Israel marks 3 years since October 7 with memorial ceremonies. (The Times of Israel)

Yesterday was October 7, and there was more material in Israeli and world media than you could take in. I spent the day flitting around on TV and the Internet. Following are some of the items I found most striking:

1. The Times of Israel ran a piece with Israel Defense Forces data from the first three years of the war that started on that October day. It includes this:

Since the beginning of the war, over 31,500 rockets, missiles, and drones have been launched at Israel from multiple fronts. . . .

The numbers included 10,200 projectiles fired from Gaza—at least 5,000 on October 7 alone—20,000 from Lebanon, around 50 from Syria, 90 from Yemen, and 1,200 from Iran. The IDF did not detail how many drones and missiles had been launched from Iraq at Israel amid the war.

The figures did not include rockets—said by Israel to be in the thousands at minimum—launched by Gazan terror groups that misfired and landed in the Strip, those launched by Hezbollah that landed short in Lebanon, and ballistic missiles launched by Iran that failed to reach Israel.

Israel’s size is about 27,000 square kilometers including the West Bank. Comparisons with European countries: Belgium, about 30,000 sq km; Netherlands, 41,000; Ireland, 70,000.

In other words, those countries are roughly equal to or considerably larger than Israel in size. Yet, with Israel under attack from multiple directions, each has stepped up its criticism of Israel and advocated, or implemented, punitive measures. They include import bans, export restrictions, halting defense cooperation, calling to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement, and in Ireland’s case, choosing this moment to formally recognize the State of Palestine.

The collective souls of these countries aren’t even capable of imagining what it is for a small country to be targeted by more than 30,000 projectiles in three years. But they all know what Israel should do and punish it for not complying.

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2. Seventy-eight high-ranking retired US military professionals signed an open letter “rejecting [the] genocide allegation against Israel.”

They include “former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Gen. Philip Breedlove, former US Strategic Command chief Gen. Kevin Chilton, former Marine Corps commandant Gen. James Amos, former US 7th Fleet commander Vice Adm. John Bird, former CENTCOM deputy commander Vice Adm. Mark Fox, and Urban Warfare Institute executive director John Spencer.”

The letter states:

Many of the signatories . . . have commanded United States armed forces in combat against enemies who regularly hide behind civilians and put those civilians intentionally in harm’s way. Fighting under those complexities is especially difficult. We understand that the loss of civilian life in Gaza is tragic. But we also know that such tragic outcomes do not necessarily violate the law of armed conflict. . . .

Assessments of Israeli combat operations, undertaken by some of the signatories to this letter, describe a military taking an unprecedented combination of precautions to avoid civilian casualties; not one following orders to destroy Palestinians as a group. The IDF has provided civilians with numerous advance warnings—leaflets, phone calls, text messages, radio and TV broadcasts, and social media notices—evacuation instructions, protected corridors, and tactical pauses to help move them out of harm’s way....

Israel has not committed genocide but rather set a high bar for how to conduct urban warfare against an enemy who will stop at nothing, including the death of its own civilians. . . . [T]he precedent established today regarding Israel will shape the conditions under which American forces fight tomorrow. Protecting civilians and preserving the ability of our nation to defend itself requires us to defend the truth when the laws of war are being distorted to make false charges of genocide.

3. Gad Saad offered this statement on Facebook:

Three years ago today, an attempted genocide on the Jewish people took place. Rather than the world uniting with the Jews against a common enemy of humanity (Islamic terrorists), the West decided that Hamas (Gaza) was deserving of full empathy and the Jews were the ones committing a “genocide.” The inversion of reality is beyond what Orwell or Kafka could have imagined. The explosion of Jew-hatred post-October 7 highlights a very ugly reality: Scratch the surface and you quickly sink into the infinity pool of arguably the oldest hatred known to mankind.

Indeed, neither Orwell nor Kafka, with their genius for depicting the absurd, could have imagined Israel being harried from all sides to look out for the welfare of the Gazans, to whom it has provided enormous quantities of aid throughout the war, while at the same time being put in the dock for “genocide.”

4. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani offered quite a different statement:

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

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

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

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

Note that Mamdani expends 49 words on the purported subject of the statement—“the Third Anniversary of October 7”—and then 162 words reestablishing his creds. The mayor makes sure to tick off every one of the mendacious buzzwords—genocide, war crimes, occupation, apartheid—that are ritually and robotically mouthed by all those who have never for a moment considered Israel a legitimate country and work constantly for its destruction.

Would it be too much to ask that all of New York City’s Jews cease to have any contact with this man?

(Israel Defense Forces)

If you’ve followed the Gaza war between Israel and terrorist organizations that broke out on October 7, 2023, it’s likely that, a substantial portion of the time, you were getting your “news” directly or indirectly from terrorists themselves.

The Times of Israel reports:

The Israel Defense Forces on Thursday said it determined that 170 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who were identified as journalists following their deaths were actually members of terror groups.

“Following extensive research, the IDF is now revealing that 170 Gazans killed during the war who were presented as journalists and media personnel were in fact serving as terrorists for terror organizations in the Strip, foremost among them Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” the army said. . . .

Seventeen of the people on the list invaded Israeli territory in the October 7, 2023, attack. . . .

Meaning they were among those who overran southern Israel on that day to slaughter more than a thousand Israelis and others, and abduct another 251 people.

Some of the journalists appearing on the IDF’s list also worked for international media outlets, including Reuters, CNN, BBC, AFP, AP, Le Monde, ABC Australia and others.

One might think these major outlets weren’t doing a great job of vetting their “reporters.” But was it a matter of vetting? These organizations’ coverage of the fighting was so skewed against Israel and so sympathetic to its enemies (see, for instance, here, here, here, here) that they were likely to regard these “reporters” as “freedom fighters” in any case.

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The terror organizations themselves weren’t reticent about who these “journalists” actually were:

The 170 names are published by the IDF on a dedicated website. Each includes the name and role of the journalist/terror operative, along with their civil and military ID numbers.

The military said it was publishing “verified evidence, including visual material and documents produced by the terror organizations, some of which were found in the field, indicating the organizational affiliation of those terrorists and the roles they held within the terror organizations. . . .”

