COMMENTARY / OPINION
Terrorists deserve justice, not flattering ‘NPR’ profiles MOSHE PHILLIPS
Many killers of U.S. citizens walk freely in territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority or nations that America considers allies, such as Egypt and Jordan.
Dec. 1, 2025 JNS – After the terrorist attack by an Afghan national on two members of the West Virginia National Guard in Washington, U.S. President Donald Trump labeled the murderer a “savage monster” and an “animal.” He also said about Rahmanullah Lakanwal: “We will bring the perpetrator of this barbaric attack to swift and certain justice.”
All of these remarks by Trump bring to mind that there’s another Islamic terrorist who targeted Americans, and all of the things that he said about Lakanwal apply just as much to this other man.
Two days before the D.C. attack, NPR aired an over-the-top favorable profile on another terrorist and completely left out that he also planned a deadly surprise attack on American diplomats. NPR’s editors decided to mark Thanksgiving week by broadcasting a story that allowed the convicted murderer to blame Israel for his crimes and to whitewash his terrorism.
With an example like this, it is hard to argue with Trump’s July quip, when he called NPR “atrocious.” It is entirely appropriate when they choose to publish articles such as this.
HonestReporting correctly criticized the NPR headline, “A Palestinian man who became a novelist while in an Israeli prison is now free,” by tweeting: “This ‘Palestinian man’ was a PFLP member who dispatched a suicide bomber to a Tel Aviv market, killing 3 and wounding over 30 people. So, @NPR, Bassam Khandaqji is not just a ‘Palestinian man who became a novelist.’ He is a convicted terrorist. Put that in your headline.”
Unfortunately, the journalistic failures go very far beyond just the headline here. The true story of Bassam Khandaqji’s evil is completely glossed over by NPR staffer Daniel Estrin. What is missing from the story is that while the attack that Khandaqji was convicted for relates to his involvement in a suicide bombing on Nov. 1, 2024, at the crowded Carmel shuk open-air market in Tel Aviv —a target he had personally visited the day before—the terrorists also carried out reconnaissance at the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem.
Estrin has a long history of being caught by HonestReporting for his bias. These reports go back more than a decade, when he was still with the Associated Press. All of the convicted terrorist’s claims about himself went completely unchallenged by Estrin, including this: “(h)e calls himself anti-colonialist,” as if, of course, an “anti-colonialist” has every reason to want to see Israel cease to exist as a Jewish state.
NPR’s Estrin could have explained to his audience that Khandaqji, who is now in Egypt, should be arrested and tried for planning a terrorist attack against Americans and a U.S. diplomatic office.
How many U.S. citizens would have been murdered by Khandaqji’s fellow terrorist if they had not decided just hours before to switch the U.S. Consulate to the outdoor market?
The U.S. State Department has a program called “Rewards for Justice,” which offers multi-million-dollar rewards for information leading to the capture of terrorists around the world. Its website specifically states that it will pay for information that “(l)eads to the arrest or conviction of anyone who plans, commits, aids, or attempts international terrorist acts against U.S. persons or property in the United States or abroad.”
The U.S. Department of Justice should launch an investigation into Khandaqji and ask the Egyptian government to arrest him. According to Estrin, Khandaqji was recently at the Cairo Marriott Hotel.
More than 150 Americans have been murdered by Palestinian terrorists since the 1960s. Many of their killers walk freely in territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority or nations that the United States currently considers allies, such as Egypt and Jordan.
The U.S. State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” website also lists attacks in which Americans were harmed and displays photos of many victims. The attack on the Jerusalem Consulate is not listed because, thankfully, it didn’t happen. But planning attacks against Americans is a crime.
Every American should be able to agree that terrorist killers should be subjected to “certain justice” and be placed behind bars. We should all come together to demand that our government make a serious effort to capture Bassam Khandaqji and everyone who plotted with him to murder Americans.
MOSHE PHILLIPS Moshe Phillips, a veteran pro-Israel activist and author, is the national chairman of Americans For a Safe Israel (AFSI). A former board member of the American Zionist Movement, he previously served as national director of the U.S. division of Herut and worked with CAMERA in Philadelphia. He was also a delegate to the 2020 World Zionist Congress and served as editor of The Challenger, the publication of the Tagar Zionist Youth Movement. His op-eds and letters have been widely published in the United States and Israel.
The technocrats who control Trump are not going to stop here. The next stop on the road to technocratic tyranny will be the total monitoring and control of not just air travel but road travel as well.
DEC 01, 2025
Travelers going through airport security checkpoints without a REAL ID or passport will face a $45 fee starting February 1, the Transportation Security Administration announced Monday.
This fee is part of the Trump administration’s next phase of REAL ID enforcement.
According to a report by ABC News, the process will require individuals to verify their identity through a biometric or biographic system if they don’t have a Real ID-compliant form of identification before they’re permitted to cross through the TSA checkpoint.
That means getting your face scanned or your fingerprints taken right there at the airport or you will be turned away, unable to board your flight.
The announcement follows a proposed rule published in the Federal Register last month, but the agency increased the fee from its previously proposed amount of $18.
Steve Lorincz, TSA’s deputy executive assistant administrator for security operations, told ABC News:
“The fee was necessary because we needed to modernize the system. We needed to make sure that the system is safe.”
Ah yes, it’s always about keeping us safe. As they herd us into their digital feudal system.
TSA says the fee will cover the administrative and IT costs associated with the ID verification program and ensure the expense is covered by the travelers and not the taxpayers.
Whether the expense — a needless one created by technocrats bent on total control — is covered by air travelers or taxpayers, it’s still a case of making the minions pay for their own enslavement.
I would submit that this same biometric control feature will eventually be required to get a driver’s license and travel on the nation’s interstate highways, similar to what’s now being required to fly in the skies.
Technocracy is never satisfied in its drive for total control over people’s lives. In this case, it’s our freedom of movement they are out to curtail. But they are also working to curtail our use of resources such as water, electricity, gasoline, etc., while at the same time monitoring and controlling our freedom of speech, our healthcare, our children’s education, everything.
Never comply. Never bow to this ugly, tyrannical beast system.
[Ed.: Our beloved President is a globalist. Heads up!]
The Rise and Fall of the Misconceptions From the River and the Sea by Reuven Berko
December 1, 2025 Special to IPT News
The Prosperity Illusion
For decades, Israeli—and Western policymakers as well—clung to the belief that improving Palestinian economic conditions would restrain terrorism. The logic was simple: prosperity would temper radicalism. This belief led Israel to accept Qatari cash infusions into Gaza, imagining that financial stability would pacify Hamas.
