Time and Space

On Saturday night in Grenoble, France, at a city festival that has run for twenty-five years, the DJ Barbara Butch got twenty minutes. She went on around 10:20. In front of the stage stood a crowd of hundreds of protesters, waving Palestinian flags, whistling, and shouting insults. The city of Grenoble says glass bottles and other projectiles were thrown, deliberately aimed at her, and that electrical installations were sabotaged. Citing threats against the artist and the safety of the crowd, the city suspended the concert. Butch left the stage while John Lennon’s “Imagine” played over the speakers.

If you know Barbara Butch, it might be from the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics in 2024. She was the DJ at the center of the “Festivity” tableau, the woman in the silver halo whom half the internet decided had blasphemed against a Renaissance painting. What followed was one of the ugliest harassment campaigns in recent French memory: tens of thousands of messages, including threats to kill her and to rape her. The abuse was antisemitic before it was anything else, with plenty left over for her body and her sexuality. She filed complaints. French prosecutors opened investigations, and some of the people who threatened her were charged and convicted. A month after the ceremony she carried the Paralympic torch through a Paris suburb and told an interviewer she had chosen not to be afraid to exist in public.

In March, Butch signed a letter in Le Point, alongside the philosopher Elisabeth Badinter and former prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve, supporting the proposition de loi Yadan, a bill whose stated purpose was to fight what its drafters called new forms of antisemitism. The case against that bill was real. Its critics, La France Insoumise loudest among them, argued that the drafting was vague and that it risked criminalizing legitimate criticism of Israel. The government withdrew the text in April. If the story ended there, it would be ordinary democratic politics: a contested bill and a government retreat. Protesting a law and supporting it are both speech. Both are legitimate.

The campaign against Butch began in May, a month after the bill died. There was no law left to oppose. What remained was the person. Allan Brunon, an LFI city councilor in Grenoble, posted a call to cancel her booking at the Cabaret Frappé festival, accusing her of supporting a colonial and genocidal regime. His evidence was the tribune, plus the claim that she had played Tel Aviv Pride in 2025, during the war. Tel Aviv Pride was canceled in 2025. What she actually played was a private event for the French Embassy in Israel. The full case against her, stripped of its phrasing, comes to this: she signed a letter against antisemitism, and she took a booking from her own country’s diplomats.

Grenoble’s mayor, Laurence Ruffin, refused to cancel the show, on the reasonable ground that city governments should not run ideological background checks on musicians. So the protesters came to the show instead. Afterward, Brunon, who attended, described the evening as a peaceful demonstration and said he was proud to have taken part. He denies that any projectiles were thrown, which puts his account in direct conflict with the city’s. He also offered a line worth quoting in full: “It is not Madame Butch who is being censored. It is everyone fighting the genocide in Gaza who is censored in our country today.” At the national level, LFI’s Manuel Bompard said he could understand a political position drawing protest, provided the protest stays peaceful. Given the city’s description of glass bottles aimed at her, that condition had already failed by the time he offered it.

The institutions, at least, were not confused. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez condemned the violence in the strongest terms, writing that antisemitism and intimidation have no place in the Republic and that preventing an artist from performing is an unacceptable attack on free expression. The International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Licra), a French nonprofit, demanded an investigation and named what it saw: an antisemitic conflation that assigns Jewish people collective responsibility for the policies of the Israeli state. The mayor called the acts unacceptable and announced that the city will file a complaint.

Here is what makes Grenoble more than a local story. Barbara Butch is not a borderline case. She is a lesbian activist decorated by the Republic for services to culture, and the public face of the fight against fatphobia in France. In 2024 she absorbed a year of far-right hatred for representing inclusion at the most-watched event her country has staged this century. By every standard the progressive left claims to hold, she should be among its most protected people. None of it transferred. What disqualified her was the Jewish part, and one public statement: antisemitism in France is real, and it is present in the anti-Israel movement.

She never said anything about Israeli policy and has never defended the Israeli government. Her stated politics amount to fighting the hatreds she has personally received and warning against the conflation of Jews with a foreign state. That is the same conflation Licra denounced on Sunday. The crowd in Grenoble enforced it. To them, a French Jew who once played a party for French diplomats and French Jews, is an agent of Israel, answerable for its wars. The far right spent 2024 telling Butch she did not belong to France’s story. On Saturday, the left joined in.

I don't feel okay mentally right now so I'll be brief: on the night between the 18th and the 19th of July there was a massive ballistic air raid on Kyiv, my city. I think a total of 50 ballistic missiles were launched towards my city and, as you may know, there are no ways to defend ourselves against them at the moment. There are Patriot air defense complexes, but we don't have any ammunition for them.

With ballistic missiles there's only 1-3 minutes from the moment they're launched to the moment they hit the target. Tonight's targets were shopping malls and civil apartment blocks. Including my very neighborhood and my very street.