“The information now being revealed illustrates the gap between the picture presented to the world and the reality on the ground, and presents additional and conclusive evidence that the IDF does not deliberately and systematically target journalists, but rather terror organizations and their terrorists, in accordance with international law.”

On the information front, Israel has faced steep odds in the Gaza war. Not only did it fight terrorists, but terrorists themselves were reporting from the front and helping to spread the memes about “genocide,” “starving babies,” and “killing journalists.”

Behind it was the malfeasance of the global media. The results include damaging Israel’s reputation so severely that it will take a long time—if ever—to redress, and helping to incite a worldwide wave of antisemitism so extreme that it endangers Jews everywhere.

Cockpit attack puts spotlight on flydubai, a key air link for Israelis since Oct. 7. (The Times of Israel)

A flydubai flight headed to Tel Aviv was seized by an Omani copilot who wanted to crash it and kill everyone onboard—reportedly including 174 passengers, all but eight of them Israelis.

His plans were thwarted by the courage of the Indian pilot—who, attacked by him with an emergency ax and bleeding profusely, managed to get the cockpit door open—and four Israeli passengers who stormed the cockpit, subdued the copilot, gave the pilot emergency care, and enabled two other flydubai pilots, fortunately onboard, to get enough control of the plunging and spinning plane to land it safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.

One of the four Israeli heroes, Tzvika Manes, told Israeli TV: “It was a very difficult scenario . . . but because we’re Israelis, so we responded quickly.”

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Yes. Of course it’s possible that, in such a situation, non-Israeli people would respond quickly and successfully. But the chances are higher with Israelis because . . . we’re used to this kind of thing. Our state has been smack in the middle of the Middle East for 78 years. It’s been an ongoing fight for survival, and we have strong survival instincts—and skills.

Of course, whenever fighting breaks out, we get avalanches of criticism—particularly from Western Europe, which hasn’t known a war for 81 years and whose countries don’t have tens of thousands of rockets and missiles targeting them; and from quarters in the US, a very large country bordered by two oceans and peaceful neighbors. Proportion! Restraint! In reality, what happened on the flydubai plane is what happens with us at the national scale—grit and heroism in the face of murderous aggression.

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No doubt, largely out of wishful thinking, we screw up sometimes—most notably in the run-up to the Yom Kippur War and to the October 7 massacre. But since that massacre, amid a fog of libels about “genocide” and “starving babies,” we’ve fought effectively—gravely weakening Hamas, Hizballah, and—in tandem with the US—Iran, striking heavy blows against the Houthis. Since April—with one exception on June 7—Iran, while continuing to pummel other countries in the region, hasn’t launched missiles at Israel. Of course, that can change again—but Iran fears us, for good reason.

Civilian casualties? On the ground, beyond all the slander, we’re good, too, at reducing those. Fighting in Gaza in the most difficult urban warfare environment in history, against Hamas—an enemy taking refuge in hundreds of miles of tunnels while starving and torturing Israeli hostages in them, embedding weaponry and command centers in hospitals, mosques, schools, and homes—Israel achieved a combatants-to-civilians casualty ratio no worse than, and probably better than, the US in Mosul and Raqqa.

You see, we live here; we know what we’re doing. For those still not too blinded by hatred to see it, what happened on the flydubai flight is a microcosm of the larger reality.

Israeli envoy to US Yechiel Leiter’s son seriously wounded in terror attack. (Jerusalem Post)

On Wednesday, September 23, Israeli reserve soldier Neria Leiter was critically wounded in a car-ramming attack near Beit Horon, an Israeli West Bank community about ten miles from Jerusalem. The attacker, Mahmoud Suleiman, was shot and killed by other soldiers at the scene.

As widely reported, Neria Leiter is a son of Israeli ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter. Another son, Moshe Yedidia Leiter, was killed in fighting in Gaza on November 10, 2023.

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Neria Leiter suffered a severe, life-threatening head injury in the ramming attack. At the time of writing on Friday afternoon, he appeared still to be hanging on to life at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem.

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On Thursday, September 24, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, speaking by video to the UN General Assembly in New York, stated:

We affirm that we have fulfilled our obligations, carried out a comprehensive national reform program, and upheld our commitment to international law, to shunning violence and terrorism.

Yet, also on September 24, Palestinian Media Watch reported that the Palestinian Authority had paid its highest tribute to Mahmoud Suleiman, the car-rammer on Wednesday:

The PA praised . . . Suleiman as a “Shahid“ . . . a Martyr who died for Allah.

Both in its official PA daily and on its official radio station, the PA stressed that terrorist Suleiman, who deliberately rammed his car into Israeli soldiers at an Israeli military checkpoint, died and “ascended to the heavens” as “a Martyr.”

The PA daily Al-Hayat Al Jadida, reversing perpetrator and victim, put it this way:

Israeli occupation forces continued to escalate their aggression. . . . Mahmoud Suleiman, a 29-year-old young man, died as a Shahid for Allah after being shot by the occupation while in his car. The occupation forces claimed that the Shahid ran over a soldier and seriously injured him.

Palestinian Media Watch notes:

Glorifying terrorists and terrorist murderers who are killed while attacking Israelis as Martyrs for Allah has been standard practice in the PA for decades. For example, 10 years ago, when a terrorist murdered a 13-year-old girl in her sleep, Palestinian Media Watch documented that both PA Chairman Abbas’ Fatah Movement and the PA’s official news agency WAFA immediately gave the murderer the honorable title of “Shahid.”

Fatah posted a photo of the perpetrator of that attack with the text:

Martyr (Shahid) Muhammad Taraireh, who carried out today’s operation in which one female settler was killed and a male settler was injured.

Comments:

1. When Abbas told the General Assembly on Thursday that the PA “shun[s] violence and terrorism,” he was brazenly lying. The Palestinian Authority may not have personally groomed the car-rammer, but it systematically instills murderous hatred of Israelis and treats killers as its ultimate heroes.

2. Dennis Prager has stated: “The Palestinians are extremely lucky that their enemies are the Jews, because otherwise nobody would know about them.” Or, if they did know about them, they would truly demand that they reform and, as long as they don’t, see granting them a state as the height of madness.