The collapse of this misconception—along with others—came violently on October 7. Much of the world now demands the establishment of a Palestinian state as a kind of reward for Hamas’ atrocity. And so we confront a chilling conclusion: the forces that failed to destroy the Jews in Auschwitz now pursue the same goal “from the river to the sea.”
But Israel should have learned this lesson long ago. 38 years of non-stop Palestinian terrorism has demonstrated the total fallacy of this doctrine put forth by our perpetual do-good thinkers who lived in a make-believe bubble. Reality had long ago proven the murderous idiocy of this theory. The First Intifada erupted in 1987 at a time when tens of thousands of Palestinians were working inside Israel. And the October 2023 massacre occurred precisely when Gaza was flourishing—Qatari money flowing, construction booming, workers crossing daily into Israel, and Hamas seemingly “fat and deterred.”
The October 7 massacre did not merely kill Israelis; it killed the Oslo paradigm and a host of long-held illusions. Anyone who insists on the “right of return,” on “Palestine from the river to the sea,” and on Jerusalem as its capital is not genuinely pursuing peace. And in this conflict, as history repeatedly teaches, the side that barricades itself becomes the side attacked; the side that takes the initiative becomes the side that survives.
Democracy Was Not a Panacea: Like in 1933, the Free Elections in 2006 Led to a Fascist Government
In 2006, Israel and the United States embarked on what, in hindsight, was a perilous experiment: Palestinian elections. To Western architects, this was democratization. To many in the region, it was wishful thinking. As another Arab proverb warns: “A dog’s tail will remain crooked even if you clamp it in a vise for forty years.” In other words, you cannot straighten what is fundamentally bent.
The election results proved devastating. Palestinians freely chose Hamas. The Palestinian Authority refused to accept the outcome. Gaza descended into brutal internecine warfare. Hamas militants hurled Fatah members off rooftops and hung bodies in public squares. The fantasy of Western-style democracy, transplanted into a blood-soaked tribal environment, collapsed grotesquely. Hamas carried out hundreds of fatal attacks in Israel as it executed thousands of Palestinian dissidents, gays, Christians and anyone that didn’t accept their Islamist rule whom they simply called “collaborators.”
Yet despite this cold hard reality, the subsequent 15 years of Hamas rule reinforced Israel’s misconception that Hamas’ control of Gaza could be strategically useful. The rivalry between Hamas and Fatah helped Israel stall international efforts to impose a Palestinian state. In that spirit, Israel tolerated Hamas rule in Gaza because it created a divided Palestinian polity and helped deflect international pressure to establish a Palestinian state. It was an alliance of cynical utility disguised as strategy.
The West Rewards the Perpetrators of the October 7th Massacre
But this calculation depended on Hamas remaining contained in its tunnels. After October 7, that façade evaporated. Paradoxically, the massacre prompted several governments to demand a Palestinian state not as a repudiation of terror but as a concession to it.
Thus the grim argument: the same forces that once failed to annihilate the Jews in Europe now pursue their goal between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, with or without the blessing of Israel’s High Court.
Should the Palestinian Authority attempt to reenter Gaza, bloodshed will follow. The collapse of Hamas will produce chaos—settling of scores among its operatives, retaliation from their rivals, and desperate efforts to retrieve the dead from the rubble and begin rebuilding.
The Day After Gaza
In the meantime, Israel’s task is clear: destroy the terrorist networks entrenched beneath Rafah, and abandon the illusion that global “marketing” of harsh legal actions against Israeli soldiers—such as the Sde Teiman controversy—will earn international favor. The world does not reward self-inflicted scrutiny.
There are no subcontractors in the fight against terror. Yasser Arafat once acted as one, as the Karine-A weapons smuggling affair demonstrated. UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, enabled Hezbollah’s consolidation. UNRWA, the UN’s Palestinian aid agency, became entangled with Hamas operatives, its facilities used for storage, recruitment, and indoctrination. Outsourcing security has always ended in disaster.
In the final analysis, it is insane to believe that a new Arab dominated “peace keeping force” or any multinational force will do anything to stop Hamas. There is only one institution capable of defending Israel: the Israel Defense Forces.
* * * * *
IPT Senior Fellow Reuven Berko holds a Ph.D. in Middle East studies, specializing in Arab and Islamic Affairs. He served as the Adviser on Arab Affairs to the Jerusalem district police. Berko is a frequent commentator on major Arabic satellite programs and an analyst for the Arabic Affairs program on Israeli TV. He writes for a broad range of Israeli and Arab newspapers and is considered one of Israel’s top experts on Arab affairs
The left-right/Democrat-Republican blame game that thrives in Washington is a false paradigm that, unfortunately, most Americans fall for every day of the week.
DEC 01, 2025
There’s a lot of misdirection and deflection going on with regard to last week’s D.C. shooter, the Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal (pictured above).
The narrative put out by CNN and Fox News (flip sides of the same coin) and that of many other networks devoted to keeping us in the left-right Democrat-Republican paradigm, wants us to focus on either Biden’s or Trump’s failure to properly vet this Muslim assassin.
Mr. Lakanwal was an asset of the CIA in Afghanistan. He worked for them and was trained by them. And, as the saying goes, once a CIA asset, always a CIA asset. He perfectly fit the bill for this mission because, depending on one’s political persuasion, the media can confidently place the blame on either the Democrats or the Republicans for his presence in America. Both Biden and Trump had opportunities to “vet” this CIA terrorist asset but neither was able to stop him from coming or get him removed once he got here.
I will attempt to explain in this article why the issue of “vetting” is exactly the wrong thing to be focused on when it comes to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been imported to America from Afghanistan and other Muslim countries since the late 1980s.
The Afghan refugee accused of shooting two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., last week was likely “radicalized” after he came to the U.S., according to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
In response to the shooting, Noem vowed in an interview Sunday that the Trump administration will carry out mass deportations of immigrants from what she called Third World countries. That makes a nice sound bite that will resonate with the base. In reality, it will never happen. The courts will not allow a refugee that is here on a legal green card or even been granted citizenship, as thousands have, to be deported back to their home country for no reason other than that Donald Trump has declared them to be dangerous.
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But, in an interview Sunday with NBC’s Meet the Press, Kristi Noem pushed that talking point along with the red herring about “vetting.”
“I will say we believe he was radicalized since he’s been here in this country. We do believe it was through connections in his home community and state, and we’re going to continue to talk to those who interacted with him.”
She added that, “We will never allow this to continue to happen in our country, allow individuals who came to our country that were unvetted by Joe Biden, allowed to run free and loose.”
