Victor Davis Hanson Exposed
The Voice of Zionist and Israeli Propaganda in America
By Jonas E. Alexis • Unz Review • October 15, 2025
Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and classicist, best known for works such as A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power, and Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom.
To be fair, these works are not without merit; Who Killed Homer in particular occupies an important place in the ongoing academic debate over the teaching of the classics. However, Hanson’s analysis collapses entirely when it comes to U.S. foreign policy and the nation’s involvement in perpetual wars across the Middle East and beyond. In The Savior Generals, for instance, he devotes an entire chapter to praising the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003—a debacle that left the region in ruins.[1]
In an apparent attempt to rescue both himself and the neoconservative movement from intellectual and political oblivion, Hanson drew an extraordinary comparison between the Iraq War and the wars of 1777, 1941, and 1950. He went so far as to claim that these conflicts “led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair.”[2]
Not once did Hanson acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that the Iraq War was built upon a monumental deception. He never confronted the well-documented reality that the U.S. intelligence community explicitly informed the Bush administration that there was no credible evidence indicating that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Nor did he address the fact that President Bush and his inner circle deliberately sought to fabricate and manipulate evidence in order to inundate the American public with the categorical falsehood that Saddam had to be removed.[3]
Hanson made no attempt whatsoever to engage with the vast body of scholarly evidence surrounding these issues.[4] He remained silent on the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib—the sodomy, humiliation, and torture that forever stained America’s moral standing.[5] Not once did he acknowledge that, prior to the Iraq War, practices such as waterboarding were virtually foreign to the American moral and legal tradition. Nor did he mention that George Washington himself unequivocally repudiated the use of torture, even against enemies who had shown no mercy.[6]
By now, it is a matter of public record that torture at Abu Ghraib was not an isolated incident but a systematic practice. Reports and testimonies confirmed that prisoners were routinely subjected to brutal physical and sexual abuse, including coerced acts of humiliation and violence that defied every principle of human dignity. Even young detainees were not spared such degradation. Official investigations and leaked photographs later revealed the extent of these atrocities, which stand as a permanent indictment of the moral collapse that accompanied the Iraq War. One prisoner testified that he saw one officer
“fucking a kid, his age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [name blacked out], who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid’s ass. I couldn’t see the face of the kid because his face wasn’t in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures.”[7]
What’s more even interesting, “150 inmates were crammed into cells designed for 24.”[8] Abu Ghraib, as one writer put it, was “a hell-hole.”[9] Torture was also routine in Afghanistan, where adolescents were beaten with hoses “and pipes and threats of sodomy.”[10] These atrocities were not committed in obscurity. Cambridge University Press has published extensive documentation of such abuses in a volume exceeding 1,200 pages, detailing the systematic nature of the torture and its moral, political, and legal implications.[11] These atrocities were also corroborated by psychiatrists such as Terry Kupers, whose professional assessments provided further evidence of the profound psychological trauma inflicted on the victims and the moral disintegration of those who carried out the abuse.[12]
For Hanson to attempt to wiggle out of this extensive body of scholarship is nothing short of intellectual dishonesty. Since the Iraq War turned out to be an unmitigated disaster—and given that Hanson supported it from its inception[13]—he is now compelled to construct arguments that are at once incoherent and irresponsibly tendentious. This rhetorical contortion serves a dual purpose: to preserve his Neoconservative equilibrium and to justify his well-funded position as a military historian at the Hoover Institution, an establishment known for its distinctly neoconservative orientation.
More importantly, Victor Davis Hanson is a Neocon ideologue and an unapologetic warmonger. He declared without hesitation:
“I came to support neocon approaches first in the wars against the Taliban and Saddam, largely because I saw little alternative—in a post-9-11 effort to stop radical Islam and state sponsors of terror—to removing such odious enemies, and did not think leaving the defeated in power (as in 1991), or leaving in defeat (as in Lebanon), or installing a postbellum strongman was viable or in U.S. interests.”[14]
Hanson, it seems, would prefer deliberate falsehoods over confronting uncomfortable truths. The war in Iraq was never about weapons of mass destruction, precisely because the Neocons themselves were fully aware that Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction.
For example, when Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley informed Paul Wolfowitz that there was no evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, Wolfowitz responded with certainty, “We’ll find it. It’s got to be there”[15]—effectively signaling that if no such connection existed, they would fabricate one. Ultimately, the Neoconservatives did precisely that, constructing deliberate falsehoods to justify the destruction of an entire nation—Iraq—for the strategic benefit of Israel.
What we are witnessing is an alarming intellectual decline on Hanson’s part. He effectively lost credibility as a serious analyst when he claimed that Iran intended to promote a Jewish Holocaust, despite the fact that Iranian Jews themselves widely denounced Netanyahu for perpetuating similarly alarmist and conspiratorial rhetoric, calling him an “insane vampire.”.[16] And what of Jimmy Carter? Hanson contends that Carter’s positions were effectively aligned with anti-Semitic sentiment.[17] Ignoring Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the 1940s and beyond, Hanson begins to reconstruct history according to his own narrative: “[Israel] fought three existential wars over its 1947 borders, when the issue at hand was not manifest destiny, but the efforts of its many enemies to exterminate or deport its population.”[18]
Sounding almost unhinged and unwilling to heed reasoned critique, Hanson asserts that, for more than half a century, the Arabs have sought to push “the Jews into the Mediterranean.” There is no serious scholarship, no intellectual or historical rigor, and no defensible argument—only one sweeping assertion after another. Hanson continues: “Over 500,000 Jews have been ethnically cleansed from Arab capitals since 1947, in waves of pogroms that come every few decades.”[19]
The source and historical evidence? According to Hanson, one simply has to take his word for it. His statement is self-referentially “true” because Hanson asserts it to be so. This is the same type of circular reasoning and tautology frequently encountered in so-called scientific discourse—most famously in the notion of “survival of the fittest.” Why did it survive? Because it is the fittest. How do we know it is the fittest? Because it survived.
Yet, long before Hanson began promoting his version of historical fiction, Jewish historians both in the Atlantic world and in Israel had documented a very different reality: Israel has systematically ethnically cleansed the Palestinian population.[20] Listen again to Israeli historian and flaming Zionist Benny Morris:
“A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.”[21]
Israel has consistently undermined peace and stability in the Middle East. A striking example is the 1982 massacre, during which the Israeli military permitted Lebanese militias to attack Palestinian refugee populations. Reports indicate that the militias “raped, killed, and dismembered at least 800 civilians, while Israeli flares illuminated the camps’ narrow and darkened alleyways.”[22]
One year later, an Israeli investigative commission concluded that Israel was “indirectly responsible” for the massacre and that Ariel Sharon bore personal responsibility as an accomplice.[23]
How did Israeli officials involve the United States in these events? According to declassified documents housed in the Israel State Archives, they persuaded U.S. officials that Beirut harbored terrorist cells. Ultimately, this manipulation facilitated the massacre of Palestinian civilians—people whom the U.S. had previously pledged to protect.[24] Ariel Sharon asserted that Beirut harbored between 2,000 and 3,000 terrorists.