3. The upcoming Sukkot holiday commemorates the Israelites’ forty-year trek through the desert to the Promised Land. Even when we find ourselves in the land, the trek continues.

IDF to recruit soldiers early from pre-military academy and service tracks. (The Times of Israel)

Israeli military affairs commentator Yossi Yehoshua reports (Hebrew original here) on an overlooked phenomenon:

After nearly three years of war, it is precisely Israel’s teenagers who are offering no small reason for optimism. They volunteer, sign up for a year of national service, join pre-military academies, seek to prepare for the army and want to perform meaningful service. Above all, many of them understand that the country is living through a period in which it is not enough merely to talk about responsibility. You also have to take it. . . .

Since October 7, war is no longer something they know only from textbooks. Teenagers have seen communities evacuated, hostage families, funerals, reservists returning to the front again and again and the ongoing fighting. How have they responded? Since the war began, demand among teenagers to join pre-military academies has jumped by about 50%, while demand for those programs, for gap-year service programs and for combat service in the IDF has reached an all-time high. [my emphasis]

Since the start of the war, 32 new pre-military academies and branches have been established. About one-third of their activity centers are located in the Gaza border communities, along the northern border, in the Jordan Valley and in outlying areas....

Competition for places in the most sought-after academies is intense. In some, the number of applicants reaches into the thousands, several times the number of available spots. . . .

Within the divided, angry and exhausted Israel that has emerged from the war, there are thousands of young people choosing a different path.

They do not ignore the arguments, but they do not allow those arguments to run their lives either. They simply ask where they are needed. And then they go there.

Imagine an alternate universe where these young Israelis would be a source of inspiration for a tired and cynical Western world. Where, instead of piles of lies and libels about “genocide” and “war crimes,” the “people that dwells alone” could be allowed to be the “light unto the nations” that in many ways they are.

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The contrast with the TikTok generation in the US could not, sadly, be sharper. Israeli young people understand what terrorism is and fight it; “a recent Harvard/Harris poll released shows that 60 percent (%) of Gen Z American voters, aged 18 to 24, expressed support for Hamas over Israel in the ongoing conflict.”

Twelve years ago, in the midst of the 2014 Israel-Hamas war, Israeli journalist and author Matti Friedman published two classic articles about media abuse of Israel (one of them fully available here, the other behind a paywall at The Atlantic). Friedman attributed the phenomenon—rightly in my view—to a hunger to display alleged Jewish moral failings.

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That war lasted seven weeks. The war that started on October 7, 2023, has of course lasted much longer—allowing an extended orgy of Israel-abuse that has unleashed all the demons of antisemitism that may still have been constrained.

Inevitably, then, the real stories about Israeli resilience and heroism get lost. Including the story of a remarkable generation.

US planning to block Abbas from addressing UN. (The Jerusalem Post)

From The Times of Israel:

For the second year in a row, the United States has denied Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s application for an entry visa to speak next week at the UN General Assembly. . . .

Abbas’s office was notified of the decision on Wednesday, with similar rejections issued to dozens of other PA officials who were hoping to travel with him....

In a Wednesday statement explaining the ban, the State Department said the PA violated US legislation that penalizes Ramallah if it targets Israel in international organizations, advances the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state, pays stipends to terrorists or glorifies violence. . . .

US President Donald Trump’s administration took the same decision last year in what was seen as part of an effort to undermine a conference that France and Saudi Arabia were hosting ahead of the General Assembly’s main week that was aimed at promoting a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

No such meeting is being held this year, and Ramallah was hoping that Washington would ease its stance on the matter.

By not easing its stance, the administration is making a good move. Abbas’s Palestinian Authority indeed continues to “target Israel in international organizations, advance the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state, pay stipends to terrorists [and] glorify violence.”

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Violence against Israelis is glorified throughout Palestinian society—and most egregiously in its education system, since it means poisoning the minds of generations. See an article last month by Adam Kredo in the Washington Free Beacon on “school-wide celebrations of the atrocities of October 7.”

Excerpts:

Palestinian Authority-run schools in the West Bank are glorifying Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree, using the Israeli death toll to teach third graders math lessons and hosting school-wide assemblies where children publicly commit to “cool the fire in our heart with the body parts and screams of soldiers . . .” according to a new investigation obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon. . . .

The PA’s schools have long been notorious for exposing schoolchildren to virulently anti-Israel as well as antisemitic ideology. But antisemitic indoctrination in the West Bank has soared to new levels following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, which is now being routinely glorified by PA schools and worked into children’s lessons, including into completely unrelated subjects such as math.

The new investigation—assembled through pictures, videos, and documentation unearthed by the Israeli research institute Palestinian Media Watch (PMW)—reveals how PA schools integrated Oct. 7 into its lesson plans and celebrated Oct. 7 through organized school-wide ceremonies where children recited poems praising the Hamas fighters who raped, tortured, and murdered more than 1,200 Israelis. . . .

“Multiplication exercise: The [Oct. 7] Al-Aqsa Flood: At least 150 Israelis were killed in one day. What was the number killed in nine days? Solution: 9 X 150 = 1,350 killed,” states one math problem from the Al-Kuwait Co-ed Elementary School run by the PA. “May Allah protect you! Excellent!” the teacher responded on the child’s worksheet. . . .

At least 11 PA schools held assemblies shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks that featured “readings and posters celebrating Oct. 7, referring to the murder, the blood, the death, and the torture,” according to PMW’s report. . . .

In another reading from the West Bank’s Shweikeh Mixed Elementary School, another young girl welcomes “October, month of blood.”

“We came to you (i.e., Israel) in multitudes, open your door, we are death. We will let you taste eternity in fire [of hell],” the girl proclaims in a video captured on Nov. 5, 2023. “Only blood do we see as an ally, and we will cool the fire in our heart with the body parts and screams of soldiers. Open your door, we are death, or close it – we will get to you, the target is identified. . . . ”

...PMW notes in its report that the growing list of Western countries that have recognized a state of “Palestine” diplomatically—including China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada—”have chosen to ignore” the vast body of evidence showing the PA “and its Ministry of Education are fundamentally terror-promoting and terror-celebrating entities.”

