Tuesday, June 9, 2026
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Ignorance of the Law is no excuse

By
​Center for Near East Policy Research
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A few weeks ago, President Trump made a bombastic declaration that he would not allow Israel to annex the “West Bank“. He later explained that his imperial diktat was based on a promise he’d allegedly made to several unnamed Arab leaders, whose friendship he apparently valued more than his adherence to American law.

When I pointed this fact out to several Foreign Ministry officials, the look of incomprehension on the faces of these bureaucrats told me all I needed to know about their total ignorance of what I was talking about.

Few people are aware of the fact that the San Remo Agreement granted our people sovereign rights over Judaea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

Fewer people, unfortunately, are aware of the fact that this agreement was accepted by the League of Nations as the law that governed Britain’s handling of its Palestine Mandate.

Not surprisingly, hardly anyone realizes that this law was subsequently accepted by the United Nations as binding international law.

What absolutely astounds me, though, is that absolutely no one within the Israeli diplomatic corps seems to be aware of the fact that the 1924 Anglo American Treaty legally bound the American government to honor San Remo’s recognition of Jewish ownership of both the Territories and Jerusalem. Since Washington had not joined the League of Nations, Great Britain decided to sign a separate treaty with the U.S. committing the latter to honoring San Remo’s recognition of Jewish sovereignty over the Territories. The eventual treaty was later confirmed by the U.S. Senate and signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge.

In other words, President Trump actually broke American law when he arbitrarily threatened to punish us if we dared to annex the “West Bank”. I guess the fact that we wouldn’t be annexing land that legally belonged to us in the first place went straight over the President’s head. Of course, if President Trump wants to void the 1924 Treaty, all he has to do is to get two thirds of the Senate to abrogate it. And that, simply put, isn’t going to happen. So the 1924 Anglo American Treaty stands as U.S. law – and Trump, in his ignorance, broke it.

There’s an old expression that ignorance of the law is no excuse for having committed a crime. I think that best describes President Trump’s violation of the Anglo American Treaty of 1924. Clearly, he had absolutely no right to promise his Arab friends something that he had no legal right to offer. On the other hand, Bibi’s “crime” is that he hasn’t summoned the courage to act on this Treaty by officially announcing the application of Israeli sovereignty over Judaea and Samaria as per our right under the 1924 Anglo American Treaty.

Luckily, there is still time, though, for him to do so. He just has to start acting like the leader of an independent country and not a servile doormat for President Trump.

Flow chart; about Palestiinian texts used in a;ll PA and UNRWA schools

By
​Center for Near East Policy Research
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Our agency has access to all texts used in all UNRWA and PA schools since the PA established its own school system on August 1, 2000. That access was facilitated by Yassir Arafat, head of the PLO who died in 2004. That access continues to this day.

On behalf of our news and research agency, Dr. Arnon Groiss has reviewed all PA texts used in UNRWA school books since August 1, 2000 and shared that research with The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.
These are our reports on PA/UNRWA education and posted at The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center

https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/?s=groiss

A senior Israel government official asked to share our research
with US officials arriving to discuss “Gaza stabilization” efforts at the new improvised
Centcom HQ in Kiryat Malachi. I readily agreed

A senior IDF official asked me to travel to Kiryat Gat to present our research to the Centcom staff.

However, both Israel and US official made it clear that policy officials had no intent to stop the incitement and indoctrination to war which characterize all UNRWA and PA schools education in all Palestinian schools
.
Neither the US or Israel express any interest in removing Hamas teachers who dominate UNRWA schools.

https://israelbehindthenews.com/?s=hamas+unrwa

BBC forced to correct two Gaza stories a week

By
​Center for Near East Policy Research
-

The BBC has been forced to correct two stories a week about the Gaza conflict since the Oct 7 attacks on Israel, The Telegraph can reveal.

BBC Arabic has had to make 215 corrections and clarifications over the past two years on stories that were found to be biased, inaccurate or misleading.

