Vivian Silver believed that there were partners for peace in Gaza and paid for it with her life. Silver was not a politician. Not a soldier. Not a “settler.” She was a lifelong peace activist who built her entire identity around Jewish-Arab coexistence.

She lived on Kibbutz Be’eri, just miles from Gaza, and devoted decades to helping Palestinians, especially the sick, the poor and the vulnerable.

The 74-year-old was a founding leader of “Women Wage Peace,” a movement that advocates dialogue, reconciliation and a two-state future.

She also volunteered with the group, “The Road to Recovery,” personally driving Palestinians from Gaza to Israeli hospitals for lifesaving care—children with cancer, adults needing urgent surgery. For the most part, people she did not know but felt responsible for anyway. She had such a big heart.

Just days before Oct. 7, 2023, Silver hosted an international meeting of peace activists. Even as security warnings mounted, she refused to give up on the idea that empathy could overcome hatred.

On Oct. 7, that belief was incinerated. Terrorists from Gaza crossed the border into Israel, entered Kibbutz Be’eri and reached Silver’s home. Hamas terrorists and ordinary Gazans set her home on fire, and sadly, she Silver was murdered.

For weeks, her family believed that she had been kidnapped into Gaza. Only later did DNA analysis confirm the truth. She was not a hostage. She was killed where she lived.

Her son, Yonatan Zeigen, was on the phone with her as the attack unfolded. When he heard gunshots outside her window, he told her to hang up and stay quiet. They continued texting as terrorists moved through the house. From a closet, Silver wrote that they were inside. She knew exactly what was happening.

Her final message to him was chilling: “They’re inside the house. It’s time to stop joking and say goodbye.”

He replied that he loved her. She told him she loved him, too. Her last words were: “I feel you.”

That was the end of her amazing life. What followed was just as telling.

There has been no meaningful outcry from Gaza condemning her murder. No apology to her family. No public reckoning that one of the Palestinians’ most devoted allies—someone who spent decades helping Gazan civilians—was burned alive.

This is not about collective guilt. It is about collective silence.

Silver’s life and death expose a lie at the heart of the two-state fantasy as it is currently sold to the world. We are told that if Israelis show enough goodwill, enough restraint, enough empathy, enough “understanding,” then peace will follow. Silver did everything she was told peace required.

She dedicated her life to Palestinian welfare. She rejected hatred. She believed in coexistence until her final moments. It did not save her.

Which leads me to this point: A viable two-state solution requires more than merely borders and international conferences. It requires moral reciprocity, the basic recognition that those who extend their hand in peace should not be murdered in return.

Yet on Oct. 7, Gazan society did not rise up to protect people like Silver. It didn’t mourn her afterward; in fact, her murder was celebrated there. It didn’t demand accountability for her murder. Instead, silence.

You cannot build a state on grievance alone. You cannot demand empathy while excusing barbarism. And you cannot murder your most committed allies and expect the world to keep pretending that nothing has changed.

Silver believed in peace with her Arab neighbors until her last breath.

The question now is not whether Israelis should acknowledge the harsh reality that the Jewish state never has and likely never will have a partner for peace next door. The question is whether or not the “innocent civilians” of Gaza are capable of saying the name Vivian Silver—and recognizing what was done to her.

By the most conservative estimates, in the coming days the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group (CSG) would be able to participate in an attack on Iran Which jibes with the threats President Trump made.

Threats which encouraged many thousands of Iranian civilians to willingly sacrifice their lives in protests as part of an effort to bring down the terrible Iranian regime.

When Mr. Trump thanked Iran for not publicly executing protestors cynics suggested that he was giving Iran a pass to continue torturing them to death off camera.

I hope and pray that next week we learn that the cynics were wrong.

That the confusing talk was just to put Iran off guard.

Prime Minister Netanyahu knows the truth.

If Netanyahu knows that President Trump is blinking, then he must assume Trump will blink on other matters relating to Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, etc..

And everything we do from this point forward must take this painful reality into account.