The American envoy to the Middle East, Morris Draper, essentially concluded that Sharon was being dishonest. Lawrence S. Eagleburger, then Secretary of State, remarked that “we appear to some to be the victim of deliberate deception by Israel.”[25]
During his conversation with Sharon, Draper understood that the United States did not fully endorse Sharon’s aggressive plans. Nevertheless, Sharon proceeded to act on his own terms. It was reported that Draper told Sharon, “You should be ashamed. The situation is absolutely appalling. They’re killing children! You have the field completely under your control and are therefore responsible for that area.”[26]
In the aftermath of the massacre, President Ronald Reagan, himself a Zionist, expressed outrage. Secretary of State George P. Shultz acknowledged that the United States had effectively become an accomplice, allowing Israel to manipulate U.S. policy to facilitate the slaughter of civilians. Yet no sanctions were imposed, and no concrete actions were taken. When asked why, Nicholas A. Veliotes, then Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, offered an indirect explanation: “Vintage Sharon. It is his way or the highway.”[27] Scholar Seth Anziska declares, “The Sabra and Shatila massacre severely undercut America’s influence in the Middle East, and its moral authority plummeted.”[28]
How might Hanson respond? Would he dismiss the archival evidence meticulously documented by Morris Draper and Ilan Pappe in their respective studies? Would he evade the fact that Israel has often acted as a destabilizing force in the Middle East? The answer is likely that we will never know, because Hanson systematically avoids engaging with such historical scholarship. Instead, he prefers silence, selectively ignoring a substantial body of evidence that contradicts his narrative.
If you still doubt this, pick up Hanson’s recent book, The End of Everything. In it, he reads as if he’s on the verge of a heart attack at the mere thought of Iran possessing nuclear weapons. He writes:
“The specter of a soon to be nuclear theocratic Iran that professes it can survive a nuclear exchange, or at least find the ensuing postmortem paradise preferrable to the status quo ante bellum, ensures a dangerous state of affairs, especially amid recent proxy wars between Iran and nuclear Israel in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.”[29]
What Hanson never dares to tell his readers is that Iran has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, whereas Israel has not—and consistently insists on a double standard. Israel itself poses a global threat, declaring that if it falls, it will take the world down with it. Listen to Israeli historian Martin van Creveld’s chilling warning:
“We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force… We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”[30]
Shouldn’t Hanson be concerned about this? Or is he so dazzled by Israeli and neocon propaganda that he cannot think clearly, leaving him both intellectually and historically crippled? Like his fellow neocons, Hanson will never consult objective, scholarly materials that challenge his thesis on Iran and Israel. For instance, he won’t touch Trita Parsi’s trilogy on Iran, published by Yale University Press, nor will he engage with studies such as Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform—apparently because doing so would undermine his neoconservative agenda.[31]
Hanson’s 2021 book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, is nothing short of propaganda. Why? Because a look at the very foundations of the United States reveals that the Founding Fathers themselves rejected the notion of making unconditional alliances with any foreign power—let alone Israel. So how did Hanson and his neocon allies become defenders of a country that has brought nothing but misery to the United States? The term “progressive elites” might be more aptly applied to Hanson and his cohort, as they have sought to fundamentally alter the principles articulated by the Founding Fathers.
In The Dying Citizen, Hanson risibly declares that he is deeply concerned about “how putting global concerns above national interests insidiously erodes the financial health, freedoms, and safety of Americans. In blunter terms, when American elites feel their first concerns are with the world community abroad rather than with the interests of their own countrymen, there are consequences for American citizens.”[32] Does this man ever look in the mirror and realize that he too has contributed to the economic disaster that followed the Iraq War—a war that will cost the United States at least six trillion dollars?[33] Think for a moment: what could a single country do with such an enormous sum? Virtually every American could have access to decent health care and an affordable college education. Yet Hanson cannot confront these fundamental issues because he remains blinded by the neoconservative and Israeli agenda.
Hanson reminds me of Thomas Sowell, who has offered many valuable insights in his books, yet Sowell too seems intellectually constrained by the Israeli propaganda machine. Much of what Sowell has written over the years—including Education: Assumptions versus History and Affirmative Action: An Empirical Study—is accurate. I must admit, I had to do some serious rethinking when I first read his assessment of slavery.
But Sowell is completely mistaken in his stance on the Middle East. He is essentially echoing what neocons have been asserting for years and appears trapped within the neoconservative worldview. In his 2010 book Dismantling America, Sowell declares:
“With Iran moving toward the development of nuclear weapons, we are getting dangerously close to that fatal point of no return on the world stage… The Iranian government itself is giving us the clearest evidence of what a nuclear Iran would mean, with its fanatical hate-filled declarations about wanting to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.”[34]
What was particularly striking about this extraordinary claim is that Sowell provided not a single piece of evidence for it—an intellectually embarrassing omission that undermines much of his own work. When I finished reading The Vision of the Anointed, I contacted Sowell to express my appreciation for his work, to which he politely replied, “Thank you.” However, after reading Dismantling America and asking him for evidence supporting some of his assertions, he never responded. He continues to warn about “the fatal danger of a nuclear Iran,” yet there is no way to assess these authoritative—and indeed dogmatic—claims because Sowell offers not a shred of evidence.
Sowell serves the neocons and warmongers in the United States in a manner similar to what Charles Murray does for neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute. After supporting the invasion of Iraq for years and writing positively about progress there in works such as Intellectuals and Society,[35] Sowell later wrote in 2015: “Whether it was a mistake to invade Iraq in the first place is something that will no doubt be debated by historians and others for years to come.”[36] Sowell then advanced a claim that directly contradicts all available evidence regarding the Iraq War:
“But, despite things that could have been done differently in Iraq during the Bush administration, in the end President Bush listened to his generals and launched the military ‘surge’ that crushed the terrorist insurgents and made Iraq a viable country.”[37]
Iraq is a “viable country”? Sowell echoes the same tired mantra in Intellectuals and Society, insisting that the “Iraq surge” was a success—even in the face of abundant evidence proving otherwise. He writes: “Eventually, claims that the surge had failed as predicted faded away amid increasingly undeniable evidence that it had succeeded.”[38] Where has this man been living for the past ten years? One would have to be morally and intellectually blind to come up with such nonsense. Consider the perspective of retired U.S. Army Armor Branch officer and military historian Andrew J. Bacevich:
“Apart from a handful of deluded neoconservatives, no one believes that the United States accomplished its objectives in Iraq, unless the main objective was to commit mayhem, apply a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding, and then declare the patient stable while hastily leaving the scene of the crime… The fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq has exacted a huge price from the U.S. military—especially the army and the Marines. More than 6,700 soldiers have been killed so far in those two conflicts, and over fifty thousand have been wounded in action, about 22 percent with traumatic brain injuries. Furthermore, as always happens in war, many of the combatants are psychological casualties, as they return home with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression.
“The Department of Veterans Affairs reported in the fall of 2012 that more than 247,000 veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have been diagnosed with PTSD. Many of those soldiers have served multiple combat tours. It is hardly surprising that the suicide rate in the U.S. military increased by 80 percent from 2002 to 2009, while the civilian rate increased only 15 percent. And in 2009, veterans of Iraq were twice as likely to be unemployed as the typical American. On top of all that, returning war veterans are roughly four times more likely to face family-related problems like divorce, domestic violence and child abuse than those who stayed out of harm’s way.
