Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

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The Illusion of Peace

When defence can never rest

I’m currently reading the award-winning novel, The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish, a historical fiction exploring Jewish life in London in the 1600s through documents and books discovered at the beginning of this century. Within the story we also see both the contemporary and historical world through the eyes of the historians studying these documents.

I’m only halfway through so far, but for me, the prevailing theme is one of neverending struggle, the fight to survive, or simply to be accepted, appreciated, and allowed to live, contrasted with the world that everyone else in British society seems to occupy, where for many, such struggle is remote, even unknown. The contrast between peace and endless war, even when the war is internal or merely veiled by the illusion of peace.

While the non-Jewish protagonist, Helen, an aging academic and expert in Hebrew and Jewish studies, is casting her mind back to her younger years during which she volunteered in Israel and became enamoured by the history of the Jews, these words, spoken by an Israeli soldier in the desert in 1954 to a group of foreign volunteers, jumped out at me:

Dror pointed to the east, into the dusky hills. In a low voice, switching languages and scanning their faces to make sure he was understood, he continued. “Over there, that line of dark rock: Jordan.” He swiveled, pointing south, then west. “There, Saudi Arabia. There, Egypt. Drive a half day to the north: Lebanon, Syria.” He turned back, surveying the group. “There’s been war on this spot where you’re standing. There will be more.”

With his tight black curls, high forehead, and handsome, angular face, he looked to Helen like something out of an illustrated Old Testament — noble and severe.

“We’re a small base,” he said, “but everything is on our shoulders. If you spend your six months here, you’ll understand what that means. If you came for a vacation, go home.”

It made me think of my dad. Born right in the middle of the second world war, his memories don’t stretch to wartime. He remembers the ongoing rationing, and the time he was convinced his older brothers and sisters were trying to poison him by telling him this firm, yellow, curved thing was a banana, when he’d only known bananas to be brown, dried and shrivelled. He’d never seen a fresh banana before.

He emerged into his childhood at a time when Britain had collectively experienced the most frightening time in recent history, and survived. Hitler was gone, Nazi Germany defeated, and Britain now braced itself for lasting peace.

No more war, was the refrain from Britain. Never again, the refrain from Jews globally, including my dad’s parents and their fellow British Jews. Never again would the world allow genocide. Never again would the Jews have to live as subjects of another’s murderous regime.

For the people of Britain, the focus was on peace, but for the Jews who now inhabited the fledgling Jewish state, the focus was on survival.

My paternal grandfather quietly understood this, but spared the youngest of his six children — my father — the mental strain of this understanding. Quietly, my grandfather Abraham contributed every penny he could spare from his humble shop profits to provide for the Zionist cause and help to put food on the table for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from both the east and the west, who had been stripped of their wealth, their dignity, and many of their family members, arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

My dad, meanwhile, enjoyed his British childhood, freer than that of the generation before him, with the promise of peace forevermore stretching ahead. Sure, life was still frugal for all Brits, especially that of large households like my father’s. It was his generation who became the flowerchildren of the sixties, where peace and love reigned, and rock ’n’ roll was the new religion. He rebelled against the old notion of religions yet never stopped being proud of his family’s Jewish heritage.

And that was what led him to become a volunteer in Israel in 1967 following the Six Day War. He spent two months on a kibbutz and was then due to fly home to resume his work for Nestle, a job he hated. The night before leaving, he arranged to meet up with an old friend of his mother’s family from Dublin, where she was born. His name was Chaim Hertzog and he was, at the time, a general in the army. The Jewish world was very small.

At that meeting, Chaim offered my dad a volunteering opportunity in the army. The choice between remaining in Israel and returning to his horrible Nestle job was a no-brainer. For the following six months, my dad was collecting up weapons abandoned by the Egyptians in the Sinai, being chased by armed Arab militias, and firing weapons he had no training in. Living life on the edge in Israel was the adrenalin kick he craved, but he also began to understand what that really meant when four members of his 25-strong group of foreign volunteers were killed in confrontations with Egyptian militia members.

Still, he remained in Israel for longer when the government offered him and his group the opportunity to stay and attend Tel Aviv University for a year. Which was where he met my mother, was married within a year, and living in an apartment in Ramat Gan.

It’s only now I realise that the naivety that was ingrained in him from the belief that lasting peace inevitably follows war never quite left him. In 1973, by now a father to a young baby daughter, he suddenly realised that he was living in a place that could not bask in such luxury as lasting peace, and he announced to my mother that he wanted them to relocate to the UK, where he could raise his children with more certainty that they would survive beyond childhood.

And so it was that in the week my sister turned one year old, they left Israel. Within days of their departure, Israel was attacked — on Yom Kippur. My mother, born into a land where running away from the inevitable wars unleashed by hostile neighbours was not an option, was suddenly given an exit option not afforded to her family who remained.

But my dad, experiencing the responsibility of parenthood for the first time, realised that this was no vacation. The fun of adrenalin had run its course. It was time to go home and return to the lasting peace he was promised as a post-war child.

I don’t blame my dad for making that decision. I mean, if you were to take away all the context and simply offer someone the choice between war and peace, who wouldn’t opt for peace? But one can’t overlook the element of denial when you do bring context into it.

My dad had a luxury even his own parents weren’t able to enjoy. Recently he said to me that he never considered the fear my grandmother must have had to live with, knowing what would happen to all of them if Hitler succeeded in invading Britain. It seems that it took the horrific events of October 7th 2023 and all that Jews worldwide have faced since then for him to begin to consider it.

I find myself pondering on all of this as I stare at the chaos in the world right now. The denial that mass immigration can pose a threat to existing civilisations. The ease with which smuggling gangs have been able to line their own pockets as they flood Britain and Europe with everyone from hopeful and desperate men, women and children to those with more insidious designs on foreign lands and their populations.

Meanwhile, peace isn’t all it pretends to be.

The narrative war has been at play since well before the outbreak of the second world war. When the UN partition vote took place in 1947, all that really happened was that it changed course. It laid a new foundation upon which it has built now for decades.

We Jews have felt the brunt of the narrative and information wars for a good while now, but the real impact on the West has yet to be realised. It’s not looking good. And yet, many are still able to disappear into the illusion that we have peace in our little corners of the Western world.

Now, when I think about the defensive wars that Israel has had to fight repeatedly since its inception, I realise our global fight that appeared to end in 1945 here in Britain has never really ended. It just relocated for most of the last 80 years. There has never been true peace because, despite some lasting peace agreements being signed, many parts of Arab society never gave up their plans to annihilate the Jewish state.

Back in 1947–9 Arab society and the numerous neighbouring states to Israel fought each other with their multitude of opposing goals surrounding Palestine. In 1947 many Palestinian Arabs just wanted to live. Many communities within towns and villages defied their leaders by selling goods to Jews and warning them of planned Arab attacks. Ramallah was predominantly Christian and set up defenses against the threatened invasion of the Muslim population. King Abdullah of Jordan had designs to be the ruler of all of Palestine, to incorporate it into Transjordan, while other Arab League member states fought to prevent such a rise of the Hashemite dynasty. The Arab League did everything it could to stop the Hitler-endorsed lunatic Haj Amin al-Husseini from causing more chaos and evacuations from Palestine.

It was due to this multitude of opposition within Arab society that they were so weak against Jewish unity, despite the Yishuv being at a huge disadvantage in weapons and manpower. Yet while none of them ever achieved any of their respective goals, they refused to ever stop fighting. Today we see how far it has come, how the Islamist greed has simply grown as they have seen the far wider fertile ground to be conquered, ie., the West. The Muslim Brotherhood, along with Islamic Republic that colonised Iran in 1979, created this vision long ago. The huge influx of illegal migrants into Europe, once seen as simply a refugee crisis, and Europe proving that it is the model of peaceful unity and inclusion, repeatedly denied that this influx was a problem.

We’re still fooling ourselves now. We still believe we are acting for the best of everyone, that giving asylum to a constant flow of illegal migrants is an act of peace, that our societies are not under attack, despite the huge quantity of evidence to prove otherwise. Besides the massive housing crisis for ordinary British citizens, there’s a whole host of violent threat we are faced with. The huge rape and grooming gang crisis. Terrorist attacks undertaken by recently naturalised citizens. Charities funding Islamist terror factions.

In Spain, the major controversy of the migrant crisis in Cuenta and the domino effect that is likely to have throughout Europe.

Left wing “progressive” politics has proven it isn’t looking for peace. We need to take note.

And yet, Britain and Europe still act as if they aren’t under attack. Lasting peace — that’s what was promised after WWII. And they will uphold the illusion until the very last.

In 1973 I can see how easy it was to believe the wars weren’t coming for the West. My dad genuinely believed leaving Israel would guarantee his children a life of peace.

But that peace was never designed to last, only delay the onslaught that Israel has been busily fending against since 1947. My dad didn’t prevent war for us, only delay it until it finally caught up with us.

Israel wanted peace more than anything else in the world. But the luxury of pretending there was peace is not something she has ever been blessed with.

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to subscribe and if this resonated with you, feel free to restack/share/give it some love. Please also consider joining with a paid subscription or a one-time donation to enable me to keep bringing this content to the platform.

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Today’s piece is by Delilah Rose and was first published in Ruach, our sister publication on Medium.

Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! The JPF isn’t here for polite debates or academic footnotes — we’re dismantling antisemitism one idiot, one coward, one apologist at a time.

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The Real Jewish Superpower

Spoiler: it’s not controlling the banks, the weather, or the media

In the nearly 80 years since the UN voted on the partition agreement that would pave the way to Israel’s independence, one can’t help but wonder if the passing of the motion was only done to appease the Jews in full expectation that Jewish independence would ultimately fail against the Arab aggression.

The actions of the UN indicate as such. The endless resolutions against Israel, the many, many condemnations by the Human Rights Council which are of insane proportions relative to Qatar, China, North Korea, Iran, and more. The consistency of the UN’s allegations would certainly lead one to think that they never really intended for Israel to stick around, and now they’re trying to worm their way out of having passed Israel’s right to establish Jewish sovereignty.

If Israel’s birth, against all the odds, wasn’t surprising enough, the subsequent 80 years have defied all belief: a tiny state with a largely weakened refugee population managing to overcome five Arab armies in its war of independence, and going on to survive and defy many more attacks since. All the funding and weapons in the world couldn’t logically bring about such an outcome, so what did?

Simple — Jewish solidarity. We saw it in the fifty years prior to that UN vote, when, miraculously, Jews came together from all over the world, bringing skills of all kinds, and developed agriculture and an economy from nothing. We’ve seen it many, many times since.

The most memorable for Gen X Jews and younger has been the aftermath of October 7th 2023, when we suddenly found ourselves frozen out of our social circles simply for not being ignorant of the truth of Israel’s history. Once again, we sought each other out, told each other’s stories, supported a re-emerging economy to support Jewish artists, writers, and businesses, and created a solid wall of resistance to fend off the rising hatred trying to bring us down.

Once again, the true Jewish superpower emerged.

Not controlling the weather, not Hollywood, or banks, or the media or governments or elections or foreign policy. Not engineering pandemics, capitalism, communism, immigration or climate change. And definitely not all of those at once.

But something far more simple yet powerful: a refusal to give up on each other, or to leave a single member of the tribe to die alone. Solidarity.

There is a Hebrew phrase: Pidyon Shvuyim — the redemption of captives.

For centuries, Jewish communities regarded pidyon shvuyim — the redemption of captives — as one of Judaism’s highest religious obligations. In the writing of the Mishneh Torah, Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon said, “There is no greater mitzvah than redeeming captives,” arguing that no suffering combines hunger, fear, humiliation and danger to life quite like captivity. But he also noted that the redemption of captives must never reward the kidnappers so much that they will be encouraged to take more.

This has proven itself to be the greatest moral dilemma of all — how does one best save both today’s captive and tomorrow’s.

So the principle may be rooted in the scriptures, but it’s also arguably an instinctive response to the tribal experience, arising as a result of the shared experience of exile itself. Already estranged from the roots of one’s culture and the tribal home for nearly two thousand years, the instinct to hold the tribe together by any means possible became paramount.

And the feeling of exile never ended. Jews were tossed from one country to another, welcomed when they were useful and then betrayed when they weren’t.

The treatment was indiscriminate. There was no concern for the family man, the mother, or the child. Across Europe, children were jeered at, adults spat on and beaten in public. Lithuania murdered 100,000 Jews without any input from Nazi Germany. Poland the same, before the murderous SS occupied the country and took care of the rest.

Across the Middle East, Jews were valued members of the community, as long as they paid the Jizya tax and made no mention of Israel as their home. As soon as any suspicion arose that they were disobeying their rulers, their homes were set on fire, women raped, children murdered.

For those two thousand years, Jews just tried to survive. Every loss was mourned as one’s own.

When history repeatedly teaches you how easily your brothers and sisters can vanish, remembering becomes an act of resistance, and searching becomes an act of love.

But let’s dispense with the romanticised version of the story.

Fast forward to modern Israel and we have an organised society with expert-trained professionals to take care of every modern-day Jewish requirement, including Pidyon Shvuyim.

There’s Mossad, whom everyone has heard of, whether through high-drama TV shows or conspiracy-pushing social media channels. But few know that within Mossad exists an intelligence team with officers whose sole responsibility is to bring home the missing.

Not just living hostages: the dead, the recently returned, even the long-ago nearly forgotten.

In an interview with Ynet in May 2025, Col. (res.) “Moshe”, the former IDF officer responsible for captives and missing personnel and now an operations intelligence officer in the IDF Captives and Missing Command, described the job unlike almost any other in intelligence. “Captives and missing is 95 per cent failures and 5 per cent successes,” he said. “It is living with ongoing failure and ongoing frustration, and you have no privilege to give up.”

On October 7th, 2023, 251 hostages were taken. Most were alive at the time, a few already dead. The team’s work would be endless for the next 843 days, after which time all 251, and four captured in 2014 and 2015, finally made it back to Israeli soil. Many were dead, but gratefully the majority were alive.

The ones who had been there the longest — over ten years — had never been forgotten. Two — Hisham al-Sayed, a Muslim Bedouin Arab Israeli, and Avera Mengistu, an Ethiopian Israeli — were released alive. The other two, Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, were known to have been killed during the 2014 Gaza war and their bodies held by Hamas. The Captives and Missing Command unit had spent over ten years following a trail to Oron’s body, which the IDF recovered during a rescue operation in January 2025. Hadar’s was returned in November as part of the ceasefire deal.

Only last week, Oron Shaul’s mother, who had waited over ten years to lay her son to rest, passed away.

The stories of Hisham, Avera, Hadar and Oron, along with the 251 hostages taken on October 7th 2023,are only a taste of the kind of persistence and finely-tuned attention with which Mossad has sought out its captives, dead and alive.

Other stories include that of Zachary Baumen, who disappeared during the Battle of Sultan Yacoub in 1982. For 37 years Israeli intelligence continued searching. Eventually, in cooperation with Russia and through years of intelligence work inside Syria, his remains were recovered and returned to Israel for burial. The operation reportedly involved years of intelligence gathering, covert relationships, satellite imagery, historical battlefield reconstruction and forensic identification.

There was the massive intelligence effort and finally the willingness to hand over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners including convicted murders and the notorious Yahya Sinwar in return for one single, treasured soldier, Gilad Shalit. Israeli intelligence agencies spent five years identifying who was guarding him, verifying he was alive, gathering information on his location, and supporting negotiations.

There’s the story of the wristwatch of legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen.

Over fifty years after Cohen’s execution in Damascus, Mossad reportedly obtained his watch in a clandestine operation inside Syria. Although not a rescue mission, it demonstrated the agency’s long-term commitment to recovering items of profound importance to Israeli families and national memory.

And one can’t forget Ron Arad. The navigator Ron Arad became one of Israel’s greatest intelligence priorities.

Although he has never been recovered, Israel devoted enormous intelligence resources over decades to finding him.

According to public reporting, Mossad and other agencies conducted operations across Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere in attempts to establish his fate.

His case shaped much of Israel’s later doctrine that no soldier should ever be abandoned.

Aside from these rescue missions and negotiations, Israel’s short history is filled with stories of working tirelessly in negotiations and spy missions to enable Jewish communities to relocate from places such as war-torn Ethiopia and the regime of the Soviet Union, and offered refuge to others fleeing violence and authoritarian regimes, including the Vietnamese boat people in the late ’70s and non-Jewish Ukrainian refugees fleeing the current war.

The government has also offered asylum to many Palestinian members of the LGBTQ+ community, whose lives are in danger from their own governments.

These days, Israel is a rich mix of different cultures and ethnicities. It is far from perfect, but Jewish principles that value life still reign, giving refuge to those in need, especially those held captive and made to suffer by an oppressive regime, because Israel knows how that feels.

It’s not about heroism, it’s just doing what we have to do.

Perhaps that is the only real Jewish superpower that has ever really existed.

Not controlling newspapers.

Not controlling governments.

Not controlling the weather.

Simply refusing to accept that one person can disappear into history without somebody still trying to bring them home.

After all, this is a people who have spent thousands of years preserving the names of forgotten ancestors, reciting memorial prayers for the dead, rebuilding shattered communities and carrying memory across continents. The intelligence officers searching for hostages and fallen soldiers are not inventing something new. They are the latest custodians of a very old promise.

A promise that every life matters.

That every family deserves answers.

That every missing person remains someone’s entire world.

For two thousand years, antisemites have insisted that Jews possess extraordinary powers.

Perhaps, in one respect, they were right.

Not the power to control the world.

The power to refuse to abandon one another.

And in a world that so often moves on, forgets and looks away, perhaps that is the most extraordinary power of all.

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to subscribe and if this resonated with you, feel free to restack/share/give it some love. Please also consider joining with a paid subscription or a one-time donation to enable me to keep bringing this content to the platform.

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Dear (Zio) Aunt Sally is back to solve another agonising Jewish concern! Agony Aunt Sally is my alter ego, here to help with your most pressing concerns and worries. Please read and enjoy.

Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! The JPF isn’t here for polite debates or academic footnotes — we’re dismantling antisemitism one idiot, one coward, one apologist at a time.

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Dear Zio Agony Aunt Sally, Is the Sex Worth it?

G-d, Mossad, and other superpowers

Welcome to the latest edition of Dear Zio Aunt Sally. This week’s questions delve into the two most powerful aspects of life — G-d and Mossad — as well as the existential issue of having a relationship with someone brainwashed into the cult of progressivism.

So without further ado, let’s dive in.

Dear Aunt Sally,

My girlfriend is Jewish and from California. My mom is Jewish so I guess that makes me Jewish even though my dad was Scots/English. I was always closer to my mom’s family than my dad’s family, and they are all supporters of Israel, as am I. My girlfriend and I get along in all ways except when it comes to Israel she seems to go into a trance, becomes angry, and says the most bizarre and negative things about Israel which confuse me. I don’t want to argue with her so I let it go. Last night we both watched the video of her favorite Senator Ro Khanna’s encounter with the IDF and some settlers in a restricted area in Judea and Samaria.