We had no time to run to the shelter (an underground parking lot of the building next door) so we huddled in the hallway of our flat, away from the windows. The explosions were so so loud, I heard the glass in the windows shake from the explosion wave. For a second I thought the missiles hit our building directly or broke the windows.

I made my family run in our pajamas in the SHORT break of 2 minutes between the missile launches. That's how bad it was. I noticed my mom, my dog and my sibling getting ahead and thought to myself that if I died and they got to safety first, I would be happy. We all got to the shelter and could barely handle the shock.

I felt like I would never ever ever sleep or eat again, that I never wanted to do anything in my life ever again.

My street is a short one, around 20 buildings in total. A missile landed 300 meters away from our home and all apartment blocks except ours got their windows blown out. A newly reconstructed historical building burned down. Our building was okay only because other buildings took the shockwave on themselves.

In late 2023, a few weeks after October 7, my husband and I had dinner with our friend Jeremy. He is British, mid-thirties, with a decent job and the kind of progressive politics that used to mean food banks and climate marches. He asked about my family in Israel by name. He wanted to know if my mother was sleeping. He paid for dinner and hugged us both on the street, and on the walk home my husband said what I was thinking, that we were lucky to have friends like him.

Over the following year I watched his feed change. First it was the accounts he followed, then the language he used in his own captions. The escalation had a rhythm to it, each week slightly further than the last, the way water finds a slope. The last real conversation we had, he said this to me: “Israel’s existence is the reason antisemitism exists. Even Jews say it.”

He is no longer our friend. That was our choice as much as his. What I want to examine is how a kind man arrived at a sentence like that in under two years.

The simplest explanation deserves to go first. People watched a brutal war on their phones and drew their own conclusions. Grief and anger at images from Gaza are human responses, and holding them requires no puppeteer. Criticism of the Israeli government is legitimate; I publish it myself, in detail, under my own name. If Jeremy had told me the war was unbearable to watch, that he believed Israel’s government had lost its moral bearings, we would still be having dinner. Plenty of people I love believe exactly that.

But that is a conclusion. What Jeremy said to me was a product. “Israel’s existence causes antisemitism” reverses cause and effect with a confidence no one reasons their way into alone, and the tag at the end, “even Jews say it,” is the laundering step, the borrowed permission slip. Products have supply chains, and this one’s is documented in sanctions designations and forensic reports that almost nobody reads.

Start with Tehran. Microsoft’s threat analysts found that from October 7 onward, Iran combined targeted hacks with influence operations amplified across social media, and by late October nearly all of its influence and cyber actors had converged on Israel in what researchers called an all-hands campaign. The most damning evidence arrived by accident. When Israeli strikes hit Iran in June 2025 and the regime’s internet went down, a network of AI-generated personas embedded in ordinary British political conversation went dark for sixteen days, then came back online pushing pro-Iranian and anti-Israel content. The analysts at Cyabra who caught it called the gap a before-and-after snapshot of state interference; the fake campaign had already collected 224 million views. During the 2026 fighting, a separate analysis found that 60 percent of the most viral posts about Iran on X in the war’s first week came from accounts outside the United States that presented themselves as American voices.

Moscow’s method is different. In October 2023, blue Stars of David appeared stenciled on buildings across Paris. A Moldovan couple was arrested for painting them at the request of a pro-Russian businessman, and France’s foreign ministry formally accused the Kremlin’s Doppelganger network of artificially spreading the photos online. Moscow staged the incident and then sold the panic.

Then there is the money that never touches a bot farm because it buys the street instead. The People’s Forum, the group that co-organized a Times Square rally celebrating October 7 the day after the massacre, received over $20 million between 2017 and 2022 from Neville Roy Singham, a tech mogul based in Shanghai with documented ties to Chinese state propaganda outfits, routed through shell organizations and donor-advised funds. Congress is now investigating whether the arrangement violates the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Samidoun, a “charity” that helped energize campus encampments, was designated by the U.S. Treasury in 2024 as a sham fundraiser for the PFLP, a terrorist organization, and listed as a terrorist entity by Canada.

And Qatar, which I know from my own meetings with officials to be among the heaviest investors in this space, does most of its work in the open, the most audacious part of all. Since 2016 Doha has spent roughly a quarter of a billion dollars on 88 registered American lobbying and PR firms, and from 2021 to mid-2025 its agents logged 627 in-person meetings with U.S. political contacts, more than any other country on earth. The American arm of its flagship network, AJ+, was ordered by the Justice Department in 2020 to register as a foreign agent because it operates, in the department’s words, at the direction and control of Qatar’s leaders. Five years later it has neither registered nor stopped broadcasting. Over Thanksgiving 2025, Qatar flew a group of American conservative influencers to Doha on a luxury trip that researchers described as an influence operation wearing an educational costume. When one government’s talking points can reach both a Brooklyn leftist and a Fox News audience in the same news cycle, the word “grassroots” has stopped describing anything.

