Whenever I’m exposed to this type of anti-Ashkenazi discourse, I can’t help but think of one particular painting by the Russian-Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi. She, as far as I can tell, appears to be some sort of leftist commenting on the power dynamics of Israel which places Ashkenazis at the top, Arabs at the bottom, and the various shades of non-European Jews as some sort of halfway between the two. In her piece titled “The History of Violence,” she attempts to display this power dynamic at its most extreme and paradoxical point, featuring a scrawny, nerdy, awkward-looking Ashkenazi Jew holding two captive Arabs at gunpoint.

But allow me instead to provide an alternative interpretation.

The Ashkenazi nerd stereotype certainly has a grain of truth to it, but only insofar as the memetic “nerd” itself is a projection of Ashkenazi stereotypes. The archetypal “nerd” in the Western imagination exists in opposition to the archetypal “jock,” both products of Hollywood movies largely created, directed, and written by Ashkenazis. The nerd is an intelligent, meek, quiet, and cerebral fellow who is mercilessly tormented by the tall, handsome, popular jock. It’s not hard to see what dynamic is being commented on here as there’s little subtlety to it at all. In these narratives, the nerd is a stand-in for an Ashkenazi Jew while the jock is a stand-in for the Aryan. This should be obvious to anyone who’s actually been to high school, since most real bullying tends to happen within social circles and, when it doesn’t is usually done by the type of kids who are likely to die of overdoses in their 20s or become some other sort of deadbeat loser, not the types who are popular and good at sports. To speak from personal experience as someone who was a nerd in school, I engaged in much more bullying against other nerds than I received from the “jocks,” who were mostly quite friendly towards me.

Even though these movies don’t really reflect the reality of high school, there’s a reason why people find these types of narratives very compelling. Americans like an underdog, and are happy to cheer for an imperfect person who they may not want to be in any sense so long as they think they have something to offer the world. The willingness to persist and use your own ingenuity to come out on top is, in a sense, really what characterizes American masculinity. The most admired men in America aren’t the most blusterous, but the men who can put their own skills and interests to good use in a way that builds up themselves and people around them, in turn building something greater than just himself.

Zoya, however, is not American, nor is she from any other Western country where this type of success would be considered admirable. Zoya comes from Russia, a thoroughly third world country which is only perceived as being above such designation because the people there are white. Russians, much like the Arabs that Israel has fought since its inception, exist in a culture based on honor and shame. Being the “nerd” in these 3rd world cultures is not admirable, even if you win, because it runs in total defiance to the aesthetics of masculinity that these cultures put on a pedestal. The most admired men in these cultures are not the ones who solve their problems, but the ones who are the most blusterous, the ones who can pump their chest out the most even if they have nothing to back it up, the ones who scream and rant hysterically at the hooka bar, shouting louder than everyone else to show their own momentary dominance. Nobody finds them convincing, but that doesn’t matter because the point is not to be convincing or even correct. The point is to shout down everyone else in the room until you’re the only one talking. When everyone’s paying attention to you, that’s when you have the power. That’s when seemingly your masculinity has peaked.

Once you notice this with redpill influencers, you can’t un-notice it. Take Andrew Tate, for example. I am under no illusion that I couldn’t possibly win a fistfight against Andrew Tate. In terms of masculine aesthetics, Tate certainly beats me. But what is there to say about his personality and intellect? His style of argumentation consists of screaming like an hysterical woman over whoever he’s talking to, throwing around insults, and ad hominem attacks. Nothing about it is rational or reasonable in a grand sense of being correct or truthful or advancing society forward in a meaningful way, but it does allow him to dominate most conversations he engages in.

Tate, of course, is a highly successful internet influencer (despite his legal troubles), but the success he has is one-in-a-million. Most people you know who behave like Andrew Tate, showing off their muscles while being totally incapable of holding a rational conversation without resorting to screaming and shouting, are total losers. Nobody respects them, although they may not be aware of that because anyone who converses with them may quickly conclude that they’re so emotionally volatile that it’s simply not worth offending them through disagreement. Most of us interact with these types of “manly men” the same way we interact with hysterical women; nodding in faux agreement while strategizing in our heads about the most effective exit strategy from this conversation.

Unfortunately for most of these people, however, there comes a point where their own self-perception must confront reality. And what is that reality? The reality is that for the past 80 years, a culture built on bluster and, to borrow a term from feminists, performative masculinity has been totally and repeatedly dominated and outflanked by the foundational, archetypal nerd. For these types of people, war is the ultimate demonstration of strength versus weakness, and all they’ve been capable of showing is weakness despite their macho grandstanding.

I don’t say this to discount the immense contributions of Sephardim and Mizrahim to Judaism and the State of Israel, but it’s important to remember that it was not Eastern bluster, but Western ingenuity that ultimately built the state of Israel. It was a bunch of Ashkenazi “nerds” who took a bunch of sand dunes and turned it into one of the richest cities in existence in just 125 years. Even more impressively, they took a land with very few Jews and turned it into a Jewish state in just ~50 years. At the same time European Ashkenazis were doing this, American Ashkenazis founded the world’s most important cultural powerhouse in Hollywood, became a dominant force in American finance, and achieved a disproportionate foothold in the politics of the most powerful nation in the world. None of this was achieved by ranting in bars about how we’re going to defeat our enemies, but by meticulously contributing and working towards success.

Many people who identify with the Western right in recent years have adopted what is often described as a third world ideology. Many of these folks deride Western society as weak and effeminate, and believe that it will inevitably experience downfall against the more “masculine” third world and their “traditional” values despite the vast wealth they’ve accumulated, which many of these people see as decadent anyway. It was essentially inevitable that some right-wingers within the Jewish community would also fall into this farcical belief system.

But to quote Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, there is no nobility in poverty. The fact that Israel is significantly better in every metric than all of its neighbours; the fact that all of our tourist sites aren’t full of aggressive scam artists like in Egypt, the fact that our gas station bathrooms don’t consist of holes in the grounds where you’re expected to wipe with your hands like in Jordan, the fact that we haven’t devolved into endless sectarian feuds like in Lebanon, the fact that we haven’t turned our country into a full-blown warzone like in Syria - these are the accomplishments of our people we should be proud of, and not take for granted. Would you be proud to be born Jordanian? Maybe if you are a mindless tribalist, but I can think of endless reasons to be proud to be Jewish while I struggle to think of even a single significant Jordanian accomplishment. ChatGPT tells me that Jordanians have made significant technological contributions to something called “cement dust treatment plants.” Anyone who knows what these are may leave a comment below, but I’ll happily say I have no qualms giving the Jordanians their credit for their modest contribution to human progress.

And that’s before getting into Gaza, which has been transformed into a place of utter ruin by a death cult, whose hearts are more hardened than Pharaoh under the influence of G-d, continuing to wage war against Israel in the face of catastrophic consequences.

What many of these influencers are selling you is that Jews should become more like these people. That we should adopt a similar culture of hysterics, tribalism, arrogance, macho-ism, and blusterous stupidity that has reduced half of Israel’s neighbours to complete societal collapse (or impending collapse). They will try to highlight the differences between us versus them, but those differences will be almost entirely aesthetic.

To indignify themselves even further, many of these types of influencers will try to sell you this thinly veiled redpill garbage under the guise of Sephardic or Mizrahi identity. My experience with these groups here in Canada probably isn’t fully representative, but let me tell you about my experience with them. The ancestors of the main admin of Low Effort Zionist Memes moved from Iraq to India to become a powerful planting family during the British Raj. My best friend growing up had immense generational wealth going back to their time as an important diplomatic family in Morocco. If you’re Mizrahi and you don’t have this type of background, no problem. Neither do most Ashkenazis. But the reality is that Jews have always played the same role in Christian lands as we did in Arab ones, albeit with different levels of hostility between them depending on the time period. Jews from Arab lands aren’t less privileged than Ashkenazis because they’ve faced more discrimination either presently or in the past, it’s because the places they came from were not run by people who even knew how to create prosperity for Arabs, let alone their Jewish minority.

So don’t buy from these snake oil salesmen telling you that Mizrahim and Sephardim should feel some sort of ethnic obligation to engage in all the worst manifestations of Arab culture. It’s neither conducive to a functional Jewish nation nor is it an accurate reflection of any Jewish subculture. And beneath all of it is fundamentally just a disgust for the stereotypical Ashkenazi and the Western masculinity he represents–intelligent, thoughtful, calm, and calculated. These are the traits which allowed a nation of 10 million people to dominate the Middle East, and we abandon these traits at our own peril.

- Beau Chasse

**as of 10:49 pm, Ben Shapiro enthusiast Nina Yamini has blocked LEZM.

This article, however, isn’t a review of the new South Park season, or even the latest episode of it. What I’m far more interested in is the reaction I’ve seen from Hasbara influencers, who have gone into collective hyperventilation over the following joke: Students at South Park Elementary use a political betting odds app to bet on whether Kyle Broflovski’s mom Sheila will bomb a Palestinian hospital. When she is spotted flying to Israel, the odds of her bombing a hospital go up, but it is revealed at the end of the episode that the highly neurotic Sheila actually went there to complain to Netanyahu personally about the war, arguing that his actions being committed in the name of the Jewish people are causing a surge of antisemitism in the United States.

How could South Park do this? Are they not aware that, erm, actually, there were tunnels under those hospitals that we bombed, or it was an accident, or whatever other excuse was given at the time? Don’t they know that Jews are NEVER responsible for the antisemitism that we face? As Hen Mazzig said, “blaming Jewish people, rather than the people targeting us, is never right. We aren’t responsible for the hatred against us. Antisemites are.” Mazzig, of course, is an expert who South Park’s creators should be listening to since he has undeniably fostered more antisemitic feelings among the British public than South Park ever has.

Some Hasbarists have even suggested that Trey Parker and Matt Stone should have to front security costs for the synagogues they put in DANGER because of this episode, which could no doubt inspire people to commit acts of violence against the Jewish people. They want to pass this off as a “joke,” but a joke can’t target an entire group of people. Let’s call it what it is: stochastic terrorism.

Or perhaps it’s even more nefarious than that. Maybe they’re being PAID by QATAR? You never know. Where did that $1.5 billion they just received come from? Oh, it’s from the same company that just put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS. Is there a Kabbalistic Candace Owens we can consult on this matter? Maybe she won’t get to the bottom of this, but we can find out why Netanyahu’s wife looks like a man. Important stuff to investigate!

It’s absolutely astounding to me that Zionist influencers still insist on talking like this even as this kind of rhetoric from the woke left has created the largest right-wing backlash in America since the late 1960s. Why did it foster such a backlash? Two reasons. First, Americans don’t like being morally judged, and second, they especially don’t like being judged by people so obviously morally flawed themselves. It’s one thing to be told not to be racist, it’s another thing to be told not to be racist by someone who expressly encourages criminal behavior among black people and demands that normal people just accept rape, murder and vagrancy all around them.

Similarly, you can give a million justifications for why Israel was right to bomb a hospital. In fact, I’d probably agree with most of them, and I definitely think Israel has better reasons to bomb a hospital than woke people have to promote criminal vagrancy or trans kids. But you have to be completely out of your mind to not think that there is an obvious moral repugnancy that normal, uninvested people will feel toward someone telling them that bombing hospitals is okay and legitimate but jokes are violence. If Hasbarists insist on using this line of thinking against the American public, we will lose badly, and the loss will be well-deserved. Additionally, we have the benefit of hindsight to clearly know it doesn’t work, and especially two years after October 7th we’ve had the benefit of direct experience to know moralistic browbeating doesn’t work.

It also goes to show just how terrible these people are at picking battles. South Park has a long history of lambasting antisemitism, including an episode just a few weeks ago wherein they mocked antisemitic manosphere influencers as charlatans. Two years ago they made an episode mocking Kanye West’s antisemitic outbursts, and the claim that Jews control Hollywood. During the Covid pandemic, they made an episode where the State of Israel quite literally saves the day. In a subsequent episode, Eric Cartman is depicted as only being capable of turning his life around by abandoning antisemitism, converting to Judaism, and becoming a Rabbi. Compare this to how South Park treats Muslims, for instance, by making a two-part episode where they have to deliver the prophet Muhammad to a group of angry celebrities so they can extract goo from him to gain his power to not be made fun of, with them later discovering that the cure to being made fun of is relentless Islamist violence against innocent people. If you’re at all familiar with South Park, you’d have to be a total lunatic to think the show promotes antisemitism, although most Zionist influencers these days seem to fall into that category.

So how should Hasbarists have reacted to this episode? Perhaps they could’ve taken notes from the Anti-Defamation League and said nothing at all. That’s where we’re at now — the ADL is less prone to neurotic outbursts over antisemitism than the Zionist influencer class. Or perhaps do what Charlie Kirk did when he was depicted in South Park and embrace it. Some big Zionist influencer could’ve changed his profile picture to South Park Bibi. Perhaps lean in to Kyle’s mom, overcome with Ashkenazi neuroticism, raving like a lunatic about Israel being responsible for antisemitism, perhaps pairing it with her calling to ban everything she doesn’t like from episodes of previous seasons when South Park was actually funny.

But for the love of G-D, stop with the scolding over anything that doesn’t just endlessly glaze and make excuses for Israel and Jews. Jews (including Matt Stone) are a funny people. Start having a sense of humor.

- Beau Chasse

This whole exercise reeks of a passé imperial hubris; once mighty, imperial powers are now dictating terms of war and peace to the unwashed Oriental and Semitic masses, restoring peace and civilization to a region of tumult, darkness and disorder. Ninety years ago, when the circle of who was viewed as civilized extended no further east than Prague, another genocidal force crept towards its ambitions in Eastern Europe. To avoid calamity, a flustered Labour government dispatched their Prime Minister to Munich. The Germans asserted they were only acting to realize the “legitimate rights of self-determination” of their brethren in Austria, and the Sudetenland. No more! The whole of Czechoslovakia, then Poland, and soon the entire continent of Europe descended into madness, with two-thirds of European Jewry being offered as korbanot. Today, the same fecklessness and weakness is attempting to offer up Israel as a sacrifice on the altar of appeasement. There is the appearance of bend even in the Trump administration, Witkoff having been dispatched to Gaza not to pressure Hamas into an agreement, but to take inventory of food distribution efforts, and line-up fresh demands of Israel. However, the Trump administration still appears to be coordinating with Israel on these matters; their pullout from the negotiations in Doha was synchronized in light of this latest propaganda campaign by Hamas was mutual, as was their mutual boycott where the peace drunkards are falling over themselves to announce the recognition of the State of Palestine.

This begs the question, what are the peace drunkards, led by Macron intending to recognize in September at the UN General Assembly? Article I of the Montevideo Convention is authoritative: “the state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) a government and (d) a capacity to enter relations with other states.”

According to the United Nations, the coterie of non-governmental organizations which orbit around it like flies, and more importantly, according to the French Court themselves, the Gaza Strip is not fit for human habitation, so the presence of a permanent population there is, according to France itself, not possible. This is the whole premise behind the French Court's ruling that all Gazans had a right to apply for asylum in France. With regards to a “defined territory” the closest legal instrument that Palestinians can point to are the Oslo II Accords, which delineate between Area A, B, and C of the West Bank. The Oslo II Accords being a zombified interim agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, demurred on questions of delineating borders as one of many final status issues to be negotiated bilaterally between the parties. On the question of governance, there are de facto two governing authorities inside the Palestinian territories described in the Oslo II Accords. On the one hand there is the corrupt gerontocratic “moderate” Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah led by (PhD in Holocaust Denial) Abu Mazen. They are the peaceful alternative to the hostage-taking, mass rape, and mass murdering jihadists that de facto govern the Gaza Strip.

French recognition as positioned by Macron is unconditional, and therefore makes no comment on which entity is the government of the State of Palestine, despite France having designated both the political and military wings of Hamas as a terrorist organization. The last point is that Palestine must have the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Under the auspices of the Paris Accords which complement Oslo; the Palestinian Authority cannot issue its own currency, and therefore cannot enter into an independent economic arrangement with other states. Palestine lacks full member status in the United Nations (a matter over which the Security Council, and therefore the United States possesses a veto), and therefore cannot be a full party to international treaties. For all the heady symbolism of the announcement, the French pronouncement is nothing but hot air.

None of this is “foreign policy”.  There is nothing in the French national interest to pursue unilateral recognition of a state whose territories conflict with the borders of Israel, with which it has normal diplomatic relations. Through deduction, the French announcement seems to be based purely on domestic political considerations. That in my view is a confession of abject weakness. Macron has the time to sue Candace Owens and a number of his domestic political opponents for defamatory statements that nobody takes seriously, and pursue a phantasmic two-state solution because within France, he faces a do-nothing hung Parliament comprised of Melenchon’s communists to the left of him, and Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale to his right. His domestic agenda has stalled. He has no domestic political capital. This is an exercise in ego, in “legacy preservation”, and it must be said, a kowtowing to the pressure exerted by Islamists in the French street. 

Only refracted through the lens of domestic politics, do the decisions of the peace drunkard begin to make sense. In Britain, Keir Starmer is deeply and profoundly unpopular, facing open rebellion from his backbench, as the British left fragments in real-time between the Greens, the Liberal Democrats, and Corbyns’ Jezbollah. Gaza is one of the few “glue” issues remaining and Starmer, in a desperate bid to hold on to power has already been pushed to the brink of unilateral recognition, while pretending that is not what he is doing to preserve some favour with British Jewry (and with his wife). The British position is that if Israel does not take immediate steps towards creating a Palestinian state; a ceasefire that leaves Hamas intact in Gaza, commitment to non-annexation of the West Bank, and commitment to a peace process, that Britain will recognize a Palestinian state, while imposing no demands on the Palestinians. In Australia, Canada, and elsewhere, buffeted by the slow disintegration of the postwar American-led order by an economically protectionist Trump Administration, rapid reorientation of economic and diplomatic relations is now the highest priority for their national security. The pivot away from the United States requires a certain shift in diplomacy. Australia, Canada and New Zealand will therefore move toward the European consensus. In Canada, where Mark Carney has since his election governed like an authoritarian progressive conservative, Palestine may be the red meat he throws to the progressive wing of his electoral coalition to keep it from collapsing if and when he decides to get some carbon-intensive energy projects moving.

The British framing of recognizing a Palestinian state as some kind of punishment for Israeli malfeasance is an electoral gift to Netanyahu, and a paralyzing blow to the peace camp. The Hostage Families Forum, which has become the moral centre of opposition to the Israeli government, and which advocates for an end to the war felt compelled to release this statement in response to growing European initiatives to recognize a Palestinian state:

“Recently, we have seen an increase in initiatives calling for unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state - all while fifty hostages have been held captive by Hamas for 663 days. Recognizing a Palestinian state while fifty hostages remain trapped in Hamas tunnels amounts to rewarding terrorism. Such recognition is not a step toward peace, but rather a clear violation of international law and a dangerous moral and political failure that legitimizes horrific war crimes. 

The abduction of men, women, and children, who are being held against their will in tunnels while subjected to starvation and physical and psychological abuse,  cannot and should not serve as the foundation for establishing a state. If the international community truly desires peace, it must join U.S. efforts by demanding first the release of all hostages, followed by an end to the fighting. Recognition of a Palestinian state before the hostages are returned will be remembered throughout history as validating terrorism as a legitimate pathway to political goals…”

The Hostages Forum, which speaks for the overwhelming majority of the Israeli public that supports a comprehensive hostage-for-ceasefire deal is now echoing the talking points of a government it otherwise regularly calls to resign. By buying into the idea that Israel is solely responsible for continuation of the war, these European states send a clear signal to Hamas that their strategy is working. Rewarding Hamas with recognition of Palestinian statehood is a further boon to that strategy. As ever, when hot air confronts cold political reality, it is the ironclad laws of national interest that triumphs. As an example, the European Commission put a “concrete option" of removing Israel’s access to EU start-up accelerators and venture capital funds. They could not obtain a majority of European states, because Israeli start-ups produce immense economic value for European markets. Furthermore, these “concrete options” serve to further reinforce a right-wing narrative in Israel. Ever shrewd, Netanyahu has been carefully waiting to decide if he needs to reposition to the centre, or to the right ahead of an inevitable election. Netanyahu can now make the case to the electorate that unilateral actions against Israel must be met with decisive unilateral actions by Israel. European enthusiasm for unilateral recognition of Palestine will also provide the legal justification for annexation for parts of Judea and Samaria. I would note that staving off the partial annexation of Judea and Samaria was the starting point for negotiations that produced the Abraham Accords.

The credible threat of annexation can now re-emerge, only now in a strategic context where the Axis of Resistance has been decimated, and the depth of Israel’s air, intelligence, and special operations capabilities are on full display. The resolution of the Hezbollah question in Lebanon will provide the template for the resolution of the Hamas question in Gaza. The Lebanese government is under sustained pressure by the United States to take a formal cabinet decision on disarming Hezbollah. At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Michael Issa, the Lebanese-American nominee for Ambassador to Beirut was forthright “Hezbollah knows if they don’t disarm, there is something that is going to happen…”, and that the forthcoming cabinet meeting was a positive development: “maybe that would create some pressure and hopefully it will solve the situation, but Hezbollah needs to go, Hezbollah needs to be disarmed, to bring some kind of hope to Lebanon.”

In notable contrast to demands made in the context of Gaza, the “permanent” ceasefire in Lebanon provides Israel the ability to act against immediate threats, with an international mechanism for dispute resolution and monitoring. Israel continues to grind down Hezbollah, eliminating mid-level operatives, commanders, and attempts to re-establish command and control infrastructure. Israel is feeding the Lebanese Army human and signals intelligence to assist its efforts in uprooting Hezbollah missile silos, weapons caches, and other infrastructure in the Beqaa and south of the Litani. Netanyahu should leverage the threat of unilateral measures in Judea and Samaria to obtain a “permanent” ceasefire with Hamas modeled after the ceasefire with Hezbollah. The premise must be that Hamas must disarm, and that Israel must reserve the right to act against Hamas when it inevitably refuses to do so. The chief difference between Gaza and Lebanon remains the scale of the humanitarian disaster and the absence of a credible alternate government. By putting annexation squarely on the table, Israel can negotiate a softening of the Arab position for an irreversible pathway to a Palestinian state, and come to a consensus on necessary reforms to the Palestinian Authority. Contingent on these reforms, Israel can accept a limited administrative role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, but it should be made crystal clear to all, that recalcitrance and footdragging will be met with actions in Judea and Samaria: dunam diplomacy, peace or piece. 

The time for indecision and bloviating is over. Israel must call the bluff of these bumbling cowards in the West, and must put immediate annexation on the table. The Arab League’s  “New York Declaration”; a unanimous condemnation of October 7th and a call for the disarmament and dismantling of Hamas. The same Declaration’s reference to “the right of return” of Palestinian refugees sinks it from a document of genuine progress, to the status quo of schizophrenic posturing between Arab national interest and placation of the Arab street. Nevertheless, Israel should call their bluff and engage the international community in negotiations on the basis of this declaration to set up a timetable for fresh Palestinian elections, without further preconditions. No ban on Hamas, or any other terrorist faction. If Palestinians are serious about peace, then they must deliver a government with a mandate to pursue it.  I will not hold my breath.

Fresh leaks suggest that Israel is mulling expanding military operations into areas where hostages are being held and considering targeting Hamas leadership abroad. These leaks are a political smokescreen to divide public attention as his government ousts the Attorney General, and as he appoints a loyalist to break the logjam on Haredi conscription, and stabilize his coalition. The leaks are also a way to gauge a sentiment of his political base - if Beitar Illit, and Sderot react to these leaks the same as Gush Dan, then we may see a swift return of the negotiation table in Doha.  The horrific footage of Ram Braslavski and David Evayatar has reignited international outrage, and may yet yield actual diplomatic pressure on Hamas: the Security Council meets tomorrow for an emergency session on the Hostages. Meanwhile, Israel rightfully lambasts the impotent Red Cross, and Hamas signals it is willing to stop intentionally starving hostages in exchange for… permanent humanitarian aid corridors, and unsupervised delivery of aid through the United Nations. The course of events in the short term will be hard to predict. In uncertainty, we turn to faith, we recite Acheinu, we pray for the redemption of the captives, and we hold strong, because the closer we get to actually uprooting these monsters, the louder the shrieking will get. Tune out the noise. 