After watching the encounter I made the mistake of speaking first, said “what a bunch of nonsense, Khanna was in a restricted area and had no business being there. He didn’t even clear his travels in advance with Israeli authorities.” My girlfriend got emotional, said “Did we just see the same video? Khanna came close to being genocided for no reason other than his color. He came close to having the upper half of his body ethnically cleansed from the lower half. Can there be any clearer example of apartheid than what we just saw with our own eyes?”

I didn’t respond as I didn’t want to argue. Later that night we had the most amazing sex. Is it worth it to maintain this relationship because the sex is so good?

Confused in California,

Danny

Dear Danny,

What a great question. Yet also so complex. I would like to address these two topics separately, if I may.

First of all the evil IDF holding up Ro Khanna and nearly genociding him: I saw the video too, and I can verify that Ro Khanna was in no danger whatsoever. The IDF soldiers looked so relaxed they’d rather light up a spliff and smoke it with him than blow one half of his body apart from the other.

However, the propaganda has very successfully drummed into the ignorant that the IDF are as evil as the SS soldiers during WWII. Therefore, they see a confrontation involving IDF soldiers and only see that anyone being stopped by them is being abused in the most inhumane ways. A bit like Greta being “kidnapped” and “forced to kiss an Israeli flag” while in actual fact she was given a sandwich and was caught on camera smiling in her stupid frog hat.

The problem is that this is pure brainwashing by a cult. There’s no other way to state it. Any academic research into cults will verify that the pro-Pally (anti-Israel) western activist scene mirrors a cult perfectly. And therefore you cannot “persuade” anyone in it that they are being duped and manipulated.

But, as cult mind-control expert Dr Stephen Hassan says, the best way to help someone de-program is to simply be there for them, be their true friend because the cult will show itself to not be the minute she becomes inconvenient to them, questions the narrative even slightly, or asks the wrong questions.

Therefore, onto the second part — the sex — if you really love her, then absolutely stick around for the amazing sex too. If it’s worth it to her too then I suspect she will eventually do the questioning required to realise she’s been hopelessly lied to. In which case, long live the sex!

Best,

Aunt Sally

Dear Aunt Sally,

Someone on TikTok explained Middle Eastern history in forty-seven seconds.

Apparently thousands of historians were wrong.

Should I throw away my books?

Jake

Dear Jake,

Since you’re Jewish I’m surprised you’re even asking this question.

In the age of TikTok, books may be becoming irrelevant, even extinct. Which of course means that eventually they will be such a rarity they will one day be sought after. Store them for that day. Other such rarities include critical thinking, integrity, and general decency.

While those last three are more difficult to monetise, useless history books may fetch millions at auctions.

Being Jewish you should be seeing the financial opportunity in holding onto antiquities, even those as worthless as history books, critical thinking, integrity and decency. After all, it’s not about the content, it’s about cashing in on everyone else’s loss.

Yours,

Aunt Sally

Dear Aunt Sally,

I want to know if ‘Fauda’ really represents what Mossad is like. Can you help?

Mia

Dear Mia,

I wish I could help but Mossad reset my Netflix password and I haven’t yet been able to crack the code. Hence, I haven’t been able to watch it. If you have an email address for Mossad, please pass it on.

Cheers,

Aunt Sally

Dear Aunt Sally,

My neighbour insists Jews have horns.

Should I correct him?

Simon

Dear Simon,

No.

Charge him for photographs.

Love,

Aunt Sally

Dear Aunt Sally,

I’ve stopped wearing my Star of David necklace.

Nothing terrible happened. No one attacked me. I just got tired of wondering whether today would be the day someone shouted at me.

I feel guilty. Am I letting everyone down?

Ruth

Dear Ruth,

No.

You’re carrying something that most people never have to carry: the calculation.

“Will this make me a target?”

Most people leave the house wondering whether they’ve remembered their keys. Some Jews leave the house wondering whether they’ve remembered to hide their identity.

That isn’t weakness. It’s the burden prejudice places on the people it targets.

If one day you decide to wear your necklace again, that will be brave. If you decide not to, that doesn’t make you a coward.

Your Jewishness has never lived on a chain around your neck. It lives in your values, your memories, your family, your history and your choices. Don’t let anyone convince you that courage only counts when it’s visible.

And if anyone tells you that Jews have “nothing to fear nowadays,” politely ask whether they spend quite so much time deciding which bits of themselves are safe to display before popping out to buy milk.

Love,

Aunt Sally

Dear Aunt Sally,

Please can you help me work out who or what G-d is. I’ve read all of the scriptures three times over and all I have to show for it is sore eyes and an aching head. I still can’t figure out who or what G-d is.

Look forward to hearing from you,

Benny

Dear Benny,

I wish I could help. Sadly I’ve been asking G-d to get in touch with Mossad and send someone to come and reset my Netflix password, but it has now been 8 months and I’ve heard nothing. Not even a whisper from G-d let alone Mossad. Therefore I feel I am no closer to discovering who or what G-d is, but I feel pretty certain he/she/it isn’t in the communications trade.

Best,

Aunt Sally

Aunt Sally’s handy vocab

In each edition I will include three words for you to keep in your handy vocabulary list. Here are this week’s:

Context (noun): The thing everyone demands until you provide it.

Settler Colonialism (noun): A phrase increasingly used to describe people whose ancestors were expelled from the place they’re accused of colonising.

Open-Air Prison (noun): A prison in which the inmates somehow manage to import Iranian missiles, concrete, luxury cars, enough cement to build hundreds of kilometres of tunnels, and more Nutella than the entire population of Lebanon could collectively dream of.

That’s all for now. Keep controlling that media and I’ll see you next time!

Aunt Sally needs you!

If you happen across any online Jewish fuckery that needs the Aunt Sally treatment, feel free to email me at auntsally777@gmail.com. You can also email me with your own questions.

In the meantime, do subscribe and support my work. Aunt Sally and the JPF are here to keep pushing for honesty, truth, and an end to antizionist gaslighting. A free subscription helps to put my work on Jewish concerns further into the Substack realm, while a paid subscription enables me to spend more time researching and bringing sobering truths to the forefront.

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Or make a one-off donation to help Zio Aunt Sally keep spreading her words of wisdom!

Make a one-time donation

Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! The JPF isn’t here for polite debates or academic footnotes — we’re dismantling antisemitism one idiot, one coward, one apologist at a time.

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The Distortion of Truth

On ideological conformity and ignorance… just another day in the diaspora

The other day I was sitting in my kitchen with a friend when he spotted a fridge magnet that had been pushed down the side of the dishwasher. It was intentionally pushed — by me — because I didn’t want anyone to see it.

When I saw him go to have a look at whatever it was he’d spotted, I murmured, “Oh, you saw it,” upon which he sat back down. “Did you see what it was?” I asked him. “No,” he replied, and so I began to explain.

It’s a fridge magnet my daughter brought home in the shape of…

At which point my friend’s brain was filling in the blank as he tried to work out what I might have been trying to hide from visitors. His first guess — Israel.

I laughed. Of course he got it wrong.

It was actually in the shape of male genitalia and not really something I care to have on display in my kitchen. Hence being shoved out of sight.

But I can completely understand why he might have jumped to the conclusion that anything I might hide from visiting eyes would be something that gives away my position on Israel. Seeing what we are currently seeing in the world at large, we don’t share this information freely.

And yet, once my initial amusement had passed it was replaced by indignance. I assumed he was insinuating that my reason for hiding it would be that I am ashamed, and yet I have no shame whatsoever about my beliefs or conviction in the rights of Jews to live free in our indigenous homeland.

In fact, I’d be far more ashamed to be someone who swallows Islamist propaganda whole and sees Israel as the bad guy while the Palestinians are merely innocent victims. But that’s another story.

The fact that one’s views on Israel can potentially rule how one is treated in a society thousands of miles away from it is the real story. How Palestine and “its evil oppressor” Israel have become the centre of everything is astounding — in every progressive left wing space it shows up.

Like in a little local craft hub mostly frequented by women over 60, for instance, where my friend hosts sessions on spinning flax into thread. She invited me to drop in to say hi to her one day, so I swung by to drink tea. It’s simply a nice community craft space. What could go wrong?

While she was busy with people visiting, I browsed the wall display. And there it was — Gaza.

It was a project to make puppets for children in Gaza. Oh that’s sweet, I thought on first glance. But then I looked closer.

The flagship puppet was made from a keffiyeh.

Now, for clarity, I have no issue with a Palestinian wearing a keffiyeh. I do, however, have a problem with people in the west buying keffiyehs from an opportunistic Amazon seller via Ali Baba, and using them for political posturing and virtue signalling. Have whatever political views you like but at least be authentic.

I also have an issue with every aspect of our lives being turned into a political statement. A political statement that most know almost nothing about beyond the regurgitated Hamas propaganda that is spewed all over our media.

Beside this poster was a book called Gaza Girl with a photo of a watermelon on the cover. I took a look inside. Filled with emotive language that describes the injustice this girl has been subjected to — yet no naming of the perpetrator. Of course, it is intentionally leaving that open to interpretation, but the rhetoric has already made its interpretation.

The unspoken rules of this society right now are very clear. Ideological conformity is being demanded and there is no escaping the inferno if you dare to visibly step outside of that.

The recent commotion following Boy George releasing a pro-Israel song perfectly encapsulated what happens when you loudly defy that ideological conformity.

We can say we care about Palestinians all we like, but unless we say in the same breath that we hate Israel then we will have failed the test. It’s not about acknowledging the dire humanitarian situation for many, many Gazans right now, it’s about calling Israel’s actions a genocide. It’s not about calling out the government to do more to protect the innocent civilians in Gaza and the West Bank/Judea and Samaria, it about declaring that Israel has forfeited its right to exist as an independent state.

These are the rules of society. They go so deep that they govern whether or not someone will vote for the most capable person in the room to be Prime Minister. Many who have traditionally voted Labour are threatening Andy Burnham that he must recognise the “Gaza genocide” or “we’ll vote Green”, ignoring all the terrifyingly destructive signs of the Green Party because… well, Israel. It’s the centre of everything!

Meanwhile the Greens are lapping up the opportunity to gain more votes by playing to the whims of the Israel-haters. Bugger facts, it’s about making the voters happy! An example that has been at the forefront of recent news is the decision to un-twin Hackney with Haifa. Hackney mayor, Zoe Garbett (or Goebbels as I think is more appropriate), wrote a letter to the mayor of Haifa, giving him the deadline of October 7th to respond. She later apologised, calling the action “insensitive”.

But let’s be more honest — she probably simply followed advice from someone else to give that date. She probably didn’t spend any time thinking about the significance of it, just as she won’t have spent any time considering what people on both sides of the green lines in Israel-Palestine are feeling. She probably hasn’t a clue what the real significance of being twinned with a city like Haifa is if you take away the Palestinian Jihadi propaganda.

In other words, she hasn’t thought. She follows the rote and that’s it. She’s been taught how to speak and what to say. She dyes her bangs to signal her solidarity with the woke pink-hair crew. And the Green Party applauds her as if she achieved all of this herself.

Spoiler: she didn’t. Florit Shoihet chased her down to ask her what her problem was with Haifa. It was evident she knew next to nothing about the city.

What do the Greens have against Haifa?
The Green’s hollow campaign against Haifa, a unique example of coexistence in the Middle East, wins them voters and a…open.substack.com

These rules of progressive society govern everything that surrounds us too, like whether or not they can be friends with you. Or if me having a fridge magnet shaped like Israel will tell someone that I am actually a genocidal Nazi.

We’re so obsessed with this topic that we barely notice the rising threat of Islamist violence. Except to acknowledge that it’s obviously the fault of the Jews.

People are confused when they meet me and discover my “dark side”. Initially they will see me and I look like someone who supports left wing causes. They talk to me and that perception becomes all the more grounded. I believe in peace, justice, human rights; I talk with compassion and knowledge about many of the global crises we are facing. But then they discover I am Jewish, hold Israeli nationality, and am unequivocally pro-Israel. Not pro the current Israeli government, not pro Jewish extremism, but very pro the rights of Israelis to live in peace in the homeland that is now theirs, however much people dispute the legitimacy of how that was established, and a proponent of enabling Palestinians to live a prosperous and fulfilling life — which in my books means the end of all violence. How they go about it is their business; we can’t force those still living in 7th century conquest mentality to change their ways but I do know that there are many well-educated Palestinians who understand that violence (what many refer to as resistance) is not the way forward.

The confusion is in the realisation that I don’t hate all Palestinians. That I have compassion for innocent lives whatever the colour of their skin or the religion they were born into. And yet, I maintain my identity as nothing separate from Israeli Jews living in Israel, and although I will never argue with people about the disinformation they come out with, I will say enough to ensure they realise that I am vastly better informed than they are. The simple reason being that I go searching for information about every aspect of the conflict, both historical and current, while the vast majority of British society simply hear the news, or read a social media post, and walk away with the conclusions those articles or posts were designed to make them draw.

For a while, I did remain quiet about my identity and political views. I was too angry and everything triggered me. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of how I felt or who I was but that I knew I wouldn’t do any favours to myself or the argument I wish to prove. I would likely come across as aggressively hostile rather than composed and able to rise above the ugly spread of Jew hate.

But I don’t care about that anymore. I’m willing to mock the ignorance of the masses — not to play down the dangers, which really are frightening, but to hopefully gradually enable people to see how they were sucked in by propaganda.

That may sound a little hopeful, but as the truth gradually comes out about the many “journalists” killed by Israel that turned out to be members of terror groups, and eye-witness accounts of hospitals being used as military bases and weapons caches, people may start to realise the Jews weren’t so evil after all. As we see the numbers of innocent civilians killed begin the fall, the failure of the list of dead to increase since the ceasefire, and the real data behind the humanitarian aid Israel facilitated to send into Gaza, and the likelihood that the ICJ will find it impossible to condemn Israel of the crime of genocide, a different story will have to emerge. People will need to understand what their own minds were led to believe and why.

Again, perhaps I am being optimistic, but there are signs. British PM Andy Burnham’s refusal to “recognise the genocide”, though obviously seen by the pro-Pally movement as him being puppeteered by “the Jewish lobby”, is significant when he has played hard to win votes by making Palestine a central topic of British policy, despite British government decisions having no impact on Israel’s actions whatsoever. He’s intelligent, and therefore understands that making a legal judgement before the formal legal conclusions have been drawn is nothing more than political posturing. He may be posturing in other ways, but they don’t have legal ramifications like the genocide libel does. It may also be that he is simply aware that the bottom is falling out of the genocide accusation, and that the legal case is crumbling. Who knows…

What I do know is that the distortion of truth will continue for a long time to come. Yet, as it does, the gap between rational argument and unhinged characters spitting venom will become wider and wider, the difference starker, and regular people who have swallowed everything they have been fed until now with no agenda of their own will see it for what it is. A massive psy-op of which they became both a victim and a potential tool.

I also believe that Israel has its own work to do too. But its fate is not be dependent on the ignorance and toxicity of the west. Change and healing could happen, as long as Israeli society can be strong enough against the extremism that is trying to kill it from within.

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to subscribe and if this resonated with you, feel free to restack/share/give it some love. Please also consider joining with a paid subscription or a one-time donation to enable me to keep bringing this content to the platform.

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Today’s article is by the amazing and was first published in her Substack publication, The Liberal Jew.

Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

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A Resistance Group That Failed To Govern: Review of "Hamas and Its Two Million Hostages" by Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

For years, Gaza and its Jewish neighbor have served as possibly the most talked-about territory in the world. We consume most of the content about it from our screens in the safety and comfort of the West, from English-language channels. Much of the time, those who speak of it here do so not out of profound understanding or a desire to seek truth, but rather to moralize. These so-called activists and political commentators talk over Gazan voices, not for them. A real understanding of Gaza among a western audience requires the perspectives of knowledgeable observers, preferably those who are actually Gazan.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib is one such voice. After growing up in Gaza, he came to the U.S. as a teenager in 2005 to attend high school through a cross-cultural exchange program. Shortly after he arrived to the U.S., Hamas got elected to run Gaza after Israel’s full withdrawal of its settlements. Ahmed was granted asylum in 2007—the first Palestinian to be granted such relief a result of Hamas’s takeover of the territory—and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2017. He has not touched ground in his homeland since Hamas took over.

Despite thinking about this conflict pretty much constantly for years, a deep understanding of Gaza and its people always eluded me. The place to me seemed almost mythical. Each time I would visit the beaches of Tel Aviv to take in the warm Mediterranean breeze, I would think to myself, “Gaza is right down the road.” It’s literally on the same coastline, but separated in a way that felt impossible and out of reach. While I have a reasonable grasp of Israeli history, I never really understood Gaza outside of the context of conflict with Israel.

Even just the term “hostage” became a lightening rod during the war. On October 7th, Hamas massacred Israel within its internationally recognized borders and took 251 hostages. In doing so, they exposed their civilian population to the aggression of the worst Israeli government ever. The title of this work challenges the “us vs. them” narrative with the term itself, suggesting that the terror group’s most numerous hostages are actually their own people—two million of whom who were denied an exit during the worst catastrophe in Palestinian history.

Throughout the last few years especially, Ahmed has served as a steady voice above the activist noise that mistakes itself as “pro-Palestinian” but is actually just anti-Israel and anti-western. He has stern words for those who belong to this movement, describing their actions post-October 7th as “a form of mass psychosis”:

I was furious that a once-in-a-generation opportunity to drum up support for the Palestinian people was squandered on sloganeering and hollow activism. I heard nothing constructive, no desire or attempt to produce pragmatic policies and results for the Palestinian people. Instead of doubling down on the two-state solution and acknowledging that the Palestinian people do not want the annihilation of Israel, but rather seek dignity, freedom and independence, activists in the Western world became drunk on the worst possible combination of extremism, oversimplification and maximalism. This toxic mix has been harmful to the lives and liberty of Palestinians and to the cause of the Palestinian people.

When I spoke out against these trends, I was attacked viciously. I realized that many in the so-called pro-Palestine movement are deeply anti-Palestinian, for they are only interested in platforming and embracing views and experiences that conform to their beliefs. That a Gazan like myself – who lost family members in the war, who is largely deaf in his left ear following an Israeli bombing in 2001 and who has been on the front lines of providing humanitarian support for Palestinians in Gaza – could be dismissed for sharing the “wrong views” was an alarming sign of the degradation of this Western-based activism.