Fast-forward to the 2-minute mark in the video below to hear Noem’s squishy explanation that doesn’t add up.
WATCH [14:31] https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiRutk7ff2o
Noem stressed that migrants with pending asylum claims aren’t off limits for deportation. But until now they apparently were, meaning Team Trump never went back and evaluated all the asylum applications that were already in the hopper when Trump took office. This would have been the common-sense thing to do, given Trump’s continuous railing against Biden’s incompetence and his autopen rubber stamp of everything put before him by the hardcore progressives on his staff.
Noem was essentially blaming Biden for an asylum case that was approved under Trump.
This jihadist came to the United States under Biden but his status as a legal refugee was approved in April of this year under Trump. Although Noem tried to talk around that fact in her Sunday interview with NBC, continuously naming Biden, Biden, Biden, she could not deny that the Trump administration is at least partially responsible for this jihadist’s continued residence in our country.
To be clear, Afghan refugees have been entering the United States almost without pause since shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2002. The U.S. has been absorbing Afghans who worked with U.S. military forces as interpreters and in other capacities since the days of George W. Bush. Islamic refugees started entering the U.S. from other countries well before that.
The Bosnians, for example, were welcomed into the United States by the Clinton administration from 1992 to 1995 after NATO bombed their home country to smithereens. The largest population of ethnic Bosnians outside of Bosnia, most of them Muslim, now reside in the Chicago and St. Louis areas.
If Trump really is implementing new, much stricter vetting protocols, that’s a welcomed change. But he needs to go further because vetting is nothing but a useful deflection used by globalists whenever one of their assets turns on America.
Frankly, it’s impossible to vet a hardcore Islamist. Noem basically admitted this when she said the D.C. shooter was “radicalized” after he arrived on U.S. soil. She completely negated everything she had said about Biden when she admitted that this Afghan refugee was considered a safe risk upon entry to the U.S., only to have gone over to the dark side after he arrived here. There is no vetting policy on earth that can weed out potential jihadists who only turn violent AFTER they get here. Thus, vetting is irrelevant to this case and Noem knows it.
The only rational policy is to stop migration, all of it, from countries like Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Somalia, Syria, Sudan and Iraq. A good place to start in accomplishing that goal would be to stop attacking those countries with U.S. war planes. Call off the neocon dogs. Trump was supposed to do that, remember? Yes, until we found out that he is actually a neocon himself whose favorite golfing partner is the warmonger extraordinaire Lindsey Graham.
The neocon penchant for using U.S. military power against helpless Third World countries serves to destabilize those regions and drive refugees into America and Europe. They are then put to work in meatpacking plants, as Uber drivers and other low-wage jobs while being signed up for Food Stamps and other government handouts to fill in the income gap. It has become one massive public-private partnership between big corporations and the government to import refugees as an economic benefit for the oligarchal class. These corporations pay them a non-living wage with the difference offset by government handouts. In return, the politicians get showered with campaign cash by the very corporations whose bidding they do.
A small percentage of these Muslim refugees will turn violent. The stock talking points we are given then turns to vetting, a false paradigm that works every time on Americans who don’t understand how the globalist game is played.
In short, we are being played.
The refugee program as it was first designed by the Refugee Act of 1980, signed by former President Jimmy Carter, was supposed to be focused on rescuing Christians and other religious or political minorities who are preyed upon by tyrannical governments around the world. It has morphed into a cheap-labor program for big corporations, with a side benefit being that the program also provides assets for globalists who wish to destabilize America in similar fashion to what they’ve accomplished in the Middle East and Africa. If you want to run a color revolution, you need assets on the ground to divide and destabilize the local population, who are then fed lies and propaganda by the controlled media (this includes the conservative controlled-opposition media).
This has to change. We must return to the roots of what refugee status was originally intended to be. That, or shut the program down altogether as a failed experiment.
I covered all of this and more in my book, Stealth Invasion, which became the most banned book on Amazon a few years after it was first published in 2017. Why? Because it predicted everything that is happening now and explained how the globalists use Islam as a battering ram against the West, and how they perpetuate the flow of refugees into the West through their endless forever wars in the Middle East and around the globe.
The ultimate goal is not a global Islamic caliphate. It’s a one-world beast system run by globalist technocrats and powered by AI. Islam is valued by the globalists only to the extent that it can help usher in the beast system.
You can still get a copy of Stealth Invasion at BarnesAndNoble.com.
OBAMA IS TRYING TO BAN BRIGITTE GABRIEL AFTER SHE EXPOSED THIS ABOUT THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD [5:44] by Leah Rosenberg
November 30, 2025 Israel Unwired
College psyop Peggy Tierney
NOV 30, 2025 TIERNEY’S REAL NEWS
FYI – there’s a new psyop going around about student loans – so I thought I’d post the truth. I’ve gotten dozens of requests from people to explain this topic, so here goes. I had no idea there would be so much interest in this topic.
People are saying Trump changed the rules on “professional graduate degrees” in his OBBB. NO, HE DID NOT – the same rule has been in effect since LBJ in 1965!
Nursing degrees have NOT historically been classified as “professional degrees” under federal regulations. The Department of Education clarified that nursing was never included in the original 1965 federal list that defined professional degrees, which included fields like medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, law, veterinary medicine, optometry, and clinical psychology.
Because of this, nursing programs have typically been categorized separately from traditional professional degrees.
This means that nursing degrees, including advanced degrees like the Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) and the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP), have not formally been counted alongside other professional degrees for purposes such as federal student loan eligibility and borrowing limits.
Regarding teaching degrees, they have not traditionally been regarded as “professional degrees” in the same federal classification either. Similar to nursing, teaching degrees typically fall under graduate or other education categories but are not counted among professional degrees like medicine or law.
In 2025, under the Trump administration’s implementation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Department of Education clarified and applied this historical regulatory definition to determine federal student loan caps for graduate degrees, explicitly excluding advanced nursing degrees (such as MSN and DNP) from the higher borrowing limits designated for professional degrees.
This is NOT a new rule change introduced by Trump; it reiterates and enforces a long-standing classification. Nursing organizations dispute this interpretation because, in education and workforce policy contexts, nursing has often been treated like a professional field, but federal student loan regulations NEVER formally recognized it as such.
BTW – you can find this information through a simple search but people would rather believe and share the lie that was manufactured by the Democrats and the fake news to hurt Trump. Please do not do that. Post the truth!