During the war that was launched against Israel on October 7, 2023, it became commonplace for those following events closely to speak of an “eighth front.” While the IDF was fighting enemies in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon, and responding to missile and drone attacks from Yemen, Iraq, and Iran, this eighth front was located in the realm of international opinion and public perception. The weapons used weren’t rifles and rockets, but images, social media, and press releases. Here Israel’s enemies fought not to kill and maim, but to demoralize and to break spirits. This unconventional war for hearts and minds directly shaped Israel’s ability to fight on all other fronts and proved itself just as lethal.

While this kind of warfare is accelerated in a digital age where propaganda can travel across the world in a matter of seconds, there is nothing new about it. It would have been familiar to the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who, 200 years ago, understood that this front can be decisive. To Clausewitz, war is never only about the clash of forces. It is a contest of wills. When the will of a people collapses, the war is already lost, regardless of battlefield outcomes. Clausewitz can serve as our guide to understanding the challenges this kind of war poses.

After repeated conventional wars failed to destroy Israel, its enemies adapted. Clausewitz wrote that the aim of war is to compel the enemy to do one’s will. When military compulsion failed, countries like Egypt and Jordan decided to seek peace with Israel. But others, like Syria, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and later Iran, shifted to legal, moral, and political compulsion, using propaganda and perverse moral reasoning to convince the world that Israel is always the aggressor, and any attempt it makes at self-defense is illegitimate. Clausewitz famously taught that war is the pursuit of politics by other means. Today, Israel’s enemies use politics to pursue war by other means.

Aiding these efforts is a powerful tool not available to many practitioners of political warfare: anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is not mere prejudice, but a way of seeing malign Jewish influence behind all the world’s ills. This ancient, ever-mutating hatred latches on to the guiding social constructs of each era—religion, with deep roots in both Christian and Muslim culture; science, with the Nazis depicting Jews as an inferior race that must be destroyed; modern politics, in the Protocols of Elders of Zion and Soviet propaganda; and the “secular religion” of human rights in a post-World War II international rules-based order—conditioning people to believe and to peddle blood libels about “the Jew” as all that is evil, employing lies that are often both vicious and absurd. Today, in its modern strain of anti-Zionism, these irrational beliefs have been transferred to Israel, the Jew among the nations.

It was the response to the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 that exposed the success of this strategy. Hours after the massacres began, there was a rush to paint Israel as the aggressor. Justifications of Hamas (Gaza was an open-air concentration camp; Palestinians have a right to resist) and denial of the atrocities soon followed. But the most effective tool may have been silence about Hamas’s depredations: speaking constantly about imaginary Israeli war crimes in order to drown out any mention of actual Palestinian ones. Even the targeting and murder of Jews worldwide was excused or downplayed: the Bondi Beach Hanukkah party was hosted by Chabad, an organization that supports right wing-Zionists; that synagogue was selling stolen Palestinian land. Through a kind of moral alchemy, evil was proclaimed good and good evil.

In a digital age, algorithm-driven social media has become the decisive terrain of this conflict. Here expressions of outrage count for more than does evidence; videos and images can circulate without context; lies and falsehoods have more cachet than truth; and people unthinkingly believe and spread further anything that confirms their preconceived notions. Clausewitz might have been bewildered if he could see our online world, but his doctrines still apply: war, he wrote, tends to the extremes when unchecked. Today, those extremes manifest not only in violence, but in the collapse of shared reality and morality.

Anti-Semitism, with its ability to mutate, has hijacked, redefined, and inverted international law and organizations ostensibly dedicated to human rights—turning them into unconventional weapons on this eighth front. Fitted with new meanings, such terms as racism, apartheid, and genocide are now used to demonize, delegitimize, and apply double standards to the Jewish state, following the pattern employed by anti-Semites from time immemorial. Those entrusted to uphold and protect international law have time and again been willing to twist or ignore it in order to condemn Israel—including in the UN Human Rights Council, the International Criminal Court, and the International Court of Justice.

All the more so, commentators, journalists, and politicians with minimal knowledge of either the law or the nature of modern warfare make absurd proclamations about the IDF’s conduct that are all too readily believed. Add to this the numerous NGOs, like Human Rights Watch or Doctors Without Borders, that have been completely hijacked by anti-Israel, anti-human rights, and anti-Western fanatics. Principles designed to restrain violence, and moderate the horrors of war, are thus inverted to restrain democracies and excuse genocidal terrorists. The very institutions meant to protect all who cherish life and liberty are now enemies of both.