I want to acknowledge a similarity between Ahmed and me: we are both millennials who regard the 90s as our most prosperous and hopeful decade. From the safety of my American upbringing, those positive feelings largely refer to Nintendo 64, Nickelodeon, and shopping malls. For Ahmed, it refers to the Oslo Accords era that I was too young to understand at the time it occurred. That time represented the closest possibility of a functional Palestinian state, complete with a Gaza international airport serviced by Palestinian Airlines, passports that allowed easy passage to and from the Strip, and better job opportunities for the general Gazan population.

The book details the circumstances that led to Hamas’s rise to power, which in effect destroyed any hope of the blossoming, functional society that many envisioned during those hopeful Oslo years. One of the common refrains that we often hear is that Hamas represents the will of their people because they were elected to power in 2005 (it was Gaza’s most recent election). The truth, however, is a bit more complicated. Hamas’s takeover, after what was most certainly a questionable electoral process, represented a power struggle between them and other Palestinian groups (Fatah, the PLO, and the PA). What happened next was hardly a peaceful transfer of power.

Analysis of international NGOs skews more towards valid criticism. After crediting these organizations for providing crucial resources to the Gazan population, he points out that their presence actually had the effect of empowering Hamas. No matter how many acts of terror Hamas committed, NGO money flowed in constantly to provide basic services that Hamas wouldn’t. To be fair, this is a more general problem with international humanitarian organizations working in countries with oppressive governments — Gaza is simply one major illustration of it.

But Gaza is unique in the extent to which its leaders use international organizations like the UN to play into a frankly brilliant PR campaign (fueled largely by Al Jazeera) to reach audiences all over the world. How do you think the ‘Gaza Health Ministry’ suddenly became a trusted authority to our nation’s elite journalists? As long as Hamas could keep that machine going—the NGOs, the donors, the PR—they could claim “resistance” while simultaneously failing to govern. It didn’t matter how many electricity outages, fuel shortages, or general misery they caused for their own.

Keeping the focus on outrage towards Israel enables Hamas to continue their thuggery unabated. The sad reality today is that the more brutality and chaos Hamas brings, the more outside money flows in to fund it. Terrorism has become far more lucrative than peace.

To address a very obvious elephant in the room: I asked Ahmed directly why he chose to publish his book with a Jewish publisher and not a Muslim or otherwise non-Jewish one. I’m just going to allow his own words on that to speak for themselves:

The Jewish Quarterly offered, and their model for publication is ideal, whereby they do short books or long form essays. That was quite a perfect fit for what I was looking for. There is a serious problem within the Muslim community when it comes to Hamas and the “pro-Palestine” sentiments and there aren’t a whole host of available options either. Still, I also do deliberately want to reach Jewish audiences that are otherwise unreachable by the pro-Palestine advocacy movements, even though large elements of my message are directed at pro-Palestine folks.

It’s safe to assume that the majority of the readers of this text will be the pro-Israel types who already regard Ahmed as a sort of unicorn. I don’t know to what extent Ahmed’s views are shared by ordinary Gazans who currently live in the Strip. What I do know, however, is that this compelling text is an earnest attempt by a native Palestinian to educate as a representative of a community that has been talked about endlessly yet understood poorly. He is what “pro-Palestinian” should mean, in a way that our current discourse does not allow.

Thanks for reading!

And thank you to Jill for sharing her work so generously. If you don’t already, please go and subscribe to The Liberal Jew where you’ll find some great analysis of many of the issues facing Jews predominantly in the diaspora.

A little confession: I’ve been busy working, enjoying summer weather, and having a birthday. And as a typical lioness Zioness, I don’t do birthdays by halves. So I never quite finished my article in time for today and therefore today’s story is the reposting of an old one I wrote — a piece of satire that will hopefully remind you that, at the very least, we’re doing better than the Irish both morally and spiritually.

Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers.

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Hamas Pays Tribute to St Patrick By Wearing Green

“As fellow victims of oppression and colonisation, we can empathise with the Irish,” says Hamas spokesman

What has slowly become clear to me over the last eighteen months is just how far Hamas’s empathy stretches. Not only are they making sure the entire world weeps with them for the tens of thousands of deaths ̷t̷h̷e̷y̷ ̷c̷a̷u̷s̷e̷d̷ caused by “the occupation”, but they are now proving how they stand in solidarity with other nations traumatised by oppression and colonisation.

Each Saint Patricks Day sees tens of thousands of innocent Gazan civilians coming out in dress that acknowledges both the pain and suffering caused by “the occupation” as well as the pain and suffering of the Irish. The green headbands are, and have always been, a token nod to the Irish for their solidarity with the cause, though Hamas, owing to their admirable modesty, never likes to bring attention to that.

Thankfully, Hamas keeps plenty of uniforms freshly laundered and ironed in its deepest tunnels, especially for Saint Paddy’s, meaning they can invite more than ever to join in this tribute to their fellow victims.

But Hamas’s generosity doesn’t stop there. They are even allowing those who dress in the attire to keep their special Saint Paddy’s Day costumes if they swear allegiance to the cause of freedom. It’s a huge sacrifice on the part of Hamas, for swearing allegiance to them means potentially blowing up their carefully-preserved uniforms. Uniforms that were protected all through the two-year war (oops, a slip of the tongue, I mean genocide) from the Nazi bombs of the Zionist entity, taking up precious safe space that could otherwise have sheltered women and children. And definitely would have, had there been space, I am sure!

Obviously, these outfits will only be blown up when the body inside them is martyred by a suicide vest or during ̶a̶ ̶m̶u̶r̶d̶e̶r̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶a̶t̶t̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶J̶e̶w̶s̶ an act of heroic freedom fighting against Zionists. Blowing up uniforms isn’t something Hamas would do willy-nilly, without a body inside it to sacrifice.

They’ve even made costumes to fit children as young as five. Plus, as a special thank you for their solidarity with the cause, they include RPGs with each Saint Paddy’s Day special costume. This is HUGE, considering most Gazans are starving; investing in RPGs for children rather than using the money for food for their families is a truly difficult choice that ̶a̶l̶w̶a̶y̶s̶ never comes easily.

A Gazan mother weighs in: “Finally, my dreams are being realised. I didn’t birth thirteen babies into the world for nothing. I birthed them to help all of us to realise freedom from the occupation. I birthed future martyrs.”

Of course, this love goes both ways. The compassion flowing out of the Irish brings me to my knees. I’m gobsmacked by the beauty of it.

Even more heart warming was the response I got from an unnamed, masked Hamas spokesman wearing his Saint Paddy’s Day green headband.

“Of course we two nations are in solidarity with one another. We have so much in common. Not only are we perpetual victims of oppression and imperialism, but both of our nations have been built on foundations of fairy tales. Of course, Ireland’s come from centuries’ worth of stories woven together while ours were invented by ourselves in only the last seventy-six years. Which probably makes us superior to them as a modern people - because we are still having to use our brains to keep adding to our fables, while they haven’t needed to use theirs for a good couple of hundred years or more. And it shows.”

With this, he proudly guided me to more wonderful children’s TV in which these fables, and their future roles as martyrs, are taught to their precious little cherubs.

I then asked him what plans Hamas has to honour the Irish in the future.

“Once Palestine has been freed from the occupation, we are looking forward to inviting the Irish to celebrate our victory with us. We intend to throw a big rooftop party as our first post-imperial nudge towards solidarity, and we are planning on inviting Bambie Thug as the headlining spectacle.”

Let me tell you, she/he/they/ze/zim/fe/fay/fim really deserves that (roof)top spot for everything that she/he/they/ze/zim/fe/fay/fim has put her/him/them/zim/zom/zoom/fim/fom/fuck-self through for the cause.

It’s been such a delight to see the solidarity between Palestine and Ireland. May it continue for a long time to come.

This post is satire, in case anyone was wondering. Though possibly there is some truth to it.

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to subscribe and if this resonated with you, feel free to restack/share/give it some love. Please also consider joining with a paid subscription or a one-time donation to enable me to keep bringing this content to the platform.

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Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! The JPF isn’t here for polite debates or academic footnotes — we’re dismantling antisemitism one idiot, one coward, one apologist at a time.

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How Did We Get Here... Again?

I never believed such a poisoning of minds to off-the-scale Jew-hatred would resurface in Hitler-esque style ever again. But they have.

I want to start by first saying that I know some of the most wonderful human beings in the world. But I’m starting to realise that humans as a race are some of the most despicable specimens on earth.

George Orwell rightly observed that in football games people long to see their team’s opponents utterly humiliated just as much as they want to see their team win. In an essay entitled The Sporting Spirit, he wrote, “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasures in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting.”

The exact same could be said of social media. People flock there to find a war to join in, hungry for that sense of triumph when they come across the perfect target and throw their most clever quip that couldn’t fail to destroy the stranger who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And it wouldn’t be so bad if it hadn’t simply become normal. But it seems it is going that way and accelerating at speed.

The other day, I was led to this reel on Instagram, the trailer for a video that apparently goes far deeper, that left me both furious and scared. I warn you, it’s chilling.

To see how we have gone from how the world was immediately following October 7th 2023, when we began to see a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents, but I couldn’t for the life of me imagine it would become a real problem. People spoke with such a level of pessimism about how quickly Jew-hate could escalate, but I couldn’t really believe we would reach this problem in any depth.

But how wrong could I have been?

The hundreds of comments that echo the hatred being perpetuated in this video are all the more unsettling.

And then there’s this… Watch from where it begins until 14:12 to get the gist of her words.

Not the pro-Israel Zionist lobby but the Jewish lobby. Did you catch that?

The “alleged” events of the 1940s. That one too?

Back in October 2023 and even in the months following, when Jews would say that we were heading for the same level of mind-poisoning propaganda as in pre- and post-war Poland, and 1930s Germany, I felt they were overreacting —  catastrophising. To reach that level once more seemed ridiculous. Surely we would never go back there again?

But the videos above prove that everything they feared was correct.

Back in 2023, we were told we were conflating “anti-Zionism” with antisemitism, or antisemitism with legitimate criticism of the Israeli government. Since then, we have been told repeatedly that “anti-Zionism” only targets “Zionists” and not Jews, nor Judaism. And the more the antizionist movement has repeated this alongside a constant repetition of all the libels that make up its insidious belief system, it has numbed the critical thinking capacity of the masses enough to gradually change the language, and finally reveal the truth.

It’s not just these so-called “Zionists” that are being targeted by this ugly campaign, but Jews. It’s not just Jewish-Israeli political figures and IDF soldiers who served in Gaza who are being singled out as war criminals, colonisers, and expansionists, but every single Jewish-Israeli on the planet, no matter their political alignment.

Had the first video I posted here been shown back in October 2023, it would have been met with horror that anyone claiming to be moral could perpetuate such xenophobic, racist content. But now the racism blends in perfectly with the environment of the time, so well done has the campaign been to turn the tide of public sympathies against Israel, however she shows up in the wider world.

Oh and FYI, the channel that made that first video and its full-length film, Uncivilised, is funded by Qatar. showed the receipts in his video linked below. As he explains in his caption,

Its main subjects are around eighty Israeli families in the Valsesia valley in Italy. The film describes them accurately. Secular liberals who marched against the judicial overhaul, opposed the occupation, anti-war, anti-Netanyahu, they left because they feared for their country’s democracy. It lays all that out and convicts them anyway: “These people haven’t rejected Zionism. They just think it’s gone off course.” Then it says what it actually believes, that violence will remain Israel’s culture, “living in the DNA of its settlers.”

DNA. The film turns “settler” from something people do into something they inherit and carry across borders in their bodies. That turn has been made before. It was the core of Nazi propaganda, which moved Jewishness out of belief and into biology. Der ewige Jude, 1940, runs on world maps of Jewish migration, an inborn essence flowing into every country that lets it in. Uncivilised uses the same maps. India, Thailand, Greece, Italy. Both films make the condition heritable. Neither can name an acquittal.

Four weeks ago the mayor of Varallo, the town at the film’s center, opened a letter containing a .40 caliber bullet and a warning that the shooting starts next. It accused him of enabling “Nazi-Zionist” settlement. I can’t tell you the sender saw this film. Once essence replaces conduct, any film will do.

Qatar, along with numerous other nations, and like Hitler and later the Soviet Union, has perfected the art of propaganda to incite hatred, division, and society-wide violence.

While the propaganda machine will tell you over and over again that AIPAC, other Jewish lobby groups, and the Israeli government are pouring funding and bribes into global campaigns to silence ant-Israel voices, it is successfully distracting everyone from the real major funding enterprises. In fact, Israel is only at number ten, according to Open Secrets.

On the other hand, there is extensive evidence of the governments of Iran, Russia, China, and Qatar using their state media channels as well as massive social media campaigns and legacy media bribes to spread libels against Israel.

Multiple investigations by Meta, Microsoft, Google, the Atlantic Council and others have identified Iranian influence operations involving:

• fake news websites

• fake journalists

• coordinated inauthentic accounts

• bot amplification

• AI-generated content

• impersonation of activists

  (Freedom House)

Along with troll farms and vast numbers of social media bots, Russia has been found to be spreading disinformation via campus protests. As has the Qatari government via the Muslim Brotherhood, detailed in a French government investigation, in addition to a wide network of institutions. So yeah, in case you believed those protesting college kids were acting on their own initiatives, you may want to think again.

Qatar also uses its state media service, whose own journalist was holding Israeli hostages captive in Gaza, to spread propaganda. Bearing in mind that many high-profile legacy media outlets, including Reuters and The Guardian, republish Al Jazeera content through what is evidently a contractual agreement — without questioning or changing a thing!

In other words, this is a very calculated and co-ordinated campaign.

Why the Jews?

It’s not really about us, and it never was. We have always merely been a scapegoat for the power-hungry to deviate from their own failures and create a problem that merely requires a simple solution. As Hitler named it, The Final Solution.

Antisemitism, or its former incarnation, anti-Judaism, and its modern day disguise antizionism, has always existed in some form or another. During the peaceful years we were blessed with for most of our lives, it merely remained in the fringes. But it has never disappeared.

I know, I know, “but look what Israel is doing — of course people hate Jews!” Well, in answer to that, I encourage your to read the two articles linked below. I can’t explain “why Israel” or “why the Jews” better than this author can. But if you take the time to read and absorb, I promise you it will make anyone who hasn’t taken the time to actually think on these matter sit up and take note. It might even blow their minds.

Behind the Narrative 📣

The Real Reason There Is No Peace in the Middle East

If you want to understand why the Middle East is trapped in an endless cycle of violence—and, on a much more urgent note, why I am still single—you only need to look at dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, or Hinge…

Read more

a month ago · 134 likes · 40 comments · Behind the Narrative 📣

Behind the Narrative 📣

Who Really Created the Middle East Conflict?

Three thousand years ago, on a desolate mountain ridge overlooking the desert, a foreign sorcerer named Balaam was hired to perform a psychological hit job. Balak, the terrified king of Moab, had paid him handsomely to stand on the cliffs and place a devastating curse upon the nomadic tribes of Israel below. But every time Balaam opened his mouth to unleash the venom, his voice was hijacked by a higher power, and instead of a curse, a stunning cosmic declaration echoed across the canyons. He described the Jewish nation as a crouching lion, a beast so radiating with quiet authority that no one in their right mind would dare disturb its rest. He concluded with an unyielding law of reality…

Read more

a month ago · 60 likes · 16 comments · Behind the Narrative 📣

And I will say this to close.

It’s not about us, we are merely the easiest scapegoats to use as a tool, a weapon, a means to an end. The world’s greatest powers are at war and always have been. Nuclear weapons are another of those tools with which to threaten. Our oil dependence is another weapon with which to attack.

A number of intelligence agencies and researchers have observed that Russia, Iran and China benefit from amplifying narratives that undermine confidence in Western governments or increase social polarisation. Anti-Israel discourse has been one avenue for doing so, for it perfectly encapsulates every reason the west should hate itself. And the more the west hates itself, the deeper the tentacles of those coming to take down western democracy reach.

And this is what we see constantly in “socialist” circles: condemnation of western powers and privileges. It’s always bad, and the good things it has achieved are always silenced from the conversation. “Yes but” is the most favoured phrase of the hard-lined “socialists” who are actually not socialists at all but indoctrinated angry individuals, whose privilege gave them an entitlement that left no room for gratitude for the freedom their upbringing gave them.

But if they were to really ask themselves why they are being baited to hate the west — and Israel… and “Zionists”… and Jews — they might start to discover they are being played by some of the most insidious powers on earth, and in one of the most frightening ways.

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to subscribe and if this resonated with you, feel free to restack/share/give it some love. Please also consider joining with a paid subscription or a one-time donation to enable me to keep bringing this content to the platform.

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Dear (Zio) Aunt Sally is back to solve another agonising Jewish concern! Agony Aunt Sally is my alter ego, here to help with your most pressing concerns and worries. Please read and enjoy.

Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! The JPF isn’t here for polite debates or academic footnotes — we’re dismantling antisemitism one idiot, one coward, one apologist at a time.

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Dear Aunt Sally, How Do I Tell Them I Am Right?

When right, wrong, and just trying to please everyone (and failing) become a little confused

Welcome to this week’s edition of Dear Zio Aunt Sally.

Today’s question comes from a particularly unfortunate breed of confused American Jew who, as far as I can work out, loves Israel but hates himself for doing so.

So if anyone else finds themselves in a similar predicament, hopefully this will help you!

PS. This is purely for entertainment purposes, and maybe a little bit of education too.

Dear Aunt Sally,

Recently my organisation, a pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy advocacy group, paid a couple of thousand dollars for an exhibit table at the College Democrats of America convention. Unfortunately we were subsequently attacked online for co-sponsoring the event, all because a very anti-Israel speaker, Hasan Piker, was speaking there.

I feel really picked on by my fellow Jews. This is an ongoing pattern, even though we’re on their side… and also everyone else’s since we are also pro-Palestine, and believe in equal rights, a two-state solution and that the IDF trains dogs to do something biology hasn’t yet caught up with. We chose to take part in this event because we, like many American Jews including those who are now being unkind to us, are left wing. I choose to believe that the left is inherently good, fair, and willing to listen to all voices, including our very balanced view that Israel should exist and so should a democratic Palestinian state.

We had no choice over who would be speaking, nor do we endorse nor agree with what Hasan Piker says or how he says it. But we feel it’s our duty to keep showing up rather than allowing the most polarizing voices in politics to shape what Democrats stand for. What can I do to convince my fellow Jews that I am right?

In gratitude,

An anonymous CEO of a major Jewish org.

Dear Anonymous,

I hear your pain, and it is absolutely right to keep showing up – in the right way. But the questions that come to mind are: what is the right way, and is it really necessary to also offer funding that supports speakers whose views you disagree with?

Tell me something: given the way you have made crystal clear to me that you neither endorse nor agree with the speaker in question, does that not tell you that perhaps you understand implicitly that there is something really quite wrong with that speaker, whose beliefs are in fact fundamentally opposed to your own, being allowed to speak at an event? An event that you are also showing your presence at, and are helping to fund? That while you insist it’s not the event itself but the choice of speaker, one that chooses to platform a speaker you have to make such a point of disassociating from might be barking up the wrong palm tree?

