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Britain once stood as the great champion against Nazism. When continental Europe collapsed beneath Hitler’s boots, British pilots fought over the Channel, British cities burned under the Blitz, and Winston Churchill refused to surrender. Eighty-one years after that victory, Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government has dragged Britain into the very European sewer it once helped drain: a state policy singling out Jews because of where they live.

Burnham claims Britain’s ban on goods from Judea and Samaria is “not aimed at the Israeli people.” That is an insult to human intelligence. Merchandise does not lose its income. Wine bottles do not miss mortgage payments. Dates, olive oil, cosmetics, and machinery do not have families to support. The people Britain is deliberately punishing are Israeli farmers, employees, shopkeepers, and business owners.

The government has ordered British businesses to avoid economic activity connected to Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines and is moving to prohibit their goods. It may be drafted in the bloodless language of geography, but its practical target is unmistakable: Jewish communities.

There is a word for a government instructing its market to reject goods because of the address of the Jews who produced them. That word is antisemitism.

If Britain possessed evidence that a particular individual who is under its legal jurisdiction had committed violence, it could prosecute or sanction that individual. Instead, it has imposed collective economic punishment upon an entire Jewish population. A peaceful Jewish winemaker in Gush Etzion is treated as guilty because his vineyard stands in the hills where Jewish history actually happened. Britain has transformed the fabricated Green Line into a moral cattle fence: acceptable Jews on one side, boycottable Jews on the other.

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Apparently, Jews may read about Judea, pray toward Judea, mourn the destruction of Jerusalem, celebrate returning to Zion, and excavate coins bearing ancient Hebrew inscriptions—but living there is considered an international emergency. Rome renamed Judea after crushing a Jewish revolt; Britain now behaves as though Jewish history began with a building permit issued by the United Nations.

Britain’s New White Paper

Britain has committed this betrayal before.

The League of Nations Mandate charged Britain with facilitating Jewish immigration and encouraging close Jewish settlement while protecting the civil and religious rights of everyone living in the territory. Britain accepted that responsibility before the world. Then, when fulfilling it became politically inconvenient, Britain reached for the knife.

In May 1939—months after Kristallnacht and with Hitler tightening his grip across Europe—the British government issued its infamous White Paper. Jewish immigration into Mandatory Palestine was restricted to 75,000 people over five years. After that, further Jewish entry would require Arab consent, effectively handing the enemies of Zionism a veto over whether European Jews could reach safety.

Members of Parliament warned exactly what Britain was doing. Herbert Morrison accused the government of breaking its promises and acting dishonorably. Parliament nevertheless approved the policy by 268 votes to 179.

Britain’s finest hour therefore began beneath the shadow of one of its most shameful acts. It fought Hitler’s armies while obstructing Jews attempting to escape Hitler’s reach. Nazi Germany constructed the machinery of extermination; Britain helped barricade one of the most important emergency exits. No one can calculate how many additional Jews might have survived had the gates of their homeland remained open. We know only that desperate people were trapped and that Britain made a deliberate decision to keep the quota in place.

Even after the Holocaust, British forces intercepted ships carrying Jewish survivors to Palestine. These were people who had crawled out of Europe’s crematoria only to be informed that returning to Zion violated British immigration policy. Europe had stolen their homes, murdered their families, and reduced their communities to ash; Whitehall still demanded the correct paperwork.

The logic behind the 1939 White Paper was appeasement: restrict the Jews, placate violent opposition, and call the retreat pragmatism. The logic behind Burnham’s policy is nearly identical. Punish Jewish communities, satisfy the anti-Israel movement, and market the surrender as support for peace.

The packaging has improved. The poison has not.

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Antisemitism With a Customs Form

Modern antisemitism has learned to avoid announcing itself with crude racial language. It now speaks in the antiseptic vocabulary of “international consensus,” “territorial differentiation,” and “economic accountability.” It does not say, “Do not buy from Jews.” It produces a policy under which the businesses being marked for exclusion are overwhelmingly Jewish—and then angrily denies that Jews are the target.

That bureaucratic camouflage does not change the substance. Britain has selected a class of Jewish civilians and told the world that ordinary commerce with them is morally contaminated. Their individual conduct is irrelevant. Their politics are irrelevant. Their innocence is irrelevant. Their address is sufficient.

That is not a narrowly tailored response to violence. It is the economic stigmatization of Jewish life in the Jewish ancestral heartland.

The timing makes the policy even more obscene. Since the Hamas massacre of October 7, Britain has experienced an explosion of anti-Jewish hatred. The Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, double the monthly average reported before the attack. MI5 says the threat to Jewish and Israeli people and institutions is elevated.

Faced with Jews being threatened at home and Israel being attacked abroad, Burnham’s government decided that what Britain urgently needed was an official boycott of Jewish businesses in Judea.

What magnificent courage. Terrorists massacre Jews, antisemites terrorize British streets, and Downing Street responds by disciplining the Jews. The bully swings the fist; Britain holds the victim’s arms.

This is how Britain joins the axis of evil. It does not need to sign a treaty with Hamas or salute the ayatollahs. It merely needs to adopt policies that advance the same strategic objective: weaken Israel, isolate Jewish communities, reward rejectionism, and convince the world that Jewish sovereignty is the obstacle to peace.

The terrorists provide the blood. The antisemites provide the slogans. The British government provides the customs regulations.

The Curse of Betrayal

The British Empire emerged victorious in 1945, but its power began collapsing almost immediately. India became independent in 1947. Across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, imperial control disintegrated. The 1956 Suez Crisis publicly confirmed that Britain had been reduced to a second-tier power. The empire upon which the sun supposedly never set discovered that Washington could switch off the lights.

Genesis 12:3 records God’s promise to Abraham: those who bless him will be blessed, and those who curse him will be cursed. Numbers 24 repeats that principle regarding Israel. This is not decorative poetry to be embroidered onto a pillow and ignored by governments. It is a warning written across Jewish history.

A nation that blesses Israel aligns itself with a people who rebuild ruins, revive dead languages, cultivate deserts, create technology, defend democracy, and choose life after centuries of attempted extermination. A nation that curses Israel begins surrendering its moral judgment. It mistakes terrorists for freedom fighters, appeasement for sophistication, Jewish self-defense for aggression, and discrimination against Jews for enlightened policy.

The curse does not always arrive as fire falling from heaven. Sometimes it appears as national decay: leaders without courage, institutions without credibility, borders without control, foreign policy without principle, and a population that no longer recognizes the country it inherited.

In 1939, Britain abandoned its promise to the Jews. Six years later it possessed victory but was financially shattered. Two years after that, India was gone. Eleven years after the war, Suez exposed the imperial giant as an actor wearing a costume from an earlier production. Today, Britain no longer governs a quarter of the globe. It lectures Jewish families from a shrinking island while nervously checking whether the mob approves.

That is quite a journey—from ruling Jerusalem to boycotting its suburbs.

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Trump Chose Strength

Donald Trump represents the opposite instinct. In 2016, almost every prestigious voice in politics treated him as a joke, a temporary disruption, and the consensus underdog. He won anyway. After being subjected to years of political warfare, he returned and won again in 2024.

Trump did not express his support for Israel through meaningless speeches polished until every trace of conviction had been removed. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the American embassy there. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. His administration brokered the Abraham Accords, creating normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states without forcing Israel to surrender Jerusalem, evacuate Judea, or reward terrorism.

Trump understood the lesson Britain has forgotten: peace is produced by strength, clarity, and consequences—not by endlessly rewarding the side that refuses peace.

For decades, Western diplomats treated Palestinian rejectionism like a malfunctioning vending machine: when nothing came out, they inserted another Israeli concession. Trump kicked the machine, changed the incentives, and produced agreements that the experts said could not happen.

Britain has returned to the old doctrine of appeasement. After Jews were massacred on October 7, Israel was subjected to escalating diplomatic punishment. The lesson transmitted to every terrorist movement is obvious: murder Jews spectacularly enough, create enough international chaos, and Western governments will eventually pressure Israel on your behalf.

That is not peacemaking. It is terrorism receiving a performance bonus.

Jews Will Outlive This Boycott

Britain may imagine that it still possesses the imperial authority to decide where Jews may live. It does not. The Mandate is over. The Royal Navy is gone from Haifa. British officials no longer control the gates of Jerusalem. The Jewish people are sovereign again, armed again, and home again.

I live in the Judean hills—not in an abstract diplomatic phrase, but among Jewish communities, schools, synagogues, vineyards, archaeological sites, and families. We are not colonial trespassers temporarily camping on someone else’s history. We are Jews living in Judea. The clue is sitting there in the name with all the subtlety of a brick through Whitehall’s window.

Andy Burnham can issue his bans. His government can invent increasingly elaborate language to conceal whom those bans punish. Britain can join France, Canada, and every other decaying Western government desperate to purchase temporary applause by sacrificing Jews.

We are not leaving.

The Jewish people survived Pharaoh, Babylon, Rome, the Crusades, expulsions, pogroms, the Holocaust, and Britain’s White Paper. We will survive Burnham’s pathetic customs boycott.

The question is not whether the Jews will survive Britain’s latest betrayal. History has already answered that.

The question is whether Britain will survive becoming the kind of country it once went to war to defeat.

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If I were a betting Brit sitting at a blackjack table in Vegas tonight, I would do something Britain’s foreign-policy establishment apparently finds intellectually impossible:

I WOULD LOOK AT THE CARDS.

Then I would cash out.

Immediately.

Because Britain has just wandered back into the Casino of Human History, loosened its tie, ordered something expensive, ignored approximately 3,000 years of statistics, and placed another enormous pile of chips on:

THE JEWS ARE THE PROBLEM.

Again.

Britain.

My dear Britain.

We have played this hand before.

Many, many, many times.

And historically speaking, betting against the Jews has roughly the same investment profile as buying beachfront property in Atlantis.

Today British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced a ban on trade in goods from Israeli communities Britain considers illegal settlements in Judea and Samaria, while accusing extremist settlers of “ethnic cleansing.”

Yes.

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Ethnic cleansing.

And Britain’s economic punishment involves Jews living in…

JUDEA.

JUDEA.

I desperately need everyone at the Foreign Office to stop whatever they are doing and stare at that word for approximately seven seconds.

J U D E A.

Jews.

Judea.

Jews.

Judea.

Anything?

A flicker?

A historical neuron firing somewhere?

Perhaps we need archaeologists.

Perhaps linguists.

Perhaps Dora the Explorer.

“Can YOU find the Jews in JUDEA?”

Apparently the British Foreign Office cannot.

This is roughly equivalent to discovering Italians in Rome and screaming:

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“COLONIAL SETTLERS!”

BREAKING NEWS:

Greeks discovered in Greece.

Chinese people reportedly spotted in China.

Frenchmen seen wandering suspiciously around France.

United Nations emergency session scheduled for Tuesday.

But Jews in Judea?

Good heavens.

Sanctions immediately.

And before somebody announces that this is another sinister Zionist conspiracy invented in a basement underneath AIPAC headquarters, allow me to introduce Britain to an obscure extremist publication.

It is called:

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THE BIBLE.

Apparently it had a few readers.

Genesis 12:3:

וַאֲבָרֲכָה מְבָרְכֶיךָ, וּמְקַלֶּלְךָ אָאֹר

“I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse.”

God says this to Avraham.

Not Netanyahu.

Not Ben-Gvir.

Not Smotrich.

Not the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

Not some terrifying Zionist grandmother in Boca Raton armed with Hadassah stationery and a kugel.

Avraham.

Genesis.

Chapter 12.

Verse 3.

No TikTok.

No Mossad.

No algorithm.

No Hasbara department.

No secret Jewish weather machine.

Just the Torah sitting there for several thousand years being spectacularly inconvenient.

Now, obviously, Genesis is not a Bloomberg terminal.

The Torah is not telling you whether to buy FTSE futures.

But if I were going to bet my civilization on antagonizing Avraham’s descendants, I might at least glance at the historical chart.

Because…

GOOD LORD, THAT CHART.

Let us examine previous investors in the “Jews Will Eventually Disappear Fund.”

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EGYPT.

Pharaoh had an empire.

Armies.

Chariots.

Monuments.

Slaves.

Power.

The Jews?

We had Moses, matzah and apparently absolutely no sense of when to stop arguing.

Result:

We are still here.

Pharaoh is a Passover teaching aid.

BABYLON.

Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple.

Surely Judaism was finished.

Result:

Babylon became archaeology.

Jews rebuilt Jerusalem.

ROME.

Now THAT looked promising.

Rome destroyed the Second Temple.

Crushed Jewish sovereignty.

Carried Jewish treasures through Rome.

Scattered Jews throughout its empire.

Surely the Jewish story was finally over.

Result:

Two thousand years later, Jewish children speak Hebrew in Jerusalem.

And Israelis visit Rome because Ryanair had a cheap fare and somebody wanted pasta.

Not exactly how Titus drew it up.

THE CRUSADERS.

Gone.

THE INQUISITION.

Gone.

THE CZARS.

Gone.

THE THIRD REICH.

Promised a thousand years.

Made it twelve.

Twelve.

The Jewish people it intended to erase established the State of Israel three years after Hitler’s corpse was burning outside his bunker.

History occasionally has the subtlety of a frying pan to the forehead.

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THE SOVIET UNION.

Suppressed Jewish religious life.

Persecuted Zionists.

Restricted Jewish emigration.

Built one of history’s largest totalitarian superpowers.

Then one day the USSR disappeared.

And Soviet Jews?

They boarded airplanes.

Destination:

ISRAEL.

At some point, even the drunkest blackjack player at Caesar’s Palace looks at this losing streak and says:

“Maybe I should stop doubling down.”

Britain apparently looked at the table and shouted:

HIT ME.

Again.

Because Britain has some previous experience deciding what Jews may and may not do in their ancestral homeland.

Remember the British Mandate?

That glorious masterclass in Middle Eastern administration?

Britain issued the Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish national home.

Then Britain spent decades navigating contradictory commitments, Arab opposition, imperial interests and Jewish immigration.

And then came the 1939 White Paper, severely restricting Jewish immigration while European Jewry stood on the edge of catastrophe.

1. 1939.

Really absorb the timing.

Europe:

“We are preparing to annihilate the Jews.”

Britain:

“Perhaps fewer Jews should enter Palestine.”

Spectacular.

If historical irony could generate electricity, Britain could disconnect itself from the national grid.

And now London has rediscovered its favorite Middle Eastern hobby:

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Drawing rules about where Jews may live.

Apparently Europe learned one very specific lesson from Jewish history:

Always maintain excellent paperwork concerning Jewish addresses.

Hebron?

Apparently suspicious.

Never mind that the Torah records Avraham purchasing the Cave of Machpelah there in Genesis 23.

Shiloh?

Ancient Israelite religious center.

Beit El?

Open Genesis.

Jerusalem?

King David would like a brief word.

Judea?

Once again, I remain concerned that THE NAME IS TRYING TO TELL US SOMETHING.

And no, none of this means every Israeli policy is automatically correct.

It doesn’t mean every settler is correct.

It doesn’t mean every settlement decision is wise.

It doesn’t mean Palestinians have no rights, history, claims or legitimate grievances.

Adults are capable of holding several thoughts simultaneously, although international diplomacy continues conducting an ambitious experiment to determine whether this is strictly necessary.

But claiming that Jews living in Judea are simply alien foreigners with no indigenous historical connection requires taking archaeology, scripture, language, geography and approximately three millennia of Jewish memory…

putting all of it into a Nutribullet…

adding ice…

and pressing:

PURÉE HISTORY.

And there is something magnificently absurd about Britain delivering this lecture.

Because for centuries Jews heard:

GO BACK TO PALESTINE.

So eventually we did.

And the international response became:

NO, NOT LIKE THAT.

Europe:

“You Jews don’t belong here.”

Jews:

“Fine. We’ll rebuild our homeland.”

Europe:

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not THERE.”

Jews:

“Where exactly?”

International community:

“We will establish a committee.”

Excellent.

Perhaps the United Nations could finally publish the approved international floor plan identifying the exact twelve square meters of Planet Earth upon which Jews may stand without triggering an emergency resolution.

Preferably somewhere with parking.

Because apparently Jews have achieved the extraordinary distinction of being accused simultaneously of:

Not belonging in Europe.

Not belonging in America.

Not belonging in the Middle East.

Not belonging in Jerusalem.

And now, apparently, being suspiciously Jewish in JUDEA.

At some point one begins to suspect geography isn’t actually the problem.

Meanwhile Israel continues committing its most infuriating offense:

EXISTING.

Hebrew is spoken in Jerusalem.

Torah is learned in Judea.

Jewish children run through the hills where Jewish history unfolded.

Synagogues are packed.

Universities are packed.

Restaurants are packed.

The beaches are packed.

Highway 1 is so packed that apparently the Jewish people’s miraculous return to Zion included a divine covenant guaranteeing traffic near Jerusalem.

And every Friday afternoon the entire Jewish state suddenly discovers, simultaneously, that Shabbat begins shortly and nobody bought challah.

People sprint through supermarkets.

Someone is screaming into a phone about kugel.

Three Israelis are arguing about politics beside the tomatoes.

Someone’s grandmother has prepared enough chicken for an infantry brigade.

Waze has abandoned hope.

And somewhere in Judea a Jewish mother is yelling:

“WHO LEFT THEIR SHOES HERE?”

That is Jewish sovereignty.

Not some sterile political theory.

It is loud.

It is ancient.

It is modern.

It is argumentative.

It is imperfect.

It is occasionally completely insane.

And after two thousand years…

IT IS ALIVE.

So Britain may issue sanctions.

Britain may issue condemnations.

Britain may lecture Israel.

Britain may summon ambassadors.

Britain may hold emergency parliamentary debates.

Britain may establish the Royal Commission for Investigating the Disturbing Presence of Jews in Places Mentioned Repeatedly in the Hebrew Bible.

There can be subcommittees.

Britain loves subcommittees.

Perhaps tea will be served.

But if I were sitting at that blackjack table?

I would glance down at Genesis 12:3.

Then I would look across the casino at the previous gentlemen who confidently bet against Jewish survival.

Pharaoh.

Nebuchadnezzar.

Rome.

Crusaders.

Inquisitors.

Czars.

Nazis.

Soviets.

Quite a VIP section.

Then I would look at Jerusalem.

September 2026.

Hebrew signs.

Jewish soldiers.

Jewish universities.

Jewish government.

Jewish children.

Jewish sovereignty.

And yes…

JEWS LIVING IN JUDEA.

Imagine that.

After Egypt.

After Babylon.

After Rome.

After exile.

After expulsions.

After pogroms.

After inquisitions.

After ghettos.

After Auschwitz.

After Soviet persecution.

After wars intended to destroy the newborn Jewish state.

After terrorists murdered Jews because they were Jews.

After generations of people explaining with enormous confidence that Jewish history was about to end…

WE ARE STILL HERE.

So Britain is perfectly entitled to place its chips wherever it wishes.

That is the beauty of a casino.

You are even allowed to make catastrophically stupid bets.

But gentlemen, before pushing the entire stack across the table, perhaps study the previous hands.

Because civilizations have spent thousands of years confidently announcing that the Jews were finished.

The civilizations keep changing.

The announcement remains remarkably consistent.

And so does the punchline:

THE JEWS ARE STILL HERE.

The Hebrew language is still here.

Jerusalem is still here.

Israel is still here.

And, much to the apparent astonishment of people who somehow obtained jobs in foreign ministries without encountering a Bible, an archaeology book or a map of the ancient Near East…

THE JEWS ARE STILL LIVING IN JUDEA.

עם ישראל חי.

The casino has been open for three thousand years.

The house has shown you the cards.

Britain?

You might want to stop hitting on 20.

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Damn Zionist.

Yes.

That is me.

I am a Zionist. I am a Jew. And if either one of those facts makes you uncomfortable, you are cordially invited to go to hell.

I am not going to shrink myself so you can feel morally sophisticated.

I am not going to whisper the word Zionism because some overeducated idiot on the internet decided that Jewish national liberation is uniquely offensive.

I am not going to apologize for belonging to the oldest surviving indigenous people in the universe.

And I am certainly not going to pretend my story began in 1948 because apparently several thousand years of Jewish history are inconvenient to people whose historical memory stretches roughly as far back as their last TikTok video.

My story is older than your slogans.

Older than your hashtags.

Older than the Roman Empire.

Older than Christianity.

Older than Islam.

Older than the countries that today sit in judgment of whether Jews are sufficiently entitled to survive.

My story begins with creation.

With Abraham walking toward a land he had never seen.

With Isaac.

With Jacob, whose name became Israel.

With twelve tribes.

With Moses standing before Pharaoh and demanding freedom.

With Joshua crossing the Jordan.

With David making Jerusalem the capital of a Jewish kingdom three thousand years before some graduate student discovered the word “colonialism.”

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With Solomon building the Temple in Jerusalem.

That Jerusalem.

Not Warsaw.

Not Brooklyn.

Not London.

Not Casablanca.

Jerusalem.

We prayed toward it when we were free.

We prayed toward it when we were conquered.

We prayed toward it when we were expelled.

We prayed toward it when our synagogues burned.

We prayed toward it when our children were murdered.

We prayed toward it when the civilized world explained, yet again, why Jewish suffering was regrettable but politically inconvenient.

And somehow, after all of that, people have the breathtaking nerve to ask Jews why we are so attached to Zion.

Because we remember.

That is why.

I am that damn Jew.

The Jew whose ancestors watched the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem.

The Jew whose ancestors watched Rome crush Jewish independence, burn the Second Temple, slaughter and enslave Jews, and carry Jewish treasures through the streets of Rome as trophies.

The Jew whose people were scattered across continents and then spent two thousand years being told that wherever they landed, they did not belong there either.

Too Jewish for Europe.

Too foreign for the Middle East.

Too Semitic for the racists.

Too religious for the secularists.

Too secular for the religious fanatics.

Too successful when we prospered.

Too poor when we struggled.

Too clannish when we stayed together.

Too influential when we participated.

Too capitalist for the communists.

Too communist for the capitalists.

Too cosmopolitan for the nationalists.

Too nationalist for the cosmopolitans.

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Humanity has demonstrated extraordinary creativity when inventing reasons to hate Jews. Civilization built aqueducts, cathedrals, universities, steam engines, airplanes and computers, yet somehow kept returning to the intellectual masterpiece of:

“Perhaps the Jews are the problem.”

Europe expelled us from one kingdom after another.

England expelled its Jews in 1290.

France expelled Jews repeatedly.

Spain expelled its Jews in 1492 after centuries of Jewish life on the Iberian Peninsula.

Portugal followed.

Across medieval Europe came forced conversions, confiscations, ghettos and massacres.

Then came the blood libels.

Jews were accused of murdering Christian children for ritual purposes.

Think about the obscenity of that accusation.

A civilization worshipping a Jewish child born in Bethlehem spent centuries accusing Jews of murdering children.

During the Crusades, Jewish communities along the Rhine were slaughtered by mobs heading east to reclaim the Holy Land from somebody else.

Jews were blamed for the Black Death.

Wells were supposedly poisoned.

Communities were burned.

People were tortured into confessions for crimes that existed only in the fevered imaginations of antisemites.

And still we survived.

Then came the ghettos.

The yellow badges.

The restrictions on professions.

The special taxes.

The forced sermons.

The humiliations.

The expulsions.

The pogroms.

In the Russian Empire, Jewish communities were terrorized and murdered while authorities alternated between complicity and indifference.

And when Jews finally began saying, “Perhaps we should go home,” Europe responded as though that was the unreasonable part.

Enter modern Zionism.

Not the birth of Jewish connection to Israel.

The political organization of a connection that had never disappeared.

Jews had maintained communities in the Land of Israel for centuries. Jews prayed for Zion. Jews mourned Jerusalem. Jews ended Passover Seders with “Next year in Jerusalem.” Jewish wedding ceremonies remembered Jerusalem. Jewish liturgy remembered Jerusalem.

Zionism did not invent the Jewish relationship with Israel.

Zionism looked at two thousand years of Jewish vulnerability and reached the painfully obvious conclusion:

Maybe the Jews should stop depending on everybody else for permission to remain alive.

Then came the twentieth century.

And humanity decided to demonstrate why that conclusion was tragically correct.

Nazi Germany did not merely hate Jews.

It industrialized Jew hatred.

It measured skulls.

Recorded grandparents.

Confiscated property.

Burned books.

Destroyed synagogues.

Packed families into ghettos.

Loaded human beings into cattle cars.

Shot Jews beside pits.

Gassed them.

Burned their bodies.

Six million Jews murdered.

One and a half million Jewish children.

Children.

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And the world knew enough to be ashamed but not enough to stop it.

Countries closed borders.

Ships carrying Jewish refugees were turned away.

Governments debated quotas while European Jewry was being annihilated.

Then, after the smoke cleared from Auschwitz, humanity discovered a new intellectual exercise:

explaining why the surviving Jews were being a little unreasonable about wanting sovereignty.

No.

We heard you the first thousand times.

We understood the lesson.

Never again does not mean:

“Never again, assuming the United Nations approves.”

Never again does not mean:

“Never again, unless defending yourselves becomes politically unpopular.”

Never again means Jewish life will never again depend entirely on the mercy of rulers, mobs, kings, presidents, dictators, clerics, bureaucrats or international organizations.

And antisemitism was never exclusively European.

Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa also experienced discrimination, violence, pogroms and expulsion.

Baghdad saw the Farhud.

Jewish communities that had existed for centuries across Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere were devastated or disappeared.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab and Muslim lands came to Israel.

Not because they had discovered a trendy political ideology.

Because Israel was home when other homes became impossible.

Then the Soviet Union discovered that old antisemitism could be rebranded with fashionable political vocabulary.

Suddenly Jew hatred could wear a suit, hold a conference and call itself “anti-Zionism.”

Convenient.

You could recycle centuries of conspiracy theories about Jewish power, Jewish money, Jewish manipulation and Jewish disloyalty while insisting that, heavens no, you had nothing against Jews.

Only Zionists.

What an extraordinary coincidence that the world’s oldest hatred discovered exactly one Jewish political movement that it considered uniquely illegitimate.

And now here we are.

The Jew is still expected to explain himself.

Explain why Jerusalem matters.

Explain why Israel should exist.

Explain why Jews need an army.

Explain why Jews fight back.

Explain why Jews refuse to become stateless again.

Explain why Jewish sovereignty is not negotiable.

Meanwhile, almost nobody demands that Britain justify Britain, France justify France or Japan justify Japan every twelve minutes.

But Israel?

Apparently Israel must stand trial for existing.

Well, I am done with the trial.

I reject the premise.

I am not asking permission.

I am that damn Jew.

I am the Jew Rome failed to erase.

The Jew the Crusaders failed to erase.

The Jew the Inquisition failed to erase.

The Jew the pogromists failed to erase.

The Jew Hitler failed to erase.

The Jew Stalin failed to erase.

The Jew terrorism will not erase.

The Jew propaganda will not erase.

The Jew who came home.

That is the part they cannot stand.

Not merely that Jews survived.

That Jews survived and became powerful enough to defend themselves.

The helpless Jew was tragic.

The murdered Jew was sympathetic.

The refugee Jew was pitiable.

The Jew with an army?

Apparently that is where everyone’s moral philosophy suddenly becomes complicated.

Too damn bad.

We learned history.

We learned what happens when somebody else controls the border.

We learned what happens when somebody else controls the army.

We learned what happens when somebody else decides whether Jewish refugees may enter.

We learned what happens when antisemitism moves from the tavern to the parliament.

And we learned what happens when Jews believe promises that civilization has permanently outgrown Jew hatred.

It never does.

It merely changes vocabulary.

So call me a Zionist.

Please.

I wear it as an inheritance.

A responsibility.

A promise.

Zionism means that after Babylon, Rome, exile, massacres, expulsions, inquisitions, pogroms, ghettos, gas chambers, terrorism and endless lectures from people who discovered Jewish history approximately fifteen minutes ago, the Jewish people are still here.

Speaking Hebrew.

Walking Jerusalem.

Planting vineyards in Judea.

Building universities.

Creating technology.

Raising families.

Arguing about politics.

Praying at the Western Wall.

Serving in an army wearing a Star of David.

Living ordinary Jewish lives in the land where Jewish history became history.

That is Zionism.

It is not perfection.

Israel is a country full of Jews, which means naturally we argue with each other about absolutely everything.

Government.

Religion.

Parking.

Hummus.

Air conditioning.

Whether somebody’s grandmother makes better kubbeh than somebody else’s grandmother.

National resurrection apparently comes with municipal bureaucracy.

But Israel’s imperfections do not invalidate Jewish sovereignty any more than America’s failures invalidate American independence.

And I will not accept a standard demanded of no other nation on earth.

So yes.

Damn Zionist.

Damn Jew.

Descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Child of a people who carried Jerusalem in their prayers across continents and centuries.

Heir to people who buried children, rebuilt communities, crossed deserts, escaped ghettos, survived camps, fled pogroms, revived Hebrew and returned home.

And here is the part that really seems to drive antisemites insane:

We are not leaving.

We are not converting.

We are not disappearing.

We are not begging.

We are not apologizing.

We are not handing Jerusalem back to history.

We are not volunteering for statelessness because it would make somebody’s political theory more elegant.

We have spent thousands of years listening to people explain what Jews should do.

Be quieter.

Assimilate.

Convert.

Leave.

Stay.

Disappear.

Die.

Enough.

This generation of Jews gets to answer.

No.

We are alive.

We are home.

We are armed.

We are building.

We remember exactly who we are.

And we are done asking permission to exist.

I am a Jew.

I am a Zionist.

And if that makes you uncomfortable, you have my deepest indifference.