Signed,

-Abba Eban

Why are Jews bad allies? 

For many decades in spite of Jewish disunity, Jews that have grown up in North America have largely been conditioned to see themselves as victims. Fearmongering about an impending American shoah has been incessantly regurgitated for decades by Jewish organizations as rationale to swindle donations. Unfortunately at the forefront of such conspiracies are many alarmist right-wing Zionists (think JDL/Betar types), who see a hurricane of anti-Jewish/Israel hate that is swirling in every nook and cranny of society. This neuroticism leads to seemingly everything being a part of a plot that targets Israel and the Jewish people. It takes a tremendous amount of hubris to conclude that the goyim are concocting a scheme to rise up against us, it’s as if they don’t have anything else to do. These people weirdly believe that Jews are the center of the world for goyim, the narcissism is enough to choke on. I lump these sorts of people together with decolonization Rudy simps as delusional doom merchants who largely perceive goyim as wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing. These people are toxic and useless, they are a mix of delusional egomaniacs and snake oil salesmen that have planted themselves inside a bottomless victim complex. To assume that a goy solely lives according to ulterior motives, just fuels alarmist conspiracies that someone is simply looking for a ticket for the afterlife, and neglects the self-autonomy of goyim genuinely seeking to support the Jewish people. (This type of thinking is the negative consequence of making the Holocaust the center of Jewishness, but that’s a topic for another substack). Altogether many Jews create a self-defeating cycle of distrust that drives a wedge against potential allies by assuming from the get go that they act in bad faith or are plotting against us. In order to be allies, Jews can’t be paranoid sissies, and must avoid all forms of hubris.

I’ll elaborate with another example. Neurotic people of this type will often claim wholeheartedly that supporting Israel and the Jewish people is the “common sense” position, and they will regurgitate that our enemies are both misinformed and brainwashed. Ok, fine. Yet at the same time, the are always ready to instantly pounce with suspicion when non-Jews act in support of Israel or Jewish people.

This reflex of ascribing malice upon goyim exacerbates unnecessary tension to the detriment of Jews themselves. It’s silly, I frankly don’t care if a non-Jew believes in a 2nd coming, rapture or whatever. It has no bearing on me and what I believe. If said person has the same enemies as us and common interests/values, that is far more important. This neuroticism is a weird double-standard that Jews put on goyim, again it’s not to say that goyim always act solely out of purity, but these same Jews would scream about antisemitism if a Jew’s true loyalty was to be questioned. Setting the bar at total altruism and maligning anything below that, is a strategy built to fail. We can’t have it both ways, we of course must be vigilant but remain grounded. We can’t expect allies on demand whilst rushing quickly to doubt others’ sincerity. 

Why do Jews chase doomed alliances? 

For many reasons, Hasbara Inc. is downright obsessed with trying to make allies where they don’t exist. It’s ineffective and perpetuates a model with low ROI. Sure don’t totally abandon these places. Universities are still where the socio-cultural capital and power stems from in large part. Though it’s dwindled, much Jewish capital has been invested into them, it’s not good to just cede universities to the woke. However we must recognize that the progressive zeitgeist has entrenched anti-Zionism as a mainstay pillar akin to BLM. No amount of facts, pamphlets or Canva slides will change this. We must drop the fixation to caring for alliances with people who have close to zero likelihood of ever being our allies. It’s a total waste of time. Not to mention, it’s probably best that our enemies waste their time going to pointless anti-Israel rallies, and lobotomize their bodies instead of building families.

The pandering to the enemy is a resource and time drain. A prime example of this is the endless blabbering about “black-Jewish relations”. To be concise, because Jews were slaves in Egypt and blacks were slaves in America, that’s not a bedrock or reason for allyship. Generally blacks in America live in a totally parallel society and reality to Jews, outside of potentially making meager inroads with religious southern blacks, seeking black support for Jews is itself a blackhole. Polls by the ADL consistently show blacks outpacing all other groups of people in their likelihood of believing in antisemitic conspiracies. The role of Louis Farrakhan/Nation of Islam in this phenomenon is often overblown, the reason blacks are more likely to be antisemitic is because black have nothing in common with American Jewish life. Outside of their landlord or their lawyers, the Jew is foreign to the Black. I saw this when I drove directly through downtown Baltimore heading to the frum Jewish suburb of Pikesville. The difference was stark between the black urban decay and Jewish suburban normalcy. Contemporary American black society of the inner cities is nearly the complete inversion of frum society in every conceivable way, and even secular Jewish life has little in common with black society either. Around 10-15% of non-orthodox Jews in America grow up in a single parent household compared to 48-63% of blacks. Furthermore, it is irrelevant that there are Ethiopian in Jews in Israel, since there is a massive chasm between Ethiopian Jews in Israel and the blacks in America. Blacks are not our natural allies whatsoever, with exceptions only proving the rule. The desire to court blacks as allies stems from an insecurity that since blacks in America were historically discriminated against, so Jews should want them on “our side”, presumably because allyship with blacks would validate us.

To wrap up this section, the reason why Hasbara Inc. is obsessed with primarily attracting leftists is because they are the most dedicated to street activism, and many leftist Jews are ensnared by these organizations such as JStreet, JVP, INN etc… This contributes to fixation on progressives since Jewish overrepresentation in leftist spaces establishes an emotional pull to “fix” and “convert” these people to “our side”. The organization “Zioness” is the epitome of this behavior, they’re practically on their knees begging to be accepted by our adversaries as equals. In my opinion, those leftist Jews have doomed themselves to assimilate into nothing, and they aren’t worth the time. Daven for their teshuva, and let them drown in their own nonsense. 

Why do Jews make villains of potential allies? 

Compounded by secularization, a lack of religious Jewish education and pervasive discomfort by Jews towards people of other faiths, the perpetual neuroticism of Jewish community is blinding us to natural allies. Have no doubt, I have deep theological and even practical problems with Christianity. However, most Christians have very little knowledge of their Bible (only outmatched by ignorance of Jews), and modern Christianity in the USA has been totally subverted, it’s become completely unrecognizable to American Christians even 100 years ago. Despite their own problems, Christians are people that we should be attempting to build bridges with. Without getting bogged down over charges of avodah zara, Christians even in their current weakened state wield the greatest power and influence in America, and in contrast to the G-dless inner cities and universities, there exists some overlap that Jews can latch onto. One of LEZM admins correctly said once: “imagine telling a 18th century impoverished shtetl Jew that the Christians in the future will want to bless Israel for they will be blessed, and they think they need to give unlimited support for to the Jewish people for nothing in return, and the Jews will think of this as antisemitism”. 

It’s noteworthy that the greatest hostility towards Christianity comes from the least observant of Jews. I remember on Jewish Facebook groups in the late 2010s that normie, unaffiliated, left-leaning Jews would go totally berserk and defensive, frothing at the mouth when Jews for Jesus (or something of the sort) were brought up, but would decry and squeal about gatekeeping in mentioning that patrilineals aren’t Jewish or saying that a conversion from a Reform Temple isn’t worth the paper it’s on. This vitriol didn’t come from some sort of deep monotheistic lust but actually it was boogeyman anti-Christian derangement. Yes, JFJ are bad and should be opposed for their evil work. But again, this opposition to JFJ is coming from Jews completely estranged from G-d. These same Jews are happy to shatter, dismantle, and disembowel all of Judaism, yet their “red line” is as arbitrary as their own choices. Personally, I think these sorts of people subconsciously, and wrongly, associate Nazis with Christianity, which fuels a lot of their hostile aversion to Christians, including those who seek to do no harm to the Jews. In contrast, many frum Jews aren’t severely unnerved by actual Christians. “Better that the goyim believe in something rather than nothing”. And again there is a lot of overlap between genuine believers in both faiths, frum Jews couldn’t care less. It’s useful to recognize that the total absence of a unified Jewish voice could be confusing to goyim. For example, when secular Jews vilify Christians while observant Jews are more open to collaborating together, it sends totally mixed signals. I saw a video of chassidim working with Amish farmers to make kosher cheese and yogurt, this is the model to strive towards.

Click the link below

American Christians are very diverse actually. This is often overlooked by Jews since we only have the stereotype of a born-again evangelical who loves Israel. In my opinion Evangelicals can’t be assumed to be natural supporters of Israel anymore, since polling younger evangelicals show that their affinity for Israel has collapsed in contrast to older counterparts. Nevertheless, these people are well within our reach to foster healthy relations with, since there is a convergence of family values and a general sense of morality. Organizations such as CUFI are vital in this role. Appealing to cosmopolitan urbanites that worship Nelson Mandela or Fentanyl Floyd is a dead end, however people who likewise see jihad as bad gives us a much higher chance of success. But again, Christianity in America is complicated, some branches such as the Presbyterian Church, the United Church, the Episcopal and somewhat the Evangelical Lutheran Church have become overly anti-Israel and much of their Christianity itself is an empty husk that’s exploited for marxist social justice. So it goes without saying, our energy should go towards branches of Christianity that we have common ground with.

How can Jews become better allies?

Introspection is necessary, it’s important to consider whether the Jewish people are good allies. I mean with all the kvetching, endless self-victimization, and whining over total nonsense, we really present ourselves as an appealing bunch! This swings back to a general point, the people within the Jewish community most eager to make allies and do activist work, are themselves toxic and unrepresentative of the Jewish community that they claim to speak for. Some of the worst of us see themselves as “worthy” or perhaps anointed, to reach out to goyim to ask for their support. They simultaneously chastise goyim for acting according to their interests, it’s disgusting. This is why Hasbara Inc. is stuck in appealing to people who are our natural enemies and ignore our natural friends. It’s a weird spiral that Jews impose on goyim: suspicious of them unless they’re on their knees for us to prove their purity. In an ideal world, G-d fearing observant Jews should be making connections with G-d fearing goyim one a far larger scale, but for many reasons that’s not happening. So we are left in a situation where we are banging our heads against a wall and crying out in pain that other people aren’t coming to our defense.

Maybe we should adopt a new strategy? 

I remember a number of years ago when a gunman murdered several Asian workers in a hair salon in Georgia. In the wake of Fentanyl Floyd, social media exploded with #StopAsianHate, a typhoon of protests and people declaring their solidarity with the Asian community. I wrote a blurb on my personal Facebook saying that people’s performative posts are empty and worthless, since none of these people had ever said anything about the discrimination against Asians by university admissions departments nor Asians being sucker punched by blacks in absolutely cruelty disguised as street pranks/games. Suffice to say I got a strong reaction. I was proven right as within 2 weeks everyone had moved on from their brief spotlight of Asians. In a similar sense, these perpetually online Jewish crybabies decry the silence of their goyish friends against antisemitism. In the wake of Oct 7th, a massive reckoning has happened, sadly it took the blood of ~1200 Jews to show the lines of who was actually a friend, and that marching as a pawn in BLM rallies was a waste of time. Performative allyship is a dead end. Jews should seek to establish an actual partnership that’s reciprocal, issue-driven, and rooted in shared goals and values. For example, partnering with Christians to advocate for religious freedom against government encroachment would bring immense value to both communities. The sooner we abandon the whining and misguided rage, the sooner our alliances will deliver actual results.

What’s next? 

The general radicalization of society against Israel and Jews is objectively not a good thing, the intifada going global is undoubtedly bad, but without a doubt it’s not over. If we are to stymie the trends, we have to stop alienating potential allies and to stop trying to win over our enemies. Part of the problem is that since Jews themselves are largely poor allies (few in number, picky and whiny), we are up against a mountain and weighing ourselves down by our own silliness. This is compounded by the fact that modern-day “allyship” is very performative and shallow, perhaps one of the things that organizations like AIPAC can be credited for is that they refined their approach to strictly those within the halls of power. That’s not to say the masses should be ignored, but broad allyship will not come from university campuses. Instead building relations with Christians is where our focus should lead us. When traveling treacherous waters, turning away will guarantee that we capsize, we have to not squander the opportunities that lay before us, and plow ahead smartly. 

- Autistic Ashki 

Certainly exacerbated since the fallout of October 7th, the schisms between Jews and goyim has become clearer. The ones that already hate Jews, hate us more. The ones that were going to hate us, hate us now. And the ones that don’t hate us, continue not to hate us. Sure there’s many people who have Israel fatigue and have their own personal lives to deal with, but there is no hiding for the Jews any longer, everyone has heard of us and has an opinion. With this in mind, what does that mean for Jews? What responsibilities do we have given that we are thrust into the spotlight? This is the wrong frame of reference since such questions are built on an entirely false premise that our actions in our day to day lives have a meaningful impact on the minds of goyim. To think that Jews are the conductors of the goyim behavior through our behavior, steering them along, it’s gnarly levels of narcissism on our end. Nobody is saying to be rude or go out of your way to incite others, but far too many Jews have convinced themselves of some contrived ambassadorship that exists far beyond rational considerations. Get a grip, sure your actions to your immediate circle are important but memes aren’t going to make the goyim gather in hoards with their pitchforks. 

The crux of this weird belief is what I call “cascade theory”. It can be described as believing that a tumbling small snowball will lead to a humongous avalanche. Theoretically this has merit but being dependent on successive leaps of exaggeration, this results in a deterministic conspiracy. For example, a meme leads to X which leads to Y which leads to Z… which leads to disaster… hmmm ok? Why are you so sure about that? Nefariously and disingenuously, people love to make it seem like online content posted on social media is “the snowball”. According to these narcissistic alarmists, the goyim will see something edgy online an will actually think that Jews™ are bad as Abdul Al-Mohammed bin Mohammed says we are, and it’ll be lights out for the Jews, game-over! 

Funnily, this type of ideology of cascading consequence isn’t foreign for Jews. I experienced it firsthand when speaking with Jews in Mea Shearim regarding how smartphones are assur. Many people in this Haredi community genuinely think that if a pure child, unexposed to the garbage online, will be lead off the derech G-d forbid he sees something nefarious occasionally online. I bring this example to highlight how similar yet silly this type of thinking is, because a human being isn’t so weak (ok maybe some are) that a person has zero self-control, zero analytical ability, and are essentially slaves to what’s in front of them. Goyim aren’t a warehouse of ammonium nitrate in the Port of Beirut, patiently waiting for a spark spotted on social media. Overall this neuroticism contributes to Jewish demoralization, it’s unhealthy spirituality and psychologically. 

To play devil’s advocate, the fear that small acts will lead to disaster isn’t entirely baseless as exemplified by blood libels, medieval expulsions, or the gradual dehumanization of Jews in Weimar Germany through propaganda. However, this is completely misapplied to the modern context of social media. Centralized, institutional and state-driven propaganda is a far cry from the decentralized and chaotic online world. Perhaps because we are so accustomed to the internet that it has warped our minds to such a degree that it’s a struggle to imagine a world before it. The fear of online nonsense somehow cascading into mass killing is sensationalist and far-fetched, even more so given how subverted the goyim themselves are. It almost seems like Jews instinctively decide to scare themselves, as some sort of coping mechanism. We are not Jack trying to sneak past the giant beanstalk without waking him up.

Unfortunately, this idea of cascading into oblivion has its most common in discourse surrounding the topic of the Holocaust. Let me be clear, it was primarily the widespread degradation of the humanity of Jews, which allowed the Holocaust to happen. Memes, jokes and weird music videos were not a catalyst for the Holocaust. Today it’s widely held that if we aren’t careful and vigilant, another similar atrocity can happen again. Thus, we must nip it at the bud wherever possible, lest the goyim cascade again into the Einsatzgruppen. It’s not to downplay the threat that Jews especially in the diaspora face, but the “globalize the intifada crowd” didn’t come to hate Jews because of a meme, they’ve doused and drowned themselves in a blend of woke and Islamist nonsense. Anyways, this thinking that specifically social media will be the harbinger for the next Jewish calamity, has sadly been propagated by organizations such as the ADL and B’nai Brith, who beg for money to be the vanguard against online antisemitism. Remember, impossible goals necessitate endless funding. 

Ok detour, whilst writing this substack, I ventured to the ADL website, it’s comical:

Lmao, I can promise LEZM Gang, no amount of shekels will disrupt online hate, and the ADL is a glorificated ponzi scheme to funnel Jewish money into blackholes and inflated salaries. I’m glad the goyim are catching onto the fraud of the ADL, the Jews could learn something from that. We will never donate our way into safety, even less when these organizations have no real incentive to reduce antisemitism. Organizations like the ADL aren’t wrong to monitor hate, but their focus on online boogeymen is a blatant grift, capitalizing on Jewish fear. Meanwhile, the “globalize the intifada” crowd isn’t swayed by memes, they’re ensnared by ideologies (marxism and jihad) that long predate the internet. It’s funny how they too are used as another excuse to siphon off more financial donations. We must stop pretending our every little move controls the actions of goyim. It’s narcissistic and it’s exhausting to see. Focus on building strong communities, laughing at our enemies, and grilling some burgers whilst they rage.

This idea that small things cascade into bigger ones is the premise which Jewish anti-hate groups (and goyishe anti-hate groups at large for that matter) prey on. It’s entirely reductionist and misleading to insinuate that jokes and memes will build a road to catastrophe, and that these groups have any capacity to influence the outcome, at best they can write reports that nobody reads or cares about. It’s a silly gift that unfortunately far too many Jews believe in. Tip toeing and walking on eggshells doesn’t keep us safe, it makes Jews weak of mind and spirit, which itself acts as a form of mental subversion.

Carrying this fear of an ever-present and impending goyish uprising against the Jews is paranoia, and weakens us by being a distraction to actual dangers facing the Jewish community. The fear that a single meme or misstep will unleash another calamity isn’t just misguided, it’s paralyzing. The self-imposed psychological toll to be always on the lookout for what might trigger goyim, this cycles into a mindset that’s not just ineffective but actually a subtle form of self-harm. 

Historically, antisemitism thrived on centralized propaganda, not the chaotic information space like the world of X posts or Instagram reels. Meanwhile, the obsession with external perceptions distracts from real threats: assimilation, declining cultural literacy. Have no doubt, far more Jews will disappear from assimilation than from mean tweets. It’s not an accident that there is a fixation on issues that have no end, you can endlessly ask for donations against online antisemitism since there will never be an end to it, it’s the perfect grift.

Doubling back, I must emphasize that the reasons for Holocaust are vast, far beyond the scope of this substack, the sheer number of things that led to the worst man-made atrocity is itself proof of how complicated and multifaceted history is. So, again the self-imposed worrying about memes, or online accounts, leading to another shoah is total insanity. It takes galactic levels of narcissism cloud judgement to such a delusional extent. 

Additionally, even though the topic has been beaten to death, it’s still overlooked how the influence of social media algorithms creates a massive distortion for its users. Platforms such as X and Instagram prioritize engagement, so inflammatory, edgy and polarizing content will rise to the top. This creates a distorted perception that antisemitic memes or posts are more prolific than they are, this is perhaps why we only ever hear about antisemitism rising, it gets more clicks and donations to wasteful organizations. It must be emphasized that social media isn’t the real world. 

Lastly, LEZM will not be dictated towards, we will not placate Jewish crybabies and wimps. We decide what LEZM is and stands for. We will not accept weak and pathetic attempts to redefine LEZM according to their sensibilities. Thank you for your attention to this matter! 

- Autistic Ashki 

CUFI is a massive organization that does advocacy, lobbying, and fundraising. It’s already ~20 years old and boasting 11 million members. That metric alone makes it the largest pro-Israel organization in the continental United States. Ignoring and or otherwise dismissing this entity is patently foolish for that reason alone. The character and inception of CUFI can basically be credited to a single man: Pastor John Hagee. His story and activism on the fronts of curbing jew hatred and promoting the US-Israel alliance is something I will get into, but I figure it’s probably more proper to clear the air for many of you before I do so. The choice to attend the conference wasn’t difficult to be honest. I believe that Jews and Christians have more in common than differences in the American continent.

I had an invitation extended to me by Kasim Hafeez (shoutout to a fellow brown), the deputy director of messaging at CUFI. Kasim’s life story is fascinating in its own right being that of a Pakistani ex-muslim with a fantastic sense of dry English humor. However, I won’t waste time relating his entire biography, he’s much better suited to do that and I suggest you give him a follow if you aren’t already. Despite my quick decision to attend the conference, I did feel a small level of creeping anxiety about going to a Christian gathering on the train ride there. Would attendants try to preach to me about Jesus? Would proselytization be expected and tolerated? Would the New Testament be a constant reference in the plenary sessions? How accommodating would it be for Jewish attendees in general?

I’ve had plenty of pleasant interactions with Christians, but the few unpleasant ones still remained in my mind. I don’t totally care to expand on this much but I have had some deeply aggravating interactions with proselytization attempts including once when it was visited upon my father, zichrono livracha, when he was brought into hospice care during his final days. I only relate this story so that the rest of the essay be taken seriously and not dismissed as one naive man’s take. Though not quite like Daniel, I felt perhaps that there was a slight chance that I would be walking into the Lion's Den.

CUFI, to their credit, does a good job of anticipating any anxiety Jews might have in attending their summit for the first time. Before any of the major programming begins, Jewish attendees were invited to a private panel with Pastor Hagee and Rabbi Avraham Scheinberg. It was made clear from the beginning that CUFI is a one issue organization: the well being of the Jewish people in the totality of what that entails. Consequently, this organization is explicitly non-conversionary and they do not tolerate proselytization efforts from either their staff or the attendants. I cannot stress enough how much that means to me, and I believe that this principle should go to them as an incredible credit. They lobby the US government, rally churches across the country to support the fight against antisemitism, promote positive Jewish-Christian relations, and do whatever they can to bolster the US-Israel alliance. 

Hagee, for his part, left a remarkable impression on me with how emotional and distraught he became in speaking about his lifelong spiritual brother, friend, and personal confidant Rav Aryeh Scheinberg. The Pastor was the only gentile who spoke at the Rabbi’s funeral and Hagee said with teary eyes that he looks most forward to seeing Rabbi Scheinberg when he enters his afterlife. He described his love for Rabbi Scheinberg as that which Jonathan had for David. I don’t consider myself a fool and what I saw from Pastor Hagee as he sat beside the son of the late Rabbi was true fraternal love for a fellow human being who also happened to be an Orthodox Jew. He spent most of his time talking to us about the ways in which Jews influenced his life for the better and the deep love he has for Israel. His condemnations of antisemitism, including when it comes from christian spheres, were refreshing. He views Jew hatred as demonic (yes he uses that word explicitly) and poisonous. He and his daughter, heir apparent to CUFI leadership, feel that Christians should not be spared from the curse that antisemitism brings to society. “If you’re going to draw a circle, draw it around us as well”.

I was reminded of all the whining in American Jewish discourse about the struggle to find allies, I couldn’t help but feel that these people were perhaps genuine allies. Pastor Hagee founded CUFI decades ago when then Iranian president Ahmadinejad described Israel as a “one-bomb country”. He organized 400 pastors to embark on a trip throughout Israel on his own volition and leveraged their experience to create a political organization that could wield enough strength to influence the highest levels of American politics.

Well, I was put at ease, this didn’t seem like a Lion's Den at all. This summit, marking the 20 year anniversary since its first, had the highest Jewish attendance yet. Jewish college students, Israeli community leaders, American Chassids, a bevy of major Jewish activists and politicians were in the room. Finding a minyan was only difficult in that you had to accept being added to yet another whatsapp chat. Actually, most of the Orthodox Jews in attendance have been veterans of the organization for many years. I was surprised. I met a daati leumi man who hails from a yishuv in shomron and operates an organization to connect Christians to communities in Judea and Samaria. He had been coming to the CUFI summit for years and the support has been a two way street with CUFI directly providing material assistance to his community. The heads of the Young Jewish Republicans were there as well. I met an unassuming chassid who spent his time chatting with African christian pastors at the convention and was planning a meeting to see Cardinal Dolan to discuss how we could improve Jewish-Catholic relations more specifically. Frankly, religious Jews seem very much at ease and comfortable at CUFI.

