COMMENTARY / OPINION
From Be’eri to Boulder: How the West’s Moral Collapse Fuels Hamas’s Global War BOB GOLDBERG
JUN 01, 2025
In Boulder Colorado, families gathered peacefully at the Pearl Street Mall to call for the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza. It was a routine Sunday demonstration — somber, heartfelt, civic. Then, at 1:26 p.m., a man approached and hurled a Molotov cocktail into the crowd. Children and adults were burned. Their crime? Daring to speak up for Israelis in public.
The suspect, Mohamad Soliman, now faces arson and attempted murder charges. Colorado’s Attorney General called it what it is: a hate crime. But let’s not mince words. This was terrorism — the weapon, the target, the timing, the intent. All of it fits the profile.
This attack didn’t happen in a vacuum. It came just days after college graduation ceremonies across the country — including at MIT — where Hamas was applauded and Israel was libeled as a genocidal state. In Cambridge, future engineers and scientists cheered slogans first coined in Gaza tunnels. In Boulder, those same slogans were literally weaponized in a bottle of fire.
On October 7 day, Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel and committed acts so barbaric they still defy imagination: babies beheaded, children burned alive, women raped beside their murdered relatives. In Kibbutz Be’eri and other towns, entire families were incinerated in their homes. Like Boulder, it wasn’t a military engagement. It was a war on civilians. And like Boulder, the motive was not resistance. It was hatred.
And yet, the slogans shouted by Soliman in Boulder — “Stop killing babies,” “Zionists,” “genocide” — were not his inventions. They were borrowed. Recited. Echoed. These are Hamas chants, recycled in Western classrooms, legitimized in the language of elite media, and now hurled with fire in American streets. The ideological weaponry of Hamas has gone global, and its physical weaponry is no longer confined to Gaza.
We are no longer just dealing with a regional conflict. We are witnessing the export of Hamas’s war against Jews, in rhetoric and arms. Molotov cocktails in Colorado. Machete attacks in Paris. Car ramming in London. And the justifications, always the same: colonialism, genocide, resistance. These slogans don’t just rationalize terror. They inspire it. They license it.
And now they are being used — not metaphorically, but literally — to burn Jews.
French President Emmanuel Macron, fresh off accusing Israel of behaving like Russia, claimed the EU cannot condemn Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine while “remaining silent” on Gaza. Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the accusation a lie — and it was. There is no “humanitarian blockade,” no campaign of extermination. But there is an old story here: the libels shift, the phrases modernize, but the moral inversion stays the same. The Jew defending his family is now a war criminal. The terrorist chanting “resistance” is the victim.
There will be time to assign blame — and there’s plenty to go around. But that time is not now. Right now, the focus must be on exposing and severing the Hamas-Harvard nexus and similar sick relationships between terror and academia. When institutions of higher learning become safe havens for ideological justifications of child murder and firebombings — when faculty members dress up terror in the robes of postcolonial theory and moral relativism — they cease to be universities. They become laundromats for barbarism. That rot must be cut out, not rationalized.
Zionism, unlike the Oslo delusion, never promised utopia. It promised only this: if the world will not protect the Jews, the Jews will protect themselves. And when attacked, they will not bow. They will fight.
The Psalmist wrote: “Rescue me, O Lord, from the hands of foreigners, whose mouths speak lies and whose right hands are false.” Today, those lies are shouted in quad rallies, whispered in UN halls, and printed in prestigious newspapers. And they are being hurled, quite literally, with flame and shrapnel at Jewish children — in southern Israel and now on the streets of America.
We must recognize it for what it is: the global projection of Hamas’s war on the Jewish people, not just through tunnels and rockets, but through slogans, proxies, and Molotov cocktails. We are not watching isolated incidents. We are watching a strategy. The rhetoric and the weapons are now one.
This terror attack also came on the eve of Shavuot. This holiday commemorates the moment God entrusted the Torah to Israel, not just a covenant of faith, but a covenant of destiny. The Jewish people stood together at Sinai and accepted a mission that binds them to law, to truth, and to moral clarity. But that covenant was not forged in fragility. It was forged in strength — in the willingness to stand apart, to carry the burden of chosenness, and to defend that identity with courage. Today, it demands that we protect Israel — and every Jew — with more forcefulness, resolve, and clarity than we have previously mustered.
And so, choose life, said Moses. Not slogans. Not false peace. Not paralysis in the face of evil. Choose clarity. Choose strength.
Choose Zionism. And let’s finish the war, wherever it rages.
The enemy within Peg Tierney
JUN 01, 2025 TIERNEY’S REAL NEWS
I received this note and article from a wise and learned friend. I thought it was powerful and wanted to share it with you. I’ve included links in red to previous articles I’ve written if you’d like more information. It’s short – so please read to the end to my conclusion.
