Explosive new intelligence report reveals Iran’s nuclear weapons program still active

May 29, 2025

A new intelligence report claims Iran is continuing with its active nuclear weapons program, which it says can be used to launch missiles over long distances.

The startling intelligence gathering of Austrian officials contradicts the assessment of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told a Senate Intelligence Committee in March that the American intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

Austria’s version of the FBI — the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution — wrote Monday in an intelligence report, “In order to assert and enforce its regional political power ambitions, the Islamic Republic of Iran is striving for comprehensive rearmament, with nuclear weapons to make the regime immune to attack and to expand and consolidate its dominance in the Middle East and beyond.”

The Austrian domestic intelligence agency report added, “The Iranian nuclear weapons development program is well advanced, and Iran possesses a growing arsenal of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads over long distances.”

According to an intelligence document obtained and reviewed by Fox News Digital, “Iran has developed sophisticated sanctions-evasion networks, which has benefited Russia.”

The Austrian intelligence findings could be an unwanted wrench in President Trump’s negotiation process to resolve the atomic crisis with Iran’s rulers because the data outlined in the report suggests the regime will not abandon its drive to secure a nuclear weapon.

In response to the Austrian intelligence, a White House official told Fox News Digital, “President Trump is committed to Iran never obtaining a nuclear weapon or the capacity to build one.”

The danger of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism (and its illegal atomic weapons program) was cited 99 times in the 211-page report that covers pressing threats to Austria’s democracy.

“Vienna is home to one of the largest embassies of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Europe, which disguises intelligence officers with diplomatic,” the Austrian intelligence report noted.

“Iranian intelligence services are familiar with developing and implementing circumvention strategies for the procurement of military equipment, proliferation-sensitive technologies, and materials for weapons of mass destruction,” the Austrian intelligence agency said.

In 2021, a Belgium court convicted Asadollah Asadi, a former Iranian diplomat based in Vienna, for planning to blow up a 2018 opposition meeting of tens of thousands of Iranian dissidents held outside Paris. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who served as President Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, attended the event in France.

When asked about the differences in conclusions between the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Austrian intelligence report, David Albright, a physicist and founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, D.C., told Fox News Digital, “The ODNI report is stuck in the past, a remnant of the fallacious unclassified 2007 NIE [National Intelligence Estimate].

“The Austrian report in general is similar to German and British assessments. Both governments, by the way, made clear to (the) U.S. IC [intelligence community] in 2007 that they thought the U.S. assessment was wrong that the Iranian nuclear weapons program ended in 2003.

“The German assessment is from BND [Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service] station chief in D.C. at that time. The British info is from a senior British non-proliferation official I was having dinner with the day the 2007 NIE was made public. The German said the U.S. was misinterpreting data they all possessed.”

The Austrian intelligence findings that Tehran is working on an active atomic weapons program “seems clear enough,” said Albright.

In 2023, Fox News Digital revealed a fresh batch of European intelligence reports showed that Iran sought to bypass U.S. and EU sanctions to secure technology for its nuclear weapons program with a view toward testing an atomic bomb.

European intelligence agencies have documented prior to 2015 and after the Iran nuclear deal( JCPOA) was agreed upon that Tehran continued efforts to illegally secure technology for its atomic, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction programs.

The Austrian intelligence report noted that Iran provides weapons to the U.S.-designated terrorist movements Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as to Syrian militias.

A spokesperson for ODNI declined to comment. The U.S. State Department and U.S. National Security Council did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital press queries.

Benjamin Weinthal reports on Israel, Iran, Syria, Turkey and Europe. You can follow Benjamin on Twitter @BenWeinthal, and email him at benjamin.weinthal@fox.com

Proposed bill taxing foreign political NGOs is a legitimate tool

Center for Near East Policy Research

May 29, 2025

There’s plenty of blame to go around for October 7 and there is no question many in Israel have many questions to answer.

But since October 8th in the Diaspora, there are legacy Jewish organizations who had long pushed programs which aren’t good for the Jews and who continued to push radical extremist liberal ideas on Israel from the Diaspora. And those who have endangered or at the very least, failed to protect, the Jewish people in the Diaspora have no business importing their ideas to the Jewish state.

Against that backdrop comes news that “Dozens of Jewish donors sign letter denouncing the new NGO bill, a proposed law which would impose an 80% tax on donations received from foreign political entities.” These donors say that it’s a “‘dangerous, undemocratic’ Israeli bill targeting foreign-funded nonprofits.”

Who are they to come to Israel and make demands of the Jewish state after they failed miserably at countering the many nonprofits in the Diaspora tormenting Jews worldwide?

Sir Mick Davis – of the UK, now a dangerous country for Jews – said about the NGO bill, “It’s a piece of legislation itself, which I think is not the sort of legislation that you want to see in a democratic country because it grants powers of exclusion to politicians in power, which can be used in very negative ways.”

Davis, however, has long attacked the Netanyahu government, saying that “15 years of almost uninterrupted Netanyahu governments have represented an increasingly unbridled assault on all the essential elements” of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. It has been “a deeply painful and destructive period that has tarnished Zionism, with the current government being the most distressing and damaging to-date. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which includes outspoken and proudly racist, expansionist, messianic, homophobic and misogynistic elements – elements he has legitimised at the heart of Israeli politics – has not revised its ambitions.”

At least the Israeli government, whether he agrees with those elected democratically by a majority of Israeli voters or excoriates them, protects Jews.

Davis and his colleagues have left Jews unprotected in the Diaspora with their failed policies, and now expect Israel to listen to them. Why don’t they focus on the many terrorist non profits in the Diaspora which are harming Israel and the Jews? Why do they feel the need to interfere in the running of the Jewish state?

Among the other signatures to this letter are Sally Gottesman, a major donor to the radical extremist New Israel Fund.

These Diaspora Jewish leaders intervened in Israeli politics by asking Foreign Minister Gideon Saar to “do what you can to scrap this cynical, dangerous and undemocratic bill.”

Davis said that “he decided to address the letter to the foreign minister — and to the Israeli ambassadors to the signers’ home countries — as opposed to MK Kallner, the bill’s sponsor, or any other legislator, from a belief that the NGO bill would damage Israel’s standing abroad. “Because we think this impacts Israel standing internationally, the most appropriate minister to send it to was the minister of foreign affairs,” he said.

Mr. Davis and fellow Jewish leaders, read this carefully: What harms Israel worldwide is all those on the left who refuse to recognize Israel’s voters and respect their opinions. The people of Ariel, and Netivot, and Lod and Ashkelon, Jerusalem and Efrat, are those who elected Netanyahu, Smotrich and this government. Their voices matter more than Jews in the Diaspora who should be fighting to keep their children safe on college campuses, instead of opposing Trump’s efforts to cleanse those campuses of genocidal antisemites.

The Jews of the UK and the rest of the Diaspora haven’t succeeded even minimally in stopping the funding of jihadi nonprofits in the Diaspora – and those nonprofits’ antisemitic activities as well as Qatari takeovers of college campuses – why do they feel the need to do so in the Jewish state?

As Likud MK Ariel Kallner the sponsor of the bill said, “NGOs that do not engage in lobbying, public campaigns, or influencing policy will be excluded from the law. The bill is intended to prevent foreign states from meddling in Israeli politics by funding NGOs that defend terrorists, slander IDF soldiers, assist illegal infiltration, and harm the Jewish identity of the State of Israel.”

In other words, those foreigners who seek to harm the nationalist government and harm the Jewish identify of the State of Israel will no longer be able to do so with impunity. What fault can one find with that?

Ronn Torossianis Vice Chairman of Betar Worldwide.