When I davened, we were given a private section of the conference plaza for our prayers with security around the corner. We live in a pretty remarkable era when Jews and Christians can meet each other in goodwill. I think it’s important to internalize this. Anyone who studies Jewish history can only be in awe of how utterly unique a place like CUFI is. The Christians were nothing short of pleasant. I was frequently greeted with a “shalom shalom” (for some reason people said it twice), very warm smiles, fistbumps and handshakes. It did bother me a bit how nice people were. This is an entirely unserious complaint, and only born of my naturally cynical and untrusting disposition. Perhaps Jews are conditioned to expect assholes and the lack thereof triggers us. I’m not sure, I’ll leave the pathologizing to neurotic Jewish therapists. I spoke to pastors, students, mothers and fathers. There was a fundamental undertone of goodwill in every conversation I had. The programming itself was great. I didn't really learn anything new from the content of the speeches themselves. Being a terminally online Jew will expose you to far more than you bargain to learn. I definitely learned a lot about how emotional the Christian attachment is to the Bible, and by extension the Jewish narrative and Israel.

The truth is that this didn't feel foreign to me. Learning Torah, reading Jewish history, and the melding of the two is also deeply satisfying to me as well. Obviously, lehavdil, the methods are a bit different, but the result is ultimately adjacent. It’s maybe a bit gauche for cosmopolitan society to admit this, but talking explicitly about G-d, giving thanks, and recognizing the intricate design in life is actually quite liberating and fulfilling if not at the very least interesting. It was moving to see a large group of people appreciate G-d and pursue moral matters. The two emotional high points of the summit both involved hostage families who were invited to speak. Yair Horn, a former hostage who was kidnapped along with his yet to be released brother, jumped off the stage after his speech to approach John Hagee and embrace him in a hug. Hersh Goldberg Polin’s mother also delivered a deeply emotional memorial for her son Hirsh. I’m only describing all this exposition because this is what natural “allyship” should look like in my estimation. A coming together over shared values and a cultural exchange. Liberal Jews have been understandably rocked by the fact that their political allies turned out to be horndogs for a medieval death cult, I can sympathize with that. All I ask is that they see that genuine allyship does exist, it’s just not where they’ve been looking in vain.

I will say that it was strange to watch pastors and preachers “work” a room full of christians from a pulpit. It was strange to me but I don't mean that in any sort of derogatory way. It was simply different from what we’re used to seeing in synagogues. I expect that Chrisitians would find our sermons and methods of prayer strange as well. Usually our Rabbinic sermons that come from a pulpit command general silence from the audience with intent to listen to analytic theology and narrative. Christians are far more animated. Open shouting from the audience, hands and fingers thrust into the air in agreement and praise. People suddenly standing with eyes closed and outstretched arms. The pastors in an expertly fashion timed the rhythm of their speeches to the audience, many seemed entranced by it. Still though, all the verses shared were strictly from Tanach and the level of enthusiasm returned to the speaker was electric. People vigorously shouting “YES”, and “AMEN” to the stories of Hashem’s miracles performed during the exodus or the Jewish war against Haman in the book of Esther was fascinating to watch. Even more so, some of the speeches were just downright hilarious. Here’s a clip of Pastor John Russell, I was cackling like a maniac at this opening.

On a political front, I will admit that it was basically just a right-wing rave. CUFI sort of pays lip service to lobbying democrats but it’s transparently just a matter of practicality. Is AIPAC still LARP’ing as a bipartisan organization? Did you guys know that they don’t even hold summits anymore? Speakers at CUFI included PragerU CEO (and unit 8200 veteran) Melissa Streit, Mark Levin, Richard Kemp and a plethora of Trump admin officials including Aryeh Lightstone who works directly with Steve Witkoff. Miriam Adelson was front and center in the audience and also delivered a speech. I'm not complaining, I had a great time. It was a bit of respite from constantly surveilling islamist, communist and anti-Israel channels for content. Kemp, Levin, Hagee and Streit all fed my appetite for nationalist rhetoric very well. What was nice to see also was how well this summit addressed elements of antisemitism in their own spaces. Qatarlson and Klandace were jabbed at multiple times for what CUFI correctly perceives as what’s either moral cowardice at best or moral inversion at worst. Macron also caught a funny jab from Kemp, well deserved and it’s nice to see englishmen still excel at a favorite pastime of putting the French on blast. The success of the joint Iran ops was also a center stage issue. The room erupted every single time a B2 bomber was mentioned. G-d I love America. Naturally, religious language adorned the narrative surrounding the unfolding events of the two weeks of bombs flying on eagles wings, BASED. Levin and Hagee were both explicit however that they seek peace with the Iranian people and that they see them as held hostage by their own government. Also BASED.

Before I conclude my thoughts I just want to make a point I think will be necessary in anticipation of what I think will be pushback to this essay and some of the ideas in here. Many will oppose efforts like CUFI because they’re suspicious of the motives. Despite the overwhelming efforts they’ve gone to to make their summit a welcoming space for Jews, I’m positive many Jews will still view their efforts as suspicious because they’ve heard about Christian rapture and eschatology. “They want to support Jews only so they can bring about the end times” or some meme of the sort. This is an unserious concern in my view. I would only address it with two points. The first point is that the majority of the summit celebrated Israel, and celebrated the Jewish people as being in common will with western values. It is far too idealistic to assume that every Christian seriously only looks to work with Jews because of eschatology. Rather the simplest explanations are usually the correct ones: christians at CUFI correctly view Israel as a spear tip defender of Western democracy and Judeo-Christian values, it’s in their natural interest to do so.

The second point I want to make is a little bit more unflattering to the Jewish point of view. Even if I were to grant that Christians only support Israel or Jews at large because of rapture (and that isn’t the case), it would still be in our interest to work with them. We are Jews, we have our Torah. I’m very secure in my beliefs. I don’t believe in Christian rapture, but if somebody wants to come and work with me towards a common goal, his religious convictions don’t bother me in the slightest, I simply disagree with what he believes will happen. So why not accept this partnership on a purely material basis then? I’ll be explicit. Usually I find that the Jews who are most concerned and most suspicious of working with Christians are Jews, who themselves are most insecure in their own Jewish identity. As I said earlier, the summit had a large cohort of Haredi Jews attending. Such Jews represent our own fundamentalist expression of Judaism, and yet they feel they can walk amongst Christians at CUFI in complete comfort. Perhaps investigate why you feel apprehension, and the misconceptions that you carry. My unease dissipated very quickly on the first day. Gabe Groisman, former mayor of Bal Harbour Florida, and Orthodox Jew summed it up perfectly:

Ultimately I realized a bit later into the conference that I was right feeling like I was entering the Lions Den. CUFI is an organization animated by deep spiritual conviction, fraternity and courage. It’s a lion's den alright, but we’re not lambs among them. I highly recommend that Jews check it out. Having been and seen what the summit is all about I honestly have no reservations in encouraging more Jews to go. You’ll be more than safe and certainly welcomed. It’s different from AIPAC, IAC and the bevy of other copy/paste Hasbara Inc. events. I look forward to bringing the other LEZM admins to this conference along with LEZM GANG to this event.

Jews, historically, have always been a bridge between the east and west. We are unique as a people in that we still maintained particularism as we brunted the weight of diaspora in every corner of the world. The flourishing of the Abraham Accords and the Cyrus Accords inshallah are fantastic developments for the East. Let’s not soon forget or become unfamiliar with the West just because we can go shopping in Dubai now. Nor should we forget that Christianity also spent much time in the east as well. A lot of the anger hurled at us is over our status as a chosen people. Yes, we were chosen for a purpose: to make Earth a resting place for G-d and to popularize morality. We need to construct this bridge and one Jew working alongside one Christian can make a world of difference, that’s what CUFI showed me at least. Let’s move forward with no fear.

שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹקינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד

- Lawless Levite

.

But Nietzsche’s famous disgust for antisemites wasn’t born out of love for Jews, since he had plenty of criticisms towards Jews. He admired some intellectual and culturally significant German Jews, yes, but he did still fundamentally view Jews and Judaism as a corruptive force. In Nietzsche’s view, the Jews uprooted Europe’s old aristocratic moral code where to be good was to be great and replaced it with a priestly class: first by inventing and spreading Christianity in ancient times, and again by inventing quasi-Christian humanistic theories of morality as the Christian order of Europe began to fall apart during the Enlightenment period. Regardless of the name slapped on the philosophy, the underlying theme is that to be good is to be meek, pathetic, lowly, or in a word: Jewish. 

This is what Nietzsche termed as “slave morality,” which he viewed as a total inversion of what it actually means to be good. In Nietzsche’s view, the good man is the great man: the aristocrat who conquers new lands, spreads his seed throughout, rules them until his death, and holds his place in the history books. To say otherwise is just cope - a petty way for slaves and other losers to excuse their unwillingness to achieve their own freedom or die trying. 

Nietzsche hated the world he believed Jews created, but he didn’t hate Jews personally for it. Putting a dead Jew on a stick, casting him as the mortal enemy of Judaism, and then getting all the enemies of the Jews to swear allegiance to a moral code that places being a weak and cowardly Jew preaching peace and love as the highest moral good was quite the con, and Neitzache couldn’t help but admire it a bit. 

Herein lies why Nietzsche hated antisemites. Not only does their slave morality drive them to deranged levels of hatred unbecoming of any civilized person, but the moral paradigm they’re using to come to this hateful conclusion about Jews was itself invented by Jews. 

This also makes it difficult to blankly state that Nietzsche’s hatred for antisemitism would’ve led him to oppose the Nazis. Hitler was no Christian, and he was very consciously trying to overthrow what he viewed as a Jewish moral order that was sucking Europeans of their racial vitality, and more specifically Aryans. Free of Jewish morality, the Nazis set in motion the most deadly and destructive war in human history, sending armies to murder and rape all across Eastern Europe and subjecting their conquered territories to an era of ruthless tyranny never before seen on the continent. I’m not sure if Nietzsche would have supported someone as psychotic (and quite frankly pedestrian) as Hitler, but I don’t think it’s as much of a bastardization as Nietzsche’s defenders would lead you to believe. Perhaps Jewish morality is a good thing after all? 

Although I’m not a Nietzschian and don’t largely agree with his assessment of Abrahamic religion (whether it be Judaism or Christianity), I still think there’s something to say for the rejection of slave morality. Of course, the Nazis were far from the only movement which sought to revitalize youthful vitality amid the challenges of modernity, nor was their ultimately suicidal attempt at it a representative sample. This type of thought was generally in vogue throughout the Victorian Era and later the Progressive Era. All sorts of beliefs and institutions from the YMCA to the American National Park system to the Scramble for Africa to all the late 19th century US Presidents having beards to basically the entire progressive movement of the early 20th century was in part motivated by these types of beliefs. If you attended an American Jewish summer camp, there’s a very good chance that the people who founded it thought that urban life was turning your great grandfathers into pathetic sissies.

Many early Zionists were also contending with these issues, particularly Max Nordau, the Zionist who came up with Muscular Judaism and the idea of the ‘New Jew.’ These Zionists largely took the Nietzschian criticism of Jews to heart, believing that 2,000 years of living as a stateless merchant/middlemen class in the diaspora had reduced the Jewish people to a degenerate state, with the shtetl being the ultimate embodiment of this humiliation. There, weak and defenseless second-class citizens living in poor, filthy, overcrowded villages under the rule of a (possibly senile) Rabbi live and die in anonymity, occasionally at the hands of the occasional marauding band of pogromists who will never be brought to justice. They didn’t sympathize with these Jews, but rather viewed them with disgust, which is why you’ll occasionally see antisemites quote their writings, and accuse Zionism of being antisemitic.

Regardless of whether their hatred for Shtetl life can be characterized as antisemitic, the only thing separating Zionists from total vindication was that they weren’t insistent enough. Shtetl life in the early 1900s was already totally dysfunctional and on its deathbed, but I don’t think even the most alarmist Zionists imagined that militarized German death squads would march across Eastern Europe and entirely exterminate Shtetl life, leaving the little that survived to be assimilated into Soviet communist culture. 

The Zionists, however, achieved their goals beyond their own wildest dreams. Not only was a Jewish state created, but it created a culture of warriors who have become the dominant military power in the Middle East, though repeatedly humiliating and instilling fear in its enemies as it expanded its own wealth and glory. They successfully liberated the Jew from the caricature of the Jew, the pathetic slave whose meek and cowardly demeanor elicited disgust from a similarly enslaved public.

The antisemite continues to be a slave however. In pursuit of destroying the warrior nation of the New Jew, the once powerful and glorious nation of Iran has turned itself into a giant Shtetl. The Iranian people are defenseless second-class citizens in their own country, and despite showing the bluster of warriors, their leadership consists of senile Mullahs who believe in magic, spy squirrels and have spent their entire lives in academies, rising through the ranks by showing off their Talmudic bookishness and academic fluency rather than achieving any real-world accomplishments such as winning a war or increasing the country’s GDP, which now by some measures sits below Iraq’s on a per capita basis. The most noble thing a person can do under the twisted value system of this antisemitic regime is not invent a new technology or advance humanity in some other way, but get blown up by Israel. What motivated them to create a society like this? A book that was intentionally plagiarized from the Torah for the purpose of marketing itself to Jews.

In other words, this is a government that is totally enslaved to Jews not because any real live Jews enslaved them, but because they have chosen to psychologically enslave themselves to the archetype of the Jew. They have created a society of inverted morality where, much like the Shtetl, being constantly humiliated, living in poverty, and losing all your dignity is good because it exposes the moral depravity of the Jew for rejecting this way of life. Also like the Shtetl, this method of organizing society falls apart immediately when confronted with even the slightest bit of force. 

We are not Nazis coming to exterminate the Iranians nor are we communists coming to them with a new form of enslavement. We are coming to defend ourselves from a fanatical regime which has chosen, entirely on their own accord, to take on the posture of a rebellious slave toward their Jewish masters. However, unlike previous states which have taken up this role (and there are many), this time Jews are not also slaves. For the first time in thousands of years, Jews are the real masters of our own destiny.

So inasmuch as Iran wants to take on the role of an uncooperative slave to Israel, Israel will put them in their place. Israel never asked for a slave, and it is entirely up to the Iranian people if they want to revel in poverty and misery under antisemitic hypnosis, or if they want to liberate themselves and reestablish themselves as the proud, dignified nation they’ve been since well before the Biblical Israel even existed. 

- Beau Chasse

“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.”

- Hannah Arendt

These words, written by Hannah Arendt are a useful place to begin. The image in the minds of most useful idiots on the subject of Palestine; that of a barren, desolate wasteland, filthy water, of desperate, and impoverished population is ironically the exact Orientalism these acolytes of Edward Said claim to decry. It is also completely divorced from reality. One of the most acute public health challenges in Palestine is not starvation, but obesity - one study1 found that a quarter of Gaza healthcare workers are morbidly obese. A systematic review of the literature found that “the prevalence of obesity and overweight in Palestine are high compared with those of some other developing nations, such as Tunisia, especially among adults and people with noncommunicable diseases…”2.  So, while I would not move to Tunis, the cradle and catalyst of the Arab Spring, it would be a grave insult to the good Arabs of Tunisia to compare life in Tunis to the Yazidi under ISIS, or the Tutsi in Rwanda, or a Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto.

 In Mapping Our Enemies we stitched together the various factions and archetypes which can collectively be described as the “Coalition of the Big Lie”. It was this imaginary Gaza that was in their heads when Hamas invaded Israel to rape, kidnap, and murder Jews. On October 8th, the Coalition of the Big Lie organized celebrations of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust - all under the careful supervision of local police departments, who were instructed to observe and keep the peace. The Coalition of the Big Lie came out in force, some to give rousing cliché speeches about “global revolution” and “liberation”, others to eat baklava and light fireworks, others to make a quick buck selling keffiyehs. October 8th was a day about “narratives of revolutionary romanticism, about…the noble Palestinian… primarily to inflame, inspire, and radicalize, or at best to entertain, their own domestic audience.”3

For the Coalition of the Big Lie, October 7th was not about Israel, or Zionism, or the Jew, because antisemitism is never about the Jew, it has always been, and always will be about the antisemite. October 8th for the Reds was the dawn of a new day, filled with a romantic revolutionary potential: a hyper-real October Revolution. If such a devastating, and unexpected blow could be delivered against Israel, then their movement could inflict a similar blow against the rest of the “capitalist machine”. For postcolonialist Reds, October 7th was praxis: “what did you think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?”4 and permission to engage in the masturbatory chud fantasy of a post-white, post-West, post-capitalist utopia. The issue is not Palestine, it never was Palestine, the issue was and remains the Revolution itself. October 8th showed them how many people in the “belly of the beast” were disenchanted, alienated, demoralized, and were ready to awaken to a new revolutionary struggle.

For the Greens, October 8th was more spiritually significant than October 7th. The attacks - as showcased by Hamas documents seized by the IDF in Gaza make clear - were a rearguard action.  In the struggle between the decadent Islam of the Abraham Accords - the Islam corrupted by the avarice and degeneracy of al-Yahood - and the Islam of al-Salaf, they prevented the House of Saud from public capitulation. It has supercharged jihad, which is a continuous struggle, until the End of Days. October 7th also rewarded many of their brethren with the honour of martyrdom. October 8th, that showed them the brittleness and weakness of the West, how demoralized and feeble the kuffar had become, and how ready and receptive a bored, atomized, and fragile public would be to dawah, ready to awaken themselves to a new spiritual Jihad. 

For the Blacks, October 7th was an indictment of their own failures. How the hell could the based accelerationist Aryan ubermensch lose out to Tusken Raiders in the sport of killing Jew. Bowers murdered a dozen Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue, the Sinwars murdered two orders of magnitude more Jews. They did carry with them the possibility of recruiting new faces to der ewige Kampf gegen die Juden, but burdened at that point by their aesthetics being synonymous with evil worse than the Devil itself, they have largely stuck to parroting leftist talking points, and focused on launching a neo-revisionist attack on history itself, picking up where Irving v. Lipstadt & Penguin Publishing left.

That leaves the Whites. Their aversion to the totalitarian poison that murdered millions in the 20th century was aesthetic, not moral or philosophical. Canada is an excellent case-study. On the heels of draconian COVID-19 lockdown measures, which turned ‘ordinary’ Canadians into gleeful snitches against their rule-breaking and immoral neighbors, Canadians were already primed for demoralization. On May 27, 2021, “the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation released preliminary findings of its investigation, saying hundreds of suspected unmarked graves were discovered at a residential school in Kamloops. The suspected grave sites of 215 children, believed to be as young as three years old, were found by the Nation on the site of what was once Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school.” 5

For the uninitiated, Residential Schools were systems designed to forcibly assimilate natives into European society. Other First Nations communities soon followed up with their own ‘preliminary findings’. The Trudeau government ordered flags be lowered to half-mast indefinitely. Trudeau arrived in Kamloops the next day, and was photographed kneeling with a teddy bear. It kickstarted a Cultural Revolution overnight. Orange shirts, and the slogan “EVERY CHILD MATTERS” became ubiquitous, spontaneous art pieces went up at other Residential School sites. Trudeau pounced, announcing new rites of penance, a holiday - Truth and Reconciliation Day, as a day of solemn reflection, and mourning for the original sin Canada committed, and for which it could never atone.

Next, statues of John A. MacDonald, Queen Victoria, and other pivotal figures in Canadian history were vandalized with red paint. Some were torn down, others were pre-emptively removed by cowardly city councils to appease mobs. Churches were targeted because of their historic role in administering the Residential School system. So one Church burned down. Then another, and another, until it was an epidemic. Altogether leading to a 652% increase in anti-Catholic hate crimes. Ultimately, 108 churches burned down (many of which were on reserves and home to Indigenous congregations). Municipalities canceled Canada Day fireworks, and replaced them with ceremonies of solemnity and national shame. 

But, the ‘preliminary findings’ were not what they appeared. The unmarked graves of children were actually anomalies detected using ground penetrating radar, on the site of an unmarked cemetery known to Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation. No matter. The government promised funding, a coterie of academic experts, and indigenous knowledge keepers to dig up the truth. Four years later, not a single anomaly has been exhumed. Our lapse into Maple Maoism was built on lies.  

It remains a half-broken taboo Canadian politics to discuss the church burnings, and remains political suicide to state plainly that the Big Lie was a Big Lie. Efforts are ongoing to make “residential school denialism” a criminal offence akin to Holocaust denial, a proposal that may pass into law in an omnibus “Online Harms Bill” at some point in the life cycle of the new Liberal government. Canadian Hasbara Inc. has voiced support for this omnibus bill, marketed by both the Trudeau and Carney governments as central to their efforts to combat antisemitism and all other forms of hate.

In the twenty months since October 7th, some of the Whites have been successfully recruited - they have reverted to Islam, awakened their revolutionary, anti-imperialist consciousness, they have seen the wickedness of the kuffar, the Imperialist, the Capitalist, the Jew. They have been programmed, and their programming will be very difficult to undo, because the Coalition of the Big Lie shares many psychological dimensions with cults: pressure to conform, division between “in-group” and “out group”, the collectivization of identity through symbol, ritual, and aesthetics, the shunning of defectors, and so on. This has permitted some to substitute the Mao suit, or the Hugo Boss uniform for the keffiyeh, surgical mask, and combat boots. The same people who recoil at a Roman salute and see dog whistles in every nook and cranny, will then chant to “globalize the Intifada”, announce “glory to all our martyrs”, hold protests in Jewish neighborhoods, in front of Jewish businesses and synagogues. Why?

It’s because they had already swallowed the Big Lie, that the system of government and ideals of Western civilization which unleashed unprecedented human flourishing is irredeemable. That they are the root of all evil. The loudest of the Orange Guard rallied overnight to the slogan “from Turtle Island to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime.”  This created the “unity of fields”6 between the struggle against the Zionist settler-colonizers of Israel, and the Imperialist settler-colonizers of the Anglosphere. Activists from Samidoun admitted as much on the anniversary of the attacks, when they burned a Canadian flag while proclaiming “Death to Canada, Death to the United States, and Death to Israel.”7

Canadian Hasbara Inc. has chosen to double down on the idea of Jewish indigeneity. This is philosophical suicide. Our opponents have already redefined the term. A United Nations fact-sheet describes “form[ing] non-dominant groups of society”8 as essential to the definition of “Indigeneity”, a premise wholly antithetical to any coherent form of Zionism.  

With one Big Lie already absorbed into the Canadian national consciousness, embracing another was inevitable.  Demands for an “immediate unconditional ceasefire” sprung up as early as October 8th. Useful idiots on campuses were describing the situation in Gaza as a “genocide” barely a few days later.

The same lugenpresse and political machinery that downplayed and whitewashed burning churches, and the same legal system that permitted it with minimal consequences operated unchanged. The lugenpresse created the Big Lie out of a composite of smaller lies, but the frame is an obvious one: this a struggle between the poor and the downtrodden, the Brown, dispossessed Indigenous Palestinian, versus the rich, wealthy, White, avaricious Colonizer Zionist. Anything, and increasingly, anyone, that does not advance this narrative is to be opposed, omitted, or destroyed. It is the psychology behind why otherwise “empathetic”, “progressive”, “tolerant” elite human capital felt comfortable destroying posters of kidnapped children. Hostages are a source of cognitive dissonance that cannot be ignored, so they had to be purged from the discourse. Tunnels? Purged. Iran and the ‘axis of Resistance’? Purged. October 7th, barely worth a mention. The vast majority of Canadians cannot name any of the eight Canadians murdered on October 7th. Hamas itself has all but disappeared from the picture, it’s not an Israel-Hamas War, it’s an Israel-Gaza war. 