Between the DEMONRATs, the JINOs, the U.N. and the RINOs the Jews raised with no real historical reference to, or care for, Israel and the facts, and then the huge attention paid to allegations of “islamophobia” which was heavily pushed by EU countries that have a huge Islam problem, and the billions poured into colleges here by Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia, the JDL, AJC, Federation, and ADL were impotently playing the game of appeasement and adoption of progressivism instead of actively combating this onslaught of Jew hatred.
Worse, “presidents” like Obama and Biden were actively and passively supporting the anti-Israel factions, and the dumb progressive Jews voted for them:
NEW YORK POST: Is America’s Jewish leadership failing American Jews? Antisemitism has never been higher.
The murder of a young Israeli couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, last month traumatized Jews nationwide — leaving many asking tough questions about the state of Jewish leadership in America. Their concern is understandable.
While the Hamas attack on Israel two Octobers ago thrust Israel, the Jewish nation, into its longest war ever, it also ushered in unprecedented levels of antisemitism in the US. There were nearly 10,000 anti-semitic incidents nationwide last year, a 5% increase over the record-breaking numbers in 2023, sparked by the war in Gaza.
The killing of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim in Washington, DC in May has prompted many American Jews to question the effectiveness of their institutional leadership.
Those figures, while startling, fail to capture the endless examples of Jews being blacklisted, ostracized or targeted in sectors ranging from medicine to the arts.
Amid this surge of hate, American Jews have begun questioning whether major Jewish groups like the ADL are doing enough — and have done enough — to keep Jews safe. The answer for many — once unspoken and now increasingly reaching fever pitch — is a resounding no.
Former Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz says the climate of inaction around Jewish leadership in the US reminds him of the period before World War II.
“I see the same problem that we had in the 1930s with the rise of Nazis.”
“Jewish leaders have been misallocating their resources, focusing on the wrong people, and are now a part of the problem.”
In the wake of the October 7 attacks and subsequent antisemitism surge, American Jews were expecting accountability — and change. Instead, it’s been business as usual for major groups like the ADL, the Jewish Federations of North America and many Jewish Community Relations Council chapters: Glitzy galas, pricey celebrity appearances and slick conferences, according to critics.
For at least three decades, the Jewish establishment underwent a mission drift, transforming from defenders of Jewish-first issues into foot soldiers for progressive politics and social justice causes. They refused to seriously address the toxic brew of leftist and Islamist ideologies seeping into universities. Stuck in their woke echo chambers, they sidelined voices who rejected progressive agendas.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars went to the ADL and all these organizations to fight antisemitism, but antisemitism has only increased. What have they been doing for the last 20 years?”
Jewish groups even aligned themselves with liberal causes that hate Jews! Take Black Lives Matter, an organization that literally enshrined anti-Zionism within its foundational mission statement. That, however, didn’t stop more than 600 Jewish organizations from signing a full-page New York Times ad in 2020 endorsing BLM’s efforts!
From ending endless wars, to slaying the debt beast, to saving the children, the Trump Administration is reversing decades of evil, and the demons are not pleased. JEROME R. CORSI, PH.D.
JUN 01, 2025 – Demonic leaders have involved the United States in too many bankers wars, shedding American blood so tyrants can grow in power and wealth. The results have been devastating here and abroad, and President Trump is determined to turn it around. He is also reversing the downward spiral of economic decline, and most of all, Trump is putting resources into efforts to stop human and particularly child trafficking, and defeating the dark forces that are profiting from its continuance.
Dr. Jerome Corsi explains the potential dangers and what needs to be done to turn the situation around on Corsi Nation.
The March of Jewish History: Macron, the Europeans, and Annexation Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer
Even the worst tragedies serve as our springboards to become stronger. Just you wait, Mssr. Macron, just you wait…
Jun 1, 2025, 7:50 AM (GMT+3) Israel National News – No one knows better than I do — though all too many Jews (and others) know exactly what I know — that the pain of losing a close dear loved one is inconsolable — forever. It never goes away. Time heals the trauma — perhaps — but it does not heal the wound. If time turns the open sore into an emotional scar, nevertheless that scar keeps piercing open again and again.
My father died of leukemia at his age 45, my 14. I have never gotten over that despite my tough exterior and the passage of half a century. I am still an orphan. And the life-partner who was and remains the love of my life died five years ago of glioblastoma at her age 64, my 67, and my life never ever has been or will be the same. (I am not a complainer; I am an optimist. I still tell people I root for the New York Jets. But what’s true is true.)
I am not alone in my pain, particularly as a Jew. The 1200 families of the October 7 murdered are no different. Holocaust families. Families of those stabbed or shot by Arabs. And even families whose dearest died of heart or lung disease or kidney or liver disease or tuberculosis or hurricane or tsunami or earthquake, the whole Yom Kippur litany of Un’taneh Tokef.