How Israeli Intelligence Misunderstood Gender-Based Violence as a Strategic Tool on October 7

Center for Near East Policy Research

May 29, 2025

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Israeli intelligence system failed to understand the significance of the gender-based violence committed by Hamas on Israeli citizens during the October 7 attack. Raw information was not converted into meaningful insights that could have aided in strategic and operational decision-making. The failure stemmed in part from a lack of information, but also from an inability to analyze the information that was available, identify patterns, and prevent errors arising from cognitive bias and methodological obstacles. Hamas used gender-based violence as a deliberate strategy intended to cause severe harm to Israeli civilians, undermine Israelis’ sense of social security, and sow terror within Israeli society. Israeli intelligence failed to identify Hamas’s intentions prior to the attack and subsequently failed to deal effectively with the denials of Hamas and its supporters in the international system.

Effective intelligence requires the conversion of raw information into meaningful insights that aid in strategic and operational decision-making. The failure of Israeli intelligence regarding Hamas’s strategy of deliberately inflicting sexual violence on Israeli civilians was the product not only of insufficient information but also an inability to analyze the information available, identify patterns, and prevent errors arising from cognitive bias and methodological flaws. Today’s intelligence systems operate in a “post-truth” environment in which it is more difficult than ever to determine what information is reliable. Intelligence decision-making is not just a matter of accessing data but also of understanding its meaning and implications.

In the run-up to October 7, the Israeli intelligence system failed to identify gender-based violence as a strategic component of Hamas’s war plan. Information about Hamas’s worldview, which includes the oppression of women and the use of violence against women as a tool of psychological warfare, was available before the attack. There is ample evidence that other Islamist terrorist groups as well, such as ISIS, use rape as a tool to break resilience. Yet there was insufficient analysis by Israeli intelligence to conclude that this pattern might materialize in an attack on Israel. This failure indicates an inability to identify similar historical patterns and connect them to predictive models.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas deliberately and systematically used gender-based violence, including rape, sexual abuse, sexual torture, sexual mutilation, and murder in the course of sexual assault as a tool of psychological and strategic warfare against Israelis. These acts were not a random result of battlefield chaos but a conscious strategy specifically employed to harm the Israeli civilian population, undermine their sense of social security, and inflict terror on Israeli society. Despite documentation of similar patterns in previous conflicts, the Israeli intelligence system did not anticipate the possibility that Hamas would employ such tactics and did not prepare appropriate scenarios for prevention, deterrence, or real-time response.

For years, Israeli intelligence has relied on the assumption that direct and tangible threats, such as rocket attacks and suicide bombings, are the main dangers on which to focus. This approach has led to an underestimation of more indirect but equally destructive tactics, such as sexual violence aimed at spreading terror and weakening communities. Gender-based crimes used as a means of warfare are not only attacks on specific victims but strategic weapons aimed at undermining national security.

The Israeli intelligence system suffered from a fixed mindset that assumed sexual violence to be a side effect of battlefield chaos and not a pre-planned tool of warfare. In addition, the anchoring effect – the tendency to rely on previous assessments and ignore new information that contradicted them – led to a persistent perception that Hamas’s approach to warfare would not include gender terrorism. Despite clear evidence that similar terrorist organizations use such tactics, intelligence continued to assume that Hamas would focus primarily on kinetic attacks rather than psychological warfare based on sexual violence.

Another misunderstanding was about Hamas’s ideology, which is based on an extreme interpretation of Islam that promotes male domination and the oppression of women. While Israeli intelligence recognized these concepts in the context of Hamas as a ruling force in the Gaza Strip, it did not link them to the military-strategic dimension of Hamas’s fight against Israel. Hamas was perceived as a political entity, and the radicalization of its methods of operation was not identified. This is despite the fact that Hamas’s official statements over the years, as well as publications in its propaganda channels, have pointed to the humiliation of Jewish women as an approved act of “revenge” and symbolic conquest.

The Israeli intelligence system misinterpreted this evidence, as it was perceived as part of Hamas’s general religious discourse rather than as a tactical threat. Unlike intelligence models developed to identify conventional terrorist attacks, there was no analytical category that addressed gender-based violence as a strategic weapon of war. As a result, targeted attacks on Israeli women prior to October 7 were not identified as a unique risk but assimilated into broad categories of “Palestinian terrorism“ or viewed strictly through the lens of criminal justice.

This evidence could have been an early indication that Hamas might use rape and sexual violence as a tool to inflict terror. However, the Israeli intelligence system analyzed these elements primarily in the context of internal control of the Gaza Strip and not as an external strategic threat.

In addition, the understanding that the distribution of crime documentation can be used as a tool of intimidation in the digital space was not internalized by Israeli intelligence. In other words, Hamas’s willingness to use images and videos of its members’ rape and murder of Israeli women as a terrorist tool in the age of social media was not sufficiently analyzed or assessed.

Nor did the Israeli intelligence system integrate gender and criminology experts into its analysis of the Hamas threat. Such experts could have identified early patterns in the organization’s behavior, identified internal processes that legitimized gender-based crimes, and provided more in-depth warnings. Instead, intelligence analyses were conducted using traditional approaches to security threat assessment that did not take deep-seated trends in gender-based terrorism into account.

After the attack, Israel was met with widespread denial by Hamas, international organizations, and hostile media outlets of the incidents of gender-based violence committed by Hamas on Israeli citizens. Disinformation campaigns were instantly and effectively spread around the world and information from Israeli sources was met with increased skepticism, making it difficult to create an effective narrative. Israeli intelligence was not sufficiently prepared to fight in the perceptual arena, and that failure exacerbated the international community’s anti-Israeli response to Hamas’s crimes. The failure was not only in proving that the crimes had been committed but also in failing to quickly identify and call out Hamas’s deliberate efforts to sow distrust in the Israeli version of events. In the face of disinformation, the Israeli intelligence system failed to respond quickly enough, which allowed pro-Palestinian organizations to dominate the global discourse and undermine the credibility of Israeli reports.

This phenomenon, it should be noted, is not unique to the current conflict. In the Balkan and Rwandan wars, victims of sexual violence were also faced with denial and downplay campaigns by political actors.

Israeli intelligence operated on the assumption that the presentation of solid facts would be sufficient to establish reality in public discourse. It failed to understand that in the “post-truth” era, truth itself is subject to manipulation. Another failure was in understanding how Hamas’s disinformation fit into the preexisting narrative of anti-Israel groups. The intelligence services did not properly anticipate how international actors would exploit the attack to produce campaigns to deny the violence, even though this is a well-known tactic from past conflicts.

A paradigm shift in threat analysis is needed to recognize sexual violence and gender-based terrorism as an integral part of intelligence assessments. This expansion will allow for a deeper understanding of the long-term psychological mechanisms of a form of terrorism that aims to undermine social resilience. In addition, data collection and analysis mechanisms need to be strengthened by creating frameworks that map global patterns of gender-based violence so they can be applied to future threat assessments and identify risks in advance.

In an era of post-truth and disinformation, advanced strategies must be developed to deal with information manipulation and false narratives, moving from an approach that focuses solely on the presentation of facts to a proactive approach that confronts the effects of biased narratives and establishes a rapid intelligence and awareness response in the international arena.

The Israeli security concept must recognize that gender-based violence is not just a side effect of war but a strategic warfare tool in its own right. Changing the concept is essential for a better understanding of the fighting patterns of terrorist organizations and for more appropriate preparation for the future.

Lee Shpilrain Nahari is researching the international responses to gender-based violence on the seventh of October as part of her master’s degree at Bar-Ilan University. She is a risk management consultant at EBA & Co.