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I am a Jew.

This is not a confession. I have nothing to confess.

It is not an apology. Jews have apologized enough. It only encourages people.

It is not an application for inclusion. I have seen what passes for inclusion lately, and I would rather wait outside with the smokers, the heretics and the one professor who still believes facts are not violence.

I am a Jew.

That means I belong to a people expelled from more countries than most activists can locate on a map—and who are now lectured about displacement by people who discovered the Middle East shortly after downloading TikTok.

We are too white for the campus revolutionaries, too foreign for the white supremacists, too religious for the secular fanatics, too secular for the religious fanatics, too successful for the socialists and too communal for the capitalists.

We were condemned for being rootless cosmopolitans. Then we returned to our ancestral homeland and were condemned for having roots.

We were despised when we were stateless. Now we are despised because we have a state.

We were mocked for going like sheep to the slaughter. Now we are condemned because the sheep bought fighter jets.

Pick a conspiracy and stick with it. This constant ideological wardrobe change is exhausting.

I am a Jew, and yes, there is arrogance in that sentence.

Magnificent, unreasonable, civilization-annoying arrogance.

The arrogance of slaves who looked at Pharaoh—the most powerful man on earth—and said, “No.”

The arrogance of a desert tribe that told kings they were beneath the law, told the rich they owed something to the poor, told farmers the land itself required rest, and told humanity that even servants were entitled to a day off.

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That was not meek spirituality.

That was a theological brick through the palace window.

We then had the astonishing chutzpah to record our own failures.

The Torah does not portray Jews as flawless superheroes. We lie. We panic. We complain about food. We build a golden calf approximately seventeen minutes after witnessing divine revelation. Moses loses his temper. David sins. Jonah runs away. Our kings fail, our priests fail, our judges fail, and our prophets spend most of their careers screaming at us.

If God wanted Jewish propaganda, the Bible was a terrible first draft.

We preserved our failures because Judaism was never founded upon the claim that Jews are perfect. It rests upon the more demanding claim that human beings are responsible.

Modern politics cannot process this. It requires one immaculate victim, one cartoon villain, twelve infographics and an idiot typing “educate yourself” beneath information he learned that morning.

So let me make my position offensively clear.

I oppose the creation of a Palestinian state.

Not reluctantly.

Not temporarily.

Not until the next “peace process.”

I oppose it categorically.

I support permanent Jewish sovereignty throughout the Land of Israel west of the Jordan River—from the river to the sea.

Yes, I said it.

You have heard that phrase screamed at Jews by masked mobs demanding the destruction of Israel. Apparently, it only becomes frightening when a Jew announces that he intends to remain alive within it.

I support Greater Israel.

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I do not support a Palestinian army overlooking Tel Aviv.

I do not support a Palestinian air force.

I do not support another sovereign government capable of importing Iranian weapons, signing military agreements with Israel’s enemies and converting the hills above Israel’s population centers into one enormous rocket platform.

I do not support turning Judea and Samaria—the geographical and historical heartland of the Jewish people—into the twenty-third Arab state because European diplomats need another signing ceremony and somebody in Oslo has already ordered the miniature flags.

There will be no sovereign Palestine between Israel and Jordan.

There is already an Arab Palestinian state carved from the territory of the original British Mandate.

It is called Jordan.

You may have heard of it. It is the large country immediately to Israel’s east that everyone discussing the “tiny remaining territory for Palestinian self-determination” mysteriously forgets to print on the map.

Britain severed the territory east of the Jordan River from the Jewish national home and handed it to the Hashemite dynasty. That territory comprised most of Mandatory Palestine. It is now overwhelmingly Arab and home to millions of people of Palestinian origin.

Call it the Hashemite Kingdom if royal stationery makes you feel sophisticated.

Geography is not fooled by letterhead.

Demanding another Palestinian state west of the river is not a “two-state solution.” It is demanding that Palestinian Arab nationalism receive another state while the Jewish people surrender half of their only one.

That is not compromise.

That is partition with a public-relations department.

And before some morally constipated academic begins hyperventilating, saying Jordan is the Palestinian state is not a call to load civilians onto buses. It is not permission to attack Arab families, seize private property or treat peaceful neighbors as enemies.

An Arab who wants to raise his children, earn a living and live without violence is not my enemy.

A terrorist is.

A terrorist’s recruiter is.

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A government that names streets after murderers is.

A political culture that pays salaries for slaughter is.

A propaganda machine that transforms every Jewish victim into “context” and every Jewish act of self-defense into a war crime is.

I refuse the idiotic binary that says I must either surrender my homeland or hate every Arab.

I will do neither.

Greater Israel means one sovereign power west of the Jordan: Israel.

It means Israeli military control, Israeli borders and Israeli security.

It means individual civil dignity without granting a collective national veto over Jewish existence.

It means freedom of religion and protection under law—not another hostile sovereignty established nine miles from Israel’s economic heart.

Local government can be negotiated. Administrative arrangements can be negotiated. Residency, citizenship and regional cooperation can be debated by serious people dealing with real conditions.

Jewish sovereignty is not negotiable.

Jewish survival is not a confidence-building measure.

And statehood is not a participation trophy handed out because the international community feels guilty.

A state is a military, diplomatic and territorial weapon. Handing one to a movement that has repeatedly glorified Jewish murder is not compassion. It is strategic malpractice with a peace dove printed on the cover.

The Palestinian national movement has been offered partition repeatedly.

Its leaders rejected partition because the objection was never merely to Israel’s borders.

The objection was to Israel.

The PLO was established in 1964—three years before Israel controlled Gaza, Judea or Samaria. Jordan then controlled Judea and Samaria. Egypt controlled Gaza.

What “occupation” was the PLO founded to eliminate?

Tel Aviv.

Haifa.

Ashkelon.

West Jerusalem.

Israel itself.

The Palestinian national movement was not born demanding a state alongside Israel. It was organized to replace Israel.

That is the inconvenient historical turd sitting in the middle of every elegant two-state-policy dinner party.

Then Israel withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005.

No settlements. No permanent Israeli military presence. No Jewish civilians.

Gaza could have become a Mediterranean commercial center.

Instead, Hamas took over and converted withdrawal into proof that terrorism worked. Greenhouses were destroyed. Rockets multiplied. Tunnels were dug. Children were trained to inherit a war their leaders had no intention of ending.

Then came October 7.

That was the Palestinian-state pilot program.

It did not produce Singapore.

It produced a slaughterhouse.

And now the same geniuses who promised that leaving Gaza would bring peace insist that doing it again—this time above Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion Airport—is the only imaginable path to peace.

Nothing says geopolitical wisdom like repeating a catastrophe on a much larger hilltop.

No.

You do not get to invade Jewish homes, murder families, kidnap babies, rape women, drag bodies through the streets and then have Western diplomats reward the political cause under whose banners it was done.

That is not peacemaking.

That is incentive compensation for barbarism.

Hamas is not a liberation movement. It is an Islamist death cult.

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Palestinian Islamic Jihad is not a human-rights organization with unfortunate branding.

The Popular Front is not progressive because it learned to speak Marxist.

The Palestinian Authority is not moderate because it wears suits while paying stipends connected to imprisoned terrorists and dead attackers.

And UNRWA is not solving a refugee crisis by turning refugee status into a hereditary political identity passed from great-grandparents to great-grandchildren.

This entire machinery survives by preserving the conflict it claims to alleviate.

It teaches the world that every refugee population must eventually resettle—except Palestinians, who must remain refugees until Israel disappears.

It teaches that millions of Jews expelled or driven from Arab and Muslim countries were absorbed and rebuilt their lives, while Palestinians must be kept in permanent historical suspension as weapons against Jewish sovereignty.

It teaches that Jewish refugees are history, but Palestinian refugees are foreign policy.

Bullshit.

I will not pretend this is about a tiny Palestinian state peacefully tending olive trees beside Israel.

A genuinely peaceful Palestinian polity could have been discussed decades ago. What developed instead was an international movement whose sacred vocabulary includes “resistance,” “return” and “liberation”—terms routinely understood to mean the elimination of Jewish sovereignty.

Ask a campus protester whether Tel Aviv belongs to Israel.

Watch the software crash.

The demand for Palestinian statehood is sold to gullible Westerners as a border dispute. Yet the maps at rallies erase Israel completely. The chants do not demand “two states for two peoples.” The keys displayed at demonstrations are not keys to imaginary houses in Ramallah. They symbolize Jaffa, Haifa, Ashkelon and Jerusalem.

They do not want a Palestinian state beside Israel.

They want a Palestinian state instead of Israel.

I believe them.

That apparently makes me an extremist.

Fine.

After thousands of years of Jewish history, I have developed the radical habit of believing people when they announce their intention to kill me.

Israel exists because Jews finally stopped allowing foreign diplomats to explain why the latest threat should not be taken literally.

The world adores dead Jews.

Dead Jews are wonderfully cooperative. They do not build homes. They do not patrol borders. They do not vote for inconvenient governments. They do not interrupt university seminars by producing historical evidence.

Dead Jews can be mourned without being respected.

Auschwitz is safe for polite society because Auschwitz asks nothing of anyone except a sad face and perhaps a wreath.

Israel asks something much harder.

Israel asks whether you still love Jews when they refuse to enter the cattle car.

There is no moral achievement in loving powerless Jews.

The test begins when the Jew survives.

Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.

Or, to use the fashionable vocabulary, Zionism is an indigenous decolonization movement that everyone supports in theory until the indigenous people are Jews, the ancestral language is Hebrew and the decolonization succeeds.

Apparently, indigeneity expires.

I would love to see the policy.

After how many centuries of forced exile does a people lose its homeland? Five hundred years? One thousand? Does the countdown continue during pogroms? Do language, archaeology, prayer, literature and uninterrupted physical presence count?

Please publish the official regulations before the next Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

For two thousand years, Jews prayed facing Jerusalem.

We mourned Jerusalem at weddings. We remembered it after meals. We ended Passover with “Next year in Jerusalem.” We buried our dead with soil from the Land of Israel.

Entire empires invaded, renamed, occupied, taxed and divided our country. Those empires collapsed. We kept saying the same names.

Jerusalem.

Hebron.

Bethlehem.

Shiloh.

Judea.

Yes, Judea—the place from which the word Jew comes.

That is terribly inconvenient for people who believe Jews materialized in the Middle East in 1948 after being fired from a Polish real-estate agency.

I live in Judea.

You may call it the West Bank, as though a brief Jordanian occupation possessed the magical authority to erase three thousand years of Jewish geography.

I call it the land where Abraham walked, David fled, prophets thundered and Jewish children now miss the school bus.

History here is not preserved behind museum glass.

It is stuck in traffic.

I support Jews living in Judea for the same reason I support Jews living in Jerusalem: it is our homeland.

Calling a Jew a “settler” in Judea is like calling an Englishman a settler in England and then expecting applause for your anti-colonial sophistication.

That does not mean Jews are perfect.

We are not.

Israel has politicians who could turn manna from heaven into a procurement scandal. Our parliament occasionally resembles a family WhatsApp group after somebody mentions inheritance. Israeli bureaucracy can transform a one-page form into a multigenerational biblical ordeal.

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The secular Israeli says he does not believe in God, then shouts “Baruch Hashem” when he finds parking.

The religious Zionist arrives carrying a rifle, a volume of Talmud and forty-seven unsolicited opinions about the government.

The American Jewish progressive explains Israel from a brunch table in Manhattan.

The Israeli taxi driver explains America, Iran, military strategy, central banking and your own marriage before the next traffic light.

And I, an oleh living in Efrat, have become an expert on the entire Middle East after mastering eleven Hebrew verbs and discovering that Israeli customer service was designed to test whether redemption can survive being placed on hold.

We are impossible.

Put three Jews in a room and you will get four opinions, five political parties, six dietary restrictions and one furious disagreement about a synagogue none of them attends.

We survived Babylon, Rome, crusades, inquisitions, pogroms and genocide, yet we remain vulnerable to one synagogue member moving another synagogue member’s chair.

The miracle is not only that Jews survived our enemies.

It is that we survived one another.

But our internal chaos does not invalidate our national rights.

Israel does not need to be perfect to exist.

No other country is required to demonstrate moral perfection before being permitted another sunrise.

Nobody responds to French misconduct by demanding the abolition of France. Nobody places Spain on existential probation. Nobody proposes returning the United States to Britain whenever Congress embarrasses itself.

Only Israel is treated as a temporary political experiment whose license can be revoked by the international community.

Criticize Israel.

Israelis do it before breakfast, during breakfast and while blocking the road after breakfast.

Criticize ministers. Debate laws. Challenge budgets. Argue about courts, settlements and military tactics.

That is democracy.

But if your proposed remedy for Israel’s imperfections is the abolition or mutilation of Israel—and only Israel—your problem is not policy.

Your problem is Jewish power.

The far right hates Jews for being foreign.

The far left hates Jews for being indigenous.

One accuses us of secretly controlling countries. The other demands that we surrender ours.

One wants Jews back in exile. The other wants us permanently defined by it.

Both become strangely emotional when Jews decline the invitation.

Meanwhile, the United Nations can locate Israel with supernatural speed.

Iran hangs dissidents. Syria becomes a cemetery. China erases cultures. Women are treated as furniture across half the planet.

But somewhere in Geneva, an intern is preparing Resolution 94,372 concerning a Jewish balcony in Jerusalem.

That is not international law.

It is obsession wearing a lanyard.

I will not participate.

I will not apologize for Jewish power.

I will not apologize for Jewish soldiers protecting Jewish grandmothers.

I will not apologize for Jewish farmers planting vineyards in Judea.

I will not apologize for Hebrew being spoken by children in Jerusalem.

I will not apologize for a Jewish state rescuing Jews.

That is what a Jewish state is for.

I am a Jew, which means I remember.

Memory is our most dangerous weapon.

We remember Egypt when every empire expects its slaves to forget. We remember Jerusalem when conquerors rename it. We remember Spain, Kishinev, Hebron, Baghdad, Auschwitz and October 7.

We remember who sheltered us.

We remember who betrayed us.

We remember what happened every time someone promised that Jewish surrender would produce Jewish safety.

Antisemitism survives by changing costumes. It can wear a cross, a swastika, a keffiyeh, a suit, a lab coat or a faculty badge. Its vocabulary changes. Its appetite does not.

The Jew is accused of whatever a society fears most.

Capitalist and communist.

Tribal and cosmopolitan.

Weak and omnipotent.

Inferior and secretly superior.

Cowardly when defenseless. Bloodthirsty when armed.

Antisemitism is not a coherent argument.

It is a conspiracy theory with a costume department.

I am finished pretending incoherence deserves respectful silence.

I am a Jew.

I support Greater Israel.

I oppose a Palestinian state west of Jordan.

Jordan is the Arab Palestinian state. Israel is the Jewish state.

No amount of diplomatic theater, academic jargon or synchronized campus screaming will make me exchange the security of Jewish children for another failed experiment in Palestinian statehood.

Block me.

Unsubscribe.

Call me an extremist, a supremacist, a colonialist, a fascist and whatever other word you learned without understanding this week.

I have been insulted by people far more intelligent than you.

I am not asking permission to exist.

I am not auditioning for your empathy.

I am not submitting my indigenous identity to a committee chaired by people who discovered colonialism last semester.

I carry a covenant older than Christianity, Islam, Europe and every flag currently flapping outside the United Nations.

I belong to a people who returned to the language, land and capital engraved into our prayers while sophisticated people explained that history could not run backward.

They were right.

We did not run backward.

We came home.

We came home argumentative, traumatized, brilliant, neurotic, armed and approximately six minutes late.

We came home with Torah scrolls, startup companies, family recipes, terrible drivers, magnificent children and enough political parties to frighten a mathematician.

We came home because exile was never our identity.

Exile was something done to us.

So yes, I am arrogant.

I am arrogant enough to believe a Jew does not need to die to deserve compassion.

Arrogant enough to believe power can be moral.

Arrogant enough to believe memory can be revolutionary.

Arrogant enough to believe Jewish children should inherit more than memorial candles.

They should inherit mornings in Jerusalem.

They should inherit vineyards in Judea.

They should inherit Hebrew jokes, Jewish arguments, Jewish weddings and the exquisite luxury of being ordinary.

They should inherit a country stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, strong enough that nobody ever again gets to decide whether Jews are permitted to live.

I am a Jew.

I am a Zionist.

I support Greater Israel.

I oppose the creation of a Palestinian state.

I do not give a damn whether that ruins your carefully curated opinion of me.

If these words comfort you, stand beside me.

If they confuse you, open a history book.

If they enrage you, excellent. Perhaps the heat will restart whatever portion of your brain surrendered to slogans.

And if none of that helps, you are entirely free to block me, denounce me and go straight to hell.

We will still be here when you arrive.

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“I don’t care.”

Of course you care.

You care so little that you’ve spent the past forty-five minutes explaining precisely how little you care. You’ve drafted three furious replies, deleted two, posted one, checked whether anyone liked it, and then announced—with the emotional serenity of a raccoon trapped inside a garbage disposal—that none of this affects you.

Bullshit.

Apathy is rarely the absence of feeling. It is fear wearing sweatpants.

It is disappointment pretending to be sophistication. It is cowardice leaning against the wall with its arms folded, smirking at everyone brave enough to enter the arena. It is the emotional equivalent of refusing to play football because you might scuff your shoes—and then spending the entire match explaining how badly everyone else is playing.

Apathy has become fashionable because caring is dangerous.

If you care, you might fail.

If you care, someone might laugh.

If you care, you might discover that your magnificent theory collapses the moment it comes into contact with another human being.

Worst of all, if you care, you become responsible.

And responsibility is terrifying because it removes life’s most comfortable excuse: that everything is somebody else’s fault.

So people perform indifference.

They say politics is pointless, marriage is impossible, religion is outdated, ambition is toxic, patriotism is embarrassing, exercise is obsessive, success is luck, and anyone trying to improve the world is probably a narcissist with a podcast.

How wonderfully convenient.

If every institution is corrupt, every leader is a fraud, every dream is naïve, and every effort is doomed, then congratulations: you never have to get off the couch.

You can remain exactly where you are—half-dressed, fully opinionated, eating hummus directly from the container—while congratulating yourself for seeing through the illusion of human agency.

You’re not lazy. You’re “disillusioned.”

You’re not frightened. You’re “protecting your peace.”

You’re not avoiding responsibility. You’re “setting boundaries.”

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At this rate, people will soon describe sleeping through a house fire as practicing radical self-care.

Enough.

There is nothing profound about refusing to participate in your own life.

Cynicism is not intelligence. Sarcasm is not courage. Detachment is not wisdom. Sometimes the person rolling his eyes in the corner has not uncovered a deeper truth. Sometimes he is simply an asshole in the corner.

Real intelligence builds.

Real courage risks humiliation.

Real conviction gets out of bed when enthusiasm has packed a suitcase and fled the country.

Look at Jewish history. It is one long, stubborn refusal to surrender to apathy.

Abraham heard Lech Lecha and walked.

Moses stood before a burning bush and answered, Hineni.

The prophets did not shrug and announce that moral clarity was “complicated.”

Herzl did not sit in a Viennese café mumbling that sovereignty sounded unrealistic. The early Zionists did not conduct a twenty-year feasibility study on whether swamps were sufficiently inclusive. They arrived, drained them, planted trees, built farms, revived Hebrew, raised families, buried friends, and kept going.

They cared so fiercely that they turned longing into geography.

That is what caring does.

It takes something invisible—a belief, a promise, a memory, a ridiculous dream everyone else mocks—and gives it roads, schools, hospitals, orchards, airports, arguments, traffic jams, and an absurdly complicated parking app.

Israel exists because generations of Jews rejected the seductive bullshit of helplessness.

They did not wait for perfect conditions.

They did not wait for universal approval.

They certainly did not wait for the comment section to reach consensus.

They acted.

That does not mean they were never frightened. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is fear being dragged by the collar toward something more important.

And yes, sometimes exhaustion is real. Sometimes a person is wounded, overwhelmed, grieving, or genuinely depleted. Rest is not apathy. Healing is not cowardice. Sitting down for a while does not mean you have surrendered.

But building a permanent home inside your disappointment is not healing.

It is surrender with decorative pillows.

At some point, you must stop treating your wounds like diplomatic immunity from responsibility.

Maybe people betrayed you.

Maybe the business collapsed.

Maybe the marriage broke.

Maybe you were overlooked, underestimated, mocked, fired, rejected, humiliated, or spectacularly screwed by someone who later posted a LinkedIn essay about ethical leadership.

Welcome to humanity.

You have every right to be angry. You have every right to grieve. You do not have the right to use yesterday’s injury as a lifelong exemption from tomorrow’s duty.

The world does not improve because good people privately hold excellent opinions.

Children are not raised by intentions.

Businesses are not built by vision boards.

Communities are not defended by hashtags.

Friendships are not maintained through vague plans to “catch up soon.”

Bodies do not become healthy because you purchased expensive athletic shoes and placed them reverently beside the front door.

Eventually, something must move.

Usually you.

Make the phone call.

Write the first sentence.

Submit the application.

Apologize without attaching a legal brief explaining why you were technically only 47 percent wrong.

Tell someone you love them.

Tell someone else to go to hell.

Learn the language.

Start the company.

Lift the weight.

Book the flight.

Defend what you believe—even when the room goes quiet and every fashionable coward suddenly finds the carpet fascinating.

Do one thing that creates evidence you are still alive.

Not a plan. Not a post. Not an inspirational quote pasted over a photograph of a mountain you have no intention of climbing.

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An action.

Small is fine. Clumsy is fine. Imperfect is inevitable. The first attempt at almost anything worthwhile looks like it was assembled in the dark by a committee of drunk goats.

Do it anyway.

You are waiting to feel motivated because you have misunderstood motivation. Motivation is not a divine lightning bolt that strikes while you lie in bed scrolling through other people’s achievements. It usually arrives after you begin.

Action creates momentum.

Momentum creates confidence.

Confidence creates larger action.

Meanwhile, apathy creates another episode, another snack, another month, another year—and eventually an entire life spent explaining why beginning would have been pointless.

That is the real horror of apathy.

It does not destroy your life dramatically.

There is no explosion. No orchestra. No villain laughing beneath a thunderstorm.

It kills quietly.

One postponed decision at a time.

One unanswered message.

One abandoned idea.

One more morning surrendered to the lie that tomorrow will contain a braver version of you.

Tomorrow is not manufacturing a replacement.

This is the model you received.

Use it.

You will embarrass yourself. Excellent. Embarrassment means you entered the room.

You will fail. Wonderful. Failure is proof that your ambitions finally exceeded your excuses.

You will be criticized. Naturally. The world has never suffered a shortage of spectators willing to heckle the people carrying the stretcher.

Let them talk.

A critic can describe the battlefield. Only a participant can change the outcome.

So care loudly.

Care recklessly.

Care enough to become inconvenient.

Care enough to lose the approval of people whose greatest achievement is never being caught trying.

Care enough to defend your family, your people, your faith, your country, your work, your friendships, and the future you claim to want.

There is no shame in caring too much.

The shame is standing beside something beautiful while it is being destroyed and congratulating yourself for remaining emotionally neutral.

Apathy is not armor. It is anesthesia.

And anesthesia has its place during surgery—but nobody was meant to spend an entire lifetime unconscious.

Wake up.

Your life is happening.

Your people need you.

Your unfinished work is sitting there, staring at you.

And history, impatient bastard that it is, has never once stopped to wait for someone who “just wasn’t feeling it today.”

Stand up.

Choose something.

Give a damn.

Then prove it.

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The rightward turn is not a mystery.

It is an invoice.

History has presented the bill for half a century of asymmetrical tolerance, borderless sentimentality, epistemological vandalism, institutional cowardice and elite contempt. The people forced to pay it—through fractured communities, silenced speech, collapsing trust and the slow criminalization of common sense—have begun to revolt.

This is not the resurrection of some sepia-toned conservatism, preserved in mothballs between the family Bible and a portrait of Ronald Reagan. Nor is it merely an electoral spasm caused by inflation, immigration or the algorithmic derangement of social media.

It is something much larger.

It is the political consequence of a civilization whose liberal elite lost the moral courage to defend liberal civilization.

The modern right did not become mainstream because millions of people suddenly rejected liberty. It became mainstream because the institutions calling themselves liberal began treating liberty as a suspicious activity.

The last liberal became a conservative when he discovered that free speech was now “harm,” borders were “violence,” equal treatment was “oppression,” self-defense was “escalation,” terrorism was “resistance,” Jewish sovereignty was “colonialism,” and truth itself was merely a vulgar prejudice held by people insufficiently educated to understand why their own eyes were lying to them.

He did not abandon liberalism.

Liberalism abandoned him.

The Hidden Foundations of Freedom

The great error of the modern liberal elite was to imagine that liberal democracy could survive as pure procedure.

Pass the correct laws. Design the correct institutions. Establish the correct courts. Write the correct rights into the correct documents. Then humanity, relieved of its primitive loyalties, would float serenely into a post-national future administered by experts, international agencies and impeccably credentialed moral supervisors.

This was always a fantasy.

Liberalism was never self-sustaining. It lived on moral capital accumulated before liberalism itself: habits of restraint, family obligation, civic trust, religious conscience, national loyalty, historical memory and the willingness to sacrifice private interest for a public good.

The German constitutional thinker Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde formulated the dilemma with brutal clarity: the liberal secular state depends upon conditions it cannot itself guarantee.

A constitution can announce freedom. It cannot manufacture the character required to preserve it.

A parliament can record votes. It cannot force the defeated to regard the victor as legitimate.

A court can protect religious liberty. It cannot create a culture in which religious factions willingly accept that their doctrines do not govern everyone.

A free press can circulate information. It cannot survive if journalists decide their function is not to investigate reality but to protect the public from unauthorized interpretations of it.

Every liberal society rests upon a pre-liberal covenant: we will disagree without destroying one another; we will lose without reaching for violence; we will tolerate your conscience if you tolerate ours; and none of us will use liberty merely as a ladder to power before kicking it away.

That covenant is not sentimental.

It is the load-bearing wall of the entire democratic order.

John Locke understood that government derived legitimacy from consent. John Stuart Mill understood that truth requires collision with error. Tocqueville understood that democracy depends on customs, associations and moral habits that government cannot replace. Burke understood that society is not a temporary business arrangement among the living but a partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn.

These were not interchangeable arguments. Together, however, they disclosed the same terrible fact: freedom requires a particular kind of human being living inside a particular kind of culture.

The modern elite wanted the freedom without the culture, the rights without the duties, the harvest without the soil.

Then it expressed astonishment when the ground turned to dust.

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How Liberalism Became Anti-Liberal

Classical liberalism began with epistemic humility: no ruler, priest, professor or majority possesses enough certainty to silence everyone else.

The new liberalism begins with epistemic arrogance: enlightened institutions already know which opinions advance justice, and therefore disagreement with those opinions is evidence of moral or psychological defect.

This is not an evolution of liberalism.

It is an inversion.

The transformation occurred through the convergence of two intellectual forces that appeared, superficially, to be enemies.

The first was technocratic managerialism. It regarded the nation as an inefficient administrative unit, the citizen as a bundle of preferences, the border as friction, politics as a technical problem and government as a delivery mechanism for outcomes designed by people who attended the correct universities.

The second was identitarian radicalism. It rejected the individual as the basic moral unit and replaced him with the demographic category. It taught that language was power, objectivity was camouflage, universal principles concealed domination and moral authority flowed from one’s position inside an inherited hierarchy of oppression.

The technocrat supplied the machinery.

The radical supplied the theology.

Together they created the most suffocating political hybrid of the modern West: a bureaucracy that speaks like an activist and an activist class empowered like a bureaucracy.

This new regime does not need to abolish elections or send police into every home. Its preferred instruments are softer, more pervasive and therefore more difficult to resist: accreditation, professional codes, human-resources investigations, reputational destruction, algorithmic suppression, compelled declarations and the quiet conversion of every institution into an ideological checkpoint.

The citizen remains formally free while becoming socially unemployable.

No censor announces himself. A “trust and safety” specialist adjusts visibility.

No inquisitor asks whether you believe. A compliance form asks whether you are aligned.

No commissar arrests the heretic. A committee explains that his continued presence makes vulnerable colleagues feel unsafe.

Tyranny has learned to use therapeutic vocabulary.

The old liberal asked power to justify itself.

The new liberal asks the citizen to justify himself before power.

The old liberal defended the dissenter because majorities could be wrong.

The new liberal disciplines the dissenter because disagreement might weaken the approved majority narrative.

The old liberal believed that human beings possessed rights regardless of identity.

The new liberal arranges humanity into a moral caste system and calls the arrangement equity.

It turned moral intelligence into a seating chart.

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The Elite Is Not a Conspiracy. It Is Worse.

The liberal elite is not a secret committee meeting beneath Davos to coordinate the destruction of civilization over sparkling water and ethically sourced canapés.

The reality is more banal and more dangerous.

It is a distributed institutional class whose members share the same credentials, read the same publications, reward the same language, fear the same accusations and derive status from performing the same moral gestures.

They do not need to conspire. Incentives coordinate them.

A professor advances by identifying a previously unnoticed oppression. An activist organization raises money by magnifying a crisis. A corporation purchases moral absolution by adopting activist language. A journalist gains prestige by translating political disagreement into a drama of victim and oppressor. A bureaucrat expands authority by finding another sphere of life requiring expert supervision.

Each actor behaves rationally within the system.

The collective result is insanity.

This is how ideological escalation occurs without an identifiable dictator. Yesterday’s radical claim becomes today’s institutional baseline. Once absorbed, it can no longer provide distinction, so the prestige economy demands a more extreme claim tomorrow.

