Israeli police swap UN flag for Israeli flag during raid on UNRWA compound in East Jerusalem
MEMO | December 8, 2025
Israeli police removed the United Nations flag from the compound of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in occupied East Jerusalem and raised the Israeli flag in its place, the agency’s commissioner-general said Monday, Anadolu reports.
“Today in the early morning, Israeli police accompanied by municipal officials forcibly entered the UNRWA compound in East Jerusalem,” Philippe Lazzarini said on US social media company X.
“Police motorcycles, as well as trucks & forklifts, were brought in & all communications were cut. Furniture, IT equipment & other property was seized,” he added.
Lazzarini continued that the UN flag “was pulled down & replaced with an Israeli flag.”
The agency’s headquarters, located in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, had been vacated earlier this year following an Israeli decision.
The UNRWA chief described the Israeli action as “a blatant disregard of Israel’s obligation as a United Nations Member State to protect & respect the inviolability of UN premises.”
Lazzarini noted that the UNRWA personnel were forced to vacate the compound “following months of harassment that included arson attacks in 2024, hateful demonstrations & intimidation, supported by a large-scale disinformation campaign, as well as anti-UNRWA legislation passed by the Israeli parliament in breach of its international obligations.”
“Whatever action taken domestically, the compound retains its status as a UN premises, immune from any form of interference,” he stressed.
Israel “is party to the Convention on the Privileges & Immunities of the UN. The Convention makes UN premises inviolable – in other words, immune from search and/or seizure – and makes UN property and assets immune from legal process.”
“There can be no exceptions. To allow this represents a new challenge to international law, one that creates a dangerous precedent anywhere else the UN is present across the world,” Lazzarini warned.
UNRWA was established by the UN General Assembly more than 70 years ago to assist Palestinians who were forcibly displaced from their land.
The UN agency has been facing severe financial difficulties since Israel launched a defamation campaign against UNRWA, claiming that staff members were involved in the Oct. 7 attacks.
Despite UNRWA’s requests that the Israeli government provide information and evidence to back up the allegations, the agency has received no response. Following Israel’s accusations, several key donor nations, including the US, suspended or paused funding.
Israel conducts ‘widespread surveillance’ of US troops in Gaza coordination base: Report
The Cradle | December 8, 2025
Israeli intelligence is conducting widespread surveillance of US forces and allies stationed at a new US base in southern Israel tasked with overseeing aid distribution to Gaza, The Guardian reported on 8 December, citing sources briefed on the matter.
According to the sources, Israel has been recording meetings between US military officials and humanitarian aid groups at the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC), located in the industrial zone of Kiryat Gat, 12 kilometers from the border with Gaza.
The spying prompted the US commander of the base, Lieutenant General Patrick Frank, to summon his Israeli counterpart and demand that “recording has to stop here.”
“Staff and visitors from other countries have also raised concerns about Israel recording inside the CMCC,” The Guardian wrote. “Some have been told to avoid sharing sensitive information because of the risk it could be collected and exploited.”
In response, the Israeli military claimed the allegations were “absurd.”
The CMCC was set up in October to monitor the 20-point ceasefire plan for Gaza proposed by US President Donald Trump.
Staffed by US and Israeli military officials, the CMCC was tasked to coordinate aid deliveries to the strip, which Israel had largely halted in previous months, causing famine to take hold in parts of the strip.
However, Israel has continued to regularly restrict or prevent shipments of food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods into Gaza despite the CMCC’s establishment.
US military logistics experts were assigned to the CMCC to ensure aid would flow. However, they soon discovered that “Israeli controls on goods entering Gaza were a bigger obstacle than engineering challenges. Within weeks, several dozen had left,” The Guardian reported.
Israel has banned the entry of essential items on the grounds that they are “dual-use” and could be utilized by Hamas for military purposes. They include basics such as tent poles and chemicals needed for water purification, as well as pencils and paper required to restart schools.
While the CMCC brings together military planners from the US, Israel, and other allied countries, including the UK and the UAE, Palestinians are comprehensively excluded.
“There are no representatives of Palestinian civilian or humanitarian organisations, or the Palestinian Authority, stationed there invited to join discussions,” The Guardian noted.
The British newspaper added that Israeli officials cut off video calls with Palestinians when US military officials sought to include them in discussions, while CMCC planning documents omit the words Palestine or Palestinian, instead referring to the residents of the territory as “Gazans.”
Israel launched its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in 2023 after Hamas’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood – in which Israeli settlements and military bases were stormed and attacked by the resistance – helping enforce a blockade on the strip.
Israeli officials have said they wish to wipe out Palestinians’ existence in Gaza, comparing them to the Biblical people known as Amalek, who were exterminated by the ancient Israelites.
Israeli officials have also expressed their desire to replace Palestinians in Gaza with Jewish settlers once the strip is rebuilt as a high-tech smart city, which Trump has dubbed the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
James Angleton: JFK Assassination Architect?
By Kit Klarenberg | Global Delinquents | December 7, 2025
Newly-declassified files show President John F Kennedy’s alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was monitored for years by James Angleton, the CIA’s infamous veteran counterintelligence chief, right up until the President’s death. In this context, freshly-released FBI documents indicating Oswald was removed from Bureau watchlists six weeks before Kennedy’s assassination, despite being judged a high security risk, at the express direction of Angleton’s staff, take on a distinctly disquieting character. Was Oswald a target of, or participant in, Angleton’s illegal domestic spying operations?
In June 1953, a memo was circulated among senior FBI officials, its subject line: “Central Intelligence Agency – information received from James Angleton”. It documents how the CIA’s counterintelligence chief had over the past year “been very cooperative and… volunteered voluminous information of interest to Bureau.” Such was the vast and sensitive intelligence yield, it was considered necessary to establish dedicated, strict internal protocols for handling and storing material provided by Angleton to the FBI.
This was “particularly” vital in respect of information Angleton received and passed on to the Bureau from Mossad, his “primary source” of intelligence among “numerous foreign sources and channels” he maintained worldwide. The memo went on to outline how Angleton handled “special cases of a various nature”, and was “usually given considerable freedom and leeway in directing the operations of his unit.” Angleton was “responsible only” to the CIA’s Director, and his staff were “responsible only to him.”
James Angleton testifies to the Senate Intelligence Committee
The memo noted approvingly how “much of the information” provided by Angleton “consists of the actual reports” he received from his sources. This was of significant advantage to the FBI, as the agency was able to “better evaluate the information instead of waiting for the delay and processing through normal channels in the CIA.” Angleton also “frequently” kept the Bureau apprised of Agency activities overseas, “which the CIA sometimes camouflages with some of its cloak and dagger techniques.”
Angleton’s extensive cooperation bought him enormous goodwill within the FBI. He successfully leveraged this in January 1958, when the Bureau serendipitously “flushed out” a scandalous, illegal spying operation targeting US citizens conducted by the CIA’s counterintelligence unit. A memo that month shared between senior FBI officials records how the Bureau was seeking to establish a program to monitor all mail being sent to and from the Soviet Union by American citizens, only to discover Angleton was already doing precisely the same thing.
Angleton in turn learned his scheme had been busted, so approached the Agency’s FBI liaison agent on a “personal basis” to outline the program. He claimed he would be fired if Langley caught wind of his disclosures to the Bureau. Angleton explained how the interception program was “one of the biggest and most secret operations being conducted by CIA,” and “extensive and expensive”. An “elaborate array of IBM machines” catalogued and conducted “complex scientific examinations” of all mail gathered.
