Former Israeli soldier: I left the Gaza war with shame and regret
Palestinian Information Center – June 3, 2026
GAZA – British magazine The Economist published an extensive testimony from a former Israeli soldier who took part in the war on Gaza, describing practices he says he witnessed firsthand during military operations and expressing deep feelings of shame and regret over what occurred in the territory.
The interview was conducted through the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence, which collects testimonies from soldiers who served in the Palestinian territories. The soldier was identified under the pseudonym “Jonathan.”
He said he joined the fighting following the October 7, 2023 events, believing he was participating in what he considered “the most just war in Israel’s history.” However, his experiences on the ground led him to completely reassess those beliefs after months of combat.
According to the soldier, his unit entered Gaza under what he described as vague combat directives. He said troops were not given clear rules of engagement regarding civilian protection and that the prevailing assumption was that anyone remaining in targeted areas after evacuation orders and bombardment could be treated as a legitimate target.
He added that Palestinian men of fighting age were often viewed as potential threats and noted that many of those killed during operations were unarmed. In many cases, soldiers were unable to verify the identities of those they targeted amid the chaos and destruction of war.
In one of the most significant parts of his testimony, the soldier alleged that the Israeli military used Palestinian detainees in field operations, forcing them to inspect buildings and move ahead of troops to check for explosives or ambushes. He said the practice was commonly referred to among soldiers as the “Mosquito Protocol.”
He further stated that discussions within military units focused less on the legality of using civilians as human shields and more on how to manage those compelled to carry out such tasks.
The soldier also described widespread destruction of homes and infrastructure across Gaza, saying that demolition gradually became the primary mission for many infantry units, even though soldiers often did not understand the broader strategic objectives behind the operations.
He said doubts increasingly emerged among soldiers as the war continued without achieving its stated goals, and that frustration grew within the military over the lack of a clear strategy and the prolonged nature of the conflict.
The former soldier accused Israeli media outlets of ignoring much of the suffering endured by Palestinians in Gaza, saying the gap between what he witnessed firsthand and what was presented to the public ultimately motivated him to speak out.
He concluded by saying that he no longer feels pride in his Israeli identity or his military service, adding that he is ashamed of what took place and can no longer imagine raising his country’s flag above his home as many citizens do elsewhere.
The UK Government Will Persecute Those Vocal about Israel, But Not War Criminals
By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | June 3, 2026
After Declassified-UK revealed that around 2,000 Britons have served in the Israeli military since the beginning of the Gaza Genocide on October 7, 2023, a campaign has now been launched to demand that London pursue justice. Instead of pursuing potential war criminals, the British authorities appear too busy cracking down on critics of Israel.
A major campaign has been launched by Declassified and the International Center of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), demanding “in the interests of transparency, public safety, and justice”, the British government adhere to the following demands:
- “Track the movements of Brits who have served in the IDF (Israeli army – PC)”.
- “Subject them to secondary screening where necessary at ports of entry”.
- “Support robust war crimes investigations in line with domestic and international law”.
Producing a letter addressed to the British leadership, the campaign quickly attracted the signatures of 60 prominent individuals– including lawyers, military veterans, politicians and Genocide Scholars. The campaign was also grounded in the fact of the recent meeting of the Hague Group, where 40 States convened to demand the implementation of international law in order for Israel to be held accountable.
This is but one of various initiatives launched to achieve justice for the victims of the Gaza genocide, aligning alongside activist work, legal projects, political lobbying efforts, and even efforts through the world’s top legal bodies.
Notably, the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have so far failed to achieve their desired results. Similarly, South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is still pending. Having worked to discourage the usefulness of international law, these cases also highlight a clear reality: individual nations’ leaders must be forced to take action, not simply a court.
The Declassified-ICJP campaign seeks to push the UK government to implement the law, which is why so many are getting behind it, hoping that the pressure will finally make London do the right thing.
For its part, the British government has been doing precisely the opposite of what this new campaign demands. In fact, in a recent move, it decided to reject the entry of prominent Leftist commentators Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker. Instead of admitting in a public statement why they had done this, they instead fed the information to The Times newspaper, informing them that comments critical of Israel were the reason for refusing them entry.
A range of personalities, from journalists to activists and former politicians, have also notably been detained at British ports of entry, under the Terrorism Act, all because of their outspoken stances on the issue of Palestine and criticism of the Israeli government. Palestine Action was even designated a terrorist organization for launching a campaign to directly confront weapons manufacturers in the UK that are affiliated with Israel’s biggest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, or supply the Israeli military directly.
Journalists like Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada and activists such as Sarah Wilkinson were even subjected to police raids on their personal homes. These are not isolated cases and there have been numerous others since the beginning of the genocide.
All of this begs the question: If the free speech rights of Britons and foreign visitors to the UK are nullified when it comes to criticizing and voicing discontent at Israeli war crimes, does the British government care for domestic legislation, let alone international law? Or, is there simply an exception to Israel that puts its officials and citizens outside of the law altogether?
Take, for example, the infamous case of Shemema Begum, a British national who was brainwashed by Daesh (IS) propaganda and headed to Syria in order to become part of the group as a bride to a fighter. Begum had made this decision at 15 years of age, and as a result, the British State revoked her citizenship, refusing her entry back into the country.
Keep in mind that Begum never committed any provable war crime, much less engaged in committing genocide; she was also a young teenager when she made this decision. The UK government, however, made the determination that she was unfit for her British passport and could no longer return to the nation of her birth.
A few years after this was all decided in court and the British Home Office fought its case – after presenting its arguments as both legally binding and moral principles – there are now some 2,000 Britons who were adults who made the decision to actively fight in a military, committing what the ICJ has ruled a plausible genocide.
Thousands of UK citizens who served in a military commanded by men who now have war crimes arrest warrants issued for them, yet not a single one has been stripped of their citizenship, there is no evidence that a single one of them has even been questioned at a port of entry, let alone investigated. All of this again points back to the question of double standards and whether the UK considers Israelis as above both domestic and international law.
If the answer is that Israel is simply above the law, then this sets a dangerous precedent and poses a major security threat inside the UK and outside its borders also. If London believes that the law doesn’t apply to Israel, then its legal system loses all legitimacy in the eyes of the public and downgrades the status of the nation in the international order.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
Australian Sumud Flotilla activists file ICC war crimes case against Israel over torture, sexual violence
The Cradle | June 1, 2026
Australian activists who took part in the Global Sumud Flotilla for Gaza filed a formal submission with the International Criminal Court (ICC) on 30 May, accusing Israel of war crimes based on documented evidence of torture and sexual violence sustained during their abduction and imprisonment.
The legal filing, submitted by 11 Australian survivors of the Flotilla and their legal team, is supported by dozens of survivor testimonies, video evidence, medical records, and sworn statements.
This evidence details severe beatings and sexual abuse following the 18 May interception of an international aid mission carrying food and medicine to the besieged Gaza Strip in an attempt to break the Israeli blockade of the enclave.
One specific account included in the submission describes an Australian humanitarian worker being forcibly injected with an unidentified substance by Israeli captors.
The submission also incorporates video evidence, including footage posted to social media by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who boasted of the ill treatment and showed handcuffed activists on their knees being taunted by Israeli soldiers.
The Global Sumud Flotilla reports that at least 67 participants suffered injuries during their imprisonment that required medical evaluation, with 12 individuals requiring hospitalization.
One survivor, Australian filmmaker Juliet Lamont, in an interview with Double Down News, recounted being dragged into a shipping container she called a “torture tunnel” where she was placed in a stress position, hands restrained behind her back, and ankles shackled in the dark before being “vaginally raped by one of the male soldiers,” while “other people had guns inserted inside them.”
She added that a 70-year-old woman’s ribs had been broken as “howls of torture and pain” would emit from the same chamber she had been tortured in.
This legal action follows the UN adding Israel to a 2026 blacklist for parties guilty of committing sexual violence in conflict zones. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres cited documented “patterns of sexual violence” against detainees, leading to the designation of the Israeli Prison Service on the blacklist.
While Israel’s ambassador to Australia and other Israeli officials have denied these claims, asserting that participants were treated according to established procedures, the Australian government previously sanctioned Minister Ben Gvir for his “shocking and unacceptable” treatment of the detainees.
Returning survivors have expressed outrage at the Australian federal government, noting that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has declined multiple requests to meet with them.
Flotilla participant Isla Lamont highlighted the contrast of being granted a hearing at the ICC while being ignored by domestic leadership, stating that “If Australian survivors can be heard in The Hague but not in Canberra, something has gone badly wrong”.
The flotilla organizers are now calling for independent international investigations, arms embargoes, and the enforcement of arrest warrants for the officials responsible.
French activists are also pursuing their own separate legal complaint on the “humiliation, rape, and acts of torture” they endured, explicitly declining to cooperate with the French Foreign Ministry’s request for a criminal probe due to their government’s continued diplomatic support for Israel throughout the genocide in Gaza.
AIPAC concealing support for candidates as its brand becomes ‘toxic’ in Democratic primaries: Report
Press TV – June 1, 2026
The pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC has adopted fundraising methods that obscure its role in directing campaign contributions to political candidates, as support for the Israeli regime declines among Democratic voters in the United States, according to a report.
AIPAC has traditionally highlighted its success in helping elect candidates committed to supporting the regime, including backing billions of dollars in annual US military aid.
Reporting on Sunday, however, Israeli paper Ha’aretz said growing criticism of the regime among Democratic voters has made public association with the lobbying group a potential political liability.
“But as the Israel-boosting organization’s brand becomes toxic in many Democratic primaries, [AIPAC] has adopted a new fundraising method that hides its involvement in steering funds to favored contenders,” it wrote.