I also included the financial caps for each. The caps on each “category” on an annual basis and a lifetime basis are higher for Trump than Biden in 3 areas. In the one area where Biden exceeds the lifetime cap – Trump makes up for it with Pell Grants and tax benefits and he also introduced programs that focus on the skilled trades. The Trump administration has initiated new programs and executive orders aimed at promoting trade schools and skilled trades training, focusing heavily on expanding apprenticeships.
The US Treasury’s and Pentagon’s Israeli Jackpot Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger
November 30, 2025 “Second Thought: US-Israel Initiative”
*Contrary to conventional wisdom, US-Israel relations do not constitute a one-way-street, but a mutually-beneficial two-way-street. Israel is not a beneficiary of foreign aid, but a game-changing ally of the US, benefiting from an annual US investment, which has transformed Israel into a unique force and dollar multiplier for the US defense and aerospace industries and Armed Forces, as well as for the US Treasury (as documented below). Thus, Israel saves the US many years of research and development (mega-billion dollars), enhances the global competitiveness of US defense products, bolsters the global leadership of the US’ defense and commercial technologies, expands US export and the US’ employment base, increases US income tax revenues, and bolsters the US national security.
*Israel was the first country (in 2018) to use the Lockheed-Martin F-35 combat aircraft operationally. In fact, Israel has been a game-changing, battle tested laboratory and the research and development center for Lockheed-Martin, as it has been for dozens of US defense industries, which supply Israel with highly-appreciated advanced military systems. Israel’s Air Force, jointly with Lockheed-Martin, overcame critical technical (software) and mechanical (hardware) glitches – which almost doomed the program – transforming the F-35 from a high-risk venture into a mega-billion-dollar bonanza for the US taxpayers and US national security.
*The uniquely intense Israeli experience in multiple combat theatres and over many thousands of hours – including long range precision strikes – has upgraded and highlighted the F-35’s combat effectiveness. It has dramatically enhanced the F-35’s reliability, maintainability, electronic warfare, weapons integration, countermeasures and overall survivability.
*The Israeli experience has showcased and underscored the US advantage over the Chinese, Russian, British and French competition; thus, playing a key role in the substantial increase in F-35 exports since 2018,and especially during the last two years.
*Over 1,200 F-35 combat aircraft have been exported since 2018 to Britain, Canada, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Romania, Greece and the Czech Republic. In late 2025, Lockheed-Martin reported a $173bn–$179bn backlog of its F-35, with Britain, Italy and Australia expanding their fleets.
*The F-35 production ramped from 91 units in 2018 to higher rates annually thereafter. The export of over 1,000 F-35s is planned through 2035. The export growth has been driven by multiple factors, including the Russia-Ukraine war and Indo-Pacific concerns, as well as the Israeli validation of the effectiveness and superiority of the F-35.
*According to Lockheed Martin, the F-35 program generates approximately$72bn in annual U.S. economic output ($40bn is export-driven), supporting 290,000 jobs and resulting in significant tax revenues through personal and corporate income taxes. The F-35’s US workforce has grown 35% since 2019.
According to Lockheed-Martin, the cumulative economic impact of the F-35 program is projected to exceed $1 trillion over the program’s life, generating anticipated annual federal, state and local tax contribution, factored into state and local fiscal benefits, of $10-15 billion.
Assuming that only 50% of the export was induced by Israel’s game-changing use of the F-35 in combat, then $20bn of the annual economic output is Israel-related, generating two forms of taxes. The first is $4bn in taxable income, predicated on 20% pre-tax profit margins, which when taxed at 30% federal and state tax rates yields $1.2bn to Treasury taxes, attributed to the Israeli battle tested laboratory. The second is employment income, that could be estimated at $10bn, which would yield $2bn of employment-related taxes. Thus, F-35-driven taxes amount to roughly the scope of the annual investment in Israel ($3.8bn),which is misperceived as foreign aid. The F-35 is one of dozens of US-made military systems employed, and enhanced, by Israel, benefiting the US’ economy and defense.
*The magnitude of the Israeli contribution to the US economy and defense is highlighted by the fact that the Israeli battle-tested-laboratory has, also, bolstered the battle-performance, export, employment and the tax-derivatives of Lockheed-Martin’s F-16 and Black Hawk helicopters, Boeing’s F-15 and Apache helicopters, as well as dozens of additional military systems, ammunition and military vehicles, manufactured by the US defense and aerospace industries, which employ about 2.5 million people.
*The aforementioned facts highlight Israel’s role as a unique game-changing, dollar and force-multiplier ally, which bolsters the US national security and the US Treasury’s tax revenues. In addition, Israel serves as a leading innovation center for the US commercial high tech sector (250 US high tech giants maintain research and development centers in Israel). Israel is a battle-tested laboratory for the US Armed Forces (formulating battle tactics on the basis of Israeli battle experience), saving the defense and aerospace industries mega-billion of dollars in research and development, a show-room demonstrating the superiority of US military systems over global competition, a ground-breaking source of intelligence (equal to 5 CIAs according to a former Chief of the US Air Force Intelligence), and the largest US military base with no need for US soldiers.
How Tel Aviv’s Elites Are Toasting the End of Israeli Sovereignty By Mordechai Sones
While Israel bleeds, the Globalists count their chips
November 30, 2025 Jewish Home News
On the crisp morning of November 27, 2025, while the smoke from the northern border had barely cleared the nostrils of the reservists returning home, the valet parking at the David Kempinski Hotel was overflowing with the sedans of the untouchable class.
Contents
Inside, under the soft lighting of the ballroom, the captains of Israeli industry, banking, and diplomacy gathered not to mourn the fracturing of the old world, but to carve up the carcass of the new one. They came for the Calcalist “Global Economy 2025” conference, an event sold under the banner of “A New World Order,” illustrated by a golden globe cracked into jigsaw pieces—a visual metaphor so on-the-nose it felt less like branding and more like a confession.
The flyer for the event, distributed with the glossy detachment of a luxury real estate brochure, promised to map the opportunities of tomorrow. But for those paying attention to the tectonic shifts beneath the floorboards, the agenda read like an autopsy of the Jewish nation-state. This was not a summit on how to strengthen Israel’s independence; it was a seminar on how to liquify it into the global stream.
This is not just a figure of speech. In 2022, 80% of our startups were Israeli companies. Today, nearly half incorporate in Delaware before hiring a single engineer. This is the “Delaware Flip”—a legal mechanism that ensures the intellectual property of the Jewish state is owned by American entities, while the risk remains in Tel Aviv. They are not just selling shares; they are selling the deed to the nation’s future tax base. As usual, the most chilling phrase was not buried in the fine print; it was boastfully printed in bold, cheerful font: “From the U.S. to Post-War Iran.”
