Tag Archive for: Israel

113 Democrats Vote against Condemning Anti-Semitic Terror Attack

For anyone with lingering doubts about whether anti-Semitism in America has increased, 26% of the House of Representatives voted Monday night against condemning anti-Semitic terrorism. When the House took its roll call on a resolution (H.Res.488) “Denouncing the antisemitic terrorist attack in Boulder, Colorado,” 113 Democratic members refused to condemn the violence. This disturbing development demonstrates how completely progressive ideology has warped the moral worldview of some American lawmakers, such that they cannot vote to condemn violent, racialized attacks.

On June 1, an Egyptian national, who was in the U.S. illegally, attacked a group of elderly Jews during their weekly march in recognition of the hostages still held by Hamas. Armed with Molotov cocktails and homemade flamethrowers, the man sent eight victims to the hospital with burns as he yelled, “Free Palestine.” The victims were aged 52 to 88, including a Holocaust survivor and certainly played no personal role in Israel’s military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza; the man simply attacked them because they were Jewish.

It’s worth stating the good news, first: a clear bipartisan majority approved the resolution in the House of Representatives — 205 Republicans and 75 Democrats voted to condemn this vulgar terror attack. However, six members (Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene [R-Ga.] and five Democrats) voted “present,” while 33 members, split between both parties, did not vote.

The resolution, introduced by freshman Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Colo.), simply declared, after a modest preamble:

“That the House of Representatives—

“(1) condemns Mohammed Sabry Soliman and his antisemitic terrorist attack on peaceful demonstrators supporting the release of the hostages held by Hamas;

“(2) affirms that free and open communication between State and local law enforcement and their Federal counterparts remains the bedrock of public safety and is necessary in preventing terrorist attacks; and

“(3) expresses gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] personnel, for protecting the homeland.”

This praise for law enforcement and condemnation of terror was too much for some members to stomach, and 113 Democrats voted against the resolution. (Perhaps these Democrats were thinking of the ongoing L.A. riots and did not want to support either ICE or cooperation between federal and state law enforcement — clever of Evans to include that.)

For his trouble, Evans earned only mockery from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). “Who is this guy? He’s not seriously concerned with combating anti-Semitism in America. This is not a serious effort. This guy’s going to be a one-term member of Congress. He’s a complete and total embarrassment,” Jeffries jeered. In answer to his first question (yes, he intended it rhetorically), Evans is a former Army Black Hawk pilot and former police officer.

Some Democrats criticized Evans’s resolution because they preferred a different resolution condemning the Boulder attack offered by Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), in whose adjacent district the attack occurred. But the House only voted on one resolution — that offered by Evans — and even Neguse chose to vote for it.

The reason why most members, even a significant number of Democrats, supported the resolution is because the moral position is clear. Violent acts of terrorism against innocent civilians are always condemnable, whether committed by Hamas operatives against Israelis at the Nova music festival or by an Islamist radical in Boulder, Colo.

To underscore this point, Hamas is still an evil terrorist organization holding onto dozens of kidnapped civilians, which it cynically uses as bargaining chips to extract ever greater concessions out of Israel. The Boulder terror victims were attacked while attempting to remind an indifferent world of this fact.

“Our life turned upside down,” said Ilan Dalal, father of hostage Guy Dalal. “Me and my wife, we had two jobs each. We provided our family with dignity. And since then, we stopped working. We are unable to do anything except fight to bring them back.”

During a recent meeting at Family Research Council headquarters, Dalal took pains to remind Americans that hostages like Guy, and Guy’s lifelong friend Evyatar David, are human beings, just like everybody else. “They both had dreams, he said. “Guy just finished his education in computer science before he was abducted. He managed to work for a new company for two months, and he taught himself to speak and write Japanese because his dream was to go to Japan and travel and see the world. Evyatar also had a dream to become a music producer.”

The young men were 22 when captured, and now they are 24. “They both have already [had] two birthdays in captivity,” Dalal declared, “two birthdays in the tunnels, without their friends, without their family, without their love.”

For a while, the families held onto hope that at least their sons were still alive. But after the release of Tal Shoham, an older man who shared their captivity, they were shocked by the barbarous conditions. “We didn’t think that their conditions of captivity [were] so harsh,” Dalal reflected. “We really thought that they [were] treating them [with] more dignity. But when Tal was released, we found the truth.”

“The tunnel that they are held in is booby trapped with explosives, which the terrorists threatened to set off if the IDF is approaching. And, since we don’t know the quality of the explosives, it might go off accidentally and kill them. And one of the guards can go crazy … and he can kill them, or they just die from the bad condition they are in,” he related. “They are beaten, starved, and abused on a daily basis. And the last sign of life … was three months ago.”

To hear such accounts and conclude, “Actually, I’ll side with terrorists,” reveals a terribly warped moral compass. Ninety years ago, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party targeted Jews for extinction because his racial ideology viewed them as impure, inhuman. Today, a new racial ideology — a Marxist one — holds sway in leftist circles, and once again Jews find themselves the target. This time, the Left accuses the Jews of colonialism for returning to their homeland, siding with the interloping Arabs merely because — they suppose — Jews have white skin, and Arabs have brown skin — an imaginary distinction that pays little heed to the facts.

But a person’s moral character is revealed through his actions, not his skin color. To say otherwise is to descend into total moral relativism — with a sturdy dose of racism to boot.

Earlier this month, a cadre of diehard progressives determined to prove their morally backward hypothesis of Israel’s supposed evil by launching a so-called “freedom flotilla” to bring humanitarian aid from Sicily to Gaza, hoping somehow to break Israel’s naval blockade. But Israel called out the ship for what it was, a “selfie yacht” carrying less aid than a single truck entering Gaza from Israel. In fact, when Israel boarded the vessel, they came bearing food and water.

Israel offered a solution to the Left’s self-deception about the morality of their war with Hamas. They invited — nay, compelled — the activists (including the nearly forgotten Greta Thunberg) to watch a 43-minute film depicting the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.

Of course, unbelief is often a matter of the will, not the mind (Isaiah 6:9-10); the truth can only change the minds of those willing to accept it. Reportedly, the activists simply refused to watch the film.

“These anti-Semitic flotilla activists closed their eyes to the truth and once again proved they prefer the murderers over the victims,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said. “They continue to ignore the atrocities committed by Hamas against Jewish and Israeli women, the elderly, and children.” So, too, it seems, does a quarter of the House of Representatives.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.


Like what you’re reading? Donate to The Washington Stand! From now until June 30, your gift will be doubled to fuel bold, biblically-based reporting.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Released Israeli Hostage Recounts Barbarous Details of His Imprisonment

Tal Shoham and his family were visiting his in-laws for Sukkot (the Feast of Booths) when, in the early morning hours of October 7, 2023, radical Islamist terrorists burst into the unsuspecting kibbutz, changing his life and the lives of his family forever. For 505 days, Shoham endured ridicule, deprivation, uncertainty, and abuse until his release on February 22, 2025.

Taken to Gaza

“The terrorists just came, dozens of them, fully armed, to an unarmed community in the kibbutz,” Shoham related at Family Research Council headquarters in Washington, D.C. “After they broke into the room, they took me out first,” he said. “They threw me into a trunk of a car and just drove to Gaza.”

Shoham had no way to know that the terrorist kidnapped nine members of his wife’s family gathered for the holiday and murdered four more, including his father-in-law. Nor did he know, until much later, that his wife “ran after” and “struggled with the terrorists with great bravery” to prevent her separation from their daughters, ages eight and three.

“When we arrived in Gaza, one of the terrorists jumped on the roof of the car and pointed his Kalashnikov on me and told me to get down on my knees,” Shoham continued. “And I knew in that moment — I could see it in his eyes — that he wanted to execute me. … He didn’t manage to kill enough people” during the terrorist incursion into Israel.

Though captured, Shoham would not die quietly. “So, I raised my hand, and I argued with him that, ‘You can do whatever you like, but I’m not going to my knees.’ I surrendered and, practically, he should not kill me,” he said. “We argued like that for half a minute. And then another terrorist just took me in the shelter.”

“We started to walk in the streets of Gaza, searching for a place to hide,” said Shoham, “because they probably didn’t have a plan [of] what to do with us after they kidnapped us.” Despite the radical decentralization of Hamas foot soldiers, officials ratified their initiative in taking hostages.

“Then a policeman on a motorbike came and … put me on the bike and did a parade in the street in the main streets of Gaza, shouting, ‘We got a Jewish soldier,’ or something like that,” Shoham continued. “Everyone was shouting and happy and tried to beat me with sticks and fists. But I was lucky enough that the motorbike didn’t stay enough time in every spot.”

Solitary Confinement

“After a while, another police car came. And they put me inside it and took me to a hidden house of one of their leaders,” Shoham said. “They shackled me with military grade handcuffs, [and] I was like that for 34 days, 24/7 … in solitary [confinement], handcuffed, and starved.”