According to the report, AIPAC has encouraged donors to contribute through online portals it controls that direct funds straight to candidates’ campaigns, thereby “erasing AIPAC’s fingerprints in public data.”
The tactic was reportedly used in Michigan, where Congresswoman Haley Stevens is running for an open Senate seat against Abdul el-Sayed. During the campaign, el-Sayed criticized Stevens for accepting AIPAC-linked funding, saying the money had “bought” her support for continued US military aid for Tel Aviv.
The Detroit News reported that AIPAC raised several million dollars for Stevens through a fundraising page hosted on its website. Ha’aretz also said the group previously emailed donors directing them to candidate-specific donation pages on the “Pro-Israel Network” website rather than to AIPAC itself.
The report added that these portals allow AIPAC to gather donor information and share it with candidates, while working on their behalf and “shielding” the process from public view. According to Ha’aretz, the strategy helps candidates avoid criticism for accepting AIPAC support at a time when only 13 percent of Democratic voters reportedly view the regime favorably.
In March, Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego said, “I wouldn’t take AIPAC money because you have to basically be endorsing what’s happening right now, and it’s not good.”
Ha’aretz also reported that AIPAC has increasingly operated through political action committees whose names do not reference either the organization or the regime.
The issue has also surfaced among Republicans. Earlier this month, AIPAC spent $16 million in efforts to defeat Representative Thomas Massie, a prominent critic of Tel Aviv, in a Republican primary. Following his defeat, Massie said, “It’s turned into a referendum on whether Israel gets to buy seats in Congress.”
Ezra Klein Warns Israel’s Role in Iran War Will Fuel Antisemitism
By Jose Nino | Occidental Observer | May 30, 2026
For decades, prominent Jewish voices have wrestled privately with an uncomfortable question. Does aggressive Israeli government conduct expose diaspora Jewish communities to backlash they did not invite? In early March, Ezra Klein brought that question back into public view. Speaking with former Obama senior adviser Ben Rhodes on a podcast episode titled “The Great Lie of War”, the New York Times columnist warned that Israel’s central role in the joint U.S. assault on Iran could fuel a new wave of antisemitism.
The two men spent most of the interview discussing the strategic recklessness of the Iran operation where the United States and Israel launched an assault that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and much of his senior command. They examined the lack of congressional authorization, the absence of an endgame, the risk of a massive refugee crisis, and what they described as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s long-sought goal of drawing the United States into direct military confrontation with Iran.
The antisemitism remark came near the end of that segment, specifically as a follow-on to a discussion about Saudi ambivalence toward the war and the question of what Israel actually wants from the conflict. Klein’s exact words in the transcript were, “I’m not saying this is the biggest issue at this moment, but the centrality of Israel in the operation has raised some concerns for me about what this is going to mean for anti-Semitism. You see the amount of talk on the MAGA right, but elsewhere as well that, you know, Israel’s leverage over Donald Trump or that, you know, this is all just some kind of Israeli plot.”
Klein then noted that Netanyahu appeared to be gambling with Israel’s long term political standing in America and in the world at a time of “very, very sharply rising anti-Semitism,” expressing uncertainty about how it would all pan out. The New York Times columnist’s concern, stated plainly, was that Israel’s highly visible, central role in what many perceived as an unjustified war of aggression would fuel conspiracy theories rather than defuse them. His worry was that Netanyahu’s short-term tactical success, finally getting a U.S. president to strike Iran, risked long-term consequences for Jews, especially in the United States.
This dilemma is not new. Jewish billionaire George Soros articulated a similar concern over two decades ago. Soros has largely steered clear of public association with Jewish communal life and seldom appears at exclusively Jewish functions. That changed in 2003, when he took the stage at a New York City meeting hosted by the Jewish Funders Network. Questioned about the spread of antisemitism across Europe, Soros offered an unexpected diagnosis, laying blame at the feet of U.S. and Israeli policy. “There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that,” he stated. “If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish. I can’t see how one could confront it directly.”
At the time, the reaction from Jewish leadership was furious. Elan Steinberg, who served as senior adviser to the World Jewish Congress after a stint as its executive director, fired back. “Let’s understand things clearly: Anti-Semitism is not caused by Jews; it’s caused by anti-Semites.” Abraham Foxman dismissed Soros’s words as “absolutely obscene.” The head of the ADL elaborated. “He buys into the stereotype. It’s a simplistic, counterproductive, biased and bigoted perception of what’s out there. It’s blaming the victim for all of Israel’s and the Jewish people’s ills.”
The Foxman and Steinberg responses reflected an orthodox position within Jewish communal leadership. Antisemitism, in this view, is a pathology of antisemites, and any attempt to link it to Israeli behavior constitutes victim blaming. Yet this position has always co-existed uneasily with a practical awareness that Israeli actions, particularly those perceived as disproportionate or aggressive, create public relations challenges for diaspora Jewish communities.
Klein’s 2026 remarks fall squarely within this tension. He was warning that Netanyahu’s gamble, making Israel so visibly central to an unpopular war, would hand ammunition to those who already believed such theories. Polling data suggests that Klein’s concerns about Israel’s political standing are well-founded. Gallup’s 2025 Annual World Affairs Survey documented a broader collapse in American sentiment toward Israel. Only 46% of Americans sympathized with Israelis, the lowest figure in 25 years of Gallup tracking. Among Democrats, 59% sympathized more with Palestinians—with only 21% sympathizing with Israelis—creating a nearly 3-to-1 ratio, the first time Palestinians had held such a commanding lead among members of a major U.S. party. A majority of Americans, and a record-high 76% of Democrats, supported an independent Palestinian state.
These trends predate the Iran strike and reflect cumulative damage from Israel’s conduct in Gaza. The joint United States and Israel operation against Iran, with Israel’s role so prominently featured, is unlikely to reverse this trajectory and will more than likely heighten Western populations’ hostility toward Israel. The polling numbers bear this out.
The Jewish People Policy Institute found that only 28% of strong liberal Jews support the war while 62% oppose it. Support climbs to 100% among strong conservative Jews. The partisan split is even more dramatic. Trump voters among American Jews back the war at 99%, while Harris voters divide 47% to 42%.
The picture among Americans generally looks very different. Pew Research found that 59% of Americans said the United States made the wrong decision in using military force and 61% disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict. An AP-NORC poll found that 59% of Americans believe U.S. military action has gone “too far,” while a Quinnipiac survey reported 74% oppose sending U.S. ground troops into Iran. The immediate unpopularity of the Iran war combined with Israel’s sullied image as a result of the Gaza genocide may explain why elements of American Jewry are embracing certain forms of controlled opposition to the Netanyahu regime, while stopping short of criticizing the entire Zionist project and its thoroughly Jewish nature.
It should be said that rational anti-Semitism is never about all Jews. Klein’s worry that “Jewish communities globally could be stained with guilt by association in the eyes of those who conflate the Israeli government with all Jews” should be seen as relying on the idea that anti-Semitism refers to complaints about “all Jews.” Most commonly complaints about Jews rely on understanding where the power of the Jewish community is directed, and in this case it’s obvious that the mainstream Jewish community in the U.S. and its powerful lobbying organizations (here and here) are entirely on board with the war. This is especially true in the Trump administration where the more conservative elements of the Jewish community, including Chabad Lubavitch, have increased their influence greatly.
It is simply that their vision [of conservative Jewish groups] for Jewish flourishing in America is radically at odds with the basic assumptions that have grounded American Jewish politics for much of the last century: chiefly, that Jewish interests are best served by the separation of religion and state; that American Jews are best protected through multiethnic, pluralistic coalitions rather than an alliance with the Christian majority; and that the invisibility of Jewish group interests is preferable to visible Jewish particularity.
Ezra Klein’s warnings about the centrality of Israel in the Iran war are a tacit admission that the Jewish establishment has lost its ability to operate from behind a veil. By leveraging control over U.S. administrations to initiate wars of choice, this power structure has forced a public reckoning that no amount of image-polishing can reverse. History has repeatedly shown that Jewish overreach eventually triggers an immune response from the host population.
We are currently in the midst of that reaction, and the path forward lies in the unapologetic identification and systematic dismantling of the Jewish influence networks that have compromised the highest levels of our government and financial institutions.
Hamas: EU hits Gaza leaders with sanctions but ‘turns blind eye’ to Israel’s atrocities
Press TV – May 30, 2026
Hamas has condemned the European Union’s sanctions, slamming the bloc for “turning a blind eye” to Israel’s violations of international law while targeting Palestinian resistance groups and leaders.
“We condemn the decision by the European Union Council to broaden sanctions against the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements and to include a number of their political leaders on its lists,” the Gaza-based resistance group said in a statement on Saturday.
Hamas added the sanctions are unjust and entirely biased in favor of the occupation’s narrative, reflecting a policy of double standards in dealing with the Palestinian cause.
“This decision comes as [Israel] continues to commit crimes of genocide, starvation, and forced displacement against our people and violates the ceasefire agreement, while the European Union turns a blind eye to these documented violations of international law and chooses to sanction political leaders who defend their people’s legitimate rights,” read the statement
“The attempt to criminalize the Palestinian resistance will not change the fact that our people are under occupation, their resistance is a legitimate right guaranteed by all laws and humanitarian norms,” the group highlighted.
Hamas noted that the targeting of political leaders confirms that these sanctions come as a response to pressure from the occupation and are not based on standards of justice.
The movement called on the EU to review its biased policies, cease providing political cover for Israel, and work to hold its leaders accountable instead of prosecuting the victims.