Moderation becomes career suicide because moral status is awarded to the person who discovers the greatest hidden evil, not to the person who asks whether the alleged evil exists.

The elite became intoxicated by its own language because it rarely paid the price of its abstractions.

Those who celebrated porous borders generally lived behind gates.

Those who romanticized disorder did not depend upon the neighborhood shop destroyed by it.

Those who treated policing as an embarrassing relic did not wait forty minutes for help.

Those who described national identity as primitive maintained ferocious loyalty to their own professional class.

Their cosmopolitanism was not the absence of tribe.

It was tribalism with airport lounges.

They converted privilege into proof of virtue and then lectured people bearing the consequences of their ideas about compassion.

This was not simply hypocrisy.

It was moral expropriation.

The Suicide of Asymmetrical Tolerance

A liberal order can survive profound disagreement. What it cannot survive is one-way tolerance.

Tolerance is reciprocal or it is surrender.

That principle should be obvious. Yet the contemporary elite made reciprocal obligation itself taboo. It demanded unlimited openness from liberal civilization while refusing to demand even minimal liberalism from movements entering, operating within or openly opposing it.

Here the confrontation with Islamism became decisive.

The distinction must be made with absolute precision because moral seriousness begins with intellectual discrimination.

Islam is a religion containing nearly two billion people, countless theological traditions and every conceivable degree of belief, doubt, observance and political opinion.

Islamism is a political ideology that seeks to subordinate individual conscience, civil law and democratic equality to religious supremacy.

A Muslim who believes in constitutional government, equal citizenship and freedom of conscience belongs inside the liberal democratic covenant.

An Islamist who regards those principles as temporary obstacles does not become liberal merely because criticizing him makes Western academics uncomfortable.

The most courageous enemies of Islamism have often been Muslims: Iranian women confronting compulsory veiling, Arab writers resisting censorship, reformist clerics challenging fanaticism, secular dissidents, gay Muslims, apostates and ordinary believers who want faith without theocracy.

The liberal elite’s refusal to distinguish these people from Islamists is not tolerance.

It is an insult.

It collapses hundreds of millions of autonomous human beings into a single political identity and then calls anyone who notices the difference a racist. It racializes a religion, infantilizes its adherents and grants its most reactionary representatives the authority to speak for everyone.

That is not multiculturalism.

It is colonial paternalism with a diversity office.

A liberalism that cannot protect a novelist, a woman, a Jew, a Christian, an atheist or a Muslim dissident from religious coercion is not liberalism. It is a public-relations department for its own extinction.

The alliance between the radical Western left and Islamism is frequently described as paradoxical. There is nothing paradoxical about it once one understands the underlying structure.

They do not share a destination.

They share an enemy.

The radical left sees Western civilization as an architecture of racial, capitalist, patriarchal and colonial domination that must be dismantled.

Islamism sees Western civilization as decadent, secular and spiritually corrupt territory that must eventually be subordinated.

One wishes to dissolve the house.

The other wishes to inherit the address.

Their temporary partnership is founded not on mutual affection but on convergent hostility toward the liberal nation-state, Western confidence and—most obsessively—Israel.

The progressive activist overlooks Islamist misogyny because acknowledging it would complicate the approved hierarchy of victimhood. The Islamist adopts the vocabulary of decolonization because it launders a supremacist project through the language of liberation.

Reaction does not become progressive because it changes languages.

Theocracy does not become emancipation because its victims are inconvenient to Western theory.

Fascism does not become anti-fascism because the fascist remembers to describe his enemy as a colonizer.

Yet the intellectual eunuchs of the modern academy have perfected the art of discovering “context” precisely where moral judgment is required.

They can identify seventy-three varieties of microaggression but cannot recognize a pogrom while watching it livestreamed.

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Israel: The Fact That Shatters the Theory

Israel is the unforgivable fact at the center of this ideological crisis.

It is unforgivable because it ruins the categories.

The Jewish people are ancient and modern, indigenous and diasporic, Middle Eastern and European, religious and secular, wounded and sovereign. Israel contains the descendants of Holocaust survivors, Jews expelled or driven from Arab and Muslim lands, Ethiopian Jews, Soviet Jews and families whose roots in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias reach backward through centuries.

The Jews cannot be neatly placed inside the crude postcolonial diagram because Jewish history predates the diagram, crosses its boundaries and exposes its intellectual poverty.

The Jew is white when his supposed privilege must be condemned.

The Jew becomes foreign when his belonging must be denied.

The Jew is indigenous nowhere and an intrusive settler everywhere.

He may be mourned at Auschwitz but condemned for refusing to build another Auschwitz in Israel.

The elite accepts the Jew most comfortably as a corpse.

A dead Jew can be memorialized, universalized and drained of political inconvenience. His suffering can become a museum exhibit about tolerance.

The armed Jew is another matter.

The armed Jew announces that memory has acquired sovereignty. That Jewish safety will no longer depend upon the intermittent decency of governments, mobs, kings, presidents, universities or fashionable political movements. That “Never Again” is not an annual ceremonial murmur.

It is a sovereign verb.

This is what anti-Zionism cannot forgive.

Not merely that Jews returned, but that Jews ceased asking permission to survive.

October 7 exposed the pathology with horrifying clarity.

The speed with which parts of the Western activist class moved from massacre to explanation, from explanation to justification and from justification to celebration was not an intellectual accident.

It was doctrine operating automatically.

The bodies had not been identified before the slogans arrived.

People who had spent years proclaiming that words were violence suddenly became metaphysically uncertain about whether torture, rape, kidnapping and the deliberate murder of families constituted violence when committed against Israelis.

They demanded “context” not to understand the crime but to dissolve the criminal’s agency.

That is one of the most repulsive features of the contemporary victimhood hierarchy: it grants limitless agency to the designated oppressor and no agency at all to the designated victim.

Israel is responsible for everything, including the choices of its enemies.

Palestinians, in this framework, are responsible for nothing, not even the murder of Israelis.

This is not solidarity with Palestinians. It is contempt for them. It treats an entire people as moral children, incapable of choice, strategy, fanaticism, courage, cruelty, compromise or responsibility.

Real respect demands agency.

Real compassion can condemn suffering without sanctifying those who manufacture it.

Real liberalism can defend Palestinian dignity without turning Hamas into an armed social-work organization.

But ideological liberalism can no longer make such distinctions. Its moral vocabulary has only two settings: oppressor and oppressed. Once the roles are assigned, facts become decorative.

Israel is guilty before it acts.

Its enemies are innocent after they kill.

That is not moral reasoning.

It is a secular theology of predestination.

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The Right’s Complicity in the Collapse

The right should not congratulate itself too quickly.

It helped create the wasteland through which it now marches.

For decades, establishment conservatism reduced freedom to economics. It worshipped deregulation, shareholder value and consumer choice while treating culture as a secondary concern and national solidarity as an obstacle to efficiency.

It defended the market but forgot to defend the society in which markets operate.

It allowed factories, neighborhoods and civic institutions to disintegrate while pointing triumphantly at aggregate growth. It treated workers as interchangeable labor units, towns as obsolete coordinates and citizenship as an inconvenient distinction inside a global supply chain.

It confused a market economy with a market society.

The first is indispensable to freedom.

The second dissolves everything that cannot be priced.

A man is not free merely because he may choose among thirty streaming services while fearing that an honest sentence at work will destroy his livelihood.

A family is not flourishing because the national economy grew three percent while its community collapsed.

A country is not a hotel with a gross domestic product.

The post-Cold War right imagined that history had ended, markets would liberalize tyrannies and cultural institutions could be abandoned to the left because politics was fundamentally about tax rates.

It ceded the universities, media, civil service, arts, schools and language itself.

Then it seemed surprised when people educated by its opponents eventually governed the culture.

The new right emerged from the ruins of that failure as much as from the failure of the left.

It no longer asks only, “How large is the economy?”

It asks, “Whom does the economy serve?”

It no longer asks only, “Is the individual formally free?”

It asks, “Does he possess the cultural, familial and institutional conditions required to exercise freedom?”

It no longer assumes that any movement of capital, labor or information across borders must be beneficial because movement itself is efficient.

It asks whether the nation remains capable of governing itself.

This is the philosophical evolution that explains the right’s movement into the mainstream.

The old right defended order.

The libertarian right defended choice.

The new right is attempting—often chaotically—to defend the conditions under which order and choice can coexist.

It combines Burke’s reverence for inheritance, Mill’s defense of dissent, Tocqueville’s insistence upon civic association, Hobbes’s recognition that order precedes liberty and Orwell’s understanding that political freedom begins with the right to state the obvious.

It is an unstable synthesis. It contains national conservatives, classical liberals, religious traditionalists, populists, working-class voters, dissident feminists, anti-communist immigrants, Muslim reformers, Zionists, secular free-speech advocates and ordinary parents who never intended to join a counterrevolution but discovered that reality had been declared reactionary.

Sometimes this coalition barely agrees on the meaning of breakfast.

But it understands one thing the elite forgot:

Liberty requires architecture.

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The Return of the Boundary

A boundary is not automatically an act of hatred.

It is the beginning of definition.

A free society distinguishes the citizen from the noncitizen, lawful conduct from coercion, religion from theocracy, immigration from invasion, compassion from capitulation, criticism from intimidation and peace from the temporary absence of resistance.

The contemporary elite treated every boundary as morally suspect because boundaries exclude.

Of course they exclude.

That is what makes them boundaries.

A legal system excludes lawlessness. A democracy excludes political violence. A home excludes uninvited entry. A definition excludes what the word does not mean. A civilization excludes practices incompatible with its continued existence.

The question is not whether society will exclude.

The question is what it will exclude, by what law and according to which moral principles.

The nation-state is not merely a bureaucratic container. It is the political scale at which democratic solidarity becomes possible. Citizens finance schools their children do not attend, defend towns they have never seen, accept election results they despise and support strangers in hardship because they recognize one another as participants in a shared national enterprise.

There is no democracy without a demos.

There is no welfare without a “we.”

There are no enforceable human rights without a government willing and able to enforce them.

Universal dignity is a moral truth.

Political responsibility is necessarily particular.

Humanity in the abstract does not patrol a street, protect a synagogue, rescue a hostage, maintain a court, collect a tax or defend a border.

Actual nations do these things.

The cosmopolitan who sneers at national loyalty is usually consuming security, law and prosperity produced by national loyalties he considers beneath him.

He is not post-national.

He is a parasite upon the nation.

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Why the Public Finally Revolted

The public’s revolt is often described as irrational, emotional or populist—as though people require a doctorate in political philosophy before noticing that their rulers despise them.

They do not.

A worker does not need to read Foucault to understand that the meaning of words is being manipulated.

A mother does not need to read Böckenförde to know that a society unwilling to transmit its values will eventually lose them.

A Jewish student does not need a seminar on discourse analysis to recognize the difference between criticism and a crowd glorifying those who murdered Jews.

An Iranian woman does not need Western feminists to explain the liberating dimensions of the morality police.

Ordinary people may lack the elite’s vocabulary.

They do not lack perception.

What enraged them was not merely failure. Governments fail constantly. It was the compulsory humiliation of being ordered to praise the failure as virtue.

They were told that noticing the consequences of uncontrolled migration was xenophobia.

That distinguishing a man from a woman was hatred.

That expecting assimilation was cultural violence.

That prosecuting crime was oppression.

That loving their national inheritance was fascism.

That defending Israel from genocidal terrorists was complicity in genocide.

That their memories were misinformation, their concerns were phobias and their eyes were unreliable instruments contaminated by privilege.

Eventually, people reach the limit of coerced absurdity.

When every ordinary opinion is labeled extreme, “extremism” loses its power to frighten.

When every defender of borders is called fascist, the word fascist becomes evidence not of the defender’s wickedness but of the accuser’s intellectual bankruptcy.

When every objection is declared dangerous, danger becomes the official synonym for dissent.

The electorate did not move because it mastered a new philosophical theorem.

It moved because it was sick of being required to lie.

Reality became politically homeless.

The right offered it a chair.

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The Danger Inside the Counterrevolution

But the right faces a test more severe than winning elections.

It must decide whether it intends to rescue liberal civilization or merely avenge itself upon the people who betrayed it.

Resentment is politically combustible. It can illuminate injustice or burn down judgment.

A movement organized around civilizational defense can decay into racial paranoia. A defense of borders can become blood mysticism. A demand for public order can become worship of force. A rebellion against bureaucratic censorship can become censorship wearing patriotic colors. A legitimate hatred of Islamist supremacy can degenerate into indiscriminate hatred of Muslims.

If that happens, the counterrevolution will have become another form of the disease it claims to cure.

The purpose is not to change which tribe controls the machinery of coercion.

The purpose is to dismantle the machinery of ideological coercion.

The standard cannot be whose boot is pressing upon the citizen’s throat.

The standard must be that no faction acquires the right to place it there.

A serious right must be merciless toward totalitarian ideas and scrupulous toward individual human beings. It must defend Muslims from collective guilt while confronting Islamism without apology. It must preserve borders without converting ancestry into destiny. It must protect public order without immunizing state abuse. It must defend tradition without sanctifying every injustice that happened to arrive before us.

It must possess the strength to identify enemies and the discipline not to invent them.

Otherwise it will not defeat identitarianism.

It will repaint it.

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The Death of the Liberal Elite

The liberal elite is dying not because it lost an election but because it exhausted its claim to moral authority.

An elite can survive incompetence.

It cannot survive becoming ridiculous.

These people presented themselves as guardians of nuance and became incapable of making elementary distinctions. They confused mercy with the refusal to judge, openness with the abolition of boundaries, tolerance with submission, diversity with ideological uniformity and moral sophistication with endless hostility toward their own civilization.

They made a profession of “speaking truth to power.”

Then they became power and declared truth a form of violence.

They transformed universities from houses of argument into seminaries for an aristocracy of grievance. They turned journalism from an adversarial investigation of power into the emotional management of the public. They turned corporations into moral ventriloquists, governments into therapeutic prefectures and language into a minefield patrolled by people whose livelihoods depend upon discovering mines.

They taught a generation to experience contradiction as injury and inherited civilization as shame.

Then the world supplied an enemy that felt no shame at all.

Islamism looked upon the West’s moral confusion and understood immediately what the elite could not: a civilization ashamed of defending itself has already begun negotiating the terms of its surrender.

History will not describe this as compassion.

It will describe it as decadence with footnotes.

The Counterrevolution

The new dividing line is not simply left against right.

It is reality against ideology.

Reciprocal tolerance against unilateral disarmament.

Citizenship against demographic bookkeeping.

Universal law against hereditary innocence and hereditary guilt.

Democratic sovereignty against both theocratic supremacy and managerial oligarchy.

Moral agency against the infantilization of designated victims.

Civilizational confidence against the obscene vanity of self-erasure.

This is why the right is becoming mainstream.

Not because humanity has become more cruel, but because millions have realized that compassion without judgment is merely cowardice performing kindness.

Not because freedom has failed, but because freedom cannot survive among people unwilling to distinguish it from surrender.

Not because every conservative is wise, but because the institutions of liberalism became catastrophically foolish.

The liberal elite imagined that the greatest danger to freedom was the person who loved his nation too intensely.

It failed to notice the danger posed by people who did not love freedom at all.

So let the obituary be written.

The elite died as it lived: correcting the grammar of the man shouting “fire,” investigating him for alarmist language, explaining the historical grievances of the arsonist and congratulating itself on maintaining civility while the library burned.

But liberty did not die with it.

Liberty changed its political address.

It went where the forbidden distinctions could still be spoken.

Where a woman remained a woman.

Where a border remained a border.

Where terrorism remained evil.

Where the citizen remained more than a racial category.

Where the Muslim reformer could be defended against the Islamist.

Where the Jew was permitted not merely to be mourned, but to be armed.

Where Western civilization was understood not as innocent—it has never been innocent—but as worthy of preservation because it created the moral vocabulary by which its own sins could be exposed.

We did not move right because we stopped believing in liberty.

We moved because liberty arrived at our door, half-frozen and bloodied, expelled by the institutions that had inherited its name.

We opened the door.

Call that reactionary if you wish.

Reaction is what living tissue does when touched by flame.

The political right is no longer merely conserving the past.

It is staging a counterrevolution on behalf of reality itself.

And the most revolutionary word of our age—the word that will separate free men from frightened administrators, sovereign nations from managed populations and civilizations from their undertakers—is also the smallest.

No.

No, censorship is not safety.

No, theocracy is not diversity.

No, terrorism is not resistance.

No, national suicide is not compassion.

No, Jewish helplessness is not peace.

No, reality will not apologize for contradicting your theory.

The liberal elite mistook its will to disappear for moral superiority.

We will not follow it into oblivion.

We are not here to preserve its ashes.

We are here to seize freedom from its undertakers.

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My mother died on July 3, 2022.

I can type those words.

I can say them.

I can tell you the date.

But there is still a part of me that does not quite understand how a person can be woven through your entire life and then suddenly become someone you speak about in the past tense.

My mother was.

I hate the word was.

There are certain words that should never have to sit next to the people you love.

My grandfather is another one.

He has been gone for decades, yet there are moments when the distance between then and now simply collapses. I can be a husband, a father of four, a man with gray in his hair and a lifetime of decisions behind him, and suddenly I am somebody’s grandson again.

That is the strange thing about grief.

It doesn’t care how old you are.

It doesn’t care how successful you became.

It doesn’t care how many countries you’ve lived in, how many times you’ve crossed the Atlantic, how many jobs you’ve had, houses you’ve owned, children you’ve raised or plans you’ve made.

It finds the little boy inside you and sits down beside him.

I grew up in Johannesburg.

Then South Africa became America.

America became more than twenty years of my life.

Arizona became home.

I went to university. Built a career. Got married. Had four children. We built the kind of life that, when you’re young, you imagine represents arrival.

And for years I kept moving.

Literally.

I have crossed the Atlantic more than sixty times.

Airports became ordinary. Passport control became ordinary. Suitcases became ordinary.

I became very good at going places.

What took me much longer to understand was where I belonged.

And even longer to understand that sometimes the people who make a place feel like home are disappearing while you’re busy building the next part of your life.

That thought bothers me more as I get older.

Because I remember being young enough to think my parents were permanent.

My grandparents certainly felt permanent.

Children believe that.

Grandpa has always been Grandpa, therefore Grandpa will always be there.

Mom has always been Mom, therefore Mom will always answer the phone.

Then life teaches you otherwise.

Brutally.

One day there is a person you can call.

Then there is a photograph.

A voicemail you wish you had saved.

An old email.

A story you tell your children.

A birthday that comes around every year even though the person whose birthday it was is no longer here to celebrate it.

And suddenly you understand that memory is a very poor substitute for presence.

I would give almost anything for certain completely ordinary conversations again.

Not some profound final exchange about the meaning of life.

Nothing cinematic.

I’d take an ordinary phone call.

I’d take five minutes.

I’d take my mother irritating me.

I’d take my grandfather telling me something I’ve already heard.

I’d take sitting in a room with someone I loved without realizing that one day I would desperately miss the privilege of being bored beside them.

That is what loss does.

It makes ordinary things sacred retroactively.

And now I look at my own children differently.

Because when your children are small, parenthood feels endless.

Another school morning.

Another meal.

Another pair of shoes somebody can’t find despite the apparently revolutionary concept of putting shoes in the same place twice.

Another argument.

Another mess.

Another request.

“Dad.”

“Dad.”

“Dad.”

Sometimes you think, Can everyone please stop saying Dad for five minutes?

Then they get older.

And suddenly you understand that one day nobody will be shouting it from another room.

That thought scares me.

Because this version of our family will not exist forever.

The six of us under one roof.

The kids walking through the door.

The shouting from upstairs.

Someone cooking.

Someone complaining.

Someone looking for a charger that apparently nobody on planet Earth has seen.

My wife and I trying to coordinate four lives while pretending we have any control over any of them.

This exact family, at these exact ages, in this exact moment, exists only once.

And it is disappearing while we live it.

God, that is hard to admit.

I spent so much of my adult life thinking in terms of the next thing.

The next role.

The next opportunity.

The next project.

The next financial goal.

The next move.

The next country.

I am an HR guy. We practically invented the idea that everything needs a strategic plan, a milestone and a spreadsheet.

But there is no spreadsheet for this.

There is no KPI for whether you noticed your life while it was happening.

There is no performance review at the end where someone tells you that you spent too many evenings worried about things that turned out not to matter.

There should be.

Most of us would probably fail it spectacularly.

Because I can remember work crises from years ago that felt enormous at the time.

Emails that had to be answered.

Meetings that could not possibly wait.

Problems that seemed worthy of losing sleep.

Many of them I can’t even remember now.

But I remember people.

I remember voices.

I remember rooms.

I remember Johannesburg.

I remember Arizona.

I remember my mother.

I remember my grandfather.

And now I live among the limestone hills of Judea.

Sometimes the morning light hits those hills and I still have the strange realization:

I live here.

After Johannesburg.

After America.

After more than sixty trips across the Atlantic.

After decades of moving through airports and countries and chapters of my life.

I am here.

My family is here.

Hebrew is outside my window.

And there are moments when thousands of years of Jewish longing suddenly stop being history and become something frighteningly personal.

I came home.

But coming home does not return the people you lost along the way.

That’s the part nobody puts on the postcard.

You can stand in the place generations dreamed about and still wish your mother could see it.

You can watch your children building Jewish lives here and desperately wish you could turn to someone who isn’t there anymore and say:

Look.

Look where we ended up.

Look at this.

You should be here for this.

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I think that may be one of adulthood’s deepest heartbreaks.

Eventually you accomplish things you once wanted your parents and grandparents to see.

And some of them aren’t here to see them.

So you imagine telling them.

You have entire conversations with dead people.

At least I do.

I wonder what my mother would say.

I wonder what my grandfather would think.

I imagine telling them about the children.

About Israel.

About the absurdity.

About the mistakes.

About how certain things worked out and others absolutely did not.

About how I spent years pretending I knew what I was doing.

And somewhere in all of this came the realization I have been trying not to look at too closely.

I am becoming the older generation.

There are fewer people above me in the family tree and more people below.

I used to be the child listening to family stories.

Now I am the one telling them.

I used to be the grandson.

Now my children hear their history through me.

Names.

Places.

South Africa.

Grandparents.

Great-grandparents.

People they never met who somehow helped make them who they are.

And eventually my children will tell stories about their mother and me.

That thought absolutely destroys me.

Because what will they remember?

Not what I hope they remember.

What will actually remain?

Will they remember that I loved them so ferociously that sometimes it frightened me?

Will they know how many nights I worried about them after they went to sleep?

Will they understand that sometimes when I was angry, underneath the anger was fear?

Will they know that nearly every major decision I made after becoming their father somehow had them hiding inside it?

Will they know how often I looked at them when they weren’t paying attention and thought:

How did I get this lucky?

Probably not.

Children do not get access to their parents’ internal monologue.

They see us from the outside.

Which means what I do now matters far more than what I someday wish they understood.

That is the uncomfortable realization.

I don’t get to preserve this.

I don’t get to freeze my children at these ages.

I don’t get another afternoon with my mother.

I don’t get another conversation with my grandfather.

I don’t get Johannesburg back.

I don’t get Arizona back exactly as it was.

And one day I won’t get this version of Israel back either.

Time doesn’t negotiate.

It just keeps taking.

Quietly.

A day here.

A year there.

A child grows up.

A parent grows older.

A photograph becomes precious because someone in it is gone.

Until one day you realize that the thing you kept calling “my life” wasn’t waiting somewhere in the future.

It was all those ordinary days you were rushing through.

It was the crowded kitchen.

It was my wife.

It was my children.

It was my mother picking up the phone.

It was my grandfather being alive.

It was South Africa.

It was America.

It is Israel.

It was every person I loved while foolishly assuming there would always be more time.

Maybe that is why I feel such urgency now.

I want my children to know the stories.

I want them to know where they came from.

I want them to understand that they are links in something much older than any one of us.

But more than anything, I want to stop missing my own life while I am still living it.

I want to hear “Dad” and remember that there will come a day when I would give anything to hear it shouted from upstairs again.

I want to sit across from my wife and understand that an ordinary dinner is not ordinary at all.

I want to look at the Judean hills and actually see them.

I want to remember the people who are gone without allowing their absence to make me miss the people who are still here.

Because I finally understand something I wish I had understood much younger.

We spend our lives collecting things we think we can keep.

Homes.

Careers.

Money.

Photographs.

Possessions.

Titles.

And eventually life strips the illusion away.

We keep almost none of it.

What we really leave behind is ourselves inside other people.

A story.

A value.

A stupid joke.

A phrase they catch themselves using.

A tradition.

A memory of how it felt when we walked into the room.

My grandfather lives somewhere inside me.

My mother does too.

And someday, God willing many, many years from now, I will live that way inside my children.

I just hope I give them enough worth carrying.

Because crossing the Atlantic more than sixty times taught me how to travel.

Loss taught me something much harder.

There are some places you can never fly back to.

And there are some people you don’t realize were home until they are gone.

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I love my wife.

Let me begin there, before rumors start racing through the Jewish world faster than news of a new kosher restaurant.

I love her faithfully, completely and without hesitation. But there is something I must confess: I have been carrying on another love affair.

My wife knows.

She has always known.

And, strangely enough, she approves.

Because this affair is not a sin. It is a blessing. It does not steal love from our marriage; it fills our home with more of it. There are no secret hotel rooms, no guilty telephone calls, no hastily erased messages. My beloved waits for me openly, dressed in Jerusalem stone, glowing gold beneath the Judean sun.

Her name is Jerusalem.

And G‑d Himself introduced us.

I loved Jerusalem before I ever knew the warmth of her stones beneath my hand. I knew her through the prayers of my ancestors, through Next year in Jerusalem, through the glass broken beneath every Jewish wedding canopy, through King David’s songs and the trembling promise:

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill.

Other cities ask to be admired. Jerusalem demands to be remembered.

She followed the Jewish people into every exile. She slipped into our siddurim, sat beside us at our Seder tables and entered our happiest moments just long enough to remind us that something was still broken. Jews who had never seen her wept for her. Jews buried beneath foreign snow turned their faces toward her. Jews being marched toward death whispered her name.

That is not nostalgia.

That is love refusing to die.

And then I met her.

Not the imaginary Jerusalem of postcards and polished tourist brochures, but the real woman: beautiful, complicated, impatient and utterly incapable of standing quietly in line.

I fell in love with her pale stones at sunrise and the way they blush pink before evening. I fell in love with the smell of bread drifting from bakeries before dawn, with rosemary growing beside ancient walls, with the sudden scent of wet limestone when the first winter rain falls.

I fell in love with her crowded buses.

Yes, even those.

There is something wonderfully intimate about being pressed between a soldier returning to base, a grandmother hauling enough groceries to feed the entire Tribe of Judah, and a mother attempting to collapse a stroller while conducting peace negotiations with a screaming three-year-old.

Someone is reciting Tehillim. Someone is arguing with the driver. Someone is loudly explaining why the government will collapse by Tuesday. Then the bus jerks forward, an elderly passenger stumbles, and five complete strangers reach out to catch him.

Jerusalem has sharp elbows, but she also has gentle hands.

I love her crowded light rail, where the Jewish people reunite several times a day and immediately begin arguing over the available seats. Ethiopians, Moroccans, Yemenites, Russians, Americans, French Jews, secular students, Hasidim, soldiers and schoolchildren sway together as the train runs along Jaffa Road.

After two thousand years of exile, we finally came home—and naturally, nobody will move farther inside the carriage.

I love Jewish, democratic West Jerusalem: the cafés and synagogues, the Knesset and Machane Yehuda, the bookshops, protests, election posters and fierce arguments conducted over tiny cups of coffee. This is democracy with a Jerusalem accent. It does not speak softly. It interrupts, gestures wildly and calls you achi while explaining why every opinion you hold is catastrophically wrong.

It is imperfect, loud and alive.

It is Jews governing themselves in their ancient capital—not as guests begging some emperor for protection, but as citizens, voters, soldiers, judges, shopkeepers, rabbis and professional complainers.

But I do not love only West Jerusalem.

A man who truly loves a woman does not ask that she be cut in half.

I love a united Jerusalem—from the Knesset to the Kotel, from Jaffa Road to Jaffa Gate, from the Jewish Quarter to the City of David, from the Mount of Olives to the Temple Mount. I reject the idea that my beloved must once again be sliced into zones, guarded by barbed wire or divided according to the appetites of foreign governments.

Jerusalem is not a diplomatic cake to be carved at an international conference.

She is one city. One body. One soul.

For nineteen years, between 1948 and 1967, a wound ran through her. Barbed wire and concrete divided street from street. Jews were expelled from the Jewish Quarter. Ancient synagogues were destroyed. The Kotel stood only a short distance away, yet Jews could not touch its stones.

Then came the paratroopers.

I admire those young men more than words can carry. They entered through the Lions’ Gate exhausted, frightened and covered in the dust of battle. They were not figures from a legend. They were flesh and blood. Some were barely older than the children now racing through the Jewish Quarter. Some carried photographs of wives and sweethearts in their pockets. Some never returned home.

Yet they carried an entire people on their shoulders.

When Motta Gur’s voice crackled over the radio—Har HaBayit b’yadeinu. The Temple Mount is in our hands—it was not merely a military report.

It was history gasping for breath.

Then Rabbi Shlomo Goren arrived, clutching a Torah scroll and a shofar. Standing beside the paratroopers at the Kotel, he lifted the ram’s horn to his lips and blew.

The sound tore through the ancient stones.

It was Iyar, not Elul. Yet no shofar ever spoke the language of Elul more clearly.

Wake up.

Return.

Come home.