“It was one of the most intense periods of my life, because I could not stop thinking about my family,” he recalled. “I didn’t have anything to do there because I was alone. So, it’s like compulsive thoughts going on and on and on.” For the first 50 days, Shoham knew nothing about what became of his family. “I didn’t have peace of mind the whole time because all day long I thought [about] what happened to them, and if they were murdered, if they were kidnapped.”

“But, after 50 days, I received a letter from my wife describing that they were kidnapped and … they were about to be released,” he said. “I knew that now I have a reason to come back, and there will be a family that will wait [for] me if I will survive it.”

Tal’s wife, Adi Shoham, was released as part of the first and largest prisoner exchange on November 25, along with her daughters, Naveh and Yahel, and her mother, Shoshan Haran.

Bonds Forged through Captivity

After just over a month in solitary confinement, Shoham “was really glad” to be joined by two younger hostages, Guy Dalal and Evyatar David, “so I [wouldn’t] be alone anymore.” The three hostages “forged a bond together,” Shoham said. But little did he expect the months of brutal torment that lay ahead. “I’m not speaking about regular hunger. It’s a hunger that eats you from within. It’s 24/7 pains that nothing can release or can make disappear. [They] wake you in the night. You fantasize on food every moment.”

“One of the cruelest things that the terrorists did is that they gave us so little, but they all the time [ate] more, with fresh fruits and vegetables, and made us know that they are having great meals in the other room,” he added.

This was consistent with the “humiliation process” to which the terrorists subjected their captives, Shoham shared. “The prime guard would come in the afternoon and just call us one by one, slap us, [laughing at us]. And he was careful not to leave bruises on us, so nobody would see that he did something. But it was daily.” The guards mocked Dalal and David, both captured at the Nova Music Festival, by joking about their friends who were murdered there. “He used to ask him, ‘How was the Nova?’ — doing those machine gun noises and laughing,” said Shoham.

The terrorists also lied to the hostages, telling them that their families had forgotten about them, and that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were coming to kill them. “They put so much psychological pressure on us, with severe starvation, that we actually started to believe that the IDF [was] trying to kill us,” Shoham related. “There was time that the IDF started to approach us, and they, in the apartment, geared up with explosives.”

Tormented in the Tunnels

The captives had no idea their situation could worsen. In June 2024, their captors told them they were being transferred to a medical facility, which was better equipped with running water and electricity. “Then they put a corona mask on our eyes and took us to a tunnel,” said Shoham. “In the beginning, I thought that we would just go through the tunnel and go out the next entrance. But we just walked and walked for more than two hours inside their empire underground — until we heard an Israeli hostage speaking with them. They told him that they brought him company — and then my heart just went down to my pants because I understood that now we are going to stay there forever, practically.” This new hostage was Omer Wenkert.

The four men shared a tunnel three feet wide and 30 feet long, but most of that space was occupied by mattresses on which the men slept — mattresses lying right on the floor of sand. “The lack of oxygen was so severe that for three weeks we couldn’t think straight,” said Shoham. “I think I slept 14 hours every night because the brain couldn’t work.”

Three small lightbulbs allowed the captives to see, but the terrorists refused to turn the lights off at night, giving the captives no way to distinguish between night and day. A hole in the floor served for a toilet, but the men were only allowed to use a nearby shower once every three weeks.

High humidity caused the men’s clothes to stick to their skin, but their captors would not allow them to remove their shirts — for no other reason than their own capricious will. “They watched us on camera to make sure that we obeyed their rules,” Shoham recalled.

The hostages were kept on their starvation diet, consisting of “a small portion of rice or one pita bread once every 24 hours,” he said. But they could hardly look forward to this daily “meal” because their jailors would come to torment them, “shouting [at] us, beating us, spitting on us, making bizarre rules that we should obey,” like ordering them not to sleep or they would be beaten.

“It’s so tough as it is underground in this tomb, why [did] they need to do such effort to try to inflict us in so many different ways?” asked Shoham. “Just to stay balanced or secured mentally and emotionally was the biggest effort that we needed to handle every day.”

To make matters worse, the hostages soon learned that one of their captors was “psychotic” — as in, “hearing voices,” “seeing things that [are] not there” — and consequently more sadistic than his companions. “When the other terrorists didn’t look, he used to do even worse things: He shut off the light in the tunnel — and there is no external light … so we could not see even our hands in front of our heads — and he would keep us like that for 12 hours, 15 hours in this eternal darkness.”

This guard “put fire outside of the iron door of the tunnel, directing the smoke into the tunnel. And we just suffocated. We laid on the ground, and we hoped that it [would] be soon over because we got to the point … that 10 more minutes like that and we would just suffocate to death there,” Shoham asserted. Afterward, “he came, and he laughed about it and say, ‘Ah, it was the IDF [trying] to enter the tunnel,’ which of course wasn’t true.”

The psychotic guard would come in to “laugh with us” one moment, said Shoham, and the next moment he would curse at them, exclaiming “that we [would] rot in this tomb, and nobody [would] save us.” He ordered one hostage to lie down as he beat him. And he ordered another to stand blindfolded, without moving, for two hours.

Finally, after nearly two years of hard fighting, terrorist duplicity, and obstruction by the Biden administration, Israel was able to negotiate the release of enough hostages that Hamas planned to let Shoham and Wenkert go free. But even in this, the terrorists displayed studied cruelty and hardness.

The terrorists teased their prisoners with the thought of release, gleefully capturing even their tortured reactions. “Two weeks before I was released, the officer came and told us that he’s got good news and bad news,” Shoham explained. “And I asked him, ‘What is the news?’ He said, ‘No, no, I will come tomorrow with a camera, and then I will tell you.’ And he came to film us, and he told us that one of us [was] going to be released, [but] the others will need to stay here. Then he tried to film how we [felt] about it.”

After that, the guard would “joke about it and say, ‘You are going out. No, no, you are going out. No, you’re going out,’ like it’s kind of a game, Shoham recalled. “We are trying to survive in this underground tomb, and he is playing with us and trying to inflict us psychologically.”

Just before their release, the guard “filmed us eating with him — a big plate of rice and meat — and having fun together like it [was] normal. But it wasn’t. [It was] only there for their film.” Then he told Shoham and Wenkert that they would be released, while trying to film the downcast reactions of Dalal and David. “After a few hours, we were separated, and three days later we were freed — but not before they took them and told them that they also will be released.”

The terrorists took Dalal and David above ground to watch the release of their fellow hostages — the last evidence their families have that these young men are still alive. “They [were] in a van looking on us when we [were] being released, and they were only 10 or 20 meters from us, 20 meters from salvation,” Shoham recalled. “Then they told them, ‘Oh no, you’re staying here. You’re going underground again. How do you feel?’ And again, [they were] filming them like it’s a kind of game.”

Freedom Again, with a Purpose

“I was blessed that I can come back and reunite with my family,” concluded Shoham. “Already, three and a half months home, and I feel like [it was] a far and distant nightmare, I mean, almost unrealistic. I need to do a reality check to even realize that it has actually happened.”

The psalmist describes a similar salvation, “Some sat in darkness and in the shadow of death, prisoners in affliction and in irons,” then the Lord “brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and burst their bonds apart” (Psalm 107:10, 14).

But Shoham remembers that the nightmare is not over for Dalal, David, and the other hostages remaining in Hamas’s inhumane captivity. “Now as we’re sitting here, they are still there, underground, suffering the same torture and torment and without any end in sight,” he lamented. “We are really afraid that if they won’t be released soon, they will find their death there. Because who knows what this psychotic guard can do.”

Every American above a certain age remembers where they were on September 11, 2001, when they first heard the news that radical Islamist terrorists had flown hijacked passenger jets into the Twin Towers. I was six years old, folding socks in the living room with my mother and siblings before our day of homeschool began.

Israel’s “9/11 moment” came on October 7, 2023. And, while traumatic for the entire nation, the infamous day had to be especially scarring for those captured by Hamas and taken into captivity. Released captives like Shoham are like the survivors who escaped the burning towers. And, after being freed, Shoham has turned around to aid the rescue effort. Years may have passed, but there are still survivors buried beneath the rubble.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.


Like what you’re reading? Donate to The Washington Stand! From now until June 30, your gift will be doubled to fuel bold, biblically-based reporting.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

U.S. Vetoes Security Council Resolution Demanding Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza

The draft resolution text, according to the UN, “reaffirmed the Council’s earlier call for the “immediate, dignified and unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas and other groups.”

Dignified? There’s no such thing as far as Hamas is concerned, given its savagery and cruelty toward the hostages, not to mention those who were murdered outright.

The UN should be calling for the complete dismantling of Hamas and the prosecution of its surviving leaders for the October 7 jihad attacks, as well as for using human shields in Gaza, continuing to pose an existential threat to Israel, stealing food supplies intended for Gazans, and intentionally disrupting aid to Gazans.