“In 2011, the year the Iraq War ended, one out of every five active duty soldiers was on antidepressants, sedatives, or other prescription drugs. The incidence of spousal abuse spiked, as did the divorce rate among military couples. Debilitating combat stress reached epidemic proportions. So did brain injuries. Soldier suicides skyrocketed.”[39]
As Dismantling America progresses, it becomes clear that Sowell is entirely ensnared in the neoconservative matrix. He asserts, “Iran, for example, has for years ignored repeated U.N. resolutions and warnings against building nuclear facilities that can produce bombs.”[40] In 2012, Sowell wrote in the National Review that Iran was “well on its way to being able to produce more than the two bombs that were enough to force Japan to surrender in 1945.”[41]
This mantra has been repeated endlessly, yet no one has produced any scholarly or academic evidence to support it. In fact, the available scholarship directly refutes this frivolous claim. Paul R. Pillar, an academic and 28-year veteran of the CIA, has stated that Iran is not a threat to global peace. Remarkably, Pillar even made the controversial claim that we could coexist with Iran possessing nuclear weapons.[42] Sowell’s stance only confirms what Andrew J. Bacevich warned in 2012 in his article “How We Became Israel”:
“U.S. national-security policy increasingly conforms to patterns of behavior pioneered by the Jewish state. This ‘Israelification’ of U.S. policy may prove beneficial for Israel. Based on the available evidence, it’s not likely to be good for the United States.”[43]
Both Sowell and Hanson have, in effect, become ideological extensions of Israel—perpetuating hoaxes, fabrications, and at times outright falsehoods about the Israel–Palestine conflict and the broader Middle East. Consider Hanson’s statement that “the radical Iranian ayatollah Ali Khamenei could freely tweet about destroying Israel.”[44]
What have Iranian representatives actually been saying for more than fifty years? Khomeini once declared that “international Zionism is using the United States to plunder the oppressed people of the world.” To understand this statement properly, we must place it within its historical context. Khomeini coined the term “the Great Satan” in 1979 largely because he had witnessed firsthand what “international Zionism” and Western powers were doing throughout the Middle East and beyond. It’s important to remember that the Anglo-American coup in Iran in 1953 effectively vindicated much of Khomeini’s suspicion about foreign interference and exploitation.
“There is no crime America will not commit in order to maintain its political, economic, cultural, and military domination of those parts of the world where it predominates,” Khomeini said back in 1979. “By means of its hidden and treacherous agents [i.e., the Neoconservatives and other warmongers], it sucks the blood of the defenseless people as if it alone, together with its satellites, had the right to live in this world. Iran has tried to sever all its relations with this Great Satan and it is for this reason that it now finds wars imposed upon it.”[45]
Khomeini’s uncomfortable yet largely accurate observation remains relevant today. If anyone doubts this, they need only look at how Israel and the neocons in the United States have systematically contributed to the destruction of one Middle Eastern nation after another—from Iraq and Afghanistan to Syria and Libya. It must also be noted that these figures show little genuine concern for the well-being of the American people. Their priority has long been the pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East that consistently serves particular geopolitical interests rather than U.S. national ones. As my colleague Vladimir Golstein of Brown University once remarked, neoconservatives are incapable of understanding political reality.[46] In that sense, they cannot construct a coherent worldview without resorting to double standards. Scholar Michael MacDonald has documented this tendency in detail:
“As [the Neocons] were mocking Clinton in the late 1990s as cowardly for his caution in the face of Saddam’s brutality, central Africa was engulfed in war and chaos. Around 5,400,000 people, mostly in Congo, perished in the convulsions and the starvation and disease they caused from 1998 to 2003.
“Yet the Weekly Standard, a reliable guide to neoconservative priorities, published just two stories on Congo during these years. In the same time span it published 279 articles on Iraq. Neoconservatives were bent on projecting power in the Middle East, not on engaging in humanitarian do-goodism.”[47]
The fact that Khomeini emphasized “international Zionism” shows that his criticism was not directed at ordinary Americans—most of whom have little understanding of the geopolitical realities in the Middle East—but at the powerful political and ideological networks that have shaped U.S. policy there for decades. His warning pointed to the continuing suffering of Palestinians since 1948, a reality well documented by numerous human-rights organizations. If one prefers more recent examples, the wars and interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria provide ample evidence of how destructive these policies have been.
Hanson objects to Iran’s use of expressions such as “the Zionist regime,” suggesting that such terminology reflects an illegitimate or hostile stance that must be rejected. Yet, he never addresses how figures within the Israeli establishment—including certain rabbis and political leaders—have themselves described Palestinians and Arabs in dehumanizing terms. For example, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin once stated, “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail,”[48] while MK Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan referred to Palestinians as “beasts, not human.” Ben-Dahan further asserted that “a Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual.”[49]
Were such remarks uttered by religious or political figures in a Muslim-majority country, they would undoubtedly provoke international outrage and intense media scrutiny. Yet when similar statements emanate from Israeli officials, they are largely ignored or downplayed by major Western outlets. This double standard raises important ethical and political questions. How can Middle Eastern nations be expected to engage in meaningful cooperation with Israel when the Israeli leadership and certain religious authorities display open contempt for the very people with whom they must coexist? More importantly, why do historians such as Hanson fail to meaningfully engage with these issues in any of their books? Listen to Hanson very carefully in his book Between War and Peace Lessons from Afghanistan to Iraq:
“Palestinians appeal to the American public on grounds that three or four times as many of their own citizens have died as Israelis. The crazy logic is that in war the side that suffers the most casualties is either in the right or at least should be the winner. Some Americans nursed on the popular ideology of equivalence find this attractive. But if so, they should then sympathize with Hitler, Tojo, Kim Il Sung, and Ho Chi Minh, who all lost more soldiers —and civilians—in their wars against us than we did. Perhaps a million Chinese were casualties in Korea, ten times the number of Americans killed, wounded, and missing. Are we, then, to forget that the Communists crossed the Yalu River to implement totalitarianism in the south—and instead agree that their catastrophic wartime sacrifices were proof of American culpability? Palestinians suffer more casualties than Israelis not because they wish to, or because they are somehow more moral —but because they are not as adept in fighting real soldiers in the fullfledged war that is growing out of their own intifada.We are told that Palestinian civilians who are killed by the Israeli Defense Forces are the moral equivalent of slaughtering Israeli civilians at schools, restaurants, and on buses. That should be a hard sell for Americans after September 11, who are currently bombing in Afghanistan to ensure that there are not more suicide murderers on our shores. This premise hinges upon the acceptance that the suicide bombers’ deliberate butchering of civilians is the same as the collateral damage that occurs when soldiers retaliate against other armed combatants.”[50]
It is important to note that Hanson, as a historian, makes these claims without citing a single serious scholarly source to substantiate them. A considerable body of balanced academic research exists that he appears to have disregarded, including works produced by Israeli and Zionist historians such as Benny Morris and others.[51] Morris declared unambiguously:
“A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.”[52]
Does Hanson genuinely maintain that the Palestinians themselves are to blame for the process of ethnic cleansing carried out under the pretext of combating terrorism? Only an Israeli or Zionist ideologue could plausibly sustain the kind of argument that Hanson is advancing.
Moreover, people like Hanson would never have the intellectual courage to address the issue of Jewish terrorism,[53] as doing so would evidently undermine the foundations of their otherwise unsubstantiated arguments. Israel has even been implicated in acts of terrorism against the United States,[54] yet this remains of little concern to Neocon puppets such as Hanson, who continue to promote the view that support for Israel is necessary.[55]
Notes
[1] Victor Davis Hanson, The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (New York: Bloomsbury Books, 2013), chapter 5.
[2] Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History—Ancient and Modern (New York: Bloomsbury Books, 2010), 12.
[3] See for example Vincent Bugliosi, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder (New York: Perseus Books, 2008).