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The UN’s illegal occupation of Jerusalem

Center for Near East Policy Research

May 28, 2025

Government House in Jerusalem. Credit: Freeyoni via Wikimedia Commons.

June 5, 2024, marked the 57th anniversary of the U.N.’s occupation of Government House in Jerusalem.

Before the termination of the British Mandate in 1948, the Government House complex, deliberately erected by the British in the 1930s on the commanding heights of the southern Jerusalem ridge overlooking the Old City, was a symbol of British rule.

Between 1949 and 1967 this area complex was acknowledged as a no-man’s-land per the Israel-Jordan armistice of April 1949. On June 5, 1967, at 10:45 am, the Jordanian army opened fire on Jewish Jerusalem despite then-Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s attempt through the offices of the U.N. to persuade Jordan not to become involved in the hostilities.

The Jordanians subsequently captured Jebel Mukhaber and by 2:10 pm had seized Government House. In the battle to retake the complex from this illegal occupation, the IDF lost 21 soldiers—testified to by the memorial plaque on the Hass Promenade.

Having pushed out the Jordanians at great cost in lives, the Israeli government procrastinated—as shown in documents found in the State Archives—as to what should happen to the complex. The government failed to show its mettle and disregarded that the complex had been the prestigious headquarters of the Mandate. It should have been incorporated into Jerusalem to serve as the official residence of the president of Israel like the White House in Washington, the Élysée Palace in Paris or the Kremlin in Moscow.

Unfortunately, the Israeli government retained the galut mentality of cowering before the nations of the world instead of exhibiting self-confidence and pride. Were they afraid of offending the King of Jordan or the defeated Arab states? Or were they kowtowing to the “great” powers?

The U.N. was immediately permitted to reoccupy the complex without negotiations, lease or any other quasi-legal conditions.

Over the past 57 years, the U.N. has made substantial modifications to both the internal and exterior structures of Government House, illegally extending its boundaries by seizing adjacent land. All this took place under the watchful eyes of the government and the Jerusalem Municipality, both of which did nothing to restrain the U.N. through national or local planning legislation—for 57 years, they acted unilaterally.

Additionally, the U.N. does not pay Jerusalem municipal taxes or reimburse the suppliers of vital infrastructure utilities like electricity, water and telephone communications. It also occupies the adjacent Antenna Hill to the southeast.

Given that Israel has signed peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt and the U.N.’s force in Lebanon UNIFIL has not ensured that Security Council Resolution 1701 that restricts Hezbollah activities in Lebanon is enforced, there can be no reasonable grounds for the U.N. and its agencies to occupy Government House. They can move lock, stock and barrel to northern Israel where they will be on the spot.

Furthermore, the Housing Minister recently declared that the UNWRA complex in Ma’alot Dafna is illegal and is taking steps such as fines and requiring the payment of retroactive rent.

Given the attitude of the U.N., its secretary-general and its staff—as well as the General Assembly and Security Council—towards Israel and the Jewish people, we must stand firm against the U.N. and openly show our supreme sovereignty by regaining full control over the Government House complex and adjacent areas.

I call upon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restore our dignity and self-respect by ejecting the U.N. from Government House and designating the complex the official legal residence of the president of Israel.

How Textbooks and Children’s Shows in America Became Hamasified

Center for Near East Policy Research

May 28, 2025

We are coming up on the 18th anniversary of the death of Farfour the mouse. And he is strangely more relevant to us now than he ever was in life.

Farfour was a demented Palestinian ripoff of Mickey Mouse, the main character (until his martyrdom) on the children’s show Tomorrow’s Pioneers, which aired on Hamas’s Gaza-based television station Al-Aqsa. When people say Palestinian children in Gaza have been reared on anti-Semitic brainwashing, they mean Farfour and his ilk.

The militant mouse met his maker in June 2007 when his dying grandfather (who was not a giant mouse, but a regular old Arab man) entrusted him with the key to Tel Aviv and claimed it was actually Palestinian land. Farfour felt the weight of his new responsibility “to liberate this land from the filth of the criminal, plundering Jews.” As you can probably guess, he was martyred at the hands of those “criminal, plundering Jews,” and the announcement was made by a young Palestinian girl.

This was, at the time, both semi-comical and horrifying. But the kind of anti-Jewish brainwashing that was done on children’s television and in elementary-school textbooks was the subject of bipartisan condemnation. Indeed, just a few months before Farfour’s untimely martyrdom, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton denounced such indoctrination of Palestinian children as nothing less than “a clear example of child abuse.”

At the time, it was still unthinkable that America would have this exact problem. Now it is undeniable that we do.

There was a revealing moment at a congressional hearing on anti-Semitism in elementary-school curricula about a year ago. Rep. Kevin Kiley, a Republican from California, asked Enikia Ford Morthel, the superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District, about a Berkeley lesson that states: “for some Palestinians, ‘From the River to the Sea’ is a call for freedom and peace.”

Morthel defended the lesson, to which Kiley very reasonably responded: “You put this on a slide in the classroom and then students go around in the halls saying it. I don’t think there’s anything surprising about that.”

Quite so. Children in America are being taught to repeat genocidal slogans about Jews.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about another such moment—this one at a state hearing involving the infamous Massachusetts Teachers Association and various anti-Semitic lesson plans. One was a grade-school workbook for kids in kindergarten and first grade called Handala’s Return, which featured on its front page a map of Israel and Gaza and the West Bank all labeled “Palestine.” Israel did not exist in this lesson plan. Handala explains that “Zionists” took her family’s home by force and won’t let her back even though she has the key. The students are then asked to draw their own home and key, presumably to imagine their own sadness were the Jews to come and take their home away.

At the end of the workbook—again, designed for children about five or six years old—is a page titled “Help Handala Free Palestine.” The students are instructed to write on the page what they will do, specifically, to “raise funds for the children of Palestine” and what they will chant at a “Palestine protest.”

There have been endless examples, documented here and elsewhere, of anti-Semitism in American grade-school lesson plans, but I chose these two because they specifically shine a light on the fact that young children here are being drafted as child soldiers into “the Palestinian struggle.” They are not simply taught bad things about Jews; they are taught to act on them from a very young age.

Will American children get their own Farfour, too? Inevitably. America’s Farfour-ward slide is well under way.

Earlier this week, what has become one of the more infamous modern blood libels was circulated around the world when a UN humanitarian director told the BBC that 14,000 Gazan babies would die in the next 48 hours due to Israel’s withholding of aid. Eventually, the BBC and others issued corrections when it turned out that the study had been misread and the actual number of babies about to die from Israel’s blockade, as detailed in the report, was zero.

But of course it had been widely repeated before being retracted, and not just by media and politicians. Ms. Rachel, a massively popular children’s YouTube host often compared to Mister Rogers, made a video about the Big Lie that would have made Leni Riefenstahl proud. Holding her own newborn daughter, Ms. Rachel tearfully appealed to the viewers while a picture of a sickly Palestinian baby was put on screen at the same time.

The baby on screen appears to be a six-month-old girl named Siwar Ashour, the Independent points out. Siwar has an esophageal medical condition that makes it difficult for her to drink her mother’s breastmilk. Nonetheless, Ms. Rachel uses Siwar as an example of Israel’s evil child-murder scheme. Ms. Rachel, crying, implores viewers to “just look at her, and… think about a baby you love.”

She then says that “you can’t be about to let 14,000 kids starve, and we all know not to bomb and kill and starve children… please don’t kill so many children.”

Ms. Rachel has more than 13 million subscribers, and her show has gotten 9 billion views in the six years of its existence. This particular video, however, has been deleted from her Instagram page, now that we all know everything in it is a lie. But the damage is done. Farfour would be proud.