The UN continues to aid and embolden Hamas and other jihadists by calling for a permanent ceasefire. This call is for Israel to end its war on Hamas permanently, which would be a tremendous victory for the global jihad.

“US vetoes Security Council resolution demanding permanent ceasefire in Gaza,” UN News, June 4, 2025:

A draft resolution calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza failed to pass in the UN Security Council on Wednesday after the United States cast its veto – blocking the initiative backed by all ten elected members of the Council.

The text, co-sponsored by Algeria, Denmark, Greece, Guyana, Pakistan, Panama, the Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, and Somalia – collectively known as the E-10 – received 14 votes in favour, with the US casting the lone vote against.

As one of the council’s five permanent members, the US holds veto power – a negative vote that automatically blocks any resolution from going forward.

Had it been adopted, the draft would have demanded “an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza” to be respected by all parties.

The text reaffirmed the Council’s earlier call for the “immediate, dignified and unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas and other groups.”

The draft also expressed grave concern over the “catastrophic humanitarian situation” in Gaza – following months of almost total Israeli aid blockade – including the risk of famine, highlighted by recent assessments by international food security experts.

It reaffirmed the obligation of all parties to comply with international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law….

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Israel Finds New Way To Fight Hamas

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that Israel is arming a clan within the Gaza Strip to fight Hamas, the BBC reported Thursday.

Netanyahu’s remarks confirmed multiple reports from Israeli media that indicated the Israeli government is providing arms to the Abu Shabab clan — led by an individual named Yasser Abu Shabab — to oppose Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the BBC reported. While several Israeli politicians accused the prime minister of endangering Israelis with the move, Netanyahu staunchly defended the strategy as a novel way to pressure Hamas.

“What’s wrong with this?” Netanyahu said according to the BBC. “It only saves the lives of Israeli soldiers.”

Defense sources confirmed to the Times of Israel that Israel sent captured Kalashnikov rifles to the gang that were originally seized from Hamas terrorists. Some observers argue that the Abu Shabab clan is more like a militia or a criminal gang than a conventional clan, according to BBC.

The Abu Shabab clan has styled itself as an opposition force to Hamas in the Gaza Strip despite allegations of looting the aid vehicles they claim to protect as Gaza faces large-scale starvation. Yasser Abu Shabab has denied that the Israeli government is arming his men, saying in an online statement that the weapons “came through the support of our own people.”

Israeli opposition politician Avigdor Lieberman said Netanyahu made the decision unilaterally, according to the BBC. The clan has reportedly been operating out of the Rafah region of Gaza, which is currently under Israel Defense Forces (IDF) control.

“The Israeli government is giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons, identified with the Islamic State group,” Lieberman said, according to the BBC. “To my knowledge, this did not go through approval by the cabinet.”

Peace talks between Hamas and Israel have stalled out in recent months after Israel resumed bombardment of Gaza as a brief 3-month ceasefire broke down in March. Netanyahu has recently faced mounting international pressure to end the war in Gaza, but has so far continued to prosecute the conflict, most recently launching “Operation Gideon’s Chariot” aimed at the total capture of the entire Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

Wallace White

Defense Reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


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Liberal Media Is in Its Death Throes — What Will Replace It?

The slow, painful death of the liberal media is hard to watch … okay, not really. Once again, the liberal media has lost all credibility, but haven’t we been here before?

It seems the apparatus of far-left talking heads and “journalists” has a zombie-like ability. The same reporters and news operations keep suffering fatal blows to their journalistic integrity, and yet they manage to struggle on as ratings — and credibility — fade away.

Take just this week, for instance. The Washington Post gleefully published a report that Israeli soldiers fired on Gaza residents waiting to receive humanitarian aid and killed more than 30. If the story sparked your skepticism, you may have better news judgment than many D.C. reporters.

This glaring lie — and the anti-Semitism that it and other lies like it help fuel — are not even surprising from the media class that is frantically grasping at the last shreds of its credibility. Meanwhile, in a move of incredible audacity, CNN’s Jake Tapper is now promoting his new book on the cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s mental health decline. Polling shows that most Americans could see Biden’s decline with their own eyes. Collective memory and the magic of video tape shows us that Tapper helped lead the charge of that cover-up. In fact, he once lambasted Lara Trump on air for daring to question Biden’s mental fitness. Lara Trump was not the only one to receive such treatment from Tapper.

Now, Tapper is being widely mocked on X and the new crop of center-right podcasts that have gained more political influence — and usually viewership — than cable news shows.

MSNBC saw a plummet in support after President Donald Trump’s election, though they have begun to recover in ratings, if not in credibility. The network axed a handful of anchors, including the notoriously bombastic, and often racist, Joy Reid. Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has taken a slot, which is so far a major flop as ratings plummet and MSNBC scrambles for relevance.

Tapper, Reid, and Psaki are the three horsemen of the liberal cable news apocalypse and the perfect face for this downfall. Tapper represents the hollowness of established cable anchors. Tapper has been in the business for decades and fails to perform the first function of a journalist: holding the powerful accountable. Reid symbolizes the liberal anti-white racism and anti-man sexism that has spread like a cancer through the Democratic Party and helped push an entire generation of young men into the arms of Trump. Psaki symbolizes cable news’s incestuous relationship with the politicians they are supposed to hold accountable. Psaki covered up Biden’s mental decline and was rewarded with a cushy anchor slot. On these shows, there is little room for real thinkers or diversity of thought, only rightly programmed Democratic messengers.

CNN’s Abby Phillips has managed to create a show relevant to the news cycles. Clips of her show regularly go viral, but they usually involve Scott Jennings blistering some poor Democrat. Despite how it helps prop up her show, Phillips never looks overly pleased.

We know from history that communist and totalitarian regimes cannot survive long without propaganda. China has state-owned media, as do North Korea and others.

To build its secular, communist takeover of the U.S., the far Left needs a media propaganda machine (state-owned media) to repeat lies and slander opposition. During the Biden administration, that apparatus grew sizably. The White House leaned on social media companies with great success to silence dissenting views on COVID and other topics. Shadow-banning of conservative viewpoints of all kinds became commonplace on social media. Those who did not toe the line of the LGBT agenda were accused of “hate speech” with a serious tone and deplatformed or demonetized. But the apparatus came crumbling down as the lies about COVID, the vaccine, the Russia hoax, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and more were exposed.

We have a biblical paradigm for this familiar cycle. False prophets, purveyors of the lies of the age, haunt the halls of wicked kingdoms, from the Pharaoh’s magicians in Exodus to Ahab’s 400 false prophets in 1 Kings. In our time marred by evil, do not be surprised when false prophets are found in places of influence.

What does this all mean? The far Left has a problem. Over the last five years, they have seen the credibility of the most reliable propagandists gutted all while media increasingly moves online. More importantly, it means you should expect in the next decades direct attempts to censor dissent and clamp down on internet freedom. Remember, state media shuts down opposition and propagates lies. This will likely be done by weaponized terms like “hate” and “fascism” and “far-right extremism.”

For now, liberal media is on its back foot. But political battles are only won temporarily. You can be sure the liberal media and their puppet masters are scheming about how to regain their power, both through rebuilding their operation and by silencing their opponents.

A false regime can’t thrive without propaganda. Keep exposing the propagandists. Stand up for free speech and against censorship. And the rest of us have a chance to have our children grow up in a free country.

AUTHOR

Casey Harper

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.


Like what you’re reading? Donate to The Washington Stand! From now until June 30, your gift will be doubled to fuel bold, biblically-based reporting.

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How the Gaza War Must End

John Spencer is a professor of urban warfare at West Point who has closely studied the war in Gaza ever since it began, as well as other campaigns fought by the IDF, and has concluded that “Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any military in history — above & beyond what international law requires.”

Now he has written a piece on the absolute necessity for Hamas to be completely defeated, both militarily and politically, in Gaza. More of his strictures on how this war must end can be found here: “No one should want ceasefire in Gaza until clear defeat of Hamas – opinion,” by John Spencer, Jerusalem Post, June 1, 2025:

…War is always tragic. But some wars are necessary. The just purpose of war is not vengeance—it is justice, deterrence, and the restoration of peace. But peace is not possible with an armed, fanatical regime in Gaza that seeks your destruction and views the murder of civilians as a divine duty. Wars of self-defense must end with unmistakable clarity.

Germany in 1918 was defeated militarily, but the war ended with ambiguity. The Allies allowed the German army to retreat intact. The result was the “stab-in-the-back” myth that fueled Nazism and led to an even more catastrophic war. In 1945, the Allies made no such mistake. Nazi Germany was not just defeated—it was destroyed as a governing entity. So was Imperial Japan. And just as importantly, the German and Japanese populations came to see and accept that their regimes had been defeated. Both societies underwent years of disarmament, reconciliation, and comprehensive deradicalization. Only then could Europe and the Pacific begin to rebuild in peace.