[4] See for example Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Bob Drogin, Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War (New York: Random House, 2007); John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: 2007). More scholarly studies have been published recently Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar & Straus, 2007); More scholarly studies have been published recently: Michael MacDonald, Overreach: Delusion of Regime Change in Iraq (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); John M. Schuessler, Deceit on the Road to War: Presidents, Politics, and American Democracy (New York: Cornell University Press, 2015).
[5] See Karen J. Geenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Lila Rajiva, The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005); Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Owl Books, 2006); Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004); Dana Priest and Joe Stephens, “Secret World of U.S. Interrogation,” Washington Post, May 11, 2004; for similar reports, see Jane Mayer, “The Black Sites: A Rare Look inside the C.IA.’s Secret Interrogation Program,” New Yorker, August 13, 2007; Craig Whitlock, “Jordan’s Spy Agency: Holding Cell for the CIA,” Washington Post, December 1, 2007. Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Anchor Books, 2009).
[6] David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[7] Cited in Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), 243.
[8] Susan Taylor Martin, “Her Job: Lock Up Iraq’s Bad Guys,” St. Petersburg Times, December 14, 2003.
[9] Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Owl Books, 2006), 132.
[10] See for example Alissa J. Rubin, “Anti-Torture Efforts in Afghanistan Failed, U.N. Says,” NY Times, January 20, 2013.
[11] Karen J. Geenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
[12] See for example Lila Rajiva, The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005), 167.
[13] Victor Davis Hanson, “On Loathing Bush: It’s Not About What He Does,” National Review, August 13, 2004.
[14] Victor Davis Hanson, “Catching up With Correspondence,” PJ Media, June 20, 2008.
[15] Thomas E. Ricks, “Fear Factor,” NY Times, October 5, 2012.
[16] “Iran’s Jewish parliamentarian calls Netanyahu an ‘insane vampire’ over Persia comparison,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 14, 2017.
[17] Victor Davis Hanson, “Israel Did It!: When in Doubt, Shout About Israel,” National Review, December 15, 2006.
[18] Victor Davis Hanson, “The New Anti-Semitism,” Hoover.org, March 28, 2012.
[19] Ibid.
[20] See for example Zeev Sternhell , The Founding Myths of Israel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Ilan Pappe, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee: Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Ilan Pappe , The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: One World Publications, 2007). Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
[21] Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest? an Interview with Benny Morris,” Counterpunch, May 23, 2010.
[22] Seth Anziska, “A Preventable Massacre,” NY Times, September 16, 2012.
[23] Ibid.
[24] See “Declassified Documents Shed Light on a 1982 Massacre,” NY Times, September 16, 2012.
[25] Anziska, “A Preventable Massacre,” NY Times, September 16, 2012.
[26] Thomas E. Ricks, “Fear Factor,” NY Times, October 5, 2012.
[27] Anziska, “A Preventable Massacre,” NY Times, September 16, 2012.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Victor Davis Hanson, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation (New York: Basic Books, 2024), kindle edition.
[30] Quoted in “The War Game,” Guardian, September 21, 2003.
[31] Trita Parsi , Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); John J. Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) .
[32] Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 269.
[33] Ernesto Londono, “Study: Iraq, Afghan war costs to top $4 trillion,” Washington Post, March 28, 2013; Bob Dreyfuss, The $6 Trillion Wars,” The Nation, March 29, 2013; “Iraq War Cost U.S. More Than $2 Trillion, Could Grow to $6 Trillion, Says Watson Institute Study,” Huffington Post, May 14, 2013; Mark Thompson, “The $5 Trillion War on Terror,” Time, June 29, 2011; “Iraq war cost: $6 trillion. What else could have been done?,” LA Times, March 18, 2013.
[34] Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 48.
[35] Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society (New York: Basic Books, 2009), chapter 7.
[36] Thomas Sowell, “Who Lost Iraq?,” Jewish World Review, June 9, 2015.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 271.
[39] Andrew Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed their Soldiers and Their Country (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 94, 105.
[40] Sowell, Dismantling America, 31.
[41] Thomas Sowell, “Democrats, God, and Jerusalem,” National Review, September 11, 2012.
[42] Paul R. Pillar, “Waltz and Iranian Nukes,” National Interest, June 20, 2012. Paul R. Pillar, “We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran,” Washington Monthly, March/April 2012.
[43] Andrew J. Bacevich, “How We Became Israel,” American Conservative, September 10, 2012.
[44] Hanson, The Dying Citizen, 342.
[45] Quoted in E. Michael Jones, “The Great Satan and Me: Reflections on Iran and Postmodernism’s Faustian Pact,” Culture Wars, July/August, 2015.
[46] Jonas E. Alexis and Vladimir Golstein, “Globalists and Neocons Prove Incapable of Understanding Reality,” VT, July 4, 2016.
[47] Michael MacDonald, Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 100.
[48] Quoted in Clyde Haberman, “West Bank Massacre; Israel Orders Tough Measures Against Militant Settlers,” NY Times, February 28, 1994.
[49] Philip Weiss, “Netanyahu deputy charged with administering Palestinians says they are ‘beasts, not human,’” Mondoweiss.com, May 9, 2015.
[50] Victor Davis Hanson, Between War and Peace Lessons from Afghanistan to Iraq (New York: Random House, 2004), 23-24.
[51] See for example Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001); 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Ilan Pappe, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: Oneworld Publications, 2007); Sara Roy, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
[52] Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest: An Interview with Benny Morris,” Counterpunch, May 23, 2010.
[53] Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, Jewish Terrorism in Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (New York: Random House, 2019).
[54] James Scott, The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel’s Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009); James M. Ennes, Assault on the Liberty (New York: Random House, 1979); A. Jay Cristol, The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Israeli Attack on the U.S. Navy Spy Ship (Dulles, VA: Bassey’s Inc., 2002).
[55] Hanson, Between War and Peace, chapters 10-14.
Toxic AIPAC
By Adam Dick | Peace and Prosperity Blog | October 16, 2025
On Wednesday, Seth Moulton, a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from Massachusetts, announced he is running for the US Senate in a Democratic primary challenge to incumbent Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA). The next day, Moulton made another announcement — that he is returning all contributions he has received from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and refusing to accept any more AIPAC donations or support.
Is the timing coincidence for this candidate who has received AIPAC money while in the House, or has Moulton’s nascent Senate campaign recognized it can do better in its primary challenge against Markey if Moulton can disassociate himself from AIPAC? The latter seems the likely answer. AIPAC is disliked by many people for its pulling of levers behind the scenes to ensure Congress members keep supporting the US government giving massive financial and military support to the Israel government despite opposition from the American public.
AIPAC can and does give candidates a lot of money. But, at least for some campaigns, the toxicity of being connected to AIPAC can impose a cost greater than the benefit AIPAC’s money can buy.
Jacques Baud: Borderless Israel & Gaza Pause
Glenn Diesen | October 14, 2025
Colonel Jacques Baud is a former military intelligence analyst in the Swiss Army and the author of many books. Baud discusses the temporary pause in the Gaza conflict and the absence of a new status quo and clear Israeli borders.
Once Again, Jeremy Bowen Is Misleading the British Public About Gaza
By Jonathan Cook | October 15, 2025
Yet again the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen is misrepresenting a key issue in Gaza – and as always, he is doing so in a way that places Israel in the most flattering light possible.
The BBC’s international editor notes two reasons why Hamas will not wish to disarm, as stipulated by Israeli and US officials:
a) Because having weapons is “deep in their ideological DNA”.
b) Because Hamas are worried that, if they are not armed, “there are plenty of people out there in Gaza who would like to take revenge on them and will come after them”.