“The U.S. and E.U. countries have demanded the PA make changes in schoolbooks. However, as this report shows, the entire PA Ministry of Education is the breeding ground for Palestinian terror that must be completely dismantled,” said PMW founder [Itamar] Marcus. “Making some symbolic changes in school books without replacing the educational directors, school principals, and teachers is like treating a cancer with aspirin.”

These days much of the world’s cause celebre for alleged evil is . . . Israel, not the Palestinian societies in the West Bank and Gaza. But those societies, both of which—among much else—systematically inundate children’s minds with murderous hatred, are unfortunately among the most evil on Earth.

The new "deconfliction" deal for Lebanon was reached between the Vance-led US and the Iranian delegations at Geneva when Qatar teamed up with the Iranians. Not surprisingly, the deal leaves out Israel and is clearly to its detriment.

[Reminder: My recently published memoir, Israel—A Place to Call Home: A Real-Life of Story of Aliyah, is available in Kindle or print.]

Share Israel on My Mind with P. David Hornik

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With the IDF controlling about two-thirds of Gaza, boxing in Hamas while greatly beefing up the protection of the Gaza border communities, this is currently Israel’s most successful front in its continuing multifront war. The reason you haven’t been hearing about any rockets or other aggressions from Gaza is that Hamas, while still there in a much-weakened state, hasn’t been able to perpetrate them.

[Reminder: My recently published memoir, Israel—A Place to Call Home: A Real-Life of Story of Aliyah, is available in Kindle or print.]

The article looks at the highly problematic situation in the current Israel-Hizballah war, in which Israel is being demanded by the US to restrain its self-defensive measures while Hizballah is free to fire wherever it wants. The US, concerned about its fragile ceasefire with Iran as well as a totally ineffectual Israeli-Lebanese peace process, is putting demands on its Israeli ally that are unjust and unacceptable.

[Reminder: My recently published memoir, Israel—A Place to Call Home: A Real-Life of Story of Aliyah, is available in Kindle or print.]

[AND ANOTHER NOTE: My recently published memoir, Israel—A Place to Call Home: A Real-Life of Story of Aliyah, is available in Kindle or print.]

26 years later, the IDF restores its South Lebanon security zone. (The Times of Israel)

It’s national-elections time in Israel. We’ll be going to the polls in late October, though there’s talk of pushing it up to September. Campaigns are already heating up.

A veteran immigrant from the US going back 41 years, I can recall what seem now like distant eras in Israeli history.

I can recall election campaigns in which the central issue was always the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria) and Gaza. “Right-wing” meant you wanted us to retain them—for religious-historical or security reasons, or both. “Moderate left-wing” meant you wanted us to give up parts of them, while retaining what was needed for security. “Left-wing” meant you wanted us to give up almost of them, replacing our presence in them with a Palestinian state in a “two-state solution.”

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Over the years, the left-wing positions took a serious blow—and then an even more serious one.

The first was the Second Intifada (2000–2005), an onslaught of Palestinian terror, launched from the West Bank and Gaza, that involved suicide bombings of buses, cafés, a discotheque, a Passover Seder at a hotel, and other murderous attacks.

The onslaught was preceded by an earnest effort by Prime Minister Ehud Barak, at Camp David in July 2000 under President Bill Clinton’s auspices, to reach a final peace agreement with Yasser Arafat based on the two-state solution. With his back to the wall on the peace issue, Arafat responded with war.

The Israeli left emerged from the Second Intifada seriously weakened, and has never regained the strength it had in the 1990s.

But still, the two-state fixation continued. From 2006 to 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, held intensive talks about it with Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas. Again, the effort met a solid wall of refusal—this time from Abbas, representing, even if not explicitly, the Palestinian view that Israel has no legitimate place at all between the river and sea.

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And then, in 2020, the two-state solution made a comeback—though in a much-modified form—in President Trump’s Deal of the Century, broached to Israel by Jared Kushner.

Because the “Deal” shrank the Palestinian state to smaller proportions, allowed Israeli settlements to remain in place, and made serious provisions for Israel’s security, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was able to take the official stance of accepting it. This time Mahmoud Abbas—still (and still today) the head of the Palestinian Authority—refused to even discuss it.

Then, on October 7, 2023, came the second great—probably fatal—blow to the old left-wing stance, in the form of the slaughter of Israelis in the Gaza vicinity that occurred on that day.

Two and a half years later—amid an ongoing multifront war sparked by what happened on that day—talk of two states, or even territorial compromise, is nowhere to be found in the campaign rhetoric.

Indeed, while the Netanyahu-led coalition is considered right-wing, two of the leaders of the opposition bloc, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman, also have—or have long been thought to have—distinctly right-wing profiles.

Not only that. Far from contemplating territorial retreats, Israeli forces are now deployed in considerable parts of Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. And there are no significant left-wing calls to “stop occupying Arab land” and pull them out of there.

The forces are in those places to prevent further buildups of terror forces like the one that was allowed to develop in Gaza—up to the nightmare of October 7. And while Israelis keep bitterly arguing among ourselves, the need to keep our forces in those places, at least for the time being, enjoys a quiet consensus.

What, then, is the election campaign about?

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The anti-Netanyahu bloc emphasizes: the fiasco of October 7 itself and what led up to it; the Netanyahu government’s refusal to allow a state commission of inquiry into the debacle; its refusal to pass meaningful legislation to draft ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis into the Israeli army, which has a serious manpower shortage; and what appear lately to be more equivocal results than the “victories” over Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran that the governing coalition was celebrating not long ago.

None of these criticisms of the current coalition would be called “left-wing” positions. Indeed, in today’s Israel it’s not easy to say what “right” and “left” even mean; it would be a subject for another article.

What is clear, though, is that we’re in a new era. Indeed, to contemplate creating another independent Palestinian entity anywhere in the space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, or allowing another buildup of terror forces at or near any of our borders, you would have to be crazy.

Smoke rises from an Israeli airstrike in Beirut. (The Times of Israel, March 2, 2026)

The Jewish holiday of Purim is just about here. Among other things, it celebrates the demise of Haman, the evil Persian vizier who aimed to exterminate all the Jews then living in Persia. Fast-forward 2,500 years, and we find another evil Persian-Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, meeting his demise a few days ago on Saturday—not quite Purim but very close to it.