In all, “two or three hundred CIA employees” were “exclusively engaged on various facets” of the operation, which cost “well over a million dollars a year” – roughly $11 million today. Angleton said the effort’s “sole purpose…was to identify persons behind the Iron Curtain who might have some ties in the US and who could be approached… as contacts and sources for CIA.” The operation was purportedly a “success”, with numerous valuable assets cultivated.
While FBI higherups questioned whether the effort “invaded our jurisdiction”, it was concluded Angleton’s unit had a “legitimate right” to conduct the mission. Moreover, the Bureau could avoid “the inherent dangers” of conducting a parallel mail intercept program – including “the sensitive nature of it, its complexity, size and expense” – by simply demanding the CIA counterintelligence unit hand over their operation’s vast intelligence yield to them.
Lee Harvey Oswald first came to Angleton’s attention in November 1959, due to news reports of his defection to the Soviet Union the previous month. Thereafter, all mail Oswald sent to and received from the US was opened and read by the CIA, until he returned home in May 1962 with his Russian wife Marina. Angleton’s monitoring of the minutiae of Oswald’s life persisted until Kennedy was killed. Multiple separate CIA operations collected intelligence on the President’s alleged assassin throughout.
‘CIA Project’
The CIA counterintelligence officer who monitored Oswald’s mail was Reuben Efron, part of a personal spying network constructed by Angleton from Jewish émigres from the Soviet Union, outside of formal Agency structures. Eerily, Efron attended a February 1964 hearing of the Warren Commission – officially charged with investigating JFK’s assassination – at which Marina Oswald testified. His presence was noted in an official volume of the investigation’s proceedings, but his employment by the Agency was unmentioned. Was he there on Angleton’s behalf?
This is but one of many mysteries related to Oswald that Angleton’s closed-door testimony to Senate investigators in June 1975 failed to resolve. During his grilling, Angleton had little to say about Kennedy’s assassination, despite being repeatedly probed about “the Oswald situation”. Questioned whether the CIA kept records on Oswald, Angleton prevaricated, “they have a file… I think more than one.” He offered scant further information, beyond claiming the supposed lone nut shooter was likely a Soviet operative.
When asked if there was a “connection between Oswald and the FBI”, Angleton elliptically acknowledged “there was a tremendous flap in the Bureau” following Kennedy’s assassination, and “confusion” the FBI “had not turned over, or had not taken enough initiative in turning over, all the information on Oswald to the local police” in Dallas. Angleton neglected to mention the FBI informed his counterintelligence unit one week prior to November 22nd 1963 Oswald was living and working in the city. By this time, the file collated by Angleton on Oswald ran to 180 pages.
Angleton was even more dishonest when testifying to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in October 1978. Asked point blank by a senior investigator if, to his knowledge, “Oswald [was] ever the subject of any CIA project,” Angleton lied, “no”. Coincidentally or not, he was then asked whether he knew Reuben Efron, and his responsibilities. Angleton responded in the affirmative, explaining Efron’s duties related to mail interception. Angleton was uniquely well-placed to elaborate that Efron was monitoring Oswald’s mail, in an operation he personally oversaw.
Angleton was grilled about his counterintelligence unit providing Israel with technical support for constructing nuclear weapons. He denied the charges, but under questioning admitted Tel Aviv may have conducted clandestine operations to source nuclear material in the US. Asked if he possessed “certain knowledge” of Israeli efforts “to acquire nuclear secrets in the US,” Angleton pleaded, “Do I have to respond to that?”
Kennedy entered office in January 1961 deeply concerned about Tel Aviv’s nuclear ambitions. A CIA assessment the previous month concluded a “major purpose” of Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant was “plutonium production for weapons.” The assessment outlined numerous grave outcomes of Tel Aviv acquiring nukes. Chief among them, exposure of the program would inevitably cause “consternation” in North Africa and West Asia, potentially prompting “threatened” Arab and Muslim states to turn to the Soviet Union for military assistance.
Perhaps spurred by this prospect, from day one of his Presidency, Kennedy made harmonious relations between Washington and Israel contingent on regular U.S. inspections of Dimona. Under intense pressure, Tel Aviv’s then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion finally allowed inspections in May 1961. Extensive efforts were conducted to camouflage areas of Dimona dedicated to research and development of nukes. Resultant assessments concluded the facility was solely concerned with nuclear power generation. Kennedy was unconvinced, however. In May 1963, he dispatched an ominous private telegram to Ben-Gurion:
“The dangers in the proliferation of national nuclear weapons systems are so obvious that I am sure I need not repeat them here… We are concerned with the disturbing effects on world stability which would accompany the development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel… Development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel would almost certainly lead other larger countries, that have so far refrained from such development, to feel that they must follow suit.”
‘Intelligence Operation’
The House Select Committee on Assassinations’ (HSCA) failure to interrogate Angleton over Israel’s nuke ambitions is all the more inexcusable given the contents of an April 1978 interview, conducted by Committee researcher Gaeton Fonzi with journeyman CIA officer Joseph Burkhalter Smith. Declassified records show Smith made a number of striking disclosures about Angleton’s role and influence within the Agency, and relationship with Tel Aviv. He suggested there was suspicion at the CIA’s highest levels Angleton may have been involved in Kennedy’s assassination, or at least concealed shadowy counterintelligence operations related to the world-changing event.
Smith enjoyed a close relationship with William Colby, who headed the CIA September 1973 – January 1976. A relative dove, Colby was forced out and replaced by George H. W. Bush, due to his candid public criticisms of the Agency’s record, and drive to break open the US intelligence community to greater scrutiny. Henry Kissinger aggressively pressed for his removal, fulminating how every time Colby “gets near Capitol Hill, the damn fool feels an irresistible urge to confess to some horrible crime.”
It is uncertain whether Angleton, Colby’s avowed nemesis, also played any role in Colby’s ouster. Smith claimed “Colby’s problems within the Agency stemmed largely from the conflict he had” with the CIA’s obsessively secretive counterintelligence supremo. Colby was totally in the dark as to what Angleton and his team were doing at any given time. Smith relayed how Colby had said of Kennedy’s assassination, “there could have been operations that Angleton’s staff was running that he wouldn’t even tell the Director.”
Smith went on to record how Angleton’s staff did “strange things”, and “handled all Israeli operations,” despite this not falling under their official purview. This “had a strange effect” on CIA operations in West Asia, “because unlike in other divisions where station chiefs kept each other informed, Angleton wouldn’t pass information to other stations in the Arab countries unless ‘he felt like it’.” It was also a mystery to Smith how Angleton “got all his power”.
Nonetheless, Smith testified Angleton had a “special relationship” with Allen Dulles, the longtime CIA director fired by Kennedy over the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, subsequently appointed to the Warren Commission. Smith also described an “incredible” cult-like ethos among Angleton’s Agency adherents. Universally convinced the CIA had been heavily penetrated by the KGB, they were “confirmed believers in the world Communist conspiracy theory” – to the extent of suspecting the Sino-Soviet split was “a great deceptive operation.”
Asked by Fonzi “to be speculative” as to whether Lee Harvey Oswald could’ve been “a deep cover agent for the Agency,” Smith suggested Oswald may have “worked either for the Soviet Division, which ran operations in the Soviet Union, or the Counter Intelligence staff.” Angleton’s team was furthermore “very interested in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee”, a longstanding target of the CIA and FBI, to the extent “getting a penetration into it would have been a high priority effort.”
After moving to New Orleans in April 1963, Oswald set up a one-man chapter of the FPCC. In an apparent attempt to attract new members to the group in the virulently anti-Castro city, which was heaving with Cuban exiles, Oswald publicly distributed leaflets promoting the group. He hired random members of the public to assist with the effort, which lasted only 15 minutes, but just so happened to be captured on camera by a local TV station.