Israel faces the same choice today. Ending this war without defeating Hamas means condemning Israelis—and Palestinians—to unending conflict. It means October 7 becomes not a cautionary tale, but a case study in successful terrorism, lawfare, hostage taking, and wars of aggression.

Israel is currently achieving real, measurable success in its military campaign. Operation Gideon’s Chariot has transitioned from massed maneuvers to coordinated clear-and-hold operations across Gaza. The IDF has successfully seized and is now holding terrain in areas once dominated by Hamas battalions. Elite Israeli units continue to dismantle Hamas’s underground networks, rocket infrastructure, weapons production sites, and command centers—undermining the group’s ability to wage war.

In parallel, Israel has established a new humanitarian mechanism—the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—to deliver food, water, and medicine directly to civilians without going through Hamas. This is critical. For years, Hamas maintained power not only through fear and force but also by monopolizing aid distribution and punishing dissent. That monopoly is now being broken. For the first time in nearly two decades, signs of civilian defiance are emerging: Gazans protesting Hamas’s theft, rejecting their authority, and calling them out publicly….

Gazans have begun to come out to demonstrate against Hamas, something they would never have done when Hamas was still riding high. Now the terror group has been so weakened, and the opposition to it so widespread among the population, that it dare not try to crush such signs of dissent, as it would have done just a few months ago. And in addition to those demonstrations against Hamas by ordinary Gazans, several major clans — powerful families with hundreds or even thousands of fighters — have begun to challenge Hamas’ power in what they regard as their “territories.”

The hypocrisy must stop. The reality must be accepted: peace will never come while Hamas remains intact. There is no future in which Gaza flourishes while Hamas remains in power. There is no future in which Israelis or Palestinians are safe if October 7, hostage taking, lawfare, and human shielding are seen as a path to political leverage.

We would live in a very different world if the Allies had not pursued victory in 1945. We will live in a dark and dangerous world if Hamas is allowed to claim one now.

Let it be clear—to Hamas and to the world—that they lost this war. Anything less guarantees a future of endless violence.

And that is what Israel is trying to do. Even should it agree to another ceasefire, in order to obtain the release of the remaining hostages, it will not agree to halt the war entirely, as Hamas is now demanding. Prime Minister Netanyahu knows that the IDF must not stop until Hamas is thoroughly crushed, all of its remaining weapons seized, its commanders and many of its fighters forced into exile, so that it has no power to revive and reconstruct itself. If the world truly wants to ensure a durable peace between Gaza and Israel, and the possibility of Gazans no longer living under the jackboot of Hamas, but enjoying a democratic and technocratic government, in a demilitarized Strip, that will focus on creating a viable economy instead of yet again preparing for a hopeless war against the Jewish state, then the world must support, not denounce, IDF’s efforts to smash Hamas to smithereens.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Israel on the cusp of civil war?

The only way to prevent a civil war in Israel is to acknowledge its impending outbreak, so that steps can be taken to forestall it. 

Israel is on the brink of civil war. An irreconcilable rift is beginning to open up between rival segments of Israeli society, which no amount of unilateral goodwill can amicably bridge. The tectonic fault lines, threatening to split the nation’s societal fabric asunder, center on Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenacious hold on power, despite multiple attempts to pry it loose.

Weaponizing the legal system

Having seemingly despaired of the possibility of defeating him at the polls, his adversaries have turned—more clumsily than not—to weaponising the legal system as a means of realizing their political goals.

This precipitated the maladroitly concocted indictments against Netanyahu, in which. whenever a prosecution witness took the stand, his/her testimony ended up strengthening the defense!!! Indeed, after hearing the prosecution’s case, the judges (even before the testimony of any defense witness), in a rare moment of judicial lucidity, warned the prosecutors that they had not made their case on the corruption charges against Netanyahu, and suggested they be dropped. The suggestion was obdurately ignored, apparently in the desperate hope that the defense witnesses would provide the proof that the prosecution witnesses failed to do. Go figure!

Thus, goaded by their incandescent anti-Bibi enmity, the people, who have done the most to erode public trust in the legal system in general and the judiciary in particular, are the jurists in general and the Justices in particular. Nothing could underscore this more than the recent High Court decision regarding the dismissal of Ronen Bar, the current head of Israel’s Internal Security Service (ISS, widely known as the Shabak). Indeed, it was so patently absurd as to make it almost comical. As an unvarnished attempt to smother common sense with legalistic gobbledygook, it made a caricature of the judicial process.

Undisputed failure insufficient grounds for dismissal?

Arguably, the most ludicrous element in the verdict was the assertion that there was not “an adequate factual foundation” for the dismissal. This is an astounding claim, itself devoid of any “factual foundation”. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of anything more counterfactual. After all, what could comprise a more valid factual foundation for Bar’s dismissal than his undisputed failure to give the alert over the impending Hamas assault on October 7th, his equally abysmal failure to prepare for it and to respond to it adequately once it occurred? In fact, if the government is to be faulted over the Bar’s removal, it should be over why it took so long to do so.

Likewise, the court’s assertion that the PM could not be involved in the dismissal decision since he was in a position of a “conflict of interest”—because two associates of his were being investigated on flimsy charges of having illicit dealings with Qatar, makes little sense.  Unless, of course, the intention is to pave the way for disqualifying the PM from future decisions.  For, the clear significance of this verdict is that all it takes to preclude the PM from taking part in any future decisions, is to implicate some of his associates—even on the most implausible grounds—in a trumped-up investigation expressly designed for that very purpose.

The onset of dystopia?

Interestingly, the clear—and erroneous—implication of the court’s ruling is that ongoing Shabak investigations come to a shuddering halt whenever the Director’s term ends, and a successor is appointed. Otherwise, why would any successor be presumed to pursue suspicions of Qatar-related malfeasance less vigorously than the current Director? Indeed, given his past failures, why would the current Director be considered essential to the Qatar investigation—unless his overt anti-Netanyahu proclivities are deemed an overriding consideration??

Sadly, it appears that enmity towards Netanyahu has pushed his antagonists to the brink of insanity and, in some cases, arguably beyond. Likewise, it has propelled Israeli society to the brink of a dystopian reality, and in some cases, arguably beyond.

Thus, enraged and exasperated by Netanyahu’s remarkable ability to withstand their continued and concerted efforts to remove him from office, his adversaries—including former PMs, defense ministers, IDF Chiefs-of-Staff, heads of intelligence services—have committed acts of unmistakable sedition and treason, openly urging members of the military not to serve—thereby conveying a message of national disarray and division, emboldening the country’s enemies, bent on its destruction.

With regard to the onset of dystopia, it should be noted that what once was the socio-political divide between Left and Right in Israel has been largely replaced by a schism, separating the fervent anti-Bibi zealots from those who are not. Although these dividing lines are not identical, they do largely overlie and overlap each other. Accordingly, keeping this minor discrepancy in mind, I will, for the sake of semantic convenience, retain referring to the rivalrous factions as “Left” and “Right.”

Rift unbridgeable by rational reasoning

With this methodological/linguistic caveat behind us, it is important to note that those on the “Right” generally seem unable to gauge the depth and intensity of the hostility and opprobrium their political rivals on the “Left” feel for them. Naively, those on the “Right” believe that what separates them from their countrymen on the “Left” is a difference of opinion (albeit profound) that, potentially, can be bridged (albeit with difficulty).

Sadly, this is not the case.

The rupture is not one that can be bridged by rational reasoning or argument—not even by bitter experience that unequivocally demonstrates how unfounded their positions are.   Indeed, to a large degree, many on the “Left” do not have an opinion as such, but rather an ambition, and to fulfill that ambition, they are willing to adopt any opinion—as well as its diametric opposite—so long as it can be used to malign their opponents on the “Right”.

Thus, as the socio-political agenda of the “Left” gradually drifted further and further away from the harsh realities of the Middle East, its electoral constituency shrank accordingly. However, this was not something the “Left” found particularly perturbing. For as long as they controlled the judiciary (and to a lesser degree, the mainstream media), they still could determine much of the tenor of the socio-political realities prevailing in the country.

Understanding the “Left’s” incandescent fury

This is the reason for the near apoplectic reaction to the attempted judicial reform in early 2023—particularly the system of appointing judges. For, this directly impacted the epicenter of the “Left’s” power.  Thus, given its diminishing electoral appeal and the unlikely prospect of it ever regaining power via the ballot box, the “Left” responded with a combination of horror and fury that drove it to unprecedented extremes—including reinventing, even inverting, the use of language, which exposed its true beliefs regarding the imperatives of political life in Israel.

Accordingly, as soon as then-newly elected Justice Minister Yariv Levin presented his initiative to the public, they immediately branded it as a “Revolution”, a term usually reserved for extra-parliamentary opposition to an incumbent government, not to policy proposals from such governments, particularly lawfully elected ones. Indeed, the use of the term seems to indicate that they believe that the “Left” is the truly ordained leader of the country, and the incumbent government is merely an impudent usurper, swept to unmerited positions of power by unworthy “plebs”, otherwise known as “Bibists” (reminiscent of “Baboons”?)