Notice two things here:
First, both of these claims are rooted in Israeli rationales for why Hamas needs disarming. Inadvertently or not, Bowen is subtly suggesting that the group is inherently bloodthirsty, and that it does not properly represent the people of Gaza (more on that in a moment).
Second, Bowen ignores the main reason why Hamas wants to keep its weapons, one so obvious that it is simply astounding that he forgot to mention it.
Hamas believes that, if it is not armed, Israel will have an even freer hand to carry out its genocidal policies in Gaza, to continue its decades-long, illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, and to intensify its siege of the enclave. Hamas believes Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people should not be cost-free.
Whether or not one approves of Hamas’ approach – and to do so would be a violation of the UK’s Terrorism Act and could lead to a 14-year jail sentence – Bowen is required to report what the group actually thinks. Otherwise he is not a journalist, he is just another western propagandist.
Instead, he is actively misleading the British public both about Hamas’ worldview and about a core issue – Hamas’ disarmament – that could soon give Israel the excuse it seeks to trash the ceasefire agreement.
Like the rest of the BBC’s coverage, Bowen’s reporting refuses to address the elephant in the room: that Palestinians are caught in a trap crafted for them by the West. If they try to resist their illegal occupation by Israel, they are slaughtered and damned as terrorists. But if they don’t, they must live as permanent prisoners of an illegal, dehumanising occupation.
A further point: Bowen says Hamas are using their weapons to take on “armed clans who have weapons themselves – to reassert their power, to send a message to Gazans, ‘Don’t mess with us’.”
Bowen, of course, carefully ignores the part Israel has played in arming these criminal clans and letting them steal food aid. The clans sold that aid at inflated prices to a small section of Gaza’s population who could still afford to pay, while everyone else starved.
One doesn’t need to be a genius, or Hamas sympathiser, to imagine – contrary to Bowen’s implication that Hamas is widely feared by the population – that most people there may be relieved to see Hamas back and taking on the criminal gangs that extorted them and were central to the implementation of Israel’s genocidal starvation campaign.
Israel delivers Palestinian bodies shackled, showing signs of execution
The Cradle | October 15, 2025
The bodies of dozens of Palestinians were handed over to health authorities in Gaza on 15 October, arriving in shackles and bearing signs of execution.
The handover came as part of a swap which saw several deceased Israeli captives released earlier on Wednesday, and coincided with continued Israeli ceasefire violations.
“Some are blindfolded, and there are signs of gunshot wounds in some cases, while others have been run over by tanks,” officials at Khan Yunis’s Nasser Hospital told CNN, adding that the bodies arrived “with their hands and legs cuffed.”
Three out of the four deceased Israeli captives handed over earlier in the day were identified. Tel Aviv said forensic testing showed one of them is not an Israeli captive.
Israel is accusing Hamas of violating the deal by delaying the release of around 20 bodies of captives that remain in Gaza. However, the Red Cross has confirmed that the amount of rubble caused by strikes has made it extremely difficult to find them, and has warned that some may never be recovered.
Tel Aviv is reportedly planning to reduce the amount of aid it will allow into Gaza as part of the deal until all the bodies are released.
The agreement states that six hundred aid trucks are meant to enter the strip. Despite this, not enough trucks have been given entry.
Dozens of Israeli ceasefire violations have been recorded since the truce took effect.
The Gaza Center for Human Rights reported that the Israeli military committed 36 violations of the ceasefire since it took effect on 10 October, resulting in the killing of at least seven Palestinian civilians and the injury of others. Other reports say nine have been killed.
The violations included aerial and artillery bombardments as well as live fire, concentrated in the eastern and northern areas of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli drones targeted residents inspecting their homes in the Shujaiya neighborhood, killing five people, while additional strikes in Khan Yunis, Jabalia, and Rafah caused further casualties.
The center stressed that these attacks were carried out without any military justification, aiming to maintain an atmosphere of fear and terror in the strip.
It also noted Israel’s continued control over aid entry, allowing only 173 aid trucks in out of 1,800 expected in recent days.
The organization warned that restricting essential supplies constitutes an extension of genocidal policies through starvation, in violation of international humanitarian law, and called on the international community to pressure Israel to fully implement the ceasefire and investigate war crimes and acts of genocide.
Tied and beaten: Freed Gaza detainees say abuse ended as it began
Al Mayadeen | October 15, 2025
Gaza resident Naseem al-Radee was released from Israeli prisons, partially blind and physically broken, only to learn that his wife and children had been killed during “Israel’s” genocide in Gaza.
Before his release, Israeli prison guards decided to send Naseem al-Radee off with what they called a “farewell”. They tied his hands, forced him to the ground, and beat him brutally, ending his 22-month imprisonment the same way it began: with brutality.
When al-Radee finally caught sight of Gaza again after nearly two years, his vision was blurred from a boot to the eye, leaving him partially blind for days. The 33-year-old government worker from Beit Lahia said his eyesight problems were just one of many injuries he sustained during his detention.
Israeli occupation forces had arrested al-Radee on December 9, 2023, from a school-turned-shelter in Gaza. Over the next 22 months, he was shuffled between several Israeli detention centers, spending 100 days in an underground cell, before being released with 1,700 other Palestinian detainees on Monday.
‘Beating us mercilessly’
Like the others released, al-Radee had never been charged with a crime. His account, marked by physical torture, starvation, and medical neglect, mirrors the testimonies of many others released under similar conditions.
Al-Radee’s ordeal, he said, reflected what the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has described as a systemic policy of abuse targeting Palestinian detainees.
“The conditions in the prison were extremely harsh, from having our hands and feet bound to being subjected to the cruelest forms of torture,” al-Radee told The Guardian, describing his time in Nafha prison in al-Naqab desert, his final place of detention.
He explained that the beatings were not random but a daily routine enforced with military precision. “They used teargas and rubber bullets to intimidate us, in addition to constant verbal abuse and insults,” he said.
“They had a strict system of repression; the electronic gate of the section would open when the soldiers entered, and they would come in with their dogs, shouting ‘on your stomach, on your stomach,’ and start beating us mercilessly.”
Tortured, starved, and caged in conditions unfit for human life
According to al-Radee, up to 14 Palestinian detainees were packed into cells meant for five. The unhygienic conditions caused widespread skin and fungal infections, which went untreated. Another recently released detainee, 22-year-old university student Mohammed al-Asaliya, said he contracted scabies while imprisoned in Nafha.
“There was no medical care. We tried to treat ourselves by using floor disinfectant on our wounds, but it only made them worse,” Asaliya said. “The mattresses were filthy, the environment unhealthy, our immunity weak, and the food contaminated.”
He described a notorious section of the prison known as “the disco”, where guards blasted loud music for two days straight as a form of psychological torture. “They also hung us on walls, sprayed us with cold air and water, and sometimes threw chili powder on detainees,” Asaliya added.
Weight loss; a common result
Both men lost significant weight during their detention. Radee said his weight dropped from 93 kilograms to 60, while Asaliya fell from 75 to 42 kilograms at one point.
Palestinian health officials confirmed that many detainees released on Monday arrived in critical condition.
“The signs of beating and torture were clearly visible on the prisoners’ bodies, such as bruises, fractures, wounds, marks from being dragged on the ground, and the marks of restraints that had bound their hands tightly,” said Eyad Qaddih, the public relations director at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, which received several of the released detainees.
He added that many had to be rushed to the emergency room and appeared to have been deprived of food for extended periods.