Oddly, when testifying to the Warren Commission, Oswald’s half-brother John Pic was “unable to recognize him” in pictures of the leafleting event, raising the prospect Oswald was being impersonated. Even more curiously, as Fonzi noted in his discussion with Smith, some of the leaflets listed the address of Oswald’s FPCC chapter as 544 Camp Street, which housed “some kind of intelligence operation run by Guy Banister, a former FBI agent.” Smith responded, “there were a lot of former FBI men on Angleton’s staff.”
Today, journalists, researchers, and concerned citizens have no choice but “to be speculative” about how and why John F Kennedy was killed, and by whom. The newly-declassified documents offer only further questions – but they all unambiguously point in James Angleton’s direction. His multifaceted role as master of the CIA’s vast Oswald file, chief of Agency relations with Israel, and potential enabler of Tel Aviv’s nuclear weapons program all appear interlinked. And these operations in tandem may account for what occurred on November 22nd 1963.
Mi5 and CIA Whistleblowers Expose Israel’s Deadly Tactics in Western Countries
The CJ Werleman Show | October 10, 2025
/ cjwerleman How Israeli intel-linked Axonius penetrated 70 US federal agencies
Al Mayadeen | December 7, 2025
A technology firm with longstanding links to Israeli intelligence has quietly assumed a central role in safeguarding the digital systems of more than seventy US government agencies, including the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, according to initial reporting by independent outlet Do Not Panic.
Axonius, founded by former officers of “Israel’s” Unit 8200, offers software designed to give organizations “visibility and control over all types and number of devices.” In practice, this means the platform collects and analyzes data tied to millions of federal employees.
The company was set up by three Israelis, Dean Sysman, Ofri Shur, and Avidor Bartov, who served together in Unit 8200 in the early 2010s. While Sysman’s LinkedIn profile offers only vague references to work with “far-reaching implications,” their time overlaps with key years of Israeli aggression.
Sysman left the Israeli forces in 2014 to launch a cyber-hacking venture. Shur and Bartov remained in uniform until 2017, a period that included “Israel’s” 2014 aggression on Gaza.
Rapid formation and strategic early funding
Shur and Bartov left military service in 2017 and swiftly reunited with Sysman. Almost immediately, the trio secured $4 million in seed funding from Yoav Leitersdorf, an Israeli-American investor, fellow Unit 8200 veteran, and managing partner of US-Israeli venture capital firm YL Ventures.
Additional financing arrived from Israeli firm Vertex Ventures, whose leadership is similarly rooted in Israeli military intelligence; partner Tami Bronner served four years in the IOF’s intelligence wing.
Axonius then attracted hundreds of millions in further investment from US venture capital funds with strong connections to “Israel’s” security apparatus, as per the investigative website.
Accel Partners, which has backed more than thirty Israeli tech firms, was among the earliest. Bessemer Venture Partners, whose Tel Aviv office is staffed by former Israeli intelligence personnel, also joined. One partner, Amit Karp, a former intelligence officer, now sits on the Axonius board.
Lightspeed Venture Partners, another major backer contributing roughly $200m across several rounds, employs multiple former members of Israeli military and special forces units.
Deep penetration into US federal system
Given these backgrounds, the reach of Axonius inside the US federal infrastructure is striking. The company says its platform is now running across “more than 70 federal organizations,” including four of the five core Department of Defense service branches. Award records show contracts with the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps.
In November 2024, the Department of Homeland Security selected Axonius to centralise cyber data for dozens of federal agencies. A month later, the Pentagon tapped the company to update its system for 24/7 monitoring of all DoD networks, a key piece of federal cyber defense.
By April, Axonius had secured blanket authorization for its cloud-based tools to be used by any US federal agency.
Far-reaching footprint across government
Axonius’ software is now integrated into agencies spanning energy, transportation, treasury, health, and agriculture. Spending databases show the Defense Logistics Agency, responsible for managing the US global weapons supply chain, spent $4.3 million on Axonius in 2023 alone. The Department of Agriculture has paid nearly $2 million while Health and Human Services has paid more than $1.3 million since 2021.
Although the company presents itself as American, with headquarters in New York, its founders, top executives, and financial backers are overwhelmingly Israeli, and its engineering operations are based in Tel Aviv.
LinkedIn data indicates that most Axonius engineers in Tel Aviv previously worked in Israeli intelligence units. Through the platform, operators can link devices to specific individuals, track login activity, review browsing patterns, disable accounts, or quarantine devices.
The firm has also established a separate R&D arm, AxoniusX, led by another Unit 8200 veteran, Amit Ofer, and tasked with developing advanced cyber capabilities.
Defenders might argue that Axonius reflects the close and often opaque relationship between Washington and “Israel”. Yet “Israel’s” long record of espionage activity in the US complicates this narrative.
Historical examples range from spying operations involving Hollywood front companies to the sale of compromised software to foreign governments. Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine Maxwell, was an Israeli agent, and substantial evidence points to Jeffrey Epstein’s links to Israeli military intelligence. During Donald Trump’s first term, US officials reportedly discovered Israeli surveillance devices near the White House.
A Trojan horse risk?
Despite this backdrop, American authorities have permitted former Israeli intelligence officers to embed software across nearly the entire federal cyber infrastructure. In effect, the US has outsourced key elements of its digital security architecture to individuals with deep roots in the intelligence services of a foreign state.
Whether Axonius has misused or intends to misuse this access is unknown. But for analysts familiar with “Israel’s” espionage record, the arrangement raises profound questions about security, sovereignty, and oversight.
Axonius also illustrates a broader dynamic: US taxpayer funds help build “Israel’s” high-tech military apparatus, only for Washington to later purchase Israeli-developed technologies at scale, effectively paying twice. This cycle creates lucrative pathways for veterans of Israeli intelligence, while embedding their tools inside US systems, as per the investigation.
While political elites have long framed the relationship as mutually beneficial, public opinion is shifting. Millions of Americans now question whether support for “Israel” is the stabilising force it has been portrayed as.
The Axonius case surely adds fresh weight to those doubts.
IDF Chief of Staff: Yellow Line Is Israel’s New Border
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | December 7, 2025
The chief of the Israeli military said the IDF will not withdraw any further, and he considers the current partition line in Gaza as the new border.
“We have operational control over extensive parts of the Gaza Strip and we will remain on those defence lines. The yellow line is a new border line – serving as a forward defensive line for our communities and a line of operational activity,” IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir told recruits on Sunday.
Under President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire with Israel agreeing to withdraw to the yellow line. The yellow line leaves just over half of the Strip under Israeli military occupation. Only a small number of Palestinians live on the Israeli side of the partition line.
As Trump’s deal is implemented, Tel Aviv agreed that the IDF would undergo further withdrawals. However, Israel has signalled it has no intention of allowing Trump’s peace plan to end the conflict in Gaza. In November, European officials expressed concern that Israel was planning to de facto annex Gaza along the yellow line.
On Saturday, the Guardian reported the IDF was building permanent structures along the current partition line.
In addition to Zamir’s remarks, the IDF has violated the ceasefire nearly every day. Israel has killed over 370 Palestinians during the first seven weeks of the truce. The Gaza Health Ministry reported six Palestinians were killed on Sunday.
The Real Story Behind Trump’s Pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández
José Niño Unfiltered | December 6, 2025
The news came in quietly from a federal prison in West Virginia. Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras once sentenced to spend most of the rest of his life behind bars, had walked out of Hazelton penitentiary a free man.