Thus, in their eyes, the judicial reform is an insufferable challenge to the established order and to the true ruling class—hence a “revolution”.

Borderline sedition

Furthermore, the reform’s proposal, that decisions should be transferred from unelected, unaccountable forums to elected, accountable forums, makes the “Left’s” accusation that the measure is somehow “undemocratic”, manifestly ridiculous. After all, is palpably absurd to claim that a system, in which a narrow, unelected forum of around a dozen appointed officials, with no accountability to the public, has the ultimate authority on matters of vital national importance, is more democratic than one, in which that authority is vested in the hands of over 60 elected parliamentarians, regularly answerable to the public.

Accordingly, the Bibi-phobic “Left” have created a dystopian-like reality in Israel, where, just as in Orwellian Newspeak, language is manipulated and distorted to serve political purposes. Thus, words take on meaning antithetically opposite to their commonly used sense. In Orwell’s 1984 dystopia, “war” was “peace”; “freedom” was “slavery” and so on.  In the emerging Israeli dystopia, “dictatorship” is “democracy”; “revolution” is “elected government policy”; “entitlement” is “patriotism”; and “sedition” is “loyalty”.

Indeed, it is a sense of entitlement, not of patriotism, that drives the anti-Bibi “Left”.  It reflects a selective loyalty to Israel, in which borderline sedition, purposefully undermining the nation’s security, economy and international standing, is preferable to accepting the victory of political rivals.

Time to gird our loins

There is a popular belief that, in Israel, civil war is not possible because a war requires two opposing sides to participate in it, and the “Right’ will always refrain from a fratricidal conflict against fellow-Jews—as was the case when Menachem Begin restrained his followers from the responding to the lethal sinking of the Altalena off the coast of Tel Aviv by forces under the left-leaning David Ben Gurion.

Sadly, today this belief has been overtaken by events and is no longer valid. The gravity of the Bibi-phobic “Left’s” actions is such that it can no longer be condoned. Action against them must be taken, lest the very bedrock on which the nation is founded be irreparably eroded. Indeed, it is clear that today, the “Left” is determined to prevent the government from making any significant decisions in the future—by means of torturously concocted quasi-legal impediments.  No amount of rational reasoning will be of any avail. A confrontation is both unavoidable and imperative. A line must be drawn in the sand. It must be made indelibly clear to the anti-Bibi “Left” that there are limits to political rivalry, which cannot be breached. Sedition in the guise of political dissent will not be brooked, and the State apparatus will be mobilized to confront, contain, and counteract any such instances.

Such confrontation cannot, and must not, be delayed. Leniency today will only compound the problem—and the peril—tomorrow.

Sadly, the time to gird our loins is now!

©2025 . All rights reserved.

Muslim Activists Helped Give Trump The White House — So Far, They Don’t Regret It

With weeks left in the 2024 election, Muslim Americans barnstormed mosques and community centers across Michigan with the purpose of preventing Vice President Kamala Harris — and the Democratic Party — from getting into the White House. They succeeded, and they don’t regret their efforts.

Those Muslim Americans told the Daily Caller that while they haven’t been thrilled with everything Trump has done in office, they are glad they cost Harris the election.

“I still stand behind our effort 100%,” Mahmoud Muheisen, the Abandon Harris Michigan Campaign Director, told the Caller. “If I could go back in time, knowing how it would turn out, I would do it again.”

“And I’m saying this as a student who’s involved in protests, and seeing that some students are facing deportation threats,” he added.

The effort to “abandon Harris” sprouted up in the Muslim American community in the months leading up to the presidential election, with the intention of punishing the Democratic Party for their handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

The effect of the protest vote was evident across one key swing state. President Joe Biden won 70% of the votes of Dearborn, Michigan residents — where more than half of the population is Arab American — in 2020. In 2024, Trump won 42% of the vote in Dearborn, while Harris won 36%. Green Party candidate Jill Stein won 18% of Dearborn voters.

In Trump’s first 100-plus days in office, his administration has taken steps to try to end the Israel-Hamas war and bring peace to the Middle East. After repeatedly striking the Houthi rebels, the Trump administration announced that the terrorist group agreed to stop bombing ships in the Gulf of Aden and other locations. The administration has also revoked student visas of individuals involved in anti-Israel protests. Trump effectuated the return of the last American hostage in Gaza by negotiating directly with Hamas. And most recently, Trump took his first foreign trip across the Middle East, visiting Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar.

It was a trip that caught the eyes of the Muslim American community, including Democrat Khalid Turaani, co-chair of the Abandon Biden campaign in Michigan, who told the Caller that he thought lifting sanctions on Syria was a positive step.

“We had our reservations about Trump, but he has proven himself to be a very decisive leader,” Turaani told the Caller. “There’s the element of him that is showmanship. I certainly did not like when he was talking about removing the people of Gaza from Gaza, and then moved into Rivera and all of that stuff. I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ … Then I realized that this is more of his showmanship.”

Turaani has been impressed by Trump’s “decisiveness,” which he argued was proven when the president moved Mike Waltz from national security adviser to United Nations ambassador.

“I thought that was very decisive and very spot on,” Turaani said. “The conversation [around the firing] was ‘it’s because of the signal gate,’ but we also have the news that it was because the guy, I guess, did not get the memo on ‘America first,’ and you don’t have to be coordinating with the Israeli prime minister on Iran or anything else. So I thought it was pretty good.”

Rex Nazarko, the founder of Drive for 75, led a large effort to divert votes from Harris in Michigan. His group assigned activists to mosques and community centers to promote their message across the state. They used social media and text message campaigns and knocked on thousands of doors.

In some instances, the “Abandon Harris” protest vote threw its support behind Stein as another avenue to spoil the former vice president’s bid.

“We still stand by that effort. We are fairly sure that none of this realignment that we see now in the Middle East would have happened under a Democratic administration,” Nazarko told the Caller as he reflected back on Drive for 75’s work.

Nazarko told the Caller that the Muslim community in Michigan has a “mixed bag of feelings” toward the Trump administration.

“There’s definitely certain moves by the administration that were not well received, like the targeting of pro-Palestinian student protesters, that kind of left a sour taste in a lot of people’s mouths post-election,” Narzarko told the Caller.

But following Trump’s trip to the Middle East, there seems to be some guarded hope sprouting up among the Muslim American community.

“They’re cautiously optimistic about the realignment that’s happening in the Middle East and the United States, detaching from an Israel-centric Middle East policy to a region-central policy,” Narzarko told the Caller.

“Then obviously there’s pockets of the community who may — on domestic issues — may be pleased with his performance. And on economics. I’ve heard that expressed a few times,” he continued.

Overall, the first several months of the Trump administration has left some Muslim Americans predicting that there could be a path forward for Republicans to embrace the Islamic faith community more permanently. Turaani told the Caller that Muslims in America are starting to realize they have more in common with the Republican Party, both socially and fiscally.

“I think Trump putting America first, I think, is a sign of leadership,” Turanni told the Caller. “To be honest with you, I’m pleasantly surprised.”

AUTHOR

Reagan Reese

White House Correspondent. Follow Reagan on Twitter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Totally Unacceptable’: Trump Envoy Steve Witkoff Rejects Hamas Demands to U.S. Ceasefire Proposal

With Israel being demonized by much of the European Union, South America, the UK, Canada, and others, Hamas is emboldened to reject ceasefire proposals from the U.S. Instead, Hamas responds with insane demands, including a ceasefire for 7 years. Such a ceasefire would allow Hamas to re-build, so that they can carry out another October 7th style attack against Israel again.

Stop the futile negotiations with Hamas.

Stop the appeasement of Hamas. Let Israel destroy Hamas and end this war once and for all.

Hamas monsters are given a seat at the table of human discourse and making demands.

Were the Nazis given such respect and grace?

What the hell is wrong with everyone?

‘Totally unacceptable’: Trump envoy Steve Witkoff rejects Hamas response to US ceasefire proposal

By: Express Web Desk

Hamas said in a statement that under the deal, it will release 10 living hostages and 18 bodies in return for Israel’s release of a number of Palestinian prisoners.

Hours after Hamas said it has submitted its response on a ceasefire proposal presented by US to mediators, Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff slammed the Palestinian group terming the response as “totally unacceptable and only takes us backward”.

“Hamas should accept the framework proposal we put forward as the basis for proximity talks, which we can begin immediately this coming week,” Witkoff said. “That is the only way we can close a 60-day ceasefire deal in the coming days — one in which half of the living hostages and half of those who are deceased will come home to their families, and where substantive negotiations in good faith can take place to try to reach a permanent ceasefire.”

Hamas in the response said that under the latest deal, it would release 10 living hostages and 18 bodies in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners by Israel — a shift from the US proposal that could complicate Israel’s ability to resume fighting if talks on a permanent ceasefire are not concluded by the end of the truce, as per The Guardian.