And we all — forever until Messianic times — mourn the burning of our Holy Temples. Visits to the Temple Mount do not alleviate that, and many of us, like me, who assert sovereignty over the Temple Mount, nevertheless strictly observe the rabbinic rulings that forbid ascending Mount Zion and walking on that holy ground. Thus, when we console mourners, we remind them that we all are in mourning . . . for the destruction of Zion and Jerusalem two thousand years ago. Time has not healed that wound either.
I begin with this because I must emphasize the background and context of what lies ahead in this opinion. I look back on all our losses and sufferings, and I see something unique in the Jewish soul and character: We do not despair. We do not give up. And we come out stronger each time — notwithstanding that we do not heal from what we have endured.
It is unacceptable for the foolish to celebrate that the Holocaust gave birth to the country of Israel. But — anyway, regardless — we came out with the country of Israel because a world of non-Jewish antisemites, for just a moment in time, could not all simultaneously look us in the eyes and say “no.” There always were Macrons and Keir Starmers and David Lammys and Mark Carneys and Joe Bidens, Barack Obamas, and Kamala Harrises. But, for a split second in time, they could not all say no. And because of the determined core of the Jewish spirit — and, frankly, both shameless chutzpah and determined defiance from two thousand years of knowing we will not get an even break — it happened.
It did not hurt that Lord Moyne was eliminated by the Two Eliyahus and Count Folke Bernadotte, too. And that the British military wing of the King David was obliterated. That British officers were kidnaped and whipped when the Brits did that to Irgun members, and that British officers were hanged when the Brits did that to twelve Jewish heroes on whose necks the country of Israel was born.
Much Jewish blood was spilled to get our land back and throw out the colonialist imperialist occupiers. Scars remain. Sores remain: visit Acre Fortress prison and see the room with the gallows. But all of it left behind a country of Israel. (My regular readers know that I reject the term “State” of Israel. Israel is a country. Iowa and Delaware are states. And it sounds different — and more accurate — when Israel’s enemies admit they propose a “country” for Arabs in Judea and Samaria, not merely a “state.”)
We lost Jews in Gush Etzion, from the Famous 35 to those left behind to defend against overwhelming numbers of Arab marauders. We lost Jews in 1967 at Ammunition Hill and elsewhere. But United Jerusalem emerged. Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook’s mesmerizing speech only weeks before proved prophetic as we even returned to Hevron, Shechem, and Jericho, and Naomi Shemer’s song also was prophetic, emerging just before the unthinkable happened, and we returned to the pits of water and the Old City. An extra verse had to be added, saying: we returned.
This is our story. Ferdinand and Isabella expelled Sephardic Jewry from Spain in 1492, and King Manuel of Portugal finished the project five years later. The pain, the sores never healed: the torture devices, the auto-da-fe burnings at the stake. But they inadvertently ensured that 900,000 Jews would be in Arab Muslim countries neighboring Israel in the 1940’s and 1950’s, so that, when the Arabs did their thing and expelled all their Jews and confiscated all their property, the Arabs inadvertently guaranteed Israel’s survival and explosive demographic success by populating it overnight with a million Jews.
And the Arabs sent us the best: not Ashkenazi Marxists but G-d-fearing Jews who eat rice on Pesach and never heard of the blight of “Reform Judaism.” Never even heard of it. Thanks to Isabella and Ferdinand, Israel got the kinds of Jews who would protect Israel, in the long run, from the Kaplan Square White privileged Ashkenazi Marxists. They overthrew the privileged Histadrut card holders and, for the past 50 years since the Menachem Begin Revolution of 1977, the act of beating the Labor Marxist Left at the polls has become, for Israel, a national . . . hobby. Beat them and beat them and beat them; that is the national hobby. So we get the Knesset, the ministries, and almost a million Jews in the post-1967 eastern regions of United Jerusalem and throughout Judea and Samaria — and they get Kaplan Square and restaurants that serve pork.
We now need to consider all the above as we confront the next moment of possibility. October 7 can never be forgiven, and its sores will never heal, not even with time and the razing of Gaza. The godless who do not observe Shabbat or kosher blame it on G-d. “Where was G-d on October 7?” G-d was in shul because it was Simchat Torah. G-d, Who is omnipresent, also was looking for Ronen Bar. He was looking for Hertzi Halevi. So leave G-d alone.
And October 7 never ever could have happened if not for 10 Av 2005, when Ariel Sharon expelled 8,500 Jews from a part of Eretz Israel, Gush Katif in Gaza. So Sharon did his part, and the Leftist Deep State media refused to cover massive demonstrations of hundreds of thousands, and arms linked across the country in snake lines to Jerusalem. Instead, they highlighted a few bad apples in tandem with the Deep State Leftist section of the Shabak (Shin Bet) who planted Avishai Raviv and other provocateurs to make the political right look detestable and to be the personal handler of Yigal Amir, encouraging the fellow to assassinate Rabin.