I know this terrain from the receiving end. In 2018, a newspaper reported that Israel’s Government Advertising Agency had paid my Israeli limited company roughly $3,500 a month, about $49,000 over fourteen months, for consulting on social media and LGBTQ outreach in Hebrew, and raised the question of FARA. The work was the ordinary kind a communications consultant does anywhere, lawful whoever the client, and top American lawyers I consulted found that registration did not apply. The contract ended that year, and I have taken nothing from any Israeli government agency since. Anonymous accounts still recirculate the article on schedule whenever my work reaches a new audience. A consulting contract that ended nine years ago works as a permanent weapon in the feed, while a Qatari state network spends its fifth year defying a formal Justice Department registration order without consequence.

None of these operations invented anger at Israel, and no honest account can pretend they did. Their work is subtler than invention. They manufacture consensus, and consensus is the one thing a decent person never thinks to verify. Jeremy could have checked a statistic. A sensation that everyone he respected had already moved is not checkable. When he saw a post with tens of thousands of likes, shared by an influencer he trusted, echoed by accounts that looked like nurses and veterans, he did what social creatures do. He assumed he was late to a truth his community had already reached, and stopped asking what the PFLP is or who funds the group organizing the march. Jeremy believed he was following his conscience through a crowd. Parts of the crowd were rented.

Here is what I cannot do, and it took me two years to understand that the inability is deliberate. I cannot point to the post that took him, or tell you whether the account that first taught him the sentence about Israel causing antisemitism belonged to a man in Manchester or a shift worker in a Tehran content farm. Neither could any investigator on earth. Attribution dies at the level of the individual, and the entire enterprise is built on that grave. Missiles have return addresses and memes do not. Every Jeremy reads as organic. Every friendship dissolves as if by weather. Anyone who says the word campaign out loud sounds paranoid at exactly the moment the evidence is strongest, and I spent months doubting my own eyes about a man I loved. That doubt was somebody’s deliverable.

The output is now measurable in people, and in power. A survey released this week found that 29 percent of Americans aged 18 to 44 view Jews as a threat to the unity of American society, against 13 percent of those over 60. The same polling shows the share of respondents whose answers mark them as openly prejudiced against Jews more than doubled since June 2023, while the share of informed allies collapsed from 15 percent to 6. Those are the numbers of a campaign that worked. The same survey carries the feed’s other signature: 53 percent of Americans were unfamiliar with the murder of 15 Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach, and 66 percent with the arson of Mississippi’s largest synagogue. An information environment that hands a fake campaign 224 million views leaves an actual massacre unseen. And electorates produce politicians. In Britain, the Green Party has organized much of its identity around Palestine. Across Democratic primaries in the United States, candidates who once led with healthcare now lead with Gaza, and the ones who don’t are learning what the algorithm does to their fundraising.

This week, New York's mayor spent much of a Times interview on Gaza, and I read the comments under the clip as they arrived. Real New Yorkers arguing about buses and rent, and braided through them, accounts with stock phrases and no history, until the commenters began accusing one another of being bots. Nobody could tell. He won office with real votes; the information environment those voters live inside is another matter, and both things are true at once.

To believe every one of those politicians is a foreign asset would be its own conspiracy theory, and I don’t believe it. They are responding rationally to a public opinion environment that four governments spent years and fortunes helping to build. A democracy that cannot tell organic opinion from purchased opinion has lost something it needs to function.

There are moments when a state finally acts, and the shape of Britain’s is instructive. Beginning in March, proxies directed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attacked British citizens on British streets: arson at a synagogue and at a Jewish ambulance charity, the stabbing of two men in Golders Green. The ban on supporting the IRGC came on July 13, four months later. For those four months, a political class that finds time to condemn Israel from a far, week after week, could barely bring itself to name the state whose agents were setting fires in London. Israel poses no threat to Britain and asks nothing of it, yet it occupies British politics as a permanent emergency, while the government that actually exported violence to British soil enjoyed the presumption of complexity until the smoke made denial embarrassing. The information war is engineered to produce this distortion. Its design is deniability, an ocean of content with no single author, so that naming the arsonist feels reckless and blaming the familiar villain feels safe.

So the response has to happen without the fire. FARA should be enforced against every state broadcaster that defies it, starting with the one that has ignored a Justice Department order for five years. Platforms can label state-linked amplification the way they already label a paid ad; it is the same transaction. Britain’s new law against state-backed organizations deserves use at home and imitation abroad. The forensic researchers at firms like Cyabra, whose findings reach a fraction of the audience of a single fake account, need funding and distribution. And the billions flowing from Doha into Western schools and universities without meaningful disclosure belong in the same ledger as the lobbying money.