France’s Malicious Recognition of “Palestine”: The Ultimate Reward for the October 7 Massacre

Center for Near East Policy Research

May 28, 2025

Hamas and Palestinian Leadership Seek Political Gains Through Violence: The October 7, 2023 massacre by Hamas was, in part, aimed at reigniting international recognition for the “State of Palestine.” Despite the violence, several countries have moved toward recognizing Palestinian statehood – a reward for terrorism.
The “State of Palestine” Fails to Meet International Criteria for Statehood: According to the Montevideo Convention and UN Charter, statehood requires a permanent population, defined territory, effective government, and the ability to enter international relations. The Palestinian leadership does not meet these standards.
The Oslo Accords Preclude Unilateral Statehood Declarations: The 1990s agreements between Israel and the PLO explicitly deferred statehood and borders to future negotiations. Any recognition of Palestinian statehood outside this framework violates the Accords.
The PA’s Own Statements Undermine Its Statehood Claim: In legal defense against lawsuits following the October 7 massacre, the Palestinian Authority admitted it has no control over Gaza, contradicting its statehood claims which include Gaza as part of its territory.
International Recognition Efforts Are Politically Motivated and Legally Baseless: Efforts by France, the UK, and Canada to promote a two-state solution ignore the legal and factual deficiencies in Palestinian claims to statehood and incentivize further violence.

One of the most prominent goals Hamas set for the October 7, 2023, massacre was to re-ignite and bolster the international discussion regarding the recognition of the “State of Palestine.” Shamefully, ten countries have already given Hamas the greatest reward and have responded to the murder, torture, rape, beheading, and kidnapping of over 250 people by recognizing the “State of Palestine.”

Next in line to grant the ultimate reward for the wanton murder of Jews appears to be French President Emmanuel Macron who, together with the UK and Canada, is promoting a high-level conference on “the two-state solution.”

Similar to the goals of Hamas, the Palestinian leadership is also pushing for the recognition of the “State of Palestine.” In support of their claim, they often say that the fact that 147 United Nations countries recognize the “State of Palestine” is proof of its existence. Closer inspection of the record of recognition, specifically the timing of the recognition, exposes an interesting and deceptive reality.

But what does it mean to recognize a new state? What criteria are required for an entity to become a “state”?

Legal Criteria for Recognizing a State

The 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States sets the basic criteria for recognizing emerging states. Article 1 provides the most widely and internationally accepted formula for recognizing statehood in international law, requiring the new state to meet four cumulative criteria: a permanent population; a defined territory; a government; and capacity to enter into relations with other states.

UN Procedure for Recognizing a New State

According to the UN Charter (Articles 4, 18, and 27) the UN can only admit a new state if nine (including all five permanent members) of the 15 members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) recommend doing so and that such recommendation is thereafter adopted by two-thirds of the states who are members in the UN General Assembly (UNGA).

According to the accepted process, a state that seeks UN membership is required to submit a request to the UN Secretary General. The request is then transmitted to the UN Committee on the Admission of New Members, which in turn provides its recommendation to the UNSC.

To date, the UN has never admitted a new state without the positive recommendation of the Committee on the Admission of New Members and without the approval of the UNSC.

In addition to the formal request, a state seeking UN membership is also required to provide a declaration that it is a “peace-loving state” which accepts the obligations contained in the UN Charter.

The Record of Recognition of the “State of Palestine”

Of the 147 UN states that ostensibly have recognized the “State of Palestine,” 100 countries did so between February 4, 1988 (Iran) and November 1, 1995 (Kyrgyzstan). Most of these countries (82 of them) gave their recognition in November and December of 1988, in response to the November 15, 1988, “Declaration of Independence”¹ issued by Yasser Arafat and the PLO.

At the time, the PLO was a pariah organization that had been expelled from Jordan in 1970 and from Lebanon in 1982, and was being hosted in Tunisia. In the declaration, Arafat gave no indication as to what comprised the population of the new state. Moreover, the declaration appeared to cover the entire territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and, in practice, denied Israel’s existence and the right of the Jewish state to exist at all.

Similarly, at the time, even the semblance of a governmental apparatus that the PLO had tried to construct did not govern any of the territory to which it laid claim. Consequently, the entity was incapable of performing any of the requisite functions associated with governance including, but not limited to, any capacity to engage in foreign relations.

Considering the criteria for statehood, and in reference to Arafat’s declaration, Professor Malcolm Shaw found,² “For this reason at least, therefore, the ‘State of Palestine’ declared in November 1988 at a conference in Algiers cannot be regarded as a valid state. The Palestinian organizations did not control any part of the territory they claim.”

Did the Oslo Accords Change Anything?

In the Oslo Accords, Israel and the PLO agreed to establish a “Palestinian Authority” (PA) as an agency to administer the implementation of the provisions of the Accords in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. The parties agreed that the PA would have powers and responsibilities to govern the daily lives of the Palestinians resident in areas that would be transferred to its control. The accords made absolutely no mention of the creation of a “State of Palestine.”

To the contrary, in the accords, the issue of statehood, including such issues as Jerusalem, security arrangements, settlements, refugees, borders, and foreign relations, were left open for “permanent status negotiations.”³ Negating the ability to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state, Israel and the PLO further agreed⁴ that “Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”

Clearly, and by definition, the Israeli-Palestinian commitment to “permanent status negotiations” precludes any predetermination by any foreign state, parliament, international or regional organization president or international leader, of the outcome of such negotiation by attempting to recognize, initiate, support, or sponsor a Palestinian state outside the agreed negotiating forum.

Furthermore, the Oslo Accords were formally witnessed by the United States, Russia, Egypt, the EU, and Norway and subsequently affirmed by the UN. In so doing, these states and organizations, including France, are under an international obligation not to act to undermine or to contravene the Oslo Accords.

Since the formation of the PA in 1996 and through 2010, 11 more countries recognized Arafat’s non-existent “State of Palestine.”⁵

Abbas Requests UN Recognition of the “State of Palestine”

In breach of the commitments of the PLO in the Oslo Accords, in September 2011, PLO and PA leader, Mahmoud Abbas, submitted a unilateral request⁶ to the UN to admit the “State of Palestine” as a member state. In the application, Abbas referred, inter alia, to Arafat’s invalid declaration.

Between 1996 and 2011, Palestinian terrorists carried out tens of thousands of terror attacks, including shooting attacks, stabbings, bombings, suicide attacks, kidnappings, and launching rockets and mortars indiscriminately targeting Israel’s civilian population, causing the death or injury of thousands of Israelis. Despite the fact that many of the attacks were carried out by terrorist groups associated with the PLO,⁷ Abbas nevertheless brazenly submitted the necessary declaration that the State of Palestine is a “peace-loving state.”

This evidently did not create any shock or surprise among the states in the international community, and pursuant to UN procedure, Abbas’s request was simply sent to the Committee on the Admission of New Members for consideration.⁸

In its deliberations, while Abbas never expressly amended the declaration of Arafat that the territory of the State of Palestine would supersede and erase Israel, the erroneous assumption was made that Abbas was willing to suffice with the territory that he referred to as delineated by “the 4 June 1967 borders” – i.e. Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip, and eastern Jerusalem.

In reality of course, “the 4 June 1967 borders,” is a term deceptively invented by the Palestinians, to describe the armistice lines set between Israel and its neighbors in 1949 at the end of Israel’s War of Independence. Those lines, according to the armistice agreements, and as expressly demanded by the Arab countries in the text of the agreements, specifically provided that the lines drawn would not be considered as “borders.”