The shofar of Elul calls the soul back to G‑d. Rabbi Goren’s shofar called a nation back to Jerusalem. Perhaps those were never two separate journeys. To return to Jerusalem after centuries of exile was to rediscover something buried within the Jewish soul.

Every Elul, when I hear the first notes of the shofar, I hear an echo of Rabbi Goren’s blast hiding inside them. I see those paratroopers touching the Kotel, tough soldiers weeping without shame. I hear generations of Jews answering through them.

We are here.

We came home.

Elul is the season of love. Its name is found in the first letters of the verse:

Ani l’dodi v’dodi li.

I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.

Those words describe my relationship with G‑d. They also describe the ache I feel for Jerusalem. In this city, the two loves intertwine. Jerusalem is not my god; she is where G‑d’s presence feels close enough to touch. She is the love letter He wrote to the Jewish people in stone.

Nowhere do I feel that more intensely than in the Jewish Quarter.

I walk through its narrow lanes and hear children laughing where conquerors once tried to erase every trace of Jewish life. I see the rebuilt Hurva Synagogue rising above rooftops—a building destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again and raised once more.

That is not merely a synagogue.

That is the biography of the Jewish people.

Empires reduced it to rubble. Jews returned and built it again.

The Jewish Quarter is where history stopped being an obituary and became a home address.

And then I descend toward the Kotel.

I place my hand upon those enormous stones and feel the prayers pressed into every crack. I think of my ancestors, who would have surrendered almost anything for one moment there. I think of the paratroopers who made it possible for me to approach without asking a foreign soldier’s permission.

I kiss the stone.

But then I look upward.

Because the Kotel is not the end of my longing. It is a retaining wall.

Above it stands Har HaBayit—the Temple Mount—the holiest place in Judaism, the mountain toward which Jews have prayed throughout every exile. It is the heart of our faith, the site woven into our prayers, our mourning, our weddings and our dreams of redemption.

And something inside me screams.

I long for clear, unapologetic Jewish sovereignty on the Temple Mount.

Not because I wish to humiliate anyone. Not because another human being’s prayer threatens mine. Jewish sovereignty need not mean cruelty; it must mean courage. A Jewish democratic state can protect the sacred places of every faith without pretending that the holiest place in Judaism somehow has no Jewish owner, memory or soul.

The Mount is not vacant real estate.

It is where heaven and earth kiss in the Jewish imagination.

I long for the day when a Jew can whisper the Shema there without that prayer being treated as an act of aggression. I long for the day when Jewish sovereignty on our holiest mountain is understood not as a provocation but as the final ending of exile.

My scream is not a curse.

It is a prayer.

It is Rabbi Goren’s shofar still echoing.

It is Elul commanding us to awaken from the comfortable lie that Jews must remain strangers at the center of their own story.

Return to G‑d.

Return to Jerusalem.

Return to who you are.

My wife understands this affair. She sees what happens to my face when Jerusalem first appears in the distance. She knows why I touch her stones, why I pause when I hear the shofar and why the sight of Jewish children playing beneath the walls of the Old City can suddenly leave me unable to speak.

She does not compete with Jerusalem.

She loves me enough to understand that some loves enlarge the heart rather than divide it.

I love my wife.

I love G‑d.

And I love Jerusalem—whole, united, Jewish, democratic and sovereign.

These are not competing loves. They are threads of the same covenant: marriage, faith, peoplehood and home. Each teaches me loyalty. Each demands that I remember. Each calls me to become more than I was yesterday.

So my affair continues.

It continues through crowded buses and shofar blasts, through golden sunsets and whispered prayers. It continues in the Jewish Quarter and upon the stones of the Kotel. It continues in my longing for the Temple Mount and in my gratitude to the paratroopers who reunited a city and returned the Jewish people to the heart of their history.

Every Elul, my beloved calls again.

Ani l’dodi v’dodi li.

I am my beloved’s.

My beloved is mine.

And when Jerusalem asks whether I still love her, I answer with the word our people have carried across centuries:

Hineni.

I am here.

German Jewry was one of the greatest Jewish communities ever built.

Not the largest. Not the wealthiest in every period. Not the longest-lived. Babylonian Jewry produced the Talmud. Spanish Jewry gave…

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That sounds like a joke.

The punchline is City Hall.

I used to think Woodstock represented the bottom of Western civilization: half a million people wallowing around a dairy farm in mud, drugs, garbage, and their own self-importance, convinced they had achieved world peace because nobody had showered since Thursday.

How innocent Woodstock looks now.

At least the hippies claimed to love peace. Their ideological grandchildren have moved on to something more fashionable: loving the people who hijack airplanes, slaughter concertgoers, kidnap children, rape women, and promise to exterminate Jews.

“Make love, not war” somehow became “Globalize the intifada.”

That is one hell of a moral collapse.

And standing proudly atop the rubble is Zohran Mamdani—the perfect mayor for a civilization that has replaced moral clarity with fashionable cowardice.

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Mamdani Is Not an Accident

Mamdani did not wander into City Hall because nobody noticed his politics.

New York elected him because millions of people saw those politics and either supported them or decided they did not matter.

That is worse.

His Muslim faith is irrelevant to this criticism. There are millions of Muslims who despise terrorism, reject Islamism, want democracy, and understand that Hamas and Hezbollah are not liberation movements. Attacking Mamdani because he is Muslim would be both bigoted and intellectually lazy.

His religion is not the problem.

His politics are.

Mamdani co-founded a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter while at Bowdoin College. He has supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel throughout his adult political life. He has refused to affirm Israel’s right to exist specifically as a Jewish state, instead offering carefully engineered language about a state with “equal rights.”

That sounds lovely until one notices that the world contains dozens of countries built around national, religious, or cultural identities, yet the Jewish state is somehow the one national project Mamdani finds morally intolerable.

Britain may retain an established church. Islamic republics may write Islam directly into their constitutions. Arab states may define themselves as Arab. Palestinian nationalism may be treated as sacred and unquestionable.

But Jewish national self-determination? Suddenly Zohran discovers his passionate opposition to religious and national particularism.

What an extraordinary coincidence.

He has described support for the Palestinian cause as central to his identity. He has accused Israel of genocide. He once declared that when “the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” dragging Israel into American policing because apparently no progressive grievance is complete until a Jew is blamed for it.

He has supported applying boycott politics to the Cornell-Technion partnership in New York. He promised to have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he entered the city, despite a New York mayor having neither the constitutional authority nor the international jurisdiction to conduct his own little foreign-policy circus.

And then there was “Globalize the intifada.”

When repeatedly asked to condemn the slogan, Mamdani initially refused. He said the mayor’s job was not to police language. After the political backlash became impossible to ignore, he eventually said he would “discourage” it.

Discourage it.

As though globalizing the intifada were chewing gum on the subway.

The Second Intifada was not a vigorous disagreement at a Brooklyn book club. It was a campaign of suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, and mass murder. Israelis remember buses ripped apart during the morning commute. We remember the Dolphinarium. We remember Sbarro. We remember the Park Hotel seder massacre, where a terrorist walked into a Passover meal and murdered thirty people.

Jews do not need Mamdani to explain what “intifada” really means. We buried its victims.

Yet when frightened Jewish New Yorkers asked for an unequivocal condemnation, Mamdani produced an academic seminar on language, context, and mayoral responsibility.

His refusal was not sophistication.

It was cowardice wearing glasses.

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He Condemned Hamas—And Then Presented the Invoice

Mamdani’s defenders insist that he has condemned Hamas.

Yes, he has. Later, he called the October 7 massacre a “horrific war crime,” mourned the victims, and called for the hostages to be returned.

Congratulations. The mayor of New York eventually reached the daring conclusion that massacring families and kidnapping babies might be bad.

But his first response after October 7 mourned deaths “across Israel and Palestine” and immediately pivoted toward blaming occupation and apartheid.

Hamas terrorists were still roaming Israeli communities. Families were still hiding in safe rooms. Bodies were still being collected from burned homes. Parents did not know whether their missing children were dead or dragged into Gaza.

Mamdani was already preparing the invoice for Israel.

That is the pattern: acknowledge Jewish suffering just long enough to establish moral credentials, then hurry toward the real objective—putting the Jewish state on trial.

His condemnations of antisemitism operate like a smoke detector with the batteries removed. Technically present. Reassuring when inspected. Completely useless when the house is burning.

Mamdani will condemn antisemitism in the abstract. He will say Jewish New Yorkers deserve safety. He will pose with rabbis, attend meetings, and recite the appropriate language.

But ask him to affirm the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty, reject BDS, or condemn the slogan that evokes the murder of Israeli civilians, and suddenly everything becomes terribly complicated.

That is not solidarity.

That is political choreography.

New York Has Heard Islamist Terror Before

New York City should be the last place on Earth requiring a refresher course on Islamist extremism.

On September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger aircraft and murdered 2,977 people from ninety countries. Two planes struck the World Trade Center. Another hit the Pentagon. The passengers of Flight 93 fought back, forcing the final aircraft into a Pennsylvania field.

New Yorkers breathed pulverized concrete, jet fuel, office paper, and human remains.

Firefighters climbed the towers while thousands fled downward. Families covered walls with missing-person posters even as they understood that the missing were never coming home.

For a brief moment, the West remembered that evil existed.

Then the professional idiots arrived.

They explained that identifying Islamist extremism was insensitive. They transformed perpetrators into victims of Western foreign policy. They buried religious totalitarianism beneath a mountain of academic vocabulary. Every terrorist acquired “grievances.” Every murderer came with “context.” Every victim was expected to apologize for surviving.

A quarter-century after Islamist terrorists murdered nearly three thousand people in New York, the city elected a mayor who could not immediately condemn a call to globalize the movement associated with suicide bombings against Jews.

No, Mamdani is not Adolf Eichmann. Only a historical illiterate would equate an elected politician with one of the principal organizers of the Holocaust.

But the civilizational absurdity is still staggering.

Imagine postwar Berlin elevating a politician who treated the slogans of genocidal movements as unfortunate misunderstandings. Imagine survivors being told that they had interpreted the slogans too emotionally. Imagine the intellectual classes praising the politician’s nuance.

That is the comparison: not identical men, but a society so drunk on self-hatred that it launders the language of those who want its people dead.

October 7 Exposed the Fraud

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and its accomplices invaded southern Israel and murdered approximately 1,200 people. They kidnapped 251. They attacked homes, kibbutzim, roads, military bases, and the Nova music festival.

They murdered children. They burned families alive. They dragged hostages into Gaza while crowds celebrated. Investigators found substantial grounds to conclude that rape and gang rape occurred during the attack and that hostages suffered sexual violence in captivity.

And before Israel had identified all the bodies, Western activists marched—not against Hamas, but against Israel.

The blood was still wet, and the signs were already printed.

That told us everything.

These people were never primarily motivated by civilian suffering. If they were, October 7 would have horrified them into silence. Instead, many treated the massacre as an exhilarating revolutionary spectacle.

They tore down hostage posters.

They celebrated “resistance.”

They harassed Jewish students.

They demanded a ceasefire before Israel had even finished counting its dead.

The same activists who insist that using the wrong pronoun constitutes violence developed endless patience for terrorists who filmed themselves murdering Jews.

A Hamas gunman can record his own atrocities, and some professor will still demand additional context.

A Jewish student raises his voice, and suddenly campus security must be called.

When Jews are dead, we receive candles.

When Jews defend themselves, we receive indictments.

And Mamdani’s political rise emerged from that exact moral swamp. He did not create the movement, but he understood it, rode it, and gave it a handsome, smiling, social-media-friendly face.

He is not the wild-eyed protester screaming outside the synagogue.

He is the polished politician who makes the protester’s worldview respectable.

That may be more dangerous.

Meet the Rats, Thugs, and Thieves

The thugs are easy to recognize.

They hijack airplanes. They fire rockets at civilians. They storm bedrooms. They seize hostages. They murder dissidents, persecute minorities, execute homosexuals, brutalize women, and then send English-speaking spokesmen onto Western television to discuss human rights.

The thieves steal the language of civilization.

They steal “resistance” to describe murder.

They steal “justice” to excuse antisemitism.

They steal “liberation” to advertise religious tyranny.

They steal “genocide” and hurl it at Israel while embracing movements that openly promise to destroy the Jewish state.

Then come the rats—not Muslims, immigrants, or any ethnic group, but the cowardly opportunists scurrying through Western institutions.

They saw October 7. They heard the testimony. They watched hostages dragged through Gaza.

But they also knew which opinion would earn applause, attract donations, protect careers, and secure political endorsements.

So they hid behind language.

“Violence erupted.”

“Tensions escalated.”

“Both sides traded accusations.”

Apparently terrorists simply materialize from the atmosphere, like humidity.

Mamdani is the political triumph of that cowardice. He packages anti-Zionism as equality, boycotts as nonviolence, intifada slogans as linguistic complexity, and hostility toward the world’s only Jewish state as enlightened universalism.

It is an impressive trick.

Bullshit, but impressive.

Civilization Requires the Courage to Judge

A civilization survives by distinguishing between democracy and tyranny, soldier and terrorist, citizen and hostage, imperfection and evil.

Israel is imperfect because it is a country populated by human beings. It has elections, opposition parties, protests, independent courts, argumentative journalists, and citizens who can insult their prime minister without disappearing into a torture chamber.

Hamas is not an imperfect democracy.

It is a terrorist organization.

Iran is not merely culturally different.

It is an authoritarian theocracy that imprisons dissidents, brutalizes women, sponsors terrorism, and openly seeks Israel’s destruction.

America is not morally equivalent to al-Qaeda. Israel is not morally equivalent to Hamas. Democracy is not morally equivalent to jihadist tyranny.

Mamdani’s politics depend upon blurring those distinctions until the terrorist becomes a resistance fighter, the democracy becomes an apartheid regime, and the Jew defending his family becomes the true obstacle to peace.

That is not progress.

It is moral brain damage.

I write from the hills of Judea, where history is not a graduate-school theory. Jewish life is carved into the stone, spoken in the language revived on these streets, and defended by young Israelis who know exactly what happens when Jews outsource their survival to the promises of fashionable politicians.

The Jewish people have heard every version of “Trust us.”

We know how that sentence ends.

But the Jews are no longer waiting helplessly behind locked doors. Israel exists. It fights, argues, builds, mourns, votes, and survives. It will not commit national suicide because Zohran Mamdani, a campus activist, or some keffiyeh-wrapped revolutionary with an iPhone finds Jewish sovereignty offensive.

New York may choose Mamdani.

It does not get to redefine the intifada for the Jews who buried its victims.

It does not get to boycott Jewish sovereignty and call itself inclusive.

It does not get to elect the smiling face of anti-Zionism and then lecture frightened Jews about tolerance.

Western civilization is not dead yet. But it is lying in the gutter, drunk on its own moral vanity, while rats pick through its inheritance, thugs test its gates, and thieves carry away the language of justice.

Its epitaph will not say that it was conquered.

It will say that it saw evil, consulted the polling, and elected the euphemism.

Civilizations do not collapse merely because barbarians arrive at the gates.

They collapse when arrogant fools open those gates—and call it progress.

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I am building Jewish life in the Jewish homeland. Brussels, Washington, Tehran, Doha, Moscow, and every other foreign capital can file their objections directly into the nearest toilet.

I am a settler.

There. I said the terrifying word.

Not a “resident of a disputed area.” Not an “obstacle to peace.” Not an apologetic Jew trembling behind a stack of international-law reports while some European bureaucrat explains my own history to me.

A settler.

I settle the land. I build a home. I raise Jewish children. I plant trees, hang a mezuzah, pay taxes, sit in traffic, complain about the price of groceries, and help continue the most astonishing national resurrection in human history.

If that makes some diplomat choke on his subsidized Brussels espresso, he should order a smaller cup.

I live in Efrat, among the hills of Judea. Not “the West Bank,” as though this land were an overdraft invented by a British cartographer. Judea.

The place from which the word Jew comes.

That awkward little fact tends to ruin the colonialism lecture.

Jews are supposedly foreign occupiers in Judea. Apparently penguins are also foreign occupiers of Antarctica, Greeks have no connection to Greece, and the Italians had better explain what they are doing in Rome.

You cannot colonize the land that gave your people its name.

We did not discover Hebrew inscriptions buried beneath Warsaw. King David did not rule from Johannesburg. The prophets did not wander around Brooklyn. The Maccabees did not fight in Brussels, although Brussels could certainly use the exercise.

Our language, faith, calendar, prayers, archaeology, national memory, and sacred texts all point here. Jerusalem. Hebron. Shiloh. Beit El. Bethlehem. The Judean hills.

For two thousand years, Jews faced Jerusalem while praying. Now that we have returned, the world demands that we face the airport.

Go to hell.

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Gush Etzion Is Not a Colonial Outpost

Jewish communities were established in Gush Etzion before the State of Israel existed. Kfar Etzion fell in May 1948, one day before Israel declared independence. Its defenders were massacred. The surviving Jewish residents were expelled, and their homes were destroyed.

For nineteen years, Jews could not return.

Then, after 1967, the children of those expelled families came home.

The international community looked at Jews returning to land from which Jews had been violently driven and announced: “Illegal settlers.”

Of course it did.

Apparently Jewish history comes with an expiration date, and it is always set by the people who expelled us.

When Jews are homeless, the world pities us. When Jews return home, the world condemns us. When Jews are murdered, officials express concern. When Jews prevent themselves from being murdered, the same officials demand restraint.

It is the oldest scam in international politics: first deny Jews security, then denounce Jews for securing themselves.

I am finished participating in it.

I Do Not Require Permission

I do not need approval from the European Union.

Europe had centuries to demonstrate its concern for Jewish safety. The Yelp review is not encouraging.

I do not need approval from the United Nations, a building where dictatorships, terror sponsors, and professional human-rights frauds gather to place Israel on trial between catered lunches.

I do not need approval from Washington, Moscow, Beijing, London, Paris, Tehran, Ankara, Doha, Riyadh, or Amman.

Foreign governments may pursue their interests. Israel must pursue ours.

My children’s lives are not diplomatic poker chips. My home is not a bargaining concession. My presence in Judea is not something a foreign secretary may suspend between breakfast and a press conference.

And I certainly will not accept moral instruction from governments that fund Palestinian incitement, embrace Jew-hating regimes, ignore the persecution of Christians across the Middle East, and then suddenly discover their humanitarian conscience when a Jewish family adds a bedroom.

The same world that barely notices rockets aimed at Israeli children develops the eyesight of a hawk when Jews pour concrete.

Screw that.

Yes, God Is Part of This

I believe the God of Israel commanded the Jewish people to inherit, cultivate, protect, and settle this land.

I am not embarrassed by that belief.

The covenant did not require ratification in Brussels. The Almighty did not submit it for public comment at the United Nations. Abraham did not wait for a zoning permit from Belgium before walking through the hills of Judea.

Secular readers do not have to share my theology. The historical claim remains. The archaeological record remains. The Jewish people remain.

That is what infuriates our enemies most.

We remain.

Empires conquered us. Armies scattered us. Churches tried to replace us. Islamic rulers subordinated us. Europe butchered us. Soviet tyranny imprisoned us. Arab governments expelled ancient Jewish communities.

Yet here we are—speaking Hebrew, defending Jerusalem, raising Jewish families, and building homes on the same ridges where our ancestors walked.

That is not colonialism.

That is return.

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Spare Me Another “Land for Peace” Experiment

Israel withdrew from Gaza.

We uprooted Jewish communities, removed every soldier, demolished Jewish homes, and handed the territory over. The result was not Singapore on the Mediterranean.

It was Hamas rule, rockets, terror tunnels, and October 7.

Now the diplomatic geniuses who helped sell that catastrophe want Israel to repeat the experiment in the hills overlooking Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Ben-Gurion Airport.

Absolutely not.

I will not gamble my children’s lives on another internationally financed fantasy. I will not support turning the biblical heartland into a terror state because foreign governments need something impressive to announce at a summit.

We already watched that movie.

The ending was written in blood.

My “Extremist” Agenda

Here is my supposedly extreme program:

Jewish families should be allowed to live in Judea.

Israel should build homes, roads, schools, synagogues, clinics, farms, factories, and universities.

Israel should apply sovereignty instead of treating Jewish communities as temporary bargaining chips.

Terror networks should be dismantled. Innocent people should be protected. Murder should never be rewarded with territory, money, diplomatic recognition, or a better public-relations campaign.

That is my radical position.

Build civilization. Defend life. Reward peace. Defeat terrorism. Stop apologizing.

My house is not an act of violence. My child waiting at a bus stop is not a war crime. My mezuzah is not a provocation.

And no, being a settler is not a license to become a thug. I need no masked mob, no vandal, and no coward attacking innocent people. My claim is strong enough to stand in daylight.

Our answer is construction, not chaos.

Permanence, not apology.

Sovereignty, not surrender.

Call Me Whatever You Want

“Settler” was supposed to be an insult.

I accept it as a title of honor.

Settlers drain swamps, cultivate rocky hillsides, establish towns, raise families, defend roads, rescue ancient vineyards, revive dead languages, and turn memory into reality.

Settlers build.

That is why the word frightens people who expected the Jews to remain scattered, dependent, grateful, and quiet.

We are none of those things anymore.

So foreign ministries may issue their condemnations. Diplomats may wag their fingers. Activists may march around Western cities chanting the slogans of movements that would throw them off rooftops. Academics may publish another six-thousand-word explanation of why Jews are indigenous everywhere except their indigenous homeland.

They can all shove it.

I am not asking permission to exist.

I am not asking permission to be Jewish.

I am not asking permission to live in Judea.

I am home.

I will build. I will plant. I will pray. I will vote. I will defend democracy. I will raise Jewish children who know exactly who they are and precisely where they belong.

Call me an obstacle.

Call me an extremist.

Call me a settler.

Just don’t call me temporary.

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How a murdered Torah civilization rose again in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Brooklyn and Lakewood—and became larger than Europe had ever imagined

Walk past the Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem late at night and listen.

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The building is still alive. Thousands of voices rise and fall over pages of Gemara. Questions collide with answers. Fingers stab at Rashi. Someone insists that Rambam cannot possibly mean what his chavruta claims he means. Outside, buses grind through Jerusalem traffic. Inside, Babylonian arguments continue as if Hitler, Stalin, exile and history itself had failed to interrupt the conversation.

Drive into Bnei Brak and look up at Ponevezh glowing from its hill. Cross the Atlantic and enter the vast beit midrash of Lakewood. Visit a Bais Yaakov school in Jerusalem, a Hasidic court in Brooklyn, a hesder yeshiva in Gush Etzion or a Sephardi beit midrash where Rav Ovadia Yosef’s rulings are studied.

None of this was inevitable.

In 1945, much of it looked impossible.

There are historical facts so audacious that they sound like religious propaganda until you count the desks.

The Nazis and their accomplices murdered six million Jews. They did not merely kill individuals. They attempted to murder succession itself.

They killed the rabbis who carried traditions in their memories. They killed the children who were supposed to inherit those traditions. They emptied the yeshivot, burned the libraries, murdered the teachers, exterminated Hasidic courts and erased towns whose names had once meant something to every serious Jewish student.

Slabodka. Telz. Mir. Kletzk. Baranovich. Novardok. Lublin.

These were not quaint shtetls preserved under glass. They were living intellectual centers. Then they became killing fields, mass graves and names recited at memorials.

The miracle—yes, miracle is the correct word—is that they did not remain memorials.

They became blueprints.

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Israel Was Not a Holocaust Consolation Prize

Let us dispose of one particularly lazy piece of historical nonsense before going any further.

Israel was not created because Europe felt guilty about the Holocaust.

Zionism was already transforming the Land of Israel decades before Auschwitz. Jews were building Hebrew cities, draining swamps, planting vineyards, establishing universities, forming defense organizations and reviving an ancient language while Europe was still deciding which antisemitic conspiracy theory it preferred.

Baron Edmond de Rothschild was financing Rishon LeZion, Zikhron Ya’akov, Rosh Pinna and Ekron in the nineteenth century. Tel Aviv was founded in 1909. The Hebrew University opened in 1925. Jewish statehood was not a pity voucher handed to refugees by embarrassed Europeans.

The Holocaust did not create the Jewish people’s right to sovereignty. It demonstrated, in six million graves, the price of being denied it.

Before Israel, a Jew fleeing murder had to beg an imperial clerk for permission to live.

After Israel, that Jew became an oleh.

That difference is Zionism.

At its peak in 1947, Europe’s Jewish displaced-persons population numbered approximately 250,000. They had survived ghettos, camps, forests, forced labor and death marches, only to find themselves behind barbed wire again, waiting for countries to decide whether Jews were convenient enough to admit.

Then, in May 1948, the gates opened.

Not because Britain had suddenly discovered its conscience. Not because the United Nations had become emotionally attached to Jewish survival. The gates opened because the Jews had a state, an army, a flag, ships and the power to say the two most important words in postwar Jewish history:

Come home.

The Survivors Carried More Than Suitcases

The survivors who arrived in Israel and America did not bring much property. Many possessed a few clothes, scraps of paper and photographs of people who no longer existed.

But certain survivors carried entire civilizations inside their heads.

They remembered how their rabbis had learned a passage of Talmud. They remembered the melodies of courts that had been annihilated. They remembered customs no surviving book had adequately recorded. They remembered which question Rav Chaim Brisker had asked, how the Alter of Slabodka had developed a student and how a particular rebbe had conducted a tisch in a town whose Jewish population was now ash.

The first reconstruction project was therefore not architectural. It was human.

Save the teachers.

Find the students.

Print the books.

Feed whoever remains.

The Mir Yeshiva became the most extraordinary example. It was the only major Eastern European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust substantially intact. Hundreds of its students escaped Lithuania, crossed the Soviet Union and reached Japan and Shanghai using transit documents connected to the Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk and the Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara.

While millions of Jews were being murdered, the Mir students continued learning in Shanghai.

Think about the sheer defiance of that sentence.

Hitler controlled much of Europe. German armies were advancing across continents. Jewish civilization was being fed into crematoria. And in a sweltering building in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, displaced young Jews were arguing over the Talmud.

The Nazis commanded an empire.

The boys had Gemaras.

The empire is gone.

The Gemaras are still open.

After the war, the Mir tradition was reestablished in Jerusalem and Brooklyn. Rav Eliezer Yehuda Finkel rebuilt in Jerusalem. Rav Avraham Kalmanowitz helped preserve and rebuild the American branch. A European institution that once numbered roughly 500 students became the ancestor of vast centers educating thousands.

That was not restoration.

That was resurrection with an expansion plan.

Rav Kahaneman Refused to Build a Tombstone

Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, the Ponevezher Rav, lost his community and much of his family. He could have responded by constructing a dignified memorial to the murdered Ponevezh Yeshiva.

Instead, he built another Ponevezh Yeshiva.

He arrived in Eretz Yisrael in 1940 and began again in Bnei Brak with a handful of students. He raised money relentlessly. He dreamed on a scale that must have appeared slightly unhinged to anyone looking at the ruins of European Jewry.

Good.

Normal expectations were not going to rebuild anything.

Ponevezh rose on its hill not as a replica of Lithuania but as what Rav Kahaneman called a living memorial. Its classrooms would not contain exhibitions about dead students. They would contain living students producing more students.

A plaque remembers a person.

A yeshiva creates grandchildren.

That distinction explains much of what followed.

The Mir, Ponevezh, Chevron, Brisk and Kamenitz were rebuilt or enlarged in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak. Rav Kahaneman, Rav Eliezer Yehuda Finkel, the Chazon Ish, the Brisker Rav, Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, Rav Yechezkel Sarna, Rav Shmuel Rozovsky and Rav Elazar Menachem Shach did not all possess identical philosophies. But collectively, they relocated the center of Lithuanian Torah learning from a murdered Europe to the Land of Israel.

They planted it in Jewish soil.

And it grew wildly.

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The Two Moshes

Perhaps no story captures this reconstruction more beautifully than the story of two young men in Rav Moshe Schneider’s wartime Toras Emes Yeshiva in London.

Both were named Moshe.

The yeshiva was desperately poor. A bakery reportedly agreed to provide leftover bread if someone collected it. One of the boys faithfully walked to fetch the bread for the other students.

The second boy accepted another unpopular responsibility: waking everyone for davening and learning.

According to the account preserved among Rav Schneider’s students, he blessed the bread collector that the world would one day know of his wealth. He blessed the boy who awakened the students that the world would one day know of his Torah.

The bread collector was Moshe Yosef Reichmann—known to the business world as Paul Reichmann.

The boy who woke the students was Rav Moshe Shternbuch.

One became one of the most formidable property developers of the twentieth century. Reichmann’s Olympia & York constructed New York’s World Financial Center and London’s Canary Wharf. At its peak, the family fortune reached into the billions.

The other became one of the most significant Haredi halachic authorities of his generation in Jerusalem.

One carried the Torah.

The other paid for the bread.

That formulation is not meant to diminish Reichmann. Quite the opposite. He understood that wealth was not the conclusion of his story. It was an instrument.

The Reichmann family reportedly donated as much as $50 million annually to yeshivot, synagogues, schools, hospitals and struggling families. They established mechanisms in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak to relieve yeshivot of crushing debts. They supported institutions across Israel, Canada, America, France and Morocco. Much of the giving was anonymous.

Even Olympia & York’s enormous construction sites closed for Shabbat and Jewish holidays. Imagine the audacity: cranes resting above some of the world’s most expensive real estate because a Jewish boy who once collected yesterday’s bread had not forgotten who he was.

Paul Reichmann later reportedly said that he wished he had been the boy who received the blessing for Torah greatness.

That may be the most revealing detail of all.

The billionaire envied the scholar.

Yet the scholar’s world could not have survived without the billionaire.