According to an AP report, Hernández had received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump after a conviction that tied him to hundreds of tons of cocaine shipped into the United States. On paper, this was a spectacular reversal of fortune for a man whom federal prosecutors had branded the head of a Central American narco state. In practice, it looked like something else. It looked like a reward for loyalty to the one cause that towers above all others in Washington and in Trump world.
Hernández did not rise overnight. He entered Congress in the late 1990s, representing the rural department of Lempira, and spent more than a decade climbing inside the National Party machine. He then became president of the National Congress and finally president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022. While he projected the image of a tough conservative modernizer at home, another storyline unfolded in U.S. courtrooms.
Federal prosecutors charged him with a vast cocaine conspiracy involving the movement of multi-ton loads into the United States and with the possession of machine guns and other weapons in support of that network. The Justice Department later described his administration as a narco state fueled by millions in cartel bribes. Testimony and media investigations painted an even darker picture. According to Democracy Now, Hernández allegedly used Honduran security forces to protect drug shipments, partnered with major traffickers including the Sinaloa cartel, and used drug money to build his own political power. His brother Tony Hernández ended up with a life sentence in a U.S. prison on similar charges.
Court filings and investigative reports in outlets like CNN repeatedly tied the sitting Honduran president to drug traffickers. U.S. prosecutors said he took payoffs from drug networks as early as 2004. Hernández’s story also intersected with one of Honduras’s most prominent Jewish families. Prosecutors alleged that he received bribe payments and other favors from the Rosenthal family, a powerful clan of Romanian-Jewish origin led by Jaime Rosenthal, whose Grupo Continental controlled Banco Continental, a soccer club, and auto import businesses, as reported by Reuters.
The Rosenthal patriarch, a frequent Liberal Party presidential hopeful of Romanian Jewish extraction, stood near the top of the Honduran economic and political pyramid for decades. For his part, Hernández treated that network as another source of money and influence. A Univision investigation detailed allegations that he used drug money to finance political campaigns. After his arrest, Honduran authorities seized dozens of properties, vehicles, businesses, and other assets linked to his family.
The saga culminated in extradition to the United States in 2022. A New York jury convicted Hernández in March 2024, and a federal judge handed down a 45-year sentence plus supervised release in June of that year. By any normal standard, this was the end of the story. A disgraced former head of state, proven in court to have worked hand in glove with traffickers, destined to spend the rest of his days in prison.
However, Hernández did not bet his future on normal standards. For decades, he had invested in a different kind of protection. That protection wore a blue and white flag with a Star of David at the center.
His relationship with Israel began long before he held national office. As a young man in the early 1990s Hernández traveled to Israel under the auspices of Mashav, the Israeli Agency for International Development Cooperation. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted that he completed a Mashav enrichment course in 1992, at the beginning of his diplomatic career.
Three decades later, at the opening of the Honduran embassy in Jerusalem, Hernández stood before an audience and called that first visit to Israel a “life-changing” experience. He said the trip had shaped his view of security, agriculture, and innovation.
Once he entered the presidential palace, Hernández turned that personal link into state doctrine. In October 2015, he arrived in Jerusalem as head of state and told an audience convened by the Israel Council on Foreign Relations and the World Jewish Congress that “As long as I am president, Honduras will stand behind Israel.” The World Jewish Congress described the event in glowing terms and singled out his declaration that ties between the two countries had never been closer.
This was not idle rhetoric. Hernández set out to reposition Honduras as one of the most reliable pro-Israel governments in Latin America. Honduran and Israeli diplomats had initially signed formal relations in the 1950s, and Honduras had allowed Jewish immigration during the Second World War. Under Hernández, those historical connections became the foundation for a new foreign policy.
He adjusted the Honduran voting record at the United Nations so that his country would abstain from or oppose resolutions deemed hostile to Israeli interests. During the 2017 General Assembly vote that condemned the U.S. decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem, Honduras was one of only a tiny group of countries that sided with Washington and Israel against the overwhelming majority.
Hernández also opened a diplomatic and trade office in Jerusalem, signaling recognition of the city as Israel’s capital. He then promised to relocate the full Honduran embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, issuing joint statements with Israeli and U.S. officials that set public deadlines for that step. In June 2021, he completed the move. At the inauguration, Hernández proclaimed that he was “here today in the eternal capital of Israel” and vowed to work “against antisemitism, often presented as anti Zionism,” as quoted by Israel Hayom.
Israel rewarded this loyalty with gestures of its own. It agreed to reopen its embassy in Tegucigalpa and provided security cooperation, technical assistance and emergency relief after devastating hurricanes and during the early stages of the COVID era.
Furthermore, Hernández pushed Honduras into the orbit of Christian Zionist networks. The Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem, an institution that promotes Christian support for Israel and campaigns against antisemitism and BDS, gave him its Friends of Zion Award in 2019 for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and for his diplomatic support. The Friends of Zion Museum and the Jerusalem Post emphasized that he now shared an honor roll with figures like Donald Trump and other leaders celebrated for their pro-Israel policies.
In the security arena, Hernández took positions that aligned perfectly with Washington and Tel Aviv. His government designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, a move welcomed by major American Jewish groups. This decision mirrored similar steps by other U.S.-aligned governments in the region–such as Argentina under Mauricio Macri–and confirmed that Tegucigalpa had no intention of straying from the Judeo-American consensus on Middle East security.
Even when the walls began to close in, Hernández treated Israel as his ultimate safety net. As his legal exposure increased and the prospect of extradition grew more likely, he reportedly turned to Israeli officials to ask for help in delaying or preventing his transfer to U.S. authorities. The Times of Israel reported that plea and underscored Hernández’s assumption that his years of unwavering support had earned him political capital in Jerusalem.
That calculation looked naïve when he arrived in New York in chains. It looks far more rational now that Donald Trump has delivered a pardon.
Trump himself cultivated a brand as perhaps the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moved the U.S embassy there, backed the annexation of the Golan Heights, and surrounded himself with advisers and donors who made support for Israel a central test of loyalty. The Friends of Zion Museum honored him with the same award it later gave Hernández, presenting both men as partners in a shared historic mission.
So when Trump announced in late 2025 that he would pardon Hernández, it was natural for mainstream outlets to emphasize the legal controversy and the scale of the drug conspiracy. But there is another thread that runs from the Mashav classroom in the early 1990s to the Jerusalem embassy ribbon cutting to the moment the gates opened at Hazelton. That thread is the politics of Zionism in the Americas and the unwritten rule that governs advancement and protection in that world.
Hernández spent his adult life proving that he would stand behind Israel. He did it in the United Nations chamber, in ceremonial torch lighting invitations, in embassy relocations, in his fights against BDS and in his designation of Hezbollah. He did it in speeches where he promised that “as long as I am president, Honduras will stand behind Israel” and in the moment when he described Jerusalem as the “eternal capital of Israel.”
Trump saw that record and recognized a fellow shabbos goy traveler. He understood that this was not just a corrupt Central American politician but a loyal member of a global pro-Israel camp who had delivered meaningful victories in a region where Israel has long worked to secure dependable allies. In a political universe where servility to world jewry carries more weight than any anti-corruption sermon, Hernández did not just have a lawyer. He had a patron.
The pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández is therefore more than a quirky case of presidential clemency. It is a message about the real hierarchy of values in U.S. foreign policy in the Trump era. Flooding American streets with cocaine will not necessarily erase your credit if you have spent years moving embassies to Jerusalem, voting the right way at the United Nations, and branding your small Central American country as an extension of Israel’s diplomatic network.
