed with comments linking back to the thread. When David walks his dog at night, he wonders whether the car slowing near his driveway is just lost or something else.

Or take a Jewish teacher in Paris. He is not an activist. He teaches French, coaches a little basketball, and shows up at shul. His name appears on an alumni page for a Jewish high school and on a sports club Facebook album.

Activists building a “Zionist network” list scrape those pages and add him. He spots his own name for the first time when someone sends him a link: an infographic naming him a collaborator in “apartheid,” with his school labeled as a node in a web of evil. A few weeks later he notices unfamiliar faces lingering outside his building after work, staring at him, then looking at their phones. One morning the wall near his apartment door has fresh graffiti with his surname and a slur.

Or look at a former IDF soldier back at university in Tel Aviv. Her mother in the United States posts a proud Facebook announcement with photos of her in uniform and the unit number on her shoulder patch. That post is public.

An anti-Israel hacker group scrapes posts containing unit names. They match her face to her own private Instagram, which has looser approvals than she remembers. They pull her Israeli phone number from an old leak. They send a fake WhatsApp from “a former comrade,” with an attachment of “funny photos from base.” She taps it between classes. The malware now lives on her phone.

Weeks later, she sees her own name and photo in a Telegram channel where Iranian and Palestinian users gloat about “tracking Zionist pigs.” They include her home neighborhood and mention that her brother currently serves in an active unit. She has never posted about him once.

Or maybe you’re an outspoken supporter of Israel volunteering for a nonprofit. Your friend posts that you two are going on a trip with a stopover in Istanbul or Paris. Or perhaps a conference in Texas near a Sharia stronghold. Iran decides to activate a local cell to humiliate the West and to ransom you. You did buy kidnap insurance, right?

None of these people is a general, a minister, or a billionaire donor. They are targets because they are visible at just the right size: easy to reach, not important enough to have a security detail.

The digital battlefield shrinks the distance between a troll, a foreign intelligence officer, and your living room. That is the point. It is cheaper than rockets and easier to deniably outsource.

Different Theaters, Same War

The way this plays out changes with geography.

In the United States, Jews live in a country with strong speech protections and very weak privacy protections. You can say almost anything about anyone online and often get away with it. At the same time, your address, phone, and email are for sale to anyone with a credit card.

American Jews, especially on campus, face mobs from both ends of the spectrum. Neo-Nazis organize “troll storms.” Far-left coalitions run doxxing campaigns and social boycotts. The ADL recorded historic highs in antisemitic incidents since October 7, much of it tied to Israel rhetoric and amplified online.

So a Jewish student at Columbia or Berkeley navigates a public square where you can be hounded day and night, and where the infrastructure of harassment sits one Google search away. The upside is that law enforcement and civil courts have space to move once threats cross into criminal territory. The downside is the time and courage required to march through that process when you are twenty and just trying to pass exams.

In Europe, Jews live closer to the physical edge. European states have more aggressive hate-speech statutes and data protection rules. That can make open online abuse riskier for perpetrators. So some of the worst activity moves into encrypted channels and closed groups: Telegram networks, far-right forums hosted abroad, jihadist chat rooms. It festers there and then spills over into the real world.

Antisemitic assaults and vandalism have long been part of life in Paris, London, Berlin, Brussels. A large share of Jews there report hiding Jewish symbols in public, including online, to avoid trouble.

Iran and its friends have focused on Europe as a playground. They plot against synagogues in Germany, Israeli embassies in London, Jewish and Israeli targets in Istanbul or Cyprus. These plots start with online surveillance: watching who posts where, who travels, who works in what embassy. The gap between online recon and a physical attack is smaller when hostile intelligence services operate in your postal code.

In Israel, as always, the cyber and kinetic fronts blend.

The same actors who gun down families on roads invest in phishing and ransomware. Civilian data is a target not for profit, but for pressure. When Black Shadow dumped the information of Israeli LGBTQ users and patients, it was a message: we can pry into your private life whenever Tehran wants.

At the same time, Israelis are heavy users of social media and group messaging. WhatsApp groups for every class, unit, and community. Facebook pages for every cause. That makes coordination easier during emergencies; it also gives attackers countless avenues for infiltration.