Continue reading.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

“Israel doesn’t need a better image. It needs to win.”

This is the best argued piece I have seen on the false premise — the foundational premise — that the Jewish people cling to, “the national obsession with explaining and justifying ourselves to the world.” It’s pathetic.

It best articulates what I and a handful of others have vocalized and fought for for years – dignity and the right to live free as proud Jews, unapologetically. Defending yourself against annihilationist savages is not “far right” — it is the only moral and rational response.

What follows is a superb essay. Read the whole thing (link continues, scroll down.)  Thanks to Paul Schnee for bringing it to my attention.

As one commenter pointed out:

Superb piece of writing, and whilst it points out what’s gone wrong, there is one paragraph that summaries what should be done.

‘What we should be saying is, “You kidnapped our civilians. You slaughtered our children. You refused to return the living or the dead. This is war. And in war, there are consequences. You do not get to butcher thousands, hold our people underground, and then demand food. If you want to eat, surrender. If you wish to drink, release the hostages. You brought this on yourselves. And you will pay until it ends. That is justice.”

Israel doesn’t need a better image. It needs to win.

By: Yonatan Daon, May 30, 2025:

In the aftermath of last week’s senseless murder of two Americans outside of a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C., some public voices have once again turned to Israel’s perceived failure in the realm of “Hasbara” — a Hebrew term loosely translated as “public diplomacy” but better understood as the national obsession with explaining and justifying ourselves to the world.

The suggestion, whether directly or simply implied, is that we are not doing enough to explain ourselves, that part of what enables these atrocities is the erosion of Israel’s global standing and image.

This essay challenges that entire framework.

Not because there’s no value in speaking clearly or countering lies, but because “Hasbara” has become a substitute for moral clarity and decisive action. We are fighting a war not only on the battlefield but within ourselves: a battle of hesitation, of trying to justify every move before making it, of shaping perception while abandoning purpose.

Hasbara” is not failing because we’re not creative enough. It’s failing because the very things we are trying to “explain” our self-restraint, our drawn-out campaigns, and our moral confusion should not be happening in the first place.


In times of war, the battlefield is not just a military arena; it is the stage upon which moral judgment is formed. The world doesn’t shape its opinion based on what Israel says, but on what Israel does. And if what we do is uncertain, hesitant, or self-contradictory, then no amount of “Hasbara” can rescue the perception that follows.

When Israel acts with moral clarity and military decisiveness, it does’t need to “explain” itself. The 1967 Six-Day War, Operation Entebbe, and Operation Opera — these actions, among others, carried their own logic and justice. There was no need to plaster social media with carefully worded talking points. The world understood.

But when a war drags on for months, when there is visible hesitation, when footage shows restraint that seems absurd in the face of ongoing barbarism, then we lose the moral high ground, not because we are right yet misunderstood, but because our actions no longer reflect that we believe in our own rightness.

And the enemy sees it. Gaza, Hezbollah, Iran: They understand that Israel is obsessed with global perception. They exploit it ruthlessly. They stage humanitarian crises, they weaponise civilian suffering, and they produce content for Western consumption. They don’t care about world opinion, they manipulate it. Because they know we care. And we’ve trained them to know it.

Hasbara,” in this context, becomes an act of narrative management. But the reality is that you cannot manage a story which contradicts the facts on the ground. People are not stupid. They can sense confusion. They can smell fear. They can tell when a state is not sure of itself. And if we’re not sure of ourselves, why should they take our side?

The battlefield always comes first. If our actions reflect justice, strength, and moral confidence, the world might not like it, but it will understand it. But if we fight with one hand tied behind our back while the other is tweeting apologetically, we lose twice: once on the field and once in the mind.

We keep trying to explain ourselves as if we’re in a rational conversation. But we’re not. The West today is not engaged in a truth-seeking dialogue. It is trapped in a postmodern fog where truth is no longer a standard, and morality has been flipped upside down.

In this world, it doesn’t matter what happens. What matters is who appears to suffer. Who cries louder? Who posts to social media first?

Israel tries to argue that we are defending ourselves, our civilians, and our right to exist. But these arguments fall on deaf ears — not because they’re false, but because the audience has lost the tools to process truth.

Concepts have been reversed. “Genocide” is now defined by casualty counts without context. “Resistance” means the right to butcher civilians. “Ceasefire” doesn’t mean peace; it means saving the enemy from defeat.

The West no longer asks: “Is this true?” It asks: “Does this fit my narrative?” And if it doesn’t, it is rejected, censored, or “deconstructed.”

“Hasbara,” in this climate, is hopeless. It’s like bringing a legal brief to a witch trial.

And that’s exactly what we did. We stood before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, grovelling in fake tribunals that masquerade as courts of justice. We treated moral inversion as if it could be reasoned with and gave legitimacy to the absurd idea that we must defend ourselves for defending ourselves.

You cannot reason with people who reject the very concept of reason. You cannot explain justice to those who believe justice is a colonial construct. You cannot win a moral debate in a culture that denies moral objectivity.

Every second we spend explaining ourselves to this worldview is not only a waste of time; it’s a strategic error. We validate their premises simply by engaging.

And, while we craft careful statements, our enemies post a single image. They understand the game. They know there’s no logic, proportion, or context; just accusation. And they play it better than we do because they are unburdened by truth.


The erosion of reason might explain the confusion. But confusion alone does not explain celebration. What we are witnessing is not mere ignorance or bias; it is an open alignment with barbarism. It is a culture that has not simply lost its way but now cheers for evil.

On October 7th, before Israel responded significantly or a single tank had crossed into Gaza, Western voices were already justifying, and in some cases celebrating, the murder, rape, and kidnapping of Jews.

At elite universities, student groups put out statements praising the Gazan atrocities as “resistance.” Professors rationalised the killings. Posters of kidnapped Israeli children were torn down. Palestinian flags were raised. Jewish students were attacked, threatened, harassed, spat on, and told they deserved it.

And what did the university presidents do? They mumbled about “free speech” and “complexity.” When pressed under oath in Congress, they refused to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct. The institutions supposedly tasked with educating the next generation had become morally illiterate.

But it’s not just the radical Left. The collapse cuts across the spectrum. On the reactionary Right, populist influencers have either platformed open antisemites or played footsie with conspiracy theorists who treat October 7th as a false flag or Jewish provocation. English media personality Piers Morgan, masquerading as a centrist, has spent countless hours interrogating Israelis for defending themselves while giving soft interviews to the very people who justify Gaza’s war.

X has become a sewer of ideological filth from all directions, where antisemitism cloaks itself in the language of “anti-colonialism” on the Left and “anti-globalism” on the Right. Everyone thinks they’re fighting the establishment, and somehow, they all land on the same conclusion: The Jews are the problem.

This is what happens when a civilisation abandons moral clarity. When justice is rebranded as oppression, when identity is everything and values are nothing, victimhood becomes a blank cheque for violence.

And in this environment, “Hasbara” is not just ineffective; it is laughable. We are not in a debate. We are in a civilisational breakdown. You cannot explain anything to people who have already chosen sides against you.


There is something even worse than “Hasbara’s” failure to persuade. It is the way “Hasbara” is now weaponised against Israel itself, not by our enemies, but by our own so-called defenders.

Well-meaning and talented figures are quick to tell the world how Israel is the only liberal democracy in the region, how we allow aid into Gaza, how we do everything by the book. But they are just as quick to scold Israeli ministers when they speak with clarity.

When Israel Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that Gaza must be destroyed, something morally obvious in the wake of October 7th, it was not just foreign journalists who panicked. It was the Israeli “Hasbara” class. They demanded we walk it back, apologise, and clarify. Why? Because his statement might “be used against us.”

This is what “Hasbara” has become: a tool for censorship and self-policing. Not to protect the country, but to preserve the image of the country as imagined by people who want us to be nice, restrained, and perpetually sorry.

It teaches the enemy something significant: that we will not stand by our own leaders. We will disown our own moral clarity if it makes us uncomfortable with the BBC. That our spokespeople will run ahead of our soldiers, not to support them, but to apologise on their behalf.

What does this say about our posture as a nation? Why should the world respect us if we don’t respect our own convictions? Why should our enemies fear us if we publicly shame anyone who speaks the truth about what must be done?

This is not diplomacy. It is weakness masquerading as communication: a narcissistic obsession with appearing good, rather than a moral commitment to being good and doing what is right.

There is something deeply tragic in this dynamic. It evokes not equivalence, but an echo of a much older pattern: the Jew who is faced with overwhelming hatred believes that, if he just explains himself well enough, he might be spared. Not out of malice but out of fear, pride, or habit, he takes on the burden of defending the indefensible, of sanitising horror into something “understandable.” In darker times, this instinct took the form of the Judenrat: Jewish councils under Nazi rule, trying to negotiate with evil.