The figures follow a week of revelations by The Telegraph of one-sided reporting at the BBC, disclosed in an 8,000-word dossier compiled by a whistleblower, which also accused BBC Arabic of choosing to “minimise Israeli suffering” in the war in Gaza to “paint Israel as the aggressor”.

On Monday, the BBC is also expected to apologise for the misleading editing of a Donald Trump speech in a Panorama documentary, putting further pressure on Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, to quit.

The media bias campaign group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera) obtained the corrections after more than 100 of its complaints over BBC Arabic’s coverage were upheld. They work out as an average of two stories a week.

One of its complaints involved a BBC Arabic report in January this year about the treatment of hostages by the Al-Qassam Brigade, in which the Hamas unit was described as “guarding” the hostages and being “responsible for securing the hostages”, rather than holding them captive.

BBC Arabic – which is part of the World Service and is funded mainly through the licence fee – has also been forced to make more than 40 corrections after Camera complained about stories that incorrectly referred to communities inside Israel’s internationally recognised territory as “settlements” and their residents as “settlers”.

Responding to the figures, Baroness Deech, a former BBC governor, said the broadcaster’s own Executive Complaint Unit (ECU) has failed in its obligation as an internal standards watchdog.

She said: “While BBC Arabic rightly continues to receive condemnation from politicians from all sides of the House for its repeated breaches of BBC guidelines and its flagrant anti-Israel bias, the BBC’s ECU considers it to be entirely blameless.

“The ECU is turning a blind eye to bias within BBC Arabic. We need an independent complaints process because the BBC simply cannot be trusted to mark its own homework.”

Michael Prescott, who until June was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC), was so appalled by the corporation’s lack of action over numerous instances of bias that he sent a memo to all BBC board members, which is now circulating in government departments.

In a copy of the letter, which was last week published by The Telegraph, he said that BBC Arabic gave a platform to journalists who had made extreme anti-Semitic comments.

Among the examples of bias highlighted by both Camera and Mr Prescott were the differences in stories about an attack by Hamas on Oct 1 2024 that killed seven Israeli civilians in Jaffa.

While the BBC News English version reported how the civilians were killed on a train and railway platform, the BBC Arabic version presented the attack as a military operation with no mention of the civilian victims.

Another BBC Arabic report in January this year described the Al-Qassam Brigade as “guarding” the hostages and as being “responsible for securing the hostages”, rather than holding them captive.

It also featured two female Israeli hostages “thanking” their captors for the “good treatment” they received while “in custody”.

WATCH: Violent Anti-Israel Protesters Attack Toronto Students at Event Featuring IDF Soldiers

By
​Center for Near East Policy Research
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Violent protesters attacked participants at a “Combat on Campus” event attended by Toronto Metropolitan students and featuring IDF soldiers. Several participants were hospitalized with bleeding injuries caused by shattered glass.

Healing the mind: Israel’s next frontline is the battle for recovery

By
​Center for Near East Policy Research
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“We must ensure that investment in mental health does not remain a slogan but becomes a reality, based on resources of both body and spirit. This is a national mission, saving lives in the broadest sense.” – Michal Herzog, the president’s wife, at the National Mental Health Conference, September 30, 2025.

That call from Michal Herzog has stayed with me. It defines where Israel stands today.

Three weeks after the return of the hostages, the country is breathing again, yet the wound is far from healed.

The 2024 Mental Health Division Report, presented at the same conference, paints a stark picture. PTSD rates have nearly doubled to around 61% among those directly exposed to attacks.

More than 100,000 Israelis have begun PTSD treatment since October 7, most suffering from prolonged stress. One in five Israelis reports increased dependence on medication or alcohol.

And 2025 is not over yet. The brief but searing 12-day Iran-Israel War in June has already deepened the national trauma.

At the same time, international experts are warning of the long-term impact. Prof. Yuval Neria, head of the Post-Trauma Research and Treatment Program at Columbia University, cautioned that “it may take a hundred years to process October 7.”

A decorated veteran of the Yom Kippur War, Neria predicts that Israel could face as many as one million post-trauma cases, stressing that “the country cannot heal without rescuing these multitudes of wounded souls.”