This narrative is reinforced and rationalized through Schrodinger’s international law, applicable and non-applicable depending on the circumstances. The systematic and pervasive violation of international law by Hamas, purged, and in so doing exposes the truth of the endeavour - to demonize, and dehumanize Israeli Jews, and delegitimize the State of Israel. First, came the farcical case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. Then, came the cases in the International Criminal Court against Netanyahu, Gallant, and three dead Hamas leaders. Then came the Hind Rajab Foundation, targeting individual Israelis’ for investigation and arrest whenever they ventured abroad.  In Canada, one communist journalist has even started compiling a list of Israeli-Canadian soldiers.  Finally, when Ireland and Amnesty International could not contort the Convention on Genocide to fit their allegations, they clamored to redefine and expand the meaning of the word. The lugenpresse’s message is simply, that Jews are bloodthirsty, enjoy slaughtering innocent people in the most cruel fashion possible. Although left unsaid, if the Jews are committing the most cruel and heinous of slaughters, then perhaps, the Shoah can be rationalized, and the slate can be wiped clean. 

The lugenpresse then beats the message into public consciousness through saturation. The lugenpresse has used “genocide” with reference to the current Israel-Hamas war than Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Syria, ISIS, Armenia, Myanmar, and Sudan put together. The Big Lie must be repeated often for it to be believed. 

The Big Lie is believed, precisely because the impulse of the Anglosphere, though atomized subversion, and estrangement from its Christian origins, has responded in a most Christian manner: by finding a scapegoat, and there is no better, no more familiar scapegoat in all of Christendom than the Jew, or a Jewish nation-state. A society that resents itself will destroy itself. Make no mistake, Israel was not the target of October 7th, it was the only available appetizer. The real target of October 7th was October 8th. In the Anglosphere, we see societies that resent themselves, in the process of openly destroying themselves. And like rats trapped in a cage, the Anglosphere begins gnawing at its own leg, willing to cast off the Jews, condemning both to ruin. There are, as always, Jews who prefer to be pure and vulnerable. They are the “Jews of privilege”9 whose families escaped the bloodletting of the last century, or they are Jews of stupidity - who have no understanding of their faith, and their people, and no desire to learn anything about it. 

On October 8th, the Hamasniks in our streets proclaimed all at once that October 7th did not happen (“Denial”), that it did happen, but the rapes did not (“Revisionism”), that it happened but Zionists did it to themselves (“Hard Inversion”), that it did happen but that it was the Zionists fault (“Moral Inversion”). That was for the true believers, the already converted. For those they sought to bring into the fold, they added the following: “the Zionists are already doing equally bad, or worse things, and steps needed to be taken to stop them (“Moral Inversion”). The Zionists needed to be villains in the story, in perpetuity, and at all times, no exceptions. 

First, there was a demand for a ceasefire. And good people did not speak up, because demanding a ceasefire was humanitarian, and noble. Then, it became a demand to stop the genocide. And good people did not speak up, because genocide is abbhorent, and if any people should know that genocide is bad, it’s the Jews. Then, it became a moral duty to oppose genocide through direct action; through blocking critical infrastructure, through encampments, through boycotts, divestments, sanctions, and property damage. Then, it became a moral duty to oppose genocide by any means necessary.

And the Blacks, Greens, and Reds, the true believers, have led the Whites down this ladder of escalation, step by step, with softer approaches. They do it through decontextualizing language, and insisting on literalism: “Intifada literally just means ‘uprising’, or ‘to shake off’  (in the same way that Seig Heil literally just means “hail victory!”). Sometimes they will employ a motte and bailey technique: “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”  just means equal rights and freedoms for all in the land, and they will gaslight you relentlessly if you assert otherwise. Otherwise censorious tyrants will appeal to freedom of speech - “even if it means what you think it means, they’re just words, and we have the right to say them!” often invoking the Livingstone Formula, asserting that any accusation of antisemitism is motivated exclusively by the desire to censor and censure criticism of Israel. 

The Whites were led down this ladder of escalation, because they already believed the lie that the society they lived in was evil, that they were guilty for ancestral sins for which they cannot atone, but that they can enact penance through good works, and by joining in a collective, revolutionary, spiritual, and religious struggle. Western leaders know this is wrong, but they are political creatures, their public views are carefully calibrated to respond to the public. Ayelet Samerano, mother of hostage Yonatan Samerano, who's been meeting with world leaders told it plainly - that world leaders are much more critical of Hamas, and much more supportive of Israel in private. Having a backbone carries political costs that many do not wish to bear. Their fecklessness is only accelerating what is to come. 

Two weeks ago, the Big Lie turned fatal. Elias Rodriguez allegedly murdered Sara Miligrim (Z”l) and Yaron Lischinsky (Z”l) “for Gaza” and “for Palestine”. Mohamad Soliman allegedly burned a dozen people in Boulder, Colorado because he wanted “to end the Zionists”. While leaders still expressed outrage and horror, the public reaction was not unanimous, thanks to the efforts of propagandists like Hasan Piker, and clout-farmers like Piers Morgan. The taboo against unapologetic violence against Jews in the Diaspora is over. The Intifada has been globalized. We must prepare, but neither must we despair, for we have overcome worse as a people, and we have the miracle of miracles, a Jewish state, however flawed, to protect us.

Signed, 

Abba Eban.

Trudeau’s resignation was welcomed by the majority of Canadian Jews, who already lean Conservative but have been especially repulsed by the Liberal government’s response to the war in Gaza. Under Trudeau’s leadership, Canada sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Gaza Strip, brought little attention to two Canadian citizens who were kidnapped and eventually murdered by Hamas, delisted Jewish charities over their activities in Israel, repeatedly issued condemnations against Israel for actions which were later proven to be hoaxes, and pledged to cooperate with the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu.

None of this was particularly surprising; the Liberals have held a reputation within the Jewish community as being ‘fence-sitters’ on this issue since the Second Intifada. What came as a bigger surprise to the Jewish community, however, were the mobs.

Much like in the United States, one of the most notable features of the Israel-Hamas war in Canada has been massive pro-Palestine protests and encampments and, due to the lack of any law enforcement against them, they’ve become increasingly emboldened. In Toronto, there is now a weekly pro-Palestine demonstration at the corner of Bathurst Street and Sheppard Avenue, a suburban residential Jewish neighborhood far north of any government buildings or the Israeli consulate. Protesting outside of synagogues has also become commonplace under the guise that these synagogues are organizing “illegal land sales” in Israel. 

The Liberals have not made much of a serious attempt to counter or respond to these mobs. When asked, the Liberals on multiple occasions would point to their Online Harms Bill, an attempt to bring European-style hate speech laws to the internet, as an example of a protection against the Jewish community that Conservatives opposed, even though this has nothing to do with real life harassment mobs. They might also point to the fact that they outlawed Holocaust denial, a new law on the books which also has nothing to do with the current threat of anti-Israel mobs, and which was proposed by a Conservative MP anyway, and I suspect the law will go the way of the dodo when it’s inevitably challenged before the courts (contrary to popular belief, Canada’s constitution does not allow for the type of oppressive speech restrictions common in Europe). They did list Samidoun, an affiliate of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as a terrorist organization (although you’ll never catch them bragging about it), but the people behind the group just rebranded and continue to roam free in Canada. To the government’s credit, they did genuinely invest in security programs for Jewish institutions, which appears to have paid off since there have been no deadly antisemitic attacks in Canada through the course of the war.

Then there was the National Forum on Combating Antisemitism, the brainchild of Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) Anthony Housefather, who represents the extremely wealthy and extremely Jewish riding (electoral district for non-canadians) of Mont Royal in Montreal. The man is a rather pitiful character– being the only sitting MP who attended Trudeau’s wedding and never received a cabinet position. He also received national attention when he broadcasted his moral conflict over Trudeau’s sympathy for terrorists to the country, but when he was given the chance to make this conference happen, he chose to stick around. The results of the conference were mixed; some funding for Hasbara Inc, ‘anti-hate’ grifters and the Holocaust Industry piled in with some supposed improvements to law enforcement, although it’s questionable whether this will have much effect if the government’s catch-and-release attitude towards criminal justice continues.

But now Justin Trudeau is gone and Mark Carney is in charge, at least for now. Could there be a change in the tone of the Liberal Party?

At face value, there’s reason to believe there could be. Justin Trudeau is a quintessential product of Canada’s so-called ‘Laurentian elite’, an insular group of aristocratic Catholic families from Ontario and Quebec who exert a hugely disproportionate degree of influence over Canadian institutions. Like most elites these days, the Laurentian elites display a cosmopolitan disposition, but this is not a group that has historically been particularly friendly towards Jews. Meanwhile, Carney comes from a more authentically cosmopolitan background. He attended school at Harvard and Oxford before landing a job at Goldman-Sachs, and then went on to become the Governor of the Bank of Canada, and later the Bank of England. Since leaving the UK, he’s served on the board, and eventually as the chair, of Brookfield Asset Management, a massive international alternative investment firm, and held positions at the UN and various international NGOs for climate-related initiatives. While the record these sorts of institutions have towards Jews and Israel is mixed at best, at the very least, it’s likely that Mark Carney personally knows more Jewish people than Justin Trudeau.

When Carney announced his cabinet, there was more reason to be hopeful that his government would be better dispositioned towards Jews. Marco Mendicino (who I personally detest for unrelated reasons), a former MP for a Toronto riding with a lot of Hasids and a staunch ally of the Jewish community since the war broke out, was named as Carney’s chief of staff. Rachel Bendayan, a Morrocan-Jewish MP from Montreal, was put in charge of immigration. He also dismissed Ya’ara Saks, a Canadian-Israeli dual citizen peacenik yoga mom affiliated with the New Israel Fund, from her position in cabinet. Saks, who is not very bright, was originally chosen to join the cabinet as an appeal to the Jewish community, where Trudeau has long been bleeding support with, but has since become persona-non-grata in her own riding due to her unwillingness to stand firmly against her own party during the war. At one point, she even had a photo-op of herself with Melanie Joly, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, holding hands with Mahmoud Abbas. She can’t even show up in her own riding when bullets go flying through the windows of Jewish schools anymore.

But it’s not all good. Melanie Joly, who has directed much of Canada’s policy towards Israel since the start of the war, got to keep her position. After the announcement that she would be sticking around, one of the first things she did was announce another $100 million in ‘humanitarian aid’ for the Palestinian Authority and Gaza, much of which will run through the United Nations. She has continued to issue foreign policy statements making baseless attacks on Israel. Carney’s Liberal MPs, meanwhile, have continued signing statements and letters attacking Israel (For Americans reading this, the leader of a political party in Canada has essentially full control over the party, and they routinely boot MPs who take stances that differ from the party line). The Carney government has made no indication that they’re going to take a different approach to criminal justice, including the active and targeted harassment of Jewish people, Jewish communities, and institutions by pro-Palestine lunatics.

Things got worse last week when Carney, in response to a heckler shouting about “genocide in Palestine,” responded that he’s “aware” and “that’s why we have an arms embargo.” Carney clarified the next day that it is not his position that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide and that he merely misheard the heckler who, in his defense, was shouting over a loud room. However, given Carney’s response to her, it’s hard to imagine what else Carney could have thought she said. His initial response was both directly responding to the claim and directly offering his solution to the imagined genocide. So what does Carney really think?

I think it’s likely that Carney doesn’t really care about what happens in Gaza, or about human rights abuses whether real or imagined anywhere in the world. In 2021, during Parliamentary committee hearings concerning the fiscal response to the pandemic, Pierre Poilievre, who at the time was serving as the Conservative finance critic, grilled Carney on a number of issues both financial and ethical. One of the issues he brought up was China’s ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs. When asked if he considered China’s actions to be genocidal, Mark Carney responded that he was “concerned” about the situation but largely chose to dodge the question, likely because giving too harsh a condemnation of China would have harmed his business’ interests in the country. I don’t say this as a criticism of Carney–I care more about my stock portfolio than I do about Uyghurs too–but it lends credence to the idea that Carney probably doesn’t really care what Israel does in Gaza except insofar as he can use it to score political points. This will save us the headache of having an explicitly anti-Israel ideologue running the Liberal Party, but this type of cynical attitude towards foreign policy doesn’t work to the benefit of Jews in a party where they are outnumbered by Muslims and leftist crackpots multiple times over.

There’s also the matter of immigration. Under Justin Trudeau, Canada brought in record numbers of migrants in various forms, culminating in an official count of roughly two million in 2023. Many of the countries which Canada has received a large inflow from in recent years, particularly Pakistan and Somalia, are hotbeds of antisemitism. In the last few months of its existence, however, in response to enormous demand from Canadian voters, the Trudeau government took action to reduce the flow of migrants into Canada, particularly targeting the massive foreign student population which has basically taken over all unskilled part-time positions in Canada’s cities. Lagging indicators (such as housing prices in university towns) indicate that they are, in fact, following through on this initiative. However, immigration levels to Canada remain extraordinarily high.

Mark Carney has insisted that he will continue in this direction of reducing immigration, but there is reason to be skeptical of this. Last month he brought on Mark Wiseman, a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ who I want to describe with words that would bring shame upon my family if they were to be put in print, as an advisor. Wiseman is a former Blackrock executive who was fired from his job over some #MeToo scandal and went on to found the Century Initiative, a lobby group with the aim of increasing Canada’s population to 100 million people by the turn of the 22nd Century, which means growing Canada’s population by roughly 2.5x. He is on the record calling to just get rid of screening of migrants entirely, which would undoubtedly put his “fellow” Jews at serious risk. Carney himself has spoken to the Century Initiative although, as far as I know, he has never decisively “endorsed” their proposals. Nevertheless, Carney has not made immigration policy an important point of his campaign and he’s made no indication that he will reverse the Trudeau government’s plan to bring in 5,000 refugees from Gaza. Under his watch, foreign Palestine activists fleeing the Trump administration have come to Canada, and there’s no indication that they will be forced to leave.

Then there’s Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party who up until a month ago held a commanding lead in the polls. Unfortunately, Pierre, as his supporters endearingly call him (his opponents call him PP), is married to a big booty latina from Venezuela, and is dispositionally pro-immigration. Nevertheless, demand from within the party and the broader Canadian electorate has forced him to take a more anti-immigration stance, promising to tie immigration levels to housing starts. If truly enacted, this would bring down immigration levels to lows not seen in two decades all whilst demagoguing about Carney’s swindling, scheming, sniveling, conniving, goblin-faced ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ new advisor (these exact adjectives may not be Pierre’s). 

But if Pierre has been weak on immigration, he’s been strong on all the other issues that should matter to the Jewish community. Taking in the footsteps of Stephen Harper, Canada’s previous Conservative Prime Minister, Pierre has been unwavering in his support for Israel, going on the record to describe Hamas as a “death cult,” attending various explicitly pro-Israel events, and vowing to cut foreign aid to the Palestinians. He’s so plugged in with the brain rot of Hasbara Inc, he’s even repeated the line about Jews being indigenous to Israel. And these statements have been paired with action. He appointed Melissa Lantsman, an ardent Zionist who represents the Greater Toronto Area’s most heavily Jewish riding of Thornhill, as one of the two deputy leaders of the party, and has given her a platform to raise the most important issues to the Jewish community in Parliament. More controversial representatives of the Jewish community like Roman Baber (who, as far as I know, is actually not Jewish) have been elevated to run for office. Pierre has also taken a hardline approach on criminal justice, calling for massive mandatory minimums on repeat offenders, large-scale bail reform to keep violent criminals locked up, and the implementations of new methods to prevent smuggling and trafficking. These types of criminal justice reforms will keep violent antisemitic loons in prison where they belong instead of on the streets harassing Jewish families.

For a variety of reasons mostly related to Trump’s tariffs, Pierre’s commanding 30-point lead in the polls that he held for virtually all of 2024 has been completely obliterated in the past few months, leaving him now polling behind Mark Carney in what is shaping up to be a neck-and-neck election. Yet while Pierre’s polling numbers have declined somewhat, he’s still polling well above the results achieved by Conservative leaders in the past three elections. What’s caused the Liberals to pull ahead is the seemingly total collapse of the New Democratic Party (NDP).

For those unfamiliar with Canadian politics, the NDP is a left-wing political party that itself is a weird creature of the country’s political culture. Technically it is Canada’s fourth largest political party, but it is typically imagined as Canada’s third largest since the actual third party, the Bloc Quebecois, is a Quebec nationalist party which only fields candidates in Quebec and does not campaign for the votes of English Canadians. Ostensibly founded as a socialist party, the NDP has historically been hesitant to fully embrace socialist ideology or align itself with the broader international left. Especially during the Cold War, the NDP focused more on incremental changes, representing the interests of trade unions and government employees, and finding common cause with American progressives over European communists. 

This embrace of American progressivism reached totality with the election of Jagmeet Singh as the leader of the NDP in 2017. Under Singh’s leadership, the NDP has fully adopted American-style left-wing identity politics as a guiding principle of the party and he has been more explicit than any NDP leader before him in making alignment with American progressives part of his personal brand, courting the endorsements of popular American progressive politicians, and engaging in direct content collaborations with figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Much like US progressives, the NDP has gone all-in on Palestine. Within less than a week after the war began, the NDP was already issuing condemnations targeting Israel. Since then, their MPs have shown up to Parliament dressed in keffiyehs to advocate for the formal recognition of a Palestinian state, sanctions on Israeli officials, import bans on goods from settlements, and an arms embargo on Israel, the latter of which the Liberals eventually complied with. Their MPs have spoken with and provided open support for the mobs that have marched through Canada’s downtowns and Jewish residential communities. 

Also like US progressives, this total embrace of the Palestinian cause has not appeared to pay off for the NDP. While the party managed to reach second place in the polls prior to Trudeau’s resignation, this was largely due to the dire unpopularity of Trudeau himself. Even as they surpassed the Liberals in the polls, the lack of enthusiasm for the party was made clear by their inability to translate their newfound support into fundraising dollars. Now half their prospective voters have fled the party since Trudeau’s resignation and Jagmeet Singh is forced to travel around the northern half of this continent by bus, the party being too poor to afford a campaign jet.

The result, regardless of whether Mark Carney or Pierre Poilievre wins the next election, will be similar to what has happened during the recent election in the United States: progressives will be relegated to the back seat of liberal politics. While sympathy for ‘Palestinian civilians’ may be popular on paper, politically this much more closely translates into supporting a negotiated ceasefire to end the war than it does having dorky college kids and Middle Eastern immigrants cosplaying as terrorists screaming at mothers with their children at the mall. And since the Palestinian liberation movement has chosen to embrace the latter, this has only alienated normal people. It’s rumored that once Jagmeet Singh inevitably brings the NDP down to a third crushing defeat and resigned that he will be replaced by Avi Lewis, a Palestine-obsessed Jew married to Naomi Klein, so it’s unlikely that the NDP will be dramatically shifting direction on this issue any time soon either.

This is an unambiguous good for Jews, containing the most fanatical pro-Palestine activists to one irrelevant party (or two, since that seems to be what the Green Party exists for these days as well) as the Liberals appear insistent on moving in a more moderate direction. With the Carney government’s insistence on moving away from reliance on the United States for military technology, increasing collaboration with Israel on that front could even be within the realm of possibility in the event of a Liberal victory. That isn’t to say that you can expect the Liberals under Carney to ever take an unambiguously pro-Israel position. You can still expect the usual two-sided statements, the occasional foreign aid handouts, and fence-sitting at the UN. You can also certainly expect far less emphasis on the needs of Palestinians as Carney rebuilds a Liberal coalition that's much more reliant on the established middle class over so-called “New Canadians.”

Of course, the Conservative Party still remains Canada’s most unquestionably pro-Jewish party, and their policies of unwavering support for Israel, locking up criminals, and moderation on immigration (although not nearly ideal) will be best for Jews among all the parties. But regardless of the outcome of this month’s election, the medium-term trends appear broadly positive for the Jewish community, at least compared to the past few years.

- Beau Chasse

Akin to Germany post-WWII, Gazans, under the supervision of Israel and/or a conglomerate of Arab states, could go through mass re-education to uproot the rot and brainwashing that Hamas has instilled in Gazans (as if Gazans never chose to participate in Jihadist ideology willingly). “Denazification worked in Germany, it can work here too!”. In theory, this process would eventually lead to a large proportion of Gazans living peacefully alongside or (G-d forbid) inside Israel. This silly idea has received so much unthoughtful and casual support that it’s actually made its way into the Israeli Knesset as well. Not that that’s impressive on its own; the Knesset is a regular shitshow more suitably watched as a daytime telenovela, but I digress. Let’s try and dissect why denazification of Gaza is both entirely impractical and ignorant of the relevant history.

Our frustration began with a series of clips coming out of Gaza showing some meager anti-Hamas protests. Hasbara Inc. has declared its support for these voices of so-called “civilians”, who not so long ago likely participated in aiding and/or otherwise celebrating the events of October 7th. The obsession to uplift and celebrate dissident Gazans has been a mainstay by pro-Israel advocacy for decades. This obsession stems from an insecure ethos that seeks peace at all costs with our Arab neighbors. Asserting that Gaza can never be a partner for peace is borderline heresy for the halls of Hasbara and reliably gets charged as a racist and reductionist take. Suggesting that a population transfer or even partial annexation raises the blood pressure of an Israel advocate™ to unhealthy levels. Although the tides have been slowly turning, many Zionists wrongly adopt a cultural relativist (tabula rasa) perspective, specifically that similar solutions from the past can be applied to all disparate peoples. A Liberal fantasy.

The first notion we’re tasked with is decoupling the ways in which the jihadism of Hamas and Nazism arrive at antisemitism. I totally understand the Jewish colloquial desire to label Hamasniks as “Nazis”, and Gazans do themselves no favor in differentiating themselves when they regularly uphold Nazi iconography and espouse support for Hitler, yimach shemo. However, let’s try to employ some high effort discourse and thought here. Nazism and jihadism are entirely different ideologies born out of completely different origins. Merely claiming that a “denazification” process can be applied to Gazans is tantamount to saying that open heart surgery can cure liver cancer. The worst part of this take is that it somehow manages to both completely misunderstand Nazism and Hamas at the same time, which leaves us entirely inert in approaching a solution with any semblance of practicality. 

History is a well of knowledge for us to learn from and use as a guide for charting future paths. Let’s not disparage the inherent and innocent attempt to do that in suggesting “denazification” as a solution. In our view however, the lessons of history show the complete opposite of what the advocacy and influencer heads are saying. For clarity, going forward, “Nazis/Nazism” will be referring to the Germans of the 1930s-1940s. We do not seek to conflate the comparably feeble neo-nazism of our time with actual Nazis. 

Conceptually, albeit Nazism and the jihadism of Hamas overlap when it comes to their bloodlust for Jews, they reach the same ends through entirely different means. Nazism is foundationally a conspiracy of conspiracies. It’s an ideology that’s built from an amalgamation of miscellaneous conspiracy theories, such as: 

• Race Science/Hierarchy - eugenics

• Antisemitism - blood libels

• Lebensraum

• Führerprinzip 

• Volksgemeinschaft

• Freemason Global Plot

• Welteislehre

• Hollow Earth Guidance 

• Lost Templar Secrets

• Tibet as an Aryan Homeland

• Elders of Zion (global Jewish kabal) 

• Etc…

This is only a small and incomprehensive list of conspiracies that form the foundation Nazism. As a small tangent, my favorite Nazi conspiracy is Welteislehre (World Ice Theory), which posits that basically everything in the universe is made of ice, except the sun. Additionally, many top-level Nazis were also enthralled with the supernatural and the occult. Witches, werewolves, vampires, and mythological tall tales were discussed with academic levels of reverence. The fascination and adoption of “occult sciences” by many high-ranking Nazis played a significant role in hindering German war efforts by diverting resources to purely nonsensical pursuits. Despite modern trad-caths, groypers, and other similar retards, reimagining Nazism as some sort of based vanguard of Christian belief, many actual Nazis immersed themselves in astrology, literal paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, and witchcraft. The prevalence of all these pseudo-scientific ideas amongst Nazis showcases how flimsy and incoherent the ideology of Nazism really was.