‘Israel’ transformed abuse into official policy
According to the Public Committee Against Torture in “Israel” (PCATI), around 2,800 Palestinians from Gaza remain in Israeli detention without charge. The practice of mass incarceration, rights groups say, has been enabled by legislative changes introduced after 7 October 2023.
An amendment passed in December 2023 to “Israel’s” Unlawful Combatants Law allows for indefinite administrative detention based solely on “reasonable grounds” that a detainee is an “unlawful combatant.”
Israeli human rights advocates argue that the surge in arrests has coincided with a steep deterioration in detention conditions, transforming abuse into an official policy.
“Generally, the amount and scale of torture and abuse in Israeli prisons and military camps has skyrocketed since 7 October. We see that as part of the policy led by Israeli decision-makers such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and others,” said Tal Steiner, executive director of PCATI.
Ben-Gvir, “Israel’s” far-right police minister, has openly boasted of providing detainees with “the minimum amount of food.” In July, he wrote on social media, “I am here to ensure that the ‘terrorists’ receive the minimum of the minimum.”
‘My joy went with her’
For many of the released detainees, however, the greatest pain awaited them at home. Upon returning to Gaza, al-Radee tried to call his wife, only to discover that her phone was disconnected. He later learned that his wife and all but one of his children had been killed during his imprisonment.
“I was very happy to be released because the date coincided with my youngest daughter Saba’s third birthday on 13 October,” he said. “I had planned to make her the best gift to make up for her first birthday, which we could not celebrate because the war had started.”
“I tried to find some joy in being released on this day,” al-Radee added softly, “but sadly, Saba went with my family, and my joy went with her.”
Israel to resume Gaza onslaught once all captives repatriated, threatens war minister
Press TV – October 15, 2025
Israeli minister of military affairs Israel Katz has declared that the occupation army will resume its military onslaught on the besieged Gaza Strip once the remaining captives are returned, marking an open defiance of the newly agreed ceasefire agreement between the Hamas resistance movement and the Tel Aviv regime.
In a post on the social media platform X on Wednesday, Katz said that once the first phase of the deal is ended with the release of all captives, the Israeli military will resume its offensives to destroy Hamas.
“Israel’s great challenge after the phase of returning the captives will be the destruction of all of Hamas’s tunnels in Gaza, directly by the army and through the international mechanism to be established under the leadership and supervision of the United States,” he added.
“This is the primary significance of implementing the agreed-upon principle of demilitarizing Gaza and neutralizing Hamas of its weapons.
“I have instructed the Israeli army to prepare for carrying out the mission,” Katz said.
The remarks came less than a day after Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire framework brokered by Qatar, Egypt and the United States, and intended to end Israel’s two-year-long genocide in Gaza.
Katz’s statement made it clear that Israel views the truce not as a step towards ending the military assault on the Gaza Strip, but rather as a temporary pause before re-launching its military offensive.
Israel killed at least nine Palestinians on Wednesday as the regime’s military warned Gaza residents to stay away from the areas it still occupies.
Additionally, Israeli tanks fired at Palestinians in the town of Bani Suheila and the Sheikh Nasser neighborhood, east of Khan Younis. There were no immediate reports of possible casualties and the extent of damage caused.
At least 67,913 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and another 170,134 individuals injured in the brutal Israeli onslaught on Gaza since October 7, 2023, according to the health ministry of Gaza.
Kamala Harris: We Should Ask If Israel Committed Genocide in Gaza
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | October 15, 2025
Former Vice President Kamala Harris said we should all ask if Israel committed genocide in Gaza. She made the remarks after serving in the administration that funded and armed the Israeli military to slaughter civilians.
On MSNBC’s The Weekend, Harris was asked by Eugene Daniels, “A lot of folks in your party have called what’s happening in Gaza a genocide. Do you agree with that?” She said we should all ask the question, but refused to answer, saying it was for the courts to decide.
She said, “Listen, it is a term of law that a court will decide. But I will tell you that when you look at the number of children that have been killed, the number of innocent civilians that have been killed, the refusal to give aid and support, we should all step back and ask this question and be honest about it, yeah.”
While Harris presented herself as unqualified to make a determination on genocide, she is a lawyer who served as a district attorney and Attorney General of California.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 67,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli onslaught. The likely death toll is significantly higher, as it does not count access deaths and Palestinians who were killed by Israelis but whose bodies were not recovered.
Data from the Israeli military shows that at least 83% of the dead are innocent civilians. Israel has prevented enough food from entering Gaza, creating a famine. Hundreds of Palestinians have starved to death.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza began while Harris was serving as Joe Biden’s Vice President. While Biden and Harris were criticized by their base over their support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza, the White House refused to pressure Tel Aviv to end the assault.
Biden was dubbed “genocide Joe,” and Kamala “Holocaust Harris.” While running for president in 2024, the two were often heckled by left-wing activists over their support of the Israeli genocide.
A poll released earlier this year found that Harris’ refusal to diverge from Biden’s Israel policy was the most common reason why Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Harris in 2024.
Jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti suffers rib fractures after assault in Israeli prisons
MEMO | October 15, 2025
Jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti sustained rib fractures after being beaten in Israeli prisons, the Prisoners’ Media Office said Wednesday, Anadolu reports.
The Hamas-run office said on Telegram that Barghouti was beaten by Israeli prison guards while being transferred from Ramon Prison in southern Israel to Megiddo Prison in the north in mid-September.
The imprisoned leader lost consciousness and suffered a fracture in four ribs, it added.
Barghouti, 66, a senior leader of President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah group, is one of the most prominent and popular figures in Palestinian politics.
He has been serving five life sentences in Israeli prisons since 2002 on charges related to the Second Intifada, which began in 2000.
Last week, US President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Hamas had agreed to the first phase of a plan he laid out on Sept. 29 to bring a ceasefire to Gaza, release all Israeli captives in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, and a gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from the entire Gaza Strip. The first phase of the deal came into force on Friday.
Phase two of the plan calls for the establishment of a new governing mechanism in Gaza, without Hamas’ participation, the formation of a multinational force, and the disarmament of Hamas.
Since October 2023, Israeli attacks have killed nearly 68,000 Palestinians in the enclave, most of them women and children, and rendered it largely uninhabitable.
UK antisemitism training body under fire for links to Israeli military
Al Mayadeen | October 14, 2025
The Union of Jewish Students (UJS), the organization contracted to deliver hundreds of “antisemitism awareness sessions” for university staff across the United Kingdom, is facing renewed scrutiny following the resurfacing of a video in which its former president praised the group’s alumni serving “in senior positions in the Israeli government, the IDF, and even the President’s office.”
The footage, filmed during a meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, shows then-UJS President Nina Freedman telling him that former members occupy high-ranking roles across Israeli entity institutions. The clip has sparked widespread concern over the impartiality of UJS’ government-funded training, particularly amid the International Court of Justice’s ongoing genocide case against “Israel” over its atrocities in Gaza.
Under a program led by the UK Department for Education (DfE) to address antisemitism in schools and universities, UJS was awarded a £998,691 ($1.27 million) contract to deliver antisemitism training across British higher education institutions.
According to the contract published on the government’s Contracts Finder portal, the organization is responsible for helping staff “recognise and respond to incidents of antisemitic abuse” and for leading discussions on “antisemitism, including related topics such as the Israel/Palestine conflict.”
Wider context
The award forms part of the DfE’s Tackling Antisemitism in Education initiative, funded through a £7 million ($8.9 million) government scheme announced in 2024 to combat what it designates as antisemitism in the education sector.