I heard the same urgency much closer to home. In the Negev, a senior rehabilitation specialist told me something I cannot forget: “An IDF reservist today can wait six months in Ashdod for a first appointment with a rehabilitation physician, three months in Beersheba at best.”

For someone trying to return to work, to parenting, or to sleep, those months are an eternity. This is the landscape in which we are asking communities to rebuild and professionals to keep standing.

Resilience in motion

This is why the way we organize care matters as much as care itself. In the fragile weeks surrounding the hostages’ return, Mahut Israel, a leading resilience organization, moved quickly.

“The deal for the return of the hostages activated us deeply across the communities,” said Yael Shapira, Mahut’s CEO.

“We convened a guidance Zoom at sunrise. More than 110 therapists and social workers joined to receive insights and direction from Miriam Shapira, an expert on trauma and bereavement, on how to prepare for meetings with residents of the Gaza envelope.”

Yael described faces filling the screen, with eyes carrying weight and purpose.

Participants asked how to help people hold relief and grief at once, how to face survivor’s guilt, and how to steady classrooms and clinics.

“The work of resilience does not end with the hostages’ return,” she said. “Community resilience is a continuous process. We have been with them from day one, and we remain beside them now.”

From vision to practice

Founded in 1989, Mahut, meaning “essence,” has become a national framework for trauma preparedness. 

Working with the Israel Trauma Coalition, government ministries, and local municipalities, Mahut trains welfare teams, school leaders, and emergency responders to lead with emotional awareness.

“When a mayor, principal, or team leader recognizes the emotional reality of their people, the entire community becomes more stable,” Miriam Shapira, Mahut’s founder and clinical psychologist, told me.

In recent webinars, she named what many feel: “a deep exhaustion that lives in the body when the psyche can no longer scream.” The task, she says, is to find hope inside that exhaustion.

Finding hope is not abstract. In the western Negev, communities are facing an ongoing complex reality: two years of evacuation, war, and the long fight to bring the hostages home, alongside attempts to restore routine.

Can they celebrate? Has trust returned? Not yet. This is a phase Israel has never known, and the way to thrive is with the support of those who intimately know the communities and how to ignite and hold on to a sense of hope.

Recognizing the unseen

Mahut’s initiative “Family Circle – We See You” meets the second and third circles of trauma, the families of survivors, victims, and hostages. Developed with the Jewish Agency, Bituach Leumi, and the Fund for Victims of Terror, it centers on recognition and the power of a supporting peer group.

“Our mission is to let people feel seen,” said Michal Leizerovitch, Mahut’s director of organizational development.

“Especially mothers and relatives who carry their families’ pain in silence. They deserve acknowledgment for what they carry.” In many cases, being seen is where healing begins.

From local roots to global reach

Through the Israel Trauma Coalition, Mahut’s approach has been shared internationally, from training clinicians in France after the 2015 Paris attacks to supporting resilience centers in Ukraine. 

Yet its core mission remains local: to help Israeli communities where remembrance and rebuilding are the same project.

The numbers tell a hard story, but behind them are people I meet every week: a teacher who still flinches at loud noises, a reservist counting months until care, and a child who draws homes with bomb shelters as the main feature.

If we want to remain a society that can defend itself and also prosper, mental health recovery must be treated as national infrastructure, not charity.

Mahut’s model shows a path: local leadership trained to recognize emotional reality, circles that restore dignity, rituals that anchor belonging, and an ethic that says recovery begins now, not after the crisis is over.

As Michal Herzog put it – this is a national mission in the broadest sense.

Allocate resources, shorten waiting times, expand community programs, and train municipal leadership nationwide. Recovery is measurable. It should begin with national and professional recognition and with the budgets to match.

The writer, a photojournalist, has returned to Sderot, where he focuses on the Gaza border communities as a global hub of resilience and innovation, documenting how recovery efforts and civic leadership are shaping the region’s future.