The reason for those Arab demands in the 1949 Armistice negotiations were at least two-fold. Firstly, they refused to agree to any “border” since that would imply the existence of another legitimate sovereign country on the other side of the border. Since the Arab countries rejected Israel’s right to exist, they would not agree to any delineation of a border.

Secondly, having rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan,⁹ five Arab countries launched a war of annihilation against the nascent Jewish state. Despite being heavily outnumbered, Israel not only survived, but also took control of more territory than the non-binding and non-authoritative Partition Plan had allocated to the Jewish State. In the eyes of the Arab countries, agreeing to the delineation of borders in place of the armistice lines would have solidified Israel’s control and sovereignty over those areas.

While some members of the Committee on the Admission of New Members were willing to ignore reality and recommend the recognition of the “State of Palestine,” others were reluctant.

Among other issues, the reluctant members of the committee pointed to the fact that the Palestinians did not even control the territory they claimed. Specifically, “Questions were raised, however, regarding Palestine’s control over its territory, in view of the fact that Hamas was the de facto authority in the Gaza Strip.”¹⁰

Regarding the criteria of government, they added that “Hamas was in control of 40 percent of the population of Palestine; therefore, the Palestinian Authority could not be considered to have effective government control over the claimed territory.”¹¹

Similarly, while some members of the committee were willing to ignore Palestinian terror and blindly accept the Palestinian “commitment to the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” others noted their reservations “since Hamas refused to renounce terrorism and violence, and had the stated aim of destroying Israel.”¹²

Interestingly, no reference whatsoever was made to the lack of any PLO/PA governance over any part of the area of “East Jerusalem” claimed by Abbas.

After thorough consideration, the committee remained “unable to make a unanimous recommendation to the Security Council.”¹³ Therefore Abbas’s bid for the admission of the “State of Palestine” failed.

While the UNGA did vote in 2012 to upgrade the Palestinian political representation in the UN to the level of “Non-member Observer State,” this was not considered to be a factual or legal equivalent to recognizing the existence of the “State of Palestine.”

Abbas Joins Hamas and Seeks to Make Political Gain from the October 7 Massacre

After thousands of terrorists from the Gaza Strip invaded Israel on the morning of October 7, 2023, murdering almost 1,200 people, raping, torturing, and beheading many victims, and kidnapping hundreds more, the Palestinian leadership again sought to make political gain, and renewed the request to the UN to admit the non-existent “State of Palestine” as a full UN member.¹⁴

This new request ignored the massacre, over a decade of violent Palestinian terror since 2012, and the fact that in reality, almost nothing had changed since the previous attempt. The reason to say that almost nothing had changed, was not because the Palestinian leadership had expanded its control, whether in Gaza, Judea, Samaria, or Jerusalem, but rather, since in the interim period, it had even lost substantial parts of its control in Judea and Samaria.

Palestinian opinion polls indicated that the Palestinians living under the PA governance now saw the PA as a burden on the Palestinian people rather than an asset. The polls also indicated the consistent decline of the PLO as their representative.

Internally, Abbas had refrained from holding elections knowing that he and his Fatah party would lose, and substantially, to Hamas, as they did in the 2006 elections. Abbas knew that if he allowed the Palestinians the choice, the allegedly “peace-loving” “State of Palestine” would be governed by an internationally designated terror group that openly calls for the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel, and that would eventually conceive, plan, and execute an October 7-like massacre.

As required by UN procedure, the PLO’s renewed request was transmitted for the consideration of the Committee on the Admission of New Members.¹⁵

Once again, while some members of the committee were willing to ignore both reality and law and supported the admission of the “State of Palestine,” others noted that the applicant “might not meet all the requirements for membership under Article 4 of the Charter, in light of the situation on the ground.” They added that the current application was premature, and questions remained as to whether the applicant met all the criteria of statehood.”

The Malicious French Initiative – A Reward for Massacring Jews

Despite the fact that the Palestinian leadership, whether PLO or Hamas, has repeatedly demonstrated the dedication to terror, violence, murder, and the destruction of the State of Israel, President Macron seems nevertheless curiously, obstinately, and mostly naively intent on rewarding their actions.

Threatening unilateral recognition of the “State of Palestine,” Macron and the others have affirmed “the important role of the High-level Two-State Solution Conference at the UN in June in building international consensus around this aim.”

The underlying facts on which the conference will be held are unequivocal. Despite the political desire to promote a political solution to the Palestinian-Israel conflict, the “State of Palestine” declared by Arafat and still claimed by Mahmoud Abbas still lacks critical elements of statehood.

The body purporting to represent the non-existent “State of Palestine” does not have a governing apparatus that exerts effective control over most of the territory it claims, and does not meet the internationally recognized criteria for statehood.

Moreover, despite the mealymouthed commitment, the “State of Palestine” does not even meet the basic requirement of the UN Charter and cannot honestly claim that it is a ‘peace-loving state’.

In the wider context, as history has shown, the misguided use of political recognition of the non-existent “State of Palestine” has not served any real purpose in promoting a diplomatic solution to the conflict. Rather, it has bolstered Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist and has been interpreted by the Palestinians as giving a green light by the international community for encouraging the use of terror to further the Palestinian goal of murdering Jews and destroying Israel.

The October 7 Massacre: PA Denies Control over Gaza

While the Palestinian leadership in the international arena continues to push for the recognition of the “State of Palestine” in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, ironically, even the PA openly admits that it has in fact no control over the Gaza Strip.

Following the October 7 massacre, hundreds of victims submitted lawsuits against the PA, claiming its responsibility for the killings. In the PA’s official response¹⁶ to one of the lawsuits, the PA claimed that in 2007, Hamas carried out a military coup in Gaza and seized control of the area. The PA responded that since it “lacks any actual control over what happens in the Gaza Strip since 2007,” it is not responsible for the massacre. In so doing, it fundamentally undermined its claim to statehood in the international arena.

The Palestinian leadership cannot pick and choose the level of control it exerts over the Gaza Strip, depending on the forum – the UN on the one hand, claiming statehood, and domestic courts on the other, rejecting the claims against it by victims of terror.

Clearly, if the Palestinians claim statehood, effective control and governance over the Gaza Strip, then they are precluded from denying responsibility for the massacre.

Notwithstanding, it is patently clear that they are relying on the naive and hypocritical international community to look the other way, divorced from all reality, and nonetheless accept the fictitious claim of Palestinian control and governance, even when the they themselves deny that situation.

How Should Israel Respond?

Two dominant factors provide the platform for the Palestinian claim for statehood.

The first is the fact that for over five decades, Israel has been reluctant unequivocally realize its internationally acknowledged historic and legal sovereign rights over Judea and Samaria. This hesitance has served to strengthen Palestinian claims that the areas are “Palestinian territory,” and as such they have succeeded in establishing a fiction that has been willingly accepted within the international community.

Israel’s legal basis for asserting its unequivocal title to those areas is anchored in the repeated determinations by the international community following World War I, including, but not limited to, the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, as adopted and given full legal force in article 80 of the UN Charter, which recognized the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and allocated the entire area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea for the sole purpose of “reconstituting their national home in that country.”

The second factor that gives potential credence to the Palestinian claim for statehood is the existence of the Palestinian Authority as a vehicle for Palestinian governance that provides a semblance of a governmental body claiming to fulfill state-like functions.

However, the PA, since its establishment in the Oslo Accords, has proven over the last three decades that it is not committed to furthering peaceful relations but rather to the destruction of Israel through the use of violence and terror.