Israelis have an advantage: many go through the army, where basic security discipline gets drilled in. Suspicious links. Device rules. Awareness of enemy cyber activity. That training fades over time for some, and family members who never served often lack it. Of course, it doesn’t always work when you’re partially raised by TikTok. That said, a twenty-year-old conscript may reject a suspicious DM; his father might click the same link.

Regardless of location, however, the enemy correctly bets that Jews and Israelis will treat the internet as a source of entertainment long after it became a live front.

Hardening Against Exposure

You cannot control Iran. You cannot re-educate a Hamas hacker or a bored neo-Nazi. You can control your own attack surface.

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We’ve been talking in the Daily Brief this week about Iran shoving more money, weapons, and “advisers” into Judea and Samaria — the same way it fed Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Islamic Republic isn’t confused about what this territory is for: a future launchpad into Israel’s heartland. The only people pretending it’s about “human rights” are the ones enjoying the grants.

So let’s pull the camera back.

This Long Brief maps the ground that almost nobody in the international system is honest about: Judea and Samaria, the so-called “West Bank.” The ridge that decides whether rockets can sit over Ben Gurion. The Jewish communities the world calls “settlements” and “settler violence” as if a besieged farming family outside Hebron is the problem, not the men being paid a salary to stab them.

If you want to understand what Iran is investing in, what the PA is gaming for, and what the settlers are actually doing on that ridge, you need more than headlines. You need the architecture:

Judea, Samaria, and the Settlers on the Ridge

The territory in question has two competing names (with deep implications). There is the historical term, Judea and Samaria. And a newcomer, The West Bank—which entered into common usage after 1948, when Jordan occupied and annexed this region on the West Bank of the Jordan river. In 1950, Jordan officially renamed Judea and Samaria as the West Bank during its time of occupation (an act only recognized by a few countries). This new term was a sterile geographic label that was intended to sever any Jewish historical reference. Over time, it became the dominant term internationally—by governments, diplomats, and media. Even after 1967 when the territory came back into the Israeli orbit, this remained the name in common international usage.

In contrast, Judea and Samaria are the age-old Hebrew/Biblical names for the hill country, evoking the heart of ancient Jewish homeland. These terms were common in usage up until 1948. For example, British Mandate-era documents and even early UN discussions referred to Samaria and Judea in describing the region. Israel’s government officially revived the usage of Judea and Samaria after 1967, embedding the historical claim that this land is the ancestral patrimony of the Jewish people.

Pro-Israel commentators argue that the prevalence of West Bank erases Jewish history and sovereignty claims. They note that the term West Bank was invented by an occupying power (Jordan) explicitly to dissociate the land from its Jewish roots. By using this term, the world, perhaps (in some cases) unwittingly, reinforces the notion that the area is distinctly Arab or “Palestinian,” with no inherent Jewish connection. As one Israeli observer put it, “When Israeli journalists use ‘West Bank,’ they’re adopting the terminology of those who deny Jewish history… telling the world this land is separate from the Jewish homeland.” In this view, language is a weapon. Whoever defines the name of the territory influences perceptions of legitimacy and ownership. Thus, referring to Judea and Samaria simply as the West Bank is seen as a form of narrative warfare—one that obscures millennia of Jewish history (the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, Jewish holy sites, continuous presence, etc.) and undermines Israel’s claim of sovereign rights.

It is worth noting that even within Israel, usage of the terms varies. Officially, Israel’s administrative label is the “Judea and Samaria Area,” and many (most?) Israelis prefer those historic names. Yet in practice, even Israeli officials (including Prime Minister Netanyahu) sometimes say “West Bank” when speaking to international audiences. This dual usage reflects the ongoing tug-of-war between historical narrative and political reality. In recent years, there have been U.S. political moves to encourage adopting “Judea and Samaria” in official language (e.g. proposals by lawmakers to replace “West Bank” in U.S. documents), highlighting how charged the terminology has become. Ultimately, the dominance of “West Bank” in global discourse signals the prevailing view of the area as occupied foreign territory, whereas “Judea and Samaria” asserts a Jewish indigeneity and claim—a claim that the term West Bank pointedly ignores.