And there is a second audience, the one the analysts’ reports never mention. The campaign that runs at people like Jeremy also delivers something to people like me. It taught me to read my friends the way a security officer reads a crowd. A slow reply, or a friend who never mentioned my wedding, now arrives with a question attached that I hate and cannot stop asking: is this a life being busy, or is this the operation reaching someone else I love? Jews across the West are living inside that question. The suspicion corrodes from both directions, and the corrosion is part of the design. A people taught to suspect its friends, and friends taught there is virtue in walking away, will separate on their own. Nobody has to order it.

I used to frame this as a choice we would eventually face. I no longer think the choice is ahead of us. The 29 percent are already voting, and some of them are already teaching. My fear, the one I carry into places where I am told to be optimistic, is that we are past the point where exposure alone fixes anything, because the generation that was farmed does not remember a feed that wasn’t.

Somewhere in London or New York this week, a dinner like ours in 2023 is happening. Someone kind is asking someone Jewish about their family, and meaning it. Whether that friendship survives the next two years is being decided partly by the two of them, and partly by people neither of them will ever meet, working from Tehran and Moscow and Shanghai and Doha. Jeremy never met them either.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Sunday spotlighted a report describing a pandemic of antisemitic behavior by Australian healthcare workers against Jewish patients. It called the investigation by The Australian a “deeply troubling picture and should serve as a wake-up call.”

“We call upon The Australian government to confront antisemitism forcefully,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry posted to social media. “No Jew should ever feel compelled to hide their identity to receive medical care in an Australian hospital.”

The ministry included a link to The Wentworth Report, which quoted large sections of an article by Megan Goldin in The Australian detailing numerous examples of antisemitic behavior by staff toward Jewish patients in Australia’s medical facilities.

The article interviewed 30 doctors, nurses, midwives and health professionals who said that since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, anti-Israel activist healthcare workers were “turning hospitals and medical clinics into ideological war zones instead of safe spaces.”

Those interviewed by The Australian cited the case of Elon Glassberg, former surgeon general of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), whose scheduled appearance at a medical conference in Perth last year was canceled after anti-Israel doctors and nurses groups threatened to protest. They said it was just one high-profile example.

“Anti-Israel activism began almost immediately after the Oct. 7 massacre when the protests that unfolded in Australian cities spilled into the wards and staff rooms of hospitals in Melbourne, Sydney and other capital cities,” Goldin reported.

Medical staff wore protest symbols to work right after the attack. They covered bathroom stalls and hallways with stickers, including a Star of David with a red line through it.

“At the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, which has received tens of millions of dollars from Jewish philanthropists, such stickers were stuck to the bedside wall of an elderly Jewish patient in the hours before he died,” she reported.

They also spouted antisemitism and support for terror groups online.

“Doctors and nurses were posting Nazi symbols and little caricatures of Jewish people but using the word ‘Zionist’ instead of ‘Jews’,” Jewish pediatric neurologist Carly Debinski told The Australian. “They were so virtuous and obsessive about vilifying Jewish people.”

Debinski has since moved to Israel.

Nearly three years later, the online hate continues. Jewish members of Facebook groups are ejected or vilified if they speak about Israeli hostages or the horrors perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7.

At a Melbourne hospital, a Jewish intensive care unit nurse, who requested to remain anonymous, resigned despite more than 10 years on the job because management refused to address the staff’s online hate speech.

“If these people are willing to share these things on social media, imagine how they treat a [Jewish] patient face-to-face,” she said.

Double standards

A Jewish healthcare worker at a Melbourne teaching hospital was physically accosted by a colleague from Ireland, demanding she apologize for the Gaza war. When a complaint was made, the hospital’s human resources department refused to take action. That same HR department had weeks earlier transferred a staff member in the same unit for mimicking a foreign accent.

No action was taken in a complaint against a doctor who described Jews as “loathed slime” online and posted a Hitler quote. Complaints about numerous other doctors who posted antisemitic, pro-Hamas content were also closed.

“That pattern was repeated across the country as hospitals and healthcare regulators tolerated conduct against Jews that would have triggered disciplinary action if the conduct had targeted any other minority group, say numerous medical professionals who experienced this double standard,” The Australian reported.

Midwife Sharon Stoliar told The Australian that the same Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) staff, which ignored complaints about blatantly antisemitic and pro-terror posts by pro-Palestinian healthcare workers, acted against Jewish staff targeted by “baseless complaints.”

Painful IV insertions

Charlotte Frajman, 64, daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, said that a Muslim nurse lost his kind demeanor when he saw on her hospital records that she was Jewish.

“When it came to putting in the cannula [IV], he took four attempts. It was incredibly painful,” Frajman said. “I was bruised for weeks. You would have thought he was a trainee nurse, not the senior nurse in charge.”

When the same nurse again took four attempts to insert cannulas during subsequent visits, Frajman didn’t know what to think. “Then the Bankstown nurses thing came out, and my husband and I looked at each other and we said: ‘Oh my God.’ ”

Frajman referred to a Feb. 2025 incident in which two Muslim nurses who worked at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital in Sydney were arrested after threatening Israeli patients in an antisemitic rant online. Charges were brought against them but in June, the judge ruled the video inadmissible, making a conviction unlikely.