In that world, a man who helped turn his own nation into a narco playground can still find a way out of a 45-year sentence, as long as his record on Zionism is pure and his friendship with the most pro-Zionist president in modern U.S. history remains intact. For Juan Orlando Hernández, that friendship did not simply buy influence. It bought his freedom.
Israel moves to extend army service to 36 months
The Cradle | December 5, 2025
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced on 5 December a plan to extend mandatory military service to 36 months.
The move raises the current service terms from 30–32 months to a full 36 months and marks a significant shift in how Tel Aviv intends to staff its army at a time of deep political rupture and growing pressure on its northern front.
The ministers said the extension would add “10,000 service days per year” and could delay the discharge of soldiers scheduled to complete their service in 2026.
Katz’s office said the government will cut roughly 30,000 reserve duty positions and rely instead on longer compulsory service to fill the gaps.
The move also comes as the government promotes legislation to exempt the ultra-Orthodox, known as the Haredim, from the draft, while expecting regular soldiers to make up for the shrinking reserve force.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid condemned the arrangement as “a budget of corruption and draft-dodging.”
The adjustment is included in a significantly expanded 2026 defense budget. According to the prime minister’s office and statements issued by Katz, the budget now stands at $34.72 billion, up from an earlier draft of $27.90 billion.
Katz said the government will “reinforce the IDF and … reduce the burden on reservists,” though the plan effectively shifts that burden onto conscripts who will now serve an extra year. Smotrich said the overall increase compared with 2023 reached $14.57 billion.
The manpower strain has sharpened in recent months. Israeli Brigadier General Shai Tayeb told lawmakers that the army is currently short 12,000 recruits, including 7,000 combat soldiers, and warned that troop levels are projected to decline even further by early 2027.
Tayeb told the Knesset that Israel “needs to expand the base of those serving” and is preparing for three-year service terms and 70 days of annual reserve duty within five years.
Israel has even begun turning to foreign mercenaries to fill its ranks, with losses from campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, rising dropout rates, and growing reluctance among reservists to return to service, the army is left to face what officials describe as a “huge shortage” of capable fighters.
Pro-Israel Forces Intensify Effort To Control American Discourse
Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | December 4, 2025
Across the American political spectrum, support for the State of Israel is steadily eroding. With the long-running, staggeringly expensive redistribution of American wealth and weapons to one of the world’s most prosperous countries under unprecedented threat, Israel’s advocates inside the United States are growing increasingly desperate to suppress the facts, opinions, questions and imagery that are causing this sea change.
Pro-Israel forces have long worked to limit and shape US discourse to Israel’s advantage. However, the intensity and novelty of what’s taking place in 2025 — from the government-coerced transfer of a social media platform to pro-Israel billionaires, to the jailing and attempted deportation of a student for writing an opinion piece, and more — deserves the attention of every American who values free expression, an enlightened electorate, and independence from foreign influence.
Many Americans know that Congress and President Biden teamed up in 2024 to force the Chinese company ByteDance to divest its US operation of the popular video-sharing app TikTok, yet few realize this unusual intervention was motivated in large part by a desire to serve the interests of Israel.
Though politicians pointed to the supposed Chinese menace lurking inside the app — while revealing their lack of sincerity by continuing to use it themselves — the catalyst for the extraordinary legislation’s passage was a sea of viral content illuminating Israel’s rampage in Gaza, casting Palestinians in empathetic light, and questioning the legitimacy of the political philosophy that is Zionism.
The idea that passage of the ban was largely about Israel is no conspiracy theory. American politicians who supported the compelled divestiture of TikTok have candidly said so themselves. Sharing a stage with Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2024, then-Senator Mitt Romney said:
“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature. You look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts, so I’d note that’s of real interest to the president, who will get the chance to take action in that regard.”
Similarly, Rep. Mike Lawler of New York told a webinar that pro-Palestinian student protests were “exactly why we included the TikTok bill… because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the US.”
Of course, mere divestiture wouldn’t guarantee that TikTok would start suppressing anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian content in the United States. To have the desired effect, the buyer — who required White House approval — would have to be an ardent supporter of Israel. That’s just how things played out. In September, President Trump approved the sale of TikTok’s US operations to a joint venture led by Larry Ellison, the founder of tech-titan Oracle and the fourth-richest man in the world.
Ellison has expressed his “deep emotional connection to the State of Israel” and has been a major benefactor of the Israeli Defense Forces, via donations to IDF-supporting organizations. He spent at least $3 million on Marco Rubio’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, after being assured by Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations that Rubio would “be a great friend to Israel.” There are other Israel-favoring billionaires in the consortium now controlling TikTok’s American presence, among them NewsCorp head Rupert Murdoch and investment trader Jeff Yass.
Americans were propagandized into fearing Chinese control of TikTok users’ data. Now that data will be controlled by Oracle, a firm whose founder has described Israel as his own nation, said “there is no greater honor” than supporting the IDF, and invited Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a seat on the board. It’s also a firm with strong business ties to the Israel government, and a firm whose Israel-born executive vice chair and former CEO last year declared, “For [Oracle] employees, it’s clear: If you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here.”
A few months before the TikTok divestiture was finalized, the company installed former IDF soldier and self-described “passionate” Zionist Erica Mindel as TikTok’s hate speech manager in July. Weeks later, and just days before the transfer of TikTok’s US operation was approved, the platform posted new guidelines on Sept 13 about what’s allowed on the platform.
Soon after the change, users and content creators began sharing examples of content being deleted by TikTok, with the platform exploiting its vague new rules about “conspiracy theories” and “protected groups” to reject negative content about Israel — wielding the threat of demonetization of repeat offenders. In a recent appearance on the Breaking Points podcast, Guy Christensen, who has 3.4 million TikTok followers, shared his experience:
“What all these videos have in common that have been removed since Sept 13 are that I am talking about Israel, I’m talking about AIPAC’s influence, I’m talking about Larry Ellison and the attempt to put TikTok under Zionist control — I’m criticizing Israel in some way. It’s the same thing I’ve heard from my audience, my friends who are creators. Ever since Sept 13, they’ve had the same exact experience. Videos that are more informational and critical of Israel get removed.”
In a late-September meeting with pro-Israel social media “influencers,” Netanyahu hailed the transfer of TikTok’s US ownership. “We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield with which we’re engaged, and the most important ones are in social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok. Number one.” Expressing hope that, by “talking” with Elon Musk, his X platform could be reshaped to be more Israel-protective too, Netanyahu added, “If we can get those two things, we can get a lot.”
Ellison’s TikTok takeover is troubling enough, but that wasn’t his only media move this year. He also financed his son David’s takeover of Paramount Skydance, the media company that controls many movie and television properties, including CBS. David Ellison quickly installed as head of CBS News Bari Weiss — a self-described “Zionist fanatic” who took a gap year before college to live on an Israeli kibbutz.
Weiss’s history of wrangling over the bounds of acceptable speech vis-a-vis Israel goes back to her sophomore year at Columbia University, when she was part of a group of students who claimed they were subjected to intimidation by Middle East Studies professors over the students’ Zionist views. A university panel found only one of the supposed incidents represented unacceptable conduct.
Both outside observers and network insiders are braced for Weiss to nudge the outlet’s reporting to Israel’s benefit, and there are early indications validating worries about her bias. Citing executive sources inside CBS, the Wall Street Journal reported that foreign correspondent Chris Livesay, who was set to be laid off as part of a downsizing move that preceded Weiss’s arrival, sent Weiss an email expressing his affinity for Israel and claiming he was “bullied” for his beliefs. Weiss intervened and saved Livesay from the layoff. Other correspondents told the Journal that Livesay’s claim about bullying was bogus.