In which case, why the hell are you giving it your dollars and presence? In the name of peace? Really? In the name of democracy and freedom of speech? Despite the fact that the speaker in question directly opposes the freedom of a specific nation to exist — the one you say you support, which he continually insists is a “fascist settler-colonial apartheid state” — and uses language that directly opposes peace by inciting violence against one specific identity: the Jewish identity, which also happens to be your own. He also blames people just like you for that very violence and has postured as pro-Hamas when choosing between Hamas and Israel. Not ‘Palestinians’ and Israel, but very specifically Hamas. And I quote,

“Hamas is a thousand times better than a fascist settler-colonial apartheid state.”
“I stand by that.” — RealClearPolitics

So back to the question of choosing to show up rather than not, perhaps your fellow American Jews are not “picking” on you but, in fact, berating you for choosing to show up in a way that implies solidarity with the speaker. Many understand that distancing oneself from evidently hostile groups and individuals does not mean you aren’t showing up. Indeed, you could choose to show up in a way in which your presence won’t be overlooked by antizionist propaganda, as in, not supporting an event that is specifically choosing to platform bigotry that opposes Jewish rights to live free of persecution.

I get that you want to be seen as nice, moderate, non-divisive, and entirely balanced. You say you believe a democratic Palestinian state should exist yet you fail to mention that not a single political group leading Palestinians has ever shown a desire to do so democratically. So I’d like to share a little nugget of wisdom I have gained over the years: it’s much more honest, balanced, and real to say things as they are, to accept that being ‘left wing’ does not automatically make one fair minded or decent, to call out hypocrisy and bigotry, and to not just meekly hand over your money and “show up” because, y’know, democracy and all that.

I read many articles from The Guardian, but I will never give it a penny of my hard-earned Substack subscriptions, because they cuddle up with Al Jazeera and platform Hamas propaganda without questioning any of it, which make them unequivocally undeserving of any support from me.

And I’d say that the College Democrats of America convention inviting Hasan Piker to speak makes them undeserving of yours. It’s not merely happenstance that they are choosing to platform someone with a huge anti-Israel following, who uses some of the most divisive rhetoric on the left and, incidentally, has explicitly blamed pro-Israel American Jewish organisations like your own for being the cause of rising antisemitism.

I’m sorry to say that everything points to the fact that they’re not interested in what you have to say, only your dollars, when the speaker with the largest following doesn’t believe Israel has the right to exist? And I quote,

“I think Israel, in its current formation, given that it’s a settler-colonial operation that’s seeking out the expulsion or complete extermination of the indigenous population, as an apartheid state, does not have a right to exist.” — Mediaite

Yet, like the nice Jewish boy you were raised to be, you paid them obediently and justified doing so with references to “free speech” and “democracy”. And then showed up to be the pro-Israel presence at an evidently anti-Israel event.

My advice? Stop being a nice Jewish boy. You’re far too old for that. Your mother didn’t put herself through the torture of hearing your pained scream at eight days’ old only to see you still in diapers now. It’s time to pull up your big boy pants and get with the times. This is 1930, I mean 2026, and Jews can’t just keep handing the Jizya tax over to our haters with some delusional idea that it’s all in the name of peace. Hasan Piker wastes no words when he says what he thinks of Israel…and of you. Stop wasting yours.

Grow a spine. You say you’re pro-Israel, so prove it. Calling out the truth about antizionist bigotry does not mean you don’t care about Palestinian rights. On the contrary, it shows you’re willing to stand up for what is right, including all rights of everyone to live in dignity and allow others to do so too, even if the antizionist nutjobs tell you otherwise. Spoiler: they don’t know shit.

If you really want to support Palestinians to live prosperous and dignified lives then you need to stop subscribing to the rhetoric of the antizionists, and instead lobby for fundamental change within Palestinian society, as well as within Israeli politics. There are many brilliant people already doing this work, like Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who had his own take on the event you co-sponsored:

Finally, you asked what you can do to convince your fellow Jews that you’re right. Here’s my answer to that:

Apologise for supporting antizionist propagandists. Be a Zionist and be proud to be one.

Because whatever anyone else says about Zionism, if you’re pro-Israel you’re a Zionist — it’s the very definition. It doesn’t mean you are racist against Palestinians, or a supremacist. It just means you support Israel’s right to exist and for Jews to self-determine, which does not negate the right of Palestinians to self-determine. It’s only when Palestinians decide they can’t do so while simultaneously allowing Israelis to live in peace, or to live at all, that Zionism gets called out as the problem — basically, we’re only actually a problem to those who want to kill or subjugate us because we refuse to die or be subjugated. But quite honestly, as long as we are allowed to live with autonomy over our own lives, we are very happy to allow others to do the same. It’s really not that difficult to grasp.

Hope that helps.

With love,

Aunt Sally

PS. This letter and its response may or may not have been inspired by the following post:

Thanks for reading!

Aunt Sally needs you!

If you happen across any online Jewish fuckery that needs the Aunt Sally treatment, feel free to email me at auntsally777@gmail.com. You can also email me with your own questions.

In the meantime, do subscribe and support my work. Aunt Sally and the JPF are here to keep pushing for honesty, truth, and an end to antizionist gaslighting. A free subscription helps to put my work on Jewish concerns further into the Substack realm, while a paid subscription enables me to spend more time researching and bringing sobering truths to the forefront.

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Today’s article is by Ann Isabelle and was previously published in Ruach, our sister publication on Medium.

Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! The JPF isn’t here for polite debates or academic footnotes — we’re dismantling antisemitism one idiot, one coward, one apologist at a time.

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How an Ideology Became a Vulnerability Became a Death Sentence

The architecture was an expression of the greatest hopes and dreams of a community, only to be the falling of it

Different societies build different worlds, and if you want to understand what a society actually believed and not what it said it believed just look at what it built. Imperial hierarchy lives in Versailles, where proximity to the king determined your worth: which rooms you slept in, which doors you could open, how far you were from power. Soviet design ideology lives in the Khrushchyovka: five-story blocks, identical floor plans, same ceiling height, same window, stamped from Riga to Vladivostok. Enforced sameness was the architecture of enforced equality. The kibbutz made the same move as the Khrushchyovka and it actually meant it.

The first kibbutz, Degania Alef, was established in 1910 near the Kinneret. The founders were Jewish pioneers from Eastern Europe, shaped by socialist ideals, and they were building something with no real precedent: a collective settlement based on shared ownership, shared labor, and the systematic dismantling of private life. They were not just farming land. They were constructing a theory of human nature in brick and soil.

The architecture followed the ideology with unusual precision. There were no fences inside the kibbutz. The idea of a private perimeter was itself a kind of bourgeois thinking to be rejected. Dwelling units were reduced to the minimum: a sleeping room for a couple, without a kitchen or living room, because meals were eaten communally in the dining hall and children were raised together in a children’s house. Individual homes were scattered across open, landscaped green space, connected by a web of pedestrian and bicycle paths. The communal dining hall and cultural buildings sat at the center, physically and symbolically. Architecture and landscape merged into what kibbutz architect Samuel Bickels called “an all-day garden”; a space designed to keep people in constant, informal contact with each other.

This was not an accident. Architects who grew up inside the kibbutz movement absorbed its values (frugality, equality, the rejection of private property) and those values found their way directly into design decisions. The kibbutz master plan developed by Richard Kaufman in 1926 drew on European Garden City models but pushed further: no private streets, no locked gates, no spatial hierarchies that would let one family signal status over another. The built environment was engineered to make equality feel natural, because it would be, literally, the shape of daily life.

It worked, for a long time, at the level it was supposed to work. People lived more communally because the space gave them no alternative. The architecture produced the behavior the ideology prescribed.

What no one fully reckoned with was that openness is a posture. And postures can be read.

October 7, 2023.

Kibbutz Nir Oz had roughly 400 residents. More than 100 Hamas terrorists entered the community in the early morning hours. When they left, they took with them approximately 80 people, a quarter of the entire population. Those seized ranged in age from nine months to 85 years. Nir Oz accounted for roughly a third of all hostages taken that day.

Kibbutz Be’eri lost 101 civilians and 31 security personnel from a community of about 1,000. Residents who survived named one stretch of ruined homes “death row.” Each house the terrorists entered, they killed everyone inside.

The kibbutz had no perimeter worth the name. The pedestrian paths that made daily life feel open and connected also meant that once attackers were inside, they moved freely. The dispersed layout of small residential buildings, so elegant as an expression of egalitarian values, became a problem of coverage and response time. There were no natural chokepoints, no spatial features that slowed an attacker or concentrated defense. The architecture of trust had no contingency for betrayal at this scale.

A 2025 academic study on kibbutz security put it plainly: the October 7 attacks exposed critical vulnerabilities in the spatial design of Israeli kibbutzim, where openness and communal planning had become security liabilities. The buildings didn’t fail, they did exactly what they were designed to do and was the problem.

There is a version of this story that frames it as naivety; the peace-loving leftists who refused to acknowledge the danger on their doorstep. That reading is cheap and mostly wrong. The kibbutzim near Gaza were not unaware of the threat. They had security protocols, armed response teams, safe rooms in every home. Several kibbutz members had spent years advocating for coexistence with their Gazan neighbors, driving patients across the border for medical treatment, building relationships across the fence line. They were not naive about the conflict. They had made a choice, and the choice had a spatial expression: they would live openly, they would face the border without armor, because to do otherwise was to concede something essential about who they were.

That is a different thing from naivety. It is ideology held at cost. The original kibbutz founders enclosed their settlements in defensive courtyards, the chatzer, during the Ottoman era and early British Mandate period. When the security situation improved, they opened up. The move from enclosure to openness was a deliberate political act, a declaration that they had arrived, that the experiment was working, that they could afford to stop building walls. Over a century later, the communities that paid the highest price on October 7 were the ones that had most completely internalized that declaration.

What happens now is a genuine design problem with no clean answer. Researchers and architects working on post-October 7 reconstruction have proposed fortified perimeters, controlled access points, decentralized community hubs, and upgraded safe rooms. These all are reasonable interventions. They are also, in a direct sense, a retreat from the argument the kibbutz has been making for a hundred years.

You cannot have a fortified perimeter and an all-day garden. You cannot have controlled access and the spatial logic of radical equality. Every wall built around a kibbutz is a concession, not to Hamas, but to the original founders, the ones who built courtyards because they had to, before the movement was confident enough to open up.

Kibbutz Be’eri voted in late 2025 to demolish most of the homes destroyed on October 7. The vote was 196 to 146. There were people who voted against demolition, who wanted to keep the ruins, live with them, build around them. The Heritage Minister considered designating some structures as national heritage sites, over the community’s own wishes. Even the question of what to do with the destroyed buildings became a fight about what the kibbutz is for: memory or future, testimony or continuity.

Nir Oz voted to rebuild on the same land. Young adults from the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement have moved in while construction begins, living in temporary housing, partly as what one of them called “defense by presence.” The newest settlers are also, in some sense, the oldest kind: pioneers moving to a dangerous border because the ideological argument demands it, because the alternative is to admit the experiment failed.

Architecture encodes belief. When the belief changes, the buildings change with it. Or they don’t, and the gap between what the space says and what its inhabitants need becomes visible, sometimes brutally. The kibbutz spent a century building a spatial argument for openness, equality, and the rejection of enclosure. That argument was not wrong. It produced real communities, real solidarity, real lives that most people living in cities would find difficult to imagine.

What October 7 revealed was not that the argument was false. It revealed that arguments have costs, and that the people who bear the costs are not always the ones who made the argument. The families in those dispersed little houses, connected by bicycle paths through the garden, were living inside someone else’s theory about how human beings should inhabit the world. The theory was beautiful. The buildings were beautiful. The people who built them were serious and brave.

None of that is armor.

Sources

Kibbutz spatial design and the “all-day garden” concept https://urbannext.net/architecture-of-collective-living/

Samuel Bickels and the kibbutz as modernist landscape: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260638583_An_all-day_garden-the_kibbutz_as_a_modernist_landscape

Post-October 7 security vulnerabilities in kibbutz architecture: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13537121.2025.2575380

Kibbutz design culture and ideology — From Vision to Realization: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2159032X.2023.2283941

Privatization trends, 2025 data: https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/israel-studies-review/41/1/isr410101.xml

Nir Oz hostage scale and community layout: https://www.timesofisrael.com/kibbutz-nir-oz-overrun-on-october-7-embodies-hamass-hostage-taking-strategy/

Nir Oz IDF response timeline and attack details — 40 minutes too late: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hkan00ib3jx

Be’eri demolition vote and heritage designation dispute: https://www.timesofisrael.com/minister-may-preserve-beeri-homes-gutted-on-oct-7-despite-kibbutz-vote-for-demolition/

Border kibbutzim rebuilding and new settlers: https://www.jta.org/2025/10/05/israel/2-years-after-oct-7-shattered-them-israels-border-kibbutzes-are-drawing-new-dreamers

Gaza envelope reconstruction on the ground: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-880638

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to subscribe and if this resonated with you, feel free to restack/share/give it some love. Please also consider joining with a paid subscription or a one-time donation to enable me to keep bringing this content to the platform.

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Today’s piece is from my new “Advice” column, Dear (Zio) Aunt Sally. Agony Aunt Sally is my alter ego, here to help with your most pressing concerns and worries. Please read and enjoy.

Note: This is purely for entertainment purposes. A little light relief in the midst of all the fuckery.

Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! The JPF isn’t here for polite debates or academic footnotes — we’re dismantling antisemitism one idiot, one coward, one apologist at a time.

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Dear Zio Agony Aunt Sally, What Am I Doing Wrong?

Your questions answered. Your problems solved.

Welcome to my new Zio agony aunt column, where you can ask questions directly to my alter ego, Zio Aunt Sally, and get your most pressing issues off your chest. If you have any questions, feel free to email them to auntsally777@gmail.com.

Otherwise, take your time to read and digest the wisdom of Zio Aunt Sally. Perhaps her sage advice will be of use in your own predicaments. At the very least, hopefully it can help us navigate the next two thousand years of the same old nonsense.

To open our new column, this week’s questions come from Yossi, Hannah, David, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel.

On the old antizionist blood libels

Dear Aunt Sally,

I’m feeling really stuck. I went with all of my friends to a local pro-Palestine march and held a big sign up saying “Israel doesn’t hate Palestinians. Jews stand with Palestinians and love Palestine and Israel.” I just wanted to show that Israelis and Jews do care about Palestinians, but no one would believe me. They called me a child murderer, even though not only I would never hurt a child but would do anything to protect a child in danger. I don’t understand. What did I do wrong?

Yossi

Dear Yossi,

I’m so sorry to hear this happened to you. The good news is that I and most of my readers will also have been called child murderers and genocide supporters too, and I for one could never even think of hurting a child, nor desire to see the end of an ethnic group of any kind.

What we do want to see is the end of Jews being targeted by Jihadists in Israel and globally. And we want to end jihadist doctrine in order to pave the way for Israelis and Palestinians to one day coexist.

We also want to see the end of bigotry and stupidity in our own communities, among people who literally have no clue what in the virgin-laden hell they are talking about, and that’s where we find ourselves up against a big wall. A big wall made entirely from bigotry and stupidity. We point out that we’re decent people who desperately want peace for all, and it hits the brick wall of stupidity. We say we care about all lives — both Palestinians and Israelis — and we hit the brick wall of bigotry.

If we expand the analogy of the brick wall, it becomes easier to understand how everything we say will bounce back at us. But if, then, we were to hold a mirror up to reflect the responses, we could show the brick wall the stupidity and bigotry with which it resists us. And we could show it its ugly, flat, boring, repetitive face in all its unimaginative uniformity.

I mean, it’s a great analogy, right? I don’t really know how that translates back into practice, but I’ll let you figure that part out. And keep me posted how it goes.

Aunt Sally

On controlling the media (and some handy dating advice)

Dear Aunt Sally,

I happened to mention in passing to some friends that my uncle works for the BBC and now they all think that he controls all of the media and that I am in on it too. How can I persuade them otherwise?

Hannah

Dear Hannah,

Don’t worry, you’re good. My sister works for the UK government’s weather forecasting department, so apparently I control the weather. When I go on a date with a creep, it always helps to mention it. I follow it up with, “I can arrange for you to see the space laser if you want,” to which their eyes light up before I mention that they have to be circumcised to be allowed near it, and they go running for the hills. It never fails.

In other words, don’t try to persuade them otherwise. Use it as your Jewish superpower in any way possible.

Best,

Aunt Sally

On being a brown-skinned ‘white coloniser’

Dear Aunt Sally,

I’ve been told that Jews are all white European colonisers. This is quite surprising to me since my grandmother came from Iraq, my cousin’s family came from Morocco, and my neighbour came from Ethiopia. Should I tell them?

David

Dear David,

Absolutely not. Imagine the confusion!

Your grandmother has spent eighty years remembering Baghdad. Your Moroccan relatives have been making couscous that would reduce me to tears. Ethiopian Jews spent centuries believing they were descendants of ancient Israel.

The last thing they need is some nineteen-year-old sociology student explaining that they’re actually Polish.

Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is let people enjoy their own history uninterrupted by some insignificant random telling them otherwise.

Love,

Aunt Sally

On being God’s chosen people (spoiler: we’re bad at it)

Dear Aunt Sally,

Someone told me Zionists think they’re God’s chosen people and therefore believe everyone else is inferior. Is this true?

Rebecca

Dear Rebecca,

No.

Being Jewish generally involves spending several thousand years asking questions, arguing with your family and offending someone by not accounting for their dietary requirements with the cake you contributed for Shabbat.

If we really believed we were superior, we’d surely be considerably less chaotic as a nation by now, wouldn’t we?

Also, if you ever attend a synagogue committee meeting you’ll quickly discover that the only thing Jews unanimously believe is that the synagogue committee could be run better.

Yours,

Aunt Sally

On antizionism and Jews

Dear Aunt Sally,

My university society has informed me that antizionism has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Jews.

Coincidentally, they only ever seem to shout at Jews.

Is this just very bad luck?

Leah

Dear Leah,

It sounds like extraordinary bad luck.

Rather like joining a birdwatching club whose members spend every weekend throwing stones at sparrows while insisting they have absolutely nothing against sparrows.

I’m sure it’s just an unfortunate statistical anomaly.

Keep counting.

Love,

Aunt Sally

On ‘going back to where we came from’

Dear Aunt Sally,

Someone told me that Jews should simply “go back where they came from.”

I’m not sure where that is anymore.

Rachel

Dear Rachel,

This is a fascinating topic.