“If I can’t have my Jewish religion on my medical records then it’s time to leave Australia because we are no longer safe here,” said Frajman.

“The needles, it is a story that keeps repeating,” says Nurit Hadad, a New South Wales-based mental health nurse counseling victims of antisemitism. “This is the easiest way to hurt people. They say: ‘I’ve done my best but I just couldn’t find a vein.’”

Orit Brand pleaded with a hijab-wearing radiographer to stop after failing eight times to insert an IV into her vein at a Melbourne hospital. Another staff member who was called inserted the IV at the first attempt “with no pain and no bruising.”

While malice is difficult to prove, in the case of Brand and Frajman, hospital protocol called for a maximum of two attempts by the same staffer.

Jewish medical students describe being ostracized by fellow students. Many of those interviewed withheld their names because they worried about their safety and future job prospects.

Mental health is the medical field with the most antisemitism, The Australian reported. A Queensland-based psychotherapist called on Israelis to kill themselves in one post. A psychiatry department academic at a Australian university compared lines at food distribution centers in Gaza to Holocaust gas chambers.

Mental health nurse Hadad panicked when a colleague draped a keffiyeh over an adjacent desk after Oct. 7.

“If someone is coming with a keffiyeh to a workplace, Australian people who have nothing to do with Middle Eastern culture … it’s a statement of violence,” said Hadad. “It represents the people trying to kill me.”

In late 2023, a few weeks after October 7, my husband and I had dinner with our friend Jeremy. He is British, mid-thirties, with a decent job and the kind of progressive politics that used to mean food banks and climate marches. He asked about my family in Israel by name. He wanted to know if my mother was sleeping. He paid for dinner and hugged us both on the street, and on the walk home my husband said what I was thinking, that we were lucky to have friends like him.

Over the following year I watched his feed change. First it was the accounts he followed, then the language he used in his own captions. The escalation had a rhythm to it, each week slightly further than the last, the way water finds a slope. The last real conversation we had, he said this to me: “Israel’s existence is the reason antisemitism exists. Even Jews say it.”

He is no longer our friend. That was our choice as much as his. What I want to examine is how a kind man arrived at a sentence like that in under two years.

The simplest explanation deserves to go first. People watched a brutal war on their phones and drew their own conclusions. Grief and anger at images from Gaza are human responses, and holding them requires no puppeteer. Criticism of the Israeli government is legitimate; I publish it myself, in detail, under my own name. If Jeremy had told me the war was unbearable to watch, that he believed Israel’s government had lost its moral bearings, we would still be having dinner. Plenty of people I love believe exactly that.

But that is a conclusion. What Jeremy said to me was a product. “Israel’s existence causes antisemitism” reverses cause and effect with a confidence no one reasons their way into alone, and the tag at the end, “even Jews say it,” is the laundering step, the borrowed permission slip. Products have supply chains, and this one’s is documented in sanctions designations and forensic reports that almost nobody reads.

Start with Tehran. Microsoft’s threat analysts found that from October 7 onward, Iran combined targeted hacks with influence operations amplified across social media, and by late October nearly all of its influence and cyber actors had converged on Israel in what researchers called an all-hands campaign. The most damning evidence arrived by accident. When Israeli strikes hit Iran in June 2025 and the regime’s internet went down, a network of AI-generated personas embedded in ordinary British political conversation went dark for sixteen days, then came back online pushing pro-Iranian and anti-Israel content. The analysts at Cyabra who caught it called the gap a before-and-after snapshot of state interference; the fake campaign had already collected 224 million views. During the 2026 fighting, a separate analysis found that 60 percent of the most viral posts about Iran on X in the war’s first week came from accounts outside the United States that presented themselves as American voices.

Moscow’s method is different. In October 2023, blue Stars of David appeared stenciled on buildings across Paris. A Moldovan couple was arrested for painting them at the request of a pro-Russian businessman, and France’s foreign ministry formally accused the Kremlin’s Doppelganger network of artificially spreading the photos online. Moscow staged the incident and then sold the panic.

Then there is the money that never touches a bot farm because it buys the street instead. The People’s Forum, the group that co-organized a Times Square rally celebrating October 7 the day after the massacre, received over $20 million between 2017 and 2022 from Neville Roy Singham, a tech mogul based in Shanghai with documented ties to Chinese state propaganda outfits, routed through shell organizations and donor-advised funds. Congress is now investigating whether the arrangement violates the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Samidoun, a “charity” that helped energize campus encampments, was designated by the U.S. Treasury in 2024 as a sham fundraiser for the PFLP, a terrorist organization, and listed as a terrorist entity by Canada.