Compounding the expectations that CBS News is about to become a de facto Israel PR outlet, the network’s new ombudsman — the arbiter of editorial concerns — also has strong Zionist credentials. The New York Times describes Kenneth Weinstein as a “firm and vocal champion of Israel.” On X, Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal noted that, “during a 2021… event with Mike Pence, Weinstein touted his Israel lobbyist creds, describing how he’d been groomed by the Tikvah Fund, the Likudnik training network which will award Bari Weiss its Herzl Award this November.” (The Likud Party is the Israeli party led by Netanyahu.)
Summing up the TikTok and CBS moves, Glenn Greenwald wrote, “The minute the American public starts turning against Israel and the US financing of that country, the world’s richest and most fanatical pro-Israel billionaires start buying up large media outlets and TikTok, then install Bari Weiss and an ex-IDF soldier to control content.”
The transfer of TikTok into Israel-friendly hands isn’t the only example of intensified US government intervention in America’s public square on behalf of the tiny Middle Eastern country.
Much of the Trump administration’s war against anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian speech has focused on college campuses. In the most alarming such move in 2025, the Trump administration has arrested, jailed and attempted to deport foreign students for merely voicing their support for Palestinians or opposition to the Israeli government.
The most atrocious example — which Stark Realities examined in depth earlier this year — centers on a 30-year-old, Turkish Tufts University PhD candidate who was arrested on a Boston street and whisked away to a dismal Louisiana prison, just for co-authoring a calmly-written Tufts Daily op-ed urging the university to formally characterize Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide, and to sell the school’s Israel-associated investments.
This cruelly despotic tactic is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation. In a policy paper, the think tank urged pro-Israel groups and the US government to characterize pro-Palestinian activists as “effectively members of a terrorist support network,” and then use that characterization to target activists for deportations, expulsions from colleges, lawsuits, terminations by employers, and exclusion from “open society.”
Supporters of Israel have long attempted to stifle critics of the Israeli government by smearing them as antisemites. In 2016, that kind of mislabelling was codified in a definition of antisemitism that’s now being embraced by governments, universities and other institutions in the United States and around the world: the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition of antisemitism.”
Some elements of the IHRA definition are reasonable, but others irrationally conflate criticism of the State of Israel with hatred of all Jews. For example, the IHRA definition says it’s antisemitic to “claim that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” or to merely “draw comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
Other, vague elements of the definition are open to creative interpretations, facilitating bogus accusations of bigotry against Israel’s critics. For example, the IHRA says it’s antisemitic to “apply double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” The IHRA also says it’s antisemitic to make statements about the “power of Jews as [a] collective,” which can put someone who talks about the enormous influence of the pro-Israel lobby squarely in the crosshairs.
Similarly, the IHRA says it’s antisemitic to “deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” a definition that could ensnare people who — right or wrong — advocate for the State of Israel to be replaced by a new governing arrangement for the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, those who want speech to be policed on Israel’s behalf frequently point to the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as inherently antisemitic.
As I wrote in another Stark Realities essay, “No Country Has a Right To Exist”:
Those who support the State of Israel are free to present a case that it’s a just arrangement for the 7.5 million Jews and 7.5 million Palestinians “between the river and the sea.” However, painting those who demand a new arrangement as inherently immoral, genocidal or antisemitic is ignorant at best and maliciously misleading at worst.
Doing its part to vilify Israel’s critics and mislead the public and policymakers, the Anti-Defamation League has employed expansive definitions in its numerical tracking of antisemitic incidents — statistics that are unquestioningly quoted by journalists and cited by pro-Israel politicians.
For example, in early 2024, the ADL claimed that, in the first three months after the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel and the IDF’s brutal assault on Gaza, antisemitic incidents skyrocketed 360%. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said Jews faced a threat “unprecedented in modern history.” However, the ADL admitted that it was counting as antisemitic incidents all protests that included “anti-Zionist chants and slogans”
Of course, exaggerating the scale of antisemitism does more than facilitate efforts to suppress criticism of Israel: It also helps the ADL justify its existence and boost its fundraising. The ADL’s over-counting is nothing new. In 2017, the ADL claimed antisemitic incidents in the United States had soared by 86% in the first quarter of the year, and major media outlets ran with the story. However, much of the increase springs from the ADL’s decision to include a huge number of bomb threats phoned into US synagogues and schools by a Jew living in Israel.
The IHRA definition is at the forefront of a broad campaign to suppress candid discourse about Israel and Palestine on college campuses, with multiple state governments ordering public schools to use it to determine what can and can’t be said.
Bard College’s Kenneth Stern, a lead drafter of a 2004 antisemitism definition that was subsequently adopted by the IHRA, has spoken out against the weaponization of the definition to stifle discourse at universities. “The history of the abuse of the IHRA definition demonstrates the desire is largely political—it is not so much a desire to identify antisemitism, but rather to label certain speech about Israel as antisemitic,” Stern wrote at the Knight First Amendment Institute.
Even at schools that haven’t adopted the IHRA definition, activists and scholars who are critical of Israel and empathetic to the Palestinians are being subjected to countless false accusations of antisemitism, and universities are being sued by pro-Israel students who claim the schools tolerate antisemitism.
A Stark Realities analysis of an 84-page complaint filed against the University of Pennsylvania found nearly every alleged “antisemitic incident” was merely an instance in which Penn students, professors and guest speakers engaged in political expression that proponents of the State of Israel strongly disagree with. Eighteen months later, a federal judge agreed. “At worst, Plaintiffs accuse Penn of tolerating and permitting the expression of viewpoints which differ from their own,” Judge Mitchell Goldberg wrote as he dismissed the case.
Courtroom victories, however, can only do so much to counter the chilling effect of campaigns that vilify students, professors and institutions as antisemitic. That’s especially true when university cash flows are threatened.
Major pro-Israel donors have withdrawn or threatened to suspend donations to various schools, and those threats have been credited with forcing out university presidents like Penn’s Liz Magill. Donor pressure has also led schools to adopt the problematic IHRA antisemitism definition, shut down chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, and strip Israel-critical professors of chair positions.
The greatest financial pressure being exerted on universities, however, is coming from the Trump administration, which has not only suspended billions of dollars in funding from various universities that are supposed hives of antisemitism, but has also filed lawsuits and hammered schools with fines. Many of them are surrendering, paying the government large sums and making policy and staffing changes. Last week, Northwestern agreed to pay $75 million to the federal government for its alleged failure to fight “antisemitism.” Earlier, Columbia agreed to a $200 million fine payable over three years, and Brown will surrender $50 million.
There are other avenues by which government force is being tapped to squelch criticism of Israel and advocacy for Palestinians. Dozens of states have passed legislation that bar individuals and businesses from contracting with the state if they boycott or divest from Israel. That led to a bizarre spectacle in which hurricane-battered Texans applying for emergency benefits were asked to verify that they do not and will not boycott Israel. Comparable federal measures have been introduced, but not yet enacted.
Another proposed federal bill is the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to use the IHRA definition when evaluating accusations that colleges tolerate antisemitism — essentially codifying a Trump executive order. It sailed through the House in 2024 by a 320-91 vote, but stalled in the Senate this year amid bipartisan concerns about the definition. Seven amendments had been attached in committee, including one clarifying that criticism of the Israeli government isn’t antisemitism.
Tellingly, champions of the bill said amendments like that were poison pills that would render it un-passable.
Zionism on the Upper East Side
By Patrick Lawrence | Consortium News | December 3, 2025
We watch in horror from afar as the Zionist terror state continues its genocide against the people of Gaza and escalates its slower-motion, lower-technology genocide against the 3 million Palestinians who reside in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, otherwise known as the Occupied Territories — illegally occupied, of course.