Thus, as Israel approaches the 57th anniversary of the liberation of Judea and Samaria from the illegal Jordanian occupation, predominantly celebrated on the 28th day of the Hebrew month of Iyar, which this year falls on May 26, the Israeli government must make two substantial declarations:

First, the erroneous policy of ambiguity adopted in 1967 towards Judea and Samaria should be ended. Those areas are no less, and some even argue more, part of the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people than Tel-Aviv, Netanya, and the rest of Israel’s coastal plain. Despite political developments, Israel maintains the most substantial legal claim and title to those areas and should effectively and unashamedly assert those rights.¹⁷

Secondly, the reality of the failure of the Oslo Accords should be recognized. By the actions of the Palestinian leadership, in consistently undermining and violating the Accords, including, most pertinently for the current subject, the bid for unilateral recognition of the “State of Palestine,” the Palestinians have fundamentally frustrated the implementation of the Accords and rendered them invalid.

Accordingly, Israel should act without delay to implement its essential national security interests by declaring the Accords invalid, including dismantling the institutions and other instrumentalities created by the Accords, starting with the PA itself.

These acts should not come, as some have suggested, as a knee-jerk response to any particular act of Palestinian terror and the irresistible urge of the international community to pamper and reward Hamas and the PLO for massacring Jews but rather as the basic and clear acceptance of reality and furtherance of the essential requirement to ensure the long-term security of the State of Israel.

Further hesitance and reluctance to move forward with these two goals will only further undermine Israel and will strengthen the resolve of the Palestinian leadership to continue to terrorize.

* * *

Notes

https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-178680/↩︎
M.N. Shaw, International Law, Fifth edition, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p.179↩︎
Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Chapter 3, Article XVII↩︎
Ibid, Chapter 5, Article XXXI, Clause 7.↩︎
From 2011 to 2019, another 27 countries recognized the “State of Palestine.”↩︎
https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/IP%20S2011%20592.pdf ↩︎
Including the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the terror wing of Abbas’ Fatah party, and the Popular Front for the liberation of Palestine↩︎
https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/IP%20s%202011%20705.pdf ↩︎
It is important to note that the Partition Plan was a mere recommendation by the General Assembly and had no legal status. While agreed to by Israel it was rejected by the Arab League states↩︎
Ibid, para. 11↩︎
Ibid, para. 12↩︎
Ibid, paras. 15, 16↩︎
Ibid, para. 21↩︎
https://docs.un.org/en/A/78/837 ↩︎
https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/n2410445.pdf↩︎
The PA response is on file with the JCFA.↩︎
See on this subject, inter alia, Yehuda Z Blum, ‘The Missing Reversioner: Reflections on the Status of Judea and Samaria’ (1968) 3 Israel Law Review 279; Robert Mayer, Israel Under Fire – The Attempt to Deny the Foundational Legal, Historical, and National Rights of the Jewish People (https://jcpa.org/article/the-attempt-to-deny-the-foundational-legal-historical-and-national-rights-of-the-jewish-people/)↩︎

Trump is not the only peddler of fake news. The misinformation against Israel costs lives

Center for Near East Policy Research

May 28, 2025

Our age is one where information is much more openly available and quickly verifiable than ever before. Yet it is also an age when speedily provable untruths are asserted ever more brazenly by leading figures, even in open, democratic societies. They do not seem to mind – or to suffer – when their untruths are exposed.

Donald Trump is the best-known western leader who excels in these methods. This week, he launched one of his notorious Oval Office ambushes. He suddenly confronted president Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa with a film show purporting to prove the “genocide” of South African white farmers.

BBC Verify quickly got to work to demolish Trump’s claims. His “burial site” of “over a thousand” white farmers was actually a line of temporary crosses commemorating the murder of one farming couple. A picture he waved at president Ramaphosa was actually a scene from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Although Trump is right that white farmers are persecuted and occasionally murdered in South Africa (some fleeing to America), this is nowhere near a genocide and his facts, which the White House surely has the resources to get right, were wildly wrong. The BBC easily established this, and was happy to do so, because it hates Mr Trump.

In the same week, another public figure made another unevidenced claim, on an even more incendiary subject. On Tuesday, the BBC Today programme interviewed Tom Fletcher, a former British diplomat who dislikes Israel even more than do his former employers at the Foreign Office and is therefore a frequent voice on the BBC. Nowadays he is the United Nations “humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator”.

In his Today interview, he strayed way beyond relief coordination and into politics, accusing Israel of using “starvation as a weapon of war”. Grandly, he explained that, when addressing the Security Council, “I weighed with great thought and care what I should say”.

On the BBC, Mr Fletcher weighed nothing carefully at all. He said that if Israel did not let UN food through there were “14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them”.

This was an obviously ridiculous statement. Even if Mr Fletcher were right – which he emphatically is not – that only Israel is to blame for the delay in getting aid through, no one could accurately name such a number in such a timescale.

His words were uttered five days ago. Although some aid did get through this week, if Mr Fletcher had been speaking true, thousands of babies would have starved in Gaza in the past three days. Not one such death has been reported.

The BBC did later probe Mr Fletcher’s assertion and reported what they politely called “more detail” on his claim. He had been relying on a report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) that it expected 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition over the course of a year, should the same level of aid continue.

His enumeration of mass deaths in 48 hours was a wild extrapolation for which he has not apologised and will surely not be punished. By the way, the same IPC whose projections he grossly distorted has admitted that there is currently no famine in Gaza.

The substance of Mr Fletcher’s claim was no more than that the blocking of aid would worsen hunger and suffering in Gaza. We knew that already, and we also know, though Mr Fletcher skirted this point, that the greatest problem with aid is that it is vulnerable to Hamas exploitation. The UN never admits this because its relationship with Hamas is collusive: it is, at root, a political not a humanitarian organisation.

Anyway, the damage was done. In Parliament, 13 MPs supporting the attack on Israel by David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, repeated the Fletcher dead baby formula, unrebuked. Tom Gross, the respected monitor of Israel coverage in the media everywhere, noted that the New York Times, NBC News, Time magazine, The Guardian and ABC news all repeated Mr Fletcher’s 48 hours claim, citing the BBC as a reliable source. On Friday, Mr Fletcher’s 14,000 dead babies were still up on the BBC website.

Although admitting the “horrendous level of suffering” in the conflict, Mr Gross also says, “I follow it incredibly closely, and so far as I can tell, no one has yet died of hunger in this conflict”. Yet the times since October 7 2023 that the BBC has run starvation scares about Gazan people are almost uncountable.

You barely hear that Israel’s policy is not to stop the aid but to find more secure ways of distributing it. It is establishing aid delivery via a US-backed group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, protected by foreign security guards.

Mr Fletcher probably has an untroubled conscience. He will brush aside his “48 hours” distortion and the BBC will treat him gently because it thinks his heart is in the right place. He may even feel proud of grabbing the headlines.

But in Gaza, more than in any other current conflict, the battle is being fought not only by weapons, but by constant propaganda. The overall effect of this is to dehumanise Israelis and, by extension, all Jews.

The constant use of the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s war is not merely a heartless insult. It is designed to make Jews seem like the Nazi murderers who sought their extinction in the 1940s.

If that propaganda succeeds, two things happen. The first is that, as in 1945, Israel will be made to face a legal reckoning for what will be claimed as war crimes. The rhetoric of Mr Lammy and, indeed, of the joint statement this week by Britain, France and Canada, ramps up the idea that international courts have the authority to punish Israel, and threatens trade and further arms export restrictions. By implication, they see what they call “the Netanyahu government”, as an illegitimate regime, even though it is the only government with democratic legitimacy in the Middle East.

The second effect is on the collective mind of the West. If those in power here half-endorse the suggestion of genocide or, in the case of Mr Fletcher and UN agencies, directly state that Israel is deliberately engendering starvation, then officialdom endorses the logic of extremism.