If you were born in London, they’ll tell you to go ‘back’ to Israel. If your family migrated from Ukraine to the USA, they’ll tell you to go ‘back’ to Israel. If your family came from Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Egypt or Syria, they’ll tell you to go ‘back’ to Israel.

Then, once you get to Israel, someone on the internet tells you to go ‘back’ to Poland.

Eventually you realise they don’t actually care where you go.

They’d just rather you weren’t wherever they happen to be standing.

Best,

Aunt Sally

PS. It’s nothing new! It has been happening for thousands of years. That’s why our predecessors created modern Israel — so that we could go back to where we came from, finally.

That’s all for now! Don’t forget to email me with your own questions at auntsally777@gmail.com.

Do subscribe and support my work.

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(On a serious note, any support, including sharing my work, helps me to keep elevating Jewish voices and concerns)

With love, Aunt Sally 💙

Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! The JPF isn’t here for polite debates or academic footnotes — we’re dismantling antisemitism one idiot, one coward, one apologist at a time.

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Andy Burnham Is Just Another Cowardly Leader

Burnham’s recent statement on Israel-Gaza was an attempt to gain more confidence without losing any. He failed on both counts.

I know I am far from the first person to be writing on the abysmal statement by Andy Burnham regarding Israel and Gaza on 9th July 2026. I’ve read some excellent analyses including Andrew Fox’s brilliant response which led a retort in terms of antisemitism, the disregard of Jewish lives, and went on to illustrate the more chilling consequences of the stand Burnham has taken. Fox went on to address the complete disappearance of Hamas’s role in beginning the war and refusal to accept any responsibility for protecting Gazan civilian lives, and how Burnham has caved to the pressure upon the Labour government, and indeed UK politicians in general.

Many see this as a continuation of Labour’s antisemitism from the Corbyn era. Others as posturing in preparation for the next general election, to win back the voters for whom Israel and Gaza are the deciding factors.

I think there’s a great deal of credibility in this speculation. Whatever the motive, Burnham clearly went from a dependable, individualistic figure in his far more minor role as Mayor of Manchester to one upon which baited breath awaited his utterances on what is evidently the most pressing issue for Brits today — Israel and Gaza. Oh, wait, no it isn’t. Is it?

My hope in Andy Burnham was in the fact that he stood his ground on not calling the war in Gaza a “genocide”. I believed that in itself showed strength of character. That he was able to remain strong despite the pressure by politicians, Muslim leaders, competition from further to the left, and the tantruming cowardly British public who want what they want and will scream and stamp their feet — but won’t do anything to practically help anyone.

That hope was shattered by his statement. But not because he changed his tune about using the word “genocide”. It was shattered because he caved to the pressure to speak about an issue that has been artificially inflated to takeover British politics and that has divided the population in unspeakable ways that bear little relation to the reality the Israelis and Palestinians are living. He spoke to the the judging ears of leftist progressives, used the correct buzz words, and affirmed their criticism of the Labour government’s failures under Starmer.

He rose to the Labour traditions of backstabbing his predecessor rather than proving himself to be a new, improved incarnation of leader.

But where was the “genocide”?

In all of his mumblings, he still didn’t utter The Word.

And thus, despite every effort he made to beg and bow to the whip-crackers, he still failed the litmus test.

I know he did because I talk with people who sit in the radical margins of the Israel debate. The haters. The ones who suck up every pseudo-analytical alternative media report on Israel’s evil. I know that until Burnham utters those words, their votes will still go to Zack Think-Your-Boobs-Bigger Polanski and his unicorn-fairyland world in which he believes Islamists love him and all his gay and trans friends. Yes, even those radicals who actually dislike the gay and trans movement will still vote for him over Burnham, simply because he speaks of genocide and uses the word Zionism in the “correct” slurrish way.

The irony is that I suspect everyone knows this, including Burnham.

I suspect he knows exactly what he did, exactly how pathetic it was, and did it anyway.

In modern British politics, especially on the left, there is an ever-shrinking corridor of acceptable opinion. Step outside it and you are no longer merely mistaken; you are morally contaminated. Politicians know this. They know there are words that must be spoken, villains who must be identified, and complexities that must be quietly left outside the room.

That is the political economy of outrage. It rewards conformity, not courage.

I don’t believe Burnham genuinely believes a word of what he said, but he now occupies a world built on political incentives, not integrity. Labour has watched voters drift towards the Greens over Gaza, and no aspiring leader can ignore that reality. No one is fooled that Burnham’s tougher rhetoric is anything but an attempt to reconnect with progressive voters who abandoned Labour over its earlier stance.

But there is a catch. The people demanding these declarations are not asking to be persuaded. They are asking to be affirmed, and the parameters they set are stringent.

He condemned Israel more forcefully. He apologised. He promised greater pressure. He edged closer to the approved position. Yet he still refused to utter the one word that now functions as a passport into the movement: genocide.

Because this is no longer a debate about policy; it is a ritual.

Every public figure is invited to prove their moral purity by repeating the correct liturgy. There is always one more confession to make, one more denunciation to issue, one more ideological checkpoint to pass. The finish line keeps moving because the purpose is not agreement. The purpose is continual demonstration of loyalty.

It serves no one — not Brits, not Jews, not Israelis, and definitely not Palestinians

And here is the tragedy.

None of this helps a single Palestinian.

Not one child in Gaza receives more food because another British politician has perfected the language of condemnation. Not one hostage comes home. Not one Hamas commander lays down his weapons because Westminster has adopted New Speak for Israel.

The conversation increasingly excludes the very questions that might actually matter, such as what political future is possible for Gaza after Hamas? How can Palestinians build institutions that are accountable to Palestinians rather than to an armed Islamist movement? How can ordinary Gazans be protected from rulers who have repeatedly invested in tunnels, rockets and perpetual war while crushing dissent at home?

Change requires looking at the very root of the problem. But the mob is motivated to distract every single public voice away from looking. It’s not about creating meaningful change, it’s about destroying Israel, bit by bit.

If a British leader really wants to lead a movement towards peace, justice, dignity and equal rights, he needs to stop bowing to the mob. Burnham needs to answer real questions, not simply pass the cult admissions test.

Where are the discussions about empowering Palestinians who reject both Hamas and permanent conflict? Where are the conversations with Palestinians from across the political spectrum — those in Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora — who have different visions for their future? Where is the curiosity about what Palestinians themselves disagree about?

These questions are inconvenient because they require treating Palestinians as human beings rather than permanent symbols.

It is easier to perform outrage than to grapple with the uncomfortable reality that Gaza’s future depends not only on Israel’s decisions, but also on who governs Palestinians, what incentives that leadership faces, and whether the international community is willing to stop rewarding perpetual rejectionism.

That conversation is difficult. It is nuanced. And it will upset the loudest babies in the room.

It is not just another carefully calibrated statement from another ambitious politician. But if one is earnest about change, it could actually be the beginning of helping Palestinians build a future that is freer, safer and more prosperous than the one Hamas has given them.

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Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

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‘Fear is a Tax’ — Yet Jews Choose Joy… and Pride

Thoughts inspired by the words of Hen Mazzig

Until recently, to me, the global Pride movement simply meant freedom of expression regarding sexuality and gender identity and inclusivity, and it’s something I support in all its authenticity.

I’m a heterosexual cis woman, so while I have many friends in the gay community, the idea of needing to express pride in my identity against a tide of public antagonism has not been something I had personally felt.

Of course, that all changed on October 8th, the day following the worst massacre of Jews in a single day since the holocaust, when a whole movement en masse turned on Jews everywhere.

For the record, I’m not interested in all the “it’s not Jews, it’s Zionists” bullshit. That’s the worst mass gaslighting I have heard in a long time, and it goes on. But we’ve learnt the script — as soon as we point out that Jews everywhere, no matter how far away from Israel (the ‘Zionist Entity’) they are, are the ones being targeted, knifed, beaten up, burnt, and shot, the excuse is always given: ‘they haven’t done enough to denounce Israel’. Which of course is bullshit. We know how many outspoken “antizionist Jews” have still found themselves ostracised, isolated, and subjected to public humiliation. Because the fact is that Jews can never do “enough” to pass the Litmus test. Hurdles will always appear eventually, even for those most obedient to the antizionist rhetoric.

Back to the concept of ‘pride’, I suddenly discovered what it meant to be hated for something related to my identity alone because of drip-fed bigotry, or mass-fed as it has been in the wake of October 7th. And thus, I learnt what it means to stand proud in the face of such hate.

As a Jew in the diaspora, I find myself face to face with it regularly. “Free Palestine” sprawled across walls and gates, PLO flags hanging from windows, and friends who can’t help but reference the propaganda they have swallowed whole about the work of the “Israel lobby” on controlling the media and our institutions. How I deal with each incident is another matter, but for the most part I have learnt that, no matter how much sense and reason I can talk in response to some of these idiotic claims, people will defend them to the death. It no longer becomes about critical analysis but about being “right”. The anti-Israel movement has developed the perfect playbook for shouting down “Zios”, using all the classic tactics of shaming and confusing from cult mind-control methodology, rendering any conventionally fought battle already lost.

As a consequence, I’ve learnt to respond only in situations for which the tools haven’t already been doled out. Those few moments are satisfying, let me tell you. Holding a mirror up to the preachers of ‘anti-racist’ theory and showing them exactly how racist they’re being is a nice feeling indeed. Following that up by being the bigger person and not just being a piece of shit like their playbook has taught them to be gives me another few points on them.

But those moments are also few and far between, because the accusations and mind games are pitched against us. I’ve learnt of the traps and how they are designed to disempower anyone standing up for Jews, so while I am choosing my battles wisely, I know the movement has succeeded in stealing my voice to some degree.

But not completely.

Which is where I now circle back to the concept of “pride”.

Since October 8th 2023, Jewish pride emerged in a way few of us have ever known or seen in our lifetimes. Prior to that, I never felt a need; we assimilated, joined likeminded secular progressive movements surrounding us, believed in justice and equality, and linked arms with all those claiming the same.

We felt aligned with these people. Differences weren’t pronounced or important. Sure, our families would get out the Chanukkiah each December while their families trudged the malls ticking off their Christmas lists, but for the most part we were “over” the idea that antiquated traditions defined any of us in any particular way. At the core we were the same, and the modern day showed us this.

Until it didn’t.

Since October 7th 2023, Jews have found themselves increasingly frozen out of progressive circles, isolated from art events and communities, and our social media and work histories scrutinised for any support for “the Zionist entity”.

And yet, as our ancestors did over and over and over again, we didn’t simply disappear quietly. We resisted and rebelled.

For millennia, just like the incredibly courageous Hannah Szenes from our last post, Jews have refused to simply submit to those who have tried to extinguish our light. A few notable moments and characters of Jewish pride-driven rebellion include the Maccabean revolt [1], Yochanan Ben Zakai [2], Medieval Jews who refuse forced conversion [3], the revival of the Hebrew language [4], the Refusniks of the Soviet Union [5], Ethiopians walking away from a warring nation towards Jerusalem [6], and the most notable of all — the founding of a sovereign homeland for the Jews, against all the odds.

Every generation has underestimated us. Every period throughout history contains stories of trying to make the Jew disappear. We are either painted as weak or as insidiously powerful (for which end times-like beliefs preach the triumph of good over the evil Jews), yet we emerge strong. And proud. Because we know — and we prove time and time again — that we are not how our haters depict us, and we will not stoop to such levels.

Today, amid the rise of pride for those who have been shamed for their sexuality or identity, we recognise our place within that. Our resistance has become known as Jewish Pride. Even as we find ourselves having to remain small in certain spaces, we search for the alternative spaces where we can remain large, walk tall, and dance. We will dance again, as the slogan goes, coined and made into a tattoo by Mia Schem following her release from captivity in November 2023.

When it comes to the global Pride movement, the radical left enveloped the LGBTQ+ story into the array of causes that prop up their doctrine of taking down the rich and powerful. That’s how to rustle up outrage against anything of their choosing, no matter how nonsensical: they gather up every cause under one hat and call it righteous justice, even when these causes are ideologically opposed to one another. And Jews become the inevitable enemy based on tropes and libels, despite the fact that we have typically always stood with, and empathised with, the oppressed.

Summer 2024 saw Jews being told they are no longer welcome at the London Pride march, unless they denounce any pride in their Jewish identity. Apparently being proud of how you choose to identify as alongside your LGBTQ+ identity is disallowed at London Pride. Yes, exactly — make it make sense.

Every year since then, Jews have found themselves constantly being subjected to abuse when proudly displaying their Jewish identity and this year was no exception. It’s the TERF wars all over again, in which the LGBTQ+ movement gets hijacked by narcissists who believe only they have the right to dictate what does and doesn’t pass. Only this time, Jews don’t even have to say anything. They just have to be recognisably, proudly Jewish and they are immediately outcast by the authoritarian movement that has taken over Pride right across Europe.

Never mind that the terrorist organisations they are cuddling up to hate everything about them, most especially their sexuality and/or genderfluidity. Basically, everything that they feel defined by and everything that is important to them.

Never mind that those same terrorist organisations imprison and torture members of their own society for being gay or trans.

Never mind that Israel, the country they despise so much they refuse to even recognise it as such, gives refuge and citizenship to gay and trans Palestinians escaping the oppressive regimes in which they have no rights whatsoever.

And never mind that Tel Aviv, the largest of the few Jewish cities of the world, is famous for holding the biggest Pride march on the planet.

But no, Jews who are proud of being Jews aren’t welcome at London’s Pride.

So last year, for the first time, Jews made their own Jewish Pride in which all who believe in the genuine right to express one’s identity proudly are welcome. For one simple reason — that’s just what Jews do.

Several Jewish organisations came together to create what would become not only a safe space for Jewish members of the LGBTQ+ community to express themselves during Pride, but also a space where Jewish allies who had found themselves frozen out of progressive circles could feel welcome.

Throughout our long history, we have chosen to build, even when no future has seemed certain; to study, even when all our books have been burnt; to make music instead of being silenced; to speak Hebrew once more after centuries without a homeland; to raise Jewish children generation after generation, and to continue to celebrate the same holidays as our brothers and sisters in every corner of the globe to which we fled.

Since October 7th, social media, despite all its insidiousness and corruption, has managed to bring Jewish people and communities back together, forging new friendships and enabling us all to find our voices instead of remaining silent in this never-ending noise that seeks to undermine us, our heritage, our rights, and most of all, our joy.

Jewish pride has helped us to find Jewish figures, artists, comedians, musicians and more, with whom we find solidarity, and to whom we can give support when the masses block it elsewhere. Jewish joy has helped to to keep laughing, smiling, and dancing.

Jewish pride is why I am here, and why you found me and this essay.

And with that, I will leave you with Hen Mazzig’s speech at this years London Jewish Pride parade.

[1] The Maccabean Revolt: When the Seleucid Empire attempted to suppress Jewish religious practice and dedicate the Temple to Greek gods, a small group led by Judah Maccabee refused, which is what we celebrate every year at Chanukkah.

[2] Yochanan Ben Zakkai: When the Siege of Jerusalem made defeat inevitable, Rabbi Yochanan escaped the city and persuaded the Romans to spare the academy at Yavne. He understood something remarkable, that if Jerusalem could not be saved, Judaism could, and from that academy emerged Rabbinic Judaism, which sustained Jewish life primarily in the diaspora for the next two thousand years.

[3] Medieval Jews who refused forced conversion: Throughout medieval Europe and the Middle East, Jewish communities repeatedly faced the choice of conversion or death. During the First Crusade, entire communities along the Rhine chose to remain Jewish despite horrific persecution. During the Spanish Inquisition, families chose to leave their homes and everything they owned to preserve what mattered most to them. Many who stayed, known as ‘New Christians’, never stopped practising Judaism in secret. Even today there are Jews who remain in Portugal, who are descendants of the New Christians. These stories are deeply painful, but they represent an extraordinary commitment to Jewish identity under impossible circumstances.

[4] The revival of Hebrew: For nearly two thousand years, Hebrew had remained primarily a language of prayer and scholarship. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda believed Jews deserved a living national language again. He insisted that his own son become the first native Hebrew speaker of the modern era. Today millions speak Hebrew every day. That may be one of history’s most successful language revivals.

[5] The Refusniks: Thousands of Soviet Jews risked imprisonment simply by asking to leave the Soviet Union. Among the best known was Natan Sharansky who spent nine years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement. Asked later how he survived, he said he continually reminded himself that he remained a free person inside. The slogan “Let My People Go” became one of the great human rights campaigns of the twentieth century.

[6] Ethiopians walking to Jerusalem: When civil war broke out, widespread famine ensued, and Ethiopian Jews became a target of persecution by the warring factions, thousands of Ethiopian Jews walked hundreds of miles through the troubles, risking their lives on the way, with one destination in mind: Israel. Many died on the journey. But those who survived were eventually rescued in dramatic airlifts. Operation Solomon transported over 14,000 people to Israel in about 36 hours — one of the largest humanitarian airlifts ever undertaken.

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Today’s piece is by Delilah Rose and was first published in our sister publication, Ruach, on Medium.

Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! The JPF isn’t here for polite debates or academic footnotes — we’re dismantling antisemitism one idiot, one coward, one apologist at a time.

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The Match That Refused to Go Out: The Story of Hannah Szenes

A poet, a hero, a human, a Jew

Born in Budapest in 1921 into an assimilated Jewish family, Hannah grew up gifted in both literature and languages. She loved poetry, excelled at school, and dreamed of becoming a writer.

Yet even as a teenager, she sensed that the world around her was changing. Antisemitism in Hungary was no longer confined to whispered prejudice. Jewish students faced increasing discrimination, opportunities were restricted, and laws steadily stripped Jews of their rights and dignity.

At just eighteen years old, Hannah made a decision that would shape the rest of her life. Carrying little more than a suitcase, a notebook and a conviction that she could no longer build a future in the country she loved, she boarded a train out of Budapest and made her way from the only home she’d known to begin a new life in Eretz Israel, known then formally as Mandatory Palestine.

She did not know that she would never see her home again.

Back then, no one knew who she was, but she knew what was important.

Her diary from those years reveals neither bitterness nor panic, but clarity. She understood, before many others did, that Jews could no longer assume they belonged simply because they had always lived there.

So she left.

She enrolled at the agricultural school in Nahalal and found her peace and her purpose in the fields and orchards in the Jezreel Valley.

She loved the physical labour. She also loved the sea, and she especially loved writing. And we know from excerpts of her diary that, most of all, she loved the idea that after two thousand years of exile, Jews could once again cultivate their own land and shape their own future. Themes she often touched on included friendships, loneliness, poetry, nature, working the fields, learning Hebrew, and her desire to contribute to the Jewish community being built in Palestine.

Upon arrival in Palestine, Hannah wrote:

“I have come to the conclusion that one must work, one must dare, one must pioneer.”