For Khamenei, exterminating all the Jews—in this case, in Israel—wasn’t a sudden inspiration as it is for Haman but a central obsession for decades. This purported man of religion, in his long tenure at the helm of Iran, had absolutely nothing to contribute to the world but hate, terrorism, and war, and to his own country—oppression, corruption, and poverty. No wonder ecstatic celebrations erupted in the streets of Iranian cities at the news of his death.

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But while Khamenei was, in my estimation, evil but not crazy, the Iranian officials who’ve replaced him appear to have that latter quality, too. As if it weren’t enough to be under a combined assault by the West’s two most powerful, technologically advanced armies, the US and the Israeli, they’ve also chosen to strike at Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Jordan—and now also a French naval base in the UAE and a British military base in Cyprus.

The Saudis, for their part, are already showing an interest in joining the American attack. As for Britain and France, it’s difficult to get Messrs. Starmer and Macron to join any campaign against a terror regime. Of course, while Israel was under concerted assault by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizballah, the Houthis, Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq, and Iran itself, Starmer and Macron were good at lambasting us and embargoing arms to us. How different they must feel to be, themselves, at the receiving end of aggression—though whether it’s enough to finally make them show backbone and moral character is highly doubtful.

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Greece, however, an ally of Israel that lives under the shadow of Turkish jihadism and is attuned to reality, is already sending two battleships to aid its neighbor and ally Cyprus.

At any rate, those now trying to steer the wobbly Iranian ship of state would appear to be irrational types who want to lash out in all directions and, if possible, draw both the Arab world and Europe into the fray. With US and Israeli warplanes already streaking uncontested through their skies and raining projectiles on their government and military strongholds, they seem determined—not to try to contain the conflict but to widen it as much as possible. It’s hard to see how this benefits them.

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And now Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hizballah—severely weakened by Israel in September and October 2024—appears to have caught the virus. Apparently feeling a need to salute the martyred saint Khamenei—and under heavy pressure from Iran to do so—on Sunday night Hizballah chose to direct a few missiles and drones at its southern neighbor. Israel is already responding with what the Israeli chief of staff calls a “days-long offensive”—against which the dilapidated Iranian terror proxy is very close to defenseless.

I’m writing these words in Be’er Sheva, the southern Israeli city where I’ve been living for 17 years (before that, a short sojourn in Tel Aviv, a much longer one in Jerusalem and its environs, and before that, an even longer one in upstate New York, where, at least literally, I originated). Since this war started on Saturday, I and the fellow residents of my building have been dashing down and up between our apartments and our bomb shelter three or four times a day. Earlier today, in a different part of Be’er Sheva, an Iranian ballistic missile got through the air defenses and wounded 19 people.

This is not new; the pace of dashing downstairs-and-upstairs was much heavier, for instance, on October 7, 2023, the day of a horrible massacre that ignited a long, still-ongoing round of hostilities. But two years and five months later, it can be said—however the current conflagration will, unpredictably, end up—that the vicious assault launched by the terror kingdom that day with Hamas as its spearhead hasn’t been a winning proposition for that kingdom, leaving it in much worse shape than if it hadn’t launched it.

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MEanwhile the first two ARC reviews have been posted at the Amazon site of my new memoir Israel: A Place to Call Home, which is already available in paperback and can be preordered in Kindle format for April 5 delivery. It’s a story of how, with not too much in my personal history that would “predict” it, I made the decision to relocate all the way to the ancient Jewish homeland halfway across the world, and what it’s been like acclimating and becoming part of the very colorful and very challenging reality that we have here.

One of the reviewers is kind enough to call my book “an incredible journey for the reader,” and the other calls it “a heartfelt and honest account of identity, belonging, and new beginnings.” Dashing down and up between the apartment and the bomb shelter, trying to keep up with all the dizzying news, this is certainly a morale booster. Happy Purim.

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This memoir tells the story of my somewhat unlikely aliyah (move to Israel) from a quiet life in upstate New York, and includes a new final chapter on “October 7 and Its Aftermath.”

I could give a description here, but there’s already an excellent three-paragraph description at the Amazon page. This book is not a 500-page job that might bog you down, but, I think it’s fair to say, a crisp, concise, 200-page story of a life, marked by a huge transition from the expansive, relatively secure United States to the tiny Jewish state on the shore of the Mediterranean in a troubled region.

Copies have meanwhile been sent to reviewers, and their reviews should be up on the Amazon page by about . . . April 5, the day when the Kindle’s coming out.

I hope you’ll have a look!

Meanwhile, though, I managed to send out some poems and, among other things, three of them were accepted by OfTheBook, a site that

emerged in the aftermath of October 7, born out of a desire to amplify Jewish voices in an increasingly hostile world. . . . OfTheBook has two main strands: the re-publication of canon texts with new introductions and commentary, and an online journal publishing short fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry.

It’s an excellent site and I’m honored that my three poems are now appearing on it:

https://ofthebookpress.com/p-david-hornik-three-poems/

“Morning Bus Ride from Be’er Sheva to Jerusalem” and “Spring in Ein Kerem” are both clearly situated in Israel. “Night Train” isn’t situated in it explicitly, though I can disclose that the event that inspired it did occur in an Israeli train station. “Morning Bus Ride” and “Night Train” are recent poems written earlier this year (fittingly, I guess, since both of them deal with public transportation); “Spring in Ein Kerem” is an oldie going back—I’m not sure—maybe 35 years.

I hope you’ll have a look, and reactions and comments are welcome.

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Troops advance in south Gaza. (The Times of Israel)

In a column this week in the Wall Street Journal, the historian Walter Russell Mead made some observations about the Gaza war that may be the most compelling I’ve come across since the war began almost two years ago:

[T]he Western leaders who flaunt their self-perceived moral purity as they condemn Israel forget the foundations on which they stand. Today’s liberal, rules-based Western order is the product of a far bloodier history than anything Israelis have done or even could do in Gaza.