Sanitizing Survival
There is something profoundly macabre about the phrase “Post-War Iran” when sandwiched between discussions on “Global Investments” and “Cross-Border Industries.” For the banking executives and tech moguls sipping espresso with British Ambassador Simon Walters, “neutralizing the Iranian threat” was not a messianic deliverance or military triumph—it was a market correction. The conference agenda treated the existential war that has consumed the region as merely a “geopolitical development,” a bump in the road to be smoothed over by “normalization agreements” and the flow of “The New Oil”—technology and data.
The receipts for this betrayal are in the numbers. While the conference celebrated a record-breaking $71 billion in high-tech M&A exits for 2025, Moody’s was simultaneously downgrading Israel’s credit rating, explicitly citing “geopolitical risk” and “no exit strategy.” The contrast is nauseating: the elite economy is cashing out at record highs specifically because it is decoupling from the state, while the real economy—the one owned by the reservist closing his faltering business to return to Gaza—is left holding the bag for the national debt.
This corporate stoicism stands in stark, violent contrast to the reality analyzed by independent observers just miles away. As the Kempinski crowd applauded the “Middle East Rewired,” reports were circulating about the “managed destinies” of Israel and Iran—a concept detailing how global powers have orchestrated the outcomes of our conflicts to suit a trilateral balance of power.
The conference’s promise to explore “the intersection of global politics and international investments” is a polite euphemism for a darker truth: Israel’s security is being decoupled from its sovereignty and reattached to the portfolio performance of global superstates.
The Rise of the Triad
The conference tracks—”Trump 2.0,” “Eastward Bound,” and the “Middle East Rewired”—mirrored almost perfectly the dystopian Triad model that has been reported by independent journals. The “New World Order” celebrated at the Kempinski is not a world of free democracies, but a consolidated map of three totalitarian blocs: the American sphere, the Eurasian/Chinese sphere, and a managed vassalage in the Middle East.
The “Middle East Rewired” panel was not discussing abstract peace; they were discussing the IMEC Corridor. This US-brokered trade route requires a rail link from Saudi Arabia to Haifa—a link that global investors will not fund while Israel is “unstable.” Thus, the war must end not when security is achieved, but rather when the financing for the rail line is secured. We are being reduced from a sovereign state to a transit node for Indian goods headed to Europe.
When Discount Bank CEO Avi Levy and the assembled dignitaries spoke of “forces reshaping the global economic map,” they were acknowledging, with terrifying complacency, the end of the liberal international order. They were preparing the Israeli economy not to stand alone, but to serve as a high-tech vendor to these emerging superstates. The “Innovation Without Borders” slogan, sponsored by a relentless globalism, rings hollow when one realizes that for the average citizen, the borders are closing in. The elites in the room were effectively negotiating the terms of Israel’s tenancy in a world where it is no longer the landlord of its own fate.
The Great Betrayal
Perhaps the most stinging irony of the November 27 gathering was its timing. On the very day the financial aristocracy met to discuss “The Future of Finance” and “Resilience,” independent analysts were publishing scathing indictments of the “Great Betrayal” by the American Jewish majority. While the conference attendees feted the “Trump Economy 2.0” and “America First,” they ignored the crumbling “Blue Wall” of Diaspora support. The disconnect was palpable: a room full of people betting on a globalized future that has already decided to leave the Jewish people behind as a distinct political entity.
The branding on the flyer—”No.No.No.No.No.Yes”—conceived by creative director Gideon Amichay, was intended to symbolize innovative breakthrough melting resistance.
Watch Gideon Amichay explain his “No, No, No, No, No, Yes” philosophy
Amichay’s famous philosophy teaches that “No” is just a comma, a pause before the inevitable “Yes” of innovation. But when applied to national survival, this logic becomes lethal. The “No” of the soldier in Gaza—no to Hamas, no to surrender—is viewed by this conference as merely a “blocking position” in a negotiation. The “Yes” they are driving toward is not victory, but the “Yes” of a capitulation signed in ink by a Delaware corporation. It is the “Yes” of the court Jew who believes that if he makes himself useful enough to the Emperor, the decree will hopefully be annulled.
A Puzzle with Missing Pieces
As the conference wound down and the QR codes were scanned for “after the conference” networking, the golden puzzle on the poster remained unresolved. The pieces of this “New World Order” do not fit together for the benefit of the soldier in Gaza or the mother in Sderot. They fit together only for the multinational corporation that can straddle the divide between Washington, Riyadh, Beijing, and a “Post-War” Tehran.
The “Global Economy 2025” conference was not a celebration of Israeli ingenuity; it was a shiva call. It was the sound of a disconnect so profound that it borders on treason—a managerial class eager to dissolve the messy, difficult, miraculous reality of the Jewish State into the smooth, golden, interchangeable pieces of a global gameboard. They call it “inclusion.” History will likely call it liquidation.
Trump’s Venezuela Offensive Impacts Israel As Well Avi Abelow
November 30, 2025 Pulse of Israel
Everyone who cares about the survival of the free world must pay attention to what President Donald J. Trump is about to do in Venezuela.
This is not just about one collapsing nation or a regional narco-crisis. This is about trying to stop the growing axis of power led by China, empowered by Qatar, and shielded by a narco-state in the Western hemisphere, pushing to destroy America from the inside and outside.
For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has been quietly building deep economic and strategic control in Venezuela through oil-for-debt deals, infrastructure financing, and energy investments that now tie Venezuela’s survival directly to Beijing’s interests. China is not just trading, it has positioned itself inside America’s backyard, creating leverage, access, and regional influence where the U.S. should be uncontested.
At the same time, Qatar, global diplomat, financier, kingmaker, Muslim Brotherhood leader, has inserted itself into the region as the power-broker between Venezuela and the West.
Qatar holds itself out as mediator, negotiator, and bridge-maker (similar to the situation in Gaza), but make no mistake: Qatar’s foreign policy consistently empowers Islamist movements and anti-Western actors across the globe.
When Qatar becomes the middleman between Washington and Caracas, it does so not to strengthen America, but to embed itself as a gatekeeper in the Western Hemisphere.
China and Qatar together building permanent footholds on America’s doorstep. Venezuela gives them both the opening.
This is why Trump’s planned military offensive matters. It is not about Venezuela alone, it is about the future balance of power, and stopping the growing red-green alliance of China and Qatar.
For America, the stakes are immediate and existential:
– Venezuela has become a narco-terror platform pumping poison into U.S. cities.
– Criminal networks and cartel smuggling routes are eroding American communities and fueling crime, addiction, and chaos.