If Israel is killing babies, say angry, radicalised young men, let’s kill the baby-killers.

In Washington DC on Thursday, a young Israeli couple, engaged to be married, were murdered in the name of Free Palestine. The man arrested is said to be a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation of the United States. His extreme anti-Israel ideology was the gateway to his actions. If we judge by the slogans shouted in the pro-Gaza marches in Britain, many are passing through the same gateway here.

For Labour, in particular, such people, chiefly Muslims, are a significant part of its constituency.

The party will pay a high price in civil unrest and terrorism for feeding their delusions.

In a lecture this week at Policy Exchange, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, tried to revive official interest in the concept of subversion, which our intelligence services took so seriously during the Cold War.

At much the same time, in France, the interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, newly elected leader of his party, has succeeded in declassifying his government’s internal report on subversion by the Muslim Brotherhood – the global organisation of which Hamas is a part – in his country.

We have never managed the equivalent here, preferring the vapourings of people like Mr Fletcher.

The pogrom comes to Washington

Center for Near East Policy Research

May 28, 2025

deux-diplomates-juifs-assasines — Tape with "Crime Scene do not cross" written on it. Original public domain image from Wikimedia Commons

Two Israeli embassy staffers gunned down in the prime of their lives. Young lovers shot to death for the ‘crime’ of taking pride in Jewish heritage. He had bought a ring and was planning to propose to her next week in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people’s homeland. We need to speak frankly about the vile slaying of Sarah Lynn Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky in Washington, DC last night. It was, in President Trump’s words, ‘obviously based on anti-Semitism’. It was an act of racist savagery that speaks to the anti-civilisational delirium that pumps in the veins of Israelophobia. It was the pogrom come to Washington.

Ms Milgrim and Mr Lischinsky were staff members at the Israeli Embassy in DC. Last night, they were shot dead as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. It was a cocktail-fuelled reception for ‘young diplomats’ aimed at ‘fostering unity and celebrating Jewish heritage’. The suspect in this sick crime was reportedly wearing a keffiyeh. ‘Free Palestine’, he hollered as he allegedly put bullets into the embassy staffers. ‘Globalise the intifada’, the drones of the Israelophobic mob have been shouting since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. Well, here it is, being globalised: Hamas-style savagery in the beating heart of the Western world.

America’s politicians are not mincing their words. This was a ‘deadly act of anti-Semitic violence’, says Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives. It’s hard to see what else it could be. If you lurk with a gun outside an event at a Jewish museum devoted to celebrating Jewish heritage, and callously butcher those who come out, it’s pretty clear what your motives are. That the suspect was allegedly wearing a keffiyeh and yelling about Gaza is not surprising: Jew hate comes gussied up in the Palestine colours these days. The fascist imagination disguises itself in faux-progressive talk about Palestine.

We await more information about the suspect. It remains to be seen if he worked alone or with others. So far as we know, one man bears responsibility for this savage act: the person who pulled the trigger. But it would be wrong, catastrophic in fact, to overlook the context in which this crime against the Jewish people unfolded. We cannot close our ears to the mood music in our societies – the screeching surround sound, in fact – that at the very least makes outrages like this one that bit more likely. We are living through the most ruthless, most relentless demonisation of the Jewish State in the entire 77 years of its existence. And it is hard to see last night’s double slaughter as anything other than the militarisation of that fashionable spite, the armed wing of a loathing for Israel that long ago crossed the line from political critique into neo-medieval hysteria.

Ours is a world in which the Jewish nation is continually damned as ‘uniquely murderous’. As barbarous beyond belief. As a pox on humanity. As so wicked it deserves violent erasure, ‘from the river to the sea’. Zionists ‘don’t deserve to live’, activists say. Jews can fuck off ‘back to Poland’, agitators cry. Week after week, the self-righteous beat the streets to libel Israel as a baby-killing machine. Just this week we were told – falsely – that this most bloodlusting state would gleefully oversee the death by starvation of 14,000 babies in 48 hours. Can we really be surprised if in the midst of such hysteria, in the frenzy of these daily defamations, some come to see Israel’s diplomats as demonic and deserving of the ultimate punishment?

An undertone, and very often an overtone, of threat and menace attends today’s orgies of Israelophobia. Activists praise Hamas’s acts of ‘resistance’, essentially dolling up neo-fascism as national liberation. People make excuses for the slaughter of 7 October. Some called it a ‘day of celebration’. Cosplaying as Palestinian militants has become all the rage on Anglo American campuses. ‘Intifada until victory!’, radicals cried in the aftermath of an ‘intifada’ that entailed the rape and murder of hundreds of Jews. Can we really be surprised if in the swirl of such savage urges, in this storm of praise for a pogrom, someone decides to become a one-man ‘intifada’? To bring home to DC some of that ‘glorious resistance’ against the demonic Zionist entity?

This is not to say that the activists and commentators who’ve been defaming Israel and suicidally cosying up to Islamism bear responsibility for last night’s gross crime. They might be lowlife motormouths but they have not killed anyone. It is essential to liberty that we conscientiously man the distinction between words and actions. And yet it would be a deadly folly to ignore the culture of intolerance and outright bigotry that has been stirred up by the myopic animus for the world’s only Jewish nation. Overlooking the cultural setting to last night’s barbarism would be as wrongheaded as ignoring the architecture of hate in which young Emmett Till’s life was extinguished in 1955. Unhinged hatreds birth unhinged behaviour.

Indeed, this act of violence does not stand alone. Since Hamas’s pogrom we’ve seen synagogues in the West attacked, Jews’ homes vandalised, Jewish students roughed up. Anti-Semitic abuse and assaults have spiked. It seems to me that what happened in DC last night was not a break from the post-7 October moment but a continuation of it, a raising of it to a grim new level, an intensification of the sheer unreason that has been unleashed these past 18 months. This is the globalisation of Hamas’s pogrom, a murderous assault not only on Jewish citizens and Israeli embassy staffers but also on our civilisation itself. If this fascistic killing does not open people’s eyes to the moral crisis of the 21st-century West, I fear nothing will.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy

Israel deserves support, not scorn, as it confronts a savage Nazi-like terror group

Center for Near East Policy Research

May 28, 2025

Perhaps you missed it on the BBC News at Ten: over the past few days now, tens of thousands of Gazans have reportedly been taking to the streets to protest against Hamas. They are risking their lives in doing so, calling for the removal of the terrorist group from power. By contrast, and equally absent from our newsfeeds, is the fact that Hamas has been busy praising foreign-policy decisions being made in London, Paris and Ottawa.

Like many in Gaza, and around the world, Israelis desperately want a different future. One that is free from Hamas and one in which our 58 remaining hostages are home in Israel, reunited with their families or, as would tragically be the case for many, afforded a proper burial. We desperately want to live in peace with our neighbours, but the presence and ongoing attacks from genocidal terror groups on our border causes such a peace to remain elusive. I am sure that no Briton would accept an Islamist terror group operating on its border, sworn to destroy the UK.

In this war, there is no perfect scenario. We are tasked with solving a number of complex and interrelated issues: our moral obligation to return our 58 Israeli hostages, dismantling the terror threat of Hamas, ensuring the security of Israeli citizens and facilitating transfers of humanitarian aid to Gazans while making sure that aid does not go to Hamas. We are having to make these decisions based on the fact that Hamas chose to carry out the deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust and take 251 of our people hostage, torturing them in inhumane conditions.