As a few Israeli commentators have pointed out — those few who guard their integrity— the operative principle here is the limitless impunity the Western powers have long granted “the Jewish state.”
This is the outcome, they say, when a people given to a culture of vengeance are told they will never suffer consequences however barbaric their conduct toward others, however many laws they break, however many their assassinations, however many their torture victims, however many exploding telephones they plant among civilian populations, etc.
Maybe we need no reminders, maybe we do, that this presumption of impunity is not bound by sovereign borders and is not limited to the cowardly, condemnable savagery of apartheid Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. But we had one last week, and it is well we consider it carefully.
Zohran Mamdani, the principled social democrat who is New York’s mayor-elect, is now under attack from Zionist Americans who insist Zionist Americans are above the law — American law and international law. You may look well on Mamdani and you may not, but as he is besieged by these objectionable people, so are we all.
This story begins on Wednesday, Nov. 19, at Park East Synagogue, a grand edifice that sits on East 67th Street between Third and Lexington Avenues in the Lenox Hill section of Manhattan.
Park East has been serving Modern Orthodox Jews since 1890. Its congregation, to be noted, is comprised of the great and good of the Upper East Side. These are observant but assimilated Jews, thoroughly plugged into, let’s say, secular public space.
Except.
Two Wednesdays back Park East hosted an organization dedicated to encouraging Jews to “make Aliyah,” the Hebrew term for emigrating to “the Promised Land.” O.K., you cannot find anything legally wrong in this, although it is unambiguously a moral wrong in that it expresses support for a genocidal state.
But let us set aside the moral question for now. The organization Park East sponsored, Nefesh B’Nefesh, also assists American Jews who wish to emigrate to Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. This is a legal matter and as such not inconsequential.
American Settlers
Statistics on the settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are hard to nail down (and I can easily imagine why). The Times of Israel reported eight years ago that some 60,000 Americans were among the Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
That was roughly 15 percent of the settler population then — not counting the considerable number residing in East Jerusalem. We have no precise figures now, but these populations — settlers and Americans among the settlers — are both higher.
As has been well-reported, and well-recorded in several documentaries, the Americans among the West Bank settlers are frequently the most violent in their incessant attacks on Palestinians. They have also been at times the most readily inclined to murder.
There is the infamous case of Baruch Goldstein, a freakshow Zionist from Brooklyn who killed 29 Palestinians when he attacked the Ibrahimi Mosque (tomb of Abraham and other patriarchs) in Hebron in 1994. Goldstein was not singular: He was and remains exemplary — and a hero among some Zionists. National Security Minister Ben Givr had a picture of Goldstein on his living room wall until 2020.
I cannot name the precise statutes applicable here, but they must be several. Open and shut, just the facts, Ma’am, Nefesh B’Nefesh is an accomplice to the settler movement.
Most immediately significant in the Park East case, Nefesh B’Nefesh — this translates as “soul to soul,” and who knows what that is all about — is directly implicated in the settlers’ breach of international law given that all the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal according to said law.
There was no claiming surprise that blustery Nov. 19th when a group of roughly 200 vociferous demonstrators gathered in front of Park East to protest the promotional seminar Nefesh B’Nefesh was running that day.
“Death to the IDF” was among the tamer of various chants; others encouraged violence against settlers. “It is our duty,” one leader of the demonstration said measuredly to those assembled, “to make them think twice before holding these events.”
Inside the Park East building, people indirectly but unmistakably promoting violence against Palestinians, land theft and all the rest. And on East 67th Street, righteous indignation, anger in behalf of a persecuted people, some violent rhetoric, but no violence.
It was obvious the mayor-elect would have to intervene. The event itself warranted this, and various Zionist constituencies, as well-reported before and since Mamdani’s election, have been attacking him as a radical jihadist, an anti–Semite and who knows what else, so attempting to poison his relations with New York’s Jewish community.
Here is the ever-poised Mamdani’s day-after statement, his first on the incident:
“The mayor-elect has discouraged the use of language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so. He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
A few days later, storms of protest from Zionist quarters having instantly erupted, Mamdani sent this statement to The New York Times:
“We will protect New Yorkers’ First Amendment rights while making clear that nothing can justify language calling for ‘death to’ anyone. It is unacceptable, full stop.”
I find these statements a little in the way of Solomon in their discernment, in Mamdani’s determination not to tilt his hand and to articulate the core truth of the matter:
The more extreme language out on East 67th Street was wrong so far as it intimidated synagogue goers, but the principle of free speech is nonetheless to be honored; those encouraging breaches of international law are wrong, and a synagogue should not be used to promote illegalities.
‘A Hateful Mob’
Maybe what has come back at Mamdani in the course of all this was predictable, more-of-the-same babble. “Mob” was the de rigueur term among those responding to the mayor-elect’s response.
The demonstrators were “a hateful mob of anti–Israel protesters,” the New York Post reported, and it got worse from there. Mamdani sided with “an anti–Semitic mob,” eJP, or eJewishphilanthropy.com, declared. “Last week,” this outfit continued, “Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani failed the first test of his promise to protect all New Yorkers.”
And from William Daroff, the chief exec of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations: “We are still judging him, and I’d say that at the moment he’s got a failing grade.”
They sitteth in judgment, you see.
O.K., we have heard all this before in one or another context, so has Mamdani. He is surely in for more of same once he assumes office Jan. 1. But we ought not miss the very much larger matters raised by the Park East incident.
There is the First Amendment question, as Mamdani correctly noted, and there are the legal questions as pencil-sketched above. These are related at the not-too-distant horizon.
People speaking for Nefesh B’Nefesh now deny they promote emigration to West Bank settlements — which, as the group’s website attests, is simply not true. It advertises Gush Etzion, an expanding sprawl of 22–and-counting settlements south of Jerusalem, Ma`ale Adumim, whose location makes it key to the Israelis final takeover of the West Bank, and various others.
“Teaching about Aliyah and Zionism belongs in that space”: This is the aforementioned William Daroff. And from eJP again: “Mamdani condemned the synagogue’s choice of programming.”
Choice of programming.
You see what is going on here. Park East and Nefesh B’Nefesh are encouraging Americans to breach international law. And absolutely to a one, those defending the synagogue and the event-organizer do so by pretending this is not what is most pithily at issue.
“We are deeply concerned by, and firmly condemn, the violent rhetoric and aggressive behavior that took place outside of the Park East Synagogue,” Nefesh B’Nefesh now declares on its website. Violent rhetoric and aggressive behavior on East 67th Street but not in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem.
To go straight to the point, this is another assertion of Zionist impunity. And we should understand what has lately transpired in New York as a very, very direct extension of the impunity that encourages and also protects the Israeli terror machine in Gaza and the West Bank. Impunity: It is a blight under which Palestinians suffer, and none of us is immune to it.
To put this another way, we witness an especially insidious case of chutzpah, the dangers of which I have considered elsewhere. You have your laws, the world has its, and we will ignore them before your eyes (and ostracize you as an anti–Semite if you object). This, in a sentence, is what Zionists now insist we must accept.
Capture, Terror, Genocide: The Systematic Annihilation of Palestine Under Netanyahu’s Leadership
By Viktor Mikhin – New Eastern Outlook – December 3, 2025
For over half a century, the bloody drama of Palestine’s occupation has dragged on, but in recent years, it has entered its darkest and most overt phase.
What was once disguised as “temporary security measures” or a “complex territorial dispute” now stands exposed for what it is: a deliberate, brutal, and systematic campaign of land seizure, the forced displacement of an entire people, and their incremental physical destruction. At the head of this process, as its chief architect and inspiration, is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His tools are the state apparatus, the military, and the wild gangs of so-called “settlers” who do the dirty work of clearing the land of its indigenous population.