For brevity, Nazi leaders genuinely viewed the Jews as omnipotent, supernatural monsters responsible for some deep evil against the German people. Nazism is a conspiracy to substantiate the evil Jews and the supremacy of Aryans. Having actually read long excerpts from Mein Kampf (I highly suggest Jews actually go read it), it’s beyond obvious that Hitler was some sort of insane paranoid narcissist that concocted grand conspiracies on the daily to cope with the deep failures of his own life. Despite it being attributed as a foundational text for Nazism, Mein Kampf is barely legible in its unceasing ranting and irrational twists. As a result, it is essential to recognize that Nazism itself really lacks a single dependable “origin”. Nazism is essentially tethered to nothing, which is why Nazism was so fluidly adaptable and moldable to become host to nearly any outlandish conspiracy. This is precisely why you’ll reliably find Hitler simps at Flat World Conferences and other similar pseudo-intellectual spaces. This is precisely why denazification was also a possibility in part, but we’ll get to that a bit later. 

By stark contrast, Hamas’ ideology, although it has no shortage of retarded conspiracies to peddle to the Arab street, is rooted and flows from the beginnings of Islam and the Quran. Calling Hamas “radical extremists” is basically an insane misnomer. They’re loyal religious followers to the fundamentals of their faith expressed in a very short and very direct foundational text. When you hear Hamas officials or Gazan civilians speak, everything is routed back to being a Muslim and Jihad. Jihad is blowing yourself up just as much as it is aiding Hamas in the smallest of actions. Jihad can be political subversion just as much as it can be a bus bombing. No artifacts dug up showing Jewish presence in the land of Israel will ever convince them to agree with Jewish autonomy in Israel. Why? Islam expressly forbids relinquishing dominion of its conquered lands.

This discomforting truth causes a short-circuit for many non-observant Jews/Zionists who lack faith in G-d. They’d prefer to pretend that this entire conflict is some sort of real estate deal that’s gone horribly sideways. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hamas’ militantism is celebrated in part because Mohammad, a perfect model of man to be emulated, himself was a barbarian conqueror. Therefore subsequent Islamic civilizations mirror and venerate his warmongering brutality. The sadism, sexual deviance, and euphoric celebration of the 24 hours that began on the morning of October 7th are indeed reflections of the unique human capacity for evil, but it’s also directly attributable to the lessons of Islam. Regardless of how we may feel, Hamas and Gazans see themselves as spearhead warriors for Islam and their cause. Hamas gets bogged down to nationalist rhetoric as a consequence of history, but ideologically it's no different from ISIS in its ultimate desire to establish a global caliphate. We literally saw direct 1:1 ISIS behavior emulated on October 7th. Not only did Hamas execute random Israelis in the streets through beheadings but they were high on captagon, an ADD medication famously used by ISIS fighters. Not to mention the trove of ISIS flags and iconography adorned on and left by Hamas terrorists. 

It can’t be emphasized enough how unlike Nazism, Hamas is but a contemporary arm of an enduring 1000+ year Islamist zeitgeist. There never was a longstanding “Nazi culture” in Germany before the Nazim rose to power. Germany, historically, was the collection of over 300 papal states that went through constant and turbulent episodes of overturning ideologies. Nazism didn’t forge the social fabric of Germany nor the German peoples in the centuries prior. Islam did do that for Arabia and its conquered lands. The levels of ideological obedience here are consequently very different. So no, denazification, merely from a historical point of view is an ignorant thing to suggest.

For what it’s worth, conspiracies that Palestinians believe in, to varying degrees, are the manifestation of their ideology but not the source of it. The conspiracies aren’t the foundation of their ideology, but are derivations of it. Examples include:

• Israel controls the weather 

• Israel invented AIDS

• Israel trains sharks and dolphins

• Israel created ISIS

• Israel causes earthquakes 

• Israel fabricates archeology

• Israel funds drug trafficking

• Israel experiments on prisoners 

• Israel poisons the water 

• Israel uses mind control technology 

• Israel steals Palestinian organs

These are just a few of the outlandish conspiracies that have come up within the past several decades. It’s noteworthy how one-dimensional and boring many of their conspiracies are, specifically that they see themselves as weaklings eternally trapped and victimized by the mighty Israel. At least the Nazis had entertainingly wild conspiracies that spin off into unending rabbit holes.

I see Hasbarist Zionists (many of whom aren’t religious) deny or distort the fundamental impact of religion within our conflict with Arabs, and even more so totally obfuscate the role that Islam plays in source for the violent jihad of Hamas. Perhaps acknowledging that Islam is what fuels Hamas isn’t popular with sensitive liberal boomer donors? Or maybe they legitimately, like most western liberals, cannot fathom the deep level of religious obedience on which Gazans operate. We’re really all just human after all. *cue John Lennon’s “Imagine” and die of cringe*. We will never defeat our enemy unless we understand their motivations and intentions, we are caught in a religious conflict against Hamas. By ignoring uncomfortable truths, we set ourselves up for failure. 

Understanding now that Nazism and Hamas come from totally different roots, why would anyone now say we can denazify Hamas? Hamas aren’t Nazis, they’re Islamists. Well, why not teach Gazans a less radical Islam? Okay chud, let’s spend less time fantasizing about some contrived abstract bullshit that’s likely coming from someone who’s spent less than an hour in sum reading about Islam and engaging with Muslims about it. Perceivably, there are more normalized expressions of Islam that don't highlight suicide bombing as a preferable method of daily Jihad, but even those sectors still overwhelmingly sympathize with Hamas. 

People who think like this aren’t serious, they’re clowns. In the case of Gaza, the past 4-5+ generations have been exposed to a deluge of endless jihadist ideology, there’s no reversing the jihadist indoctrination. 

The other laughable oversight here is that the “denazification” crowd conveniently looks past the fact that Nazism arose in German society, a society which for its time, was perhaps the most advanced in industry, science, arts, medicine etc. Germany before Hitler’s rise wasn’t a backwards dump like Gaza, rather it was one of the forefronts of Western civilization. Just before the rise of Nazis, it was relatively one of the better places on Earth despite even the conditions set in the Treaty of Versailles. Gaza, by contrast, is a hodgepodge of religious zealots and consanguine cousins which exists to be a thorn to Israel and as a pawn for Iran. Among the great Gazan scientific achievements is painting a donkey to look like a zebra. We’re literally not even kidding.

As said before, Germans were amenable to be dissuaded of Nazism because Nazism didn’t have deep roots in German society to begin with. The Nazis themselves had to go through a process of converting Germany itself into a Nazi state (called Gleichschaltung), because Nazism itself was something “foreign” to the German people, and therefore a campaign of Nazification had to be launched in order to engineer Nazism into German society. The reason that the Nazis even had a Minister of Propaganda (Joseph Goebbels) is because Nazism had to be “propagandized”. There is no history of Germans being Nazis for 1000+ years prior to the 1930s, nobody’s German grandfather from the 1800s was a Nazi. He might have been an anti-semite for entirely different reasons, but great-grandpa Hans wasn’t a Nazi. In direct contrast, little convincing was needed for Gazans to appoint Hamas and cheer them on. They won the first supervised UN election and have held onto that power by popular support ever since. Nearly every Gazan’s ancestor was a Muslim (Rudy PBUH is seething somewhere over this sentence), and arguably antisemitism has been prevalent amongst Muslims since before the Mamluks came to the land. The seed of Nazism barely sprouted in Germany before its own total downfall, whereas the ideology of warring jihad is foundational to the Muslims of Gaza. This isn’t apples to oranges, it’s a pickle to a cupcake.

Here’s the other big problem with the German solution for Gaza: denazification only came after the total defeat, obliteration and surrender of Germany. Though Germany wasn’t nuked like Japan, its society was left in ruin. It existed at the total mercy of outside allied powers. The grand predictions of a 1000 year Reich, and Aryan supremacy were demonstrably proven false to Germans by virtue of the Nazis losing the war and losing it big time. Gaza, and Hamas are far from such a reality. Yes, we’ve destroyed a lot of Gazan infrastructure and killed many Hamas terrorists but take a look at the opinion polls of Gaza. Hamas still enjoys the lion's share of support both in Gaza and the West Bank. Street markets in Rafah are filled with food and Gazan content creators are back to filming themselves making lavish meals. Do you really want denazification? Let's finish the first step first in breaking Gaza and Hamas.

Even in the war since Oct 7th, Gazans haven’t experienced the same sort of humiliation and defeat of their ideology compared to the Nazis. The ongoing war with Israel itself undermines any potential for an ideological overhaul. Simply living on to fight another day against a vastly superior opponent is a victory for Gaza. Obviously the power dynamics and context is very different, but the point is that Gazans haven’t felt enough defeat to repent, and the entrenched jihadist ideology amongst Gazans arguably makes them a more challenging enemy than the Germans were. The more Gazans lose and suffer the more victorious they feel. Unlike the bombing of Gaza, Germans didn’t see the bombing of Dresden as a sign that they’re winning. The only sliver of hope seen thus far at humiliating Hamas has been President Trump’s explicit desires to see a mass population transfer. Making Egypt, Jordan and the ummah pay their due share for egging on Palestinians for decades whilst giving Israel secuirty control over the land is precisely the language in which the Middle East talks. Dunam Diplomacy: Start shit and lose land, the equation here is tried, true, and simple.

Denazification was also a multi-year effort in a relatively controlled post-war environment. This could never be the case in Gaza. Hamas foments ideological fever through grassroots networks in mosques and clan-ties, not just formal propaganda in the media or in the classroom. (Notably the proliferation of the internet in Gaza also makes denazification a fantasy.) Unlike Nazi party membership, which could be tracked and dismantled, Hamas’ organic support base is harder to uproot since Arab culture emphasizes steadfastness (sumud) against adversity. A denazification-style intervention would be perceived as an attempt to erase this societal resilience, thereby strengthening rather than weakening jihadist ideologies. Another overlooked fact is that the median age of Gaza is 18, historical demographers suggest Germany’s median age in 1945 was double at approximately 37. Suffice to say it’s much easier to have a rational discussion with someone in their late 30s than teenagers who’s been indoctrinated by Hamas since pre-school.

People who espouse this German “solution” to Gaza either are just communicating this idea in passing without much critical thought or are trying to cope with the reality of possible population transfer. Both are unfortunately cringe, though not unforgivable. There have been some recent studies which partially laud de-radicalization through education programs, but even so, the results are limited, inconclusive, and often counterproductive. It’s a nascent field, not without its due respect, that admits of itself that it cannot be the sole solution and must be paired with counter-terrorism operations. In most global case studies, whether it be Bangladesh, Jordan or Indonesia, the equation is for a new authoritarian to essentially round up extremists, put them in some hole and attempt to re-educate the remaining population. It's mostly futile. Another gaping problem with deradicalization in Gaza is that no real institution even seems equipped to administer it. The UN has filled this void in other sectors of the world like Somalia with limited results but I sincerely doubt any of you reading this would even fathom a world wherein we’d be okay with giving the UN any authority, especially after the revelations of how entrenched Hamas was in UNRWA. The problem is that for deradicalization to actually take root, the embedded populations have to be receptive to change. I don’t see Gazans partaking some new massive collective shift. Media of some tiny protest, a couple thousand at best, isn’t an indicator of anything other than that people are upset that the aid shipments have stopped coming in. The only anti-Hamas protest that would have any significance is if Gaza’s somehow decided to ravage Hamas militants and bring out the hostages themselves. We’ve seen popular Arab uprisings, riots and revolutions before. This recent Gazan march was entirely underwhelming by comparison. Far too often, this conflict is spoken about in lofty abstract terms without considering the practical realities. Deradicalization, to me, seems to still exist at this far-fetched stage of loftiness.

The German solution for denazification in Gaza will not work because Gazans aren’t Germans. Everything said above can also be equally applied to those thinking they’re playing 5d chess in saying Gazans are more comparable to the Japanese in WW2. All that they know about the Japanese is that kamikazes flew into American Navy vessels at Pearl Harbor. Sepukku is the same as Jihad, trust me bro. Enough with all this khara, Gazans are Gazan, stop coping. The cold truth is that Gaza is a backwards society that produces nothing useful and has always existed on the charity of other nations including Israel, the US, the EU and a conglomerate of Arab nations. “Denazifying” Gaza is a futile exercise and a suggestion borne out of laziness and the unwillingness to face cold hard realities. It’s time to grow up and end the experiment, it failed. 

- Autistic Ashki and Lawless Levite

However, what's interesting from a Canadian perspective is that despite the immense cultural overlap between right-wing Canadians and right-wing Americans, such a rise in antisemitism has been virtually absent on this side of the border, with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agitation being essentially entirely confined to the left. Off the top of my head, I can think of three anti-Jewish right-wing influencers on Canadian Twitter, and only one of them has any real credibility as an activist beyond online influencing. Compare this to the United States, where Candace Owens runs the second largest conservative podcast in America, in which she spends time talking about conspiracies revolving around 18th century Messianic shtetlbillie cults.

The conventional explanation for this is that Canada is just ten years behind America’s cultural trends, and Canada will eventually get the same antisemitism too. There are also policy considerations involved; obviously citizens of a country who give to Israel billions in foreign aid every year will develop more interest, both positively and negatively, than Canadians will. However, I think that conservatives in Canada have maintained a stronger messaging strategy against the Palestine protesters through a strategy which would be significantly harder to implement if Canada had a larger Jewish population. 

It goes without saying that the chief target of the watermelon mobs that we’ve seen for the past year and a half (aside from potentially the Democratic Party establishment) are Jewish people, but this fact must be juggled with two other facts:

1. Most Americans are not Jewish, don’t know many Jewish people, and don’t really understand antisemitism; and

2. Jews are not the only targets of these mobs.

Jewish organizations, of course, do not cater to non-Jews, but they’re theoretically subject to the desires of the Jewish community and, even more than that, they’re at the whims of their donors who are overwhelmingly baby boomers. When Palestine supporters launch a protest where they dress up as terrorists and harass random people, these Jewish organizations will quickly come out to condemn the demonstrations as acts of antisemitism, pointing to the lies they told about Israel, and pointing out how phrases like “from the river to the sea” are, in fact, calls for genocide.

That might all be true, but the problem with this is that none of this rhetoric resonates with normal people who, at best, won’t really register what you’re talking about and, at worst, will see this as more woke whining. Americans have other things to worry about than whether a slogan regarding a conflict halfway across the world is a call to genocide, nor are they worried about falling victim to antisemitism. As a result, these disruptive protesters are seen as just another ethnic feud in America’s streets that don’t really concern anyone else.

However in Canada, the Jewish community is much smaller and less influential. Consequently Jewish organizations do not have the same national megaphone that their American counterparts do. For context, Canada’s Jewish community is proportionally ~40% of the size of America’s Jewish population (0.9% vs 2.4%), whilst obviously being vastly smaller numerically. As a result, it has largely been non-Jewish Canadian conservatives, not Jews, leading the way in crafting the response to these protesters, and the difference couldn’t be more stark.

Go to a typical Canadian conservative’s social media page and find a post about anti-Israel protesters, and you’ll scarcely hear a word about antisemitism. Instead, they talk about things that actually matter to normal people: some freak playing terrorist dress-up just threatened to kill one of our heroic policemen; families trying to take their kids skating on New Years’ are having some hysterical woman blow a megaphone in their ear; mothers feel unsafe bringing her daughter to the mall to buy her a prom dress because Hamas supporters are screaming at her in Arabic.

It’s difficult for any right-winger to disagree with this messaging. One can talk about complicated conspiracies that their audience doesn’t have the time or interest to research until the cows come home, but it’s much harder to defend harassing women at the mall because of foreign aid money or whatever. Is Candace Owens an antisemite? Frankly, your average American doesn’t know nor care. But does Candace Owens think that mobs of terrorist lovers should be shutting down Thanksgiving parades? Will she condemn that? This type of stuff matters much more to ordinary people. The scope of our messaging and rhetoric should speak to that.

If Jewish organizations want to win normal people to our side, this is the message we have to promote. You’re either on the side of normal people who want business as usual, or you’re on the side of deranged terrorist simps screaming at you dressed up in Hamas cosplay, woke college students taking over public land that you pay for, and communist agitators harassing you in the streets. Those are the teams. The winning message isn’t appealing to the sensibilities of boomer donors, who likely have no clue where their money is actually going, rather we will succeed by reaching normal people at their everyday level.

- Beau Chasse

A small observation before we begin: if your goal is to quell, and/or otherwise limit dialogue surrounding Kahane, perhaps you shouldn’t, in a suddenly momentous campaign, flood Instagram with condemnations of a massive influencer account talking about him. I couldn't stop myself laughing while reading the comment sections. On a variety of posts were accounts suddenly discovering Kahane and liking the message in the clip. “I’m tired of yahrtzeits and kaddish”. There are some undeniably resonant lines. Because Lizzy also refused to delete the reel, (respectable imo) all the whiny condemnations managed to do is drive more traffic and attention to it. Shkoyach guys. Ya did it. Everyone is now talking about Meir Kahane instead of far more relevant topics.

Despite the undeserved attention and outsized fear mongering of jews of say ‘Kahana Tzadak’ , it should be said that Kahanism, in practice, was a total failure. After moving to Israel in 1971, the Israeli political apparatus set up a firewall against Kahane, and unsurprisingly the Israeli Supreme Court banned him from running in the Knesset in the late 80s. Putting aside the merits, Kahane was essentially purged from political life in Israel, and as a result within his lifetime accomplished very little. JDL- Stans can whine as much as they like about the unfair political treatment Kach received but it’s moot. If you cant sell your ideology politically you’ve failed, period. I’ve come to realize that Kahanism as an ideology offers little of value because Kahanism can’t answer the how. Kahanism offered a utopian vision, but no strategy or plan of action to actually achieve it.

These days, Kahanism is adrift, largely ensnared by regurgitated slogans. Even the heir apparent of Kahane, Ben Gvir, is a completely useless entity. His political currency has only diminished since Saar’s homecoming to the Likud party and his clownish choice to leave the government over the hostage deal has rendered him utterly ineffectual and irrelevant. His limited loosening of gun control in Israel was his best achievement (one that hopefully continues to loosen). Frankly the sheer level of fear mongering over brown Peter Griffin deserves a substack analysis of its own, but let’s not get distracted. Kahanism’s main effectiveness now is to exist as ragebait, and inflate egos on social media. Kahane has become a low effort symbol for those who want to countersignal against Arabs. It isn’t very original nor new, it’s פשיטה. Overall, Kahane asked important questions, offered many true insights but also offered a lot bad ones that have been undone over time.

The reality is that most of the people liking the reel are nowhere near to being devoted kahanists.

Hell, even most self-described kahanists aren't even really that committed to the man's teachings. Yeah, they're all about the JDL imagery and being tough Jews, but little importance is placed on leading a life centered around halacha. The disconnect between supporters of “Kahanism” and Kahanism itself, is most apparent when considering that Kahane advocated for a fully halachic state, and the people espousing “Kahane was right” aren’t for the most part remotely Orthodox. If polled, I doubt even 30% of self-described kahanists would be in favor of a theocratic government that would require deporting their gentile girlfriends. It’s clear that the vast majority of his supporters truly know close to nothing about him. I would argue that they couldn’t tell you which yeshiva Kahane learned at, or have read any of his books (I’ve tried reading his religious works which I found plainfully bland). Little is said of Kahane’s affair with a goya named Gloria Jean D’Argenio who mysteriously jumped off a bridge soon after discovering that Kahane was an FBI undercover agent. All this seems to get conveniently swept under the rug. A false representation of Kahane that is entirely detached from who he actually was gets propagated by the bulk of his stans. Will the real Meir Kahane please stand up? It appears that most people see a clip of him saying “Arabs bad”, and conclude that he is some sort of epic psychic wizard prophet. Have we lost all sense of standards? Saying “Kahane was right”, when a person knows nothing, and just wants to be edgy, is a futile exercise. Trolling has its uses, we're no strangers to it here at LEZM, but this is faux edginess in our opinion. Want to be a real Kahanist? Get married and start a Jewish family that centers Judaism at home.

Let’s close this point by saying that most people, who were by no means Kahanists, flocked to Savestkys uploaded clip because of the message in it, and not the man. And unlike the libzio contingent on Instagram, we dont believe a self-inflicted whipping post needs to get set up as a response.

So many big influencer pages immediately launched into girlboss educator mode as if anyone really cares about intra-jewish instagram drama other than fellow neurotic and autistic Jews. Still though, the impulse is funny. Last time I remember seeing this much ire was when a different Jewish mom-fluencer posted about the radical assimilation rates plaguing the American Jewish community. To be fair it was the way she said it according to them, because otherwise they totally agree it's a problem, right Jinstagram? Right?!? Obviously this too is a cope. The fact that people get more upset about provocative language rather than the assimilation crisis itself is clearly a cope because they can’t possibly defend rampant assimilation as a desirable feature of communal Jewish life. This is repeated once more in the current week’s fascination with Kahane.

The prevailing sentiment seems to be to say that “Kahanism is the death of Zionism”. Oslo-era liberal reincarnations like Sam Hyde (not the funny one) seem to own this as a rallying cry now. Others of his ideological ilk have jumped onto the phrase as well. Truthfully, it falls on deaf ears. The huffing and puffing against “militant language” of Kahane and the doomer predictions are shallow when you look into what this cohort prescribes as a solution to the “Arab question”. Hyde, joined by Blake Flayton, openly suggests that the settlements in Judea Samaria should be evacuated of its Jewish inhabitants and that Israel should force them into submission by economically isolating them from mainland commercial resources. How is this not considered an extreme and offensive suggestion? We seemingly don't even have the guts to do this to Gaza all the way in the middle of a war, but we do for Jews in Judea Samaria? I find it absolutely repulsive. For all the whining about the extremes of Kahane, which we can easily condemn, surely suggesting that the Israeli government should choke out hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes in the heartland of Israel is extreme in equal measure. Naturally, no one cares, because this isn’t a cudgel to beat right wingers over the head with. Tried and failed liberal solutions never receive the death blow they deserve, the Oslo Syndrome remains. Have we not learned our lesson already? We played this game out already in Gaza. What is it going to take? Another October 7th?

The hubris from people who openly endorse these ideas while castigating “Kahanism as the death of Zionism” is really too much. Give me a fucking break. They must deride Kahane and declare their own self-righteousness in order to thwart any self-reflection in themselves. The boogeyman of “Jewish terrorism” must be condemned so that we may present ourselves as civilized people as if that isn’t the obvious truth. Lately, the biggest manipulation rolling out of these hyper-liberal corners (and from the Sudra-Man PBUH) is that “we must not become them!”. Ignoring the stupid bumper sticker intellectualism, with some deeper thought this is actually a pretty good point to investigate. Sam Harris digs into this in saying that it’s actually quite hard to challenge jihadists at their own value systems. People who chant “we love death” and view their own children as cannon fodder won’t be deterred by the standard rules of warfare developed in the west. How does a modern military fight a jihadist death cult? Do we match their level of depravity so as to repel them? I don’t have the answers to be honest. At the very least, what we do know, is that land is the currency of victory in our neighborhood of the world. Diplomacy gets settled over conquest and dunams. Let us not forget that Sadat came to the table because Egypt lost Sinai and Cairo was about to be captured. Unfortunately, left wing Zionists don’t even seem to have an appetite for re-taking any section of Gaza into Israeli sovereignty or discussing populations transfers lest they be accused of ethnic cleansing. It’s also just a gross lie to position Israeli society as being so near to Hamas that it would only take Meir Kahane to make us indistinguishable from them.

So why even say these things? Why post so much cope? It’s becoming clear that normie/liberal Zionist institutions and activists are realizing they’re losing their grip on Jewish discourse online and in person. As a participant in the vice known as “jinstagram” (“Jewish instagram” for the mentally-healthy people reading this), it's been observably true to see how much the “Jewish right” has grown, and dominated online discourse since October 7th. Israelis for the most part have been reliably right-leaning people for a long time now, but our American counterparts resoundingly not so much. A shift is occurring though, and it's palpable. Trump winning the election with a historically high proportion of the Jewish vote seems to be the biggest signal of this. Just to be explicitly clear, this election was decided over culture war issues and Jews have shifted right in a large proportion. Will that be a repeat phenomenon? It’s unclear. Point is, for the time being, the red-pill has been swallowed. October 7th, in tragic fashion, seems to have formed in our minds as a totally sobering episode of the dangers of relinquishing Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. It has reminded us that there is such a thing as objective good and evil and that the latter can sit on our very doorstep.