That is Jewish reconstruction in one story: the word and the bread, the teacher and the donor, the Gemara and the payroll.

America Was Not a Torah Desert

The popular version of this history sometimes suggests that observant refugees arrived in a completely barren America and invented Orthodoxy from scratch.

That is not true.

RIETS and Yeshiva University had roots stretching back to 1886. Torah Vodaath was founded in 1918. Chaim Berlin, Ner Israel and other institutions existed before the war. American Orthodox Jews had already built synagogues, schools, kashrut organizations and communal networks.

But the refugees changed the ambition, intensity and authority of American Orthodoxy.

Rav Aharon Kotler founded Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood in 1943 with approximately fourteen students. He insisted that advanced Torah study could exist in America not as a hobby performed after work, but as a consuming intellectual vocation.

By Rav Kotler’s death in 1962, Lakewood had approximately 200 students.

Today, it has more than 9,000.

Fourteen to more than 9,000.

That is not nostalgia. That is a demographic detonation.

Rav Kalmanowitz rebuilt the Mir in Brooklyn. Rav Eliyahu Meir Bloch and Rav Chaim Mordechai Katz reestablished Telshe in Cleveland. Rav Yitzchok Hutner shaped Chaim Berlin. Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky led Torah Vodaath. Rav Yaakov Yitzchok Ruderman built Ner Israel. Rav Moshe Feinstein became the address to which American Jews sent their most difficult halachic questions.

At Yeshiva University, Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Samuel Belkin developed another postwar model: rigorous Torah scholarship living in conversation with universities, professions and modern American life.

These approaches disagreed—sometimes loudly. That too was evidence of success. Dead civilizations do not argue about educational philosophy.

Living Jews do.

The Women Who Made the “Society of Learners” Possible

Any history that discusses only roshei yeshiva is not merely incomplete. It cannot explain the bank account.

The Torah world was also rebuilt by women.

Bais Yaakov schools operated even in displaced-persons camps, where traumatized teachers attempted to educate traumatized girls using almost no supplies. Vichna Kaplan opened America’s first Bais Yaakov high school in Williamsburg in 1938. After the war, Bais Yaakov schools and seminaries spread across Israel and the United States.

They trained teachers. They educated mothers. They created administrators. They gave Orthodox women access to serious textual education. They also prepared women to enter the workforce.

That last point is not a footnote.

The postwar kollel system depended heavily on women who earned salaries while their husbands studied. They taught classes, raised children, managed households, stretched budgets and built the domestic structure beneath the beit midrash.

The “society of learners” rested on a society of women working incredibly hard.

Torah Umesorah, founded under the leadership of Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz and developed nationally by Dr. Joseph Kaminetsky, helped transform Jewish day-school education in America. Chinuch Atzmai, established in Israel in 1953 with leaders including Rav Zalman Sorotzkin and support from Rav Aharon Kotler, created an independent Haredi school network.

By 2013–14, approximately 255,000 pupils attended 861 Jewish day schools in the United States. The fastest expansion was concentrated in Hasidic and yeshiva-world schools.

This is how a civilization survives.

Not through an annual commemorative dinner.

Through first grade.

The Hasidic Courts Became Cities

Hasidic reconstruction required more than locating surviving rebbes.

A rebbe without a community is a voice without an echo.

Ger, Belz, Vizhnitz, Satmar, Klausenburg, Bobov, Skver and Chabad rebuilt in Israel and North America. But the postwar courts often became more organizationally extensive than their European predecessors.

They created schools, housing projects, charities, businesses, matchmaking networks, welfare systems and medical institutions. They functioned as spiritual communities, social-service organizations and, at times, miniature municipalities.

The Vizhnitzer Rebbe, Rav Chaim Meir Hager, developed Kiryat Vizhnitz in Bnei Brak. Rav Yoel Teitelbaum built Satmar into an enormous transatlantic community centered in Williamsburg. Rav Shlomo Halberstam rebuilt Bobov in America. Rav Yaakov Yosef Twersky created New Square.

The Klausenburger Rebbe, Rav Yekusiel Yehuda Halberstam, survived the camps after losing his wife and eleven children. He came to Israel and built Kiryat Sanz and Laniado Hospital.

Read that again.

A man whose wife and eleven children were murdered built a hospital devoted to saving lives.

That is not merely survival.

That is a theological counterattack.

Chabad followed yet another path. Rav Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn reached America in 1940. Under the leadership of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rav Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Chabad eventually sent emissaries throughout the world.

Hitler attempted to make the Jew homeless everywhere.

Chabad responded by opening a Jewish home almost everywhere.

The Torah Renaissance Was Not Only Haredi

The postwar rebuilding cannot be reduced to the Lithuanian yeshiva world or Hasidic courts.

Religious Zionists built a different Torah society—one that rejected the idea that a Jew must choose between a page of Gemara and responsibility for the Jewish state.

Rav Moshe-Zvi Neria opened the first Bnei Akiva yeshiva at Kfar Haroeh in 1940 with thirteen students. Rav Chaim Yaakov Goldvicht developed Kerem B’Yavneh, which became the prototype for hesder: serious Torah study combined with military service.

Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook transformed Mercaz HaRav into the intellectual engine of a generation. Holocaust survivor Rav Yehuda Amital helped formulate hesder and later founded Yeshivat Har Etzion. Rav Aharon Lichtenstein joined him, creating a beit midrash that combined intellectual rigor, moral seriousness and commitment to the State of Israel.

These institutions produced rabbis, soldiers, educators, officers, judges, scientists and public servants. Their students carried Gemaras into military bases and military responsibility back into the beit midrash.

This was also Torah reconstruction.

So was the Sephardi renaissance.

Jews arriving from Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Syria, Egypt and across North Africa were not remnants of the destroyed European yeshiva world. They carried their own ancient traditions into Israel.

Porat Yosef, established in Jerusalem in 1923, became the central academy of modern Sephardi Torah scholarship. After its Old City home was destroyed in 1948, it was rebuilt. Rav Ezra Attiya trained a generation that included Rav Ovadia Yosef, Rav Ben-Zion Abba Shaul and Rav Yehuda Tzadka.

Rav Ovadia’s mission to “restore the crown to its former glory” was not a decorative slogan. It was an attempt to rescue Sephardi halachic authority from marginalization and make it national again.

Israel did not produce one Torah world.

It produced several—and gave them enough freedom to disagree ferociously.

The State Some Opposed Helped Them Flourish

Here comes the historical paradox that polite accounts often tiptoe around.

Many Haredi leaders did not accept Zionist theology. Rav Moshe Shternbuch himself has been a forceful opponent of Zionism. Satmar rejected the state ideologically. Other Haredi leaders treated Israel as a practical reality rather than the beginning of redemption.

Fine.

History does not require ideological tidiness.

But geography has receipts.

The largest Torah renaissance in Jewish history developed within the State of Israel.

The state opened the gates. It absorbed survivors. It provided roads, electricity, water, hospitals, security and municipal infrastructure. It recognized independent religious school systems. It funded schools, yeshivot and kollelim. It permitted religious political parties to negotiate for their communities.

And Jewish soldiers—religious and secular—defended the country in which every Jew retained the freedom to argue over whether the state was religiously significant.

People may debate theology.

They cannot debate plumbing.

In 1948, David Ben-Gurion approved military deferments for approximately 400 yeshiva students. The measure was partly intended to preserve the remnants of a Torah world that had just been slaughtered.

By 2023, Israel counted approximately 169,000 students in postsecondary yeshivot and kollelim. In 2023–24, roughly 401,000 children attended Haredi schools—about one-fifth of all Israeli pupils.

The categories are not identical. The original 400 counted deferments, while the modern figure counts broader enrollment. But no statistical footnote can conceal the direction of history.

Four hundred endangered students became a society of learners.

That achievement deserves respect.

It also raises a legitimate contemporary question. An emergency rescue arrangement cannot automatically settle every debate about military service, public funding or shared citizenship eight decades later. A mature forest cannot permanently demand to be treated as twelve endangered saplings.

One can honor the rescue of the Torah world and still insist that every part of Israeli society participate seriously in protecting the Jewish future.

Gratitude is not a veto on responsibility.

The Checkbook Was Part of the Miracle

There is no honest ranking of “the greatest philanthropists to Israel” because philanthropy cannot be measured only by the size of a check.

Moses Montefiore supported Jerusalem’s early neighborhoods, public health and economic development. Baron Edmond de Rothschild kept early agricultural settlements alive and helped establish the economic foundations of the Yishuv. Nathan Straus financed health and welfare projects. Henrietta Szold and Hadassah built medical and educational institutions and helped rescue children through Youth Aliyah.

The Rothschild family’s Yad Hanadiv later financed buildings that physically express Israeli sovereignty and civilization: the Knesset, the Supreme Court and the new National Library of Israel.

The Azrieli family invested in education, medicine, research and Israeli social resilience. Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt helped create Birthright Israel. The Schusterman family invested in Israel, Jewish education and young leadership. Bernie and Billi Marcus supported Israeli medicine, emergency services and aliyah. Sheldon and Miriam Adelson poured historic sums into Birthright, Yad Vashem, medical research, Jewish education and unapologetic defense of Israel.

The Reichmanns financed yeshivot, kollelim, schools, hospitals and families. Other families—the Wolfsons, the Grusses and many more—quietly carried institutions through years when tuition and government support could not cover expenses.

Then there were the millions of ordinary Jews who gave through the United Jewish Appeal, Jewish Federations, Keren Hayesod and the Jewish National Fund.

No billionaire built Israel alone.

The collective effect of ordinary Jews writing modest checks year after year may exceed that of any individual donor. A grandmother in Johannesburg, a shopkeeper in Brooklyn, a dentist in Toronto and a family in Phoenix may never have seen their names carved into Jerusalem stone.

Their money is nevertheless inside the stone.

The great philanthropists funded different visions of Jewish life. Some supported universities. Others built hospitals. Others purchased ambulances, planted forests, brought immigrants home or kept yeshivot solvent.

They did not necessarily share religious beliefs or political positions. They might not have survived ten minutes at the same dinner table.

But nation-building does not require everyone to agree.

It requires enough people to build.

What Was Rebuilt Was Not the Same

The postwar Torah world described itself as a continuation of Europe. That was true—but only partly.

It was also something new.

Historian Haym Soloveitchik famously described a transition from a mimetic religious culture, absorbed naturally through family and community, to a more text-centered Orthodoxy governed by schools, books and formal rabbinic authority.

In Europe, much of Jewish practice had been learned by watching parents, neighbors and local rabbis. But what happens when the parents are dead, the neighbors have vanished and the town is a cemetery?

The book must perform the work once done by the street.

The yeshiva must replace the community.

The rav must answer questions once resolved through inherited custom.

Postwar Orthodoxy therefore became more institutional, more centralized, more textually self-conscious and, in certain areas, more stringent. Hasidic courts became larger organizations. Rabbinic authority crossed national borders. Girls’ education became systematic. Full-time study for married men expanded from a comparatively limited elite practice into the central ideal of an entire Haredi society.

This was not Europe reconstructed brick for brick.

It was Europe remembered, distilled and redesigned for Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Brooklyn and Lakewood.

The people who claimed to be preserving tradition were also among the most audacious social innovators in modern Jewish history.

Why Has This Story Been Neglected?

This reconstruction is under-studied relative to its enormous importance.

Holocaust history often ends at liberation, the displaced-persons camps or immigration.

Israeli history usually proceeds through Ben-Gurion, the War of Independence, mass aliyah, the kibbutzim, the IDF, the Six-Day War and the political battles of the state.

American Jewish history prefers Ellis Island, suburbanization, universities, civil rights and liberal religious movements.

The yeshiva world falls between the filing cabinets.

Secular historians sometimes treated Haredim as a fossilized remnant—people standing still while modern history happened around them. Internal Haredi histories often went in the opposite direction, producing inspirational biographies rich in saintly personalities and miraculous episodes but thin on budgets, institutional politics, women’s labor, government negotiations and organizational innovation.

One side saw backwardness.

The other saw only greatness.

Neither fully explained how the electricity bill was paid.

The archives are also difficult. Records were destroyed. Others remain in private yeshiva, dynasty and family collections. Sources are scattered across Yiddish letters, rabbinic correspondence, fundraising ledgers, oral histories, newspapers and recordings that major libraries ignored for decades.

The story is also ideologically inconvenient.

It reveals that anti-Zionist communities flourished under Jewish sovereignty.

It reveals that people defending tradition introduced radical innovations.

It reveals that the ideal of male full-time study depended heavily on female education and employment.

It reveals that American liberty, supposedly the great solvent of religious identity, allowed disciplined Orthodox enclaves to grow.

And it reveals that the State of Israel was not merely a political refuge. It became the physical platform for the greatest concentration of Torah study in history.

Scholars including Menachem Friedman, Haym Soloveitchik, Michal Shaul, Benjamin Brown, Kimmy Caplan, Yoel Finkelman and Marcin Keren-Kratz have begun filling this enormous gap. Michal Shaul’s work is especially important: she estimates that Haredi survivors may have constituted only 6–10% of Israel’s surviving remnant, yet they played a disproportionate role in rebuilding yeshivot, Bais Yaakov schools, Hasidic courts and the social ideal of sustained Torah study.

The field is growing.

It is about time.

Against All Odds

This is not a story about one religious faction defeating another.

It is the story of a people rebuilding every part of a civilization.

Zionists built sovereignty.

Soldiers defended it.

Farmers cultivated its soil.

Doctors built its hospitals.

Engineers built its roads.

Hebrew educators rebuilt its language.

Sephardi sages restored traditions carried from Baghdad, Aleppo, Fez and Sana’a.

Hasidic rebbes rebuilt communities from broken families.

Roshei yeshiva rebuilt academies from murdered student bodies.

Women built schools, homes and livelihoods.

Philanthropists converted private success into public continuity.

And survivors who had every reason to surrender to grief instead married, had children and began again.

That may be the greatest act of defiance of all.

“Against all odds” is not sentimental language. The odds were measurable.

Six million murdered.

Thousands of communities erased.

A quarter-million displaced Jews waiting behind fences.

Five hundred students in the prewar Mir.

Fourteen in early Lakewood.

Approximately 400 Israeli yeshiva deferments in 1948.

Then came Mir and Ponevezh, Lakewood and Telshe, Bais Yaakov and Torah Umesorah, Chinuch Atzmai and Porat Yosef, Mercaz HaRav and Har Etzion, Kiryat Sanz and Kiryat Vizhnitz.

Then came thousands of schools, hundreds of thousands of students and millions of Jewish children who would know Torah not as the relic of a murdered civilization, but as the living language of their homes.

The murderers wanted the Jew reduced to an exhibition in somebody else’s museum.

Instead, the Jew returned to Jerusalem.

He opened a school.

He built a hospital.

He argued with his government.

He paid taxes, complained about tuition, missed the bus, served in the army, protested the army, raised money and stayed awake far too late debating a line of Gemara written fifteen centuries earlier.

In other words, he became alive.

They burned the books.

We built libraries.

They emptied the towns.

We built cities.

They tried to make the Jew a memory.

The Jew returned home—and opened the Gemara.

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History has a sick sense of humor.

Sometimes it whispers. Sometimes it taps politely on the window. And sometimes it watches the president of the United States sign an agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran at the Palace of Versailles and screams, “Have none of you read the plaque?”

On June 17, 2026, President Donald Trump signed the 14-point Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding during a dinner at Versailles. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed from Tehran. The cameras clicked. The diplomats applauded. Markets exhaled. The phrase “historic agreement” was dragged out of the diplomatic storage closet, dusted off, and forced to perform one more humiliating little dance.

Historic? Absolutely.

Reassuring? Only if your knowledge of history begins with yesterday’s breakfast.

Versailles is not a neutral venue. It is a monument to the catastrophic human habit of confusing a signed document with a solved problem. In 1919, leaders gathered in its Hall of Mirrors to sign the treaty that formally ended the First World War. They promised a new international order. They produced grand language, borders, reparations, commissions, guarantees, and enough paper to insulate a small country.

Twenty years later, Europe was at war again.

To be precise, the Treaty of Versailles did not single-handedly create Hitler or cause the Second World War. Nazi ideology, rabid antisemitism, the Great Depression, political collapse, appeasement, and the deliberate choices of evil men all mattered. But Versailles helped create a settlement filled with humiliation, grievance, unstable promises, and security mechanisms that depended on aggressors respecting paper after they had stopped respecting civilization.

It was peace announced before peace had been built.

And now the same palace has hosted another performance in which political theater was mistaken for strategic victory.

Only this time, history did not wait twenty years to expose the fraud.

It took twenty days.

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Before Versailles, There Was Évian

The geographical symbolism is almost too obscene to invent.

The 2026 G7 summit was held in Évian-les-Bains. For most tourists, Évian means bottled water and a pleasant view of Lake Geneva. For Jews, the name carries a rather different aftertaste.

In 1938, delegates from 32 countries gathered at Évian to discuss the desperate plight of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. For nine days, representatives expressed concern, displayed sympathy, and explained—very elegantly, of course—why their countries could not take meaningful numbers of Jewish refugees. With the Dominican Republic the lone country at the conference willing to accept more refugees, the doors remained shut.

It was an international masterclass in compassionate vocabulary and moral cowardice.

The Jews received speeches. The Nazis received information: the world objected to the persecution of Jews, but not enough to inconvenience itself by saving them.

Eighty-eight years later, world leaders gathered again in Évian, and the American president then signed an agreement with Iran at Versailles—an agreement that purported to address fighting involving Israel and Lebanon even though Israel was not a party to it.

Évian to Versailles.

Sympathy without rescue. Peace without security. Decisions about Jews made in rooms where Jews are absent.

History is not repeating word for word. It is rhyming so loudly the chandeliers should be shaking.

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America Promised. Iran Would Try.

Ignore the palace for a moment and read the agreement itself. The architecture of surrender is hiding in the verbs.

The United States undertook to begin removing its naval blockade immediately and end it within 30 days. It promised waivers allowing Iran to export crude oil and conduct the banking, insurance, and transport transactions needed to sell it. It agreed to make Iran’s frozen funds fully usable. It committed to pursue the termination of American sanctions, secondary sanctions, United Nations restrictions, and IAEA-related resolutions. It pledged, with regional partners, to develop a reconstruction and economic package worth at least $300 billion. During the interim period, Washington also promised not to impose new sanctions or deploy additional forces to the region.

Those are not vague aspirations. Those are valuable, measurable concessions.

What did Tehran offer in return?

Iran agreed to stop military operations, use its “best efforts” to restore safe commercial passage through the Strait of Hormuz, reaffirm that it would not develop or acquire nuclear weapons, maintain the existing status of its nuclear program, and negotiate the difficult details later.

The enriched uranium stockpile? To be resolved later.

The future of enrichment? Discussed later.

The inspection and enforcement machinery? Established later.

The final nuclear settlement? Negotiated during a 60-day window.

The ballistic missile program built to carry weapons across the region? No meaningful restriction.

The terror proxies Iran has armed, financed, trained, and used as disposable launchpads against Israel and American interests? No meaningful dismantlement.

America promised action. Iran promised discussion.

Washington offered relief. Tehran offered a calendar invitation.

This was not “peace through strength.” It was ransom with hors d’oeuvres.

The nuclear clause was especially insulting. Iran “reaffirmed” that it would not develop nuclear weapons—as if the revolutionary regime deserved hundreds of billions of dollars for repeating an obligation it had already claimed to accept.

That is like rewarding an arsonist for signing a note promising that he remains philosophically opposed to fire while he keeps the petrol, the matches, and the keys to the building.

The agreement did not require the immediate, verified dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. It allowed the nuclear status quo to remain during negotiations. Even the minimum proposed treatment of enriched material was on-site downblending under eventual IAEA supervision, while the fate of enrichment itself was pushed into the final talks.

Apparently geopolitics now operates like a crooked home renovation: release the money, defer the inspection rules, let the contractor keep the dangerous equipment, and hope he becomes honest after the deposit clears.

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The Strait of Hormuz Got a Free Trial

Iran closed one of the world’s most important shipping routes, helped send energy markets into panic, and then negotiated rewards for partially reversing the crisis it had created.

Under the memorandum, Tehran promised toll-free safe passage for commercial vessels for 60 days only, using its “best efforts,” with full traffic to be restored over as many as 30 days.

How generous.

The Strait of Hormuz had apparently become a subscription service: enjoy two months of free navigation, then check back for premium pricing.

This is how deterrence dies. An aggressor creates a crisis, holds the global economy hostage, and is then paid for lowering the gun slightly. The lesson to every aspiring dictatorship is obvious: missiles are leverage, piracy is a negotiating strategy, and terrorism comes with a rewards program.

The regime did not learn that aggression carries unbearable consequences. It learned that sufficient aggression produces better terms.

And the free world applauded because the oil price moved in the preferred direction before dinner was over.

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Iran Was Allowed to Negotiate Over Lebanon. Israel Was Expected to Obey.

The first paragraph declared an “immediate and permanent termination” of military operations on all fronts, explicitly including Lebanon. It invoked Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Lovely words. There was only one small problem: Iran does not own Lebanon.

The Islamic Republic spent decades arming Hezbollah, hollowing out Lebanese sovereignty, and turning civilian territory into an Iranian missile platform. Then Tehran was welcomed as a statesman entitled to negotiate Lebanon’s future.

The arsonist was invited to help draft the fire code.

Israel, meanwhile, was not a signatory.

Think about the arrogance of that. Israel was expected to accept security restrictions arising from an American-Iranian memorandum while Iran’s missile program, nuclear infrastructure, and proxy network remained unresolved. The country whose civilians live under the missiles was treated as an administrative complication. The country supplying the missiles was treated as an indispensable partner.

This was not merely bad diplomacy. It was diplomatic imperialism wearing a peace pin.

The same moral logic appeared at Munich in 1938, when powerful states negotiated over Czechoslovakia without Czechoslovakia at the table. Iran is not Nazi Germany, and 2026 is not 1938. Historical analogies should illuminate, not replace thought. But the governing conceit is chillingly familiar: powerful men decide that a smaller democracy should absorb the danger required to purchase everyone else a temporary quiet.

Europe brought Munich’s morality to Versailles’ address.

Israel’s answer must remain the answer Zionism restored to Jewish history: No.

No foreign capital gets to decide how many missiles Israeli children must tolerate. No chandeliered dining room gets to trade away the security of Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Be’er Sheva, or the communities along the northern border. No government—friend or foe—has the authority to bind Israel to a suicide note Israel did not sign.

Jewish sovereignty means that never again will our survival depend on whether distant statesmen find our deaths diplomatically inconvenient.

I write this from Efrat, in the Judean Hills—far from the mirrors of Versailles and close enough to Jerusalem to know the difference between history as decoration and history as survival. Here, an “implementation period” is not a harmless bureaucratic phrase. It is time an enemy can use to reload.

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The “Permanent” Agreement That Lasted Twenty Days

Then reality arrived and mugged the press release.

The memorandum was signed on June 17. On July 7, President Trump declared it “over.” Iran suspended it a week later. By August 12, the Strait of Hormuz remained closed, both sides were accusing the other of violations, attacks on shipping had rattled markets again, and mediators had made no progress reviving the arrangement.

“Immediate and permanent” peace lasted less than three weeks.

Even a free streaming trial survives longer.

The 1919 settlement at Versailles took two decades to reveal the full scale of its failure. The 2026 production managed it in twenty days. Say what you will about modern diplomacy—it has become remarkably efficient at manufacturing disasters.

But the collapse was not bad luck. It was embedded in the agreement from the beginning. The document front-loaded benefits, postponed the central disputes, excluded essential regional parties, and relied on a revolutionary regime’s goodwill while leaving its machinery of coercion substantially intact.

That is not a peace agreement.

It is an intermission financed by the audience.

The Iranian People Deserve Better Than a Richer Regime

Condemning this agreement is not hostility toward the Iranian people. It is the opposite.

Persians and Jews are not eternal enemies. Jewish memory honors Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who allowed the exiles of Judah to return to Jerusalem and rebuild. Before the Islamic Revolution, Iran and Israel cooperated.

The natural conflict is not between two ancient peoples. It is between free societies and a revolutionary dictatorship that imprisons Iranians at home while exporting terror abroad.

A $300 billion reconstruction promise directed through the Islamic Republic is not a gift to Iran’s brave dissidents, women, workers, minorities, or political prisoners. Money is fungible. Economic oxygen given to the regime frees resources for the Revolutionary Guard, internal repression, missiles, proxies, and the next confrontation.

The Iranian people deserve a country that builds hospitals instead of tunnels, powers homes instead of centrifuges, and sends tourists abroad instead of drones. Israelis deserve to live without a regime publicly organizing its strategy around their destruction.

Those goals are compatible.

Strengthening the dictatorship serves neither.

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What a Real Agreement Would Require

A serious agreement would begin with performance, not promises.

It would require the verified dismantlement of the military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program before major relief. It would remove or irreversibly destroy dangerous stockpiles. It would impose intrusive inspections, including access to suspect military sites, with automatic consequences for obstruction.

It would address enrichment, weaponization, ballistic missiles, drone production, terror financing, and the arming of Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Iranian militias across the region.

Sanctions relief would follow verified compliance in stages. Frozen assets would not be released on the strength of a signature. Enforcement would not depend on another future committee, another 60-day negotiation, or the goodwill of Russia and China. Any provision affecting Israel’s security would require Israel’s participation and consent.

In plain English: Iran acts first. The benefits come second. Cheating brings consequences immediately.

That is diplomacy backed by strength.

Everything else is calligraphy on a countdown clock.

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Versailles Is Not Cursed. Leaders Simply Refuse to Learn.

The palace is not haunted. The mirrors are not magical. Versailles does not doom agreements merely because they are signed beneath its gilded ceilings.

The problem is human vanity—the recurring belief that a dramatic venue can transform an unfinished bargain into a historic achievement; that cameras can substitute for verification; that an aggressor’s signature is evidence of an aggressor’s conversion; that the people placed in danger should be grateful because diplomats used the word “peace.”

History repeats itself because leaders keep believing they are too sophisticated to repeat it.

Versailles was the warning. Évian was the warning before the warning. Israel’s exclusion was the warning inside the text. The missing missile restrictions were a warning. The deferred nuclear provisions were a warning. The $300 billion promise was a warning with twelve zeroes attached.

And twenty days later, the corpse of the agreement supplied the final warning.

The West must stop paying the Islamic Republic to postpone war and start imposing conditions that make war, nuclear blackmail, and proxy terror impossible for the regime to wage.

America’s allies do not need elegant reassurances. They need American clarity, American leverage, and American resolve.

Israel will welcome genuine peace. We have crossed deserts for it, traded land for it, buried children while waiting for it, and signed agreements with former enemies who chose a different future.

But we will not confuse a pause with peace, bribery with diplomacy, or a signature at Versailles with security.

The Jewish people have read this chapter before.

This time, we are holding the pen—and the sword.

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Land Back—unless the land is Judea. Believe women—unless they speak Hebrew. Never Again—unless the Jews actually mean it.

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I am writing from Efrat, in the hills of Judea, where the limestone glows gold at sunset and every archaeological excavation causes another nervous breakdown in a Western humanities department.

Another Hebrew inscription.

Another Jewish coin.

Another ritual bath.

Another stubborn fragment of reality refusing to identify as Palestinian.

History has become a hostile work environment for the modern Left.

Children speak Hebrew here. Jews plant vineyards here. Ancient terraces climb the hills. Jerusalem sits just up the road, still refusing to relocate despite several strongly worded resolutions.

This is where Abraham walked, David ruled, prophets thundered, Maccabees revolted, Romans slaughtered, Jews prayed, and Jewish children have now returned to complain that the Wi-Fi is slow.

That last part is what victory looks like.

The Left looks at this astonishing national resurrection—the scattered remnants of an indigenous people returning from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—and screams:

“Colonialism!”

Colonialism usually involves a mother country.

Which one was ours?

Poland, where Jews were massacred?

Iraq, which stripped Jews of citizenship and property?

Yemen, where Jews lived under humiliating restrictions?

Morocco? Russia? Ethiopia? Germany?

The Jewish people returned from dozens of countries to one land because those countries were exile.

Jerusalem was the mother country.

But the Left has developed a political philosophy capable of looking at a Jew standing in Judea and asking:

“What are you doing on Palestinian land?”

Judea.

Jew.

The clue is inside the word.

Calling Jews colonizers in Judea is such an extraordinary act of intellectual gymnastics that it should be performed in sequins beneath a circus tent.

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The World Did Not Go Mad. It Went to Graduate School.

Ordinary madness is disorganized.

This madness has credentials.

It has a diversity office, an academic journal, a podcast, a tote bag, and a reusable water bottle covered in stickers supporting movements that would imprison the person carrying it.

It arrives wearing a lanyard and asks everyone to “hold space” while it explains why kidnapping a Jewish toddler requires historical context.

It was approved by Legal.

It passed through Human Resources.

It received funding from the Department of Applied Moral Bankruptcy.

And it was unveiled at a conference called “Centering the Lived Experience of Contextualized Massacre.”

The Western world spent centuries learning several supposedly universal lessons:

Slavery is evil.

Women are citizens.

Racial discrimination is wrong.

Rape is not resistance.

Religious minorities should be protected.

Indigenous peoples have ancestral rights.

Mass murder cannot be justified by political grievances.

These ideas were purchased with blood.

Abolitionists fought slavery. Suffragettes fought for the vote. Black Americans marched against segregation, violence, and political exclusion. Women exposed sexual predators through #MeToo. Gay people fought governments that treated their existence as criminal.

The victories mattered because the principles were meant to apply to everyone.

Then Jews tried to use them.

The cashier examined the coupon.