Just as Shabak botched October 7, they botched instigating and inciting Amir, and ended up creating a direct line between their Agent Provocateur, Avishai Raviv, and the assassination of Rabin — a Shabak mess truly tied with October 7 as the Number One All-Time Shaback Botch.
We now are in deep pain from October 7. Men, young boys and families, except for those Haredim who will not serve in any capacity based on a new interpretation of Judaism, have been wrenched from home for 600 days, living in chaos, families split by a very long war that now seems to be geared militarily in the direction it should have been before, if not for the Biden-Harris embargo.
The world is more overtly against us than it has been in decades. Pressure is everywhere, except from Milei in Argentina, Orban in Hungary, Trump in America (really), and a few opposition leaders like Polievre in Canada, Badenoch in England, Le Pen in France, and Wilders in Holland. But, if you have been reading this far, let us put this on the line:
Macron, Starmer, and Carney are threatening bad stuff. Most Arabs never mean well for Israel, and forget about Putin, Xi, and Kim. Even Germany has gone back to its real self, as if a leopard ever could have shed its spots; as long as the Germans are not putting their Israeli expatriates into ovens, we are ahead of the game with them.
But this massive push for an Arab sovereign entity in Judea and Samaria opens one of the greatest opportunities in Modern Jewish history. If the Country of Israel emerged, in part, from the Shoah — but only in small part — and if the Spanish Inquisition ensured that Israel would be populated by one million North African Jews from “Edot HaMizrach” while paving the way for Columbus to discover the Exile that would become the greatest “resting point” haven for Jews along the road to returning to Zion, now is the time to get prepared to annex the rest of Judea and Samaria.
This war — what I call the Ariel Sharon War — has prompted the greatest breakthrough for annexation since 1967: the emergence worldwide of the chant “From the River to the Sea, [expletive omitted] Will be Free.” It finally, finally — finally! — is out in the open, that which so many of us — and Arafat and Abbas — have been saying since Oslo 1993: They don’t want a shared two-country solution. They want it all, one country.
And, in great measure, they are right. The land is not suitable to two tiny states like Delaware and New Jersey. From the River to the Sea, there is land for but one country. It now is out in the open. They don’t want two countries, and more than 80 percent of Israelis and their Knesset members don’t want two countries either. That is the great blessing of the Ariel Sharon War. Even half the blind lemmings in Kaplan have figured out that, although they want to give the Arabs a country in Judea-Samaria, they just can’t because, if the Arabs get sovereignty there as they got it in Gaza, then the Left will not be able to gather safely anymore in Kaplan Square without getting blown up every week. That is the blessing.
It is time to annex. If Israel needs an “opening,” let it be the moment Macron declares France recognizes an “[expletive deleted] State.” Israel should immediately annex the Jordan Valley. Yes, eventually all of Judea and Samaria, but the Jordan Valley will gain the most internal support at the outset, even from the Marxists who live there and work that land. Netanyahu previously ran an entire campaign on annexing the Jordan Valley.
When Macron declares, then annex the Jordan Valley. When anyone else next declares, annex Ariel, a city of more than 20,000 with a university and a strong mix of non-religious and religious, Israeli and Russian/Ukrainian and Anglophonic Jews. Annex those two — the Jordan Valley and Ariel — and we actualize the Jewish Narrative of History: they cannot break us, and even the worst tragedies serve as our springboards to become stronger and to hasten the day when G-d’s ultimate plan will unfold on the mountaintop of Zion.
Adapted by the writer for Arutz Sheva from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.
Are we winning? Does anybody know? Jack Engelhard
They have two things going for them, the Gaza civilians and the media worldwide, and those two cards they play to the hilt. Opinion.
Jun 1, 2025 Israel National News – Are we winning? Does anybody know?
Keeping score.
On Monday we read that the IDF are being sent in full force to finish the job once and for all, and we cheer.
Finally, we say…and it’s about time…although where has this been the previous months? Okay. Never mind. Go get ‘em.
On Thursday we read how Israel has agreed to a 60-day ceasefire, and then only for the release of 10 live hostages, a plan devised by Trump’s envoy Steve Witcoff . and I am still not sure whether Witcoff is any different from Biden’s Antony Blinken, and whether Israel was forced to accept this latest tactic under duress…Godfather style…your brains or your signature on the dotted line.
This does not sound like much of a deal to me…and after all this time, still negotiating, and still making deals?
Who’s the boss around here anyway!
And on behalf of my readers, I ask, can’t Israel’s secret service find the place where the hostages are being kept, and is it a bridge too far to go rescue them?
Entebbe, yes. This, no?
Anyway, Israel accepted, Israel signed. Which seems odd, a first-rate military power bending to a group of dirty rotten scoundrels.
Not only that, but they need time to consider the offer…and now demand a seven-year ceasefire and full Israeli withdrawal.
If so, and if the deal is not good enough, you face the full brunt of our military process, and you face elimination. So says Defense Minister Israel Katz.