Today, thankfully, we are not under Nazi occupation. We are a sovereign nation with a powerful army. And yet, some of us still behave as if we are pleading for our lives. As if the right turn of phrase could win mercy. As if the world is a tribunal, we must constantly persuade.

This is not survival. This is surrender in a suit and tie.

Continue reading here. Do it……

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Anti-Semitism Soared in 2024, with Almost 70% of Incidents Linked to Left-Wing Extremism

There were 6,326 documented acts of anti-Semitism in 2024. Roughly 4,327 of them — 68.4% — were linked to far-left ideologies.

The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), a prominent organization dedicated to tracking and combating anti-Semitism, compiled these statistics. Regarding previous reports, CAM has consistently identified both far-left and far-right groups as key contributors to the global rise in anti-Semitic incidents. However, the 2024 data reveal a seismic shift. Not only did the overall rate of anti-Semitism surge by 107.7% compared to 2023, but incidents tied specifically to left-wing radicals skyrocketed by nearly 325%.

Moreover, this dramatic increase underscores the growing influence of far-left narratives in fueling anti-Semitic acts. In stark contrast, anti-Semitism linked to far-right ideologies saw a significant decline, dropping by 54.8%, with only 7.3% of the year’s incidents attributed to far-right sources.

A key factor in the rise of far-left anti-Semitism, as noted by The Post Millennial, is the prevalence of anti-Zionist narratives. The outlet reported, “The overwhelming majority — 96.4 percent — of far-left antisemitic incidents were rooted in anti-Zionist narratives, including accusations that Israel is a colonial, apartheid, or genocidal state.” The CAM report further warns that this rhetoric often serves as a veneer for anti-Semitism, distorting Jewish identity and collectively targeting Jews under the guise of critiquing Israeli policy.

Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023, which killed over 1,200 Israelis and involved widespread atrocities, triggered an immediate and alarming rise in anti-Semitic incidents worldwide. According to an October 2024 report, anti-Semitism surged by 200% compared to the same period in the previous year, reflecting the rapid escalation of tensions following the attack. In the United States, this period saw the emergence of anti-Israel mobs on university campuses, particularly at elite institutions.

Ivy League universities, notably Harvard and Columbia, became epicenters of this unrest. Campus encampments, some provocatively labeled “Liberation Zones,” were established, creating exclusionary spaces where Jewish students were frequently forbidden. Jewish professors and students faced a barrage of hate speech, physical violence, or threats of violence, while acts of anti-Jewish vandalism surged. Columbia University, in particular, gained further notoriety when agitators occupied campus buildings, increasing tensions and drawing national attention to the crisis.

The scale of this crisis suggests that these reported incidents may represent only the tip of the iceberg, with many more acts having occurred during that time, and likely going undocumented. In response, the incoming Trump administration acted swiftly to address the rising tide of anti-Semitism, both on and off university campuses. One of President Donald Trump’s first actions was to issue a stern warning to universities: comply with anti-discrimination laws or risk losing federal funding. This policy has already resulted in the withholding of millions of federal dollars — Trump has even threatened to pull billions — from institutions that failed to adhere to Trump’s executive orders aimed at combating anti-Semitism.

In conjunction with these measures, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) sent letters in March to 60 universities delivering a clear directive: “fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus, including uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities.” Despite this warning, some institutions, including Harvard, still resisted. Consequently, the Trump administration imposed severe penalties. For example, they recently suspended Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students — a significant blow to the university’s prestige and financial model.

On May 27, however, Trump’s team went a step further by freezing all new student visa interviews. While this affects roughly one million students — a major cash grab for elite schools — the move plays a role in Trump’s broader strategy to protect both Americans and Jews. Because anti-Semitism, though prominent on campuses, is not exclusive to colleges.

Last week, two Israeli Embassy staffers, 26-year-old Sarah Lynn Milgrim and her partner, 30-year-old Yaron Lischinsky, were murdered outside of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. The suspect, 30-year-old Elias Rodriguez, was dragged off into custody after he opened fire, yelling, “Free, free Palestine!” A few days later, a dual American-German citizen named Joseph Neumeyer was arrested after attempting to firebomb the U.S. Embassy branch office in Tel Aviv. Neumeyer’s social media activity revealed a pattern of virulent anti-American and anti-Semitic views, including direct threats against Israelis, President Trump, and the United States.

Addressing concerns about the visa freeze, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce provided clarity during a press briefing. She asserted that this topic should not be controversial. “We’ve always vetted people trying to come in,” she said. “We’ve always looked at visas seriously. … Every sovereign country has a right to know who’s trying to come in, why they want to come in, who they are, what they’ve been doing, and, at least hopefully within that framework, determine what they will be doing while they’re here. So, that’s nothing new, and we will continue to use every tool we can to assess who it is that’s coming here, whether they are students or otherwise.”

Regarding CAM’s report, Penny Nance, CEO and president of Concerned Women for America (CWA), told The Washington Stand, “The report’s finding that 70% of anti-Semitic incidents last year are tied to left-wing ideologies is deeply troubling and demands urgent action, but sadly, it is not surprising.”

She continued, “This surge in anti-Jewish hatred, often masked as anti-Zionism, threatens the safety and dignity of Jewish communities across the globe and undermines our shared values.” As such, “We must call it what it is — bigotry — and refuse to tolerate it in any form. CWA stands firmly against anti-Semitism and remains committed to truth, justice, and promoting the inherent worth of every individual.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Israel and Syria in Face-to-Face Meetings Focused on Security

After much military maneuvering, Israel has finally reached a point of face-to-face negotiations with Syria. “Exclusive: Syria and Israel in direct talks focused on security, sources say,” by Timour Azhari and Suleiman Al-Khalidi, Reuters, May 27, 2025:

DAMASCUS, May 27 (Reuters) – Israel and Syria are in direct contact and have in recent weeks held face-to-face meetings aimed at calming tensions and preventing conflict in the border region between the two longtime foes, five people familiar with the matter said.

The contacts mark a significant development in ties between states that have been on opposite sides of conflict in the Middle East for decades, as the U.S. encourages the new Islamist rulers in Damascus to establish relations with Israel and Israel eases its bombardment of Syria.

They also build on back-channel talks via intermediaries since Islamist rebels Hayat Tahrir al-Sham toppled Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad in December, said two Syrian and two Western sources, as well as a regional intelligence source familiar with the matter.

The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject for two nations with no official ties and a history of enmity. The direct talks and their scope have not been previously reported.

On the Syrian side, the sources said contacts have been led by senior security official Ahmad al-Dalati, who was appointed governor of the province of Quneitra, which borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, after the fall of Assad…..

Syria is ruled by violent jihadists, from its leader Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani (aka Ahmed Al-Sharaa) to his jihadist following, who have been accused of engaging in the slaughter of Christians, Alawites, Druze and other minorities. Jihadists have continued to kill Israelis through the decades, and break ceasefire agreements and other agreements. Regarding Syria, Israel immediately set up a defense perimeter on the collapse of Assad regime, despite the unreasonable demands and objections of its Arab neighbors. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and UN condemned Israel for a supposed “dangerous land grab in Syria” in December. Of course, it was not about a land grab, but about protecting the Jewish state from more jihadist attacks.

According to the Media Line, Israel managed to secure control over “the demilitarized buffer zone in Syria that was established as part of a 1974 ceasefire reached between the two hostile countries. In that buffer zone is Mt. Hermon’s highest peak, the highest point on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The territory guarantees strategic control over the whole southern Syrian arena, which generates an immediate threat to Israel…..There is no higher vantage point than the Syrian part of the Golan.”

Jihadists cannot be trusted or appeased, but now with Trump’s influence in Syria, combined with Israel’s buffer zones and the Israeli air strikes that have destroyed most of Syria’s strategic weapons stockpiles, Syrian President Al-Jolani is backed into a corner and has little choice but to cooperate with Israel. Reuters also reported Al-Jolani “confirmed indirect talks with Israel that he said were aimed at calming tensions, a striking admission that followed a Reuters report that the UAE was mediating such talks.”

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Israeli Minister Ron Dermer: “Either Israeli sovereignty or October 7 in Tel-Aviv!”

Minister Ron Dermer is in Washington said to be promoting sovereignty in Judea and Samaria as “Yesha Council” warns of nightmare scenario.

“It’s either Israeli sovereignty or October 7” — this is the chilling message of a new video released by the Yesha Council as part of a campaign to apply Israeli law to Judea and Samaria.

Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer has reportedly proposed advancing sovereignty in closed-door government talks in Washington DC.

In the campaign video, the Yesha Council depicts a horror scenario: terrorists breaching the fence at Qalqilya, heading in trucks and motorcycles toward central Israel’s central cities.

“We’re in Bat Hefer—they kidnapped Dad to Tulkarem. Help!” one voice says. Another reports, “Police? I see trucks near Azrieli.” The message ends: “It’s either Israeli sovereignty—or another October 7.”