However, critics have long questioned UJS’ political neutrality, given its constitutional commitment to “inspiring Jewish students to make an enduring commitment to Israel” and its longstanding ties with the Israeli Embassy in London. The union has previously hosted Israeli emissaries with military backgrounds on its executive team and facilitated pro-“Israel” campus initiatives, including “birthright trips” and visits by Israeli diplomats.
During her address to Herzog, Freedman described UJS as being “on the frontline of the fight against antisemitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Israel bias,” adding that the group seeks to “shine a positive light on Israel’s successes” and encourage students to defend the entity through advocacy and online engagement.
“I feel so lucky to have gone through the UJS machine,” she said, referring to it as an incubator for “young Jewish activists.”
The remarks have amplified growing concerns about conflicts of interest in the UK government’s decision to outsource “anti-Semitism education” to an organization so closely linked with the Israeli entity.
How Zionist Influence in New York Gave Rise to Zohran Mamdani
By Matt Wolfson | The Libertarian Institute | October 14, 2025
Coverage of Zohran Mamdani’s run for New York City mayor is focused on the outsized politics at play in the race: democratic socialism, Islam, state-owned grocers, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, until recently incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, and President Donald Trump. But this risks missing the real story in New York, which is the decades-long creation and maintenance of a financialized, factionalized city of free market distortions and middle class displacement at the hands of powerful Zionists and their allies that led to backlash and Mamdani’s rise. Rewinding Mamdani’s catapault to politcal stardom reveals that New York’s current situation—its transition from a city hospitable to the working and middle classes and genuine free exchange of goods and services to a feudal one of government-backed financiers and service workers—is in many ways the work of a little more than a dozen Zionist financiers who twisted government to their ends.
Zionism in New York was part of a shift in the city begun by establishment-connected WASPs away from government by wards and organizers and toward rule by government-connected finance. The originator was Nelson Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller’s grandson and the governor of New York from 1959 to 1973, who floated New York City’s bills by arranging for banks like Chase Manhattan (run by his brother David) to buy bonds. These new bonds covered the old bills even though the bonds were not backed by actual assets of the city’s but by anticipated returns; e.g. “tax anticipation bonds,” “bond anticipation notes,” and “moral obligation bonds.” This meant the city borrowed from the bankers, paid a portion of the interest, and borrowed again, while having no long-term way to pay back the full amount of ever-increasing debt.
The fix to this problem created by financiers came from financiers: a consortium set up in 1975 by Nelson Rockefeller, now vice president, to “solve” the city’s $6 billion debt. The consortium operated through various vehicles with names like the Municipal Assistance Corporation and the Emergency Financial Control Board and it achieved this “fixing” in a predictably self-interested way. It cut out of influence the city’s old political power brokers—Jewish, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and black politicians with connections to their communities. It then executed a bait-and-switch. It cut city funds from supporting welfare and unions in the name of small government while actually redirecting those funds to support financial development via investing in a real estate boom driven by a handful of connected players that attracted new “talent” to the city.
The main beneficiaries were rising Wall Street power brokers, the most notable ones Zionist, for whom the 1980s was a kind of heyday. The roster included Laurence and Robert Tisch, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, Michael Steinhardt, the Bronfmans, Michael Milken, Stephen Schwarzman, and high-end retailers like Victoria Secret’s Leslie Wexner and Leonard and Ronald Lauder, the sons of Estee Lauder and heirs to her fortune. One difficulty of critiquing a cohort like this is that the conflation of “Jewish power” and New York is an old trope, in part because New York has been, since the early twentieth century, a Jewish city. So it should be emphasized that this cohort was small and highly specific. It was distinct from older generations of New York Jews—not just Jewish ward players like Abraham Beame, New York’s last mayor under its old power dispensation, but Jewish financiers like Felix Rohatyn, who played a major role in stabilizing the city’s debt in the 1970s.
Players like Beame and Rohatyn had planted their stakes firmly in America and nowhere else. Having experienced the rise of the Nazi Party in an economically cratered Germany as a childhood reality, they were committed to creating the conditions for what they hoped would be lasting social peace. Zionists, by contrast, had their eye on the military-corporate apparatus and its ties to Israel, and they were not especially concerned with the effects of their actions on the ground. They also rejected what would become the mores of the majority of Jews and especially Jews of a later generation: intermarriage, mixing, diverse assimilation. Their style was self-consciously distinctive and gloves off, and beginning in the 1980s they executed an aggressive reinvention not just of the financial markets but of New York.
Part of this reinvention was done, much as the Rockefellers’ rise to influence in New York had been done, through philanthropy, but at a much greater scale. Among these Zionist players’ direct bequests were the Steinhardt Conservatory at the Bronx Botanic Gardens, the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, NYU Langone’s Tisch Hospital, the Tisch Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, the Tisch Children’s Zoo in Central Park, the Leonard Lauder Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, Ronald S. Lauder’s Neue Museum, and the NYU Bronfman Center.
Another part of this reinvention was done through real estate, which, like Wall Street, was increasingly dominated by Zionists. Perhaps most notable among them was Lawrence D. Ackman of Ackman-Ziff, the firm which redeveloped West 34th Street, West 42nd Street, and Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side in the 1970s and 1980s and turned portions of 9th Avenue into the high-end Chelsea market in the 1990s.
So far, government had been indirectly incentivizing development; then, in the 2000s, government got directly involved. Philanthropy and real estate became direct tools of government with the mayoralty from 2002 to 2014 of Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire financial services provider and the man most connected to this class by Zionism and finance. Bloomberg’s projects pushed in one direction: using government policy and finance capital to redevelop the city to create a tourist and tech mecca. His opening gambit was re-zoning 40% of the city. He then filled those rezoned spaces with public-private projects—parks, high-rises, high-end department stores—displacing middle and working class New Yorkers and driving up rents for everyone else.
This was not a free market experiment, where the best contractor gets the development job or the philanthropic bequest. This was explicitly a project of wealthy and connected Zionists with ties to the mayor. As Leonard Lauder told it to The New York Times some years later, “When Mike Bloomberg was the mayor, he was the ultimate power broker. He would call me up on the phone and say, ‘I need this and this and this, OK?’” Hollywood Zionists who came East were mobilized too, notably the media executive Barry Diller and his wife, the designer Diane von Furstenburg, and the music producer David Geffen. So was a new generation of real estate Zionists like Steven M. Ross of Related Companies, the developer of Columbus Circle, and Gary Barnett of Extell Development Company, the son of a rabbi and former diamond trader with significant holdings in Israel. So, finally, was a new generation of Zionist financiers like the hedge fund operators Daniel Loeb and Bill Ackman, Lawrence Ackman’s son.
Development proceeded from there. Bill Ackman’s first wife Karen Herskovitz and Laurence Tisch’s niece Laurie Tisch were major backers of the public park The High Line and the High Line’s anchor building, the relocated Whitney Museum of American Art. This was Bloomberg’s pioneer re-development project: a park built on former railway lines that cut through the Lower West Side to Midtown West, from 4th to 34th Street. Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg provided the funds for Little Island off West 13th Street west of the High Line, which “replace[d] the dilapidated Pier 54, envisioning an extraordinary new pier combining public Park and performance space.” Stephen M. Ross, facilitated by Bloomberg and later backed by an infusion from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, developed Bloomberg’s culminating project: the mega-mall Hudson Yards on West 34th Street at the top of the High Line. Stephen Schwarzman donated $100 million to the New York Public Library. David Geffen donated $100 million to refurbish the New York Philharmonic, with the help of Leonard Lauder and Bloomberg confidante (and Zionist) Barbara Walters.