She settled at Kibbutz Sdot Yam, where friends remembered her carrying notebooks in her pockets, pausing during the day’s work to jot down a line of poetry before returning to the fields.

One diary entry captured both her humility and her quiet ambition:

“There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth although they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for mankind.”

She could not have known she was describing herself.

Then came the news from Europe.

At first the reports seemed impossible to comprehend: entire communities disappearing, families transported east, mass shootings, death camps.

Among those trapped was Hannah’s own mother.

Safe in Palestine, Hannah faced a choice. She could remain where she was, and no one would have blamed her.

Instead, she volunteered for one of the most dangerous missions of the war. Before she left, she wrote the following:

“The day after tomorrow I start something new. Perhaps foolish, perhaps imaginary, perhaps dangerous; perhaps one in a hundred, perhaps one in a thousand will pay with their life… Do not ask what; a time will come when you will know what it is all about.”

The British Army was recruiting Jewish volunteers for clandestine operations behind enemy lines. They would parachute into occupied Europe, work with resistance fighters and, if possible, establish contact with Jewish communities facing annihilation.

The chances of survival were painfully slim. Hannah volunteered anyway.

She trained relentlessly. She learned wireless communications, parachuting, weapons handling and survival skills.

Yet throughout her training she continued to write. Her notebooks never left her side.

In March 1944, she jumped from an aircraft into Yugoslavia under cover of darkness.

The parachute opened. Below stretched forests filled with resistance fighters and German patrols, yet she landed safely and spent months preparing with Tito’s partisans for the crossing into Hungary.

But things were getting worse fast and the resistance fighters faced difficult decisions. Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944. Within weeks, one of the fastest genocidal operations in history began. More than 430,000 Hungarian Jews would be deported to Auschwitz in less than two months.

In one diary entry during those months she wrote the following:

“I am dreaming and making plans as though there were nothing in the world. As if there were no war and destruction, thousands dying every day.”

Hannah knew that every day delayed was costing thousands of Jewish lives. And yet, crossing the border became infinitely more dangerous. But, as with every other choice she had made in her short adult life, she chose indescribable courage.

As she crossed into Hungary in June 1944, she was arrested almost immediately by Hungarian gendarmes. The Hungarian authorities discovered the British radio transmitter she carried and they knew immediately she must hold information that could potentially change the course of history.

The interrogations began, her captors demanding the wireless codes. But she refused to give them anything.

The beatings followed, again and again. Again and again she refused.

Eventually they arrested her mother and brought her before Hannah.

Imagine the cruelty: a daughter already bruised and exhausted; a mother terrified for her child. They threatened to torture both of them unless Hannah cooperated.

Still she refused. Her diary revealed that she would never ever relent, even to save herself:

“I could have been twenty-three next July.
I gambled on what mattered most.
The dice were cast.
I lost.”

She did reach her twenty-third birthday, but by this time she was not living, merely surviving, and still keeping her lips closed tight. Despite months of suffering, Hannah never revealed the information that would have endangered her comrades.

In October 1944, Hannah was brought before a Hungarian military court on charges of treason. The proceedings were little more than a formality. She was sentenced to death.

On the morning of 7 November 1944, soldiers led the twenty-three-year-old into the prison yard.

Someone offered her a blindfold. She declined.

She wanted to meet death as she had met life — with her eyes open.

Moments later the rifles fired.

Her body fell.

But her words did not.

Among the poems found after her death was one she had written before leaving on her mission, “Blessed is the Match”.

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honour’s sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.

A match burns only briefly. Its purpose is not to last, merely to ignite.

Yet eighty years later, Hannah’s flame still burns.

Not because she changed the outcome of the Holocaust.

No one person could have done that.

Not because she rescued thousands, for history denied her that chance.

She is remembered because, when confronted with overwhelming evil, she didn’t choose fear and safety, she chose courage and responsibility to the innocents.

She travelled backwards across a border almost everyone else was trying to escape, towards the danger that others fled. And she refused to betray strangers, even under torture.

She faced death without surrendering either her dignity or her convictions.

There is a tendency to imagine courage as fearlessness.

Hannah Szenes’ diary suggests something far more human. She loved sunshine, poetry and friendship. She dreamed about the future, worried about the choices before her, and openly acknowledged the danger she faced. Before leaving on her mission, she admitted it might be “foolish” or “dangerous.” Shortly before her death she wrote, “I want no war, no battle cry.” Hannah was not fearless. She simply believed that some responsibilities outweighed fear. That is what makes her courage so enduring.

The Nazis extinguished millions of Jewish lives.

They could not extinguish the light that those lives created.

Hannah Szenes became exactly what she once wrote about: a star whose light continues to guide long after it has disappeared from the sky.

Some flames burn for only a moment.

Some continue to illuminate generations.

What moves me most about Hannah is that she never wrote as someone seeking martyrdom. Her diary is full of youthful hopes, literary ambitions, observations about nature, and friendships. She wanted to live. That makes her decision all the more remarkable: she knowingly walked into extraordinary danger not because she desired death, but because she believed that, if she had the ability to help others, she had a duty to try.

Her story has become one of the defining examples of mesirut nefesh — self-sacrifice in service of a higher moral purpose — and continues to inspire Jews and non-Jews alike.

She reminds us that even in humanity’s darkest hours, one person can choose integrity over despair, hope over resignation, and courage over fear. Her life lasted only twenty-three years, but the light she kindled continues to burn.

Sources:

Haaretz, WWII Jewish Heroine Hannah Szenes in Her Diary: ‘What Is Heroic Death? Is Anything More Sacred Than Life?’

The Librarians, Hannah Senesh Bids Farewell to Her Brother Giora

GoodReads

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Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

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The Guardian Just Loves Its Jihadist Rhetoric

Al Guardian de la Fascismo has done it again!

Honestly, I thought I was done talking about The Guardian newspaper with my last piece on them. I mean, I really don’t enjoy giving them any attention, I promise you.

But amid the millions of Islamist-sponsored, antizionist, antisemitic fuckwitteries of the moment that I could have been writing about, came this latest ‘opinion’ piece in the shit-rag that The Guardian has become — a piece that perfectly follows the lessons that Hitler and later Stalin perfected in anti-Israel propaganda, written by US columnist Kenneth Roth.

In our article-of-choice, Kenneth Roth has repeatedly assumed the truth of contested allegations, omits inconvenient facts, and leaves readers with an account of the conflict that is nothing like analysis and every bit like advocacy.

Here’s a quick run-through.

Declaring the debate over before it has begun

“Genocide” has been the most contested allegation of all in these recent years. While many organisations including a UN Commission of Inquiry and Amnesty International have published reports calling it a genocide, there has also been mountains of evidence that these reports were constructed by individuals who had already proven themselves to be far from objective, neutral players. And let’s not forget that, as a legal term, only a legal body can decide whether a genocide has taken place or not — and that is still to be decided. Oh yeah, not forgetting that accuser South Africa has required an extension to come up with the evidence it needs. Hmmm.

But nevertheless, the article opens by referring to “Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”

Not “what many describe as genocide” or “what critics argue amounts to genocide.”

Just genocide.

That is not a stylistic choice. It is a factual assertion about one of the most legally contested accusations in international affairs.

The legal definition of genocide is exceptionally narrow and requires proof of specific intent to destroy a protected group. Whether Israel’s conduct meets that threshold is the subject of intense international legal dispute, not settled consensus. Yet readers are presented with the allegation as though the argument has already been won.

The same treatment is given to terms such as “apartheid”, “ethnic cleansing” and “war crimes”. All are serious legal accusations. All remain disputed in significant respects. None are framed as contested.

Opinion writing allows strong arguments, but they should never replace uncertainty.

History begins exactly where it becomes convenient

Roth portrays Benjamin Netanyahu as having “bamboozled” Donald Trump into war with Iran while sabotaging negotiations.

Readers are offered little explanation of why successive Israeli governments — along with American administrations of both parties — have regarded Iran’s nuclear ambitions and regional proxy network as existential security concerns.

One can certainly argue that military action was a mistake. But one cannot honestly discuss Israeli policy while pretending those security concerns simply appeared from nowhere.

The article repeatedly asks readers to evaluate Israeli decisions in isolation from the decades of rocket attacks, proxy warfare and explicit threats from Tehran and its allies that shaped them, yet fails to provide the honest context of these decisions.

Context is how readers understand why governments make the choices they do. The deliberate omission manipulates the readers to understand things incorrectly.

October 7 presented as happenstance

How Roth portrays October 7th is pretty striking.

Netanyahu may still lose the coming election, which must be held by late October. He is unpopular not only because of the paltry showing for his endless wars but also because of the long-pending corruption charges against him and the sense that he was so preoccupied by his far-right side projects that he ignored clear warning signs of Hamas’s deadly 7 October 2023 attack.

The deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — a day that fundamentally reshaped Israeli politics, public opinion and security thinking — receives only a passing reference. Even then, it serves primarily as another criticism of Netanyahu.

The murder of more than 1,200 people, the mass hostage-taking, systematic sexual violence, entire communities destroyed and families burned alive scarcely register as events deserving independent moral weight. Imagine attempting to explain American foreign policy after September 11 while barely mentioning the attacks themselves. Readers would immediately recognise something had gone badly wrong.

The selective use of comparisons

The article goes further by suggesting that Israel should surrender its democratically elected prime minister to the International Criminal Court, comparing the situation to Serbia handing over Slobodan Milošević after the Balkan wars.

Historical analogies can illuminate but they can also obscure.

Comparing a democratic state defending itself after the largest terrorist massacre in its history with a regime whose leadership was convicted over systematic campaigns of ethnic cleansing and genocide is not a neutral historical observation.

It is a rhetorical device designed to frame the conclusion before readers have evaluated the evidence.

The most demonising of all…

This is the one that shocked me the most.

Why can Israel trust the large Palestinian population of Jordan to live in peace but not the Palestinian population of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza? The distinction suggests that the problem is not the inherently violent character of the Palestinian people, as the Israeli government’s self-serving mythology would suggest, but Israel’s endless occupation — Israel’s refusal to recognize Palestinians’ right of self-determination, their right to a state.

The quote above attributes to Israel the belief that Palestinians are inherently violent, implying that Israeli concerns arise from prejudice rather than security experience.

Israeli governments have consistently argued that security concerns stem from armed organisations, repeated terrorist campaigns, failed negotiations, incitement and the refusal of groups such as Hamas to accept Israel’s existence — not from some essential characteristic of Palestinians as a people.

This is a remarkably easy argument to defeat because it is not the one most Israelis actually make and nowhere does Roth cite any evidence to back his claim.

Which makes it all the more shocking to me that an assumption, an allegation based purely on the magical concoction of antisemitic tropes and libels, has made it into The Guardian stated as fact.

The stories that disappear

Equally revealing are the stories that never appear.

On 26 June, Palestinians again demonstrated publicly against Hamas rule, calling for an end to repression and demanding a different future. Organisers warned that participants risked violent retaliation for speaking out. The protests themselves highlighted that many Gazans see Hamas not simply as defenders, but as rulers whose governance has brought immense suffering and whose authority they reject. (Asharq Al-Awsat)

Yet readers of The Guardian may never have even known these demonstrations had taken place. The paper’s Gaza coverage around that period included numerous articles critical of Israel, but no comparable reporting devoted to these anti-Hamas protests.

Editorial choices always involve deciding what deserves attention.

Those choices also shape readers’ understanding of reality.

When one side’s actions dominate coverage while inconvenient facts about the other receive little or no attention, a distorted picture inevitably emerges.

Activism and journalism are not the same thing

I have recently been looking particularly at the radical left-wing YouTube channel Double Down News and its methodologies to absorb people into a belief system and a false sense of being “in the know”. Like every radical social media account, it perfectly mirrors the activity of a cult to lure people to it with sensational headlines, paints a very dark picture of the world and pushes people into conspiratorial thinking with one specific enemy — of which Israel is of course at the centre.

There are many just like it across different social media channels.

Ultimately, like cults, they have an agenda — usually involving gaining followers and making shit-loads of money (see the cult-social media parallels?) — and they will do whatever it takes to fulfil that agenda. It will usually involve bending the truth at least a little, and creating fearmongering content with no nuance whatsoever to keep people hooked.

Disgusting and exploitative, yes. Surprising, no. Because we have come to expect this level of insidiousness from social media. Very little of it, after all, is real journalism.

But when it comes to the Guardian, using such tactics does not uphold the journalistic standards one expects from a paper with such a reputation as it has.

Newspapers have editors precisely because they are supposed to distinguish advocacy from journalism, certainty from allegation and rhetoric from evidence.

Opinion columns are not exempt from those standards.

If anything, they require them even more.

This is not about disagreement. It is about standards.

It is entirely legitimate to criticise Israel’s government and its failures. That is not the issue here.

It is entirely legitimate to argue that Israeli military operations have taken too many civilian lives.

And it is entirely legitimate to advocate for Palestinian rights or sweeping political change.

But here’s the thing about expressing an opinion that, for some reason, this Guardian-endorsed opinion writer seems to not understand: An opinion is not fact. This is basic knowledge. And if it contains any claim that is highly contentious and deeply disputed, any reputable newspaper will ensure that this is acknowledged.

But The Guardian hasn’t done so.

Years ago, I wrote a letter to The Guardian when they published an opinion piece that was deliberately filled with lies in order to smear a company. Their response was that they don’t interfere with the opinions of guest writers and they simply published it in good faith.

I thought that was pretty poor as far as such a highly-respected newspaper goes. But this is a step further. The contentiousness surrounding the claims made by this writer is well known to everyone, and The Guardian can’t plead innocent.

On the other hand, when one wishes to play to a side, to effectively cancel opposing views, and therefore states disputed claims as indisputable fact, that is classic authoritarian propaganda, in exactly the style demonstrated by all of history’s most famous dictators.

Serious publications with standards as high as The Guardian’s need to stop publishing and platforming words that shape world views to demonise a whole nation whose constant targeting is documented regularly on social media.

Instead they need to insist that their writers, whether their own or guests, distinguish contested legal allegations from established fact, acknowledge the historical context surrounding Israeli decision-making, and present readers with enough complexity to make up their own minds.

Honesty requires acknowledging facts even when they complicate a preferred narrative.

One has to ask why nuance and context are given no place even by The Guardian. Including them in articles on social media can easily bring out the trolls, but surely The Guardian doesn’t have bullies breathing down their necks? Does it?

Perhaps that’s exactly the point. (Cue Qatar entering stage left?)

But while it presents itself as serious legacy media, if The Guardian wishes to champion rigorous journalism, it should expect more from its opinion pages than the sort of one-sided storytelling that has become commonplace in the most partisan corners of social media.

When a newspaper fails to differentiate between analysis and advocacy, that is when you know the propaganda machine has broken through.

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Today’s article is a guest post by the amazing Ruchama, first published in our sister publication on Medium, Ruach.

Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

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The Man Who Took on Hitler

He didn’t win, but he exposed him in ways that were never forgotten

On May 7, 1931, a young bespectacled lawyer summoned party employee Adolf Hitler to appear in a Munich courtroom. Six months prior, Stormtroopers, also known as Brown Shirts or the SA, had attacked the Eden Palace dance hall where Hitler’s political opponents liked to socialize. They shot into the crowd, killing three (some say four) and wounded twenty-four in this violent incident.

Hitler and the SA movement had been involved in political street violence and intimidation for years in the late Weimar period. But his party had an electoral breakthrough, jumping from fringe support in the late twenties to becoming the largest party between 1930 and 32.

At the time, Hitler was already attempting a transformation from street agitator to law-abiding statesman. He publicly renounced violence and claimed his intentions to work within the law. He wore conservative suits, traveled across Germany by plane, delivering tightly choreographed speeches to massive crowds. The lighting, the banners, the uniforms — all of it was carefully staged to project order and inevitability. Nazi violence was publicly downplayed during key electoral moments. Hitler’s image make-over was working.

The last thing Hitler and the Nazi Party needed was association with violent SA activity and politically embarrassing trials.

The man questioning him under oath was a twenty-seven-year-old Berlin lawyer named Hans Litten, two years out of law school. Hans did not treat Hitler like a rising political figure or a man already mythologized by followers but like any other witness: someone whose words could be tested, compared, and pinned down under oath. Littens’ summons identified Hitler as: Adolph Hitler, party employee, reducing the future demagogue to the status of a salaried clerk. The Nazi Party insisted the SA’s violence was either exaggerated or the result of rogue behavior. Hans would test those claims in the courtroom.

In doing so, Hans took on the most powerful rising political figure in Germany. Even Hitler’s opponents understood he would reach the top, and when that time came, there would be devastating repercussions for every insult and snub he received. You have to wonder why Hans attempted what some might call a fool’s errand.

His family background surely had something to do with it. His father, the dean of a law school, had converted to Christianity as was common then for Jews, to advance one’s career and social standing. His mother, a lover of culture and literature, was a not particularly devout Christian. Hans rejected what his father represented to him — morally compromised, conforming, inauthentic, opportunistic. Hans himself was drawn to poetry, art, and linguistics, but his pragmatic father urged him toward law. Here’s where Hans’ contrarian nature kicked in. You’re compelling me to study law? All right, but I’ll take on cases that make no money, are unpopular, and my only guide the execution of justice.

Then he found another way to rattle his father. Father renounced his Jewish ancestry? Well, I’ll embrace mine. Hans chose to study Hebrew in high school, delved into Hassidic mysticism, and attended synagogue. Once, while praying at a Hassidic synagogue in Koenigsburg, he was asked directly, where he stood on religion. Even though he had been confirmed in the Evangelical Church, Hans insisted that was merely a legal matter. “By conviction,” he told his questioner, “I am a Jew with all my heart.” It seemed what began as a reflexive rebellion against his father devolved into a sincere desire to immerse himself in his Jewish heritage.

Part and parcel of his Judaism was to take on every just cause. And then he took on Hitler.

Hans saw seated in the witness box a narrow-shouldered man of slight build with black hair slicked back as was the style then. His toothbrush mustache sat square above his lip. In the courtroom, without stage lighting or rally atmosphere, Hitler appeared physically unremarkable, like any Joe or Helmut.

Hitler was not there as a defendant, but as a prestige witness for the defense — called to support the Nazi Party’s claim that it was not responsible for the political violence tied to its paramilitary wing, the SA.

Litten began slowly. His questions were technical, almost bureaucratic. He introduced Hitler’s own prior statements, testing them against his sworn testimony. Hitler gave calm assurances. Gradually, the rhythm changed.

Hitler’s answers shifted as well. What began as controlled testimony turned into defensiveness, then into ideological explanation. At times he no longer answered questions so much as redirected them — into speeches about national struggle, political necessity, and the nature of the movement itself.

At what point did Hitler realize he was being treated like a hostile witness whose documented words were going to be pinned down under oath?