What those opposing Kahanism generally fail to accept is that they themselves give fuel to Kahanists because they don’t see past their own failures, which in turn makes people seek an alternative. The lack of strong leadership leads people to search for strongmen, and so Kahane is thrust into this role on social media despite him being dead for over 30 years and his movement fizzling out. Whether it be the failures of the Oslo Accords or the events following Oct 7th, the song hasn’t changed, and it won’t because their position is built upon a duplicitous foundation. No one wants to hear anyone muse over some entirely impractical two-state solution much less starving out Jews from their homes in the land of Israel. Constantly hammering the same failed solution as the end all be all can only work for so long. Jews are exhausted of it.

We must face a basic truth in our pursuits going forward: there will never and can never truly be peace with the Palestinian national project. It has chosen to uplift the worst traits of humanity as championed values and solely exists as a thorn into our own national existence.

So spare us the whining, stop dogging out Jewish moms because you’re bored. The admin group of Low Effort Zionist Memes aren’t theocrats, some of us are frum, and some aren’t. Kahanism’s greatest worth is the lessons that can be derived from its failure, most importantly that without a real plan, ideas will never grow past imagination. Whether it be in Israel or abroad, similar to Kahanism, LEZM fully advocates and supports Jews projecting strength through force + action, and responsibly taking up arms to protect against our enemies. LEZM supports genuine אהבת ישראל. Growing knowledge and pride in our faith, culture, history, traditions are massively important objectives for Jews to build Jewish families. 

- Autistic Ashkie

- Jewish Mom Defender (formerly known as the Lawless Levite)

Any deal with Hamas is a deal with the Devil. The Jewish people were compelled by the international community to negotiate on equal footing with Islamonazis hell bent to keep power so they could plan how to kill as many of us as possible. Yet, the Israeli public that has sent its fathers and sons into mortal danger supports the deal with the Devil because the Jewish nation understands that the redemption of the hostages is a holy and sacred mission, that to save a life is to save a whole universe. When Hashem was going to smite Sodom, Abraham haggled and begged him to spare the city if he could find but one righteous person. The Jewish nation has also come to accept - many of us through personal experience - how little Palestinian society values life. And if, in the Muslim Brotherhood’s theological conception, whole populations of human lives are merely shaheeds-in-waiting, then releasing ten, or fifty, or a thousand prisoner terrorists to redeem our dead for a proper burial, and bringing the living back to their loved ones, is worth it. We should mirror how they value their own lives and pay it back in kind. They value their own lives as nothing and so we trade nothing to return our brothers and sisters in captivity, that should be the prevailing arithmetic.

Biden, in the twilight days of his Presidency clamored for credit, and we shall give him his due. But even he acknowledged that it was American and Israeli successes on the battlefield - against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the Red Sea, and their cascading effects on Assad regime, and on Iran itself that created the conditions for a deal. Specifically, Biden pointed to the fact that it was “his” framework (though, at the time, he insisted it was in fact an Israeli proposal), proposed in May, and endorsed by the UN Security Council.  Broadly he is right. The terms agreed in January differ in key ways from what was on the table in May. Though, all in all, we can let the old man claim the win as he withers into irrelevance.

Hamas insisted for months on a complete withdrawal of the IDF in the first phase as a precondition. They caved. The IDF continues to maintain a presence along the Philadelphi and Netzarim axes. Hamas demanded an up-front commitment for an end to the war, which now will only come about with the “mutual agreement of both parties”. Hamas insisted they would release twenty-four hostages in the first phase of any agreement. They are now releasing thirty-three. This is still a bad deal, because Hamas are still the Devil. So far, they have violated the agreement - by failing to submit the initial names of hostages on time, by releasing (B”H) soldiers before all civilian women and children, and by failing to provide information about the condition of the hostages. They have also attempted to turn the hostage releases into propaganda spectacles to convince the Arab world of their victory. Israel must weigh these violations against the war goal of securing the return of hostages. It is in a sufficiently strong position to punish Hamas for transgressions: it delayed the start of the ceasefire, and it has delayed withdrawing from Netzarim or permit the return of Gazans to the North until Arbel Yehud is released (and presumably until the condition of all twenty six hostages to be released is known). 

But here is the critical point, the agreement is a phased one, stating that there will be “upon agreement of the parties, a permanent end to hostility, in exchange for the release of all the other hostages still in Gaza…”. There is a new President in the White House who will manage this transition from phase one to phase two. So far, Trump has ordered the suspension of all foreign aid (with the exception of Egypt and Israel, groypers coping and seething rn), annulled sanctions on settlers, and removed the Biden holds on JDAMs’. Hamas is now caught in a Catch 22. Release the hostages, and they lose any leverage preventing Israel resuming the war in a time and manner of its choosing. Fail to release the hostages, and Israel can resume the war with the full diplomatic and logistical backing of the Trump administration. In May, Hamas had the luxury of having an American President whose electoral coalition was riven over the question, with plummeting approval ratings, and an election campaign to run. They now face a fresh administration, with a strong mandate, and a blueprint for implementing its agenda, at home and abroad. 

The strategic reality on the ground in Gaza has been transformed. First, Israel has tripled the size of the cordon sanitaire inside of the Gaza Strip, creating a square-kilometre wide ‘kill zone’ (How this ‘kill-zone’ is maintained is an ongoing tactical debate within the IDF, but I would personally opt to fill it with landmines + automated weapons systems, and not conscripts). This ‘kill-zone’ is to Swords of Iron, what the completion of the security barrier was to the suicide bombing campaigns of the Second Intifada. Israel has enacted legislation to terminate UNRWA activity in Gaza and East Jerusalem. For decades, UNRWA provided the international community a mechanism to absolve Palestinians for taking meaningful responsibility for governance, perpetuating the destructive narrative of the ‘right of return’ and indoctrinating generations of Palestinians into fanatical hatred of Jews. Israelis, indulged international fantasies far too long, and Netanyahu is as guilty as any other Israeli political leader for perpetuating this conceptzia by topping Hamas off with suitcases full of Qatari cash. 

With Hamas leadership decimated, a ceasefire tentatively in place, the world now turns to resolving the question of the future political administration of the Gaza Strip.  Here are the options, though please note that they are categorized for analytical simplicity, and in practice will overlap to some, if not to a great extent. 

Option A - Jewish Settlements in Gaza. I think this would be a mistake, because there is little strategic purpose to building Jewish communities in Gaza. It would, like some of the communities deeper in Judea & Samaria stretch limited manpower and intelligence resources to the overall detriment of Israeli security. It would require Israel to resume responsibilities for the day-to-day lives of Palestinians in Gaza as the ‘occupying power’ placing further strain on Israeli finances at an inopportune time. However, there is still political value in the expression of this position, because it shifts the Overton window.  Being able to credibly threaten resettlement grants Israel leverage in negotiating with the Americans, Arabs, and Europeans on the future administration of the territory. Recall that one of the key goals of Arab states in the process of negotiating the Abraham Accords was to forestall Netanyahu’s proposed annexation of the Jordan Valley under the auspices of Kushner’s “Deal of the Century.” We may be seeing a repeat of ‘flooding the zone’ for diplomatic gains once more. However, if Option D comes to pass, and the security concerns diminish, then developing Jewish communities in Gaza becomes feasible. 

Option B - The ‘Reformed’ Palestinian Authority. This was the brainchild of Biden’s State Department. It inverts the logic of Option A: linking future Arab-Israeli normalization to a concrete “political horizon” for a Palestinian state. The intention of this approach was first and foremost to shift the Overton window. In broad strokes, the United States would accommodate Israeli financial and security concerns in the short-to-medium term through an American funded, trained, and supported international peacekeeping and interim governance arrangement - a freakish hybrid of UNRWA and UNIFIL for the duration of reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. This would have given sufficient breathing space to “reform” and “revitalize” the Palestinian Authority - shelving “pay-for-slay”, drafting a new constitution, creating a timetable for elections, after which the reformed Palestinian Authority (rPA) - under an American created security umbrella would take over responsibilities for civil administration. It remains to be seen if Trump will discard this possibility. Based on the fact that Abu Mazen is (again) congratulating convicted murderous terrorists on their steadfastness and congratulating on their release thanks to the work of the ‘resistance’, I would say that he believes the rPA plan is dead. That said, the PA, having international legitimacy through the Oslo Accords of the status quo ante Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the PA may be involved in technocratic aspects like approving exit visas for Gazans, helping to secure shipments of humanitarian aid, etc. This option is as dead as Yahya Sinwar. 

Option C - The Dermer Plan. Israel Hayom reported that a “preliminary” agreement was reached between Israel and the United Arab Emirates on “how Gaza will be managed after the war.” The report is light on details. In essence, this option involves the Arab world accepting that the “political horizon” for a Palestinian state will be measured not in years, but decades. It involves “rebuilding” Gaza “in a way that neutralizes any potential threat to Israel.” Somewhere in the Negev, Mordechai Kedar is smiling. The lengthening of this “political horizon” reverses Biden’s diplomatic and Hamas’ terror-pogrom effort to recenter Palestine as the central question in Middle Eastern political affairs, and places Israeli-Saudi normalization back on the table. Given that Saudi Arabia has committed hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in American AI infrastructure, negotiations appear on an accelerated track. Israeli-Saudi normalization effectively outsources the maintenance of American interests in the region to a coalition of modernizing and moderating Arab monarchies: fusing Arab financial capital with Jewish human capital, under the protective umbrella of the Israeli Air Force, and as a backstop, the might of the US Navy. 

Option D - “‘Temporary’ Resettlement”. It remains to be seen if this is a serious proposal from President Trump, or if he is merely ‘flooding the zone’ to keep all players involved off balance. Initially, Trump mused that Indonesia could temporarily house some percentage of Gaza’s population during the reconstruction. Yesterday, during an impromptu presser aboard Air Force One, Trump revealed he had called King Abdullah II and demanded that Jordan take in Gazan refugees, and that he planned to speak with President Sisi of Egypt to demand the same. The Ummah is being called to help their downtrodden brethren. It was easy to refuse the doddering Biden administration, it will be costlier for Egypt and Jordan to refuse Trump, because he may not be in the mood to take “no” for an answer. أوه لا! نكبة أخرى

Somewhere between the Dermer Plan, and ‘Temporary’ Resettlement of Gazans to Indonesia it will hopefully become clear that it’s never been more Joe-ver for Palestine. And Jimmy Carter lived just long enough to realize it. TRUST THE PLAN. 

And now that you’ve been thoroughly whitepilled, get on with the important things in life: create a strong kehillah, strengthen your bond with your fellow Jews, develop and deepen your personal relationship with the Almighty, פרו ורבו, and stay tuned for the arrival of epic LEZM merch.

- Abba Eben

There is an utterly treacherous proposition from Rudy that deserves special attention solely because of its full-throttle insanity. This idea was first communicated to the Lawless Levite (LL) two years ago at a screening of the pilot episode to Rudy’s “documentary” about “lost” Israelite tribes in Africa. The take was as shocking to hear in person then, as it is to hear online now. LL refrained from addressing it publicly because Rudy had not articulated it in a public setting until now. In order to  avoid another threatening message from a lawyer and accusations of mischaracterizing Rudy’s “ideas”, LL kept quiet (if said lawyer would like to contact LL again however, please do, he would love to discuss the boundaries of defamation law with you). Well anyways, it’s out now, so let’s get into it. 

In a recent Youtube debate, Rudy emphatically re-iterated that he supports the Palestinian “right of return”. That isn’t new, though it is a position that he has received little scrutiny for from the Jewish community. The reasons for scrutiny are obvious: it ends a Jewish demographic majority within Israel, therefore posing an existential danger to our nation-state. However, Rudy seems to believe this is a virtuous position because of some contrived shared “Levantine” identity that resonates with neither Jews nor Arabs. Rudy’s ‘solution’ to the existential danger created by the ‘right’ of return is the intake of 15 million Igbo Africans, who by his halachic decree are “lost Jews”.  LL can attest from his personal exchange with Rudy that it is his sincerely held view that millions of Igbo Africans are in fact Jews who must be returned to Israel to fulfill messianic prophecy. We wish we were joking. “We Were Never Lost”, which landed him (briefly) in a Nigerian prison, is in short - an activist piece of footage to articulate exactly that, here is the video and subsequent quote:

“…I’m constantly speaking to Jewish communities, and they say how do we create a reality that Palestinians will be able to have the right of return?… How do you maintain a Jewish majority? Well there's a few things that have to happen. These are two problems that come to the Jewish people. Problem number one is demographics and problem number two is culture. How can you bring in populations of people who currently, where we are standing right now, most Palestinians in the diaspora hate Israel and are probably more supportive of Hamas than not. How do you bring in that population? Well the first thing you need to do for demographics is do something you need to do unrelated even to this conflict, is bring back the rest of the tribes of Israel today. The Jewish population is 156 million Jews that we are around the world, [there] are about 15 to 16 million and we're the descendants of 2.5 tribes, there's 9.5 other tribes of our nation that still exist out there, that are in Africa and Asia and South America today their descendants are about 500 million… not all of them are identifying as Jews. Most of them have been converted to Islam and Christianity. Over time those who still identify as Jews are about 20% of that population, those who [would want] to make Aliyah to Israel to are about half, so we're talking about a population about 50 million people. If that population was brought back to Israel… they should be brought back because these are the people who are indigenous to the land and they have every right to come back to this land, then from the Jewish perspective there's actually no more demographic problem.”

One can only laugh at how absolutely insane and detached from reality this whole thing is. The devil's advocate might say: new ideas are often provocative but shouldn't be dismissed outright. Well, we dismiss it outright. This isn’t a provocative or revolutionary idea, it's closer to a psychedelic fueled rambling you’d expect from a self-identified shaman at a forest rave. 

Rudy is advocating for mass migration into Israel by hordes of people who are not Jewish by any contemporary or historical measure. He seems to want to present the antithesis of Zionism as Zionism itself. There is not a single legitimate halachic authority that affirms these millions of people to be Jewish. The evidence for Judaism among the Igbo ranges from non-existent to biased wishful thinking. Rather, the bulk of history in Southern Nigeria suggests that a small number of Igbo Africans adopted Jewish/Zionist narratives as a consequence of Christian missionary activity, and aspirational political separatism. Indeed, the source of Igbo-Israelite origin theories was a Christian freed slave named Olaudah Equiano (also known as Gustavus Vassa, but that is a deep rabbit hole for another time). Now there have probably been individual cases of legitimate Igbo gerim to Judaism, but they couldn’t fill a minyan for mincha much less offset importing a single Dearborn, MI worth of Palestinian Arabs into Israel. 

It used to only be our worst enemies dreaming of flooding Israel with millions of goyim - “OPEN BORDERS FOR ISRAEL!” - and yet now that also includes some of the largest public Zionist advocates we have and support. There is no bigger gift we could give to those who seek our destruction, than to import tens of millions of people who are alien to our identity, culture, religion, and shared history. It’s national suicide. Remember, that this proposal is supposed to be the response to accepting the “right of return” for up to 20 million Arabs that he himself characterizes as “supporters of Hamas”. Do any of his followers even pay attention to the ideas he propagates? Are boomer Hasbara Inc donors so desperate to max out their public speaking budgets that they’ll give such ideas and such a person a podium?

For argument’s sake, let’s try and put Rudy’s luminary suggestions into practice. Adding 15 million Igbos alone (ignoring another potential 10 million+ belligerent Arabs) would make Israel the most densely populated country in the world. New Jersey, which is comparable to Israel in size, is home to 9.3 million residents. In Rochmans world, Israel - a far less developed state, and strained for land given the uninhabitable Negev Desert - would be home to over 30 million people, all while making us a minority in our own state. Everywhere, from moshavim in J&S to Tel Aviv, all aspects of life would be immediately crushed by this level of immigration, even if it was spaced out over time. Israel’s own documented history of accepting Jewish immigrants from all corners of the world came with its own challenges that still affect Israeli society, plague national discourse, and strain national unity.  It is already miraculous enough that Israel manages to function amid such chaos. DAYEINU. It begs the question, Is Rudy Rochman even a Zionist anymore? This proposal would obviously destroy Israel’s demography as a Jewish state. 

Not a single sector of Israeli society would support this farcical idea. It is so obviously insane that it, like Jews for Jesus, has the potential to bring the various tribes of Israeli society together in opposition to it. Seriously, ask any Israeli their thoughts about Neve Sha'anan - the mini Mogadishu of south Tel Aviv dominated by Eritrean gangs that brawl in the streets over the same tribal feuds that drove them to flee their homeland in the first place. Make no mistake in thinking that Nigeria is somehow vastly different in its internal politics and culture to Eritrea. 

The only audience that has any appetite for Rudyism exists in the diaspora, and it’s doubtful that even this circle of supporters could defend this batshittery. It is interesting that most of Rochman’s content seems to be about engaging Jews and goyim outside of Israel. Why is that? Well, I’d imagine it’d be quite a challenge to convince Kfir the Gett driver to devastate his already strained socio-economic prospects in the name of restoring a so-called “lost tribe” of Israel. Much less so any conversation about a Palestinian ‘right’ of return. Israelis happen to have a good (((nose))) for bullshit, and Kfir would probably tell him he is “chai be’seret”.

Two years ago, Rudy went on a podcast opposite a man named Godfrey (who incidentally, is a fan of Louis “I am not anti-Semite, I am anti-Termite” Farrakhan), and alongside Jewish hip hop artist “Kosha Dillz”. The conversation focused on Black-Jewish relations in America after a famous Basketball American, Kyrie Irving, promoted a Black Hebrew Israelite propaganda movie on his Twitter. Here’s some of their exchange: 

I think my favorite part of this clip is how certain Rudy is that Godfrey is a “Jew from Gad” while Kosha Dillz is only “probably from Judah”. Hahaha. I don't know how Mr. Dillz sat through that conversation so still, hip-hop beefs have turned lethal for far less shade thrown. Godfrey claims to be a descendent of Igbo Africans that were brought to the United States as slaves. That could be true, and that seems enough to satisfy the Sudra™ salesman that Godfrey is “one of us”. Gone are the guardrails of Jewish identity that have existed for thousands of years. Gone are the lamentations of the prophet Ezra who outlined for us the parameters of Jewish identity. All the pages of Talmudic discourse on gerut are rendered utterly useless in the presence of Rudyism. Is this what being a “decolonized judean” means? The complete refutation of Jewish identity as it has existed since forever? These aren’t rhetorical questions by the way, we’d like to hear some answers.

We’ve been told by Rudy and his supporters that the way we engage with his ideas is lashon hara. Even those neutral on the subject of mass importing 10s of millions of African and Arab goyim to Israel feel LEZM comes on too strong because “Rudy means well, he’s on our side!”.  To these people, we have a simple message: throughout Jewish history, we have been led astray by false prophets like Shabbtai Zvi, and confident utopians like Karl Marx to cataclysmic consequences. Both believed themselves to be conduits for a new grand future. Asserting, explaining, and maintaining Jewish identity is already a heavy task unto itself, without nonsense about “lost tribes” to add more layers of chaos and confusion. LEZM GANG isn’t allowed to fall for this trap. 

We have the same respect for Rudy’s service in Tzahal as we do for every other soldier who has faced our enemies, but his army service cannot shield his terrible ideas from ridicule and scrutiny. As we’ve stated previously, part of the persuasive power of any idea comes from its aesthetic appeal. Rudy has tapped into an energizing Jewish archetype - he mogs Mort from Family Guy, but beyond the aesthetic, his positions are completely fringe, and most importantly, cringe. 

Now we know what you’re thinking (and yes, LEZM does have access to mind-reading technology, you fucking wot m8): “Well, all LEZM does is criticize others while offering no solutions!”. Here is our proposal to fix Israel’s demographic issue: tell the Hamas fans to check their pagers on the way to Gehennom while you adhere to the very first mitzvah bestowed upon us in our Torah, פרו ורבו (“be fruitful and multiply”). Simple as. Now, go find your bashert LEZM GANG.

- Lawless Levite and Autistic Ashki 

I’d consider it fitting to briefly first explain my experience of using LEZM to raise money for tactical gear approximately half a year ago after October 7th. I feel it’s paramount to shine a light on several issues surrounding such campaigns. I don’t seek to gloat nor boast, I’m very well aware of how many thousands of fundraisers for IDF soldiers were spontaneously launched and amassed much larger sums than ours. I’m proud to be a single thread in a grand tapestry (yes this is a Prince of Egypt reference) with all of your help as LEZM GANG.

Of the many things I’ve obtained from LEZM, perhaps the most valuable have been the friends I’ve acquired along the way. In this case I’ve made friends who serve in some of the most grueling infantry brigades that the IDF deploys. For many years, these friends and soldiers of the Golani brigade have been emphasizing to me the crisis of gear shortages within the IDF, specifically the mismanagement of the supply-chain. When Oct 7th hit, the far-spreading rot in this sector was painfully exposed to us all. The private diaspora Jewish mobilization on this front was enormous. Without remembering the source, I believe that I had read that over a billion dollars was raised across the US alone to purchase a wide variety of supplies including drones, helmets, plate carriers, boots and many more things. In the immediate shock and aftermath of October 7th, LEZM alone was able to raise close to $30k that purchased a wide variety of gear for several units with tzav 8 orders to enter Gaza. I only mention this to once again express my gratitude and pride in running this account.

Last spring, after some respite in civilian life, my friends were called back up to enter Gaza. Thanks to previous efforts (in which LEZM participated), they acquired night vision units that allowed them to operate in the dark in Gaza. However, they were missing crucial adapter mounts that attached the units to their helmets; without which, the night vision units were basically useless. With about two weeks to spare before their scheduled deployment to Gaza, I aimed to establish a fundraiser to purchase the aforementioned mounts, and then somehow get them to Israel on time. Thankfully, with the help of G-d, Jewish moms, and LEZM GANG, they received the mounts to supply their entire unit. All in all it was a small fundraiser, only about $5200 in total capital raised but I definitely under-estimated the logistical effort it required going into it. I’d like to give a special shoutout to @joanofjudea for organizing the original NVG fundraiser, and amplifying the one I did for the mounts. Though it was exhausting, it was rewarding to hear that our brothers were made more lethal on the frontlines in the punishing conditions in Gaza. Once again, I want to reiterate that thousands of similar fundraisers were organized by Jews and allies, expending tremendous amounts of effort to raise serious financial capital. Such efforts reflect the best in us when we get pushed against a wall.

Fast forward two months and I begin to see media from a summit held in NYC called “Voices for Truth: Influencers United against Antisemitism” on my Instagram feed. The event was hosted by an organization called “Combat Antisemitism”, led by Sacha Roytman, and was joined in partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The event was held from June 30-July 1 of 2024.

Essentially, over 300 social media influencers and “thought leaders” were invited to join this summit. For 48 hours, attendees were treated to a string of lectures along with an impressive list of celebrity appearances. I had friends who attended this summit and they told me about how lavish the spread was. Open bars, beautifully catered meals, and an exclusive venue hosted at the Glasshouse in Chelsea NY. Moreover, many of the invited attendees were treated to free hotel stays for the duration of the summit. The celebrity list included Montana Tucker, Mayor Eric Adams, Rep. Ritchie Torres, Jen Cohen (honestly, I have no clue who this person is), and Andy Cohen. Andy Cohen, is a host and producer of The Real Housewives reality TV show, a Hollywood mainstay, and he was chosen to be the MC for the summit. Mr. Cohen has absolutely no public record of saying anything in defense of Israel’s mission post-October 7th. At the summit, he said to the attending audience of himself that he’s experienced little antisemitism in his life. Even worse, he explicitly announced that he wasn’t going to make any remarks on the war or conflict. Perhaps he was trying to incubate his reputation among his ranks in Hollywood? Who even is this guy? Why was he paid to host a summit surrounding antisemitism? Why is the man commonly opposite of neurotic maudlin housewives the emcee for an antisemitism summit? Which celebrity obsessed moron made and approved this choice?