Yesha Council Chairman Israel Ganz also presented the plan to senior officials from the Trump administration. In recent meetings at the White House, State Department, and Pentagon, Ganz warned that a Palestinian state would pose an existential threat to Israel.

According to the Council’s outline, Israeli law would apply to 65% of Judea and Samaria. The Arab population would reside in 20 autonomous cantons without forming a unified national entity.

Ganz cited security data: about 6,000 terrorists infiltrated from Gaza on October 7, while 40,000 armed personnel serve under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. He noted that Gaza’s border with Israel spans just 20 km—compared to 350 km along the Green Line.

“A green light from Washington is the only way to stop a Palestinian state,” Ganz told U.S. officials, linking Macron’s efforts to the urgency of Israeli action.

President Trump previously hinted at the possibility of Israeli sovereignty being on the table. When asked in February, he responded that an announcement might come within a month.

Meanwhile, the Yesha Council has launched a public awareness campaign with videos and billboards warning of the risks of a Palestinian state.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar warned key global players that unilateral recognition of Palestine would be met with Israeli sovereignty moves in the West Bank. “Unilateral actions against Israel will be answered with unilateral actions by Israel,” he told his British and French counterparts.

This all comes ahead of a France- and Saudi-led international summit in New York (June 17–20) aiming to push for unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state. Israel has strongly rejected the initiative, accusing Macron of moral distortion following the October 7 massacre.

The U.S. has announced it will not attend, and several European countries, led by Germany, are also distancing themselves.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Newsrael News Desk column with video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


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D.C. Murder of Jewish Couple: ‘This Is a Major Watershed Moment’

It may have been the 593rd day of the conflict in Gaza — but last Wednesday, the war came to America. In a nightmarish attack on the streets of D.C., the hatred that’s been boiling under the surface spilled over, taking the lives of a young couple who will never have the chance to grow old together. “Instead of walking you down the aisle,” Israeli Embassy spokesman Tal Naim wrote mournfully, “we are walking with you to your graves.”

Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were casualties of a battle with no real ground forces, no weapons system, no command structure. But it’s a force that a growing number of countries — including the United States — are desperately trying to overcome: anti-Semitism.

“I did it for Palestine,” the shooter told police officers at the Capital Jewish Museum, where the two embassy workers’ bodies lay outside — the deliberate targets of a man who was born and raised in America. They were a handful of days away from going to Jerusalem to meet his parents. Sarah’s own mother, Nancy, didn’t know Yaron was planning to propose until the entire world realized he never would.

She was two days away from flying to D.C. to watch her daughter’s goldendoodle Andy while they were away. When she saw the news alert about the shooting, Nancy hurried to open the locator app and check her daughter’s location. “I pretty much already knew,” she told The New York Times. “I was hoping to be wrong.” Still reeling, Sarah’s dad admitted, “The ironic part is that we were worried for our daughter’s safety in Israel. But she was murdered three days before going.”

Like so many people in disbelief, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins could only shake his head. “This is not something I expected here on the streets of America. I’ll be very frank.” The day after the killings rocked the Western world, he sat down with Elan Carr, CEO of the Israeli American Council and former U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism.

“This is more than just another incident,” Carr stressed. “This is a major watershed moment in this fight.” As a nation and a world, he underscored, “We have to fight against Jew hatred. We have to understand how dangerous it is. We have to understand how prevalent it is. And we have to understand where this comes from. And when you look at [the shooter Elias] Rodriguez’s background and you look at the ideological indoctrination [that he experienced] to get to this point, it’s very clear that we’ve got a real fight on our hands, and we need to stop the indoctrination of Americans in anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Semitic values that contradict the very spiritual DNA of our civilization.”

In the days following the attack, larger cities like New York and D.C. are on high alert, promising a bigger police presence around synagogues and other Jewish institutions. The greatest mistake, most believe, is becoming complacent. “I hate to say it,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) told Perkins on “This Week on Capitol Hill,” but I think oftentimes we have become numb to these things happening internationally and certainly in the Middle East. But we [should be] completely shocked that they happen in the nation’s capital, right here in the United States of America.”

The Pennsylvania congressman, like so many others, blames the anti-Jewish sentiment taking over college campuses. Here’s a person, he said of the shooter, who “grows up in America and is willing to assassinate and execute Jews on the streets of America.” It’s unfathomable. But then, he lamented, “We have accommodated this global intifada, the calls for ‘Free Palestine,’” he warned. “And this is the result of that. This is the next phase of that. The radical leftist anti-Semitic movement is robust around the world, and it has unfortunately come home to America.”

Let’s be clear, Carr wanted people to know. “‘Free Palestine’ is not a pro-Palestinian statement. It is an anti-Semitic call for genocide against the Jewish people. That’s what that is. And we have to understand that when Americans are indoctrinated in anti-Semitic genocidal hate, they are being ruined. A generation of American kids [is] going to be ruined and raised in a culture of violence and aspiration to jihad,” he paused, “which is what we saw. And so, we’ve got to fight this indoctrination of America’s young people.”

Above all, he emphasized, “This has to be a unifying moment. We have to understand that all of us are in the crosshairs, and we are facing a despicable, violent, evil enemy that is bloodthirsty. We saw that on October 7th. We saw that on October 8th. And the global reaction of glee and joy at the murder of 1,200 Jews with medieval barbarity. And we see it today … in the United States.”

This is all in the shadows of the current Iranian talks, Perry reminded people. “And we know that Iran continues to stoke the flames.” This tragedy, he insisted, “just hints at the urgency of making sure that not only does this rhetoric stop and these actions stop, but that the potential for mass global atrocities” at the hands of monsters like Iran, Hamas, and their proxies “also stop.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Israel to build 180,000 homes in Samaria, bringing a million Jews to the area

The establishment of 13 cities will include 180,000 housing units. 

Israel is allocating 30 million shekels ($8.3 million) to build more than a dozen cities and industrial zones throughout Samaria, Construction and Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf announced on Thursday.

The “Samaria to a Million” proposal was launched by Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan in 2023, and will now enter its first phase with financial support from the state, according to Goldknopf.

“In the face of those seeking our destruction, the clear and unequivocal answer is to strengthen the settlement and solidify our hold on the Land of Israel in general—and in Judea and Samaria in particular,” the ultra-Orthodox minister said in remarks cited by the Israel Hayom daily.

“Planning and expanding the communities serves as a security and economic anchor for the region and sends a firm and unmistakable message: We are here to stay—and to grow,” he said.

Goldknopf announced his support for the plan alongside Dagan during a visit to the latter’s temporary office at the site of of the May 14 terrorist attack in which pregnant Israeli Tzeela Gez was murdered.

“Terrorism tries to drive us out, but we will respond with growth. We will establish cities, build industrial zones and make Samaria flourish,” declared the Samaria leader. “I commend Minister of Construction and Housing Yitzhak Goldknopf for the principled and courageous decision to invest 30 million shekels in planning 18 settlement points—13 cities and 5 industrial zones—as part of the ‘Samaria to a Million’ plan.”

The initiative is being advanced in cooperation with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also serves as a minister in the Defense Ministry with responsibility for civilian matters in Judea and Samaria, and Religious Zionism Party Knesset lawmaker Zvi Sukkot, who is the chairman of the Knesset Subcommittee for Judea and Samaria.

In 2023, Dagan unveiled his plan to increase the number of Jews living in Samaria from some 140,000 to more than one million by 2050, saying the move would “strengthen Zionism” and solve the housing crisis.

The initiative encompasses building major cities and expanding existing Jewish communities, while better connecting the region to central and northern Israel via trains and highways. The plan also proposes the construction of a hospital, as well as five industrial zones.

According to the plan, which now has an approved budget for its planning phase, the establishment of 13 cities will include the addition of 180,000 housing units in the Samaria Regional Council’s area of jurisdiction.

Tens and thousands of units are expected to be built in Samaria’s north, including by rebuilding Sa-Nur, Ganim, Kadim and Homesh, towns that were evacuated during Israel’s 2005 disengagement from the area and Gaza.

Additionally, an outpost will be established on Mount Ebal, the site of Joshua’s Altar, the Samaria Regional Council announced, noting its historical, biblical and national significance for the Jewish people.

On May 19, Channel 14 News reported that Smotrich was set to legalize 22 Jewish communities throughout Judea and Samaria, nine of which would be new towns. Smotrich’s proposal reportedly included the legalization of Homesh and Sa-Nur, as well as Mount Ebal.

As of Jan. 1, 529,704 Jews live in Judea and Samaria, amounting to approximately 5.28% of Israel’s population.

Nearly 70% of Israeli citizens want Israel to extend full legal sovereignty over the disputed territory, according to a survey conducted on Jan. 29.

Meanwhile, 58% of Israeli Jews believe that communities in Judea and Samaria contribute to the security of the country, according to a poll the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) published on March 11.

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EDITORS NOTE: This JNS – Jewish News Syndicate column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


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