“We affirm that these measures will not undermine the will of our Palestinian people or their commitment to their legitimate national rights, especially freedom, self-determination, ending the occupation, and establishing the Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital,” the group stated.
The EU on Friday said that it had listed ten members of Hamas’ top political leadership body as subject to a travel ban and asset freeze, prohibiting making funds or economic resources available to those named, either directly or indirectly.
Since launching its genocidal assault on Gaza on October 7, 2023, Israel has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians and wounded at least 172,000 others, the majority of them women and children.
The Israeli war has also devastated Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, destroying hospitals, schools, sports facilities, power plants, water networks and residential neighborhoods across the besieged territory.
The widespread destruction and continuing blockade have displaced much of Gaza’s population, leaving Palestinians trapped in the besieged territory and heavily dependent on humanitarian aid that enters only in limited quantities.
“Balancing” Act at the New York Times
Nicholas Kristof Wrote About Israel’s Sexual Torture of Prisoners, the Next Day Isabel Kershner Penned More Unverified Rape Allegations Against Hamas
By Robin Andersen | ScheerPost | May 30, 2026
The New York Times attempted to ‘balance’ Nicholas Kristof’s documentation of the systematic rape of Palestinians by Israeli forces with yet another unverified rape ‘investigation’ claiming that Hamas had weaponized sexual violence on October 7. It was written by the paper’s pro-Israel Jerusalem-based reporter, Isabel Kershner.
Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times Op-ed piece titled The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians, published on May 11, was based on documentation and grueling victim testimonies of rapes that Palestinians have experienced at the hands of Israeli security forces. Brutal and sadistic acts of sexual torture are described in a piece that triggered enormous attention even though human rights organizations have been documenting these same crimes for years now.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has documented Israel’s sexual torture of Palestinian men, women and children calling the “Israeli prison system a network of torture camps.” Save the Children reported in July 2024 that Palestinian children in Israeli detention were facing “disease, increasing starvation, [and] abuse including sexual violence.” A Palestinian women’s rights organization warned that their documented 75 cases of rape and sexual violence against Palestinian women amounted to about 1% of what was actually happening in Israeli detention. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor’s extensive report published on April 13, 2026, emphasized that the sexual torture was so bad it amounted to “another genocide behind walls.” They identified its purpose as a “systematic destruction of the body and identity.” The report emphasized the scope of “criminal responsibility,” by the collusion of state institutions that were creating impunity.
In a discussion about Kristof’s piece, Francesca Albanese, who has also documented brutal Israeli torture sites, told Al Jazeera’s UpFront that she had given a long interview about sexual torture to the New York Times as early as February 2024, but nothing came of it. Albanese went on to say she didn’t understand why the Times piece should have been “more important” than the extensive documentation of human rights monitors. But when Kristof finally acknowledged that Palestinians were being tortured and raped by trained dogs, (corroborated by a soldier) in Israeli prisons, it made headlines in the US and sent shock waves through Israel’s hasbara apparatus.
The agenda setting New York Times is a “paper of record,” with a journalism staff of 3000, about 7 percent of all journalists working in the US. The paper has also been a reliable source of pro-Israel messaging for years, especially after October 7, so when a well-respected human rights journalist wrote such an op-ed in its pages it was a public relations disaster for Israel and its propaganda machine went into high gear to counter the bad press. Zionists and genocide supporters protested in front of the Times building. Netanyahu was so outraged that he threatened to bring a defamation lawsuit against the paper. The Israel Foreign Ministry called the piece “blood liable” and accused Nicholas Kristof of writing “an endless stream of baseless lies and propaganda” that turned the “victims into the accused.”
It should come then, as no surprise that the paper attempted to “balance” Kristof’s essay by publishing a piece the very next day, on May 12, about another “two-year investigation” by Israel, that “concluded” that sexual violence by Hamas was widespread on October 7. Isabel Kirshner’s piece attempted to breathe new life into the thoroughly discredited and debunked original Times’ front-page ‘investigation’ titled Screams Without Words. Screams was first published on December 28, 2023, just as the South African legal case against Israel’s genocide was being presented to the International Court of Justice, and it served as a significant denial and justification for Israel’s genocidal violence at the time. Screams without Words can be described accurately (and has been) with the same words used by Israel’s Foreign Ministry to falsely describe Kristof’s piece; “an endless stream of baseless lies and propaganda.”
The timing of the now infamous rape story of 2023, along with its extravagant claims to evidence not found in the front-page article, had much to do with why, almost immediately, the piece drew critical attention from media analysts, independent investigative reporters, and human rights organizations. Withering criticisms of the story included an essay in Medium, calling it “crappy journalism,” saying it offered a “lesson on selection, slanting, and charged language, and why using words in these ways constitutes a poor substitute for solid evidence and reasoning.” An Egyptian feminist non-governmental organization (NGO) Speak Up, called the article a “disgraceful investigation,” and shamed the Times for claiming to provide readers with definitive evidence, while actually offering no evidence at all. Independent US investigators such as Electronic Intifada, The Grayzone, The Intercept, Mondoweiss and others, roundly debunked the fictionesque inventions continued within it. Sixty journalism professors wrote to the New York Times calling on the paper to commission an independent review of the article. It was “troubling to professors of journalism to see such a shoddy article be published without a retraction or an investigation,” Professor Deepa Kumar told Democracy Now!
The timing, the definitive assertions without evidence, the reliance on already discredited sources, the sensational writing replete with lurid content, the omissions, half-truths, misdirections, and the way the paper manipulated the family of a young Israeli female victim killed at the rave, all point to a case of journalism malpractice at the New York Times. “Screams Without Words” is an example, not of journalism, but of the power of persuasive myths and war propaganda.
The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
The paper’s 2026 version of the Hamas rape story was penned by one of the Times’ most reliably pro-Israeli reporters, Isabel Kershner, and this new ‘investigation’ once again takes seriously, discredited Israeli sources that Kershner claims to be independent and reliable. At the center of the piece is Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a key Israeli source after October 7. Elkayam-Levy and her organization were central to Western media coverage after October 7, when she repeatedly presented the rape allegations against Hamas. However, as MintPress News reported, Israeli media later reported that “Elkayam-Levy and her commission had misled donors, exaggerated evidence collection efforts, and spread misinformation related to October 7 claims. The controversy surfaced shortly after she received the prestigious Israel Prize.” In Kersner’s new piece, extravagant claims are made about the thorough nature of the investigation, describing all the visual evidence now assembled. But Kershner isn’t allowed to publish the evidence. She writes; “The commission’s archive is closed to the public because of the graphic nature of much of the material, it said, and to protect the privacy of victims and their families.” The Times is asking its readers to trust the Israelis, Isabel Kershner, and the paper itself with its abysmal track record on this topic. Kershner does not mention the fact that early last year, Israel blocked a UN probe into possible Hamas sexual crimes of October 7, because according to Haaretz, they wanted to avoid an inquiry into the abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Isabell Kershner at the New York Times
Kershner has been providing positive reporting for Israeli Security Force for years now. With Kirshner, polishing the image of the IDF is a family affair. The Jerusalem-based correspondent whose husband worked with the Israeli military complex says on her Times’ profile page, that says she “strives to be accurate, honest and fair.” Yet she failed to mention that her husband Hirsh Goodman, was working as a senior research associate at a national security think-tank, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). INSS’s website boasted about the group’s “strong association with the political and military establishment.” Goodman’s job, at least in part, entailed “shaping a positive image of Israel in the media.” An examination of articles that Kershner wrote or contributed to from 2009 to 2012 by FAIR revealed that she overwhelmingly relied “on the INSS for think tank analysis about events in the region.” The Times has not disclosed Kershner’s connections to INSS.
Reporting on INSS, Haaretz cited published papers that backed the “Dahiyah Doctrine,” an Israeli military doctrine that called for disproportionate force to be used on civilian infrastructure in Gaza and Lebanon during operations against Hamas and Hezbollah. Since Ovtober 7, this doctrine has been extensively followed. Writing for FAIR, Alex Kane reported that the Dahiyah Doctrine was applied in 2008–09 during Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and goes on to explain that “Goodman’s job within that context was spin.” Because disproportionate violence resulting in many civilian casualties could lead to charges of war crimes, Goodman understood that “Israel must devise a strategy to impact positively on international and Arab public opinion and overall disseminate its message more effectively.” INSS messaging was certainly disseminated effectively in the New York Times, “From 2009–12, Kershner wrote or contributed to 17 articles that quoted officials from the INSS, far more than other comparable think tanks.
Though Kershner never used her husband as a direct source, as a Society for Professional Journalism (SPJ) ethics expert Kevin Smith, told FAIR, this is basic ethics 101, these relationships are not healthy for unbiased news coverage. “You cannot expect trust or to maintain credibility from the public when, before they read a word of your copy, you have engaged in an act of deception by not disclosing your potential conflicts.”
In her post-October 7 coverage, Kershner’s hand in promoting the Israeli military can be easily detected in her writing. In an article from January 2024, well into Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza, Kersner wrote; “Israeli Women Fight on Front Line in Gaza, a First.” Kershner continued, “After a long struggle for acceptance, Israel’s female combat soldiers are pushing new boundaries after rushing into battle on Oct. 7.” We learn that a woman now “commands a company of 83 soldiers, nearly half of them men. It is one of several mixed-gender units fighting in Gaza, where female combat soldiers and officers are serving on the front line for the first time since the war surrounding the establishment of Israel in 1948.” There are also two all-women tank crews on the ground in Gaza. Kershner calls women’s new role in the military, a progressive victory over “ultraconservative rabbis and religiously observant soldiers” by “feminists, secularists and critics of the country’s traditionally macho culture.”