“Sorry. Terms and conditions apply.”

Apparently, every Western moral slogan contains microscopic print:

Void where the victim is Jewish.

The Left’s New Ten Commandments

The modern Left has produced a revised moral code:

Land Back!

Unless the land is Israel.

Believe women!

Unless the women speak Hebrew.

Silence is violence!

Unless Jews are screaming.

No human being is illegal!

Except a Jew living in Judea.

Celebrate indigenous survival!

Unless the indigenous people survived long enough to obtain an air force.

Protect minorities!

Unless the minority refuses to remain powerless.

Words are violence!

Unless the words are “Globalize the Intifada.”

Then words become vibrant protest poetry requiring several pages of contextual interpretation.

Diversity is our strength!

Unless a Zionist enters the room.

Then diversity becomes a closed event.

Never Again!

Unless the Jews attempt to enforce it themselves.

Then it is “disproportionate.”

The Left has not abandoned its values.

It has installed a Jewish exception into every one of them.

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The Great Left-Wing Mathematical Error

The Left’s entire moral calculator rests on one childish equation:

Weak equals good.

Strong equals evil.

Fewer weapons equals righteous.

More weapons equals guilty.

This is not morality. It is spectator sports for people who think history began when they downloaded TikTok.

Being weaker does not make a movement just.

ISIS was weaker than the international coalition that defeated it.

Nazi Germany was weaker in 1945 than the Allied armies surrounding it.

A bank robber surrounded by twenty police officers is the underdog. He is not therefore Rosa Parks.

Power differences do not determine right and wrong.

Behavior does.

Intentions do.

Choices do.

Yet the Left treats Palestinian violence like weather.

Rockets “erupt.”

Terrorism “happens.”

Hostages somehow “find themselves” in Gaza.

Hamas is described as though it were a regional thunderstorm rather than an organization whose leaders planned, funded, armed, and ordered atrocities.

Israel alone is granted agency, which means Israel alone can be guilty.

The Palestinians are treated like children, wind patterns, or furniture—anything except adults responsible for political decisions.

This is not respect.

It is the racism of low expectations dressed in a keffiyeh.

If Palestinians possess national agency, they also possess national responsibility.

You do not get to demand independence while claiming permanent exemption from the consequences of your choices.

October 7 and the Speed of Left-Wing Moral Collapse

On Simchat Torah, October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel.

They attacked families in their homes.

They slaughtered young people at a music festival.

They murdered approximately 1,200 human beings.

They kidnapped more than 250 people and dragged them into Gaza.

Before Israeli authorities had identified many of the bodies, Western activists had identified the real criminal:

Israel.

Harvard student groups declared Israel entirely responsible for the violence.

Rallies began while parents were still repeatedly calling the phones of missing children.

A Chicago Black Lives Matter chapter briefly posted the silhouette of a paraglider—the method used by terrorists descending upon the Nova festival.

It later announced that it was not proud of the post.

Thank God.

Without that clarification, people might have mistaken the celebratory terrorist graphic for a celebratory terrorist graphic.

Apparently, resistance now includes hang-gliding into a music festival and murdering people dancing before breakfast.

A massacre does not become liberation because a sociology department adds footnotes.

A terrorist does not become Che Guevara because an American student wears his politics as a Halloween costume.

And a Jewish corpse does not become less dead because the murderer has better branding.

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#MeToo—But First, What Is the Victim’s Nationality?

The feminist movement taught the world that allegations of sexual violence must be taken seriously.

Correct.

Evidence matters. Investigations matter. Truth matters. Every unverified wartime claim should not be accepted blindly.

But the standard cannot change according to the victim’s politics.

Evidence eventually established reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape occurred during the October 7 attacks and that hostages suffered sexual violence.

Yet activists began denying the crimes almost immediately.

Israeli women apparently required eyewitnesses, forensic evidence, video evidence, a handwritten confession from the attacker, and a notarized certificate from the Ministry of Intersectional Approval.

UN Women took fifty-five days to unequivocally condemn the Hamas attacks and acknowledge reports of gender-based atrocities.

Fifty-five days.

The international organization responsible for women apparently needed nearly eight weeks to determine whether Jews possessed vaginas.

The slogan was quietly revised:

Believe all women.

Except Israeli women.

Except Jewish women.

Except women whose suffering embarrasses the revolution.

Rape does not become resistance because the rapist screams “occupation.”

Kidnapping does not become liberation because the hostage has Jewish grandparents.

Burning a family does not become decolonization because someone later explains it on Instagram using pastel-colored slides.

Your keffiyeh is not an invisibility cloak for rape.

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Welcome to Universal Human Rights Customer Service

Imagine a Jew calling the Universal Human Rights helpline.

“Thank you for calling. Your estimated waiting time is two thousand years.”

“I have been attacked.”

“Please identify your attacker. Press one for a neo-Nazi. Press two for an Islamist terrorist.”

“Two.”

“Please remain on the line while we determine whether your murder was an authentic expression of resistance.”

The Jewish application for protected-minority status is endlessly complicated.

Race? Jewish.

Too white.

Grandparents’ origin? Baghdad.

Too Middle Eastern.

Current country? Israel.

Too indigenous.

Previous country? Poland.

Go back to Israel.

Returned to Israel?

Colonizer.

Congratulations. You have achieved Schrödinger’s ethnicity: white enough to be blamed, foreign enough to be expelled, indigenous nowhere, and somehow secretly controlling the weather.

Antisemitism is magnificently flexible.

To the fascist, Jews were racially foreign.

To the communist, Jews were bourgeois capitalists.

To the nationalist, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans.

To the anti-nationalist, Jews are excessively attached to a nation.

To the far Right, Jews are importing foreigners to destroy Western civilization.

To the far Left, Jews are Western foreigners who must leave the Middle East.

Antisemitism is not an ideology.

It is Google Maps.

Wherever your politics begins, it can always calculate a route to the Jew.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion—Except Israel

DEI promised to recognize identities that had been excluded, stereotyped, or misunderstood.

Then it met the Jews and suffered a system failure.

Jews are simultaneously a religion, ethnicity, civilization, people, nation, extended family, historical argument, and committee meeting at which fourteen people produce twenty-three opinions.

Jews may be white, Black, brown, Middle Eastern, North African, Ethiopian, Indian, Persian, European, Asian, or a glorious Israeli mixture that renders American racial spreadsheets useless.

So the diversity industry classifies Jews according to convenience.

When Jews succeed, they are privileged.

When Jews are attacked, they are powerful.

When Jews are frightened, they are manipulative.

When synagogues require armed guards, this apparently proves Jewish influence rather than the existence of lunatics trying to murder Jews during Shabbat services.

Jews represent roughly two percent of the American population but were targeted in nearly seventy percent of reported religion-based hate crimes in 2024.

If your inclusion system cannot detect that, it is not social justice.

It is decorative stationery.

University reports eventually documented Jewish students experiencing harassment, threats, exclusion, and ostracism.

Naturally, the universities created task forces.

The first task force studies why the diversity department ignored antisemitism.

The second task force establishes a framework.

The framework recommends a working group.

The working group hosts a listening session.

The listening session concludes that Jews do not feel heard.

The discovery is published in a seventy-page PDF nobody reads.

Everyone receives a commemorative lanyard.

Problem solved.

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Genocide Is Apparently Contextual

In December 2023, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT were asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their institutions’ policies.

The answers disappeared into a swamp of legal language about context and conduct.

These universities can produce seventeen pages of guidance about Halloween costumes, pronouns, cafeteria decorations, interpersonal sensitivity, and the emotional consequences of an improperly phrased email.

But calling for genocide?

Whoa.

Let us not rush into reckless extremism such as answering a question.

Apparently, “Please do not call for exterminating the Jews” had become an advanced philosophical problem requiring more grant funding.

Free speech matters. Academic freedom matters. Offensive speech must often be protected.

But rules must be applied consistently.

A university cannot treat an awkward joke as a five-alarm emergency and then send a call for Jewish genocide to the ethics department for twelve months of peer review.

That is not intellectual sophistication.

That is moral cowardice with a doctorate.

Land Back—But Not That Land

The Left adores indigenous rights.

It celebrates ancestral memory, cultural survival, native languages, sacred places, and displaced peoples returning to their historic territories.

Excellent.

Judaism is built around a specific land.

Our calendar follows its seasons.

Our prayers name its cities.

Our festivals mark its harvests.

Our prophets walked its roads.

Our kings ruled from Jerusalem.

For two thousand years of exile, Jews faced Jerusalem while praying.

At every Passover seder, we declared:

“Next year in Jerusalem.”

Not next year in Brooklyn.

Not next year in Warsaw.

Not next year in an autonomous cultural district graciously provided by the European Union.

Jerusalem.

The Torah records God’s covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jewish law, Jewish memory, Jewish longing, and Jewish peoplehood are inseparable from this land.

As an Orthodox Jew, I do not require Columbia University to certify God’s covenant.

Moses did not stand overlooking the Jordan and announce:

“Behold, the land that Brussels may eventually partition after consulting a focus group.”

David did not establish Jerusalem as the Jewish capital subject to approval from the Harvard student senate.

Judah Maccabee did not fight the Greeks to secure improved minority representation on Antiochus’s DEI committee.

Even outside faith, the physical evidence is overwhelming: Hebrew inscriptions, Jewish coins, synagogues, ritual baths, ancient cities, burial sites, continuous communities, and centuries of documented longing for return.

The Left’s response?

“Go back to Europe.”

Tell an Iraqi Jew, Moroccan Jew, Yemenite Jew, Persian Jew, Ethiopian Jew, or Indian Jew to return to Europe and watch geography choke on its coffee.

Around 850,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab and Muslim-majority countries during the decades surrounding Israel’s establishment.

Israel absorbed them.

They rebuilt their lives instead of remaining permanent refugees.

This success is now used to erase their suffering.

Apparently, refugees lose historical legitimacy if they build functioning cities instead of multigenerational grievance industries.

The Jews committed the Left’s unforgivable sin:

We survived successfully.

No, You Are Not Getting a Palestinian State

The international community recites “two-state solution” with the vacant devotion of people who have forgotten what the words mean.

It is no longer a policy.

It is a religious chant.

Say it three times before a European summit and a complimentary lunch appears.

I reject it.

I do not recognize a Palestinian state as legitimate, and I never will.

I do not accept a sovereign Palestinian claim to Jerusalem, Judea, or Samaria.

Palestinian Arabs exist. They possess individual lives, families, property, needs, and rights under law.

But statehood is not a human right.

A country is not a participation trophy awarded because enough diplomats feel guilty.

A state is power.

It has borders, ministries, security forces, alliances, infrastructure, communications systems, and the ability to import weapons while explaining that the weapons mysteriously arrived due to root causes.

Judea and Samaria are the mountain ridge overlooking Israel’s narrow coastal plain, Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion Airport, Highway 6, and the homes of millions of Israelis.

Creating another hostile sovereign entity on those hills would not be peace.

It would be assisted national suicide with an EU logo.

There was no sovereign Palestinian state conquered by Israel in 1948.

The United Nations proposed partition. Jewish leaders accepted. Arab leaders rejected it and chose war.

From 1948 until 1967, Jordan controlled Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem. Egypt controlled Gaza.

Neither created a Palestinian state.

Then Israel withdrew every soldier and every Jewish resident from Gaza in 2005.

That was the pilot program.

Hamas seized control, built rockets and tunnels, and eventually launched October 7.

The consultants examined this catastrophe and concluded:

“The experiment failed because Israel did not repeat it on a larger, strategically fatal scale.”

This is like watching an arsonist burn down your kitchen and solving the problem by giving him the upstairs bedrooms.

Gaza was land for peace.

Israel surrendered the land.

It received rockets, tunnels, hostages, and massacres.

Now the Left wants Israel to perform the same experiment on the hills above its airport.

No.

Israeli children are not laboratory animals for failed diplomatic theories.

The Jewish state is not a suicide pact.

Terrorist Chic

The strangest Western fashion trend is the Left’s romance with authoritarian religious movements.

Hamas has not faced an election since 2006. It suppresses dissent, persecutes opponents, marginalizes women, and offers no protection to LGBT people.

Yet activists in democratic societies treat it as a neighborhood liberation collective with an unfortunate public-relations problem.

People who require a trigger warning before watching a 1990s sitcom now lecture Israelis about tolerating a genocidal terrorist organization next door.

Activists who believe words constitute violence suddenly discover remarkable tolerance for actual violence.

The same people who demand “safe spaces” on campus demand that Israelis share borders with men who invaded safe rooms and kidnapped the children inside them.

This is not solidarity.

It is revolutionary cosplay performed by people who know they will return from the protest to a country protected by police, borders, intelligence agencies, and armed forces.

They romanticize dangers Israelis must actually survive.

The Iranian regime funds terrorist proxies while imprisoning dissidents and policing women’s lives.

But Western activists describe Iranian expansion as though it were an organic community initiative.

American influence is imperialism.

Iranian influence arrives naturally, like locally sourced missiles.

Nothing says “resistance to empire” like becoming an unpaid intern for Tehran’s propaganda department.

Right-Wing, Jewish, and Not Apologizing

Let me save everyone the detective work.

I am right-wing.

I am Jewish.

I am Orthodox.

I am a Zionist.

I live in Judea.

I believe Jerusalem belongs to the Jewish people.

I believe Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are not colonial outposts but part of the Jewish return to the Jewish homeland.

I believe Israel has a moral duty to protect innocent life—and an even more immediate duty not to sacrifice Jewish life to satisfy international opinion.

That is not extremism.

That is sanity produced by historical experience.

The Torah commands justice. It also commands us not to stand idly by while blood is shed.

Jewish morality does not require national helplessness.

Pikuach nefesh—the preservation of life—is not served by gambling millions of Jewish lives on promises from governments that will send thoughts and prayers after the first massacre.

Being right-wing does not mean celebrating the suffering of civilians or pretending every Arab is a terrorist.

It means refusing to confuse compassion with surrender.

It means understanding that kindness without strength becomes an invitation to predators.

It means recognizing that peace requires an enemy who prefers coexistence to conquest.

It means refusing to make my children pay for my reputation among people who will never have fifteen seconds to reach a bomb shelter.

The Most Dangerous Jew

For centuries, the world preferred the Jew powerless.

A powerless Jew could be taxed, restricted, expelled, converted, ghettoized, massacred, and later memorialized.

Dead Jews are wonderfully convenient.

They can be mourned in museums.

They can be quoted in speeches.

They can serve as decorative evidence that humanity learned something.

They never demand borders.

They never carry weapons.

They never object to the curator.

A museum Jew is universally beloved.

A living Jew with sovereignty, children, vineyards, ballots, an army, ancient claims, and absolutely no desire to die politely is apparently terrifying.

That is the dangerous Jew.

Not dangerous to innocent people.

Dangerous to lies.

Dangerous to pogromists.

Dangerous to empires.

Dangerous to terrorists who confuse Jewish compassion with Jewish weakness.

Dangerous to academics who believed “Never Again” was a commemorative slogan rather than an operational policy.

Zionism is what happens when the Jew leaves the diversity seminar, returns home, locks the front door, and announces that nobody is breaking into the children’s bedroom again.

The Left’s greatest mistake was believing Jewish survival required its applause.

It does not.

We Withdraw the Application

The world is not empty of decent people.

Millions of non-Jews stood with Israel after October 7. They comforted Jewish friends, guarded synagogues, condemned Hamas, defended hostages, and refused to let political fashion erase elementary morality.

Their courage matters.

But too many institutions spent decades preaching universal justice and then developed sudden moral paralysis when the victim had a Hebrew name.

Women’s rights that exclude Israeli women are fraudulent.

Anti-racism that excludes Jews is racism.

Indigenous rights that stop at the Jews are political theater.

Diversity requiring Jews to renounce Zionism is a loyalty test.

Human rights that depend upon the attacker’s identity are not human rights.

And a peace plan requiring Israel to construct a terrorist state above its major cities is not peace.

It is a funeral arrangement.

The Left is wrong.

It is wrong about Israel.

It is wrong about Jewish power.

It is wrong about indigeneity.

It is wrong to confuse weakness with morality.

It is wrong to romanticize terrorism.

It is wrong to treat Palestinian leaders as creatures without agency.

It is wrong to demand that Jews surrender the land, sovereignty, and defensive strength that finally ended two thousand years of helplessness.

We have seen what international sympathy looks like.

Flowers after the massacre.

Speeches after the funeral.

Candles after the synagogue burns.

No, thank you.

The Jewish people are no longer applying to become the world’s approved victims.

The application has been withdrawn.

We are its unapproved survivors—living, praying, building, voting, defending ourselves, raising Jewish children, and arguing loudly in Hebrew on the hills of Judea.

Jerusalem is ours.

Judea is ours.

Samaria is ours.

Israel is ours.

We did not steal our homeland.

We outlived the people who stole it from us.

We came home.

Am Yisrael Chai.

And we are not going anywhere.

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Rosh Chodesh Elul 5786 — the Judean Hills, Israel

My teacher, Rabbi Azriel Chaim Goldfein zt”l, once described what happened when Elul arrived in the Lithuanian town of Telz. The change was not confined to the yeshiva. It entered the street. People spoke differently. They carried themselves differently. There was a sharpened sense of responsibility, a fear of judgment, and an awareness that the King of the universe was not an abstraction. Rosh Hashanah was approaching, and human beings would soon stand before the God of Israel with nowhere to hide—not behind reputation, routine, clever excuses, or last year’s good intentions.

Rabbi Goldfein did not teach us this to terrify us. He taught it to wake us.

He had studied at the reestablished Telz Yeshiva in Cleveland from 1953 to 1962, becoming a close disciple of Rav Mordechai Gifter zt”l and learning from great Telzer rabbanim who had survived the destruction of European Jewry. He then carried that Torah to South Africa, where he built the Yeshivah Gedolah of Johannesburg upon the principles of Telz: Torah without compromise, integrity, responsibility, derech eretz, and service to the Jewish people.

The original Telz Yeshiva had been founded in Lithuania in 1875. Its faculty, families, and most of its students were murdered by the Nazis. Yet in November 1941, while European Jewry was being consumed, survivors opened Telz again in a house in Cleveland. The murderers destroyed its home and slaughtered its people. They did not cancel Elul.

That chain matters to me today. The voice of old Telz passed through Cleveland, reached Johannesburg, entered the soul of a student, and is now being remembered on Rosh Chodesh Elul in the Judean Hills. Jewish history has a rather glorious habit of refusing to remain dead.

This coming Rosh Hashanah will be my third in Israel. I say that slowly because I never want the sentence to become ordinary. I am here. My family is here. The Hebrew language is outside my window. The limestone hills of Judea catch the morning light. Vineyards grow on mountains where empires once promised that Jews would disappear. Children argue, pray, laugh, and complain in the language of Isaiah. Even the bureaucracy is in Hebrew; redemption, apparently, also comes with forms.

But Elul does not permit me to turn this achievement into self-congratulation. It turns privilege into responsibility. It asks not only, “How did you get here?” but, “Now that you are here, what will you become?”

The first message of Elul was addressed to returning exiles

There is a remarkable Elul text hiding in plain sight. The book of Haggai opens on “the first day of the sixth month”—Rosh Chodesh Elul. The Jews had returned from Babylonian exile. They were back in the Land, but the House of God remained in ruins while everyone rushed to complete his own home. Through the prophet Haggai, Hashem gave them a command that could serve as the motto of the entire month:

שִׂימוּ לְבַבְכֶם עַל־דַּרְכֵיכֶם — “Set your hearts upon your ways.”

Then came the order: “Go up to the hills, bring wood, and build the House.” (Haggai 1:5–8)

That is Elul in one chapter. Look honestly. Correct your priorities. Then build.

The prophet did not tell the returned exiles that arriving in the Land had completed their redemption. Physical return had created a new obligation. They had rebuilt private life while neglecting national holiness. Their answer was not another conference, another slogan, or a beautifully designed statement about their values. It was to climb the hill and begin carrying timber.

Elul is not a mood. It is construction.

The fear of Elul is the fear of wasting a life

Jewish tradition locates the beginning of Elul’s forty-day journey after one of the worst failures in our history. Moshe descended from Sinai on the seventeenth of Tammuz, saw the Golden Calf, and shattered the first tablets. According to Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer 46, Moshe ascended again on Rosh Chodesh Elul to receive the second tablets. A shofar sounded through the camp so that Israel would not repeat its betrayal. Forty days later, on Yom Kippur, Moshe descended with the tablets of forgiveness.

Elul therefore begins after catastrophe, but it ends with a renewed covenant. Its central symbol is not the broken tablet. It is the second tablet.

The Tur explains that the shofar is sounded through Elul to warn Israel to repent, invoking Amos: “If a shofar is sounded in a city, will the people not tremble?” (Amos 3:6; Tur, Orach Chaim 581). The Mishnah teaches that on Rosh Hashanah every human being passes before God like sheep through a narrow gate, while the Talmud speaks of the books of judgment being opened (Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:2; Rosh Hashanah 16b).

That is real fear. Judaism does not reduce Rosh Hashanah to apples, honey, and a seasonal family photograph. We stand before the Judge who knows not only what we did but what we could have done; not only the words we spoke but the damage they caused; not only the opportunities we lost but the excuses we polished until they looked respectable.

Yet this fear is not panic before a cruel ruler. It is awe before a just Father and King. The same month whose shofar makes us tremble is hinted in the words of the Song of Songs, אֲנִי לְדוֹדִי וְדוֹדִי לִי — “I am my Beloved’s, and my Beloved is mine.” The initial letters spell Elul, as noted by the Abudraham. Judgment and love are not opposites here. We fear losing the relationship because the relationship matters.

The Rambam hears the shofar saying: “Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep… examine your deeds, return in teshuvah, and remember your Creator.” (Hilchot Teshuvah 3:4). His definition of repentance is brutally practical: abandon the sin, remove it from one’s thoughts, regret the past, confess, and resolve not to repeat it (Hilchot Teshuvah 2:2). No public-relations language. No blaming “the environment.” No solemn post followed by the same conduct on Tuesday.

The fear of Elul is ultimately the fear of reaching the end of another year unchanged.

Teshuvah means return—and return has a geography

In English, teshuvah is usually translated as repentance. The translation is not wrong, but it is too small. Teshuvah means return: return to God, return to truth, return to the person one was created to become. For the Jewish people, return also has a national and geographic meaning.

The Torah describes exile, awakening, repentance, ingathering, and renewed life in the Land as parts of one movement: “You will return to Hashem your God… then Hashem your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion upon you, and He will return and gather you from all the peoples.” He will bring us to the Land of our fathers and then “circumcise” our hearts so that we may love Him fully (Deuteronomy 30:1–6).

Ezekiel presents the process with another emphasis: “I will take you from among the nations, gather you from all the countries, and bring you to your own land. Then I will sprinkle pure water upon you… and I will give you a new heart.” (Ezekiel 36:24–26)

Read the order carefully. The prophet does not say that every Jew will first become spiritually perfect and only then be permitted to come home. He describes ingathering followed by purification. The return to the Land is not the end of teshuvah; it creates the conditions for a deeper teshuvah. Haggai said the same thing in the language of his own generation: you have returned, but now set your hearts upon your ways and build.

Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook gave this idea its clearest modern expression. In Orot HaTeshuvah 17:2, he wrote that the awakening of the nation “to return to its land, its essence, its spirit, and its character” truly contains the light of teshuvah. In Orot, Eretz Yisrael 1, he insisted that the Land is not an external possession or merely a tool for physical security. The Land and the people are joined by an inner bond of life.

That does not mean that every Israeli is righteous or that the State is beyond criticism. Anyone who has met Israelis—or opened Tanakh—should be cured of the fantasy that Jewish sovereignty automatically produces Jewish perfection. It means that the national body has come back to the place where it can live its full covenantal life. A body can be home and still require healing. In fact, once home, the demand for healing becomes greater.

The Ramban counted possessing and settling the Land as a continuing Torah commandment: we are not to leave it under the rule of other nations or allow it to remain desolate (Hasagot to Sefer HaMitzvot, positive commandment 4). The Talmud says that a Jew should live in Eretz Yisrael even in a city with a non-Jewish majority rather than outside it even in a Jewish city (Ketubot 110b). This is not a license to belittle the Torah, sacrifice, and courage of Jews in the Diaspora. It is a refusal to rename exile as the final Jewish destination.

For me, making aliyah was not merely a change of address. It placed my private life inside the geography of Jewish prayer. “Gather us from the four corners of the earth” is no longer only a sentence in the Amidah. It is also a family biography.

Herzl saw the danger, Ben-Gurion built the vessel, and Rav Kook revealed the soul

Theodor Herzl did not invent Jewish longing for Zion. Long before Basel, Jews faced Jerusalem in prayer, mourned her destruction at weddings, rose at midnight to weep for her, and ended Pesach with “Next year in Jerusalem.” Political Zionism did something different: it translated an ancient covenantal longing into the political grammar of the modern world.

Herzl looked at emancipated Europe and understood what comfortable Jews desperately wanted not to understand. Antisemitism was not an embarrassing medieval rash that education would inevitably cure. It was politically adaptable. It could survive salons, universities, newspapers, parliaments, and declarations of universal brotherhood. In Der Judenstaat in 1896, he wrote: “The Jews who wish for a State will have it.” He ended with another astonishing sentence: “The Maccabeans will rise again.”

They did.

David Ben-Gurion converted political will into institutions, immigration, defense, and sovereignty. Testifying before the British Peel Commission on January 7, 1937, he declared: “The Bible is our Mandate… written by us, in our language, in Hebrew, in this very country.” Eleven years later, he read Israel’s Declaration of Independence and announced that Jewish history would no longer require the permission of those who had repeatedly failed to protect Jewish life.

An Orthodox Jew does not need to pretend that Herzl was a prophet or that Ben-Gurion was a rav. Providence has never limited itself to people whose religious opinions would pass our entrance examination. Tanakh is filled with flawed human beings, foreign kings, soldiers, builders, and reluctant leaders moved into positions they did not fully understand. Human beings act for mixed motives. God is not confused by the mixture.

Herzl grasped the political disease of exile. Ben-Gurion built the national vessel. Rav Kook saw that beneath even secular Zionism ran a current of national teshuvah. Together, their very different lives teach one truth: God’s plan does not erase human agency. It recruits it.

We must also remember the Torah’s warning once the work succeeds: “You may say in your heart: My power and the strength of my hand made me this wealth. But you shall remember Hashem your God, for it is He who gives you the power to create strength.” (Deuteronomy 8:17–18)

The IDF, Hebrew agriculture, medical innovation, intelligence, diplomacy, and economic strength are not arguments against faith. They are the instruments through which responsibility operates. Trusting God never meant leaving the border undefended and calling the negligence emunah.

The Jewish world outside Israel is hearing an old sound

Diaspora Jewish life today is not a wasteland. It contains magnificent Torah communities, acts of chesed, serious learning, creativity, wealth, influence, and courage. America remains a remarkable home for Jewish achievement and Israel’s indispensable democratic ally. But gratitude must not become anesthesia. Exile is showing its teeth again.

The measurements differ—incident audits, victim surveys, and attitude studies do not count the same thing—but every serious dataset points toward a dangerous normalization of Jew-hatred.

The ADL’s most recent Global 100 survey questioned more than 58,000 adults across 103 countries and territories. It classified a respondent as holding elevated antisemitic attitudes only when that person endorsed at least six of eleven longstanding anti-Jewish stereotypes. Forty-six percent met that threshold—an estimated 2.2 billion adults. When the index began a decade earlier, the figure was 26 percent, or about 1.09 billion adults. The percentage has risen by twenty points; the estimated number of people has more than doubled.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights surveyed nearly 8,000 Jews in thirteen EU countries in the first half of 2023—before the October 7 massacre and the explosion that followed. Even then, 96 percent said they had encountered antisemitism during the previous year, 80 percent believed it had worsened over five years, and 84 percent considered it a major problem in their country.

In the United States, the ADL recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in 2025—an average of seventeen every day and the third-highest annual total since tracking began in 1979. The overall number fell from the record levels of 2024, but physical assaults rose to a record 203; attacks involving deadly weapons rose by 39 percent; and three people were murdered. A lower total is thin comfort when the violence becomes deadlier.

The American Jewish Committee’s 2025 survey found that 93 percent of American Jews considered antisemitism a problem, 78 percent felt less safe because of the post–October 7 reality, and 66 percent believed Jews were less secure than one year earlier. Among current and recent Jewish college students, 34 percent had avoided displaying something that identified them as Jewish, while 38 percent had withheld their views about Israel out of fear of antisemitism. A campus that welcomes a Jew only after he publicly divorces himself from half the Jewish people is not practicing inclusion. It is conducting a political conversion ceremony.

In Britain, the Community Security Trust recorded 1,926 antisemitic incidents in the first six months of 2026, 21 percent more than in the same period of 2025. The monthly average was almost exactly double the rate in the six months before October 7, 2023. Physical attacks reached the highest six-month total CST had ever recorded. Thirty-five percent of all incidents combined explicit anti-Zionist motivation with anti-Jewish language or targeting. The old hatred has learned new vocabulary, but the target remains remarkably familiar.

Tel Aviv University’s Antisemitism Worldwide Report for 2025 found that twenty Jews were murdered in four antisemitic attacks during that year—the highest number of victims in more than three decades. The danger now comes in several uniforms: white supremacism, Islamist extremism, conspiratorial populism, and an anti-Zionism that stops pretending to distinguish Israelis from Jews whenever a synagogue, schoolchild, kosher shop, or Jewish student enters the frame. Jews owe no political camp the comforting lie that only the other side is dangerous.