This is telling it as it is.
They should be quaking in their boots…at least what’s left of them.
But they have two things going for them, the Gaza civilians and the media worldwide, and those two cards they play to the hilt.
Cowards that they are, they hide behind the civilians, playing catch me if you can, while the media weeps for those “innocent” Gazans, many of whom cheered Oct. 7.
Who’s cheering now?
One more thing in their favor…the campuses inflamed with Jew-hatred, which was manifest even before the slaughter of Oct.7, but turned into a roaring fire immediately the day after.
Yes, Israel can take care of itself, but who takes care of the smut we name humanity? Watch what happens when Israel’s Tzipi Hotovely faces-off against humanity’s Piers Morgan.
For Israel, it’s do or die.
Hamas will indeed fight until their last man is eliminated. Because they are so brave? Not at all. Rather, they seek death. They are a death cult.
“We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind…you ask, what is our policy…it is to wage war with all the strength God can give us.”
Thus spoke Winston Churchill to the House of Commons on being named prime minister for a nation that for a time would have to fight alone.
Moreover, Britain faces a task to “wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.”
Perfectly said for Israel at this moment.
So far as scorning Israel for civilian casualties in Gaza (never purposeful), the allies chose to firebomb mostly civilian Dresden to send a message that all bets are off for the cause of victory, and when the war with Japan became intolerable, the United States bombed to smithereens Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Humanity has no place to go about judging Israel.
Now available, a collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, “Writings.”
Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller Indecent Proposal that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. New from the novelist, the anti-BDS thriller Compulsive. Website: www.jackengelhard.com
From the esteemed John w. Cassell: “Jack Engelhard is a writer without peer, and the. conscience of us all.”
Davos and Chabad!? MICHOEL GREEN
JUN 01, 2025
RFK Jr. states the obvious:
The ‘World Economic Forum” in Davos is a billionaire boys club of greedy and hypocritical tyrants who bark orders at the governments of all modern states and seek to eliminate the essential human liberties of the common man. Their nefarious objective is totalitarian control of the world’s human population.
[In reality, WEF is much more sinister than that. It’s stated agenda is “depopulation,” a euphemism for mass democide, but let’s use RFK’s description for argument’s sake]
The question begs to be asked:
What in the world is institutional Chabad Lubavitch doing at Davos?
Why are they servicing a rogue billionaires’ club of wannabee totalitarian dictators?
Why are they recklessly tarnishing the Rebbe’s reputation by colluding with high-profile villains, in grave betrayal of Chabad adherents everywhere and in grave betrayal of humanity?
Why does the Chabad community remain silent over this outrage?
Links:
1) RFK Jr. on the WEF in Davos: https://rumble.com/v6u3jv9-rfk-jr.-accurately-describes-the-globalist-cabal-known-as-the-world-economi.html
2) Examples of institutional Chabad’s participation at Davos and my past protest: https://open.substack.com/pub/westbororabbi/p/time-to-speak-out?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=y7p7j
A thousand private jets at Davos whose billionaire passengers sanctimoniously lecture world governments on “carbon reduction.” Why must Chabad be enmeshed in their sinister agenda?
Texas Redneck Man Vows to Drive Until Palestine Is Free—Now Technically Homeless
May 31, 2025 Tik Tok
A man who wrapped his entire truck in a giant keffiyeh and declared he “won’t go home until Palestine is free” is now, according to friends, technically homeless.
He began his nationwide road trip on October 7, 2024 vowing not to return to his apartment in Texas “until the Zionist regime falls.” But after 8 months, 72 gas station showers, and zero geopolitical breakthroughs, his landlord re-rented his place—and his mom changed the locks.
Going by the alias “Redneck for Palestine,” the man claims his real name is Abdullah.
“He’s now living out of his truck, which smells like hummus and hopelessness,” said one former roommate. “He still insists he’s not homeless—just ‘geopolitically displaced.’”
Critics now suspect the campaign may be less about activism and more about mobile panhandling with a political theme, since he has a few GoFundMes going and is constantly advertising his PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, and CashApp handles.
[Ed.: The kid has a big heart! 
The Jewish state exists because it was never allowed to be weak. DANIEL GREENFIELD
Legendary writer John Steinbeck walked Israel’s soil. What he saw stunned him. For better and for worse, very little has changed.
MAY 31, 2025
In 1966, a year before the war that would fundamentally change the country and the region, John Steinbeck arrived.
“I want to see everything in Israel,” he told the press.
Outraged novels of class warfare like “Grapes of Wrath” had once made the author a favorite of the cultural establishment, but Steinbeck had turned to other topics. He considered his life’s work to be “East of Eden,” a retelling of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel in California, which touched on his own dark family history that he had followed all the way back to Israel.