Savages with a State License: Who Unleashes the Settlers?
The rhetorical question in this headline is no mystery. The answer is screamingly obvious to anyone who dares to look at the situation without the veil of propaganda. The violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers in the West Bank is not the “work of a small group of extremists,” as Netanyahu and his Western apologists hypocritically claim. It is part of a well-oiled system of demographic engineering, strategic land capture, and the fragmentation of Palestinian society.
These attacks are not chaotic pogroms. They are well-planned and coordinated raids that serve a clear purpose: to terrorize Palestinian families into fleeing their land so that Israel can confiscate it and hand it over to Jewish settlers. When settlers burn olive groves—centuries of Palestinian history and a source of livelihood for entire families—the army declares those lands a “security buffer zone.” When armed settler thugs drive Palestinian shepherds from their pastures, the military immediately establishes a “closed military zone” there. This is a criminal symbiosis: unofficial enforcers create “facts on the ground,” and the official state machine legitimizes and consolidates them.
The political ecosystem built by Netanyahu and his ultra-right allies doesn’t just condone this violence—it cultivates, funds, and protects it. The state builds roads for illegal outposts, provides them with electricity and water, and supplies them with armed protection. Ministers in Netanyahu’s government openly call for the “erasure” of Palestinian villages, the annexation of the West Bank, and the “voluntary transfer” of Palestinians—a euphemism for a policy of ethnic cleansing. When senior officials broadcast such slogans, Israeli settlers take them as a direct order to act. The state maintains “plausible deniability,” but its fingerprints are on every burned-out home, on every dead Palestinian.
The Army of Occupation: Accomplice and Guarantor of Impunity
The role of the Israeli army (IDF) in this process is far from passive observation. It is an active accomplice and the guarantor of impunity for settler terror. Numerous reports from human rights organizations, the UN, and even testimonies from former Israeli soldiers paint the same picture: soldiers stand by while settlers assault Palestinians, burn their property, and seize land. Military checkpoints are often used as entry points for settler gangs into Palestinian villages. Arrests, in the vast majority of cases, are used against Palestinians who dare to defend their homes and families.
This military logic is simple and cynical: settlers are viewed as allies, an extension of state expansionist policy, while Palestinians—even when they are the victims—are a priori considered a “security threat.” When an occupying army protects the criminals and punishes their victims, the occupation becomes something more—a system of organized persecution, a crime against humanity falling under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Human Rights Watch and other authoritative organizations directly accuse Israel of committing war crimes and pursuing a policy aimed at the forced transfer of Palestinians. The International Court in The Hague has repeatedly confirmed that Israeli settlements constitute a gross violation of international law. But for Netanyahu and his cabinet, these verdicts are empty words. They understand perfectly well that condemnation will not be followed by any real accountability.
Netanyahu: Chief Architect of a Genocidal Policy
Benjamin Netanyahu is not merely a passive observer or a manager of a complex process. He is the ideological and practical inspiration behind a policy that is becoming increasingly difficult not to call genocide. Under his leadership, settlement expansion has reached unprecedented levels, and settler violence has been institutionalized as a tool of state policy. His rhetoric about a “small group of extremists” is a brazen lie designed to lull the international community to sleep.
The Netanyahu government has legalized dozens of illegal outposts built on stolen Palestinian land. It has directed millions of shekels to their infrastructure and security. It has brought outright racists and advocates of the “transfer” of Palestinians into the highest echelons of power, mainstreaming their ideas. When National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an open supporter of the terrorist organization Kach, distributes weapons to settlers and calls for harsher strikes on Gaza, he does so with Netanyahu’s silent approval. This is not a deviation from the norm; it *is* the norm established by the Prime Minister.
The statistics speak more eloquently than any diplomatic trick. Since the start of the latest bloody massacre in Gaza in October 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank. Hundreds of them are civilians. These numbers are not “collateral damage.” They are the result of a deliberate policy aimed at crushing any resistance to the occupation and creating unlivable conditions. The destruction of agricultural land, the blockade of cities, mass arrests, and extrajudicial killings—all are elements of a single plan to dismantle Palestinian society and expel the people from their land. This meets the definition of genocide under the UN Convention: creating conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a group.
The International Community: Complicity and Hypocrisy
The response of the so-called “international community” to this ongoing genocide is a model of hypocrisy and political cowardice. Statements of “deep concern” from European capitals and even mild condemnations of “settler violence” from the U.S. State Department are nothing more than theater, designed to create an illusion of action. In reality, they provide cover for business as usual.
If Europe truly considers the settlements illegal, why does it continue profitable trade with them? Why are companies operating in the occupied territories not sanctioned? If the U.S. truly disagrees with Netanyahu’s policy, why does the annual $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel continue to flow without any conditions? This aid is a direct financial subsidy for the machinery of occupation and killing. Every bomb dropped on Gaza, every armored personnel carrier patrolling the city of Hebron, and every bayonet arming a settler is paid for by American taxpayers.
Even the recent call from four European powers—France, Germany, Italy, and the UK—for an end to settler violence remains an empty gesture as long as it is not followed by real consequences for Israel. Diplomacy without sanctions, condemnation without accountability—this is not just useless, it is immoral, for it makes the international community complicit in the crimes.
A Crime Without Punishment
The situation in Palestine today is not a “conflict between two sides.” It is an asymmetric war waged by a powerful, nuclear-armed state against a practically defenseless civilian population, stripped of statehood, rights, and hope. Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has finally cast off the mask and revealed itself as an aggressor state, pursuing a policy of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
The settlers are merely the shock troops, the vanguard of this policy. The army is its shield and sword. And the Netanyahu government is its brain and black heart. The system they have created works with frightening efficiency: localized terror, legalization of seizures, military cover, legal machinations, and an information smokescreen. The goal is clear: to finally bury the possibility of a viable Palestinian state and bring the “Eretz Israel” project to its logical conclusion across the entire territory of historic Palestine, regardless of the cost in Palestinian lives.
The world faces a choice: to continue watching this bloody spectacle, hiding behind diplomatic phrasing, or to finally call things by their true names and apply all measures of responsibility provided for by international law to the rogue state and its leaders. Silence and inaction are not neutrality. They are an endorsement of genocide. As long as Netanyahu and his regime are not brought to justice, and the Palestinian people do not obtain freedom and justice, the conscience of all humanity, and above all the Western world, will be stained with a bloody mark that can never be washed away.
Viktor Mikhin, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Expert on Middle Eastern Countries
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China and India have ‘low intellectual potential’ – top Zelensky aide
RT | September 13, 2023
The people leading India and China lack the ability to predict the long-term consequences of their policies, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has claimed.
Mikhail Podoliak pointed to what he called “the problem of the modern world,” singling out India and China, in an interview with Ukrainian media on Tuesday.
“The problem with these countries is that they do not analyze the consequences of their own moves. These countries, unfortunately, have low intellectual potential,” he said.
Podoliak suggested that even though India has a lunar exploration program, it “does not mean that this nation understands what the modern world precisely is.”
The dismissive remarks were in the context of Beijing and New Delhi’s refusal to support Kiev in its conflict with Moscow. Podoliak complained that India, China and Türkiye were “profiting” from the war by maintaining trade with Russia.
“Technically, it is in their national interests,” he acknowledged, before presenting his view of what would benefit China in the long-run.
“China should be interested in Russia disappearing, because it is an archaic nation that drags China into unnecessary conflicts,” he claimed. … continue
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