Even as she writes the story, she seems to acknowledge that it serves a PR role for the military, by bolstering the new positive image of the IDF. She asserts that women “combat soldiers have become symbols of progress and equality, appearing on magazine covers and featured in television news profiles.”
Writing from a feminist peace perspective, Joyce Chediac notes that Palestinian women’s groups have called the genocide a feminist issue and are urging all those who value women’s rights to support a ceasefire. As Kershner lauded women in Israel’s army, Joyce Chediac questioned their role in the violence:
Are the two tanks operated by women among those involved in the storming of Al-Khair hospital in Khan Yunis, arresting their staff, and preventing ambulances from rescuing the wounded? Are the women in combat for the first time among the snipers shooting Palestinians dead as they search for food or water for their families? Are they guarding the bulldozers now flattening huge swarths of Khan Yunis, forcing pregnant women to give birth in freezing tents because their homes were destroyed and they are blocked from hospitals?
Chediac concludes that, “equal gender opportunity to commit genocide is a cruel and obscene mockery of women’s rights.” Providing cover for Israel’s military does not advance the rights of women, it sets them back. The concept that female military power is progressive has helped sugarcoat the genocidal violence and atrocities carried out by the Israeli military.
Testimony gathered by B’Tselem in 2024, confirms that female soldiers have been involved in mistreating detained prisoners in Israel’s system of torture camps. A 39-year-old mother of five from Gaza City told B’Tselem, “On December 31st we were taken out of the cage and dragged to a bus, like animals. The bus started driving and the whole way, the female soldiers guarding us wouldn’t let us lift our heads. They swore at us, hit us on our hands, and took pictures of us. After some time, the bus stopped. We were taken off of it… A female soldier grabbed us by the head and ordered us to kiss the Israeli flag. Another female soldier bashed my head against the side of the bus.”
Balancing legitimate reporting that includes reliable witness testimony confirmed by multiple human rights investigations over a period of years cannot be not done by publishing unverified allegations from discredited sources. Alan MacLeod noted a recuring media pattern here that applies to the New York Times’ reporting on Israel; “whenever scrutiny intensifies around Israeli abuses against Palestinians, major Western outlets redirect attention toward unverified claims against Hamas to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”
Balancing Kristof’s rare acknowledgment of Israeli war crimes with reporting by a pro-Israel, biased journalist citing discredited sources repeating unverifiable allegations was a shameful, and failed, attempt to appease the state of Israeli as it expands its crimes of war and occupation into Lebanon for a Greater Isreal. The Times would do better to simply report the truth and stop catering to hasbara and the false narratives that facilitate Israel’s on-going genocidal violence.
Material in this piece was drawn from Chapter 4, “A Compromised Media Landscape,” and from Chapter 8, “The New York Times Rape Story: War Propaganda and Trauma Porn,” in The Complect Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, by Robin Andersen
Robin Andersen is professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University and an award-winning author of a dozen single- and co-authored books. Her work examines film, television, and media coverage of war, the environment, politics, and elections. She edits the Routledge Focus Book Series on Media and Humanitarian Action, serves as a Project Censored Judge, and contributes to the annual State of the Free Press. Andersen is on the Board of Directors of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), where she also writes regularly, and is an Izzy Award Judge for the Park Center for Independent Media. Her writing has appeared in CounterPunch, LA Progressive, The Progressive, Salon, Common Dreams, and ScheerPost, among others.
Beyond Gaza: The expanding geography of displacement
By Dr Oroub El-Abed | MEMO | May 29, 2026
The War on Gaza continues and has not stopped. It is even expanding to wider geography of displacement and has been unfolding across the Eastern Mediterranean. The Zionists are empowered to widen their gradual restructuring of the land: depopulating borderlands, fragmenting societies, erasing cultural landscapes, and normalising permanent instability across the whole of Palestine, southern Lebanon, and southern Syria.
This week, the Israeli military ordered the immediate evacuation of the ancient Lebanese city of Tyre. Tyre A city that carries thousands of years of Mediterranean history, Phoenician heritage, trade, memory, and civilization was suddenly reduced to a military target. Residents were ordered to move north of the Zahrani River as Israeli bombardment intensified across southern Lebanon despite the language of a “ceasefire.” Entire communities were once again placed on the road during Eid, carrying children, blankets, medicine, and fragments of home while others elsewhere exchanged sweets and celebratory visits.
The symbolism of Tyre matters. Cities like Tyre are archives of human civilization. Their ports, neighbourhoods, cemeteries, mosques, churches, markets, and coastal life embody centuries of coexistence and cultural production. When such places are emptied, bombed, or transformed into militarized zones, the damage extends beyond physical destruction. A civilization itself becomes vulnerable to erasure.
The same logic that devastated Gaza is now visibly extending outward. In Gaza, entire archaeological sites were destroyed. Urban landscapes have been flattened under the justification of war. Universities, hospitals, archives, schools, libraries, bakeries, agricultural lands, and refugee camps have been systematically destroyed. The assault has targeted the infrastructure of Palestinian life itself, it has dismantled the social, cultural, and demographic foundations necessary for collective survival.
In the occupied West Bank, Palestinians continue to face settler violence, military raids, land confiscation, and forced displacement. Villages are emptied through intimidation, checkpoints fragment movement, and economic suffocation deepens dependency and precarity. Yet the expansionist vision articulated through biblical and historical claims is now stretching beyond Palestine.
Now southern Lebanon and southern Syria are being pulled into the same spatial planning.
Reports and online campaigns promoting land acquisition in areas near Daraa and southern Syria reveal a deeply alarming trend: the normalization of territorial expansion beyond internationally recognized borders. References to ancient “Davidic routes” or biblical entitlement are increasingly integrated into public discourse, settlement imaginaries, and strategic military narratives. The danger lies in transforming expansion into something culturally acceptable and politically negotiable.
This is occurring at the very moment Syrian refugees are being pressured to return “home” after years of displacement with many Global North countries issuing deportation regulation letters against them. Governments and international actors increasingly speak of refugee return as though Syria has become stable enough for repatriation. But what does “return” mean if homes are destroyed, lands fragmented, economies collapsed, and territories themselves vulnerable to new forms of Zionist militarization and external control? Refugees are told to go back while the geography they once belonged to is simultaneously being reconfigured.
The contradiction
The publicised initiatives presented under the language of “peace” and “reconstruction” now stand exposed as hollow political theater. Donor fatigue deepens. Funding commitments evaporate. Humanitarian systems are collapsing under both political paralysis, Israeli persist with insolence to continue the attacks against Palestinians and deliberate underfunding. Gaza’s Peace Board, created by Trump remains largely unfunded while displacement spreads regionally. The promise of rebuilding has become another mechanism for managing headlines with peace illusions rather than protecting people.
Meanwhile, millions remain displaced across the region. In Lebanon alone, over a million people have reportedly fled their homes since the escalation intensified. Entire southern communities now live between temporary shelters, schools, relatives’ apartments, or overcrowded Beirut neighbourhoods.
Families displaced during Eid navigate trauma while attempting to preserve dignity amid uncertainty. The contrast is painful: festive tables offering ka’ek and chocolate exist alongside families searching for mattresses, medication, and safety.
This widening geography of displacement reveals a deeper transformation underway in the Middle East. Forced migration is becoming a governing logic of regional order. Populations are uprooted, contained, redistributed, or rendered permanently precarious while territorial realities are reshaped through military violence and demographic engineering.
Tyre should alarm the world not only because people were forced to flee, but because an ancient city carrying human civilization is being drawn into a broader architecture of destruction. Southern Syria should alarm the world not only because of geopolitical tensions, but because territorial expansion is increasingly discussed openly while refugees themselves remain disposable. Gaza should alarm the world not only because of death tolls, but because the destruction of an entire society is unfolding in front of global institutions that are unable or unwilling to stop it.
What is happening today exceeds the boundaries of a single conflict. It is the expansion of a political project that treats land as empty once people are displaced from it, culture as expendable, and civilian existence as negotiable. The fear is that this geography of displacement may continue and widen far beyond Gaza, unless confronted with nationalist power and regional unity.
Israel Is Arming ISIS Linked Gangs With Military Drones To Help Carry Out Further Ethnic Cleansing In Gaza
The Dissident | May 28, 2026
Israel is going forward with its plan to force Gaza’s Palestinian population to flee to make way for Israeli annexation.
Israel Katz, Israel’s defence minister, said last week, “the voluntary emigration plan from Gaza will be implemented” , “everything at the right timing and in the right manner”, “voluntary emigration” being a euphemism for the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Benjamin Netanyahu has since stated that he ordered IDF militants to occupy 70 percent of the Gaza Strip, in violation of the so-called “ceasefire”.
Benjamin Netanyahu said , “At this point, we are fully in control of 60% of the territory of the Gaza Strip… and my directive is to get to… 70%”.
Netanyahu implied the end Israeli goal is to occupy all of Gaza, saying, “First 70%. We’ll start with that” in response to calls from audience members to occupy “100 percent”.
To aid in this genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing and annexation, Israel has again tasked its criminal proxies in Gaza.
The Times of Israel reported that:
In the remainder, some armed groups backed by Israel continue to challenge Hamas’s dominance as the territory’s governing power.
A militia led by Ashraf al-Mansi, which works against Hamas in northern Gaza with Israeli backing, published footage on Thursday showing one of its members operating a heavy military drone.
The footage appeared to be the first of its kind released by an anti-Hamas militia, which until now have primarily been seen using light weapons.