I remind you that there was a ceasefire in place on October 6 2023 – a ceasefire that was brutally breached by Hamas. We now live in a post October 7 reality, and that means we can not allow Hamas to continue its control of Gaza. For our security, we need to see Gaza de-militarised; no one can expect us to simply wait for another October 7. Unsurprisingly, volunteers to carry out this process of demilitarisation in Gaza have been lacking, so it falls on us. That being said, I’d suggest that the lack of opposition to this in our region should be interpreted as tacit support – no one wants armed, Jihadi extremists operating on, or near, their border. All Western leaders agree that Hamas must not remain in power but we find a gap between rhetoric and actions in Europe. When it comes to it, no viable plan that takes seriously our security concerns have been proposed.

It can not be overstated that our enemy is specifically Hamas. That is why it is all the more tragic that Hamas has created an industry from the aid that it diverts from those who need it. Its strategy is steal it, sell it and use it to recruit new terrorists, pay their salaries and continue launching attacks against our people. The evidence of Hamas looting aid from international organisations, some of which has been paid for by donor countries including the UK, is overwhelming: whether it’s the plethora of videos on social media of armed Hamas terrorists directing aid lorries and shooting at ordinary Palestinians, or the testimony given at the UN Security Council by former hostage Eli Sharabi, who said he saw terrorists steal UN aid and “eat like kings”. Indeed, there’s more: a recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal noted that Hamas has “pilfered aid” and even the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has criticised “the looting and theft carried out by criminal gangs targeting warehouses and storage facilities of humanitarian aid [in Gaza]”.

It is for this reason that we have collaborated with American companies to improve the mechanism for aid delivery in Gaza. A new framework where the real loser becomes Hamas and not the Palestinian people. As we continue the facilitation of hundreds of trucks of aid, in a few days, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) will be operational and will be able to deliver aid to the Gazans who actually need it, bypassing Hamas and organisations that have been compromised, like UNRWA. The GHF will provide aid directly to Palestinian families. Alongside the US, we have been trying to find solutions to this fundamental issue so that Palestinians who need aid, get it. We fully support this plan and hope the UK, and others, will do too.

In the UK, we see an ally that successfully defeated Nazism in its ultimate fight against evil during the Second World War. The war took time and the British had to make many difficult decisions. Indeed, the civilian death toll in Nazi Germany was significant, notably in Dresden and Berlin. Israel today faces that very same evil and yet we are going to great lengths in order to minimise civilian casualties, warning them before attacks, making phone calls, dropping leaflets and sending text messages, notifying Gazans of specific areas to avoid. But we are fighting against a terror entity that uses civilians as human shields and hides behind them.

No one seems to ask: what was Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar doing in a tunnel underneath a hospital? Or what was the architect of the October 7 massacre, Mohammed Deif, doing in the designated humanitarian zone? I’d suggest that these are pertinent questions that the whole international community, journalists and politicians alike must be asking. Every innocent loss of life is a tragedy, but this tragedy was created and orchestrated by Hamas. Rightly, the Allied victory over Nazism is viewed as an historic example of good overcoming evil. We too have no choice but to defeat that evil once again.

Tzipi Hotovely is Israel’s Ambassador to the UK

The Legacy of Eli Cohen – and Implications for Israel-Syria Relations Today

Center for Near East Policy Research

May 23, 2025

In the aftermath of President Trump’s meeting with Syria’s President Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, as of this writing, there are rumors of the imminent return of Israeli hero Eli Cohen’s remains — close to the day of his execution 60 years ago.

The story of Eli Cohen’s life deserves to be remembered — even if he had never gone undercover in Syria.

When Eli Cohen was publicly executed by the Syrian government on May 18, 1965, it was already clear to both Israelis and Syrians that he had succeeded in befriending the Syrian president and had penetrated the highest levels of the Syrian regime. What was not yet known, however, was that he had gathered the intelligence that would later help save the State of Israel from destruction.

Perhaps more than any other individual, Eli Cohen — an Egyptian-born Jew — earned the Mossad its reputation as one of the world’s most formidable intelligence services. His work paved the way for Israel’s success on the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War in June 1967.

As a young man in Cairo, Cohen was deeply moved by the 1944 trial of two members of the Stern Group (LEHI), Eliahu Bet-Zouri and Eliahu Hakim. These two had assassinated the antisemitic British High Commissioner for the Middle East, Lord Moyne.

Cohen helped organize demonstrations in support of Bet-Zouri and Hakim. Though the protests proved fruitless — the men were hanged — on the scaffold, they maintained their dignity and sang the Zionist anthem, Hatikvah. It is said that Cohen later drew strength from their example as he, too, faced execution.

Cohen played a key role in establishing an “underground railroad” that smuggled Egyptian Jews to Israel. In the early 1950s, he was recruited by the Mossad to help monitor ex-Nazi scientists working for Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser on rocket development. Cohen reportedly also took part in sabotage operations.

After this Mossad network was exposed and many members were arrested, Cohen moved to Israel in 1956. Following a brief adjustment period and service in the Israel Defense Forces, Cohen was offered a role as an intelligence analyst for the Mossad.

Eventually, he was approved for field duty.

Assuming the identity of Kamal Amin Taabet, a wealthy Arab merchant who had emigrated to Argentina and then returned to Syria, Cohen infiltrated the highest echelons of Damascus society. He joined the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, and became close with many of its rising leaders.

After the Ba’ath Party came to power in a coup, many of Cohen’s acquaintances became high-ranking government and military officials, including intelligence chief Colonel Ahmad Suweidani and President Amin al-Hafiz.

As Taabet, Cohen was one of the few civilians ever permitted to tour Syrian military installations on the Golan Heights. He transmitted photographs and sketches of the entire Syrian front to the Mossad. In one instance, he even alerted Israel to an imminent attempt by Syrian commandos to cross the border.

Beyond intelligence gathering, Cohen was tasked with assassinating escaped Nazi war criminal Franz Rademacher, then living in a Syrian colony of former Nazis. That 1962 attempt failed. Cohen also participated in efforts to target Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s top aide, who had also found sanctuary in Syria. This dark chapter of Syrian history deserves renewed attention: even before the rise of the Assad regime, Syria’s government hated Jews enough to shelter Nazi war criminals. The famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal called Brunner “doubtless the worst … living criminal of the Third Reich” in 1988.

Cohen was ultimately discovered by chance, when his radio transmissions were detected by Soviet KGB agents operating in Damascus. At the time, he was reportedly being considered for a senior government post.

After two trials, Cohen was sentenced to death by hanging. He was 40 years old. He left behind a widow, three daughters, and a son. In his final letter to his wife, he wrote: “I beg of you not to waste time crying for me. Always think of the future.”

Cohen also left behind a warning to Israel’s future leaders: “Against the Arab you mustn’t defend yourself. You must attack.”

Cohen gave his life to ensure that the Syrian threat from the Golan could be neutralized.

Israel is now facing criticism for its continued presence on Mount Hermon, the highest strategic point in the Golan, since the IDF’s deployment there in December. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz stated in February 2025 that the IDF would remain in the area “for an indefinite period of time to protect our communities and thwart any threat.”

Katz is correct.

Future threats are not hypothetical.

There’s no way to know how long the fragile interim government of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa will remain in power — let alone whether it will return to peace negotiations or collapse into chaos.

Let’s remember: the only thing that stood between Israel and Hafez al-Assad’s chemical weapons was the Golan Heights. The same remained true for his son, the deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad. Had Israel caved to international pressure, the Assads would have seized the Golan — and their weapons, including poison gas, would be aimed at the families of Israel’s Galilee, Jews and Arabs alike.

The Israeli government owes it to Eli Cohen not only to bring his remains home for reburial, but also to maintain a vigilant posture to limit threats from Syria — now and in the future.

Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, AFSI, (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.

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