The liberal world order whose fruits modern Europeans have enjoyed for so long is grounded on the Allied victory in World War II. The Allies, like the Israelis, weren’t the aggressors in that war, but in their efforts to extirpate the scourges of Nazi nihilism and Japanese militarism, they killed as many as three million German and another one million Japanese civilians [my emphasis, here and below]. They created mass homelessness, destroyed some of the world’s greatest cultural and religious monuments, disrupted medical and educational services, and subjected millions to ethnic cleansing on an unprecedented scale.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and British Labour leader Clement Attlee scoffed at suggestions that the Allies provide humanitarian aid to enemy civilians while the war continued. As the British Foreign Office reminded Lord Lothian, its ambassador to the U.S., “supplies admitted to the occupied territories either fall into enemy hands or release other supplies for the enemy.”

Those who criticize Israel for demanding the return of all hostages as the price of a cease-fire forget that Allied demands for unconditional surrender had much bloodier consequences in World War II. Those demands were issued in the full knowledge that they would likely prolong the war and increase civilian suffering. But FDR thought this might be a feature rather than a bug. The Germans, in his view, had been willing to venture another world war because the first one had ended without any serious fighting inside Germany itself. Real peace could come only if the Germans and the Japanese had the spirit of resistance beaten out of them.

As for ethnic cleansing, more than 11 million Germans were forced from their long-term homes in Poland and Czechoslovakia after the guns fell silent, often in winter amid terrible shortages of food, medicine and safe water.

. . . Israel faces genuinely hellish choices in Gaza. But Western leaders who insist that Israel’s actions are historically unprecedented and morally unjustifiable betray an ignorance of history and unseriousness of purpose that raise fundamental questions about their fitness for the offices they hold.

There is not much that can be added about the hellish hypocrisy Israel has been subjected to by Western countries and their leaders in this war. But, a few points:

1. Western countries pelting Israel with accusations are not located in the heart of the Middle East and are not under murderous attack by Sunni and Shiite jihadists on all sides. Yet they express constant, smug outrage at Israel’s efforts to cope with that reality.

2. Israel finds itself in an appalling double jeopardy. On one hand, it’s been required—in a manner unprecedented in the history of warfare—to devote tremendous resources to feeding and caring for an enemy population. Israelis remember the horrifying scenes on October 7, 2023, when masses of Gazan civilians poured across the border in the wake of the terrorists to join the onslaught of murder, rape, mutilation, and kidnapping; and, within Gaza, lined the streets to wildly cheer passing vehicles flaunting kidnapped or murdered Israelis. But Israel, under enormous pressure to do so, has gone on tending to all the Gazans’ needs.

On the other hand, none of this—alongside unprecedented measures to reduce civilian casualties with warnings and evacuations from combat zones—has stopped Israel from being assailed with blood libels about “starvation” and “genocide,” not only in the Islamic world but throughout the Western world as well. It’s double jeopardy of the nastiest kind.

3. Western countries should, instead of embargoing arms to Israel, be supplying it liberally with the weaponry it needs to fight jihadist terror that threatens them as well; and instead of turbocharging the blood libels, be praising Israel for its strenuous attempts to minimize the carnage. Instead they ply it with relentless demands that, if heeded, will ensure that Hamas stays on its feet and the bloodshed continues.

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Authorities indentify the four Israelis killed in Iranian missile attack on Beersheva. (The Times of Israel)

Morning. A little more than 24 hours ago, yesterday morning, we were in the bomb shelter in the basement of our building — for the third time in quick succession. Iran was firing missiles in a staggered sequence, and our Home Front Command seemed confused by it.

It was during that third time in the bomb shelter, here in Be’er Sheva, that we heard the tremendous bang of an interceptor hitting a missile not far overhead. Out of two missiles arriving here in that sally, that was the one that was downed. The other was not downed — instead pulverizing an apartment building and killing an 18-year-old soldier who had been training in an elite unit, his girlfriend, his mother, and an older woman who was an active protester for the hostages in Gaza.

That was how the “ceasefire” began for us — with Iran sneaking in some last missiles and snuffing out four lives, including two very young people.

When, about three hours later, the ceasefire having formally begun, Iran fired still more missiles, this time at northern Israel, our leaders thought — as any leaders would have — that we had to react. That was when, with the warplanes on the way to Iran, President Trump had his now-famous, profane tantrum at Israel and lambasted our prime minister over the phone, and all the planes were recalled except one that executed a minor, purely symbolic attack.

So where do we stand? Is it time to celebrate the defeat of Iran, the demise of its nuclear and ballistic-missile endeavors? Or too early for that, with disturbing reports saying too much of Iran’s means of destruction have survived?

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Here in Israel we barely had time to ponder those questions before — just about 24 hours after the deaths in Be’er Sheva — we got the news that, yesterday, seven soldiers had been killed in Gaza when “a Palestinian terror operative planted a bomb on the Puma armored combat engineering vehicle the soldiers were in.”

If anybody was feeling jubilant, it was enough to shatter it.

And it has been that way since the Israel–Iran war — the war pitting Israel against Iran and its proxies — began with the calamity of October 7, 2023. An indescribable rollercoaster of feelings, from abysmal despair to amazement and glee at our astounding intelligence and military achievements.

And this is what it’s like when you’re at the cusp of civilization and can’t just theorize about, make excuses for, or even endorse barbarism, but have no choice but to fight it — while getting widely reviled for doing so.

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And what of those assessments of where things stand now, how hard Iran has been hit, what the future holds?

A CNN-cited “early US intelligence assessment” that’s making the rounds says the

US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of [Iran’s] nuclear program and likely only set it back by months.... Two of the people familiar with the assessment said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed. One of the people said the centrifuges are largely “intact.” Another source said that the intelligence assessed enriched uranium was moved out of the sites prior to the US strikes.

Israeli intelligence disagrees,

assess[ing] that US and Israeli strikes set back Iran’s nuclear program by “several years” [and that] the strikes on the nuclear program along with other military targets in Iran will serve as a deterrent against the Islamic Republic again trying to enrich uranium.

Two notable experts also take a more positive view. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, says: “Iran has likely lost close to 20,000 centrifuges at Natanz and Fordow, creating a major bottleneck in any reconstitution effort. Moreover, there has been considerable damage to Iran’s ability to build the nuclear weapon itself.”