It added:
A statement published on al-Mansi’s Facebook page said that “the People’s Army led by Ashraf al-Mansi in northern Gaza announces the successful introduction of advanced drones into operational use.”
Brig. Gen. Ghassan Dehini, who is considered the commander of various militias in Gaza, announced that “several successful operations” had been carried out using the new drones.
Referring to the drones, the Times of Israel noted “given Israel’s military and logistical support for the militias, it is likely they were transferred from Israel”.
For context, the so-called “popular forces”, currently led by Ghassan Dehini and which Ashraf al-Mansi is a part of, is a group of ISIS-linked criminals who became Israeli proxies after the start of the Gaza genocide.
These criminal gangs during the Genocide in Gaza, looted humanitarian aid in Gaza with support from Israel.
This was carried out both to continue the genocidal blockade on Gaza, and as a false flag to falsely blame Hamas.
By tasking its proxy gangs to carry out false flag aid lootings, Israel falsely accused Hamas of being behind the aid lootings, in order to justify the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” sites, the U.S./Israeli backed fake aid sites used to lure and massacre starving Palestinians.
The former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman revealed in early 2025 that “Israel is providing weapons to a Jihadist group in the Gaza Strip affiliated with ISIS,” referring to the Israeli-backed criminal gangs behind the false flag aid lootings led by Yasser Abu Shabab, who the Financial Times described as “Gaza’s most notorious gangster”.
Soon after, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that “The IDF and Shin Bet security service are using Gaza-based militias to carry out military operations in exchange for pay and control over territory in the enclave,” adding, “Each militia consists of dozens of armed men, most from prominent Gaza clans, including the Abu Shabab family.”
One IDF official told the paper, “They’re given more missions in densely populated zones. It’s no longer just the menial work we gave them in the beginning. Now they’re conducting major operations,” and another said, “They train for missions right in front of us, We’ve seen them in groups of five to ten armed men. Sometimes it even alarms our forces because no one bothers to update us.”
The so-called “popular forces” last year faced an internal coup, with militant members killing Yasser Abu Shabab and replacing him with Ghassan al-Duhaini, who similarly previously joined the Army of Islam, or Jaysh al-Islam, “a Gaza-based Salafi jihadist group with a similar ideology to al-Qaeda that declared its allegiance to ISIS in 2015”.
The Jerusalem Post noted that Ghassan al-Duhaini “was a commander in a terrorist group in Gaza that was associated with al-Qaeda”.
In an interview with the Middle East Forum, Ghassan al-Duhaini said he “adopted Salafi jihadism” and “affiliated with a faction that was close to Jabhat al-Nusra (the Syrian Al Qaeda branch) during the war in Syria” .
Now, Israel is yet again backing this ISIS-linked criminal network, even arming it with military drones to help carry out the “final solution”to the Gaza genocide.
The Popular Scapegoats: How Israel Is Pushing Its New ‘Bad Apples’ Hasbara Strategy
By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | May 28, 2026
A revived attempt to scapegoat a handful of Israeli officials for the crimes of its entire regime structure has again taken off, especially in light of the recent diplomatic fallout over Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s public humiliation of Gaza aid flotilla activists. The idea behind this Hasbara campaign is to normalize Israel’s actions.
When Itamar Ben-Gvir posted the video of him mocking the brutal treatment that foreign activists were being subjected to – after being kidnapped in international waters – entitling it “welcome to Israel”, it understandably triggered a diplomatic firestorm. However, the Western leaders who summoned their envoys in response haven’t dared to address the treatment of the activists, including their own citizens, since.
All of this begs the question as to how much authenticity came along with these stances. One point of note is that even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined in with the chorus of condemnation, as did his Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and others. Since that time, at least 15 activists who were part of the latest Global Sumud Flotilla have accused the Israeli military of committing different forms of sexual assault against them, including rape.
The widespread weaponization of sexual violence by the Israeli military and security forces is no new phenomenon, yet it has occurred at a markedly higher frequency over the past few years, and it is something that has solely occurred to international peace activists. Instead, the Israelis have been proven to have implemented a systematic campaign of sexual violence against Palestinians, in particular those who are held hostage in military detention centers and civilians who have been detained in Gaza.
UN and human rights reports, eye witness testimonies, victim accounts, even video and photographic evidence, have all been presented to support the conclusion that sexual violence, including rape, has been used in unprecedented ways against the Palestinian civilian population. Despite all of this, the only mainstream corporate media outlet in the West that dared report on the issue was the New York Times, in a piece that addressed the issue years too late.
These same Western governments have not followed up the summoning of their envoys with any solid action, nor have they made a deal about the testimonies of sexual assault against activists who were kidnapped in international waters. Now, a coordinated media push, within which the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, has recently participated, seeks to play the “bad apples” public relations strategy.
Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have become popular scapegoats, used to hide a society behind them that supports almost everything they do, even if they seek to be more well hidden. The overwhelming majority of the Israeli public supported their military committing genocide.
In fact, things are so bad that the 10 Israeli soldiers who were accused of gang raping a Palestinian hostage have now become celebrities in their society. Israeli comedians make jokes about the rape of Palestinians with dogs, Israeli politicians openly defend such despicable behavior, and there were even the infamous “right to rape” protests when soldiers were temporarily detained for the acts they committed.
The gang rape incident was not just alleged; it was caught on film and leaked. In the end, all of the Israeli soldiers who committed the violent rape got off scot free. The Israeli military’s top lawyer, who had leaked the video of the incident, something that forced the arrest of the perpetrators, ended up getting arrested herself, resigning from her job, and then made at least two suicide attempts following a string of death threats.
Itamar Ben-Gvir did not sexually assault those 15 activists; it wasn’t Bezalel Smotrich who convinced Israeli society to turn gang rapists into heroes and place them on public television shows. Israel has a citizen army and is a society built around a military culture.
When others try to scapegoat Benjamin Netanyahu, something that you will hear from Western liberals and mainstream Democrats, this, too, is disingenuous. According to polling data, a plurality of Israelis dislike the current Premier, which means it isn’t him that is to blame for the vast majority of Israeli citizens supporting the genocide in Gaza, or even worse, advocating publicly for even harsher means of dealing with Palestinian civilians.
It’s also not only Netanyahu that has openly supported the notion of achieving the “Greater Israel” project, his so-called “moderate” opponent, Yair Lapid, has himself publicly advocated the exact same policy– the only difference is that the opposition leader seeks to be more strategic about stealing territory all the way up to and including Iraq.
The reality is, these Western leaders are fully complicit with the Israelis. They only withdrew their summoned diplomatic envoys because Ben-Gvir’s video embarrassed them, robbing them of the ability to lie and cover up Israel’s blatant crimes against the international activists. It took no courage and it would have been more genuine of them to have endorsed the Israeli Security Minister’s actions.
Why? Because many of these nations that summoned their envoys are openly part of the so-called “Civil Military Coordination Center” (CMCC) that was set up to enforce the Gaza ceasefire and prevent violations of it. Instead, these nations have joined a center that watches Israeli war crimes – including the mass murder of over 900 Palestinians during the ceasefire – in real time, refusing to even leave the center in protest, let alone take any action. They are all directly complicit in the genocide.
What this whole ordeal has proven is just how low Western governments and their stenographers in the media will go in order to cover up the crimes of the Israeli regime. No matter what, they refuse to take a stand. If they had grown a backbone, it could have deterred many of the horrors we see playing out today.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
Empire with a Humanitarian Face: Democrats Rebrand
By Matt Wolfson | The Libertarian Institute | May 27, 2026
American political successions in recent years happen counterintuitively: implicit hand-offs between two nominally opposing sides. This strange reality is where we derive our notion of “the uniparty” and the media its notion of “partisanship.” Through the “partisan” lens favored by media, our politics appears divided between a party, the Republicans, in hock to Israel, the “big five” weapons contractors, real estate, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley; and a party, the Democrats, in hock to powerful “progressive” or “Left” nonprofits like ActBlue, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Center for American Progress, and the Open Society Foundations.
But the “uniparty” theory of the case shared by many politically disenfranchised Americans is a more accurate read of our political reality. Indeed, Democrats are as in hock to corporate and military interests as Republicans, and the newer “New Democratic” Party they are promising as a replacement to Donald Trump is his mirror image—there to serve the same interests under a different and deceptive cultural guise. Tracing the development of the modern Democrats from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and how that development shapes them today, shows that every sector of the party—from “neoliberals” to “progressives” to the Left—is de facto arbitered by military corporate interests which determine its policies and propaganda.
The initial cooption of Democrats by the military-corporate complex forty years ago is a familiar story, but largely one told by the political Left which is loyal to those economic groups left behind by this cooption, and largely unfamiliar to Americans at large. The story, which I have traced in part in past reports for the Libertarian Institute and elsewhere, goes something like this. In the 1970s and the 1980s, financiers used their influence to underwrite philanthropic ventures in New York City that gave them access to institutional and then political power at the expense of unions and activists—a top-down model of consolidating authority that they then transferred to the Democratic Party at large. During these years, what the scholar Dylan Gottlieb calls “a new generation of politicians and donors — people like Gary Hart, Chuck Schumer and Bruce Wasserstein,” took over the mantle of Democratic politics. In 1992, Michael Steinhardt and Al From at the Democratic Leadership Council and Martin Peretz and Leon Wieseltier at The New Republic along with David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg in Hollywood created the platform for Bill Clinton. In 2008, Penny Pritzker, George Soros, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with help from sympathetic media like S.I. Newhouse’s and David Remnick’s New Yorker, created the platform for Barack Obama.