In the short term, this information warfare aims to turn popular opinion in the West against the Jewish state, influencing governments to isolate Israel and pressure it to show restraint. A sufficient quantity of such pressure can stop the fighting and leave Hamas, Hizballah, and their allies intact. But there is also a strategic, longer-term goal: to fracture Western societies from within and undermine their moral confidence. Clausewitz emphasized that the strength of a state rests on the unity of its people, government, and armed forces. Already, anti-Israel protests have brought disorder to American cities and constant controversy to university campuses, while corroding politics with accusations that U.S. support for Israel is tantamount to support for genocide. But that’s only the beginning.

For years, enormous sums have been invested in the UN and its agencies, universities, K-12 education, media outlets, cultural institutions, and sports diplomacy to shape narratives and normalize extremist worldviews, with anti-Semitism as both symptom and weapon. This is how modern ideological warfare is waged: slowly, legally, and largely unnoticed until its effects are irreversible. In New York City, more than two years after October 7, children as young as six are taught about “Palestinian resistance” during civic commemorations. Leading feminists publicly rationalize rape as “armed resistance.” These are the fruits of patient and effective propaganda operations.

October 7 was not only an act of mass terror against Israeli civilians. Like September 11, it was a barbaric attack on civilization. It was an act of war against the possibility of peace itself, and against the paradigm shift represented by the Abraham Accords. Too much of the international conversation continues to frame the conflict narrowly as Israel versus Hamas. The multifront war to annihilate Israel exposed this framing as strategically blind. Hamas is a proxy; Gaza is but one arena. The war is waged by a broader totalitarian axis intent on destroying the very ideas of freedom, democracy, and coexistence, of which Israel (and the Jews) have become a symbol.

This totalitarian axis is already deploying the same methods of information warfare against the U.S., and will do so more as conflict escalates. Simply by unleashing anti-Semitism, this axis undermines America, since, as the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned, anti-Semitism is almost always coupled with civilizational rot. If the distortions of the laws of war employed against Israel become accepted interpretations, ruthless terrorists will have a permanent advantage over law-abiding Western militaries. Future enemies will copy the strategies of Hamas, knowing that they can justify mass rape and deliberate murder, turn civilian populations into human shields, and then win global sympathy.

America must begin studying and learning from Israel’s eighth front, and applying what it learns. Too often, the distorting lens of anti-Semitism has prevented those who cherish life and liberty from learning the hard lessons Israel has paid for in blood, lessons about conventional warfare, civil resilience, emergency medicine, education, and the defense of democratic societies under sustained attack.

Let us then return one last time to Clausewitz, who taught that the first task in war is to understand the kind of war one is in. Israel’s experience shows us the war we are already fighting. Any Western democracy that fails to recognize this reality risks defeat in the next war, possibly before the first rounds are fired. The battle for will, legitimacy, and truth is well underway.

According to terms set up by U.S. President Donald Trump on Oct. 9 as part of his 20-point plan for revitalization of the Middle East after Israel’s two-year war with Hamas in Gaza, the terrorist organization must disarm in the Strip completely for the agreement to move forward.

Total and absolute demilitarization is required. Trump has said, “Hamas was born with rifles in their hands.”

This begins to focus on one of the major problems that Israel faces. Hamas, and I might add the Palestinian Authority, continue to churn out textbooks for Palestinian Arab for as young as first-graders that call for the killing and murder of Jews.

Since the Oslo Accords were signed on Sept. 13, 1993, the educational system in Ramallah and Gaza has persistently called for the destruction of the State of Israel, and has glorified the stabbing and shooting of Jews. Children go to summer camps to learn military training.

Although many U.S. politicians have tried to change this, little has actually happened in 30-plus years. If a culture of peace is truly to be achieved, Hamas and the P.A. must not only disarm people but also their textbooks.

The savagery, butchery, rape, torture and murder by Hamas and Palestinian operatives against Jewish communities in southern Israel that took place on Oct. 7, 2023, was the direct result of the inculcation of Gaza youth to do precisely what they did.

Disarming Hamas militarily is a first step. Disarming their educational system is equally important. It is not only the textbooks that need to be corrected, but the teachers themselves who need a massive overhaul. Most are aligned and affiliated with Hamas.