And Rafael Grossi, director general of the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency, states: "It is clear that there is one Iran before June 13 — nuclear Iran — and one now. It is night and day."

But it is also notable that some Israeli observers are among the worried.

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Sima Shine, a former Mossad official and now at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, told The Telegraph:

“I’m sure they have a hidden place somewhere with some hundreds, if not thousands of centrifuge[s] and they have material all there in several places all over Iran.

“They cannot do anything now, tomorrow, but in the future, they have all the capabilities [to build a bomb].”

And veteran security-affairs analyst Ron Ben Yishai, in a piece titled (in part) “Israel must prepare for another round with Iran,” says:

Israel must ensure that Iran is not attempting a rapid breakout toward a basic nuclear weapon, such as a crude “dirty bomb”—using its remaining stockpile of 60% enriched uranium and several hundred advanced centrifuges reportedly hidden away.

Iran may try to buy time for its scientists to assemble a rudimentary nuclear device that could be mounted on a missile.

...Both damage assessments and negotiations over a new nuclear deal could take several months, possibly up to half a year. If, by then, results are unsatisfactory from Israel’s perspective, or if Iran drags its feet, another military confrontation may be necessary — ideally coordinated with Washington. Either way, Israel must already begin preparing for that possibility.

I would sum it up this way: As long as the ayatollah regime exists, nothing will divert it from its “Death to Israel, Death to America” objectives and it must be kept under the strictest possible intelligence surveillance at all times. It is not encouraging that President Trump has already reverted to silly rhetoric about taming the mullahs with inducements: “They’re going to get on to being the great trading nation. They have a lot of oil”; and even less encouraging that he already says they can resume selling oil to China. Trying to keep the president focused on the nature of this regime and the danger it continues to pose is part of our very difficult struggle.

Iran fires 181 missiles at Israel; PM: They made a “big mistake” and “will pay for it.” (The Times of Israel)

As the Israeli — Israeli–US? — vise closes on the ayatollah regime, what should be the fate of its helmsman, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?

There are three possibilities: his elimination; his arrest, incarceration, and trial; and his survival, either by fleeing or remaining as head-of-state of Iran.

Asked by ABC News about the first of those options, Prime Minister Netanyahu, who had broached an Israeli plan to assassinate Khamenei to President Trump, said doing so would not “escalate the conflict, it's going to end the conflict.”

President Trump, who reportedly rejected the Israeli plan at the time, wrote more recently on his Truth Social: “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there — We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”

Khamenei has been Supreme Leader — read, dictator, running Iran with a tight grip — since 1989, and the charge sheet against him could not be longer.

From a specifically American standpoint, it includes — among other things — the bombing of the Khobar Towers in 1996; the killing or maiming with IEDs of over a thousand US soldiers in Iraq; the attempt to blow up a restaurant in Washington, DC, in 2011; death threats and assassination attempts against US leaders including President Trump; and ongoing “Death to America!” chants with ritual burning of American flags and effigies of Uncle Sam.

From a specifically Israeli standpoint, it includes — among other things — sponsoring our era’s most vicious anti-Israeli terror groups including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizballah, and the Houthis; providing funding, training, and planning for the massacre of October 7, 2023; massive missile attacks in April 2024, October 2024, and June 2025, in the latter case directed mainly at civilian targets with 24 killed and hundreds wounded so far; ongoing “Death to Israel!” chants with ritual burning of Israeli flags; and constant, explicit threats to annihilate Israel, including by Khamenei himself as recently as a month ago.

One of Khamenei’s most chilling crimes, however — which was clarified in a report last April but slipped under the radar — must also be taken into account if it comes to deciding his fate.

In the AMIA atrocity on July 18, 1994, a bomb-laden van was driven into the Jewish Community Center building in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Upon detonating, it killed 85 people and injured over 300. It has long been known that this attack on a purely civilian target — with the aim of murdering as many Jews as possible — was carried out by Hizballah operatives under Iranian guidance. In other words, it happened on Khamenei’s watch.

Under Argentina’s pro-Israel President Javier Milei, however, the long-dormant investigation of the crime has been revived. Last April 9, Israel’s Ynetnews reported that it had borne fruit:

The lead prosecutor in the case of the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Buenos Aires Jewish Community Center building in Argentina, Sebastián Basso, has petitioned the country’s federal court to issue both national and international arrest warrants for Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Basso, who succeeded Alberto Nisman after his murder in 2015, claims that Khamenei was directly involved in planning the attack, which killed 85 people. The prosecutor is demanding Khamenei be held accountable and immediately arrested if he enters Argentinian territory.

. . . In his legal opinion submitted to the court, Basso argued Khamenei played a central role in planning the attack and issued the fatwa (religious decree) that authorized it.

The fact that Khamenei didn’t just approve or issue a directive for this antisemitic atrocity but was personally involved in planning it sheds a special light on his viciousness and evil.

As Netanyahu pointed out, there would be a pragmatic basis for eliminating Khamenei — namely, dealing a fatal blow to his regime. But it would also rid the earth of a monstrous killer and flash a warning to others of his ilk.

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In “most distant strike,” Israeli Air Force bombs Iranian plane at Mashhad Airport in northeastern Iran. (The Times of Israel)

After another night of air-raid sirens, with Iranian ballistic missiles crashing into residential buildings—the casualty count so far is eight dead, including a man in his 80s pulled out of the rubble of a building, and hundreds hospitalized — this Monday morning brought the news that:

The US Air Force appears to be in the midst of an unprecedented mass deployment of aerial refueling tankers across the Atlantic Ocean from bases in the US, amid the ongoing Israel-Iran war.

The number of KC-135 and KC-46 tankers continued to rise, with at least 30 moved east in the late hours of Sunday, according to flight tracking data.

Such tankers are required to refuel aircraft participating in strikes far away from their home country, such as the Israeli jets hitting Iran.

There have been no reports of refueling problems for those Israeli jets now hitting Iran; Israel has its own refueling tankers. Early in April, though, the US moved powerful strategic bombers to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, within striking distance of Iran.

On Sunday, asked whether Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had asked him to get the US more involved in the war, President Trump replied, "We're not involved in it. It's possible we could get involved. But we are not at this moment involved."