Hitler got snappish. His answers sounded formulaic, rehearsed. Sometimes he went off on riffs about the ideology of the Nazi party. Litten managed to corner Hitler into contradictions that exposed him as a liar, a buffoon, and probably far worse.

The cross examination went on for three hours. On the witness stand, the mythic aura dissolved. Reporters described not a man of destiny but a flushed and sputtering agitator — at one point likened to “an enraged barber” lashing out under humiliation. His performance made clear, he might hold a mass audience en thrall, but one-to-one, in any setting he couldn’t control or speak uninterrupted, he was pretty ordinary.

This story has a devastating ending. Multiple devastating endings.

Weimar court structures didn’t allow for the trial to go political, so the Judge cut off extended questioning, allowed Hitler to reframe answers broadly, and prevented Littens from nailing Hitler or charging the Nazi Party with any crime.

Left-leaning papers considered Litten a bold, brilliant hero, and regarded the trial a humiliation of Hitler, but the trial hardly made a dent. Hitler squirmed but the Nazi momentum would not be stopped. By 1932 they surged electorally. And we all know the rest. Seventy to eighty-five million people killed, the majority of them civilians.

The life most dramatically changed by the trial was Hans Litten’s. He was a marked man. Hitler treated him as a personal enemy. Hans could’ve fled Germany, but he chose not to, he chose to identify as a Jew, defiantly.

As soon as Hitler and his gang came to power in January 1933, the Nazi Party arrested Hans Litten. He was sent to multiple prisons and concentration camps, where he endured torture and abuse. Fellow inmates said he kept his dry wit, recited poetry and literature from memory, engaged in philosophical discussions, and maintained his inner dignity even as the Hitlerian regime physically broke him. But the years of degradation caught up, and he died in Dachau in 1938 psychologically broken, too.

Was his life a waste? Did Hans die in vain? Did Sophie Scholl or Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Claus Von Stoffenberg? Imagine if there had been a handful more like them. Imagine if someone had leveled a court case against Hitler when he only had two percent of the vote.

P.S. Any attempts to enlist Hans Litten in contemporary ideological projects overlook what actually defined him: resistance to mob thinking and a rare capacity for independent judgment under pressure. He evaluated power and justice on his own terms, not through alignment with prevailing intellectual fashions.

Sources consulted:

Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand

Hans Litten — Buchenwald Memorial

In 1931, the lawyer and criminal defense attorney Hans Litten (1903–1938) succeeded in summoning Adolf Hitler to appear…

www.buchenwald.de

And a number of other sources I lost track of.

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Today’s article is by Ann Isabelle and was first published in Ruach, our sister publication on Medium.

Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers called Book Talk — all about books relevant to Jewish life and literature. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

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The Name Erased: A Father’s Agonizing Choice to Save His Son

How an Arab Israeli father hid his identity to protect his son from Hamas, and the painful questions it raises about identity and survival

On the morning of October 7, 2023, as Hamas terrorists stormed Kibbutz Re’im, Ramzy Nassar, an Arab Israeli Muslim, found himself in an unimaginable position. His 18-year-old son, Liam Or-Nassar, was kidnapped and dragged into Gaza. In the chaotic hours that followed, Ramzy made a decision that would haunt him, a “cold and painful calculus” born of a father’s desperate love: he would erase his own identity to save his son; a son whose Arab heritage, in a cruel twist of fate, was not a shield, but a target.

The Unthinkable

Ramzy, married to a Jewish woman, Dana Or, had built a life in Kibbutz Re’im, a community they chose for its “moral, supportive” environment. But on that devastating morning, the kibbutz became a war zone. While hiding with his family in their safe room, Ramzy exchanged frantic texts with Liam, who was in his own apartment in the youth neighborhood. “Dad, I’m scared,” was one of the last messages Ramzy received before the communication went silent.

The family’s worst fears were confirmed when Liam’s girlfriend received a horrifying image: Liam, in his underwear, tied up in a tunnel. The picture, a cruel proof of life, was also a confirmation of a nightmare. “I looked at it: Liam, in just his boxers, tied up in a tunnel. One part of my mind said, ‘That’s Liam, your son.’ Another part said, ‘It’s fake, impossible.’ But my heart said — Ramzy, you know that’s your boy,” Ramzy recounted.

The Agonizing Calculus

In the immediate aftermath, as the family grappled with the shock and terror, a grim and tragically ironic realization dawned on Ramzy. In the twisted logic of his son’s captors, Liam’s 50% Arab blood was not a “get out of jail free” card. It was the very thing that could get him killed. Ramzy understood with chilling certainty that Hamas would only see a “traitor” in his son or the “son of a traitor” for being part of a mixed family in Israel. This fear, a horrifying indictment of the conflict’s dehumanizing nature, forced Ramzy’s hand.

“If Hamas knew, it could hurt Liam. It’s not something that would have been well-received on the other side, that his Muslim father is married to a Jewish woman, even though there’s no such prohibition in Islam,” Ramzy later explained. The family, in a makeshift crisis command center, made a swift and agonizing decision. On a protocol sheet, a single line was drawn through the name “Nassar,” and a note was made: “Ramzy not up front.” Liam Or-Nassar became, for all official and public purposes, Liam Or.

This act, a desperate measure to protect his son, was a profound personal sacrifice for Ramzy. “My name, Ramzy Nassar, is not a technical detail. It is identity,” he would later say. “For me, insisting on the name is basic respect, because a name is the simplest way to connect with a person.” To erase his name was to erase a part of himself.

A Vow of Silence

For the 54 days of Liam’s captivity, Ramzy remained in the shadows. He did not speak to the media, appear on social media, or join the public campaigns for the hostages’ release. He was a father in silent agony, his voice silenced by the fear that his very identity could endanger his son. “I was devastated that I had to stay silent because of my identity, my origins, in the very country I live in, out of fear that it could harm my son, whether in Gaza or here in Israel,” he said. “It made me ask what kind of reality I am even living in.”

The Reunion

Liam was released in November 2023 as part of the first truce deal. The reunion was a moment of overwhelming emotion for Ramzy. “The closest thing I can compare it to is the birth of a child,” he recalled. “When we finally met, I ran to him, he ran to me, we hugged. The first thing Liam said to me was, ‘I’m okay, Dad, I’m okay.’ … That was the moment I felt like I could breathe again.”

At the hospital, Liam was surprised to find his last name had been changed on his new ID card. When Ramzy explained the reasoning, Liam understood, but asked to have his full name restored. The change was made that same day.

The Aftermath

The trauma of the kidnapping and the agonizing decision to hide his identity has left deep scars on Ramzy and his family. The story of Ramzy Nassar is a poignant and painful reminder of the human cost of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a conflict that forces individuals into impossible choices and questions the very essence of identity. It is a story of a father’s love, a story of sacrifice, and a story that lays bare a devastating truth: in this conflict, even the bonds of blood can be twisted into a weapon. It asks a difficult question: what is a name, and what is it worth, when the heritage it represents marks your son not as a brother, but as a traitor in the eyes of his captors?

Sources:

“A father in the shadows: How hostage Liam Or-Nassar’s heritage was hidden to protect him.” www.timesofisrael.com/a-father-in-the-shadows-how-hostage-liam-or-nassars-heritage-was-hidden-to-protect-him/.

“The hidden identity behind Liam Or’s kidnapping.” www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/byvcljqizg.

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Palestine Action and Self-Aggrandising Delusion

It’s official — Britain’s progressives are stuck looking at their own anuses

Last Friday, four members of the proscribed group, Palestine Action, were sentenced following the conviction of criminal damages and grievous bodily harm. This was the outcome of a raid on the Elbit Systems factory near Bristol in August 2024, in which the activists caused £1.2 million in damage and fractured the spine of a female police officer with a sledgehammer.

The sentencing drew uproar from supporters owing to a small detail that made a huge difference: the judge ruled that their motivation denoted terrorism since he concluded that the act was an attempt to influence the government through violence and damage to property. Convicting them of acts of terrorism came with harsher sentences and will remain on their criminal records for life.

Now, as with any sentencing one might expect some outrage from supporters. The normal protocol might include some upset, a feeling that the sentence was too harsh among some while others will acknowledge that every act of criminal damage comes with a risk of a harsher sentence depending on the judge on the day.

However, when we are talking about the anti-Israel contingency, it is completely normal protocol for any undesirable decisions to be met with a cacophony of hysterical voices yelling that the judge is a Zionist or has been paid off by the Israel lobby, or that the government intentionally set it up so that the protestors would be made an example of. It’s always the Jews! Remember too that the unspoken rules of acceptance into the anti-Israel gang are that you must speak up, even if the words spoken are completely regurgitated crap that you never even thought of yourself. So it was hardly surprising to see social media losing its shit within moments of the sentencing.

And, as ever, most of it was poorly thought-out, uneducated, and often nonsensical. So I thought it fair to dissect the latest in really sad British twattishness and take a look at a few of these online reactions:

The Canary, a popular radical left online population that specialises in nothing of any real interest bar the kind of reactionary diarrhoea that anyone sporting a Green Party badge tends to like, spoke of “the state’s feeble excuse for demanding terror sentencing: that the activists were trying to influence the Israeli government.”

Gotta love how such a highly regarded publication managed to change “the government”, which clearly denoted the British government, since the factory targeted was on British soil and it is the British government who approves the manufacturing of the weapons on its soil, into “the Israeli government” as if no one is looking. Either they are really dim or they are really bad at gaslighting.

It then added, “Nobody believes the Israeli government was going to be influenced — the action was to damage weapons and save Palestinian lives.”

Not gonna lie, I’ve seen better ways of saving lives than by damaging a few drone components, smashing up a building, and fracturing a woman’s spine. So no, The Canary hasn’t convinced me.

Onto our favourite “think your boobs bigger”, we-love-partying-with-fetishists-and-Islamists, proud token-Jew Zack Polanski.

He tweeted, “Gut wrenching to see four young people jailed for direct action against an arms supplier to Israel. Years in prison for protesting to save lives in Gaza, with ‘terrorism’ used despite no jury convicting them of it. A truly dangerous attack on the right to protest.”

Let me repeat, for protesting to save lives!! No mention of criminal damage, intimidation through use of aggression, breaking and entering into government-linked facilities, or physically assaulting and injuring a police officer. You know, where normal lines are drawn between healthy behaviour and sociopathic conduct.

Amnesty International UK showed up as ever to swear its allegiance to terror, claiming that “The defendants in today’s case were sentenced as terrorists because prosecutors want to make an example of them.”

If the prosecutors achieve that, it really wouldn’t be a bad thing. But one has to love the way these ideas are projected as fact, when Amnesty evidently has no way of knowing what the prosecutors were thinking, nor has it at any stage given any indication that it condemns unlawful acts of violence that end in extensive criminal damage and injury to humans. One has to admire how groups like these pass as sane humanitarians, and not as the sociopathic cretins they are with such inability to show remorse, empathy, emotional intelligence or critical thinking.

Now comes Jezebel Jeremy Corbyn, dutiful to the terrorists as ever, calling it “A historic miscarriage of justice — and a truly dark day for civil liberties in this country.”

Apparently it’s a “dark day” when the British government says we can’t go smashing up private property to the tune of £1.2 million, or attack police officers with sledgehammers.

Zarah Sultana, Jezebel’s partner in Israel-hate and fellow failed Our Party leader, claimed that the defendants “were even prevented from telling the jury they acted to stop genocide.” In fact, the judge probably ruled this, along with several other restrictions on using saving lives as an excuse, because he wanted to keep this emotionally-manipulative bullshit from entering the courtroom. Like most of us, he’s probably seen enough of it on the street, in social media, and being fed to every wannabe left-wing virtue-signaller on the planet.

Meanwhile, on Monday the court ruled that the Home Secretary was correct to determine Palestine Action a terrorist organisation, and to proscribe it in the UK. The official statement read:

The Court of Appeal’s judgment upholds the proscription of Palestine Action.

The Court has found that Palestine Action has carried out acts of terrorism, celebrated those who have taken part in those acts and promoted the use of violence. It is not an ordinary protest or civil disobedience group, and its actions are not consistent with democratic values and the rule of law.

This decision does not affect lawful protest in support of the Palestinian cause, which remains a fundamental democratic right. There is a difference between supporting Palestine and supporting a proscribed terrorist group.

We will always take the strongest possible action to protect our national security and keep the public safe.

Zarah tweeted that she hoped “the ministerial car was worth selling out the Palestinian people.”

For context, in the last three years alone, in addition to the Elbit Systems Filton-branch raid in August 2024, Palestine Action has been responsible for

• entering the RAF base and spraying red paint into the engines and onto two Voyager military aircraft. Authorities stated the damage ran into millions of pounds.

• Repeated attacks on Elbit-linked facilities

• Spray-painting buildings

• Smashing windows

• Occupying rooftops

• Damaging factory equipment

• Blocking entrances

• Causing temporary shutdowns of facilities

• Breaking, entering and damage to government buildings, universities, financial institutions, charities, defence-industry suppliers, often involving paint, vandalism, occupations, or disruption of operations

• Smashing up a private family-owned shop in Golders Green, terrifying the owners and making them fear for their and their children’s safety.

But apparently, according to Zarah Sultana, protecting British Jews from threat and British government property from damage is “selling out the Palestinian people.”

Try as she and others might to frame the sentencing of “the Filton Four” and the proscription of Palestine Action as an all-or-nothing, them-or-us crisis, we won’t buy their gaslighting. And we won’t stop calling out the bullshit until they have used up every last drop of it. I promise.

Ok, it’s time for some real talk from me.

I entertain myself writing stuff like this, but the irony of it all is not missed. There is nothing exceptional about Palestine Action or its cheerleaders, namely the movement to bring down Israel. Their activity has stolen the time, energy, resources, and attention of much of the media and politicians in recent times, and the delusion of significance only enables them and motivates them to create more pointless chaos. They fool themselves into thinking that their protests matter, and that they are doing the work of heroes.

They’re not. It’s as simple as that. What they’re doing doesn’t help the people of Palestine, and the importance they place on the plight of Palestinians above all else would be laughable if it wasn’t so shamefully abusive of the Palestinians.

Palestine does matter in so far as it is a component of a wide and messy political situation in the Middle East. But it doesn’t matter in the way they think it does.

While those screaming about the injustice of Palestine Action’s proscription and our apparent loss of freedom of speech and the right to protest, tens of thousands of Iranians were murdered in a matter of days for protesting, and many others have been executed over the years for daring to speak their truth. British progressives meanwhile stare at their own anuses and seem to have forgotten that anything exists outside of them.

And while the news of the Filton Four and Palestine Action has occupied these tiny brains, real shit is happening in the real world. No one yet knows exactly what has been agreed in Trump’s deal with Iran, but according to many, the future is looking bleak. Political analysts and commentators I trust are sharing some seriously pessimistic outlooks.

It hurts. To me there has been terrible decision after terrible decision starting way before October 7th 2023: Netanyahu buttering up the religious extremists and refusing to listen to the Israeli population, Donald Trump being so obsessed with his own delusions of grandeur that he seems to have let down the people of Iran and the people of Israel in one foul swoop, and an incredibly fragile political situation inside of Israel.

I’m not a political analyst so I don’t wish to say more than that. I can just say now, however, that as someone who wasn’t raised religious, I can truly understand right now why people turn to prayer.

I really hope things aren’t as bleak as many are projecting. If they are, I suspect the Palestine Action and BDS crew will be patting themselves on the backs because they wanted the Islamic regime to win against the US and Israel. Until, of course, they realise that if we Jews lose, neither they nor the Palestinians will be spared either.

But, again, I hope — and pray — for all of us, and for much, much better times ahead.

With love,

Sally ✡️

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Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

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The Foundation of Palestinian Victimhood

It’s not what you think

Someone once called me as a racist when I observed that Palestinians bring every misfortune upon themselves. By that I did not mean there was something intrinsically defective about Palestinians that brings about their suffering. I meant something very different.

I will start with this truism:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Most people eventually recognize when certain patterns of behavior consistently lead to failure and suffering. Rational actors adjust their behavior in pursuit of better outcomes. The tragedy for Palestinians and the victims of their violent actions, is that they have repeatedly chosen the opposite course.

I trace the history of Palestinian suffering and their current stateless condition to a single source, namely, remarkably poor leadership. The instigator of the violent relationship between Palestinians and Jews was Hassan Amin al-Husseini who was perhaps the most influential and powerful Palestinian leader during the period between World War I and the end of World War II. As a member of the most politically connected Arab family in Palestine, the British appointed him Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921. He then became the supreme leader of the Palestinian Arabs with his appointment as President of the Supreme Muslim Council, effectively making him the dominant political and religious figure among Palestinian Arabs.

After World War I, nationalist movements emerged throughout the Levant, including Jewish and Palestinian. To the extent coexistence was ever possible, and by many accounts it was, Husseini dedicated himself to ensuring that coexistence would fail, using anti-Jewish sentiment in Islamic texts to incite anger among the Arab population encouraging violence against Jews.

The Spring of 1920 saw the first pogrom by Arabs against the Jews of Jerusalem.

The attitude promoted among the Palestinian Arabs is exemplified by this statement by then prominent pan Arabist Awni Abdel Hadi (who secretly acted as a broker on land sales to Jews):

“[W]e will not rest until Palestine is placed under a free Arab government or becomes a graveyard for all the Jews in the country. We will finish them off one by one: if not in a month, then in a year, in not a year, then in ten years. But our goal will be achieved, and there is nothing that can prevent us from achieving it slowly but surely.[1]”

But here we are a century later, with the Palestinians no closer to their goal, and in fact further from it than ever before. Yet the underlying rejectionist mentality continues to shape Palestinian politics. Time and again, Palestinian leadership has pursued the elimination of Jewish sovereignty rather than the construction of a viable Palestinian state despite the fact that it becomes increasingly unlikely with every defeat.

The Mufti focused his attention on convincing the Arab public that the Jews had designs on Al Aqsa Mosque with the intention of rebuilding the third temple there. This libel sparked the well-known massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1929 which ended the Jewish community that had existed there for centuries.

In 1935, the British killed Izz ad-Din al-Qassam (the namesake of the Hamas military wing that led the October 7 attacks) a militant anti-Zionist preacher. This event triggered a significant uprising among the Palestinian Arabs beginning in 1936 and lasting until 1939. What came to be known as the “Great Arab Revolt” started with grassroots general strikes and ultimately involved violent attacks against the British and Jews.

At first these violent tactics seemed to work. The British responded to Arab violence against Jews by sharply limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine in an attempt to appease Palestinian leadership (a losing strategy for which they became well known). In response to the organized violence, the Jews formed their own militia known as the Haganah which defended against continued attacks and ultimately became the Israel Defense Force. In addition to preparing militarily, the Jews continued to focus on building the economy and international diplomacy.