And Qatar, which I know from my own meetings with officials to be among the heaviest investors in this space, does most of its work in the open, the most audacious part of all. Since 2016 Doha has spent roughly a quarter of a billion dollars on 88 registered American lobbying and PR firms, and from 2021 to mid-2025 its agents logged 627 in-person meetings with U.S. political contacts, more than any other country on earth. The American arm of its flagship network, AJ+, was ordered by the Justice Department in 2020 to register as a foreign agent because it operates, in the department’s words, at the direction and control of Qatar’s leaders. Five years later it has neither registered nor stopped broadcasting. Over Thanksgiving 2025, Qatar flew a group of American conservative influencers to Doha on a luxury trip that researchers described as an influence operation wearing an educational costume. When one government’s talking points can reach both a Brooklyn leftist and a Fox News audience in the same news cycle, the word “grassroots” has stopped describing anything.

I know this terrain from the receiving end. In 2018, a newspaper reported that Israel’s Government Advertising Agency had paid my Israeli limited company roughly $3,500 a month, about $49,000 over fourteen months, for consulting on social media and LGBTQ outreach in Hebrew, and raised the question of FARA. The work was the ordinary kind a communications consultant does anywhere, lawful whoever the client, and top American lawyers I consulted found that registration did not apply. The contract ended that year, and I have taken nothing from any Israeli government agency since. Anonymous accounts still recirculate the article on schedule whenever my work reaches a new audience. A consulting contract that ended nine years ago works as a permanent weapon in the feed, while a Qatari state network spends its fifth year defying a formal Justice Department registration order without consequence.

None of these operations invented anger at Israel, and no honest account can pretend they did. Their work is subtler than invention. They manufacture consensus, and consensus is the one thing a decent person never thinks to verify. Jeremy could have checked a statistic. A sensation that everyone he respected had already moved is not checkable. When he saw a post with tens of thousands of likes, shared by an influencer he trusted, echoed by accounts that looked like nurses and veterans, he did what social creatures do. He assumed he was late to a truth his community had already reached, and stopped asking what the PFLP is or who funds the group organizing the march. Jeremy believed he was following his conscience through a crowd. Parts of the crowd were rented.

Here is what I cannot do, and it took me two years to understand that the inability is deliberate. I cannot point to the post that took him, or tell you whether the account that first taught him the sentence about Israel causing antisemitism belonged to a man in Manchester or a shift worker in a Tehran content farm. Neither could any investigator on earth. Attribution dies at the level of the individual, and the entire enterprise is built on that grave. Missiles have return addresses and memes do not. Every Jeremy reads as organic. Every friendship dissolves as if by weather. Anyone who says the word campaign out loud sounds paranoid at exactly the moment the evidence is strongest, and I spent months doubting my own eyes about a man I loved. That doubt was somebody’s deliverable.

The output is now measurable in people, and in power. A survey released this week found that 29 percent of Americans aged 18 to 44 view Jews as a threat to the unity of American society, against 13 percent of those over 60. The same polling shows the share of respondents whose answers mark them as openly prejudiced against Jews more than doubled since June 2023, while the share of informed allies collapsed from 15 percent to 6. Those are the numbers of a campaign that worked. The same survey carries the feed’s other signature: 53 percent of Americans were unfamiliar with the murder of 15 Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach, and 66 percent with the arson of Mississippi’s largest synagogue. An information environment that hands a fake campaign 224 million views leaves an actual massacre unseen. And electorates produce politicians. In Britain, the Green Party has organized much of its identity around Palestine. Across Democratic primaries in the United States, candidates who once led with healthcare now lead with Gaza, and the ones who don’t are learning what the algorithm does to their fundraising.

This week, New York's mayor spent much of a Times interview on Gaza, and I read the comments under the clip as they arrived. Real New Yorkers arguing about buses and rent, and braided through them, accounts with stock phrases and no history, until the commenters began accusing one another of being bots. Nobody could tell. He won office with real votes; the information environment those voters live inside is another matter, and both things are true at once.

To believe every one of those politicians is a foreign asset would be its own conspiracy theory, and I don’t believe it. They are responding rationally to a public opinion environment that four governments spent years and fortunes helping to build. A democracy that cannot tell organic opinion from purchased opinion has lost something it needs to function.

There are moments when a state finally acts, and the shape of Britain’s is instructive. Beginning in March, proxies directed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attacked British citizens on British streets: arson at a synagogue and at a Jewish ambulance charity, the stabbing of two men in Golders Green. The ban on supporting the IRGC came on July 13, four months later. For those four months, a political class that finds time to condemn Israel from a far, week after week, could barely bring itself to name the state whose agents were setting fires in London. Israel poses no threat to Britain and asks nothing of it, yet it occupies British politics as a permanent emergency, while the government that actually exported violence to British soil enjoyed the presumption of complexity until the smoke made denial embarrassing. The information war is engineered to produce this distortion. Its design is deniability, an ocean of content with no single author, so that naming the arsonist feels reckless and blaming the familiar villain feels safe.