It’s possible to tentatively link the second sentence of that terse reply to the news about the US refuelers being moved toward the region.

Much of the Israeli news discourse in the last few days has centered on the question of possible US involvement — and particularly regarding Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility. Israel has already started bombing Fordo by itself, with “limited damage” reported this morning.

Fordo, however, is dug so deep inside a mountain that it’s considered outside the range of Israel’s fighter jets — but not outside the range of the sort of bombers deployed at Diego Garcia, which can carry immensely powerful, exclusively made-in-America bunker-busters.

The cardinal purpose of the war on the Iranian regime that Israel launched on Friday is to prevent it from going nuclear. Assessments of how much damage Israel has inflicted so far on Iran’s nuclear program — by bombing its Natanz, Isfahan, Fordo, and Parchin facilities, assassinating many of its nuclear scientists, and other measures — vary.

Clearly, though, Iran’s nuke program is still far from kaput, and demolishing it — even for a significant period of time —is seen as impossible as long as Fordo still stands.

More broadly, the ayatollah regime — with the Israeli air force in control of its skies and raining fire on its facilities and top military and intelligence officials, its proxy terror groups neutralized and feeble, its economy in a shambles, and its population full of contempt toward it — has never been in a weaker state, and for the US not to make the most of this moment and, in tandem with Israel, put a final end not only to the nuke program but to the regime itself, would be an instance of strategic insanity.

It would not require anything approaching a “forever war,” as proclaimed by the isolationist advisers Trump has unfortunately surrounded himself with. In a heterogeneous country with rock-bottom morale, Iran’s ground forces and aged air force have long been irrelevant; its strategy has been to project power through its proxy forces, ballistic missiles, and prospective nukes. It is no match at all for a combined US–Israeli offensive.

Thanks to the window that Israel’s campaign has opened, the time when the world can finally be rid of this dire, malevolent regime, to be replaced by real possibilities of a more peaceful Middle East and beyond, is now.

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Hamas claims growing Gaza protests against its rule actually aimed at Israel. (The Times of Israel)

On Tuesday night two rockets were fired into the Golan Heights from a point about seven miles within Syria. They landed in open areas. It marked the first instance of rocket fire at Israel from Syria since April last year. At the time of writing, it’s not known who launched the projectiles.

Almost simultaneously, a long-range missile fired by the Houthis in Yemen was reaching Israel—the second of the day. Both were downed by air defenses, but not before necessitating air-raid sirens affecting hundreds of thousands of Israelis.

Since March 18, when the IDF renewed its campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis in Yemen have dispatched 45 ballistic missiles and at least 10 drones in Israel’s direction. On May 4, one of the ballistic missiles hit Ben-Gurion Airport, injuring six people and prompting major airlines to cancel flights for extended periods.

Israel is subjected to pressures that the countries criticizing it, embargoing arms to it, and threatening to sanction it are not subjected to.

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On May 17, Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khamenei stated: “The Zionist regime is the source of corruption, war, and rifts. The Zionist regime that is a lethal, dangerous, cancerous tumor should certainly be eradicated, and it will be.”

Such a call for the destruction of another country is illegal under international law. Yet the statement by Khamenei—whose regime President Trump and his aides have been granting legitimacy by negotiating the nuclear issue with them—didn’t even merit a blip in the news cycle.

Israel has been worried about those negotiations, fearing—among other things—that Iran would use them to stall for time. It now turns out that (a) in recent months—amid the negotiations—Iran’s stock of near-weapons-grade uranium has grown by about half, with Iran now having enough for nine nuclear bombs; and (b) Iran has been “repairing and preparing” its air defense systems that Israel heavily bombed last October.

And all that—projectile fire from multiple locations, open threats of genocide, a growing nuclear stockpile for an archenemy—is without even mentioning Gaza.

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To begin with, countries like France, the UK, and Canada, which have threatened Israel with “concrete actions...including targeted sanctions” over its Gaza policy; Spain, which has reneged on a major purchase of Israeli antitank missiles; and many others, including a whole slate of democracies that have embargoed arms to Israel since the October 7 massacre—have not been living for twenty years beside a terror statelet that, in those years, has fired over 20,000 rockets into their territory, culminating in a land invasion involving a grisly rampage of massacre and kidnapping.

Second, for about a week Israel, at great expense and effort, has been trying to solve a key aspect of that problem.

Since the current Gaza war began on October 7, 2023, voices both within and outside of Israel have charged that it’s taking too long, that Israel is not really defeating Hamas, and that it has no plan for a “day after.”

One of the key factors prolonging the war is that Hamas has been systematically stealing food provisions, selling them to Gazans at inflated prices, and thereby both reinforcing itself and keeping the population dependent on it.

Last week Israel, in tandem with a newly formed US organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, launched an initiative to provide food to Gazans at special locations outside the reach of Hamas.

And if you follow the news at all, you know that since that effort began, the Israel-bashing has a reached a new crescendo.

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It works—in a way that could have been predicted with absolute certainty—like this: Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry repeatedly charges Israel with massacres of Gazans. The major international media outlets run with these stories, which can be summed up as: Jews just kill people.

One of the outcomes is that people kill—or try to kill—Jews.

While the news media are raking in the bucks from these irresistible, gratifying stories of alleged Jewish wickedness, and while the UN and governments of democracies ramp up their Israel-bashing even further, the Israeli military conducts slow, painstaking investigations of the alleged events. On that basis, it acknowledges that: amid the confusion wrought by the brand-new aid program, mishaps occurred—but the casualty figures touted by a heinous terror organization are, naturally, exaggerated; and Israel and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation are working hard to tackle the logistical problems and avoid mishaps in the future.

Meanwhile, the GHF says it has provided over seven million meals to Gazans since the project began last week.

Israel is making a draconian effort to solve a problem of a kind—managing both a war effort and a humanitarian effort in the small, crowded space of Gaza—that its numerous critics have never had to cope with themselves. While the war effort is denounced as pointless, its purpose is to defeat Hamas and ensure that Israel will not have to keep living beside a terror statelet that subjects it to murderous attacks.

Since October 7, 2023, however, in the eyes of much of the world Israel can do no right. The criticisms reflect an absence of empathy and a presence of dark currents of cynicism and worse.