In my rough estimation, the event easily topped over a million dollars in cost, albeit likely much more. It’s important to recognize that nearly no Israeli born influencers attended this summit despite the Ministry of Foreign Affairs funding a significant portion of it. Israeli tax dollars funded this thing, and barely any Israeli influencers were brought over to perhaps bridge the oceanic gap between American and Israeli content creation. That’s an actual challenge worthy of tackling to promote national jewish unity and cultural exchange. The missed opportunity here alone is an insane oversight in my view that would get people fired in private industry.

In ~48 hours, an enormous sum of cash was spent on an event that ultimately amounted to zilch. My friends who attended the summit were left confused as to what exactly the entire point of it was. It was basically an unending stream of lectures, the majority of which were autobiographical pieces that preached to an already pro-Israel crowd. 300 social media influencers were invited and there wasn’t a single goal outlined to give purpose to the summit. There were no fundraising attempts for tactical gear or anything of the sort. There was no coordinated social media push for exposure, and the livestream content posted online seemingly isn't even worth farming for shameless reposting by the organizations involved. Honestly, some of the clips are downright embarrassing. Even the guest list is bewildering. Some very small influencers (I know of one who actually started producing anti-zionist content after the summit) were invited to an all-expenses paid experience while other massive ones were left off the invite list for unknown reasons. As an outsider looking in, the level of organization here is abysmal relative to the amount of money spent. What was the return on investment? Hahaha.  

Downright embarrassing:

After spending two days figuring out what a blunder this all was, I wanted to put my head through a wall. It was deeply demoralizing then and it still is now. Why the fuck was I busting my bottom trying to raise a bit over $5k? Why were my brothers in Gaza lacking tactical gear necessitating them to rely on our fundraiser? Why are thousands of Jews sending portions of their own earned income to Israel, whilst our own Hasbara industry heads are burning copious amounts of cash on useless self-aggrandizing summits? 

Why is this cash instead, not going to initiatives on the offensive? Jew Hate Database (@jewhatedb) has become the leader in unmasking our opponents and holding them accountable. The guys behind JHDB have built an incredibly valuable tool that has sent simps for jihad on the defensive. While Andy Cohen gets paid a small fortune to play a bland piece of deli meat these guy are struggling to raise money.

It’s a pitiful thing. The Hasbara industry isn’t serious and lacks an actual vision. Look no further than our enemies for inspiration, they have a plethora of goals from seeking to conquer Israel, ostracizing Israel in the public sphere, and libeling it in international theater (UN and ICC). As misguided and evil as they are, our enemies at least manage to conceive of destinations to reach. What is the goal of Hasbara Inc.? It’s beyond the scope of this piece, but simply put, Hasbara Inc isn’t interested in “victory” for the Jewish people, its priorities exist in the spreadsheets of its donor list at best. 

Our advocacy industry has become fat with cash and lazy in disposition. Hasbara can continue along the path of self-induced diabetes or seek health, unfortunately I’d bet on the former. Even the names of these organizations are entirely uninspiring. “EndJewHatred”, “StopAntisemitism”, “Combat Antisemtism” are some of the most bland and boring monikers that keep getting repeated and recycled over and over again. Since their inception, rates of antisemitism have largely only grown, so nice going guys! What’s the point of all this fracture in organization even? 75% of these organizations all share overlapping mission statements, (“fighting BDS on campuses”) yet feel the need to justify themselves as uniquely deserving of donations to pay all their various staff members. Here’s a suggestion: let’s cut then consolidate half these organizations into one large one where investment oversight becomes transparent while keeping staff costs down.  They all consequently need to throw gala dinners and summits to grift enormous sums off well-meaning Jews who probably have no good idea of where their money is going or what it’s even accomplishing. “EndJewHatred”? Yeah good luck, it’s been around for a while. Impossible goals necessitate endless funding. 

Every year the WZO (World Zionist Organization) runs a sort of accelerator competition where all these organizations compete for Jewish votes to secure a portion of a $1B portfolio of grants. Activist groups, campus advocates, and even kiruv organizations all jockey for a portion through crammed social media campaigns imploring you to vote for them. I’ve been suspicious of this for a while now since multiple organizations have reached out to LEZM for official support and shares. The whole thing is kind of laughable to be honest. Do you want to know what’s really plaguing Jews in the United States? It’s not impish BDS resolutions on campuses. Most of the time these resolutions are entirely symbolic and the overarching business/research relationships university administrations hold with Israeli institutions are untouchable by student government resolutions. It reminds me of when I used to pass my little brother an unconnected Xbox controller so that he could feel as if he was actually playing GTA IV along with me. BDS resolutions are kind of a smoke screen. I’m not saying they should be ignored, but the vast amounts of money that goes into campuses to push against these resolutions is wasted when they are eventually approved by a new student government in the following year or two.

What’s really plaguing Jews in the United States is the challenge of reaching substantive Jewish education. Far more of our brethren fall to the wayside because of assimilation and ignorance than from BDS. BDS has practically become a red herring that’s distracting us from deeper problems and draining our earned resources.

How do we expect to recruit ranks of proud Jews when they reach college and they’ve had little to no education in their own history and tradition? I think $1B invested properly in a managed fund could easily fund thousands upon thousands of scholarships for young Jewish kids to enter elite private Jewish schooling with top tier academics. It’s shameful that the scope of organization only really seems to start at college. I’ve met so many parents desperate to get their kids into Jewish schools but cannot because of the capital hurdles. I’ve met parents who end up having to send their children to Christian schools as a result. Shame on us.

Ronald Lauder, CEO of the World Jewish Congress, is in my estimation one of the few Jewish leaders who understands this crisis. He alone, an heir to the Estée Lauder estate, funds Jewish schools across the entire continent of Europe to make sure young Jewish children grow up with parochial schooling. Imagine if we had 10 Ronald Lauders doing this for America. Yes, it would take some time to see the payoff but it’s a far better investment than playing an unending game of catch up when we reach college. Some still ponder why so many young Jews turn to anti-Zionist causes without addressing the key shortcomings of their upbringing that caused their turn. The calculus is actually rather simple: educated Jews end up being strong yids. No amount of donations could ever “end antisemitism”. Building everlasting Jewish homes however is achievable, measurable and practical. 

I have little faith that the Hasbara industry will reform itself. Nonprofits are heavily incentivized to keep their target problem alive, they largely behave similar to a parasite so that they can continue to grift donations. I have seen no criticism leveled at these organizations aside from meager in-person whispers, and tepid objections. Social media, while it has its uses, cannot be our catch all solution to far deeper issues. No matter how many hundreds of tiny accounts are created recycling the same boomer-tier content, it will never convince a Jew ignorant of his own history to stand up and be proud, let alone change the mind of an antisemite. Let’s cut the crap and talk about it, for if we don’t, we condemn the next Jewish generation to ignorance and assimilation.

Despite the running ire throughout this essay I want to end on a hopeful note for we still are a people of tikva. Despite decades of wasteful spending and aimless organization, we are still winning. There are still many organizations and individuals that are indeed enhancing our standing in the world. Thankfully also, our enemies also happen to be deeply stupid people who think that their worst attributes are their best defining features. The other day I was discussing with the other LEZM admins what the best outcomes have been from Hasbara Inc. We failed in trying to come up with solid answers. Actually we ended up reminding ourselves of that terrible “blue square” Instagram campaign that essentially just copied a move from the Marxist strategists of BLM. We did agree on one positive however: our years long friendship and coordination. Without Hasbara none of us would know each other and ironically enough, LEZM would not exist. If Hasbara were to ever truly reform, don’t throw this feature out. Bringing Jews together to network and connect across different industries and communities is the best fruit Hasbara Inc. ever bore.

הנה מה טוב ומה נעים, שבט אחים גם יחד

Cheers LEZM GANG.

~ Lawless Levite

Al-Jolani, to put it lightly, has a colorful history. As has been widely reported in the press, he had past affiliations with al-Qaeda and ISIS. In fact, he was one of Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s closest allies, and the two worked together closely in establishing the al-Nusra Front, a branch of al-Qaeda in Syria. The two later had a falling out over a Soviet-style ideological dispute, with al-Baghdadi taking the (cringe, losing, pickaxe-to-the-head) Trotskyite global revolution approach to Islamism while al-Jolani the Soon-To-Be-Reformed promoted a more (based, winning, absolute power for life) Stalinist national revolution approach. Clearly he was using his head, because al-Jolani now runs Syria with the full support of The Power That Be while al-Baghdadi, according to one reliable source, “died like a dog.”

Just a couple weeks ago, al-Jolani the Reformed appeared on CNN where he explained that he is not the same man who used to run around beheading people and blowing up schools. As Syria’s new enlightened despot explained, that was simply youthful indiscretion. Who among us hasn’t set up an al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq in preparation for the inevitable chaos that would follow the toppling of Saddam Hussein? This, of course, is normal behavior for a man in his 20s. You probably can’t relate because you live a sterile comfortable middle class lifestyle and the most based thing you’ve done this week is like a LEZM meme on Instagram, but if you check in on one of those Israeli settlers who burned a baby alive 20 years down the line they could probably find al-Jolani’s journey pretty relatable.

The point is, al-Jolani is leaving Radical Islamic Terrorism behind in favor of a new ideology: Radical Islamic Centrism. Instead of slaughtering Christians, al-Jolani plans to slaughter traffic, setting up bus routes across his country to better facilitate transportation. Instead of forcing people to memorize the Qur’an, Alhamdullilah he will lower taxes to attract international investment and rebuild his country. Instead of beheading Shi’ites, he utters the Wahhabi-Trudeauist motto “diversity is our strength.”! He even trimmed his beard and dressed up as Zelenskyy when he showed up for the interview and, even though he still looks like a terrorist, one can’t help but admire the effort. 

It seems like al-Jolani can’t even muster excitement about liberating the Golan Heights these days, a cause which was once so dear to him that he renamed himself after it (his real name is Ahmed al-Sharaa). As he was going on and on about how he was going to build strong government institutions in Syria to facilitate development, the interviewer asked him what he planned to do about Israel, which at the time of their conversation was actively eliminating the only real “institution” the modern Syria ever had from the sky. Al-Jolani didn’t seem bothered about it, and went on some more about how building institutions is his primary focus right now. The fact that Israel just invaded Syria and seized the demarcation zone didn’t seem to bother him much either.

While I can’t say I spent a great deal of time following the Syrian Civil War over the years, the Arab Spring it emerged from was actually the catalyst that got me interested in politics in the first place. Over the years, I watched many “moderate rebels” enter the scene, only for them to be revealed that the “moderate rebels” did not, in fact, have the 13 Keys to the White House. In Egypt, the democrats were quickly swept away by the Muslim Brotherhood until they were overthrown a few years later by the military, bringing Egypt back full circle with a status quo which continues to this day. In Libya and Yemen, it appears nobody had the keys to the White House, and the countries have been neo-Somalias ever since. Tunisia seemed to be doing okay for a bit, but is now back to being a dictatorship. And aside from Assad’s Syria, the Arab Spring failed to topple governments anywhere else.

With all these events of the past decade in mind, it’s reasonable to be skeptical about the new “moderate rebels” who have taken control of Syria, especially given the youthful indiscretions of Mr. al-Jolani. Yet despite the absurdity of a former al-Qaeda leader moving on to build medium-density homes because Matthew Yglesias told him to, the evidence from the past few years suggests that he’s serious about his Jihadi-neoliberal ideology, at least if we judge him by the results he’s achieved in and around Idlib, which al-Jolani has effectively governed for a few years. Satellite footage shows that, in the past few years of the Civil War, the amount of light pollution emanating from regime-controlled regions of Syria declined by 50% while in Idlib light pollution grew by 900%. Despite constant bombardment from the Assad regime, the population of Idlib has grown much faster than the rest of Syria as unemployed Syrians move there to find work. 

Of course, while al-Jolani does appear to be serious about his ideological shifts, that doesn’t mean Syria will be on a smooth course towards development. Al-Jolani could always be overthrown, for example, or be forced to succumb to the various Islamist factions who make up much of his support base. Perhaps the country could once again fracture under the weight of its ethnic diversity. But if he is capable of consolidating power while moving forward with the moderate agenda he seems to be implementing on the ground, it’s possible that Syria could end up looking less like Iraq and more like Oman, which would probably be making the most out of its potential.

That’s why I think we should be optimistic. Maybe replacing an overly cautious secular dictator with a YIMBY-Al Qaedaist “reformed” Islamist promising to build 15-Minute Medinahs will prove to be a bad idea as it plays out but, at the end of the day, a society that doesn’t risk moving backwards cannot move forwards. The Assad regime was depraved, ruled by a despot as comically corrupt as Idi Amin and propped up with prisons as grotesquely inhumane as Auschwitz. The contrast between the lavish mansions Assad and his criminal associates were living in compared to the piles of dead bodies in his mouldy underground prison cells tells the whole story. We’re yet to see what the full fruits of al-Jolani’s ideological journey will be, but it would need to go to great lengths to be worse than what the Assadists had to offer their people, and the world.

In other words, glory to Emir Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani (he/him) the Reformed, Sword of YIMBYism, Conqueror of al-Sham in the name of Allah, the most Beneficent, the most Merciful! Long may he reign over all of al-Sham, sans the Jolani Heights, of course.

- Beau Chasse

1. The United States is the leading global superpower with no close seconds. 

2. The US is a haven for Jewish life, personal liberty and human flourishing.

The individual deserving of such a title must be grand indeed. Comparable to the likes of Zerbavel, who lead us back to Israel under Cyrus the Great. Alternatively maybe like Philo Judaeus or Josephus; respected Jewish leaders under relatively benevolent rule. He would surely be a fair representation of American Jewry itself, dispensing Jewish wisdom while embodying American particularism. Basically Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks but the Yellowstone version. Well, in our case, the title of “America’s Rabbi” isn’t a knighted appointment like it is in London. In our case the title was all at once conjured, grabbed, and self applied by one man: Shmuley Boteach.

As a native New Jersyian I have been familiar with Shmuley for quite a bit now since he first ran for the House of Representatives in New Jersey’s 9th district. He was summarily beaten by the Democratic incumbent but I do remember thinking in my youth how cool it was to see a Rabbi’s campaign posters planted all over the place. His rise to fame is well documented and comes replete with a portfolio of (albeit strange) celebrity contacts and reality TV showings. Well, 12 years have passed, and these days I recoil at seeing Boteach make public media appearances. Whether it’s unhinged shouting matches on Piers Morgan, embarrassingly ego-driven public demonstrations, or toxic defamation campaigns. I know I’m not alone. In this piece I seek to highlight several examples of why I think Shmuley should be resoundingly shunned or shamed from representing himself as a figurehead of American Jewry (or Jewry in general for that matter). Lest I be accused of stirring division or defaming a large Jewish profile with this essay, I’d only point out and say that this substack pales in comparison to the division and defamation Shmuley Boteach himself causes to little pushback.

Before I lay out my argument I think it’s important to point out that Shmuley has indeed occasionally been at the receiving end of antisemitic abuse. The consequences of being a public Jew are such. Nonetheless, I figure that we can call out bad behavior while standing against detractors who end up targeting Boteach. Though I’ve had a mildly distasteful opinion of Shmuley for a while I’ve generally elected to not highlight all his shenanigans on LEZM. Shining a light on distasteful behavior only elevates its public profile. However, given some of the egregious public behavior this past year I feel that having a more comprehensive public record serves as a PSA that hopefully reaches someone who could perhaps reign the man in. 

The Gay scandal

The red line for me was his patterned inquisition of other Jews in our community for completely nonsensical reasons. It may surprise some readers to learn that Shmuley decided to leverage his weight on social media to try and remove the Harvard Campus Chabad Rabbi from his position during the Claudine Gay saga. Shortly after her ridiculous testimony in front of Congress, Hanukkah came about and the Harvard Rabbi extended an invitation to Gay to join the campus menorah lighting ceremony. This is a campus tradition and one that's existed for years showcasing the administration's support for its resident Jewish community and vice versa. Rabbi Hershey Zachi, the shaliach at Harvard spoke extremely critically of the administration and of Harvard as an institution. He lambasted the silence from his fellow Harvard chaplains for not confronting chants of intifada and in front of Gay exclaimed that the Harvard Jewish community disowns her and the administration.

Gay was right next to him as he delivered his speech. Personally, I consider this a true showcase of bravery. Instead of making the lighting ceremony private and disinviting the President, Zarchi kept our Menorah out in public and his words pointed directly to the adminstrations’s’ face. It was truly a modern macabbee moment. Well, Shmuley Boteach didn’t think so. Shmuley decided to launch a defamation campaign with the purpose to depose the rabbi from his position. His argument was that by tolerating Gay at the lighting Zarchi was actually displaying cowardice and catering towards antisemites. Zarchi, smartly, never responded to the deluge of Shmuley shenanigans. It’s also important to point out that Shmuley is guilty, of that which he accused Rabbi Zarchi of. It was only a year earlier when Boteach himself hosted Reverend Al Sharpton at a menorah lighting ceremony. Though Sharpton has somewhat sanitized his rhetoric when it comes to Jews, the Reverend was directly responsible for inciting the Crown Heights riots which saw synagogues vandalized and firebombed along with Jews abused in the streets. He’s never issued an apology for his role in it. And even more generally, his rhetoric on race relations are intensely toxic and divisive. Shmuley, for whatever reason, seems to think Sharpton has redeemed himself but I’m still waiting to hear a cogent reason as to why Shmuely himself is not a coward for cozying up to and legitimizing such a man. 

Targeting of the (((DailyWire)))

The pattern continues with his and his daughters targeting of the DailyWire (DW from here on out) and its Jewish employees. DW, under the leadership of Ben Shapiro, was very publicly embroiled in a controversy with one of its previous hosts Candace Owens. Owens is despicable, stupid, and an obvious antisemite. This however has been a revelation that's only unfolded in the later term of her tenure at DW. Candace began employment as a very standard conservative voice. Since the war started Candace publicly asserted that Israel is bombing christian children, that Mengele’s experiments on Jews during the Holocaust “smelled like propaganda”, and openly accused Rabbis of being drunk on christian blood. There’s not much room to interpret her animus other than being motivated by antisemitism. Boteach and his daughter decided to pile onto Ben Shapiro and DW journalist Kassy Dillon during the public spectacle and adding onto the massive wave of controversy already surrounding them. And how did the Boteach duo choose their line of attack? By calling Kassy a “weak kneed jew” and openly belittling her status as an Orthodox Jew. Shmuley’s daughter, in a truly childish showing, decided to share unflattering images of Kassy on X to accompany her attack as well. It’s an egregiously gross inquisition given that Kassy is a ger. Leaving aside the halachic prohibition of such rhetoric, it's also just plainly stupid. Akiva and Shapiro have both dedicated much of their time covering, highlighting, and defending Israel’s moral war against Hamas. Akiva herself was on the ground in Israel with IDF officials covering the war on the ground; not at all the action of a “weak kneed Jew”. This episode alone should have earned Shmuely a public gezerah in my opinion. Naturally, after Candace left DW, Shmuley in a self-glorification ritual claimed it was his “activism” that pressured Shapiro to remove her. I think he very much overestimates his social capital and very much misunderstands what activism is.

When he’s not publicly shaming proud Jews (or berating and filming teenage chabadniks for innocent trolling), Shmuley spends much of his time being entirely unhinged on social media. Pier Morgan, to his credit, has a talent for collecting the loons of society and getting them to shout at each other for views on Youtube. Shmuley, to his great discredit, plays right into the ploy. Nearly every showing he’s had on Piers’ show have brought along with them a bevy of comments ridiculing his clownish appearances. I very much hope the majority of Piers’ audience don’t associate Shmuley with the larger Jewish community but that’s potentially difficult for a gentile who’s first introduction to Shmuley is that as “America’s Rabbi”. I’ll also pay a quick moment of attention to Shmuley’s ill-informed choice to also appear on Alex Jones’ show in which he decided a wild conversation encompassing Alex’s “peepee”, kosher dildos, and Jesus was a wise decision. I honestly cannot understand the cascading series of terrible choices made. All of these decisions only serve to diminish the image of Jewish goodwill and civility in these great United States.

Shmuley in the lobby

The last example that I think services understanding how utterly deluded Shmuley has become is his most recent bout with the Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami. As I mentioned earlier, being a public Jew comes with the unfortunate consequence of being especially targeted by antisemites. Well, during a recent stay at the hotel Shmuley was confronted by such a man. Faiz Akbar accosted Shmuley in the hotel lobby as a “baby killer” and during his tirade eloquently claimed that he would “fuck yo shit motherfucker”. Clearly a man of distinction and class. I would have sympathy for Shmuley if it wasn’t for his ridiculous antics after the fact. Despite this being an entirely verbal altercation with some low class moron Shmuley claims online that he was “almost murdered” in this exchange. He also labels the Fountainebleau hotel as a “sewer of antisemitism”. That would be a shocking revelation to the thousands of Jews who frequent and live in the hotel’s complex throughout the year, myself included.

I really cannot overstate how much worse it gets to defend against legitimate acts of antisemitism when Shmuely exaggerates the circumstances beyond rationality. His antics continue.

Instead of mounting the bulk of pressure on Akbar (which would actually yield a favorable result) he’s decided on law-fare and public demonstrations against the Fountainbleau hotel and specifically the Jews involved. Boteach’s entire Facebook feed is dominated by childish AI generated videos and posts mocking the Jewish owner and lawyer opposite his lawsuit. In a repeat fashion of his attack on Kassy Akiva he’s decided to mock the lawyer on his Jewish identity. Sean Burstyn, the lawyer who sent Shmuley a letter declining his entrance on the property has “learned nothing from Judaism except how to leverage his kippa for cash”, according to Boteach. He even goes farther to say that he should learn from Christianity since he’s not educated in Judaism. I can feel the internal Rabbi Immanuel Shochet in me screaming in ire at such a statement. If this rhetoric came out of a gentile’s mouth it would be resoundingly characterized as antisemitism.

I don’t think Shmuley realizes how deeply delusional and ill-advised his course of action is. More than likely he’s opened himself up to even deeper legal troubles in this episode making this a much larger public spectacle than what it needs to be. Though maybe that’s what he truly craves. On Dec 15 he’s scheduled a rally outside the hotel that’s surely going to feed his ego even more. I sincerely hope few people turn out.

“America’s Rabbi”. Well perhaps he’s not the kosher cowboy I’d personally envisage deserving of such a title. Perhaps he’s “America’s Rabbi” in the worst sense of the term: someone desperately seeking celebrity and public controversy to feed their own ego. A Rabbi emulating the most deranged behaviors that dominate Hollywood to at least be in the press, because after all: all press is good press.

I’ll finish with a personal experience. A couple months ago I attended a rally in Times Square to commemorate the 1 year anniversary of October 7. Without verifying, I bought tickets to the event forwarded to me by my mom. It turned out to be an event hosted by Shmuley’s “World Values Network” and at which his ego was the primary topic, not the war or the lives lost. “I did this and this celebrity is my friend and I fought Candace and I am the best fighter for Israel”. It turned out to be an ill organized event that was entirely exhausting and not meaningful in the slightest way. Instead of a heartfelt display of Jewish solidarity I felt like I was at the Shmuley show. There’s a lot more of his shenanigans I could write about but I think I’ve made my point. For now at least.

I only hope that eventually someone sensible that Shmuley respects could deliver reason to him on a personal level. Until then Shmuley remains our great misfortune.

- Lawless Levite

The Assad regime has fallen. The ripple effects will be felt for many years to come. At present, the various players vying for influence in al-Shams and the broader Levant now arrive at irreversible and monumental strategic decision points: Rubicons that cannot be uncrossed.

The Americans have publicly signaled they do not intend to get involved in the internal political dynamics of the future of al-Shams, but they remain inside their buffer zone at al-Tanf. American and British jets have been pounding Daesh targets in the Eastern Syrian desert to prevent their reconstitution as a cohesive political force. The lame duck Biden administration has laid out conditions for the removal of Hayat Tahrir al-Shams (“the Organization for the Liberation of Syria”) as a listed terrorist entity: guarantees of minority and womens’ rights, and commitment to a peaceful and lawful transfer of power. This is  a laudable aim, and will set al-Shams on a trajectory for reconstruction, political stability, and provide opportunities for a prosperous future for all Syrians. Some may say it is impossible, but to those pessimists I would point to the history of our own beloved Israel. As a fellow contributing merchant to this Substack Beau Chasse poignantly argues, discarding Ba’athism into the dustbin of history is itself a monumental achievement. The Syrian people have a right to try after decades of autocracy. 