So the response has to happen without the fire. FARA should be enforced against every state broadcaster that defies it, starting with the one that has ignored a Justice Department order for five years. Platforms can label state-linked amplification the way they already label a paid ad; it is the same transaction. Britain’s new law against state-backed organizations deserves use at home and imitation abroad. The forensic researchers at firms like Cyabra, whose findings reach a fraction of the audience of a single fake account, need funding and distribution. And the billions flowing from Doha into Western schools and universities without meaningful disclosure belong in the same ledger as the lobbying money.

And there is a second audience, the one the analysts’ reports never mention. The campaign that runs at people like Jeremy also delivers something to people like me. It taught me to read my friends the way a security officer reads a crowd. A slow reply, or a friend who never mentioned my wedding, now arrives with a question attached that I hate and cannot stop asking: is this a life being busy, or is this the operation reaching someone else I love? Jews across the West are living inside that question. The suspicion corrodes from both directions, and the corrosion is part of the design. A people taught to suspect its friends, and friends taught there is virtue in walking away, will separate on their own. Nobody has to order it.

I used to frame this as a choice we would eventually face. I no longer think the choice is ahead of us. The 29 percent are already voting, and some of them are already teaching. My fear, the one I carry into places where I am told to be optimistic, is that we are past the point where exposure alone fixes anything, because the generation that was farmed does not remember a feed that wasn’t.

Somewhere in London or New York this week, a dinner like ours in 2023 is happening. Someone kind is asking someone Jewish about their family, and meaning it. Whether that friendship survives the next two years is being decided partly by the two of them, and partly by people neither of them will ever meet, working from Tehran and Moscow and Shanghai and Doha. Jeremy never met them either.

But the trolley problem is not just the one scenario of 6 people tied 1v5 on two train tracks. It contains a large number of variations of, for example, who these people are, what they have done with their lives, and so on - most importantly, it includes variations of the background scenario. Many people choose to pull the lever and sacrifice one person for the sake of saving five. So how does this change if you are not talking about train tracks? What if you are, instead, in a hospital? Here are five patients in need of organ transplants to live, as well as one healthy person. The doctors will kill the healthy person and save the five patients with their organs, if you tell them to. What's the matter, then? "Choosing not to act is an active choice", isn't it? It's still five lives for the cost of one, isn't it? If you say that killing this healthy person is the correct choice, would you advocate for this politically? For choosing healthy people by lot to kill them in order to get their organs?

I'm not American. I didn't throw anyone on any fucking tracks.

I didn't say the choice Americans made in 2024 was the correct or justifiable one. I did, in fact, call it "devastating". I don't know how you missed that. Here, I'll highlight it for you:

it's just not a situation comparable to the trolley problem. There were no two tracks. That's an integral part of the problem, that you either kill 5 people or 1 other person. There were no two tracks of separate people. It was "Palestinians" or "Palestinians plus a lot of other people". That's a scenario incompatible with the problem.

Most of the post was an explanation of why this is not how the trolley problem works and your comment proves pretty clearly that you either didn't bother to read or lack the necessary reading comprehension.

I really did my best to phrase my previous comment in short sentences so even people with low reading comprehension would be able to follow the line of reasoning, so I hope you were just too arrogant and full of yourself to bother reading it, because otherwise that really says something even sadder about you.

Makes me wonder if they even understand the trolley problem. Because in the trolley problem scenario the 1 person is also already tied to the tracks, just like the other 5. They are all in potential danger, and you can’t stop the danger (/the train) nor pull the people off the tracks. The only thing you can influence is the position of the lever, leave it as it is and 5 people die, pull it and 1 person dies.

In case of the “organ donor”, it’s a person that isn’t in danger, they aren’t even near the tracks. Killing them to take their organs would be like hunting down a person and tying them to the tracks to be run over by the train.

Published 16 July, 2026.

By Kira Rudik

The more Ukrainian missiles hit Russian oil refineries, the more articles by "new" and "good" Russians we will see. That is the first sign the empire is beginning to fall. The "good Russians" will recycle the same old arguments. In Ukraine, we have heard them so many times they make me sick: “Russia is too big to fail,” “Russians cannot be humiliated—otherwise there will be nuclear escalation,” “The Russian army is incredibly strong,” “Russia has a democratic future,” etc.

None of these claims withstands scrutiny. The truth is that Russia is the last surviving European empire. It outlived the tectonic changes that reshaped Europe after the Second World War. Then it was a totalitarian state controlling the 15 republics of the Soviet Union. Today it remains a centralised empire ruling over 21 national republics within the Russian Federation.

It is a top-down, KGB-FSB state that survives by exporting natural resources while investing billions in propaganda designed to convince the world that it is an indispensable global power.