International Framing on the Global Stage

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The collapse of a civilization, apparently, doesn’t come with tanks. In this era, it comes with meetings. With apologies. With a thousand “sensitivity reviews” that trade courage for calm.

Britain is the control sample of Western decay: a democracy that learned to fear its own shadow. “Islamophobia” became policy. Law became a seminar. Police learned to arrest Jews for their own safety.

And now the contagion spreads.

France surrenders, again. The Netherlands bargains. Canada and America rehearse the same moral theater under new hashtags. You can already see the sequel in New York: Mayor Mamdani elected on grievance and guilt while his bureaucrats call it “representation.”

This brief dissects how the mechanism works — how intimidation became governance — and what happens when liberalism forgets to defend itself.

Britain: Controlled Surrender

Britain is the first modern Western democracy to show how you lose a civilization without losing a war. No tanks, no coup—just decades of hesitation dressed as tolerance while gatekeepers forgot what the locks were for. The arc starts in 1989 and never really stopped.

Islamist networks learned early that liberal democracies can be out-maneuvered by their own virtues. Free speech became their cover, anti-racism their shield, and multicultural guilt their fuel. Britain, once confident in its moral vocabulary, now apologizes for using it. Each concession—don’t offend, don’t name, don’t enforce—became precedent. It became ingrained in daily life step by step. Intimidation in the streets. Paralysis in the offices. The reward structure inverted: threats made policy; candor drew discipline. An ever-shrinking space where truth could be spoken without fear of an accusation.

The operational method is simple. Replace assimilation with grievance. Redefine criticism of Islamist behavior as “Islamophobia.” Weaponize equality laws so that extremism is protected as culture. Install loyalists inside local councils, school boards, and police “community liaison” desks. Reward fear while punishing candor. Within a generation, incredibly, Britain built a bureaucracy allergic to its own defense.

The results are easy to miss only if you’re willfully ignorant. Parallel legal systems now mediate marriage and inheritance under Sharia precepts. (85+ Sharia “councils” now operate informally in the UK family-law shadow; women lose rights first.) “Community representatives” dictate police priorities. Mobs, frothing with Jew-hate, march through London chanting for Israel’s eradication while Jewish citizens are given police cautions for simply wearing a Magen David (Star of David) necklace. (2023: record CST incident counts post–Oct 7; London streets hosted weekly terror-promoting riots.) The law still exists on paper. Enforcement now depends on who is offended. That is how equality dies—in procedure, not proclamation. (This article alone could have me jailed the next time I step foot on that isle—let’s hope the political situation changes. How is it that I’m safer in the UAE than in Europe? Insanity!)

Strategically, the cost is deeper than urban unrest. Britain’s governing class now hesitates to confront any Islamist actor, domestic or foreign, for fear of igniting the same protests they once indulged. This hesitation has metastasized into national-security policy. When senior officials whisper that Britain could one day become “the first Islamist state with nuclear weapons,” they are not predicting an armed takeover. They are describing what is about to happen. Deterrence has been replaced by risk management—to the detriment of the whole of the West.

Every indicator visible in Britain now flickers across the Atlantic. The same slogans, the same intimidation, the same moral confusion—only newer, louder, and richer. America and Canada still have time, but not decades. The proof is in the pairings, which basically write themselves:

• Rushdie → campus clashes

• Rotherham → municipal “sensitivity”

• Birmingham schools → faculty capture

• London streets → U.S./Canada marches

The defense begins with clarity: one law for all, no blasphemy codes, no appeasement disguised as compassion. Integration over separatism. Citizenship over sect. Tolerance that stays within the bounds of sanity, not surrenders to terrible ideology.

The Islamists did not outwit Britain. They out-waited it. Liberalism without courage is self-terminating. The remedy is re-asserting the right to defend civilization without apology, and the parasites feeding on its guilt lose their host. Britain’s story is a live warning: a democracy that fears to offend will not survive for long.

Breeding Ground

Britain began the post-WW2 era standing upright. Immigrants arrived into a culture that expected—without hostility—that their children would be British, full stop. Teachers taught Shakespeare without apology. (1950s–1970s: assimilation still assumed.) Public life ran on a simple rule: one law, one language, one society.