Steinbeck’s support for the Vietnam War had infuriated the literary establishment and, even though he had won the Nobel Prize and his acceptance speech became one of the most famous of its kind, he continued to be dismissed as an outdated fossil. And the author, prone to an old school literary machismo, who never much liked parties and crowds, dismissed them.
After facing the establishment’s fury over the Vietnam War, Steinbeck was not worried about the reaction to his visit to Israel. And he looked at Israel through the lens of a writer who had chronicled pioneers and messianists, but also a man who had come to see the world caught in a struggle between good and evil, the forces of democracy against those of Communism.
“The Israelis are the toughest and most vital people I have seen in a long time,” Steinbeck wrote to then-U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, with which he had developed a close relationship. “Their army is superb. They say that Israel’s secret weapon is ‘No Alternative.’ They have no place to go and anyone who will invade them will have to kill them all, men, women and children, and they all go down fighting. Only they won’t go down. Right now with the weapons they have and they command, they could lick the whole Arab League single handed.”
Steinbeck was a little over a year away from being proven right when the 1967 Six-Day War would see Israel, outnumbered and outgunned, defeat Egypt, Syria and Jordan, not to mention forces sent by Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. But if the American author’s enthusiasm was especially passionate, it might have been because, unlike a lot of visitors, his family had left blood here.
“I’ve started for there several times and never made it,” wrote Steinbeck. “I wonder if I have an unconscious reluctance because of what my great-grandfather tried to do there in the 1840s.”
One of his stops in Israel was to “Mount Hope” and the “Steinbeck Farm” that his grandfather had left behind after his brother was murdered by the local Arab Muslims. The Grossteinbeck family (the name was later shortened) had joined a Christian mission in the 1850s that was the first to try and build outside Jaffa. But the idealistic farmstead had not taken into account the fanatical Muslim hatred for Christians and Jews who, under Islamic law, had no rights at all.
The Grossteinbecks and other settlers had faced Arab Muslim harassment, but what happened in 1858 had international repercussions and brought American military power to bear in Israel — 90 years before the State of Israel, as a Jewish country, had even been reborn.
In January 1858, five Arab Muslim men came to the farmstead under the pretext of looking for a lost cow, convinced Frederick Grossteinbeck, the brother of John’s grandfather, to parley and then fatally wounded him.
Frederick retreated to the farmhouse where he prayed, “Oh! Father forgive all my sins and help me to bear this dreadful pain” while his wife Mary tried to stop the bleeding from his stomach.
Mary Steinbeck, John’s great-aunt, then only 24 years old, was dragged away and raped by each of the Arab Muslim invaders in turn. She testified: “He violated me. Before I had time to rise, another one came; he violated me and bit my cheek. Then a third one violated me. They then went into the house, and I got up and followed them. I went to Frederick; I could not feel his pulse.”
The Muslim colonists also sexually assaulted Frederick’s mother-in-law and robbed the farm.
While the United States had no military presence in Israel (then ruled by the Ottoman Islamic caliphate) and was unused to projecting much force abroad, its leaders were much less feckless than ours when it came to the honor of Americans.
In an account that was included in a report submitted by President James Buchanan to the U.S. Senate, the Consul to Egypt stated that he met the Islamic leadership which intended “to make them feel our power, and the influence of our consuls, it is very evident that every effort must be made in the present case, so to act as that such a case shall never occur again,” he wrote.
American flags were raised to make a diplomatic point despite the protests of the Ottomans.
The assaults on the Steinbeck family alerted many Americans for the first time to the mistreatment of foreign and domestic Christians in Israel. Bringing justice to the perpetrators came to be seen as a test of American power and the survival of Christians in the region. The Senate report included a description of the massacre of Christians in 1856 in Nablus.
“We had to threaten them with the presence of a squadron to bombard Jaffa,” Consul Edwin DeLeon, a Jewish American diplomat who later worked as the Confederacy’s representative to Europe, wrote. “The expediency and propriety of detailing a war steamer to that coast, as a visible emblem of our power, to reassure the terrified Christians, to averawe [sic] the fanatic savages, who, like wild beasts, now lie in wait for them, and, finally, to insure the effectual punishment of those five bloodhounds of Jaffa we have in bonds, whose brethren else may rescue or bloodily avenge them on the unprotected heads of the Christians and Jews of Palestine.”
Describing his meeting with Ottoman officials, DeLeon rejected all social formalities: “When further asked by the governor whether our countries were not at peace, I promptly responded, ‘No, we regard murder of men and the violation of women, when permitted and screened by governors, as a declaration of war. You have commenced it, not we.’”
When John Steinbeck visited the “Steinbeck Farm,” he was conversant with the bloody scenes that had taken place in the rooms and they informed his view of the region. And with his literary imagination, he may have been able to see them as he walked around the quarters.
During his World War II special correspondent dispatches, Steinbeck had described the American soldiers as having “no love lost for the Arabs. They are the dirtiest people in the world and among the smelliest. The whole countryside smells of urine, four thousand years of urine.” He mentioned that the soldiers stayed out of cities because of all the “many little religious rules and prejudices that an unsuspecting dogface can run afoul of.”