How Terrorists Are Rewarded for Killing Jews

By
​Center for Near East Policy Research
-

To secure long-term peace, fix Gaza’s schools

By
​Center for Near East Policy Research
-

For decades, billions have been poured into Gaza. It has been well documented how these funds have been used to construct tunnels, build rockets and fund other military infrastructure. But the biggest scandal isn’t what’s been built, it’s what’s been taught in Gaza’s schools — in large part funded through Western largesse.

Every generation in Gaza grows up memorizing the language of martyrdom. Schools, summer camps, mosques and media channels work in concert to instill an uncompromising worldview: violence is virtuous, compromise is weakness and the annihilation of Israel is a sacred duty. Hamas’s rockets are the visible expression of decades of indoctrination of the next generation.

Gaza’s children are the victims of this violent ideology. Few parents in London, Paris or Washington would tolerate their child being taught that violence is noble or that neighbors are subhuman. Yet the international community has subsidized precisely that curriculum for Palestinian children — and then has acted shocked when violence perpetuates itself. It’s time for that to end.

Academic critics have long alleged that Western funding for education is just a thinly veiled cover for cultural imperialism. Such arguments badly overreach. After World War II, Germany’s education system was overhauled to remove Nazi propaganda while preserving German culture. Postapartheid South Africa reformed its curriculum to promote reconciliation. Postwar Japan replaced militarism with civic education. Defanging destructive ideologies is not imperialism, cultural or otherwise.

The scale of the problem today is well documented. A 2021 report by IMPACT-se, an education nongovernmental organization, found ample evidence of textbooks produced by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency containing militaristic themes alongside maps that erase Israel from the region. A 2019 UN Watch analysis identified over 100 UNRWA social media posts supporting militant groups. Another 2025 UN Watch report documents that more than 15 percent of UNRWA’s senior educators in Gaza are affiliated with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Other investigations have found that curriculum materials violate UNESCO standards and that schools have been used to store weapons. This is clearly a systemic problem.

UNRWA has operated for decades with minimal oversight. But each revelation produces the same response from the organization: acknowledgment of concern, promises of reform — and then business as usual once the cameras leave. The massacres of Oct. 7, 2023 were the gruesome cost of inaction. Several UNRWA employees may have participated in the violence. The agency responded by treating it as an isolated personnel issue rather than the logical endpoint of decades of hateful indoctrination.

The Trump administration is right to insist in its 20-point peace plan that “the values of tolerance and peaceful co-existence” are critical for long-term success. To ensure that hate does not take root again, reconstruction aid must come with nonnegotiable conditions: independent curriculum oversight by external auditors with direct access to materials and classrooms, teacher vetting for extremist affiliations and full donor transparency. When Western taxpayers fund schools, they have every right to insist those schools don’t teach children to become terrorists. Indeed, they have every obligation to do so. We now know what failure looks like.

The proper test of sincerity in rebuilding a decent society for Palestinians isn’t how much money we pledge. It’s whether we enforce the standards we would insist upon for our own children. Gaza’s children deserve schools that prepare them for life, not death. They deserve textbooks that teach them to build, not destroy. They deserve a brighter future.

Todd L. Pittinsky is a professor at Stony Brook University.

In New York City, we are witnessing the liberal betrayal of the Jews

By
​Center for Near East Policy Research
-

Dear Friends,

It’s official: New York City has elected Zohran Mamdani—an avowed socialist, anti-Zionist, and terror apologist—as its next mayor.

That such a man could rise to power in the most Jewish city in America is a sobering sign about the state of the American left—and about how confused so many Americans who view themselves as progressive and tolerant have become.

How did we get here? How did the same liberalism that once defended Jewish life and liberty turn into a source of hostility and confusion?

In her powerful four-part lecture series “The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews,” Professor Ruth Wisse answers that question with unmatched insight.

She traces how liberal ideals have been twisted into self-destructive politics, and how those ideas have paved the way for figures like Mamdani. The language of human rights and tolerance has been weaponized against the Jews and the Jewish state, and now New York City is leading the way.

Professor Wisse also shows why liberal societies are uniquely vulnerable to anti-Semitism, how Holocaust education has sometimes been perverted, and what a renewed Jewish political vision must look like.