These financial and political and journalistic and policy operators quietly refocused the Democratic Party to depend on corporations, so that “Goldman Sachs employees and their families donated more to Bill Clinton’s…campaign than any other firm” and “Barack Obama…raise[d] more money from Wall Street lawyers and law firms than any presidential candidate in history.” During both administrations, government largesse flowed accordingly. Under Clinton, the fifty major weapons contractors were condensed, based on Pentagon pressure, into the “big five,” with a lock on government contracts, and under Clinton and Obama these companies made their bones off of a spate of interventions or proxy fights abroad: in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
Under Clinton, Wall Street investment banks and Silicon Valley technology companies also consolidated based on government backing and thrived off alleged “deregulation.” And under Obama these corporations further concentrated, so that 2015, the penultimate year of Obama’s presidency, was “the biggest year ever…in worldwide dealmaking…not just for the total value of the deals but for the number of so-called mega-deals, which refers to any deal that exceeds $5 billion.” The structural legacy of the Democratic Party since the end of the Cold War, then, is political dependency on those very military corporate networks which Democratic rhetoric would seem to belie.
A surprising and instructive place to begin tracing these networks and their priorities as well as their distance from Democratic rhetoric is the pages of The Wall Street Journal, which has recently become a favorite gathering space for neoliberal or “business-friendly” Democrats. This is surprising because it was not thirty years ago that the Journal’s op-ed pages were leading the crusade for the impeachment of Bill Clinton. It is instructive because today some of Clinton’s most prominent allies are appearing in them. Indeed, on three days at the end of April (20th, 22nd, and 23rd), the pages ran op-eds by Clinton’s defender during his impeachment as well as Jeffrey Epstein’s close friend, Alan Dershowitz (“Why I’m Becoming a Republican); by Clinton’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo (“Trump is on the Right Track in Renewing Penn Station”); and by Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff and a possible contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, Rahm Emanuel (“Trump’s research cuts play into China’s Hands”). These op-eds nicely encapsulate the three political pillars of Democrats’ military corporatism as they have practiced it since the 1990s: reshaping their key voting constituency; funding monopolist development projects; and hinging America’s future on conglomerates’ relationship to China.
Dershowitz assigns his move to Republicans to what he calls Democrats’ abandonment of both Israel and of “moderation,” both of which he hopes the party re-finds:
“… perhaps they’ll wise up and move back to the center, where I (and others) could rejoin [them].”
This “center” was a concept first successfully articulated via the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign platform the “New Covenant” or the “New Choice” or the “Third Way.” Whatever its name, it was a platform which, thanks to the ministrations of the political strategists Stanley Greenberg and James Carville, “redrew our political map” by “help[ing] to shift the Democratic Party away from the unions, Black Americans and urban bosses of the New Deal coalition and toward the interests of metropolitan professionals.” The political economic focus of this “New Democratic” Party adjusted accordingly, based off the urban development ethos of Michael Steinhardt, now embraced by Cuomo in his Wall Street Journal op-ed. It was Steinhardt along with a roster of other financiers and Steinhardt’s protégé Michael Bloomberg who, as I reported for the Libertarian Institute in October, used government largesse towards financiers and philanthropy to change the landscape of New York City with real estate development and “public spaces” funded by private money. It was this development which made this city and imitators like Miami and San Francisco playgrounds for tech operators and tourists, while driving out productive industry and the middle class.
This was the most tangible expression of a broader pattern: power percolated to the top of society while alienating the middle and working class and the people at the bottom. And the underwriting engine for these elite operators’ growing power—what kept politically dissatisfied Americans politically inactive in the 1990s and early 2000s even as power slowly concentrated behind the scenes—was a seemingly prosperous economy of low consumer costs based on America’s relationship with China, which Rahm Emanuel in The Wall Street Journal makes the linchpin of our development today. The difference is that, where Clinton did this in the 1990s in the name of importing consumer products and exporting American media, Emanuel does it in the 2020s in the name of government investment in Silicon Valley to compete with China. In the end, these different forms of Chinese-centric policy enrich the same groups via lowering production costs or incentivizing government investment: financiers, technologists, and “the metropolitan professionals” who work for them.
The clearest articulation of the Democratic project of the 1990s as repackaged for 2026 is the “Abundance Agenda”: the brainchild of Ezra Klein, the columnist and podcaster at The New York Times; and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic. The “Abundance Agenda,” as I have reported in the past, is monopolist corporatism dressed up as small government practicality. It is a series of proposals to weaken public and regulatory oversight of tech and urban development projects, from Google’s Waymo cars to Michael Bloomberg’s public parks to various real estate schemes helmed by a small rotating band of connected developers. This is not deregulation for the small business owner; it is deregulation for corporate welfare at the expense of local government, and it is being embraced most energetically by Democratic politicians backed by corporate interests.
These include Daniel Lurie, the Mayor of San Francisco, who is relying on philanthropy from Silicon Valley to “fix” the city; and Ritchie Torres, the self-identified “progressive” congressman from New York. Congresspeople Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), Tom Suozzi (D-NY), and Jared Golden (D-ME) are also Abundance supporters. Rising Democratic politicians linked to Abundance or its supporters include U.S. Representatives from New York and California Pat Ryan and Jimmy Panetta; Governors of Virginia and New Jersey Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill; and former Deputy Secretary of the Air Force and current San Antonio mayor Gina Ortiz Jones. Ryan, Panetta, Spanberger, Sherrill, Ortiz Jones, and Slotkin are former intelligence officers; and Spanberger, Sherrill, and Slotkin are eager adapters of Rahm Emanuel’s defense-tech-friendly policies towards China.
Almost all of these players, along with nationally “electable” Democrats in “red” or “purple” states like Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO), Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins, and Texas senatorial nominee James Talarico, are members of Majority Democrats. According to The New York Times, Majority Democrats is “a new group of elected officials from all levels of government [with] outsized ambitions to challenge political orthodoxies and remake the party” whose “structure resembles that of the Democratic Leadership Council, the once-influential group that successfully pushed the party to the middle in the Clinton era.” One of its strategists is Seth London, who, in a post-2024 election memo, recommended that the Democratic Party should imitate the Democratic Leadership Council and referenced as crucial to the party’s coming success the Abundance Agenda. London’s CV, not surprisingly, is peppered with financial connections, and so is Abundance: among them Michael Bloomberg, Reid Hoffman, James and Kathryn Murdoch, and the Walton Family, along with the lesser-known but influential operators Rob Granieri, Edward Fishman, Mark Heising, and David Nierenberg.
But why is a political economic agenda of billionaires outlined in The Wall Street Journal the most powerful agenda-setter for purportedly “progressive” Democrats? The reason is straightforward. The most powerful constituency of the new Democratic Party as shaped by funders like Michael Steinhardt, George Soros, Penny Pritzker, and Michael Bloomberg is the one constituted of “metropolitan professionals,” or, in the scholar Dylan Gottlieb’s words, “Yuppies,” who staff the corporate conglomerates these operators own. Though the Yuppie constituency does not share the Journal’s cultural values, it does share the Journal’s economic interests; and, at the hands of strategists like Stanley Greenberg and David Axelrod and David Plouffe, this fact has functioned to create a new progressive Democratic definition of “dispossessed.” At their hands, protecting the dispossessed has come to mean expanding “equal opportunity” to various minority groups or ideological interests that might appeal to Democrats’ Yuppie constituents: in other words, combating injustice in ways that do not affect the political economic structures on which Yuppies or their underwriters rely.
Early moves in this direction came with Martin Peretz’s and David Geffen’s push for gay rights before and during the Clinton administration, but the decisive shift came at the hands of David Axelrod and David Plouffe in the run-up to Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. As the scholars K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor explain, “the Democratic defeat in the 2010 midterm elections focused Obama’s attention on how identity politics could rally his base,” and so “the administration took high-profile positions in favor of marriage for same-sex couples, permitting ‘dreamers’ to remain in the United States and mandating contraceptive coverage in Obamacare.” After Obama’s victory in the 2012 election, an overtly identitarian strategy emerged from Obama’s success. In the words of Bill Clinton’s strategist Stanley Greenberg, in his 2018 book RIP GOP: How the New America is Dooming the Republicans, an America that is “secular, racially diverse, and fueled by immigration,” and filled with “non-traditional family structures,” independent women, and “dynamic cities” means the “[Republican] party’s imminent demise.”
Rhetoric on this register reinforced the perception of moral and political stakes at play, even as the reality was politics-as-usual. Indeed, the groups’ progressivism courted were disproportionally upper-middle class (white collar beneficiaries of affirmative action; college-educated women; gay rights campaigners) or they were groups which benefited the upper-middle class (illegal immigration provided cheap labor). And initiatives to help these groups were undertaken predominantly through regulations and lawsuits, empowering administrative agencies, courts, and single-issue nonprofits. Progressivism’s overall effect, then, was to add regulations to the military corporate complex (more bureaucrats at the Pentagon; racial sensitivity training and eco-friendly policies in administrative agencies; formal or informal partnerships between those agencies and the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Open Society Foundations) without diminishing its power. Its unintended effect was to provide Donald Trump fuel against Democrats and Democrats fuel against Donald Trump, since much of Donald Trump’s second term has been devoted to sweeping away these regulations, particularly when it comes to Trump’s ostentatiously deregulated approach to ICE, Israel and AI.