Education is a path to success. Before you can build skyscrapers, you must get your schools right. Hamas is already not only breaking the ceasefire daily but has started to make outrageous demands, including integrating hundreds of its terrorists into the security apparatus and lobbying to preserve its status as a political faction in the P.A. elections. This is exactly how they took over total control of Gaza in 2007.

No doubt, the leaders of Turkey and Qatar are lobbying for such conditions. They are Hamas’s biggest backers. They should be working to improve the education of the Gaza youth rather than pushing for Hamas to recover from its degraded status.

If the education of the Gazans remains the same, then they will aim for another Oct. 7 again and again. Trump is the only leader they fear and respect. He has a historic opportunity to change Gaza into a success story. I know that he badly wants that to happen.

The key is not to pump money into the coastal enclave simply to rebuild it. It is to revamp and redesign the entire educational system of both Hamas and the P.A. If the teaching system and materials can be fixed, then peace is a possibility.

International bodies set to administer the Gaza Strip expect to complete its disarmament within three to five months. As first reported by Israel Hayom, the “Board of Peace” led by President Donald Trump is expected to present Hamas with an ultimatum demanding that it agrees to disarm in the coming days.

The ultimatum will include an explicit requirement for Hamas to hand over all types of weapons in its possession, not merely as a symbolic gesture. Hamas will be given a short period of time to respond on whether it accepts the demand.

If the response is positive, the policing forces operating on behalf of the “technocratic committee” that is to run Gaza would be responsible for collecting all weapons held by Hamas, including rifles, rockets, explosive devices and other arms. In other words, neither the IDF nor the International Stabilization Force (ISF) would carry out the collection. Instead, it would be handled by a Palestinian police force that has been trained in recent months in Egypt. The assessment is that this process would take between three and five months.

Senior officials familiar with the details stressed in conversations with Israel Hayom that all parties understand full disarmament of the Gaza Strip and the stripping of Hamas of its weapons are an essential and critical condition for implementing the peace plan. Without this, there will be no progress in Gaza’s reconstruction, and the international community will not transfer funds for that purpose.

According to the officials, this is a fundamental principle agreed upon by all parties, including Arab states. They added that skepticism is understandable, but assessed that just as diplomatic pressure led Hamas to release the hostages and agree to an end to the war, it is possible that Hamas will also cooperate in this case. If the optimistic scenario does not materialize, the officials added that there is also agreement among the international bodies that Israel would receive authorization to disarm Hamas by force.

The muffled response of legacy media and so-called human-rights groups to the massive, momentous Iranian uprising, especially in comparison to their hysterical activism during the Gaza war, exposes profound hypocrisy.

Media coverage of Iran has been paltry by comparison to daily front-page coverage of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Data show that whereas news about the Gaza war regularly made the front pages, legacy media have seldom regarded the protests in Iran as equally important.

The media has downplayed the importance of unrest in Iran, attributing it merely to cost-of-living issues. Thus, headlines like NBC’s “Protests in Iran over economy turn deadly” omit the fact that Iranian protesters don’t just want better economic conditions. They want to depose the regime that oppresses them.

Legacy media have also declined to cite death tolls, hiding behind “need to verify” policies, which were blithely ignored when publishing fake Hamas fatality figures. Indeed, during the Gaza war, media outlets such as the BBC often produced headlines like, “More than 25,000 now killed in Gaza since Israel offensive began, Hamas-run health ministry says,” without a hint of doubt as to the credibility of the terrorists’ numbers.

These double standards exemplify anti-Israel bias on the part of legacy media—not surprising, since surveys show these journalists are overwhelmingly left-leaning and Democratic Party members.

Likewise, political groups so passionate about “freeing” Palestinians have made no declarations and have not organized any significant events to support millions of Iranians seeking freedom.

While true liberation movements should transcend geopolitics, neither legacy media nor anti-Israel activists demonstrate sympathy for those suffering under Islamist autocracies. Rather, their agenda is focused on ushering in a new world order, based on the destruction of Western democracies, crushing capitalism and supporting those they deem “oppressed” by designated “oppressors”—to which latter category, apparently, Iran’s mullahs do not belong.