Watch “The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews” today.

All the best,

Avi Snyder
Senior Director, Tikvah Ideas

Hamas Just Spit in Trump’s face – Will the West Wake Up?

By
​Center for Near East Policy Research
-

Dan Diker and Khaled Abu Toameh argue that the UN-driven, internationally managed “Trump 20-point plan” is constraining Israel while Hamas exploits the ceasefire to rearm, regroup and entrench control in Gaza. They warn that vague terms like “demilitarization” and “decommissioning” (without explicit disarmament) enable loopholes, drawing lessons from Hezbollah in Lebanon. They caution against rebranding Hamas through new “security forces,” urge clan-based regime change backed by the West, oppose granting safe passage to wanted militants, and connect Western political trends, like New York’s mayoral race, to a wider jihadist information war. The episode closes with a call to replace Hamas entirely and build genuine Arab-Jewish bridges through clear-eyed policy, not wishful thinking.

You have been funding Hamas to train child soldiers

By
​Center for Near East Policy Research
-

Did you know that, for years, Hamas has been running summer camps to train tens of thousands of children aged 10 to 17 to hate, fight, and kill Israelis?

Did you also know that, through Western governments’ financial support of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), your tax dollars have been helping fund these camps that graduate child soldiers to fight for Hamas? In fact, 58% of UNRWA’s budget is dedicated to “education,” a significant portion of which is spent indoctrinating a new generation for war.

To learn about this severe child abuse that has been going on in the Middle East for at least a decade, we have invited Middle East expert Joseph Ben-Ami back to the show. Joseph works with The Nahum Bedein Center for Near East Policy Research, a non-partisan, not-for-profit institution dedicated to the research, analysis, and publication of government and NGO policies and practices that impact Israel-Arab relations and the Jewish community worldwide. Joseph is also a former Director of Government Relations and Diplomatic Affairs for the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith.

In the second part of today’s show, Joseph and Tom discuss President Donald Trump’s Gaza ceasefire deal and consider whether it will hold if, as seems likely, Hamas ultimately refuses to disarm and end their role in Gaza’s government. After all, in their response to Trump’s plan, Hamas framed their acceptance of the ceasefire as a tactical step, not a strategic shift.

So, will they just use the pause in the fighting to regroup, rearm, and fortify positions, as they have done so often in the past when peace was supposedly at hand?

Join Joseph and Tom today for this important episode!

References relevant to this show:

The Nahum Bedein Center for Near East Policy Research

“Jewish History Is Key To Understanding the Israeli-Hamas War,” referenced in this episode as important to hear, Nov 27, 2023, America Out Loud News interview with Joseph Ben-Ami.

“Training for terror: How Hamas recruits and trains its child army,” Nahum Bedein Center video recommended in this episode (screen capture above from this documentary)

“IDF proof: Hamas, PIJ use young children for Gaza terror activities, incitement,” Jan 3, 2024, The Jerusalem Post

“The Age of Amnesia,” an important article by Abe Greenwald, appears as the second piece here.

“We should put ourselves in Israelis’ shoes,” by Gwyn Morgan, Oct 10, 2025, Financial Post, Toronto, Canada.

Below is a list of the top 20 funders of UNWRA in 2024 (USA highlighted in blue and Canada highlighted in orange). Note that in March 2024, the US Congress passed a law halting all US funding to UNRWA through March 2025. The $70 million+ figure in the table below reflects disbursements made in 2024 before the March 2024 cutoff. In February 2025, President Trump signed an executive order that permanently halted US financial support for UNRWA, which had previously received $300–400 million annually from the US, making it by far the agency’s largest donor. Table courtesy of The Nahum Bedein Center for Near East Policy Research.

The Other Side of the Story airs on Saturday and Sunday at 7 PM ET. Listen on iHeart Radio, our world-class media player, or our free apps on Apple, Android, or Alexa. All episodes can be found on podcast networks worldwide, the day after airing on talk radio.

Image: Nahum Bedein Center for Near East Policy Research

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