But what must have really struck Steinbeck is that the precarious outpost outside Jaffa that his ancestors had labored and bled for was now a neighborhood. The “Mount Hope” settlement has since become known as the “HaTikvah” (“The Hope”) quarter of Tel Aviv.
During Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Hassan Salamah, a leader of the Army of the Holy Jihad, had attacked “The Hope” community now populated by Jews. The Muslim attackers were so confident of victory that they brought sacks to carry away the loot and torches to burn the rest.
While the mob fell to looting and burning, 16-year-old Ezra Tzapadiya, a Jewish refugee from Beirut who had smuggled himself into the country at only 15, managed to pick off the attackers by copying their battle cry. (Ezra lost an eye in the battle but went on to have a successful musical career.) The Muslim attackers failed to realize that, by burning the Jewish homes, they had highlighted themselves against the flames and were wiped out by the Israeli defenders.
Disgraced among his fellow Muslim Jihadis, Salamah had to turn to ex-Nazi volunteers to carry out attacks on the Jews. His son, Ali Hassan Salameh, became the architect of the Munich Massacre, and received CIA protection that allowed him to escape Israeli assassins for seven years until his entire convoy was taken out in Beirut.
Twentieth-century Israelis, like 19th-century Americans, meant business and would not allow the murders of their families to go unpunished. That is no longer the case. “Mount Hope” or the “HaTikvah” quarter became a working class Jewish neighborhood, but has since been overrun by African migrants. Residents of the quarter have asked the government to stop the plague of crime, drugs, and gang violence that has overtaken their community.
“Mount Hope,” once worthy of its name, has once again become a source of despair, but it is also a reminder of the resilience of history. Steinbeck’s grandfather had left behind Jaffa for America. His father raised the family in Salinas, California — a new promised land. Israeli and American settlers had cultivated fields and changed the world around them for the better.
When Herman Meville, the author of “Moby Dick,” visited the Christian settlement, he dismissed the idea that there was any possibility of a Jewish return to Israel.
“The idea of making farmers of the Jews is in vain. In the first place, Judea is a desert with few exceptions. In the second place, the Jews hate farming. All who cultivate the soil in Palestine are Arabs. The Jews dare not live outside walled towns of villages for fear of the malicious persecution of Arabs and Turks. Besides, the number of Jews in Palestine is comparatively small. And how are the hosts of them scattered in other lands to be brought here? Only by a miracle,” he wrote.
The Jews proved to be excellent farmers and the Jewish villages became settlements, towns, and cities guarded by their young men. And Jews came there from around the world.
John Steinbeck wrote a year before the war that might have ended Israel, but instead helped secure its future and reclaim its territory:
“You can search the world over and you’ll not find Israel’s equal for a stinking past of heroic proportions. The present is even worse if that is possible — surrounded by enemies dedicated to her destruction, hemmed in between the sea and illiterate compromises of an absent, but quite an innocent, academy of the nations. And the people, the Israelis, the remnants of the trampled, tormented and rejected Jews from 87 nations.”
Israel, he summed up, “bears up what I have always felt — that only those people who have nothing to do and no place to go are tired.”
“Mount Hope” is not just in Israel; it is where we are too. It is a reminder that no matter how dark the past, we can strive to reclaim the future. Nothing is so hopelessly lost that hope cannot rise from it again, as long as we do not despair. Only those who do nothing are truly tired.
Iran Duping Trump with IAEA Inspections. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? by Majid Rafizadeh
May 31, 2025
- Iran knows exactly what it is doing. It is playing a game it has mastered for decades: stall, confuse, buy time, bring in the well-intentioned but toothless International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). All the regime needs to win the negotiations is to entrench enforceability and retain the ability to work in secret down the pike.
- Iran could, at any moment, declare itself part of the nuclear weapons club. The mullahs could also negotiate a deal that grants them partial sanctions relief, re-entry into the global financial system, and access to international trade — all while keeping key parts of their nuclear program intact.
- Giving Iran any daylight to enrichment is not diplomacy — it is surrender.
- US President Donald Trump seems shocked that he is being duped by the superstar of KGB (now the FSB) whose entire purpose is to dupe Americans and the West: You mean he is not really my good friend Volodya? Russian President Vladimir Putin has not gone crazy; we were crazy for believing him. The same holds true for Communist China’s President Xi Jinping.
- Iran does not want “peace.” Iran wants victory. Why don’t we? The only “peace” Iran is interested in is one strictly on its terms. With nuclear weapons, there will be “peace,” all right — the Iranian regime’s survival, power and domination — that kind of peace.
- Meanwhile, Trump’s “deadlines” with Hamas and Iran have come and gone, thoroughly eroding his credibility with Putin, Xi, Kim, NATO and everyone else. There have been no consequences, no accountability and no results.