The senior members of the group of Democratic politicians who use progressivism as their spear against Trump are lawyers like Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD). Their “rising stars” include Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), who is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s choice as Schumer’s successor as party leader. Their newer members include Alex Bores, a candidate running on a platform of AI regulation in New York’s 12th Congressional District. And their presidential contenders are Governors J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California. Schiff, Raskin, Schatz, Pritzker, and Newsom have heavy ties to defense technology and financial industries and (in Newsom’s and Schatz’s cases) to the Abundance Agenda, while Bores is running for U.S. Congress in a district which encompasses much of Manhattan and is home to Michael Steinhardt, Michael Bloomberg, and a number of their allies. All of them oppose the current policies of ICE and Israel, but none of them target the consolidated structures of corporate-government power on which ICE and Israel depend.
It might be supposed that an effective counterbalance to the neoliberal and progressive sectors of the Democratic Party comes from the Left since they seem to focus on questions of political economy like redistribution and antitrust. Indeed, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) put the Left’s program best in 2025 when he said that aggressive promotion of identity politics was “what the liberal elite [tries to do].” In Sanders’s summing up of his own view, “Is every gay person brilliant or wonderful or great? No, of course not, everyone’s a human being. The issue is: what do you stand for? And that gets you back to the issue we discussed earlier: class politics.“ This class-over-lifestyle approach seems like a fairly defined brief for mobilizing poor, working, and middle class voters demonstrably shortchanged by a system run on corporate finance underwritten by government. But the exercise of often decisive military corporatist influence extends even to the most viable standard-bearer of Sanders’s revived Left, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and candidates running in the 2026 congressional elections on Mamdani’s platform.
Mamdani’s chief political strategist, and the chief political strategist of senatorial candidates Graham Platner in Maine and Dan Osborne in Nebraska, is Morris Katz, whose early political contact, thanks to an introduction from his father, a well-known movie director in Tribeca, was Melissa DeRosa, Andrew Cuomo’s closest aide. Since this initial introduction, Katz has moved away from pure establishmentarianism to combativeness with that establishment over issues like welfare and antitrust, but he and his candidates have not changed their rhetoric, which is reliably universalist. Namely, an appeal to concepts like “politics of humanity” or “dreaming and hope” that vacuum out the political economic context of any situation in the name of “pious uplift.” In the words of Susan Sontag, this perspective “systematically denies the determining weight of history—of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices, and conflicts” by “purporting to show that human beings are born, work, laugh, and die everywhere in the same way” to suggest “a world in which everybody is…immobilized in mechanical…identities and relationships” that make politics “irrelevant.”
Nowhere is the language of universalism more visible than at the Open Society Foundations, the project of George Soros which, as I have also reported for the Libertarian Institute, spent the 1990s and 2000s reliably “piggybacking” on military interventions executed by Democratic presidential administrations in the name of “universal ideals.” The Foundation’s former Director, Patrick Gaspard, is a close adviser to Zohran Mamdani and the former director of the Center for American Progress or CAP. CAP is funded in part by the Soroses, and it is the brainchild of John Podesta, the influential adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is famously the mentor of Huma Abedin, who is now married to Alex Soros: George Soros’s son who now directs the Open Society Foundations.
Based on these connections alone, much of what is said in public by progressive players like Mamdani and Katz begins to seem less relevant: plays in a game to parlay with those Zionists who have a lock on Democratic institutions rather than to meaningfully combat them. And, along these lines, it is not necessarily a coincidence that Zohran Mamdani seems to be embracing aspects of the Abundance Agenda. This may alienate portions of his base (labor unions, environmental groups, anti-gentrification activists) but it appeals to New York’s institutional arbiters. Namely, Governor Kathy Hochul; Congressman Ritchie Torres; The New York Times editorial board; as well as New York City’s police commissioner Jessica Tisch; Tisch’s close friends Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, a real estate developer; and President Donald Trump, whose control over federal largesse is necessary for Mamdani’s welfare agenda. Despite differences over welfare policy and rhetoric, the distance from The Wall Street Journal to the pages of the democratic socialist magazine Jacobin, a key supporter of Mamdani’s, is not always so far as it may seem. This criticism is shared by some Leftists themselves: people like the Seattle activist Kshama Sawant, who sees Mamdani courting the universalist and globalist establishment to the detriment of his base in the working class.
There is a particular intellectual style shared across the sectors of this newer New Democratic Party; and its function if not its intent is to distract from questions of who has power and how they are using it. Its guiding concept, a cousin of universalism, is “reason”: in the definition of a recent article in David Remnick’s New Yorker, “to accept that one’s deepest convictions may fail to command assent from others who are no less sincere or thoughtful, and then to propose terms of political coöperation that others can appreciate.” Interestingly, The New Yorker locates its model for public reason in the place most Democrats seem to be locating their new politics:
“Bill Clinton’s… ‘triangulation,’ Tony Blair’s Third Way, and Barack Obama’s insistence on being the most reasonable person in the room.”
These leaders were, indeed, known for their rhetoric, which relied on concepts like “complexity” and “pragmatism.” In practice this meant all-night “grapplings” with “tough issues” of morality or peace; or else detail-heavy and sometimes hyperkinetically minute proposals for “reforming” government, a tactic Rahm Emanuel, an acknowledged master of it in the Clinton White House, has reanimated today. All of this complexity and pragmatism existed under a universalist philosophical veil: the notion that “reasonable people” who all believe in the same undefined abstractions (“human rights” and “democracy,” “hope and change”) can “set aside their differences” and “find common ground” through discussion and debate.
There is a lot of this talk occurring in Democratic circles today. In Morris Katz’s words, politics means “an increased fluency and understanding that we can disagree while being agreeable.” For Rep. Ritchie Torres, it means that “everyone should have a seat at the table, everyone’s voice should be heard, but no one’s gonna have veto power.” For Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic, “the essence of democracy” is “rational discourse” and “thoughtful back-and-forth argument.” For Ezra Klein in The New Yorker, democracy means “building political coalitions around disagreement.” What “reason” or “pragmatism” stands for in this variant is not the formation of public opinion, which as conceived by James Madison would play itself out at the local level on various issues then form a rough consensus throughout the republic based on the free flow of information and debate. What reason or pragmatism stands for in this variant, instead, is elites speaking to elites: a kind of senior debate society of the powerful which functions to elide questions of what actual interests they functionally serve.
Indeed, very few people attuned to Bill Clinton’s or Tony Blair’s or Barack Obama’s administrations would describe them as committed to public reason. Clinton and his political strategists James Carville and Stanley Greenberg were recognized experts at covering electoral bases using stealth emotional triggers, playing to white voters with one hand and black voters with another and splitting the baby on gay rights, while quietly reallocating power to corporate conglomerates and administrative agencies under the aegis of “pragmatism.”
Obama, aided by David Axelrod and David Plouffe, was instrumental in upping the emotional ante of government via identity politics. Gavin Newsom has taken this essentially manipulative approach to an even higher register. He has begun to traffic in criticisms of Republicans using slang like “gay” which is deeply offensive to progressive LGBTQ+ voters but which attracts white men who support Trump, even as he claims to be using this language to “bait” Republican opponents. All the while he is strongly supporting LGBTQ+ rights but making an exception for men’s participation in women’s sports. This is textbook triangulation of a Clintonian kind.
Another Clintonian practitioner is U.S. Senator from Georgia Jon Ossoff, who manages to triangulate between neoliberal center, progressive, and Left. He “supported the Laken Riley Act, an immigration bill written by congressional Republicans that calls for the detention of undocumented immigrants if they are arrested for minor crimes”; he “condemns Trump’s antidemocratic and racist tendencies in a way that excites party activists”; and he “uses Bernie Sanders–like rhetoric to…slam corporations and the super-wealthy. “
What will be the result of a “newer” Democratic Party run along these tried-and-true models? What the last thirty years suggest is an endless bait-and-switch. There has been domestic militarization at home (on black crime and white nationalism) in the name of national security. There have been military interventions abroad (Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, Ukraine) in the name of human rights. There has been government investment in corporations (the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act; “free trade” and outsourcing to China; monopolist real estate projects that displace the working and middle class) in the name of “growth.” And there has been “redistribution” (Obamacare, multiple stimulus packages) in the name of human rights and minority advancement. What there has not been is any redistribution of power to legislatures or small business associations or private sector unions or local politics; or an investment in working and middle class independence and productivity. This is a system for institutional “winners,” run by institutional “winners” that operates with the stick of monopolist development and the carrot of government welfare.
An instructively stark lens through which to consider what this system might look like going forward in America comes from “Liberal” Israelis’ Democratic-underwritten policy toward Palestine—not by coincidence, since many of the operators behind America’s modern Democratic Party are Jewish Zionists who, as I have investigated for the Libertarian Institute and elsewhere, succeeded WASPs as arbiters of American institutions forty years ago. In 1993, a year after Clinton’s “triangulation” had won him the White House, he presided over the Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestine. This was arguably the Democrats’ first massive military corporate development project, begun by Clinton and continued by Obama, under the guise of reasoned attention to detail and a commitment to “universal” human rights.
According to Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, after the Oslo Accords and despite widespread “euphoria” about them among Palestinians, “conditions grew much worse for all but a very small number of individuals whose economic or personal interests were intertwined with the Palestinian Authority”: what the anti-Zionist Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein calls “collaboration-building to facilitate a burden-free Israeli occupation.” Under this system, “there were consistent denials of permission to travel and move goods from one place to another as a labyrinthine system of permits, checkpoints, walls, and fences was created.” This was part of a larger process of severing Gaza from the West Bank, which was itself severed from Jerusalem, effectively cleaving the Palestinian territory in thirds. But this was a process partially concealed by a raft of Israeli nonprofits and Israeli corporations that made a presence in the Palestinian territories in the name of “development” and “peace.” Indeed, it was in these years that progressive outlets funded by Soros and Pritzker and other Israeli-linked financiers expanded their commitment to amalgamating Palestinian rights with human rights and LGBTQ+ and women’s rights. This was a version of Yuppie progressivism for the Levant that was put in place even as Palestinians’ sovereignty was being effectively dismantled underneath them.