As it became apparent that the Jews and the Arabs would not be able to share the same land, the Peel Commission adopted a recommendation to partition the territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arab state would have occupied 80% of what remained of Palestine (after the creation of Transjordan in the territory east of the Jordan River) with a Jewish state in most of the remainder, and with Jerusalem and Bethlehem to remain under the British mandate.

The Jews reluctantly accepted the plan. The Arabs rejected it outright. The Mufti demanded the abandonment of the plan to create a Jewish national home in any part of Palestine, the immediate and complete cessation of Jewish immigration, a halt to land sales to Jews and the creation of a single Arab state under Muslim rule where Jews would remain a minority. During the hearings before the Peel Commission, Lord Peel asked whether the new Arab state would be able to assimilate the 400,000 Jews then living in Palestine.

The Mufti responded in the negative.

“Some of them would have to be removed by a process kindly or painful as the case may be?” asked Lord Peel. The Mufti responded that “[w]e must leave all these things for the future.”

“You complain that there are too many Jews Would they b e safe in an Arab Palestine?” asked Lord Peel. The Mufti responded, “[t]hat would depend on the Arab government.”[2]

This exchange underscored what the Holocaust had revealed. Jews without sovereignty are unsafe. Certainly a Jewish minority in Palestine would have faced enormous threats and violence.

The Mufti’s irrational thinking and lack of concern for the well-being of his constituents resulted in their loss of what could have been an Arab state in substantially all of the available territory with only a token allocation to the Jews. But the Mufti’s uncompromising insistence that the Jews have no sovereignty anywhere in Mandatory Palestine, where it was obvious to the British that Jews would be no safer in Palestine under Muslim rule than they had been in Nazi occupied Europe, had disastrous results.

In yet another effort to appease Arab violence, in 1939, just as Jews were facing annihilation in Europe, the British issued a “white paper” which limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the next five years, after which no Jewish immigration would be permitted without the Arabs’ consent. Jewish immigration was completely suspended from October 1939 until March 1940, which amounted to a complete repudiation of the mandate. But the Arabs were not satisfied. They demanded the immediate creation of an Arab state and the review of the status of every Jew who had entered Palestine after 1918.

The Mufti spent World War II broadcasting antisemitic propaganda and recruiting Balkan Muslims for the Nazi war effort and calling for the murder of Jews wherever they could be found. Another terrible decision. By aligning himself with Hitler, he not only morally disgraced the Palestinian national movement but also alienated potential Western sympathy after the war.

The Palestinians made this same mistake by taking the side of Iraq when it invaded Kuwait in 1990. This decision had devastating consequences for the Palestinians in Kuwait who fled or were forced out. (Strange I haven’t heard any condemnations of the mass expulsion).

After World War II with no end to Palestinian rejectionism in sight, the British decided to end the mandate and place the question of Palestine in the hands of the newly created United Nations. Like the Peel Commission before it, the United Nations proposed partitioning the land into two states – one for the Arabs and one for the Jews, but by now the Arabs were offered about 45% of the territory instead of 80%. Again, the Jews accepted the plan, and the Arabs rejected it and launched a war to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state.

Maybe they thought the Jews would not fight back as they largely had not during the 1936-1938 Revolt. But there were mistaken and found a formidable adversary in the Jews who had developed a sophisticated and organized military. Years of institution-building, economic development, and military preparation gave the Jewish forces a decisive advantage. The Arabs had used that time to fight amongst themselves.

In fact, it was at that very point that the Palestinians began to flee Palestine in large numbers. Some were urged by Arab leaders (who believed the Jews would soon be defeated) to leave temporarily so as not to get caught in (or hinder) the fighting. But the largest contingent of Palestinian refugees fled from fear of the advancing Jewish forces.

Had Palestinian leadership accepted partition instead of pursuing war, there would have been an Arab Palestinian state in 1948 alongside Israel. The Palestinian refugee problem would not exist today had the Palestinians made a different choice instead of pursuing the same path that had already failed several times.

By 2000 Palestinian leadership had still not absorbed the lesson of 1948. When Israel offered the Palestinians a state in almost all of the West Bank, with land swaps to compensate for lost territory, Gaza and with a capital in East Jerusalem, they responded by unleashing the Second Intifada, a campaign of suicide bombings and terrorism that devastated both societies and led Israel to construct security barriers and checkpoints. Palestinians and the so-called supporters complain about these incessantly. But they were not a foregone conclusion to this conflict. The Palestinians made a choice to reject statehood and pursue war.

Then came October 7, 2023, perhaps the starkest example of Palestinians bringing troubles on themselves. When Hamas led an attack on southern Israel murdering, raping and taking hostages in an assault that shocked the civilized world, the end result was the almost complete devastation of Gaza and the loss of countless Palestinian lives.

Regardless of what one thinks of the Israeli response to October 7, Palestinian leadership knew or certainly should have known the terrible consequences that would result from their actions. To launch the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust against a militarily superior neighbor and expect anything else was either reckless beyond comprehension or a conscious willingness to sacrifice Palestinian lives for ideological ends.

Some will insist on drawing a sharp distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian population. But Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist organizations are not foreign occupiers; they are composed of Palestinians, including many young men and teenagers recruited from within Palestinian society itself. Nor was October 7 carried out by Hamas alone. Thousands of civilians crossed into Israel alongside the Nukhba forces, participating in looting, kidnappings, and other atrocities.

The world also witnessed crowds of Palestinians jeering and celebrating as Israeli hostages were paraded through Gaza, and families applauding the grotesque spectacle surrounding the return of the bodies of four-year-old Ariel Bibas and ten-month-old Kfir Bibas, innocent children whose murders became symbols of the depravity of that day.

None of this means that every Palestinian bears responsibility for these crimes. But it does mean that the comfortable fiction that October 7 was the work of a handful of isolated extremists cannot withstand scrutiny. The catastrophe that followed was not an unforeseeable tragedy. It was the predictable consequence of decisions made by Palestinian leaders and embraced by the society they represent.

The same pattern appears repeatedly throughout modern history: Palestinian leaders initiate or escalate conflict with Israel, lose, and leave their own population in far worse condition than before.

Let’s be real. If the goal of the Palestinian people is to live in dignity within the borders of their own sovereign state, they have chosen a poor way to achieve that goal as they should know by now will not succeed. Some may call that stupidity. But I don’t think they are stupid. I think that all they want is an absence of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the territory not necessarily a Palestinian state.

In fact, prior to 1967, when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza, there was little demand for an independent Palestinian state. The central issue is not about Palestinian sovereignty, but rather about the existence of Jewish sovereignty.

If they insist on pursuing a goal that is clearly unattainable, namely the elimination of Jewish sovereignty, Palestinians themselves will continue to bear the heaviest consequences.

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Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! The JPF isn’t here for polite debates or academic footnotes — we’re dismantling antisemitism one idiot, one coward, one apologist at a time.

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The Antisemites Just Won’t Let Us Rest

They don’t let up

Yesterday I went for a walk with a new-ish Jewish friend of mine, Ami. She has been someone I have seen on Facebook for a few years and had followed, but only became IRL friends with recently. She has always been very vocal on the topic of antisemitism, Israel-Palestine, and general decency, and I found her a comfort in my feed, so it was without hesitancy that, when I saw her walking down the road one day, I approached her. As she later relayed to her friend, “and then we just did that Jewish thing and talked nonstop for the next hour.” (It would have been longer if her back wasn’t giving her trouble and my poor aging dog hadn’t started shivering.)

Anyway, I don’t know why I was so surprised to find her genuinely delighted to have found a friend in me. I don’t think I’m that fascinating or great, and I’m also perhaps a little less forgiving of Palestinian behaviour than she is. But I began to understand more yesterday on our walk.

She told me how her (non-Jewish) partner had requested of her one day to “please not talk about antisemitism for at least the first hour of the day.” She said, “I get it, but activism against antisemitism has become my life, as much as I wish it hadn’t. Honestly, I’m tired of it, and yet, I am compelled to keep going, because antisemitism never lets up.”

At that moment, it all became clear. I understand exactly how she feels. Every day I think, “I want a day off today.” But I don’t take it. Perhaps I’ll manage a morning off; I’ll walk the dog on the beach and lose myself in the sights and sounds of the sea, the cormorants and gulls, and the glistening reflection of the sun on the water. But then I’ll come home and keep working, keep reading, educating myself, writing thousands of words that will never be seen by anyone while publishing just a fraction.

And of course, she knows that she can talk to me about it whenever we meet, because as tired as I am of it, I’m never too tired to bounce off someone else fighting as passionately as I am. We compare notes; we share different teachings we have taken from one place or another.

And the thing that brings us to the most similar place is how damned hard we have thought about everything surrounding antisemitism, antizionism, the Jewish story, the Palestinian cause, and so much more. We have both approached every narrative with caution, checked our own biases time and again, and sought to listen with the most open yet honest minds that we possibly can.

Ami inspires me to keep going. Not simply because if she can then I can, but because she reminds me that my agonising self-questioning has not been for nothing. She’s everything progressive — in the LGBTQ community, very left-leaning, and grew up in Jewish East London while witnessing horrific white nationalism that directly threatened the Jewish minority along with immigrants of all colours. You know, those days when Jews weren’t yet the white supremacists, just dirty and money-grabbing. She predominantly speaks the language of the left, like many of us who have always felt aligned with left-wing politics.

AND she’s highly intelligent. And so she sees exactly where the left fails Jews.

She has joined anti-racism groups only to find herself isolated from them the minute she raises Jewish concerns. She helped to set up what should have been a brilliant local evening of dialogue attended by a peace organisation including a peace activist from Israel and a peace activist from the West Bank. I attended and appreciated the work of these brilliant people, but had to make my exit before the talk drew to a close (it had already gone ten minutes over its scheduled time). But I heard later that it then erupted into an ugly shouting extravaganza with one particular woman telling the Jewish organiser that his genetics weren’t from the Middle East, and the Israeli speaker that the rapes and murders committed by Hamas on October 7th never happened.

Proving that no matter what effort we put in, no matter how much we show that we want to compromise, make amends for the hurt we have caused, give up land for peace, open up space for dialogue, and all of that malarky, it’s never enough. Not because we aren’t doing enough but because — well, antisemitism.

I’m going to be honest — I didn’t write this to make any novel point or bring you any new information. I am writing this merely to say that: I am tired. But there’s no rest where antisemitism is concerned, and so, no matter what I will keep going.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s all pointless, if we should just stop talking, exposing, pushing against it.

But the minute I question that, I realise how stupid it is to think like that. Even if no one appears to be listening, we must never stop exposing antisemitism and antizionism for what they are. The more we see them being normalised into everyday speech, the more we MUST point out that it’s wrong. No matter if we are told we are weaponising it or are accused of perpetuating ‘hasbara’, or being paid by the Israeli government, or ignoring the plight of the Palestinians every time we shine a spotlight on antisemitism. That would only mean their bullying is working.

So fuck them and their rhetorical talking points that we hear on repeat in every social media comment section. When they come up with something original of their own, perhaps I’ll stop and listen for a moment. But until then, I know where it comes from, and it’s definitely not from love, empathy, compassion, or downright basic decency.

Ami figured that out and, as a result, now has to try not to let every minute of every day become consumed by her mission to fight antisemitism. I figured that out and have had to find ways to decompress.

Reuben, prior owner of the Judean People’s Front, figured that out, and had to step away for his own wellbeing and that of his family. He found a different, equally meaningful way to continue standing strong for the Jewish cause.

I’m sure many of you can relate.

I keep nearly giving up, but then I remember. And I know you do too.

As long as antisemitism’s ugly head keeps trying to bring us down, we will still be here fighting back, exposing the hypocrisy for exactly what it is, and calling it out, no matter what.

So here’s a big thank you to all who are fighting the good fight and, along with people like Ami, for inspiring me to keep going!

And with that, I will share a list of some of the other writers who are working overtime to expose the truth of what is happening in societies, institutions, and political circles everywhere. Please go and read their work, and share any more you think should be added in the comments:

, Blacklisted
Andrew Fox
, Gawenda Unleashed
, Notes From the Ruins
, The Liberal Jew
, When I Should Have Died
, The New Zionist Times
, Second Thoughts | Florit’s Substack
, The Lioness Writes
Behind the Narrative
Feminists Against Antisemitism
, For Normal People
, The Inverted World
Jonathan Sacerdoti
, Thoughts From the Center of the Universe
Movement Against Antizionism

Thanks for reading! If you wish to support me to keep producing content in solidarity with the Jewish people and calling out antisemitism, consider making a one time donation by clicking the button below.

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Today’s article is a guest post by Delilah Rose and was first published in our sister publication on Medium, Ruach.

Wednesday stories (8 pm UK time) are by Sally Prag. Sunday stories (at the same time) feature the work of a range of writers. With the gradual evolution of the JPF, I am keeping all regular posts free but will be introducing a new column for paying subscribers. Watch this space! For now, if you would like to support me with a one-time donation, click here.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! The JPF isn’t here for polite debates or academic footnotes — we’re dismantling antisemitism one idiot, one coward, one apologist at a time.

Subscribe now

Confessions of a Recovering ‘As a Jew’

I was lost in a whirlwind of delusion and self-destruction before the penny finally dropped

It is with a deep sense of shame that I stand before you (virtually) and confess all. That I was one of those people, the worst of the worst, the ones who can wave their Jew card, who get tokenised by the most poisonous of all, before I had my epiphany and came to my senses.

The truth is, though, that I knew I was being fake all along. I’d never cared for my Jew-ness for most of my life. I had no interest in what I deemed conventional religion. My parents moved away from Jewish North London, where I was born, when I was seven, and we had no Jewish community surrounding us.

My mum lit Hanukkah candles every year and we would go to visit our grandparents on the south coast, where they’d retired to, for Passover each year. My brother and I were pushed into having our Bar and Bat Mitzvahs (respectively), which we both resented.

But as soon as I could, I got right away from all things Jewish and lived a more esoteric and arty life, practising yoga and eventually becoming a yoga teacher.

Most importantly, I cared nothing for Israel. We had some family friends who had made aliyah, and so I learnt plenty about the country when they would come back to visit, and it certainly fascinated me to hear about this land that we all could move to if we so desired. But politically it was confusing and dark, and so I chose to distance myself entirely from the idea that I, who was born a Jew, had any connection to the place.

So when October 7th happened and it was expected among my left-wing peers to “choose a side” (and make it the right one), I was all too happy to choose appropriately and make it known that I owned one of those handy Jew cards.

The truth was that it was far more beneficial to my friends than it was to me. I was popular for having it and gained more friends as a result.

And yet, all the while, I knew I had never cared for this Jewish identity that had suddenly become my pass into popularity. That I was only using it to be someone that people could be proud to be friends with. That, in fact, I was a fake.

It was this uncomfortable feeling that made me start to question the doctrine.

The discomfort spread deeper too, because of the denial of the rape allegations of October 7th. Deep within, I knew it was wrong to deny the horrifying ordeals all the innocent Israelis experienced on that day — not only the women but men and children too. But I was reminded constantly by the messages in the WhatsApp chats I was in and on social media platforms that Israel was an “illegal, colonising, apartheid terrorist state” and these lives had to be sacrificed for the sake of the resistance.

It became uncomfortable when I would return to my mum’s house, and she would be mourning Jewish lives and wore a yellow ribbon to signify her support for the return of the hostages. I would tell her she didn’t care about Palestinian children, since that was what supporting the return of the hostages must mean, didn’t it?

Of course that was nonsensical. But I had fallen victim to the twisted form of justification that I was soon to see for exactly what it was.

I’m just gutted it took more than a year of me being an absolute shit to my family to get there.

The first person to make me see sense was a non-Jewish friend of mine. She was married to a Jewish man and, although their children weren’t strictly Jewish, she saw them as the half-Jewish kids they were, and therefore carrying the identity nonetheless.

She began to see things happening in their schools, a subtle denial of Jewish identity and an almost exclusive focus on the suffering of Palestinians as something that rightfully erased any rights of Jews to feel pain. So she began campaigning along with several other parents to ensure any chance that Jewish kids were feeling marginalised was addressed and dealt with appropriately.

She spoke with a deep empathy for people who felt the definition of Zionism had been ripped from them, stolen to be made into something that would make them legitimate targets of hate. I’d never even thought about what else Zionism might mean besides those hateful terms thrown around in leftist circles until I saw this woman with no Jewish roots of her own defending the rights of those around her. Her natural empathy was stark in comparison to the fake activism I waved around.

That was when I started seeing how antizionist talking points were successfully dispossessing people who felt a connection to the ancient homeland of the Jews. And that included my own parents.

I started to understand that it was these very same talking points that had made Jews feel both politically and physically homeless, not only now but over and over again for centuries.

I started to realise how easily I had allowed this notion that certain people and events were used to frame every Jewish person as inherently wrong simply for existing and choosing to identify as Jewish, unless they swore allegiance to the Palestinian cause and, with it, hatred of Israel.

This epiphany was deeply confusing to me as someone who had recently chosen to identify as Jewish purely to tokenise myself. I suddenly not only felt used and dirtied, but realised the connection to my Jewish roots that I had played with was now something far more meaningful. I began to feel a sense of understanding and compassion towards my mother that I hadn’t previously allowed myself to feel. I started to feel a sense of kinship with the women who underwent some of the most horrific abuse at the hands of Hamas members when I first heard Roni Gonen’s story of being raped repeatedly while in captivity.

And yet, I still wanted badly to be accepted by my peers who spat venom at anything Israeli constantly.

The change truly came for me when I began to clearly see how my own friends were unknowingly embracing antisemitism, now repackaged as antizionism in order to give it legitimacy (yet was just as dismissive and racist as its predecessor), as they rattled off their well-rehearsed list of intellectually-contorted justifications as to why Jews had no right to complain about being murdered in the street when Israel was bombing Palestinian children. That was the point I realised I was sick of hearing these talking points being repeated and repeated, over and over, with a clear intention to drown out any opposing voices and convince anyone daring to sit on the fence.

I walked away from those friendships and never looked back. Only forwards.

I searched out people whose voices were clear, honest, and yet humble. All qualities completely lacking from the voices I had aligned with prior. I found new friends, and a genuine sense of welcome. Not the feeling that I was crowed over for my Jew card and the chance to tokenise me.

My life changed for the better at this point. I felt I could embrace my Jewish identity honestly now, rather than dishonestly, and the relief was indescribable.

I’m pretty ashamed that I allowed myself to be drawn into the trap of the hateful movement I now know as antizionism. But happy to have eventually found the light.

And, most of all, darned fucking proud that I can call myself Jewish and surround myself with a huge family of awesome Jewish brothers and sisters worldwide.

Am Yisrael chai and if the haters don’t like it, well fuck ‘em.

Thanks for reading! If you wish to support me to keep producing content in solidarity with the Jewish people and calling out antisemitism, consider making a one time donation by clicking the button below.

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