- This is not about compromise or Munich 2.0. This is about survival. Ours, not theirs. Stop being played.
Once again, the United States has sat down with Iran for yet another round of nuclear negotiations — this time the fifth. And once again, we are told that there will be another round in the “near future.” Sound familiar? It should. Iran’s cat-and-mouse diplomatic theater is not a breakthrough; it is a rerun. Just as the past rounds, this latest episode concluded without any meaningful agreement, while Iran continues to advance in its nuclear program, intercontinental ballistic missiles — not needed to attack Israel — and rebuild its air defense.
Iran knows exactly what it is doing. It is playing a game it has mastered for decades: stall, confuse, buy time, bring in the well-intentioned but toothless International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). All the regime needs to win the negotiations is to entrench enforceability and retain the ability to work in secret down the pike.
This endless cycle of negotiations is not a good-faith diplomatic process. It is a maneuver, a delaying tactic, most likely with a plan on how successfully to deceive. Whenever pressure mounts, Iran opens the door just enough to create the illusion of cooperation. Then it floods the conversation with talk of “complexity” and nuance.
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, a seasoned veteran of these talks, recently said, “The negotiations are too complicated to be resolved in two or three meetings.” This quote is not a revelation; it is a tactic. These negotiations are not “complicated.” At the same time, he claimed that this was “one of the most professional rounds of negotiations.” That is how Tehran works — sound serious, appear engaged, stall for time, press forward to achieve the goal.
Iran has been playing this game for over 20 years. The goal is always the same: to outmaneuver American officials. Iranian diplomats are working under the direct strategy of a regime that has survived international pressure and sanctions for decades by learning how to manipulate the Western diplomatic process and the West’s failure of backbone ever to hold them seriously to account. Every meeting is an opportunity for Tehran to gather intelligence, to gauge the U.S. political climate, to exploit partisan divides in Washington, and most importantly — to manipulate.
So, what exactly does Iran get from dragging the United States along these endless talks? Everything. Every day that passes without a deal is another day Iran gets to enrich more uranium, build new secret sites, continue amassing stockpiles of highly-enriched, easily weaponized uranium.
Iran could, at any moment, declare itself part of the nuclear weapons club. The mullahs could also negotiate a deal that grants them partial sanctions relief, re-entry into the global financial system, and access to international trade — all while keeping key parts of their nuclear program intact.
It never was “complicated.” The core demand is simple — no uranium enrichment, no centrifuges, no exceptions. Period. That should be the unshakable foundation of any deal. Once that line is crossed or blurred, any deal becomes meaningless. An agreement that allows just the more international observers than the IAEA, rather than more international observers from the US and Israel or any fancy-sounding so-called “monitoring mechanisms,” is not a real agreement. It is an American surrender. The Iranian regime’s mottos are still “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”
Giving Iran any daylight to enrichment is not diplomacy — it is surrender.
US President Donald Trump seems shocked that he is being duped by the superstar of KGB (now the FSB) whose entire purpose is to dupe Americans and the West: You mean he is not really my good friend Volodya? Russian President Vladimir Putin has not gone crazy; we were crazy for believing him. The same holds true for Communist China’s President Xi Jinping.
For years, some Washington elites and so-called foreign policy experts have insisted that Iran is a “rational actor” and that the issues are “complex”; But that language only serves to justify paralysis. The truth is much simpler. The Iranian regime is driven by Islamist ideology, by expansionism, by deep-rooted anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. Iran’s is not a normal government. It is a revolutionary theocracy that funds terror groups — Hezbollah and Hamas, the Houthis — and sends weapons across the Middle East.
Iran does not want “peace.” Iran wants victory. Why don’t we? The only “peace” Iran is interested in is one strictly on its terms. With nuclear weapons, there will be “peace,” all right — the Iranian regime’s survival, power and domination — that kind of peace.
Iran’s nuclear clock is ticking faster and louder every day. While American negotiators shake hands and make polite statements about “progress” and “bridging gaps,” Iranian physicists and engineers are able to make nuclear bombs. We are not watching diplomacy — we are watching a slow-motion disaster. The disaster could be stopped, but only if we stop being spineless and pretending it’s “complicated.”
Iran is duping the United States once again, with precision and confidence. Another round of negotiations has passed. Another is on the calendar. Meanwhile, Trump’s “deadlines” with Hamas and Iran have come and gone, thoroughly eroding his credibility with Putin, Xi, Kim, NATO and everyone else. There have been no consequences, no accountability and no results.
Trump, while having good intentions, is being played and does not even know it.
This is not about compromise or Munich 2.0. This is about survival. Ours, not theirs. Stop being played.
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, is a political scientist, Harvard-educated analyst, and board member of Harvard International Review. He has authored several books on the US foreign policy. He can be reached at dr.rafizadeh@post.harvard.edu