Legacy media provide little coverage of the Iranian protests. During Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, daily front-page stories covered all aspects of the conflict. War coverage comprised 20% to 30% of content during peak news cycles. In contrast, the protests in Iran merited just five to 10 articles a week in legacy media outlets, with no front-page dominance for the first seven to 10 days of the demonstrations. Articles on the protests consisted of just 2% to 5% of news cycles.

Legacy media try to justify meagre coverage of the Iran protests, citing lack of independent journalists, dangers to journalists, and the internet and telecommunications blackout in Iran. For instance, CNN stated: “The countrywide communications shutdown makes it difficult to assess what is happening on the ground.” But these same conditions existed in Gaza during the media’s blistering—and fact-free—criticism of Israel during its war against Hamas. Shame obviously does not inhibit such hypocrisy.

Legacy media downplays Iran protests, attributing them to socio-economic conditions. In fact, the demonstrators’ real objective is to topple Iran’s Islamist regime. Protesters regularly chant “Death to the dictator!” and “Death to Khamenei!” and burn pictures, symbols and buildings associated with the Islamist regime. Nevertheless, weeks into the protests, headlines in The New York Times still asserted that “Severe Inflation and a Currency Crisis Provoke Protests in Iran’s Biggest Cities,” and ABC insisted that “Protests in Iran sparked by economic woes now nationwide.” As Iranian activist Mahtab Gholizadeh said “Separating these protests into ‘political’ or ‘economic’ is misleading. Almost everyone understands that the political structure of the Islamic Republic has produced the economic collapse.”

Why do legacy media insist on “verifying” data in Iran, but not in Gaza? For instance, BBC world affairs editor John Simpson claimed social-media footage must be carefully verified before reputable outlets can use it. But lack of verification never stopped the BBC and other legacy media from regularly publishing misleading casualty figures from Hamas during the war. Indeed, according to a study by the Centre for Media Monitoring, which analyzed BBC coverage from October 2023 to October 2024, the network attached the phrase “Hamas-run” to the terrorists’ casualty figures in 1,155 articles—almost as often as casualty mentions appeared.

Leftists with an anti-Israel bias control mainstream media reporting. Surveys in the United States have shown that journalists lean left ideologically compared to the general public. U.S. journalists are three to five times more likely to call themselves liberal than conservative and 10 times more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans. A study of NPR staff revealed 86 of their journalists to be registered Democrats with no Republicans.

Clearly, such a tilt explains the tendency to criticize Israel rather than support it. Thus, it’s no surprise that left-leaning journalists skewed coverage on the Gaza war to overlook “liberator” Hamas’s daily war crimes, while refusing to refute blatant lies of genocide and starvation tactics by the alleged “oppressor”: Israel.

Why do “pro-Palestinian” political groups show no interest in a free Iran? Organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, the BDS movement, Palestine Solidarity Campaign and similar campus groups have remained silent on the Iran protests. Accordingly, no widespread university campus protests have condemned the Islamist autocracy or throngs of students or celebrities championing the demonstrators.

Iranians’ struggle for freedom doesn’t fit the radical leftist narrative. According to leftist doctrine, liberation struggles are only legitimate when it’s “oppressed” peoples, such as people of color, fighting white, Western “oppressors.” Hence, the Palestinian cause is legitimate and worth defending because it is “oppressed” Arabs—1.2 billion strong—fighting tiny “white-colonial-oppressor” Israel. The oppressed Iranian protesters’ quest for freedom doesn’t merit attention because their ruthless, autocratic Islamist regime is apparently even more oppressive.

The struggle for freedom is universal. These are not issues of superficial racial “identity” or fake definitions of “oppressors” or “oppressed.” Israel is by no factual reality a colonizer, oppressor or majority white—quite the contrary on all three counts. Some 90 million Iranians are trying to liberate themselves from one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships, and they’re being murdered on their streets in cold blood. They are surely worthy of attention and support from the media and champions of human rights.

The following is the full text of the charter of the Board of Peace, the international body headed by US President Donald Trump.

This charter was attached to the invitations sent out to dozens of world leaders who were asked to join Trump on the panel tasked with overseeing the postwar management of Gaza.

The text of the charter was obtained and verified by The Times of Israel.