– Leaving Venezuela intact means leaving China and Qatar unchallenged as they expand their influence only hours from U.S. shores.
– A successful campaign sends a message the world desperately needs to hear: the free world is not finished. America still fights. America still pushes back.
If the U.S. fails to act, Latin America becomes the next staging ground of the red-green alliance, communist authoritarianism fused with Islamist influence and economic dependency. If the U.S. succeeds, the free world gets a lifeline.
Some may ask: What does this Venezuela situation have to do with Israel?
Everything.
Any blow against China’s and Qatar’s strategic web weakens a global patron of Iran. Any rollback of their influence limits the diplomatic protection of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. When America stops rogue regimes from becoming proxy-states for anti-Western forces, Israel becomes safer, more secure, and less isolated globally.
We cannot ignore that the world is shifting. Power blocks are realigning. Alliances are forming beneath the surface, in Caracas, in Doha, Qatar, in Beijing, and those alliances will shape Israel’s security future as much as missile defense or Iron Dome. If America reasserts itself now, Israel gains breathing room. If it retreats, the Chinese/Qatari/Iranian axis surrounding us in Israel strengthens.
But here is the kicker…
Trump’s military offensive against Venezuela may weaken Venezuela, disrupt cartel networks, and push back China and Qatar in the Western hemisphere, but it will not protect America from the millions of jihadi Muslims and ideological agents already living inside the country, and growing in political power, at the federal, state and local levels. The red-green alliance is not only advancing outside America; it is already extremely active within U.S. borders, on campuses, in community organizations, in the media, with influencers, and in politics.
And here is the uncomfortable reality no one wants to say out loud:
Stopping Qatar in Venezuela does nothing to stop Qatar’s growing influence inside America itself*.
As we speak, U.S. conservative influencers, Republican media figures, and even sitting politicians are in Doha, Qatar being courted, flattered, and absorbed into Qatar’s soft-power machine.
Trump can bomb cartel ports in Caracas, but unless America also confronts the jihadi ideologues and foreign influence networks operating on U.S. soil, and expels them from American soul, America remains vulnerable for internal destruction via cultural and demographic jihad.
A sovereign country has the moral right, and responsibility, to remove those who declare their intent to destroy it. Until that internal threat is addressed, external victories, no matter how necessary, cannot secure America’s future.
Trump is opening the first front. The next front is inside the homeland. And if America wants to survive, it must win both.
And Israel must show the way by expelling all jihadist Muslims in all areas that we control. That is the moral way to stop the jihadist onslaught against us and all the minorities in our midst persecuted by the Sunni and Shia jihadis.
We must be the shining light of morality for the rest of the world to learn from. It’s not just about the fight of good vs evil, it’s about our literal survival.
Am Yisrael Chai!!!
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Leftist Marxists Preparing Now to Take Over America – Alex Newman [VIDEO 52:39] By Greg Hunter
November 29, 2025 USAWatchdog.com
Journalist Alex Newman, author of the upcoming book “Woke and Weaponized, How Karl Marx Won the Battle for American Education and How We Can Win it Back,” has a dire warning for America. Newman is back from the recent UN climate conference in Brazil called COP30 (Conference of the Parties). Newman saw firsthand that just about every country there hates America and wants to overthrow the government and replace it with a communist dystopia. Newman warned last time he was on USAW that “Venezuela Is a Very Dangerous Enemy.” Newman explains the latest danger, and says, “The Marxist President of Columbia Gustavo Petro, who was put in place with help of George Soros, Joe Biden and Barak Obama. He went to New York in September for the UN General Assembly, went out in the street with a bullhorn and told American soldiers that they must disobey Donald Trump, and ‘stand with humanity.’ Whatever is that supposed to mean? Why would a president of a foreign country come and tell our soldiers to disobey our Commander in Chief? It’s because they are preparing for something. Why would these six members of Congress, some with deep ties to the CIA and other subversive forces on our country, why would they be putting out this idea that they should disobey the Commander in Chief? It’s because we are watching a replica of the color revolutions we have seen in North Africa and Eastern Europe. In many cases, the same people who wrote the script for those cases are writing the script here. This will involve the people that came across the border in the last few years, many from Venezuela . . . and many from China. It will involve using the domestic radical left. . .. They are all being used to collapse the United States into a civil war.”
General Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), agrees with Newman. General Flynn says there is an ongoing color revolution to overthrow the US government, and he thinks President Trump should let the country know how dire things really are. Newman says, “They are preparing something enormous, and if Donald Trump does not get ahead of this, I think this is going to be a very rough ride. I think it is going to be a rough ride if he does get ahead of this. I agree 100% with Michael Flynn. Donald Trump needs to come out and have a fireside chat and explain to the American people here what we are facing.”
Rich Higgins, who died in 2022, was Director for Strategic Planning of the National Security Council in the Trump Administration in 2017. Higgins tried to warn President Trump in his first term what was coming in a now famous memo. Newman says, “Higgins said you cannot think of this as regular politics. This is not regular politics. They are trying to delegitimize you so we can have an overthrow of not just your presidency but our system. He talked about how socialists, Islamists, communists and the LGBT crowd have joined in an international alliance to destroy the United States of America and not just as a nation but as an ideal. This is one of the final steps necessary to usher in this new world order that they have been talking about for generations.”
Newman contends that the “climate hysteria hoax” is the basis for total tyrannical control, and you could see this in full detail at the recent UN COP30 meeting in Brazil. Newman says, “One of the top priorities is to completely destroy the climate hysteria hoax. Donald Trump actually stood up in front of the UN General Assembly and said this was the biggest con job in the history of humanity. Why is the President of the United States making this such a big deal? Because he understands this is the fraud that underpins the entire agenda. The whole effort to smash national sovereignty revolves around the climate hoax. The whole effort to indoctrinate your children into pagan earth worship all revolves around the climate hoax. The effort to expand government to micromanage every area of your life all revolves around the climate hoax. It all revolves around the lie the gas we exhale, carbon dioxide, is pollution that needs to be regulated and controlled by the UN. Even the effort to bring all the religions together all revolves around the climate hoax. They say Mother Earth is in trouble, and Christianity of the Bible is the cause of this.”
In closing, Newman says, “This is not just politics. It is aimed to overthrow our system of government. I think we are getting closer to this really turning into a hot mess.”
President Trump said recently that drug traffickers in Venezuela will be stopped “very soon.” He also said Saturday (11/29/25) that air space around Venezuela is “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”
There is much more in the 52-minute interview.
Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog as he goes One-on-One with hard-hitting journalist Alex Newman, founder of LibertySentinel.org and author of the upcoming book “Woke and Weaponized.” This is a stark warning for all parents about the communist, thought shaping agenda, in our public schools for 11.29.25.
White Women Are the Best, and the Worst! | Nicholas De Santo [13:53] Nicholas De Santo
[Ed.: Viewer caveat: borderline misogynism.]
Nov 28, 2025 Anglo Italian Comedy
Truth-based conservative comedy is back!
%85 of women under the age of 30 voted for Mamdani! White women want state-sponsored abortion bonanza and “independence” from men, funded by the state, through tax collected from… men! And in their pursuit of these goals they don’t think twice about destroying the Western civilisation, and ultimately, themselves!
Current news of the world brought to you in a comedic twist, by the best (and only) Italian-Iranian comedian in the world! Performed with Comedy Unleashed at the famous Backyard Comedy Club, Bethnal Green, England.
“I’ve created a monster” Peggy Tierney
NOV 29, 2025 TIERNEY’S REAL NEWS
Nicole Shanahan, who was once RFK’s VP choice, gave an interview to Allie Beth Stuckey earlier this year that nobody has really seen. It’s really important to hear.
Shanahan was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin from 2018 until their divorce in 2023, so she knows what it means to be a Big Tech wife and a mother as well as a business owner in Silicon Valley herself. Nicole Shanahan and Sergey Brin had a daughter named Echo, who was born in 2018, and was 4 years old at the time of their divorce.
Nicole was a CodeX fellow at Stanford Law, and the founder of ClearAccessIP, a legal tech company specializing in patent analytics and intellectual property asset management, which she sold in 2020. She also founded a philanthropic foundation (an NGO) to “give back” some of her wealth so she understands the “giving” part too and what it entails.
Here’s what Nicole said about “progressive women” in Big Tech:
NICOLE SHANAHAN: “I don’t think many wives in the Big Tech mafia realize now that they were used to set the groundwork for what Klaus Schwab calls The Great Reset.
Their (our) money [BILLIONS] especially was being CONSCRIPTED through a network of NGO advisors, Hollywood, Davos, and their own companies.
A really small group of people in Big Tech was used and completely blind to how their MONEY is being used to enable these Great Reset policies.
Progressive women (and Big Tech wives) find their meaning through philanthropic work. I really believed I was helping black communities and indigenous communities rise up.
But now the problems have gotten worse. Crime is worse. Mental health is worse. The whole model is broken.
Many of these tech wives are involved with Hollywood, their kids are a mess, their relationships with their husbands are not working, they are depressed and on SSRIs and looking for meaning so they “invest” in society to try to feel better.
At the end of the day they always go: ‘But climate change.’
The combination of social justice + climate change — it gets progressive women 100% of the time.
What they don’t know is that most of the big weather issues they say are caused by “climate change” are actually caused by their own geoengineering manipulation. We (they) were the useful idiots.”
Hmm. Is Nicole telling the world this for altruistic reasons or to CYA? The word “conscripted” makes it sound like they were forced.
NICOLE: “These Big Tech wives realize that the wealth comes in not necessarily because their tech husband is this exceptional entrepreneur. It’s because the Government helped fund their husband at some point along the way. If you look at like the history of Google or the history of Facebook or the history of Apple, Amazon, Hewlett Packard or Oracle, these companies didn’t just spring up out of nowhere – they came through institutional backing at some point in the case.
Facebook (founded in 2004 at Harvard under Bush) and Google especially is where a lot of these tech wife mafia folks come from. At Stanford there’s this Silicon Valley Stanford network and if you look at where some of those grants or money [to Big Tech] came from – early money especially – and it came from individuals that had Government ties. These companies serve Government functions as well (that’s called fascism BTW – they are private companies given Governmental authority.)
Google (founded at Stanford in 1998 under Bill Clinton) really was involved with the Government in helping identify behavior on the internet and Facebook as well. And so it’s no surprise that the intertwining between the Democrat Party, which is so prevalent in California, and Hollywood and these Big Tech companies, has just always been there.
Big Tech wives try to find meaning in social justice issues like funding illegal immigration, climate change and so-called criminal justice reform.
Minority groups would tell us that their biggest supporters in Congress have been Republicans, but yet they continued to vote Democrat. Every cause (NGO) would ask us for money and we just gave it away to feel better.
Did it work? Did the minority communities thrive because we helped? No, the communities did not thrive. The NGOs thrived. It’s like the teachers’ unions. It’s the same racket. It’s a racket.
At the end you realize: “Oh my god, I’ve created a monster.” But you can’t break the cycle. Your purpose is to raise more money in order to raise more money.”
Whatever her motive, I think EVERY liberal woman in American needs to hear this interview. You will see yourself in Nicole.
Watch and decide. Here is a 4 minute clip: https://x.com/newstart_2024/status/1994506579660689812?s=20
[Ed.: Do see the 4 minute clip at the end of the article! Apparently, it’s not climate change at all! It’s geoengineering weather – climate control! Surprise, surprise, surprise.]
[Re-posting from last week in case you missed it:] DC Attack: A Warning President Trump Still Refuses to Hear [15:05] Avi Abelow
Nov 27, 2025 Pulse of Israel
Washington just learned what Israel has known for generations: jihad doesn’t stop where compassion begins. If America wants to live, it must wake up, because the enemy is already inside. There is only one way to save America.
Political correctness has become a muzzle; we must remove it.
The answer is what you see in this video, and it must be repeated, loudly and consistently, again and again. It is literally a matter of life and death. Do not be afraid to voice this out loud, to one and all, day after day.
The old Israel is gone. It’s time to build a better one. AVI MAYER
We will never return to the Israel of October 6th — and that may be our greatest gift.
NOV 29, 2025
Over the past month and a half, sitting through Shabbat morning Torah readings in several cities on two continents, I have been struck by how closely the biblical story has come to mirror our own.
The release of the 20 remaining living hostages came on the eve of Simchat Torah, the holiday on which Jews around the world conclude the previous year’s Torah reading cycle and begin anew with the first portion of the Book of Genesis, Bereshit.
At the time, several commentators drew on the story of creation, finding parallels between the beginning of the world and the new beginnings experienced by the hostages and all of us who had been gripped by their plight over their two years in captivity.
Two weeks later, addressing a congregation on Long Island, I commented that I thought the next portion, Noah, might be even more instructive. Like Noah, we have all been through a cataclysm that destroyed the world we knew — or thought we knew — and have emerged to contend with an entirely new reality.
But the lesson of the next reading, I noted, is no less powerful, because it is there, in the portion known as Lech Lecha, that Abraham is instructed by God to go forth to the land that would come to be known as Israel.