That framework fractured as empire faded and a new priesthood took over the institutions. (1990s–2000s: multiculturalism as official doctrine.) The creed said all cultures are equal, history is indictment, and asking newcomers to integrate is oppression. The elites traded confidence for self-reproach. The classroom followed. The civil service followed. The press followed. Integration gave way to management of difference.

Two shocks exposed the new timidity. In 1989 “The Satanic Verses” triggered book burnings in Bradford and open calls for Rushdie’s death—on British streets, in full view. The KKK without the costumes. Open calls for murder on British streets—and not one incitement prosecution. Labour joining the call to ban the book. Commentators blamed the novelist for “provoking” believers. The lesson absorbed in every town hall across Britain (to say nothing of Muslim Brotherhood conferences across the Middle East): when Islamists threaten, the state apologizes. The second shift came as “Islamophobia” entered official vocabulary. While real anti-Muslim bigotry exists, Islamists used the term to freeze scrutiny of their own politics. Critique of Islamist doctrine became hate. Enforcement inside closed communities became “sensitive.” Officers and social workers learned the survival skill of looking away.

Mass migration in the 70s–90s concentrated South Asian Muslim communities across northern cities and London. Multilingual services and a bureaucracy of “community engagement” signaled that the host culture would adapt, not the other way around. Village patriarchy re-created in English neighborhoods. Brides imported and kept apart—sometimes forcibly kept from learning English. Informal Sharia adjudication grew because it was easier than insisting the society-within-a-society abide by the courts and the civil code. The message from the state: your norms can stand next to ours; we won’t press the point.

Operationally, Islamists read the environment correctly. They replaced assimilation with grievance, then routed that grievance through the very systems meant to protect liberty. The trigger words—race, rights, faith—became vetoes. Council leaders learned that naming an Islamist network could end careers. Headteachers who resisted hardline takeovers found themselves isolated. Police “liaison” intermediaries set priorities that advantaged the loudest clerics over the quiet majority. Each concession hardened into precedent. Precedent became habit.

A society that teaches its elites to apologize for defending its own standards will, by reflex, outsource enforcement—building sovereignty gaps: in schools, in family law, on the street, as “community leaders” take over. Once the gaps exist, they fill with parallel authority—mosque committees deciding marriage and inheritance; local power-brokers gatekeeping police access; protest movements establishing de facto blasphemy rules. The state remains on paper; in practice it bargains with a sub-state veto.

Weaponized Norms

Once Britain lost cultural confidence, the rulebook of liberalism became a toolkit for illiberals. Tolerance, anti-racism, and human-rights law were built to protect the weak. Islamists learned to use them to protect their colonizing project. The method is blunt and effective: redefine scrutiny as bigotry, punish those who name the threat, and force officials to manage offense instead of enforcing law.

The grooming-gang scandals were the clearest tell yet. For years, organized groups of Pakistani-heritage men raped and trafficked English girls while police and social services stood down. The order wasn’t written anywhere. It lived in the heads of managers who feared the label that ends careers. Don’t “racialize” crime. Don’t inflame tensions. Don’t be called Islamophobic. Children paid the price while adults laundered cowardice as sensitivity. Every Islamist watching learned that the accusation is stronger than the statute.

It was no better in schools than in the police. In Birmingham, hardline activists captured governing bodies and pushed faith-first discipline, gender segregation, and tampered with the curriculum—all in service of imposing Islam on its host by hook or by crook. Inspectors confirmed there had been an organized campaign. (Ofsted: “evidence of an organised campaign”; headteachers targeted and removed.) The response from enablers was scripted: call the exposure a hoax, smear whistleblowers as racists, litigate on process until sanctions collapse. The tactic worked well enough to chill reporting. Headteachers learned that resisting Islamization is a lonely business.

Speech protections became one-way. Hate preachers strutted under Britain’s generous free-expression umbrella, spitting incitement they could never attempt in their countries of origin. Critics who displayed a Muhammad cartoon or mocked a terror group met arrest, discipline, or social ruin for the incitement of hate. The state tolerated those who would abolish tolerance and policed those who defended it. That is simply surrender disguised as balance.

A free-speech shield for theocrats, a gag for their critics.

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