This is not 1938—and that is precisely why we must learn from 1938

Historical comparison requires discipline. The year 2026 is not 1938. Today’s Western democracies are not Nazi Germany. Antisemitic incident counts did not exist then in forms comparable to modern audits. On Kristallnacht, the Nazi state coordinated a nationwide pogrom, more than 1,400 synagogues and prayer houses were destroyed, thousands of Jewish businesses were vandalized, and about 26,000 Jewish men were imprisoned in concentration camps. To call every ugly demonstration a new Kristallnacht does not honor history; it blurs it.

But refusing every comparison is equally foolish. We compare not because the scale is already identical, but because the mechanisms are recognizable: collective blame, conspiracy, loyalty tests, social exclusion, the celebration or “contextualization” of violence, the transformation of Jews into the one minority whose fear must first survive a political cross-examination.

The demographic comparison is devastating. In 1933, about 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe—more than 60 percent of world Jewry. Europe today is home to roughly 1.3 million Jews, about 9 percent of the Jewish world. The global Jewish population, approximately 15.8 million in the latest estimates, still has not clearly recovered to the roughly 16.6 million Jews alive in 1939. Eight decades later, the missing millions remain visible in the mathematics.

There is another warning from 1939. A United States opinion poll asked whether 10,000 refugee children, most of them Jewish, should be admitted and cared for in American homes. Sixty-seven percent opposed the proposal; only 26 percent supported it. America would go on to help destroy the Nazi regime and later become Israel’s greatest ally. The lesson is not that democracies are worthless. The lesson is that sympathy in a free society can coexist with a locked door—and that Jews cannot base their survival on the assumption that moral people will always act in time.

The greatest difference between then and now is not that the antisemites have become kinder. It is that the Jewish people are no longer entirely powerless.

In 1939, a Jewish refugee ship could cross an ocean and still find every harbor closed. Today there is Haifa. There is a Law of Return. There is an army made up of Jewish children who grew into Jewish soldiers, operating under a Jewish government in the Jewish homeland. Israel is not a consolation prize handed to us because Europe felt guilty; our historical, legal, and biblical claim is far older than the Holocaust. But the Holocaust demonstrated, in blood, what Jewish statelessness could cost.

Prophecy is a summons, not a spectator sport

From an Orthodox Jewish perspective, it is impossible to read the Torah and the Prophets honestly and dismiss the ingathering of exiles as an incidental political event. Deuteronomy promised return after dispersion. Ezekiel described Jews gathered from many countries to their own soil and then called toward spiritual purification. Jeremiah heard Rachel’s weeping answered with the promise that her children would return to their border. Amos envisioned ruined cities rebuilt and vineyards replanted.

The Talmud goes further. Rabbi Abba says there is no more revealed sign of redemption than Ezekiel’s words to the mountains of Israel: “You shall shoot forth your branches and yield your fruit for My people Israel, for they are soon to come.” (Sanhedrin 98a; Ezekiel 36:8). It is difficult to stand among the vineyards and fruit trees of these hills and treat that sentence as dead literature.

The same Talmudic tradition says, “Great is teshuvah, for it brings the redemption near.” (Yoma 86b). Sanhedrin 97b records the debate over whether redemption depends upon repentance and includes Rabbi Yehoshua’s frightening teaching that, if necessary, pressure like the decrees of Haman can drive Israel to return.

That passage does not make antisemites holy, excuse their crimes, or permit us to sit passively while Jews are threatened. Evil remains evil, and perpetrators remain accountable. The Torah commands us not to stand idly by our neighbor’s blood. But Jewish faith insists that evil does not possess final control of history. God can bend even the hatred of our enemies toward an outcome they never intended. The villains are guilty; they are simply not sovereign.

Nor are we authorized to announce dates or decode every headline as a secret timetable. The Talmud condemns those who calculate the end, and the Rambam warns that no one knows the precise order of messianic events (Sanhedrin 97b; Hilchot Melachim 12:2). Emunah is not clairvoyance. We can recognize a pattern without pretending to possess God’s calendar.

I believe we are witnessing parts of that pattern now: a dispersed people gathering, an ancient language restored to daily speech, barren hills producing fruit, Torah flourishing in its native land, and a sovereign Jewish nation able to defend Jewish life. To call all of that random may sound sophisticated, but it requires a faith in coincidence far greater than my faith in God.

Still, the Rambam adds a necessary correction. The Sages did not long for redemption so Jews could dominate other peoples, enjoy luxury, or receive applause. They longed for freedom from oppression so that Israel could devote itself to Torah and wisdom (Hilchot Melachim 12:4). Jewish strength is not the final purpose. It is the protection that allows the purpose to be lived.

What Elul demands now

First, personal teshuvah. Not vague spirituality—specific repair. Apologize to the person we injured. Return what is not ours. Stop the habit we keep renaming. Increase Torah, tefillah, and tzedakah. The Rambam’s verbs are mercilessly concrete because a changed life is built from changed acts.

Second, national teshuvah. Israel must defend itself without apology, but sovereignty cannot become a substitute for holiness. A Jewish state must be Jewish not only in its flag, calendar, army, and anthem, but in its honesty, justice, care for the vulnerable, reverence for life, and responsibility toward every Jew. The Land is not a trophy confirming our perfection. It is the arena in which God demands more of us.

Third, Jewish unity without Jewish cowardice. We can argue—Jews appear to have retained professional-level certification in that field—but we cannot allow political hatred to dissolve peoplehood. October 7 reminded us with unbearable cruelty that our enemies do not inspect voting records, synagogue affiliations, or preferred rabbis before deciding who is a Jew.

Fourth, a serious Diaspora reckoning. Not every Jew can make aliyah tomorrow, and no thoughtful person should speak casually about family, health, livelihood, or communal obligations. But every Jew should ask the question honestly. Learn Hebrew. Strengthen Torah identity. Visit Israel. Invest in it. Defend it publicly. Prepare children to see it not as a foreign policy hobby but as home. Aliyah should not belong only to moments of panic. It is not flight from history; it is return to it.

Fifth, fight antisemitism with the full force of democratic law and Jewish self-respect. Secure synagogues and schools. Prosecute violence. Expose propaganda whether it comes from the right, the left, or religious extremism. Refuse the obscene demand that Jews earn protection by denouncing Israel. A shul surrounded by armed guards may be necessary, but it must never be rebranded as normal.

And finally, build. Haggai did not tell the returnees to admire prophecy. He told them to carry wood. Build families, schools, yeshivot, farms, businesses, laboratories, communities, and institutions worthy of the Jewish future. Divine providence is not permission to outsource our duty to Heaven.

The shofar has reached the hills

I keep returning to Rabbi Goldfein’s description of Telz. The people felt judgment approaching, and that knowledge changed the atmosphere of a town. His teaching itself traveled through the furnace of Jewish history: from Lithuania to Cleveland, from Cleveland to Johannesburg, and from Johannesburg to a student who would one day stand in the Judean Hills on the first day of Elul.

That is not proof that I understand every detail of God’s plan. I do not. It is proof that the plan is larger than the intentions of those who tried to end us.

This will be my third Rosh Hashanah in Israel. The magnitude of that fact is not that I have arrived and can congratulate myself. It is that I have been given a place to answer the call. The privilege of coming home carries the obligation to help make the home worthy of its name.

We may be standing at one of the great hinges of Jewish history. Antisemitism is again exposing the fragility of exile. Israel, wounded and magnificent, is being forced to rediscover the depth of its purpose. Jews everywhere are being asked whether Judaism is merely an identity they possess or a covenant they are prepared to live.

God has a plan. Jewish history is not drifting toward nowhere, and the promises of the Torah were not poetic decorations for a people sentenced to eternal weakness. But the plan is not a theater performance for us to watch from comfortable seats. It moves through choices, courage, repentance, aliyah, defense, Torah, and building.

On the first of Elul, Haggai’s words return: Set your hearts upon your ways. Go up to the hills. Build the House.

The shofar is already sounding in the hills. The question of Elul is not whether God remembers His covenant. The question is whether we remember ours.

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Before dawn, the Judean Desert is almost unnaturally silent. The Dead Sea lies below like a sheet of dark metal, the mountains of Moab form a black wall across the water, and a thin procession of hikers zigzags upward along the Snake Path. Headlamps flicker. Shoes scrape against stone. Nobody has enough coffee.

Then the sun rises.

Light spills across the Jordanian mountains, strikes the Dead Sea and climbs the cliffs of Masada. The Roman camps become visible on the desert floor. So does the enormous siege ramp constructed to destroy the Jewish resistance nearly 2,000 years ago.

The Romans are gone.

The Jews are standing on top of the mountain again, speaking Hebrew.

That is Masada.

The Biblical Desert Before Masada

Masada itself is not named explicitly in the Tanakh, and there is no need to manufacture a connection when the real one is already powerful. The mountain rises within the biblical wilderness of Judah, overlooking the landscape where Jewish history was born, tested and repeatedly rescued from disaster.

Its Hebrew name, מצדה, Metzada, comes from the word for a fortress or stronghold. The Tanakh uses the same linguistic root when describing the desert refuges where David hid while King Saul hunted him. David moved through the strongholds of the Judean wilderness and the crags of Ein Gedi, just north of Masada. Psalm 63 is introduced as a psalm of David “when he was in the wilderness of Judah.”

It is tempting to place David on this exact summit, staring across the Dead Sea with a harp tucked under his arm. It would also be historically dishonest. The Bible does not say that. What it does give us is the landscape: Ein Gedi, the wilderness of Judah, the Dead Sea, the cliffs, caves, wadis and fortresses that shaped the life of Israel’s future king.

Stand on Masada and that geography stops being a collection of names in a book. You can see why David survived here, why armies feared this desert and why a fortress on this isolated rock could appear almost unconquerable.

The Hasmoneans Arrive

Masada entered recorded Jewish history during the Second Temple period. Josephus attributes its first fortification to “Jonathan the High Priest,” although scholars debate whether he meant Jonathan the Maccabee or the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus, whose Hebrew name was also Jonathan.

Either way, Masada’s emergence as a fortress belongs to the age of the Hasmoneans, the Jewish dynasty created by the Maccabean revolt. These were not wandering visitors borrowing somebody else’s land. They were Jewish rulers governing a Jewish kingdom in Judea, maintaining fortresses, minting coins and defending the country surrounding Jerusalem.

Then came Herod.

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Herod Builds a Palace at the End of the Earth

Herod the Great ruled Judea from 37 to 4 BCE. He was ruthless, paranoid and politically dependent on Rome—but he was also one of the ancient world’s most ambitious builders. Caesarea, Herodium, the expansion of the Temple Mount and the palaces of Jericho all carried his architectural fingerprints.

At Masada, Herod’s fear and genius met on top of a desert mountain.

He transformed the plateau into an almost self-contained royal refuge. He built a casemate wall around the summit, guard towers, enormous storerooms, barracks, bathhouses, administrative buildings and two major palaces. The Western Palace covered roughly 3,700 square meters. The Northern Palace descended dramatically across three terraces cut into the cliff, complete with columns, reception rooms, mosaics and frescoes.

This was not a miserable military bunker. Herod apparently wanted to survive the apocalypse with a Roman bath, imported wine and a dining room overlooking the Dead Sea. Paranoia, certainly—but paranoia with excellent flooring.

The greatest achievement was water. Masada stands in one of the driest environments on earth, yet engineers built channels that captured flash-flood runoff and carried it into vast cisterns carved into the rock. Its sophisticated system could store enough water to sustain a large population for years. As UNESCO notes, this engineering transformed a barren, isolated summit into a lavish royal retreat.

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The Revolt Against Rome

In 66 CE, Judea exploded in revolt against Roman rule. A Jewish group known as the Sicarii seized Masada from its Roman garrison. Their leader was Eleazar ben Yair.

Four years later, Roman forces destroyed Jerusalem and burned the Second Temple. Other Jewish strongholds fell. Masada remained.

The people living there were not a simple cast of flawless movie heroes. Josephus describes the Sicarii as a violent faction that fought other Jews and carried out a murderous raid against the Jewish community of Ein Gedi. Zionism does not require us to turn every ancient rebel into a plaster saint. Jewish history is strong enough to be told honestly.

But whatever we think of the Sicarii, the larger historical reality is unmistakable. After Jerusalem fell, Jewish men, women and children were still holding a fortress in Judea and refusing to submit to the empire that had destroyed their capital and Temple.

Rome could not tolerate that.

Around 73 or 74 CE, the Roman governor Lucius Flavius Silva marched against Masada with Legio X Fretensis and supporting forces. The Romans built eight military camps around the mountain and connected them with a siege wall, sealing the inhabitants inside. Much of that system remains visible today and constitutes what UNESCO calls the most complete surviving Roman siege works in the world.

Then the Romans began building the ramp.

They hauled earth and stone against Masada’s western face until their troops could push a siege tower and battering ram toward the wall. Think about the scale of that obsession. Rome committed a legion, engineers, laborers, camps, fortifications and months of work to crush a final group of Jews on a desert mountain.

Apparently, the Roman army failed to receive the modern memo explaining that Jews had no history in this country.

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The Last Night

Our only detailed account of Masada’s final hours comes from Josephus, who was not present at the siege. According to him, when Eleazar ben Yair realized the Romans would break through, he urged the inhabitants to die free rather than be captured, enslaved and abused.

Josephus wrote that 960 people died, with only two women and five children surviving after hiding in a cistern. Potsherds bearing names were later discovered, including one inscribed “Ben Yair.” They may have been the lots described by Josephus, although they may also have served an ordinary administrative purpose.

The mass-death narrative remains debated. Archaeology verifies the Roman siege, camps, wall, ramp, destruction and Jewish occupation, but it cannot prove every detail of Josephus’s dramatic account. Jewish law places extraordinary value on preserving life, making the story morally painful rather than romantically simple.

Masada should not be reduced to a slogan celebrating death. Its deeper Jewish meaning is the refusal to disappear.

Rome breached the wall and ended the revolt. Yet it failed in its larger objective. The Jewish people survived the destruction of Jerusalem, survived exile, preserved the Hebrew language, prayed toward this land for centuries and eventually returned to rebuild sovereignty.

Rome won the mountain for a night. The Jews won history.

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The Archaeology That Refuses to Shut Up

Masada is not merely a legend. It is physical evidence.

On its summit archaeologists uncovered a synagogue used during the final years of the Second Temple period. Stone benches lined its walls. Biblical parchment fragments were found in pits believed to have served as a genizah. Elsewhere on the mountain were portions of Psalms and other biblical texts, ritual baths, Hebrew and Aramaic writings, Jewish coins, domestic objects and the rooms where Jewish families lived.

Walk a little farther and look down. You can still see the camps of the Roman army, the siege wall and the ramp built to reach the Jewish defenders.

A synagogue above. A Roman legion below.

It is difficult to invent a clearer archaeological summary of Jewish history in Judea.

Masada cannot determine every modern boundary or private property dispute; archaeology is not a land registry. But it utterly demolishes the lie that Jews are recent foreign trespassers with no national history here. The fortress documents Jewish government, Jewish worship, Jewish resistance and Roman efforts to destroy them centuries before Islam existed and nearly two millennia before the State of Israel was reborn.

When activists call Jews “colonizers” in Judea, they are asking the world to ignore a mountain covered with Hebrew texts while surrounded by the camps of the foreign empire that came to suppress them. That is not scholarship. It is historical taxidermy—gutting the past and stuffing it into whatever political costume is fashionable this week.

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From Abandoned Ruin to Zionist Landmark

After the revolt, Roman troops occupied Masada. Centuries later, Byzantine monks established a small community on the summit and built a church whose mosaic floor can still be seen. When they departed in the sixth century, the mountain fell silent for more than 1,300 years.

Western explorers identified and surveyed the site during the nineteenth century, but its modern transformation began with the Zionist return. Yitzhak Lamdan’s 1927 Hebrew poem Masada turned the mountain into a symbol of Jewish survival. Youth movements began making difficult desert pilgrimages to the summit. Long before cable cars and air-conditioned visitor centers, young Jews climbed with packs, water and a stubbornness that probably alarmed their mothers.

Between 1963 and 1965, archaeologist and former IDF Chief of Staff Yigael Yadin led the great excavations of Masada. Thousands of volunteers from Israel and abroad participated. Archaeology became a national encounter: a generation rebuilding the Jewish state was uncovering the lives of the final generation that had lost it.

Masada became a national park in 1966. The first cable car opened in 1971, making the summit accessible to visitors who could not climb. It was replaced in 1998 by the current system, which reaches the summit in about three minutes and is wheelchair accessible. Masada was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. Its development into a major attraction did not happen because somebody added a gift shop. It happened because the site combines staggering scenery, world-class archaeology and a story that reaches directly into the identity of modern Israel. The official park history traces that transformation in detail.

Cable Car or Climb?

The cable car leaves from the eastern visitor center and rises almost vertically toward the Snake Path Gate. As the cabin climbs, the Dead Sea expands behind you and the desert floor falls away beneath your feet.

Taking it is not cheating. The Romans needed an entire legion and a gigantic ramp to reach the summit. You are allowed three minutes of Swiss engineering.

For hikers, the Snake Path is the classic ascent. It twists up the eastern face, gaining roughly 350 meters through exposed desert terrain. The climb usually takes about an hour and is demanding, particularly in the heat. Every turn reveals more of the Dead Sea until, near the summit, the water and mountains seem to fill the horizon.

The shorter option is the Roman Ramp trail from Masada’s western entrance, reached through Arad. It takes roughly half an hour and follows the route of the ancient Roman assault. The eastern and western entrances are not connected by a road around the mountain, so decide which side you want before blindly obeying your navigation app into the Judean Desert.

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Sunrise, Sunset and a Desert That Does Not Negotiate

Sunrise is Masada’s legendary experience. The Snake Path normally opens about an hour before sunrise, while the Roman Ramp opens about thirty minutes before it. Climbing through darkness and reaching the plateau as the sun clears the mountains of Moab is unforgettable.

The desert changes color by the minute—black to violet, violet to copper, copper to blazing gold. The Dead Sea catches the light below, while the Roman camps slowly appear out of the shadows. It feels less like watching a sunrise than watching history return to the land.

Sunset is different. The western cliffs burn orange and red, the air begins to cool and the desert stretches toward Arad in enormous folds of stone. Ordinary park and cable-car hours often end before actual sunset, so plan for the western campground, the night show or special extended-hour events rather than assuming you can remain on the summit. Current trail closures and schedules should always be checked with the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.

And take the heat seriously. In summer, the Snake Path may close early—sometimes very early—because the Judean Desert does not care about your vacation schedule, your fitness tracker or the fact that you once walked uphill in New Jersey. Bring water, cover your head and start before the sun begins behaving like a weapon.

Why Every Visitor to Israel Should Go

Visit Masada because the view is magnificent. Visit for Herod’s palaces, the mosaics, the cisterns, the synagogue and the astonishing Roman siege works. Visit because the hike will humble you and the cable car will delight your children.

But above all, visit because Masada exposes the absurdity of separating the Jewish people from the Land of Israel.

The mountain remembers the Hasmoneans. It remembers Herod, King of Judea. It remembers Jewish prayer, Hebrew scripture and families resisting Rome. It remembers the destruction of Jewish sovereignty—and it now overlooks a reborn Jewish state.

Below the summit sit the remains of the empire that tried to erase us. Above them fly Israeli flags.

The empire is an archaeological layer.

The Jews are home.

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I walked through the City of David today—the ridge where Jerusalem became Israel’s capital, Jewish engineers carved survival into bedrock, and 3,000 years of history refused to behave like a political slogan.

Today I walked into the City of David and watched a modern political slogan lose a fistfight with 3,000 years of stone.

The entrance sits just downhill from the Old City, only a few minutes from the Western Wall. Yet the first surprise is that ancient Jerusalem did not begin inside the walls tourists photograph today. Those walls are Ottoman, built under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century. Biblical Jerusalem began farther south, on a narrow limestone ridge squeezed between the Kidron Valley on the east and the ancient Tyropoeon Valley on the west, with the Gihon Spring bursting from its lower eastern slope.

That ridge is the City of David. Not a symbolic name invented for a visitor center. Not a neighborhood given a biblical nickname by an enthusiastic tour guide. It is the southeastern hill identified by the overwhelming weight of archaeology and topography as Jerusalem’s earliest urban core—the place the Hebrew Bible calls Ir David.

Jerusalem keeps her birth certificate underground. To read it, you descend staircases, pass walls built before Rome existed, squeeze through rock-cut passages and follow water engineered by Jewish hands twenty-seven centuries ago. It is history you feel in your knees.

Before Jerusalem, David Faced a Giant

The story of King David did not begin here. It began in Bethlehem, where the prophet Samuel anointed the youngest son of Jesse—the ruddy young shepherd nobody had bothered to call in from the fields.

Then came the Valley of Elah.

Across that valley stood the Philistine army and its champion, Goliath of Gath, a heavily armed warrior who spent forty days humiliating Israel and daring anyone to fight him. David arrived carrying food for his brothers, heard the taunts and reacted with the righteous disbelief of a teenager who had not yet learned that adults can become very sophisticated at explaining why cowardice is practical.

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He refused Saul’s armor because he could not move in it. He took his staff, his sling and five smooth stones from the streambed. Then he told Goliath exactly what was about to happen:

“You come against me with sword, spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.”

In Hebrew, the heart of that declaration is unforgettable: אָנֹכִי בָא־אֵלֶיךָ בְּשֵׁם ה׳ צְבָאוֹת—“I come to you in the name of the Lord of Hosts.”

David’s sling was not a child’s toy. In trained hands it was a battlefield weapon. The stone struck Goliath in the forehead, the giant crashed face-first into the earth, and David finished the fight with Goliath’s own sword. The Philistine army ran. Israel discovered that its future king was not impressed by size, armor, noise or expert predictions of inevitable defeat—a rather useful Jewish leadership trait, as history would repeatedly demonstrate.

Goliath fell in the Valley of Elah, not in Jerusalem. That distinction matters. The City of David tells the next stage of the story: how the shepherd who defeated a giant became the king who gave Israel its eternal capital.

Why David Chose Jerusalem

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After years of being hunted by Saul and after Saul’s death, David ruled from Hebron for seven years and six months. Eventually the tribes came to him and anointed him king over all Israel. He now needed a capital that could unite a fractured nation.

Hebron was deeply associated with Judah. Choosing a northern tribal center would have created the opposite problem. Jerusalem, then a Jebusite stronghold, sat near the boundary between Judah and Benjamin and belonged to no Israelite tribe as an established capital. It was centrally placed, naturally defended and politically brilliant.

It was also extremely difficult to capture.

The Jebusites were so confident in their fortress that, according to the Book of Samuel, they mocked David that even the blind and lame could keep him out. David captured the “fortress of Zion” anyway and renamed it the City of David. The biblical text mentions a tzinnor, a word connected with a shaft, conduit or water passage, although the exact route and method of entry remain debated. For years visitors were told that David’s soldiers climbed through the vertical passage now called Warren’s Shaft. Later excavations showed that explanation is far from certain. Honest archaeology does not need to turn every theory into dogma. The conquest is part of the ancient account; the precise underground maneuver remains an open question.

David established his residence here, fortified the city and built outward from the Millo. He brought the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, transforming the city into more than a seat of government. It became the political and spiritual heart of Israel.

That choice changed world history. Jerusalem would enter Jewish prayer, prophecy, mourning, marriage ceremonies and daily memory. Jews would face it in prayer. We would invoke it at funerals and under wedding canopies. We would end Passover Seders with Next year in Jerusalem while empires rose, renamed streets, rewrote maps and disappeared.

The empires are exhibits now. Jerusalem is still Jerusalem.

Solomon at the Gihon

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The Gihon Spring was not merely Jerusalem’s water supply. It was a stage on which Jewish kingship itself was secured.

Near the end of David’s life, his son Adonijah attempted to seize the throne. David responded by ordering that Solomon be placed on the king’s own mule and taken down to the Gihon. There, beside the spring, Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon. A shofar sounded and the people cried, “Long live King Solomon!” The celebration was so loud that the earth seemed to split with the noise.

Stand near the Gihon today and let that sink in. This is not a vague tradition attached to an unspecified Jerusalem hillside. The biblical narrative names the spring. The spring still flows. The geography still makes sense.

Solomon expanded the royal and sacred center northward toward the Ophel and the Temple Mount. According to the Book of Kings, he began building the Temple in the fourth year of his reign and completed it seven years later, using dressed stone and cedar supplied through his alliance with Hiram of Tyre. The Ark was brought into the Holy of Holies, and Jerusalem became the center of national worship.

David conquered the capital, purchased the threshing floor associated with the future Temple site and prepared the way. Solomon built. Between father and son, Jerusalem became the city that would define Jewish civilization.

Jerusalem Exists Because Water Exists

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Ancient cities did not survive on panoramic views and good intentions. They survived on water.

The Gihon is the reason settlement took root on this ridge. For much of its known history it behaved as a rhythmic or intermittent spring, surging and weakening in cycles. It was Jerusalem’s essential natural water source, but it emerged low on the eastern slope—an awkward and dangerous position whenever an enemy surrounded the city.

Long before David, Canaanite builders understood the problem. Around the eighteenth century BCE, they enclosed and defended the spring with an enormous fortification now called the Spring Citadel. Massive stones protected the source and controlled access from inside the city. They cut passages, channels and pools to collect water and carry it toward fields in the Kidron Valley.

The scale matters. David did not conquer an empty hill with three tents and a goat. He captured a formidable Canaanite-Jebusite city with sophisticated defenses and water engineering. Admitting that earlier history does not weaken the Jewish story; it makes David’s achievement intelligible. Every serious nation has predecessors. If an earlier civilization automatically canceled all later national rights, most of the world would need to pack immediately.

In 1867, British engineer Charles Warren crawled through the Gihon’s underground passages and discovered the near-vertical natural shaft that now bears his name. For decades scholars thought Jerusalem’s residents lowered buckets through it and that David’s men may have used it to enter the city. Excavations by Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron transformed that picture. The protected Canaanite approach to the spring was far more elaborate, and the shaft itself was probably not the bucket-drawing system Warren imagined.

That is what makes this site magnificent. It is not frozen. Every excavation sharpens the picture. The stones do not change, but our ability to question them does.

Hezekiah’s Answer to Assyria

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Roughly three centuries after David, Jerusalem faced an enemy that had already pulverized much of the region.

The Assyrian Empire destroyed the northern Kingdom of Israel in the late eighth century BCE. In 701 BCE, King Sennacherib invaded Judah and captured Lachish, the kingdom’s second great city. Jerusalem was next. Hezekiah understood the brutal arithmetic of siege warfare: walls without water are delayed coffins.

So Jerusalem turned geology into national defense.

The popular shorthand says Hezekiah’s Tunnel was built “during the siege.” More precisely, it was a siege-preparation project undertaken under the Assyrian threat. Hezekiah’s workers blocked or concealed access to the Gihon outside the defenses and redirected its water through the ridge toward the western side of the City of David, where it collected in the Pool of Siloam.

The tunnel runs about 533 meters through solid limestone. It twists in a great S-shaped path, yet the difference in elevation from beginning to end is only about thirty centimeters. Thirty centimeters across more than half a kilometer—without laser levels, satellite mapping or a civil engineer sending a passive-aggressive email about the revised deadline.

Two teams carved toward one another from opposite ends with picks and chisels. The mystery of how they coordinated their route underground is still debated. They may have followed natural cracks, surface markings, sound signals or a combination of methods. What is not debated is that they met.

We know because the workers left us their own account.

The Siloam Inscription, discovered in 1880 near the tunnel’s southern exit, was cut in ancient Hebrew script. Its surviving six lines describe the final breakthrough: workers heard one another’s voices through the rock, struck “pick against pick,” and watched the water flow from the spring to the pool for 1,200 cubits. It does not name Hezekiah, but its script belongs to the late eighth century BCE, scientific dating supports construction around that period, and its engineering matches the biblical descriptions of Hezekiah making a pool and conduit and directing the Gihon westward into the City of David.

The original inscription was removed during Ottoman rule and remains in Istanbul. Jerusalem has the tunnel; Turkey has the Hebrew label that explains it. History occasionally develops a very dark sense of humor.

Walking through the tunnel is unlike looking at an artifact behind glass. The water is cold around your legs. The passage narrows. Chisel marks run along the walls. Switch off the light and the darkness is absolute. Then remember that men entered that black rock from opposite directions while the most terrifying military empire of their age approached Judah.

This was not merely plumbing. It was Jewish survival carved into bedrock.

The Pools That Fed a Capital

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The Pool of Siloam developed over centuries rather than appearing in a single building campaign.

A monumental dam associated with the pool’s water system has now been scientifically dated to approximately 805–795 BCE, during the reigns of Kings Joash or Amaziah—earlier than Hezekiah. The exposed structure rises about twelve meters, is more than eight meters wide and extends at least twenty-one meters. It is the largest dam yet discovered in ancient Israel and the earliest known in Jerusalem. It captured water from the Gihon system as well as violent floodwater rushing through the city’s central valley. Ancient Jerusalem was already conducting large-scale water management before the Assyrian crisis forced Hezekiah’s famous tunnel project.

Hezekiah’s system later brought Gihon water to the Siloam area inside the defended city. Centuries afterward, near the end of the Second Temple period, the pool was rebuilt and dramatically enlarged. At its height it covered roughly five dunams and was lined with broad stone steps that allowed people to descend as the water level changed.

For Jewish pilgrims arriving for Passover, Shavuot or Sukkot, the pool likely served both practical and ritual purposes. From there, crowds ascended toward the Temple along the monumental stepped street now known as the Pilgrimage Road. Coins, paving stones, shops, drainage channels and the road itself reconstruct a living Jewish capital—not a sepia biblical illustration, but a city of merchants, priests, children, arguments, sacrifices, dust and enormous festival crowds.