The Torah’s message, I posited, is that it is not enough to reconstruct what was. That world is gone. Abraham was tasked by God — and we are tasked today — to pursue a loftier mission, to gather ourselves and build a world that is better than the one that once existed. For us in Israel, and for Jews around the world, that means acknowledging and reaffirming that the reality of October 6th will never return — and that the Israel we build going forward must be worthy of the sacrifices that made its future possible.
As we enter the latter half of the Book of Genesis, it is hard to escape the feeling that the readings are still sending us timely messages.
This week’s Torah portion, Vayetze, is the first that centers on a dream. For the rest of the book, dreams will play a pivotal role in the narrative. From Jacob’s fateful dream of a ladder reaching the heavens, to Joseph’s dreams about his elevated stature compared to his brothers, to Pharaoh’s dreams that set Joseph on a path to greatness, these biblical dreams are no mere escapes from reality; they are the forces that redirect it.
When Jacob arrives in the place he will later call Beit El and falls asleep, dreaming of angels ascending and descending that heavenly ladder, he receives a divine promise that the land on which he lies will be his and his descendants, and that God will be with him and will bring him back to that land.
When his son Joseph, already getting on his brothers’ nerves, regales them with his dreams about their sheaves of wheat bending to his and about the sun, moon, and stars bowing down to him, it serves as the final straw that drives them to throw him into a pit and sell him to a passing caravan heading to Egypt.
And when Joseph goes on to successfully interpret the dreams of Pharaoh and his key aides, he begins a rise to power that will eventually draw his father and brothers to Egypt and set the stage for both the Israelites’ bondage and their transformation into a people with a divine mission.
In a way, the arc of the past two years can be seen as closely mirroring the biblical story.
As my predecessor at the helm of The Jerusalem Post, Yaakov Katz, suggests in the title of his recent book, during the period leading up to October 7th, Israelis were asleep. We had let our guard down, having been lulled into a sort of national slumber by the very group that was plotting the most devastating attack in our national history. We had allowed ourselves the perverse luxury of directing our spears inward as we bickered over the government’s divisive legislative agenda, tearing into one another at a time when those who wished us harm were looking for every weakness to exploit.
Our national nightmare began on October 7th and stretched for two long, devastating years. At times, the nightmare of it all seemed too much to bear: the sheer scale and cruelty of the massacre, the unprecedented number of hostages, and the slow, sickening realization that the nightmare was not a moment but an era.
The blows kept coming: Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran itself. Tens of thousands of Israelis were evacuated from their homes; millions slept in bomb shelters for days on end. Families lived in constant fear of the dreaded knock on the door informing them that a loved one had been killed in action. Businesses collapsed. Airlines stayed away. Our economy suffered. Around the world, calls for our destruction became normalized as a wave of vicious antisemitism continues to sweep through cities large and small, fueled by media, civil society, digital platforms, and officials who manufactured and amplified despicable libels.
Throughout it all, the knowledge that fellow Israelis — parents, spouses, siblings, children — were languishing in dark underground tunnels, malnourished and abused, tortured our collective consciousness, forcing many of us to wonder whether the nightmare would ever end.
And then, suddenly, with a 109-word post on a niche social media platform in the wee hours of a Thursday morning, seven weeks ago, a new phase of our two-year ordeal began.
“I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan,” President Trump wrote triumphantly. “ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon.”
Like so many other Israelis, at first I didn’t believe it. Despite our protests and our prayers, experts had cautioned us not to expect all of the hostages to return. They were too valuable to Hamas, we were told. They were the terrorist group’s highest-value bargaining chips, its most effective human shields. There was no way they would let all of them go.
Over the tense days that followed, there were conflicting reports about when and how the hostages would be released, with some openly asking whether this was some kind of cruel ruse by Hamas.
And yet, that Monday morning, we all found ourselves glued to our televisions and computers, watching in disbelief as the President of the United States arrived in Israel and addressed the Knesset while wave after wave of hostages returned to Israeli soil until there were no longer any living hostages in Gaza.
In the few minutes I allowed myself to shop for the holiday that was to begin that evening, I found myself wandering the aisles of my Jerusalem supermarket with tears in my eyes. I ran into several friends and we whispered hushed hellos and hugged one another as we watched the joyous reunions between the former hostages and their families on our phones.
In my last media interview of the day, shortly before going offline for the holiday, I tried to convey what I and so many Israelis were feeling.
“If I look a little bleary-eyed, it’s because I pulled an all-nighter in anticipation of this day, and also because I’ve spent much of this day in tears — as, I think, have many Israelis,” I told MSNBC’s Erielle Reshef. “It almost feels surreal. This is a moment that we’ve been praying for, that we’ve been desperate to see for two full years.”
Over the course of the holiday, I found myself walking around humming Psalm 126, which is recited before the Grace After Meals on Shabbat and holidays: “When God brought back the captives to Zion, we were like dreamers.”
And it felt, in fact, like a wonderful dream.
But after every nightmare, and after every dream, the time comes to wake up and confront reality.
And that reality is dramatically different than that which existed before October 7th.
The war has not ended. There are still many Israeli soldiers in Gaza, serving as a buffer between Hamas and the Israeli communities they have sworn to attack again, just on the other side of the border. There are two murdered hostages — 24-year-old Ran Gvili and 43-year-old Thai national Sudthisak Rinthalak — whose bodies are still being held by Hamas.
The challenges that lie ahead are massive: We must rebuild our society and our economy, deal with concentric circles of trauma that include virtually all Israelis, and navigate a world that is more hostile to us than at any point in recent memory.
But like Noah emerging to a changed world, like Abraham set on a path to a new land, like Jacob given the promise of providence and return, and like Joseph drawn from the depths and elevated to greatness, we now stand at a moment of both opportunity and responsibility.
We are being called to imagine a national life that is better than what was, to write a new Israeli story that draws on the pain of the past two years and the joy of the past two months to build a stronger and brighter future.
Over the past two years, we have proven more resilient, more determined, more courageous, and more committed to our sovereign existence in this land than many might have imagined. Now is the time to channel those powerful qualities into creating an Israel that reflects our most cherished values and ideals as both a Jewish state and a democracy that is part of the family of nations — an Israel that is, at once, more prosperous and more equal, more self-assured and more open, more decisive and more thoughtful, more secure in its distinctive identity and more inclusive of all its citizens.
We are no longer asleep. Our moment is here. All that remains is for us to seize it.
* * *
Avi Mayer, founder of the Jerusalem Journal and former Editor-in-Chief of The Jerusalem Post.