I remain optimistic as it comes to Syria for two reasons. The refugee crisis created by the Syrian civil war, the single largest refugee crisis since World War II, has created a prosperous diaspora network that can send remittances, and lobby for foreign assistance in rebuilding the country. Many able-bodied and fervently proud Syrians, who have been struggling to eke out existences from Istanbul to Toronto will decide to return home, providing a possible economic base.  While optimistic, I am not naive. This is still the Middle East. The prospects of success depend on a leadership that is able and willing to commit to this vision for a new al-Shams. While Ahmed Sha’ara has portrayed himself effectively as a moderate, and may act as a pragmatist, the long term success depends on disparate rebel factions to come to a political consensus despite obvious ethnic and sectarian divisions that have plagued the polity of Syria since its modern borders were concocted by Sykes-Picot. 

The Assad regime was propped up by the Alawites, and the clamor for retribution, especially as the true extent of the horrors it inflicted at Saydnaya Prison and elsewhere come to light will grow strong. Despite the pragmatism of Ahmed Sha’ara, there exist other rebel factions who are ardently Salafist and will demand the imposition of Sharia. The Kurds have established a de facto state in Northern and Eastern Syria, and the YPG and SDF are battle-hardened from a decade of fighting Daesh in the desert, and dodging Turkish airstrikes. The Druze in De'arra and al-Suweyyada will, as the Druze always do, hedge, and wait for things to settle, and then pledge loyalty to whoever ends up ruling al-Shams. 

The Druze and Blue Gold

Israel crossed its Rubicon when it crossed into Rafah. The October 6th consensus of passivity, of deterrence, and of ‘mowing the grass’ has been replaced with an Israel that is assertive, action oriented, and unapologetic in the pursuit of its interests. The IDF has occupied the Syrian side of the demilitarized buffer zone, they have captured the Syrian side of Mount Hermon, and reports float around that Israeli tanks have reached as far as Qatana, some twenty kilometers from Damascus itself. Lame duck Biden and limping duck Starmer have backed the move, stressing that it is temporary, but have declined to provide a timetable in a region where ‘temporary’ can last decades. Meanwhile, the Air Force has wiped out Assad’s air assets, chemical weapons depots, naval assets, and research facilities. In my view, Israel should expand the buffer zone along the border all the way to the Damascus-Beirut highway, to further choke off the flow of funds and weapons to Lebanon.

Controlling the high-ground, and placing Damascus in the range of Israeli artillery fire has obvious strategic benefits, but what is less discussed, though it is of even greater strategic importance, is the flow of water in the Yarmouk drainage basin.  Since 1987, the fraternal Arab states of Jordan and Syria have had an agreement governing water rights and usage, as administered by a bilateral Yarmouk River Basin Higher Committee.  To summarize, Syria is allowed to construct infrastructure in the Yarmouk River Basin in exchange for guaranteeing the export of water to Amman, and placing a cap on the water Syria is entitled to use. The largest of these is the  al-Wehda Dam, which sits on the Yarmouk river roughly on the Jordan-Syria border. Since the agreement was signed in 1987 “the number of Syrian dams has increased from 26 to 48, while around 3,500 wells were drilled to pump water from the river basin” reducing the flow of water flowing into the al-Wehda reservoir, with the Yarmouk River’s flow decreasing from 16 cubic meters per second in the 1960s  to only one cubic meter per second.  The Assad regime constructed these dams primarily to generate hydroelectricity, and to create water reservoirs for irrigation. The maintenance of traditional flood irrigation practices are the principal reason for why Assad’s Syria used an excess 6 million cubic metres of water per year, making the old-fashioned farming techniques appear to be a deliberate tactic to reduce what is available to Israel and Jordan.

By seizing control of the Syrian side of the demilitarized buffer zone, Israel now overlooks the hydroelectric and water irrigation infrastructure in the Yarmouk river basin, and has taken control of portions of it. The replacement of flood irrigation with Israeli drip irrigation methods, and ‘temporary’ control of the Yarmouk river basin will be a source of leverage for Israel to reconfigure hydrological infrastructure via an agreement with the Druze of De'arra and al-Suweyyada with whom the Golan Druze already have established contact. This will significantly restore the flow rate of the Yarmouk river, replenishing the Sea of Galilee and slowing or reversing the evaporation of the Dead Sea and at a much cheaper cost relative to alternatives like the Red-Med-Dead Sea pipeline. It will also alleviate Israel’s strategic reliance on desalination plants, de-risking Israeli water security, and enabling the Golan, Galilee, and indirectly the Negev to sustainably support larger populations, critical to the longer term strategic and demographic security for the State of Israel. In the Middle East, the contest for energy inputs gets most of the attention, but blue gold is just as essential as black gold in this parched part of the planet. 

Turkey and the Kurdish Question

The fact that Turkey has been able to gobble up portions of Northern Syria, bomb the SDF and YPG in Northern and Eastern Syria with impunity, and the fact that they back some of the Sunni Islamist factions that just brought down the lynchpin of the Axis of Resistance heralds their ascent as a regional power. In the short term, Israel faces a strategic choice, because they must currently contend with an Erdogan regime increasingly beholden to ultranationalists and ultraconservatives with irredentist and fantastical ambitions most neutrally described as neo-Ottoman. Until such time that a Kemalist, more Western-oriented political leadership emerges in Turkey, Israel will have to contend with Erdogan the Watermelon Seller, the biggest political prostitute in all of the Middle East. Erdogan purchases Russian air defence systems while supplying the Ukrainians with Bayraktar drones, he plays host to Hamas while quietly maintaining a lucrative trade, and intelligence relationship with Israel. After the Gaza flotilla incident in 2010, it took twelve years for President Herzog to make a state visit and fully mend ties. Working with that ten year timeline as a baseline, Israel must find avenues to constrain and contain Turkey. In Syria, the biggest irritant for Turkish interests is a strong Kurdistan. 

So, Israel must calibrate its strategic outlook on the Kurdish question carefully, and ensure the Americans align closely with it. As a matter of principle, I believe that Zionists must support any non-Arab minority group capable of meaningfully exercising self-determination. The more blows we deal to the fantasies of pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism that still grip the consciousness of Middle Eastern publics, the better odds reformers have at meaningful transformation of their economies, and societies which we have glimpsed under the auspices of the Abraham Accords. Back the Kurds to the hilt, full throttle, and you risk empowering Kurdish ambitions beyond their current borders, extending it within the territory of Turkey.  As I believe Israel will have to forge a strategic partnership with the Turks, this is an unacceptable risk. However, abandon the Kurds to their fate, and you risk them reaching out to Iranians, enabling the establishment of new smuggling routes, resuscitating the Axis of Resistance from its fragile and failing state. Abandon the Kurds to their fate, and you risk the Shi’ite ‘axis of resistance’ led by Iran being supplanted by an ikwan ‘axis of jihad’ led by an Islamist Turkey. Eliminating the strategic capabilities of the defunct Assad military is in keeping with this middle-of-the road approach. 

They can also invest in getting a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia across the finish line, thereby playing the Sunnis off against each other. 

The Russians, the Alawites and a Change in Posture on Ukraine

The spectre of vengeance being unleashed on the Alawites is predictable. Here too, Israel will have a strategic choice to make. Their strongholds are in Latakia and Tartus, on the Mediterranean coast. Here, Israel’s interests intersect with the Russians, meaning there may be Shaldag and Spetsnaz joint missions in the future to stabilize and preserve an Alawite enclave.  The risk with the Alawites is of sea-based smuggling routes emerging.  Some kind of meeting of the minds between Putin and Netanyahu therefore will be necessary. To leverage this, Israel could threaten to alter its position regarding the war in Ukraine. Maintaining security coordination with Russia in the Syrian theatre was the main realpolitik justification for Israel abstaining from providing any significant military assistance to Ukraine. With the Assad regime gone, and with a ceasefire holding in Lebanon, Netanyahu could sell the Arrow interceptor system, and Israel’s emerging anti-drone capabilities to Kyiv. This could significantly alter the balance of power in that war, and the mere threat of doing so could expedite a hostage deal in Gaza, given the coziness between Russia and Hamas. 

So, Where Does This Lead?

Taking these parts as discussed, it is clear the most advantageous post-war political settlement for a post-Assad al-Shams is a decentralized federalist system of government that grants significant political autonomy to ethnic and sectarian minority groups, especially the Kurds and the Druze. Until such time that the dust is well and truly settled, Israel should absolutely maintain its new strategic and security buffer zones within southern Syria and pursue all means and incentives available to nudge the future administration of Syria in this direction. In exchange for such a framework, Israel, the EU, and the United States could offer significant financial assistance, support for the reconstruction of the Syrian military, and eventually, if all goes well, a normalization of relations between Israel and Syria that would permit a withdrawal back to the 1974 Disengagement Line. And the Golan Heights? We must inform Mr. al-Golani that we’ll be keeping that. 

- Abba Eben

The common response Zionists give to this type of criticism is to correctly point out that the vast majority of Jews are Zionists. So much so that being Zionist is seen inseparable from countering antisemitism and promoting religious freedom in the diaspora. 

Now, perhaps an argument can be made that Jewish organizations should make room for the small minority of Jews who go against the grain of the majority, but I think there is actually a deeper premise being forwarded by anti-Zionists that needs to be addressed here. The premise being that if Jewish organizations toned down or eliminated their institutional Zionism, that anti-Zionist Jews would suddenly be welcome at Jewish institutions.

But, of course, this is absurd. Jewish organizations did not become uniformly Zionist for no reason. Jewish organizations became uniformly Zionist because their membership demanded so, a demand which has only become more powerful since October 7th. As noted in the Crimson article, J Street was suspended by Harvard Hillel recently, suggesting that J Street was tolerated by them beforehand. In fact, many Zionist organizations previously tolerated the obvious anti-Zionist trojan horse that was J Street for years, despite stiff opposition from their members. My parents’ Conservative synagogue, for example, invited a guy from J Street to speak last Sukkot, just a week before October 7th, and even had a flier on the bulletin board promoting the organization. When asked why an organization like J Street was allowed to do this, the Rabbi said that there’s no problem with intellectual diversity. But a week later, the “intellectual diversity” was tolerated no longer.

The reality is that most of these Jewish organizations are just looking to survive and grow, and the more people they can include, the better. Many of these Jewish organizations have made overtures to anti-Zionists in an effort to expand their appeal. But they always run into the inevitable problem that most other Jews despise these people, and don’t want to be part of an organization that tolerates them.

Which, of course, is why anti-Zionist Jews don’t demand tolerance. The author of this Crimson piece does not indicate anything from Hillel that is intolerant of anti-Zionist Jews. The presence of an Israeli flag does not physically prevent an anti-Zionist Jew from attending a Shabbat dinner. Inviting a speaker who served in the IDF does not preclude an anti-Zionist Jew from going to a lunch-and-learn about this week’s Parsha. The existence of an organized trip to Israel for Zionists to experience our proud history and culture does not stop an anti-Zionist Jew from going to look at mass graves in Lithuania to experience theirs. Jewish organizations can bend over backwards to appeal to anti-Zionists but so long as they do anything Zionist whatsoever, anti-Zionist Jews don’t feel tolerated. The same applies to other demoralization campaigns: Hillels’ that embrace the DEI doctrines of anti-racism or decolonization are still not tolerate by the DEI crowd.

But, of course, this is all cope. Anti-Zionist Jews don’t avoid Hillel Shabbat dinners because there are Israeli flags on the walls. They avoid them because no matter how much they cleanse the room of Zionist aesthetics, they cannot escape the judgment of their fellow Jews. The word ‘kapo’ pierces through them like a silver bullet, even if it goes unspoken. They know that’s what everyone there is thinking. The fact remains that many ‘anti-zionist’ jews are also the product of intermarriage and reform ‘conversions’ and therefore exist on the periphery of the Jewish community. The Dunning-Kruger effect might very well be at play here.

This reality, that anti-Zionist Jews are simply despised by the rest of their community, viewed as deserving of the title given to Jewish traitors during the Shoa , is too much for them to bear. Thus, they must come up with a fantasy that it is the Zionist aesthetics of Jewish organizations that’s keeping them out. But deep down, they know that’s not true. They know that if, G-d forbid, Israel ceased to exist tomorrow and the Zionist project was over, they would not be welcome back in Hillel. In fact, they’d only become more hated and more isolated by everyone else. So they can continue their futile attempts to bend Jewish organizations to their will. It won’t stop the rest of us from muttering ‘kapo’ as we walk by them on the streets.

- Beau Chasse

1. Who will pay to rebuild Gaza?

2. Who will govern Gaza?

3. How much can Israel alter the facts on the ground before the Americans, Arabs, and Europeans mount enough pressure to compel it to accept their answers?

On the broader end it refers to a grand strategic vision and a fundamental realignment of the Middle East. Let’s discuss all of it.

Given that the status of assistance to Ukraine is up in the air, it is a safe bet that a Trump administration will not be financing the reconstruction of Gaza. There is little appetite in America right now to be involved in foreign entanglements any more than is strictly necessary. To compensate, Europeans will have to increase their own spending on Ukraine’s defense, and on their own militaries. They might show up for some of the photo-ops, and may put up funds for some high-profile projects, but they cannot afford the bill either. The Chinese are already in an economic death spiral of their own making. That leaves the Arab monarchies. With untold hoarded trillions in oil wealth squirreled away in sovereign wealth funds, they can certainly foot the bill. The Arabs currently rely on the Americans to guarantee their security from external threats so that their security services can focus on tamping down on internal ones.  Who these Arab states perceive as the biggest external threat will determine where their diplomatic energies will be directed.

The lead up to the disaster of October 7th, and the disaster itself showed the Arab world two things: Israel is more vulnerable than its technological sophistication and economic might suggests, and that Israel is doggedly determined to eliminate that perception and restore deterrence.  The logic of Saudi-Israel normalization from the Saudi perspective was to supplement the Americans as regional security guarantors, and meld Arab financial capital with Jewish human capital. The long-term logic has not disappeared, but the short-term calculus for Saudi Arabia regarding its security needs has changed, so the price for a normalization deal has increased, and the Saudis are de-risking by slowly continuing a rapprochement with Tehran. It’s easily observable given the very recent meeting between Iran, Saudi recommitting to the Beijing Agreement hosted by China. That leaves the realistic alternatives to Riyadh narrowed down to the Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, and Turkiye. 

Qatar:

The Qataris are a major non-NATO ally. They host the U.S. Air Force at Al-Udeid. Al-Udeid is a security blanket, but what gave them relevance was their status as an open line of communication to entities Washington would prefer not to engage with directly. The brutality of the October 7th attacks combined with the reality that Qatar provided sanctuary to Hamas leadership during its planning and execution means that if there is a hostage deal, Qatar becomes irrelevant. But, the execution of hostages including Hersh Goldberg-Polin means Qatar continuing to host Hamas poses a risk of losing their security blanket. So, the Qataris’ played one of their two remaining hands: they removed themselves as mediators and told Khaled Mashaal to pack his bags. The other hand they have left to play is mute the poison they are pumping into the air waves via al-Jazeera. And while Qatar can afford to pay the salaries of Palestinian civil servants to administer the Gaza Strip, they cannot finance the reconstruction by themselves. 

Emirates:

The Emirates, to their benefit, choose to keep their hands mostly clean of Palestinianism. They’ve been doing well since signing the Abraham Accords. It should be said though that they did demand a price for signing: a freeze on any Israeli settlement annexations, along with the ability to purchase F-35s for themselves. Its still a win, and we can certainly expect to hear more in the near future. The newswires in Washington buzz with rumors surrounding the return of the “Deal of the Century” proposed by Jared Kushner during Trump’s first term. The appointment of Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel, and the appointment of Elise Stefanik as the American pitbull in the United Nations suggests there is credibility and meat to these rumors. The Emiratis continue to publicly enjoy the benefits from melding Arab finance with Israeli human capital. More discreetly however, do they enjoy cooperation on intelligence and security matters. They can also be negotiated with, it’s refreshing. The Emirates need to hedge against their Arab street - so they require some kind of concession from Israel in relation to expanded Palestinian autonomy. By themselves, the Emiratis’ do not have the security forces to stabilize Gaza, so either the IDF will retain a security presence in the Gaza Strip for some to-be-agreed-upon length of time, or other partners will need to be brought abroad.

The Europeans expressed a willingness to restart their Rafah monitoring mechanism, but the lessons of UNIFIL and Security Council Resolution 1701 elicits justifiable skepticism in Jerusalem. In summary, the Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia will be footing the bill, but they do not have the forces necessary to stabilize the Strip. Israel cannot afford to entangle significant resources in Gaza as it did in South Lebanon between 1982-2000, but it cannot afford to abandon freedom of action in Gaza as it did in 2005. It’s not such an easy quandary for us, who could have seen that coming?

Egypt:

With the Qataris out as the mediators, and the Hamas politburo outside of Gaza packing their bags, the task of negotiating a ceasefire arrangement now falls to Egypt, and likely Turkey.  And there will be an agreement, because President Sisi publicly announced frameworks designed to lead to a deal.  The Egyptian ‘mini-deal’ and the Russian ‘mini deal’ (for the two hostages with Russian passports) are efforts at confidence-building between the negotiating sides. Qatar stepping away means Israel and the Americans have one less parties’ interest to consider.

The Americans:

In any case the high-intensity operations that marked the first four months of war have ended. The IDF recently completed the construction of a new corridor which cuts off Jabaliya, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun from Gaza City: the West Bankification of Gaza is now 70% complete. Furthermore, Israel has finally kneecapped UNRWA, which for two decades alleviated Palestinian groups of their core governing responsibilities and allowed them to focus on building their terrorist infrastructure.  Before the presidential election, Biden issued a series of demands of Bibi - who, not being able to predict the future, was forced to hedge his bets in case a Democrat returned to the White House. Sinwar, before his untimely death (should have been way sooner), made his own hedge after recognizing that Iran and Hezbollah would not save him. He hitched his best bet on the Biden-Harris adminstrations’s foreign policy team. It did not pan out.

Israel did comply with American demands. The al-Mawasi humanitarian zone increased in size by 25%. The IDF reopened a new port of entry for humanitarian assistance at Kissufim. Israel delisted certain items from their ‘dual-use’ goods list, and the IDF recently completed a new access road for humanitarian assistance to better facilitate deconfliction and reduce interdiction of aid.  A bilateral mechanism for addressing incidents involving civilian casualties will meet for the first time in December. The IDF remains treading water in a counterinsurgency posture: raiding and clearing, but not holding areas. Ongoing tasks remain the fait accompli of a cordon sanitaire on the Palestinian side of the Gaza envelope and the fortification of  the Northern (Jabaliya), Central (Netzarim), and Southern (Philadelphi) Corridors’.  Israel is shaping the “day after” by creating new facts on the ground. In the face of an overwhelming Trump mandate, any Executive Action enacted by Biden will likely be reversed by the Trump administration when it assumes office, which leaves Biden with one realistic tool: to relinquish the American veto at the UN Security Council and allow the imposition of terms by the international community that ensure the survival of Hamas. If that transpires, then Netanyahu in my view, must accept a hostage deal, end this current military operation - and then resume operations at a later date. 

The focus of the IDF has for months been on the Northern border. After Operation Grim Beeper’ and the decapitation of the senior leadership of Hezbollah, an engineering operation supported by infantry maneuvers has gradually cleared out military infrastructure along the border, while the Air Force continued to deteriorate their stockpiles of drones, rockets, and rocket launchers. The mid-level command has been decimated. Demoralized rank and file have melted away among throngs of Shi’ites fleeing to Syria alongside former Syrian refugees. The Biden administration has ‘reversed’ its thinking: calm in Lebanon will lead to calm in Gaza. Lebanon wants a ceasefire, Hezbollah wants a ceasefire (but cannot say so publicly), and Israel has applied the lesson of the last Lebanon War in insisting on a mechanism to enforce 1701 itself, and retain freedom of action. Lamentations about the loss of Lebanese sovereignty are crocodile tears, Lebanon was eaten away by Hezbollah and Hafez al-Assad’s imperialist fantasies before them.  There are details regarding the ceasefire that remain unclear: who will be part of the dispute resolution mechanism, and how will it function? What, if any, will UNIFIL’s role be? What will backstop the Lebanese Army? And to what extent will Israel retain ‘freedom of action’ to prevent Hezbollah from re-supply? These questions will be answered in time. 

Turkiye:

In setting the table for the day after the “day after” the only realistic option is Turkey. Unlike the Arab states, Turkey is a NATO member. Not only that, it has the second largest standing military in NATO. As America retreats behind the curtain of isolationism, this is the next best thing. It maintains the “FaFO” dilemma for the mullahs and what is left of the Axis of Resistance. Unlike the Arab states, which are palace guards focused on quelling internal dissent, the Turkish military has battle experience - fighting Kurdish insurgent groups, the Islamic State, and in their operations in Northern Syria.  Israel’s warm relations with the Kurds give it some negotiating leverage in the contest for Syria to an arrangement that prevents, or at least limits the flow of Iranian arms through Syrian land and airspace. 

That is not to suggest a deal with Turkey will be easy.  Erdogan’s AKP suffered defeat in local councils, largely due to a collapse in voter turnout among his rural, nationalist, and religiously conservative power base. To shore up that support, he has spent the year vacillating between threatening to invade and destroy Israel, and warning that if Hamas is defeated the ‘Zionists’ would come to swallow the whole of the Middle East. Turkish media is state-controlled and pushes a pro-Hamas narrative. To further up support, Erdogan joined South Africa’s lawfare at the International Court of Justice. In May, he announced the suspension of trade with Israel ‘until a permanent ceasefire’ in Gaza. Israel imports far more from Turkiye than it exports, making it a key source of foreign currency at a time where Erdogan’s mismanagement of the economy has pushed inflation higher, further fueling political resentment at home. The suspension is temporary, and is a means of pressuring Israel into accepting a deal. It is also largely theatrical: goods are still being transferred from Ankara to the Palestinian Authority, diplomatic and intelligence relationships remain intact. Oil from Azerbaijan - some 40% of Israel’s total energy imports - flows uninterrupted under Turkish soil. And, because most of the trade between Turkey and Israel is facilitated by Turkish Jews, many of those companies have simply relocated to Cyprus, a loophole that Erdogan has so far left open.

The trade relationship will be restored once a ceasefire is in place in Gaza. Israel should preserve the current diplomatic contacts it has and avoid taking Erdogan’s bait. The end of hostilities against Hezbollah and Hamas will lead to a restoration of economic ties. There will come a time where Erdogan will no longer lead, and Turkey may rebalance towards a more secular, Kemalist nationalism.  Turkey is a realistic guarantor to interdict weapons supplies to Hezbollah. The Turkish Nav is the only one in the region with enough force projection to deploy to the Straits of Hormuz, and maintain order in the Bab el-Mandeb. Combining Israeli air power with Turkish naval power could tilt the short term Saudi security calculus back towards a normalization agreement. Turkey would be considered a much more credible mediator between Israelis and Palestinians in the event of a resumption of the ‘peace process’, and Israel would likewise be a credible mediator to tamp down tensions between the Turks and the Kurds.  The signals are already being sent. Foreign Minister Fidan declared two days ago that he looks forward to strengthening bilateral ties with the Americans, and resolving disputes with his Greek friends. 

The development of a stable diplomatic and security framework between Israel and Turkiye is what will unlock the grandiose “day after” espoused by Blinken, McGurk, Hochstein, and Sullivan.  This framework unlocks normalization with Saudi Arabia. Turkey despite the Islamist ramblings of Erdogan, is still home to a sizable Jewish community, meaning the people-to-people ties do not need to be built from scratch. This framework preserves the prospects for a solution, and creates a checkmate strategic overmatch against the Iranian regime.  

- Abba Eben