Then there was real estate. A bevy of “supertall” skyscrapers which cast shadows over the surrounding buildings and streets were developed by Gary Barnett’s Extell, among the most prolific developers in Manhattan. (The occupants of Extell’s and other supertall developments were mostly financial workers and Saudi princes, who complained when the buildings leaked from the inside and swayed in the wind.) Smaller versions of Extell’s developments appeared in Brooklyn neighborhoods, built with cheap materials and generally agreed by locals to be eyesores meant for purchase by out-of-towners. Imitators of these projects abounded, thanks to Bloomberg’s largesse via not just re-zoning but also his provision of incentives to developers and his personnel intercession to make some projects happen. During his mayoralty, seven of the twenty tallest buildings in the city were built, along with smaller towers in areas ranging from downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn to Harlem.
In all of these spaces, the natural circulation of neighborhoods, which depends on small businesses and schools and places of worship, was replaced by “excursion destinations” constructed with enormous capital investment from powerful financiers with access to government. These high rises, parks, and cultural centers and the luxury apartments surrounding them also functioned as surveillance spaces, with manicured lawns for “relaxation” flanked by buildings which were easy to watch and patrol. And they functioned as class filters, siphoning from Manhattan the middle income earners priced out by rising rents and replacing them with finance workers or wealthy foreign nationals looking for second apartment homes. These new arrivals, in turn, relied for their needs on a growing number of service workers working low-wage shifts in restaurants or at Doordash—many of them undocumented.
This finance-and-philanthropy-based surveillance-and-extraction model is quite similar to the fundamentals of the “Raze-and-Rebuild” program being pushed by prominent Zionists for Gaza: a space meant to be serviced by undocumenteds and inhabited by financiers and tourists once the “locals” are “relocated.” It is also quite similar to the cities of authoritarian regimes in West Asia and the Gulf States that rose in the 2010s. And there is past precedent for it in the developments of Paris and Berlin at the hands of authoritarian regimes of the nineteenth century—developments which immiserated the working and middle class of these cities and seeded the ground for the cycle of revolt and reaction that created fascism.
But these explicitly feudal parallels have gone almost completely unremarked on in New York, probably because Zionist financiers have also assumed positions at the helms of the city’s education system and media nexus.
At the hands of Laurence Tisch’s daughter-in-law Merryl Tisch, as Chair of the Board of Regents (in charge of education in New York state) she and her allies Andrew Cuomo and Michael Bloomberg put a focus on standardized testing in the name of “merit.” This functioned to place “high achieving” outer borough students into private or “special” schools in Manhattan rather than giving outer borough schools the resources to help these students represent their communities. At the hands of the longtime presidents of New York University and Columbia, the city’s two most powerful universities have expanded their footprints off the real estate boom and muted critiques of the crony corporatism behind it. Successive Zionist executives and op-ed editors of The New York Times and Conde Nast, which is owned since the 1980s by the Zionist Newhouse Family and publishes Vogue and Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, media coverage of New York has celebrated expansion, “modernization,” modernizers, and the celebrities and fashion innovations these shifts bring to the city. So has CBS News, owned by first the Tisches in the 1980s and 1990s and then the Redstones, another Zionist family, from the 1990s to the 2020s. Despite the quiet admonitions of older players like Felix Rohaytn against the dangers of this insularity, the fantasy of empire management has turned New York into something closer to nineteenth century Europe than anything Americans might recognize.
This project only continues faster today. Zionists like New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Ezra Klein are backing the “Abundance Agenda,” a spate of policies to fast-track building permits in urban areas across the nation to combat housing scarcity, which will accrue to the benefit of governmentally connected developers and financiers able to manage large-scale projects. Academics from MIT, the site of lavish donations from New York Zionist financiers like Jeffrey Epstein and Stephen Schwarzman, have been calling for New York to become a “leisure city” catering to tourists and younger workers in the finance industry.
Of course, just as there is backlash to colonization abroad, there is backlash to it at home. In the 1980s and 1990s, the backlash came in the form of crime, boycotts, and riots, and protests from leftwing activists and the leadership of black and Hispanic communities whose influence had waned after the 1970s. In the 2010s, these marginalized figures received a new infusion of outside energy from political progressives who had built up their power in universities and the arts using state grants, in effect commandeering parts of the institutions Zionists had funded to enhance their own control. These players brought media sophistication and an ideological agenda to the on-the-ground communal left which had been rudderless. Meantime, the on-the-ground left brought to the table a close connection to the communities at the stick end of Zionists’ policies. The realization of the success of this synthesis was the mayoralty of the progressive Bill De Blasio, who within three months of beginning his first term was publicly criticized by allies of Zionist philanthropists for failing to give them the attention they felt they were due.
Then, in the 2020s, came De Blasio’s successor, Zohran Mamdani, a more effective progressive (as De Blasio freely admits) on every level. Where De Blasio talked about a “tale of two cities” and universal Pre-K, Mamdani talked, over and over and in original ways, about affordability, and took direct aim at the enemies of affordability in New York, finance, and Zionism. Historically, as I have reported elsewhere, socialism and its ideological cousin redistributionism have occurred in America after long periods when finance twisted around the state and distorted its functions. At a certain point in these processes, Americans respond to a program pushing for government money to flow not toward financial firms or weapons contractors but directly to them. Indeed, Mamdani’s victory speech when he won the primary, which emphasized returning the city to serve the interests of the working people who make New York run, was an emblem of exactly what New Yorkers appear to be looking for.
Bill Ackman, Dan Loeb, and other members of the club of Zionist financial elites have sounded the alarm of creeping socialism since Mamdani’s victory, but they have not blamed themselves for creating the distortive conditions that led to it. In fact, they’ve done the opposite. They’ve turned to a characteristically Zionist—which is to say colonialist—solution to rising discontent. This is a solution which they’ve slowly been developing since the 1990s and which had its antecedents or parallels in nineteenth century Europe and the twenty-first century Middle East: techno-military law enforcement to control “restive populations.” As I will show in a coming report, if Andrew Cuomo wins on November 4, the militarist play being run by Zionists will continue without any meaningful check, since Cuomo is both a close Zionist ally and not known for his concern for civil liberties. If Mamdani wins, there may be checks on this militarism, but these checks will not be absolute. Instead, some measure of militarized law enforcement will coexist with socialist government expansion. Together, these could lead New York on a path toward government control across sectors: security, economy, politics, society.
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Book Review
The Voters’ Self-Induced Matrix
By Jeb Smith | The Libertarian Institute | April 20, 2026
In Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions, Professor Todd Rose explains that to belong to a group, people “keep twisting [themselves] into pretzels, trying to conform to what we falsely believe everyone else expects of us.” Seeking acceptance from the group, we conform in language, behavior, beliefs, and practices. As a result, we lose our individuality and aggregate into herds. Within our group we create an alternate reality to fit whichever collective mindset we attach ourselves to, and interpret the world through those lenses—our innate desire to belong overrides reality.
Rose says these illusions “have become a defining feature of our modern society.” In other words, the collectivist mindset is a great conduit for spreading illusions; thus, it is the politician’s favored form of governance.
Rose points to studies in psychology and neuroscience showing we delude ourselves into believing what the majority does, even if it is not what we desire or know to be accurate. … continue
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