The overall aim of this process was articulated by Israel’s Liberal Zionist Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who “express[ed] a vision for transforming the Gaza Strip” into a version of the techno-authoritarian city-state of Singapore based on “trade, tourism, and technology.” And now, with the Netanyahu government having spent fourteen years of blockade and three years of genocide strangling Palestinians’ effort at sovereignty via Hamas, Peres’s are exactly the “values” being expressed by Jared Kushner for “remaking” Gaza today. Essentially, Peres’s and Kushner’s plan for Gaza is the Abundance Agenda applied abroad. Its endpoint is the current population being either displaced or forced to turn to low-level service work for corporations underwritten by government in the name of “progress,” “aspiration,” and “enlightenment.” And where America will end up under Democrats is not too different, in broad strokes, than where Gaza will end up under “liberal” Israelis: a techno-corporate “utopia” underwritten by government where uplifting progressive rhetoric and an occasional welfare program disguises the power imbalances underneath. This is not, in any sense, a real alternative to the overt military corporatism of Republicans under Donald Trump. It is military corporatism with a universalist, humanitarian, progressive face.
Defining Dissent: How the Federal Crackdown on Anti-Semitism Redefines the Boundaries of Speech
The Lancaster Patriot | May 21, 2026
A dual-track federal offensive aimed at combating anti-semitism is rapidly altering the landscape of American public discourse, civil rights enforcement, and immigration policy.
The strategy is unfolding simultaneously across both the executive and legislative branches. On May 19, 2026, the Department of Justice (DOJ) Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism officially launched a 15-city “National Awareness & Action Tour.” Concurrently, Senators Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and James Lankford (R-OK) introduced the bipartisan Jewish American Security Act, a comprehensive bill that seeks to mandate strict Title VI frameworks on college campuses, boost nonprofit security funding to $1 billion, and force social media platforms to disclose their moderation algorithms.
At the core of this sweeping nationwide push is a highly controversial legal mechanism: the codification of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition” of anti-semitism into federal civil rights investigations. By linking this specific definition to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, federal agencies are increasingly treating political criticism of the State of Israel as potential instances of unlawful discrimination.
The Executive Foundation: EOs 13899 and 14188
The DOJ’s new 15-city tour serves as the public enforcement rollout of two pivotal executive actions spanning two administrations: Executive Order 13899, signed in 2019, and Executive Order 14188, signed on January 29, 2025.
Together, these orders dictate how the federal government defines, monitors, and punishes anti-semitism. EO 13899 explicitly instructs federal departments—including the Department of Education and the DOJ—to “consider” the IHRA definition when adjudicating discrimination complaints. EO 14188 escalated these measures by ordering agencies to utilize “all available and appropriate legal tools” to prosecute violators and aggressively targeted campus protests.
Crucially, EO 14188 directs federal agencies to leverage immigration laws (specifically 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3)) to investigate, block entry, or initiate deportation proceedings against foreign students and visa holders who “endorse or espouse terrorist activity” during political demonstrations. It also tasks universities with actively monitoring and reporting the activities of non-citizen students and staff to federal authorities.
The Litmus Test: What Now Counts as a Civil Rights Violation?
Because the IHRA framework is now the operational standard for federal civil rights compliance, public scrutiny has shifted heavily toward the specific “contemporary examples” of anti-semitism outlined in the text.
Under this framework, actions and statements that historically fell under protected political speech, theological debate, or historical revisionism are now systematically flagged for federal review. The specific criteria include:
1. The Nazi Comparison Ban
The IHRA framework explicitly classifies “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” as an act of anti-semitism.
- The Impact: In practice, this guideline establishes a unique legal standard for the State of Israel. While political commentators, historians, and activists routinely draw analogies between various global governments and 20th-century authoritarian regimes (such as comparing U.S., Russian, or Chinese policies to Nazi or fascist systems), doing so specifically in reference to Israeli military or domestic policy can now trigger a federal civil rights investigation, risking a university’s federal funding.
2. The “Racist Endeavor” Test
The definition labels anti-semitic any claim that “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
- The Impact: This standard directly intersects with academic and political discussions regarding the geopolitical founding of modern states. Under this rule, analyzing or criticizing the historical displacement of populations during the 1948 foundational period of Israel, or arguing that the state’s structural laws inherently favor one ethnic group over another, transitions from a matter of political theory into a potential violation of federal civil rights law.
3. Placing Historical Atrocities Outside Normal Inquiry
The framework flags “accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.”
- The Impact: The inclusion of the word “exaggerating” introduces an unprecedented legal boundary around historical analysis. Scholars note that every major historical event—including wars, genocides, and revolutions—is subject to ongoing demographic debates, revisions of casualty numbers, and critiques regarding how governments politically leverage historical trauma. Under the federal framework, subjecting this specific historical atrocity to standard revisionist or critical analysis can be interpreted as a civil rights offense.
4. The Codification of Theological Interpretation
The IHRA definition includes “using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.”
- The Impact: This provision brings traditional Christian theology and historical textual interpretation into the crosshairs of federal oversight. For centuries, various Christian denominations have maintained specific theological positions regarding the New Testament accounts of first-century Jewish authorities and the rejection of Jesus Christ. If a religious group or individual applies these traditional covenantal critiques or biblical interpretations to the actions of the modern, secular State of Israel, those statements can now be legally categorized as anti-semitic harassment.
5. The “Double Standard” Mandate
The definition includes “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”
- The Impact: Legal experts have pointed out the extreme ambiguity of this clause. Because there is no objective legal metric to determine whether a protest group or political candidate is demanding “more” from Israel than they do from other nations, this clause gives federal investigators vast discretion to classify selective foreign policy criticism as a discriminatory act.
The Chilling Effect on Domestic Dissent
The combination of the DOJ’s 15-city tour and the newly introduced Jewish American Security Act marks a systemic shift in how the state monitors local communities. The stated objectives of the DOJ tour include “increasing reporting of antisemitic incidents by local officials” and embedding federal oversight directly into K-12 public schools and teacher unions.
Critics from across the ideological spectrum—ranging from civil liberties lawyers to anti-war activists—warn that these measures create a de facto speech code. By utilizing the machinery of the state to insulate a foreign government, its lobbying apparatus, and billions of dollars in annual U.S. foreign aid from severe public criticism, the federal government has effectively created a protected political class under the guise of civil rights enforcement.
Featured Video
The Iran War has destroyed fertilizer markets and farmers everywhere, almost
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Truth, History and Integrity
By Gilad Atzmon | March 13, 2010
… As devastating as it may be, at a certain moment in time, a horrible chapter was given an exceptionally meta-historical status. Its ‘factuality’ was sealed by draconian laws and its reasoning was secured by social and political settings. The Holocaust became the new Western religion. Unfortunately, it is the most sinister religion known to man. It is a license to kill, to flatten, no nuke, to wipe, to rape, to loot and to ethnically cleanse. … Read full article
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Former Israeli soldier: I left the Gaza war with shame and regret
- The UK Government Will Persecute Those Vocal about Israel, But Not War Criminals
- Is Hungary about to give Ukraine the EU green light?
- EU pushing Armenia to expel Russian Orthodox Church – intel service
- From Evo Morales to Rodrigo Paz: Bolivia’s Dramatic Shift Toward Israel
- Iran rejects US assassination claim, says Washington trying to whitewash its own crimes against Iranians
- The Iran War has destroyed fertilizer markets and farmers everywhere, almost
- Capitulate or Die: The Gaza ‘peace process’ and Western propaganda
- FSB Blows Lid on Western Plot to Hack Russian Officials’ Phones — But Here’s the Shocker
- Do Palantir’s bosses have blood on their hands over the Starobelsk massacre?
- If Americans Knew
- AIPAC: Defending the Indefensible
- “You Either Leave Right Now or You Die”—Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of a Village in Lebanon
- Selling American dead bodies to the US Navy for Israeli military training?
- AIPAC affiliate has funded lavish trips to Israel for dozens of Congress members since 7 October, filings reveal
- Trump called Netanyahu crazy, stopped Israel attack on Beirut: three articles
- ISRAELI MEDIA: Israel’s Education System Isn’t Broken. It’s Doing Exactly What It Was Built to Do
- UN experts alarmed by escalating settler terror and displacement in West Bank
- Israeli soldiers halt Catholic festival preparations in West Bank Christian village
- Congress Is Quietly Making Israel a Permanent Pillar of U.S. Military Modernization
- Israeli media report ritual abuse in major Israeli settlement block: three articles.
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
- Germany’s Ecological Holocaust… Once Fairy Tale Forests Getting Cleared For Wind Turbines
- A Grand Solar Minimum Has Arrived…Global Cooling Of At Least 1°C Is Expected By The 2030s, 2040s
- European “Expert Commission” Urges COVID-19-Like Global Climate State Of Energency!
- Real-World Observations Do Not Support The Position That Climate Change Is Human-Caused
- Germany’s AfD Party Calls Debunked Climate Scenarios “Greatest Fraud In Human History”
- Researchers Find Rapid Global Warming Phase At End Of Last Ice Age (Ca.18,000 Years Ago)
- Even The DNA Of Single-Celled Plankton Can Upend Alarmist Arctic Sea Ice Melt Claims
- Scandal: Although Climate Panic Is Canceled By IPCC, Europe’s Policymakers Continue With Their Crushing Policies
- How Once Hardcore Climate Alarmist Lucy Biggers Realized It Was All A Scam, Brainwashing
Aletho News 