The road leads north toward the Temple Mount. The direction is not politically convenient. Stone tends to be inconsiderate that way.

What the Excavations Have Actually Found

The City of David has been excavated by generations of archaeologists: Charles Warren in the nineteenth century; Kathleen Kenyon in the 1960s; Yigal Shiloh from 1978 to 1985; Eilat Mazar; Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron; and teams from the Israel Antiquities Authority, Tel Aviv University and other institutions working today.

The dating is becoming sharper as the science improves. A major 2024 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed 103 radiocarbon dates from five excavation areas. The samples came from secure archaeological contexts and included short-lived organic material that could be tied to specific building phases. The results found settlement on the ridge during the twelfth through tenth centuries BCE—the broad era in which the biblical account places David—and extensive architectural activity across Jerusalem by the ninth century BCE. It does not stamp David’s name on every wall. It does make the old caricature of an empty, irrelevant hill increasingly difficult to sustain.

Near the top of the ridge stands the immense Stepped Stone Structure, a terraced mass supporting the slope below the ancient acropolis. It may be connected with the biblical Millo, a royal fortress or another monumental construction. Above it, Eilat Mazar uncovered what she called the Large Stone Structure and proposed that it formed part of David’s palace. Other archaeologists dispute the identification and aspects of the dating. The fair description is thrilling enough: a monumental public complex stood in the upper City of David around the formative centuries of the kingdom, while the claim that it is David’s palace remains a serious but contested interpretation.

That distinction is important. The City of David does not need fake certainty. A site containing genuine ancient Hebrew inscriptions, royal administration, fortifications, houses, destruction layers and waterworks gains nothing from pretending every disputed wall arrived with a brass plaque saying DAVID SLEPT HERE.

Farther down the slope, excavations uncovered the administrative quarter of the Kingdom of Judah. Archaeologists found houses, storage vessels, arrowheads, a burned room and a remarkable group of fifty-one clay seal impressions known as bullae. These were once attached to rolled documents. The papyrus burned away, but the fire hardened the clay and preserved the names.

One bulla bears the name Gemaryahu son of Shaphan—the same name and patronymic carried by a royal scribe in the Book of Jeremiah. Other seal impressions bear names associated with officials mentioned in Jeremiah’s account of the final decades before Jerusalem’s destruction. A name match is not magical proof of every biographical detail, but it places Judahite officials, Hebrew writing and a functioning royal bureaucracy exactly where the historical setting says they belonged.

The destruction itself is visible. Babylonian forces burned Jerusalem in 586 BCE, destroyed the First Temple and carried much of the population into exile. Excavators have found collapsed buildings, charred pottery, arrowheads and ash from that catastrophe. In 2026, archaeologists announced the discovery of unusually well-preserved wooden roof beams burned in the Babylonian destruction. Melted wall plaster apparently sealed the timbers and protected them for roughly 2,600 years.

That is the City of David: the rise of Jerusalem, its water, its government, its worship, its destruction and its return, stacked in layers beneath a living city.

Now Let Us Discuss “East Jerusalem”

The phrase “East Jerusalem” is repeated today as if it describes an ancient foreign capital that Jews wandered into after taking a wrong turn in 1967.

Then you visit the City of David.

Here, in the part of Jerusalem placed east of the 1949 armistice line, David established Israel’s capital. Solomon was anointed at the Gihon. Judahite engineers redirected the spring. Hebrew workers recorded their tunnel in Hebrew. Royal officials sealed documents with Hebrew names. Jewish pilgrims climbed from the Pool of Siloam toward the Temple.

The modern compass label cannot retroactively deport them.

Does archaeology function as a deed to every privately owned house in modern Jerusalem? Of course not. That would be a ridiculous standard, and no country on earth could satisfy it. Individual property rights remain individual property rights. Archaeology establishes something larger and politically devastating to the fashionable lie: the Jewish people are not foreign settlers in Jerusalem. We are an indigenous nation returning to, rebuilding and governing the capital in which our national life was formed.

The Green Line through Jerusalem was not an ancient border. It was the military armistice line left after the 1948 war, and the Israel-Jordan agreement explicitly stated that the line did not prejudice future borders or territorial claims. Jordan controlled the eastern part of the city for nineteen years, expelled the Jews of the Old City’s Jewish Quarter and denied Jews access to our holiest places. That brief occupation is constantly treated as sacred legal antiquity while three millennia of Jewish connection are dismissed as mythology. It is an argument so upside down it should be charged rent for hanging from the ceiling.

Israel has the historical and moral right to exercise sovereignty over a united Jerusalem—west, east, north and south—and the responsibility to protect the civil and religious rights of every resident. Those principles do not contradict each other. Jewish sovereignty is not a demand to erase anyone else. It is a refusal to permit anyone else to erase us.

Archaeology alone does not create that right. Jewish memory, continuous attachment, national self-determination, lawful governance and the defense of the city all belong to the argument. Archaeology does something simpler: it destroys the claim that Jewish Jerusalem was invented yesterday.

If your theory of Jerusalem requires David, Solomon, Hezekiah, Jeremiah, the Gihon, the Siloam Inscription, the bullae and the Pilgrimage Road all to shut up, your theory is not history. It is propaganda wearing an academic scarf.

Go and Walk It

Do not experience the City of David through a thirty-second video filmed by a man who calls every old wall “incredible” and then sprints back to his tour bus. Go.

Take the guided biblical tour. Stand above the ridge and understand the valleys. Descend to the Gihon. Study the Canaanite defenses. Walk the dry ancient channel if you prefer, or put on water shoes and enter Hezekiah’s Tunnel with a light. Continue to the Pool of Siloam. If time allows, walk the Pilgrimage Road toward the Temple Mount and follow the route taken by Jewish worshippers two thousand years ago.

Bring your children. Bring Christians who want to understand the world of the Bible. Bring secular Jews who think Tanakh is merely a book they survived in school. Bring skeptics. Especially bring skeptics. Jerusalem is not frightened by questions.

The City of David is not a side attraction beneath the “real” Jerusalem. It is the opening chapter. It is where a shepherd’s courage became a kingdom, where a spring became a capital, where engineers answered an empire and where the stones keep returning Jewish history to the surface no matter how often the world tries to rebury it.

Come argue with the stones. They have been waiting 3,000 years, and they are terribly patient.

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By Friday afternoon, Tzfat had attempted to murder my knees, confuse my GPS, and force me into a deeply personal relationship with gravity.

Every street is either a staircase, the beginning of a staircase, or a staircase pretending to be a road. Google Maps tells you to turn right. There is no right. There is a blue door, three cats and a wall built when the Ottoman Empire still had a functioning complaints department.

The entire city is so vertically unequal that Amnesty International may soon issue a report. Ireland will recognize the lower alley as an oppressed state. The United Nations will condemn the upper city for disproportionate elevation.

This is Tzfat.

High in the Upper Galilee, wrapped in cool mountain air and Jewish history, Tzfat does not gently introduce itself. It grabs you by the ankles and drags you uphill through five centuries of mysticism.

White stone. Blue railings. Arched passageways. Ancient synagogues wedged into alleys barely wide enough for one rabbi and half an argument. Through gaps between rooftops, the green mountains roll toward Meron.

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Then Friday begins its usual Israeli military operation: acquire challah, finish cooking, find the missing shoe, shower the children, iron a shirt and discover that candle-lighting is somehow seven minutes earlier than every person in the house believed.

In Tzfat, the entire operation happens uphill.

Yet as sunset approaches, the city changes.

Shops close. Cars vanish. Aluminum trays disappear through doorways. Men in white shirts hurry toward shul. Women light candles behind old windows. The frantic machinery of Friday suddenly shuts down, and the mountain exhales.

Tzfat becomes quiet.

Not dead quiet. Living quiet.

You can hear footsteps on stone. A chair moving across a floor. A child calling from an upstairs window. The first notes of prayer slipping out of a synagogue.

Then comes Lecha Dodi.

This is its hometown.

Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz composed the hymn here during Tzfat’s extraordinary sixteenth-century golden age. The mystics would go out toward the fields at sunset to greet Shabbat as a queen and bride. That practice became Kabbalat Shabbat, carried from these Galilean hills into Jewish communities across the planet.

Every Friday night, Jews in Morocco, Poland, Yemen, Baghdad, Johannesburg, Scottsdale and Efrat sing words born in Tzfat.

Think about that. A mountain town with no airport, no seaport and no marketing department created one of the most universal moments in Jewish life.

TikTok influencers beg for twelve seconds of attention. Tzfat released Lecha Dodi nearly five hundred years ago, and it still trends every Friday night.

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Standing in shul, hearing those words rise against the stone walls, I understood that this was not merely another melody before Maariv. This was the home-field anthem.

Nobody asked us to visualize abundance. Nobody distributed healing crystals. Nobody charged $1,800 for a “transformative sound journey” followed by organic cucumber water.

We sang.

That was enough.

Tzfat became a Jewish intellectual powerhouse after the expulsion from Spain in 1492 sent Jewish refugees across the Ottoman world. Scholars, merchants, rabbis and mystics arrived carrying Torah, commercial experience and memories of homes stolen from them.

They built again.

The city developed a thriving textile industry, but its most valuable exports were ideas.

Rabbi Yosef Karo lived and taught here. His Shulchan Aruch became the foundation of practical Jewish law, guiding Jewish life from the kitchen to the synagogue.

Rabbi Moshe Cordovero organized generations of Kabbalistic thought into a coherent system.

Then Rabbi Yitzchak Luria—the Ari—arrived in Tzfat around 1570. He taught here for roughly two years before dying at only thirty-eight, yet those two years transformed Jewish mysticism.

Two years.

I have kept bottles of salad dressing longer than the Ari taught in Tzfat, and the salad dressing has influenced absolutely nobody.

The Ari’s teachings about creation, concealment, shattered vessels and spiritual repair reshaped the Jewish understanding of human responsibility. A mitzvah was never merely a private religious act. Prayer was not empty recitation. Every Jewish action carried weight far beyond the visible world.

Empires could exile a Jew, tax him, humiliate him and steal his house. They could not make him irrelevant.

That idea is pure Jewish defiance.

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Tzfat placed Jewish law and Jewish mysticism in neighboring alleys. Rabbi Yosef Karo taught Jews how to live. The Ari explained why the universe trembles when they do.

The modern wellness industry now sells “intentional living” in beige packaging. Tzfat did it with Torah, mitzvot, a minyan and no promotional code.

Then came the Shabbat meal.

Wine. Challah. Hot food. Torah. Singing. Actual human conversation without a glowing rectangle interrupting every eleven seconds to announce that a celebrity has changed shampoo brands.

A Shabbat table in Tzfat obeys its own laws of physics. An extra chair appears. A visitor discovers that the host knows his cousin. One niggun lasts fourteen minutes. By dessert, everyone has shared a Torah insight, a family history and a medical opinion despite nobody present having attended medical school.

This is Israel. We contain multitudes, and all of them recommend magnesium.

Outside, songs drift through open windows. One melody ends and another begins farther down the alley. The city becomes a scattered choir.

Western retreats charge thousands for a “digital detox.” Shabbat provides the original package every week: wine, bread, prayer, family, silence and a nap. Tzfat throws in mountain views and cardiovascular punishment at no additional charge.

On Shabbat morning, the old city glows.

The cats move through the alleys like reincarnated synagogue officials. They know where everybody sits. They disapprove of visitors. One stared at me with the unmistakable expression of a gabbai who believed I had folded my tallit incorrectly.

Tzfat’s synagogues hold melodies and customs carried from North Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and ancient communities scattered by exile. Sephardi prayer, Ashkenazi prayer, Hasidic song and Kabbalistic meditation occupy the same few streets.

Jewish history refuses to remain inside museum display cases here. It sings, argues, eats, prays and occasionally blocks the alley while carrying six trays of kugel.

Yet Tzfat’s beauty was not manufactured by a tourism board.

In 1837, a catastrophic earthquake tore the city apart and killed thousands. Jewish neighborhoods were devastated. The community rebuilt.

In 1948, Tzfat’s Jewish Quarter endured siege and brutal fighting. Jewish defenders and Palmach forces fought to keep the city in Jewish hands. Against terrifying odds, they succeeded.

The mysticism of Tzfat was never the luxury spirituality of bored celebrities. It emerged from exile, poverty, persecution, rebuilding and an absolute refusal to surrender Jewish identity.

These rabbis were not hiding from reality. They were creating a language strong enough to survive it.

Today, Hebrew is spoken openly in the streets. Jewish children run through alleys where earlier generations struggled merely to remain. Israeli flags fly above stone buildings. Synagogues are protected by a sovereign Jewish state.

The Kabbalists prayed for redemption. Modern Israel delivers it—with traffic, municipal taxes and parking tickets, because apparently even redemption requires bureaucracy.

Shabbat afternoon arrives slowly in Tzfat. The sun slides across the Galilee. The hills deepen in color. At seudah shlishit, the melodies become softer because everyone knows Shabbat is preparing to leave.

There is an ache in that final hour.

Then three stars appear.

Wine spills into the cup. Spices pass from hand to hand. The braided Havdalah flame flickers against the stone.

And the phones awaken like demons released from tiny black prisons.

Within thirty seconds, WhatsApp has eighty-six messages. Eighty-four are irrelevant. Two are asking for money.

But for twenty-five hours, the mountain won.

If you visit Israel and skip Tzfat, you have left out an entire register of Jewish civilization. Jerusalem carries Jewish sovereignty and sacred longing. Hebron holds our oldest family memories. Tiberias preserves the voices of the sages. Tzfat gave the Jewish world the language of its inner life—and the soundtrack to Friday night.

Come before Shabbat. Wear serious shoes; fashionable sandals are a suicide pact. Walk through the old Jewish quarter. Enter the ancient synagogues. Explore the galleries. Look toward Mount Meron. Buy the cheese. Then put the phone away.

Do not merely photograph Tzfat. Let it happen to you.

I left with aching legs, a full stomach and a dangerous clarity: Jewish history is not buried. It is singing behind a blue door, halfway up a staircase, waiting for sunset.

Tzfat broke my knees, restored my sense of proportion and made a five-hundred-year-old song feel like breaking news.

Book the trip. Bring a sweater.

And when Google Maps says your destination is only two hundred meters away, remember: in Tzfat, those meters are vertical.

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Haifa attacks vertically.

The sea is at your feet, Mount Carmel is in your face, and every place you want to visit appears to be directly above or below wherever you happen to be standing. The city planner’s guiding philosophy was apparently: let them buy stronger knees.

I spent the day moving through Haifa by foot, bus, cable car and sheer determination—from the Bahá’í Gardens to the story of Aliyah Bet, from sand sculptures on the beach to a cold drink at Rebar, and finally to excellent Italian pizza beside the Dan Panorama, where I am staying. By the end of it, I had crossed religions, empires, mountains, beaches, shopping malls and several thousand years of Jewish memory. This is normal in Israel. In another country, the itinerary would require three flights and a visa.

The garden that runs down a mountain

My first stop was the Bahá’í Gardens, the immense green staircase that descends Mount Carmel toward Haifa’s German Colony and the Mediterranean. Photographs capture the symmetry. They do not capture the absurd precision of the place. Every hedge looks as though it has undergone military inspection. Every flower appears to have signed a contract promising never to lean in the wrong direction. Even the gravel behaves itself—which, in Israel, may qualify as an open miracle.

At the center stands the golden-domed Shrine of the Báb. The Bahá’í faith began in nineteenth-century Persia. In 1844, a young merchant known as the Báb proclaimed a new religious mission and prepared the way for Bahá’u’lláh, whom Bahá’ís regard as the faith’s principal founder. The Báb was executed by a Persian firing squad in 1850. Bahá’u’lláh was persecuted, imprisoned and eventually banished by the Ottoman authorities to Acre in 1868. That exile tied the new faith to this corner of the Land of Israel. The Báb’s remains were later brought to Mount Carmel, and the shrine and terraces developed into the spiritual and administrative heart of the Bahá’í world.

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The gardens contain nineteen terraces, reflecting a number with deep importance in Bahá’í tradition. They form a straight, almost ceremonial line down the Carmel, with the blue Mediterranean beyond them and the port spread below. It is one of the great urban views in the country.

I am an Orthodox Jew. Visiting a beautiful place does not require me to dissolve my beliefs into a bowl of interfaith porridge. I did not go to participate in another religion, borrow its rituals or pretend that every theology says the same thing in different hats. It does not. I went to see a remarkable work of human design and to witness one of the clearest demonstrations of what Jewish sovereignty looks like when it is confident.

Israel protects this site. Think about that for a moment. The Bahá’í faith was born in Iran, where Bahá’ís have endured relentless persecution. In the Jewish state, their world center sits openly on Mount Carmel, its golden dome shining above a mixed Jewish-Arab city. The Middle East is crowded with regimes that cannot tolerate the wrong prayer, the wrong opinion or, on a particularly nervous Tuesday, the wrong haircut. Israel protects a minority faith’s holy places and lets its gardens dominate the skyline. Irony, apparently, has excellent irrigation.

Below the terraces lies the German Colony, founded by German Templers in 1868—the very year Bahá’u’lláh arrived as an Ottoman prisoner in Acre. That single date captures Haifa perfectly: religious movements, imperial decisions and foreign communities all arriving on the same patch of coast, each leaving another layer behind. Haifa is not a museum set. It is a city built out of overlapping footnotes, except the footnotes have balconies, cafés and impossible parking.

The cable car: because roads are for flatter cities

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From the gardens I took a bus toward the cable car linking Bat Galim with the Stella Maris ridge. Haifa does not merely sit on Mount Carmel; it clings to it, argues with it and occasionally hangs public transportation from a wire above it.

The small cable cars rise beside the cliff with the Mediterranean opening beneath them. One moment you are near the water; minutes later you are looking across the bay from the Carmel. The geography explains Haifa’s entire personality. Jerusalem faces inward, toward stone, memory and holiness. Haifa faces outward, toward ships, trade, movement and the horizon. Yet Mount Carmel carries its own fierce biblical memory. This is the landscape of Eliyahu HaNavi, where the prophet confronted the priests of Baal and demanded that Israel stop limping between loyalties. Long before cable cars floated over Bat Galim, Carmel was already a mountain of Jewish conviction.

The area around Stella Maris also reflects the city’s religious complexity. Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions have all attached meaning to sites on the Carmel. I can recognize that history without compromising who I am. My frame remains Jewish, Orthodox and unapologetic: this is the mountain of Eliyahu, overlooking a modern city in a sovereign Jewish state. Religious freedom does not require Jewish amnesia. In fact, it works best when nobody is forced to forget who they are.

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And then there is the cable car itself, bobbing above the cliff like a glass egg that has made several questionable life choices. It is scenic, slightly strange and completely Haifa.

The museum where “nevertheless” became policy

Near Bat Galim, I visited the Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum. This was not merely another stop. It was the emotional center of the day.

The museum tells the story of Ha’apala—the effort to bring Jews into Mandatory Palestine in defiance of British restrictions—and the creation of Israel’s navy. The underground immigration operation was also known as Aliyah Bet. It was organized largely through the Haganah’s Mossad LeAliyah Bet, with the Palyam, the Palmach’s naval arm, providing commanders and crews. Its mission was brutally simple: bring Jews home when the gates had been slammed shut.

Britain issued the White Paper of 1939 just as Europe was becoming a death trap. Jewish immigration to the ancestral Jewish homeland was sharply restricted at the precise moment Jews needed escape most. The bureaucratic language sounded clean. Bureaucratic language always does. Behind the quotas were human beings trapped under Nazi rule while British officials guarded the coast of Palestine from Jewish refugees.

After the Holocaust, survivors crowded onto aging ships in European ports. They had already endured ghettos, camps, forests, hiding places and death marches. Then they were told that reaching the Land of Israel required one more confrontation—with the Royal Navy.

The ships of Aliyah Bet were rarely luxurious. Many were old, overloaded and dangerously unsuited to the voyage. Passengers slept packed together with little food, poor sanitation and no guarantee that the vessel would reach shore. British patrols intercepted many of them. Refugees were taken to detention camps at Atlit or deported to camps in Cyprus. The Exodus 1947 became the most famous case: thousands of Holocaust survivors were seized by the British and forced back to Europe. Nothing says imperial wisdom quite like putting Jewish survivors behind barbed wire after liberating them from behind barbed wire.

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The museum’s centerpiece is the ship Af Al Pi Chen—Hebrew for “Nevertheless.” That name contains an entire national character.

You cannot come in.

Nevertheless.

The British Navy is waiting.

Nevertheless.

The world has abandoned you, Europe has murdered your families, and diplomats are preparing another very serious document.

Nevertheless, the Jews are going home.

Standing beside that vessel, Aliyah stops being an abstract chapter in a history book. You see the cramped interior. You imagine survivors at sea, chased by the fleet of an empire because they insisted on living as Jews in the Land of Israel. The State of Israel was not presented to us at a polite ceremony because the international community finally developed a conscience. Jews organized, sailed, fought, absorbed refugees and built the machinery of sovereignty while much of the world explained why the timing was inconvenient.

Haifa was central to that transformation. Its modern importance grew under Ottoman and British rule. In 1761, the regional ruler Zahir al-Umar relocated and fortified the town. In the late Ottoman period, rail links tied Haifa to the interior and to Damascus. Under the British Mandate, a deep-water port, railway infrastructure, oil facilities and heavy industry turned Haifa into a strategic hub. By 1948, whoever held Haifa held one of the essential gateways into the country.

The city became a gateway not only for cargo but for Jews returning from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and beyond. The story moves naturally from clandestine ships to the Israeli Navy because sovereignty changed the question. Before 1948, Jews needed secret networks to reach their own homeland. After 1948, a Jewish state could defend its coast, open its ports and decide for itself that Jewish refugees would never again need foreign permission to come home.

That is Zionism in steel, saltwater and stubbornness.

Sand kingdoms beside the real one

After the museum, I went to the sandcastle exhibition on Haifa’s beach. The transition was wonderfully Israeli: one minute I was staring into the hold of an immigration ship and thinking about the British blockade; the next I was inspecting giant sculptures made from beach sand while children ran around with kites.

The sculptures were intricate, enormous and completely vulnerable to wind, water and one determined five-year-old. Artists had turned ordinary sand into towers, faces, creatures and entire imaginary worlds. It was playful, technically astonishing and a perfect excuse for adults to stand around pretending the children were the reason they wanted to see it.

Beyond the exhibit, the real Haifa was carrying on. Jewish and Arab families shared the beach. Children flew kites into the same Mediterranean wind. People ate, laughed, argued, took photographs and attempted to stop sand from entering places sand considers sovereign territory. Nobody had been assembled for a diplomatic photo. There was no orchestra playing “coexistence music.” It was simply life.

That matters because Haifa’s mixed character is often described either with syrupy fantasy or relentless doom. The truth is more interesting. Jews and Arabs do not agree on everything. No city inhabited by actual human beings enjoys permanent harmony; most families cannot even agree on air-conditioning. Yet Haifa has developed a daily civic rhythm that is distinctly its own—shared hospitals, universities, businesses, buses, restaurants, beaches and public spaces. Hebrew and Arabic sit side by side. Religious Jews, secular Jews, Muslims, Christians, Bahá’ís and visitors from everywhere move through the same steep city.

This is the Israel television panels rarely show: not an airbrushed utopia, and certainly not the cartoon apartheid state invented by activists who could not locate Bat Galim with a flare gun. It is a loud, imperfect, democratic country in which difference is visible and ordinary. Arabs and Jews flying kites on a Haifa beach will never trend as widely as a riot. Reality has terrible public relations.

The sandcastles offered their own accidental history lesson. Empires have ruled this coastline—the Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Ottomans and British. Each believed its arrangements were permanent. Most of those arrangements now have roughly the durability of a sand dragon at high tide. The Jewish people, meanwhile, returned, rebuilt Haifa and opened its beaches to the ordinary chaos of life.

Civilization, served cold at Rebar

By late afternoon I reached Rebar at Azrieli Mall Haifa. After gardens, buses, cable cars, ships, museums and beach sand, a cold drink was no longer a luxury. It was emergency infrastructure.

The mall sits in the southern part of the city, another reminder that Haifa is not frozen in its historic port. It stretches along the coast, up the mountain and into modern commercial centers. The city contains oil refineries and research laboratories, ancient caves and high-tech offices, monasteries and synagogues, falafel counters and chain stores. It is both industrial and beautiful—an unlikely combination, like a dockworker who secretly grows orchids.

Rebar restored me to operating condition. Israel has perfected the art of taking fruit, ice and several ingredients I cannot pronounce and turning them into something that convinces you that walking all day was a health decision rather than poor planning.

Then came dinner.

Near the Dan Panorama, where I am staying high on the Carmel, I found a pizza shop serving delicious Italian pizza. This was exactly the correct ending. Not a tasting menu. Not a foam. Not a microscopic tomato resting on a plate the size of the Kinneret. Pizza—hot, generous and capable of settling every argument except whether pineapple is an act of culinary terrorism.

From that part of the Carmel, Haifa spreads below in layers: neighborhoods descending the slope, the golden dome, the port cranes, the curve of the bay and the lights reaching toward the Galilee. The city looks magnificent at night, but it looks earned. Haifa did not become beautiful by hiding its industry, history or contradictions. It put them all on the mountain and switched on the lights.

Come see the Israel that refuses to fit on a poster

Haifa deserves more than a quick photograph of the Bahá’í Gardens before tourists race off to the next famous site. Give it a full day. Better yet, give it several.

Come for the view down Mount Carmel, but learn why a Persian-born faith found safety here. Ride the cable car, but remember Eliyahu HaNavi and the ancient Jewish memory embedded in the ridge. Visit the clandestine immigration museum and stand inside the word “nevertheless.” Walk the beach and watch Jewish and Arab children launch kites into the same sky. Examine a kingdom made of sand. Drink something cold. Eat the pizza. Israel is holy, but holiness does not prohibit carbohydrates.

Haifa is thrilling because it refuses to behave like a single story. It is biblical and modern, Jewish and mixed, sacred and industrial, solemn and ridiculous. It remembers refugee ships while children build castles beside the sea. It protects the gardens of another faith beneath the sovereignty of the Jewish people. It climbs a mountain, hangs cable cars over the cliff and assumes everyone will cope.

This is not the Israel sold by propaganda, either hostile or sentimental. It is better. It is alive.

And tonight, from the Dan Panorama, with the lights of Haifa below and the last evidence of Italian pizza rapidly disappearing, alive looks very good indeed.

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The air is different.

Laugh if you want. Bring your scientist. Bring your oxygen meter. Bring your PhD and your clipboard. Stand on Har HaBayit for twenty minutes and tell me it’s just another hill.

It’s not.

There are places you visit.

Then there are places that visit you.

Har HaBayit grabs you by the soul.

I’ve stood all over Israel. On the cliffs of Rosh HaNikra. In the Judean Desert. On Masada at sunrise. In the Galilee when the mist hangs over the mountains. They’re breathtaking.

None of them feel like this.

Because this isn’t just scenery.

This is the address where Jewish history keeps refusing to die.

Every empire wanted this mountain.

The Babylonians.

The Romans.

The Crusaders.

The Ottomans.

Every one of them thought, “We’ll be here forever.”

Cute.

Where are they now?

Tour guides.

Museum exhibits.

Broken stones.

The Jews?

Still arguing.

Still praying.

Still showing up.

Still saying, “Am Yisrael Chai.”

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That has to be one of the greatest long-term victories in human history.

Imagine telling a Jew being marched into exile by Rome:

“Don’t worry. In two thousand years your descendants will speak Hebrew again, rebuild Jerusalem, have one of the strongest militaries on earth, grow wine in these hills again, invent life-saving technology, and fly their own flag over the capital.”

He would’ve thought you escaped from the local asylum.

Yet here we are.

That’s Israel.

Impossible has a terrible winning percentage here.

And then you walk onto Har HaBayit.

Everything slows down.

You stop looking at stones.

You start seeing generations.

You think about King David.

You think about Shlomo.

You think about the Kohanim.

You think about millions of Jews scattered across every continent who ended every Pesach with the same impossible sentence:

“Next year in Jerusalem.”

Not Paris.

Not London.

Not New York.

Jerusalem.

Every.

Single.

Year.

For two thousand years.

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Find me another nation that carried one dream that long without dropping it.

I’ll wait.

The world is obsessed with this mountain.

Think about how ridiculous that is.

The planet has roughly 149 million square kilometers of land.

Israel is a tiny sliver of it.

Jerusalem is a tiny piece of Israel.

The Old City is a tiny piece of Jerusalem.

Har HaBayit is a tiny piece of the Old City.

Yet diplomats lose sleep over it.

The UN writes resolutions about it.

Empires fought wars over it.

News channels obsess over it.

For a place everyone claims isn’t important... humanity seems weirdly incapable of shutting up about it.

Maybe because somewhere deep down, everyone knows this mountain matters.

Jews don’t face this mountain because it’s convenient.

We face it because it’s home.

Every synagogue points here.

Every generation remembered it.

Every wedding remembers it.

Every fast day mourns it.

Every prayer carries it.

This mountain has occupied more Jewish hearts than any army has ever occupied land.

And yes, religious Jews pray every day for the rebuilding of the Beit HaMikdash. That prayer has been part of Jewish liturgy for centuries. It isn’t a modern invention. It isn’t a political slogan. It’s one of the oldest hopes our people have ever carried.

Stand there long enough.

Take one deep breath.

If all you feel is oxygen...

You missed it.

If you feel the weight of three thousand years pressing gently on your shoulders...

Welcome home.

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