In reality, before the full-scale invasion, Russia's economy was roughly the size of Italy's or Canada's. Yet we never heard either of those countries claim to be one of the defining poles of a new multipolar world.

Black smoke rises from the area of the Russian oil producer Gazprom Neft's Moscow oil refinery on the south-eastern outskirts of Moscow on 18 June, 2026.

Russia is not too big to fail. Its territory is enormous, but territory alone does not make a superpower. The Soviet Union was even larger—and it collapsed.

The idea that Russia, and especially Vladimir Putin, must never be humiliated, became one of the defining narratives of 2022. I remember it vividly. As the world was discovering the atrocities of Bucha, it felt surreal that so many influential voices were still concerned about protecting the dignity of the dictator who had authorised murder, torture, rape, and countless other war crimes.

Back then, "Putin's red lines" dictated Western policy. Many governments refused to provide Ukraine with essential weapons because they feared escalation or believed Putin might resort to nuclear weapons.

That conversation sounds very different in 2026. Ukraine has demonstrated that the Russian army is not invincible, that Russia cannot adequately defend its own borders, and that its military power has clear limits. The Kursk operation, Operation Spiderweb, and the destruction of Russian warships across the Black and Azov seas proved exactly that.

As someone who lives in Kyiv under almost nightly missile and drone attacks, let me tell you something.

There has never been a diplomatic formula built on fear of Putin that protected Ukrainian civilians. The only thing that has worked is reducing Russia's ability to wage war.

And despite years of warnings about "retaliation," Russia's retaliation looks exactly like its regular attacks. It bombs civilians regardless.

Perhaps the biggest illusion many people in the West still cling to is the belief that Russia can become a democracy, return to the international community, and resume business as usual.

The "good Russians" want you to believe this too. There are two fundamental problems with that narrative.

First, Russia has never been a democracy—not for a single day in its history. Ironically, many of the same people who insist that 148 million Russians cannot simply disappear also expect those same 148 million people to embrace democratic values overnight.

We in Ukraine believed this ourselves in 2022. We thought that if ordinary Russians simply learned the truth about the war, they would rise against Putin. Considerable resources were devoted to breaking through the Kremlin's information blockade.

Reality proved otherwise. The majority of Russians support the war. Many genuinely believe they are fighting NATO and the West to defend their way of life. Good luck convincing them otherwise.

The second problem with the fantasy of restoring relations with Russia under the slogan "trade is better than war" is even simpler.

Russia already had all of that. It belonged to the G8. It traded freely with the democratic world. It created enormous wealth for its oligarchs while distributing just enough prosperity to much of its population. It expanded its influence across Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East while building partnerships with authoritarian regimes.

Now ask yourself a simple question. Can Russia realistically expect to achieve greater economic prosperity than it enjoyed in 2012 or 2013?

It already reached that point. And it willingly sacrificed it for one overriding objective: preserving the empire.

Russia is likely to collapse for many of the same reasons the Soviet Union collapsed—falling energy revenues, the growing political weight of war veterans, and the desire of Russian elites to regain access to the wealth and assets now frozen under Western sanctions.

The story of a sinking empire is never new. As the ship begins to sink, different players suddenly present themselves as reasonable, democratic, pro-Western, and pro-peace. They promise they can build the "good Russia" Europe has always hoped for.

What almost every one of these self-appointed Russian leaders desperately wants to distract you from is a far simpler conclusion.

The destruction and decolonisation of the Russian empire would be one of the best things that could happen to Europe—and the only lasting strategic outcome worthy of the immense price this war has already demanded.

Ukraine today (11.07.26)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/27/received-death-threats-abandoning-pro-palestine-movement/

It wasn’t long after Hamas carried out its attack on Israel in Oct 7, 2023, that Taryn Thomas found herself swept up in the chorus of pro-Palestine activists mobilising against the Jewish state.

Even before Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza following the Oct 7 massacre,“I was scrolling through social media, and I only saw support for Palestine,” she recalls. “People I know, whether it was activists or people I look up to, were already posting their thoughts.”

Then aged 19 and studying biomedical science at the elite Stanford University in northern California, Thomas, an African American, was first introduced to the anti-Israel movement at Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, where Palestinian flags were flown by some activists. “I never really understood why, but we were told that in order for us to be free, Palestine has to be free,” she says.

She subsequently helped lead large protests against Israel and, within two weeks of Oct 7 2023, had joined an encampment of activists on campus protesting against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Like many others, she donned a keffiyeh, the headscarf worn to demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians. “I really loved it because of the sense of belonging and the sense of purpose,” she says of the encampment. “It was like an instant community.”

Besides fellow students, Thomas was encouraged by “faculty members like history professors” who “validated the movement”. “It seemed like everyone was a lot more educated than me and very certain and sure of themselves that this is a genocide,” says Thomas, who is now 21. “The only safe position was the more radical one in the encampment.”

‘I was confused by what our mission was’

Thomas grew up in Riverside County, one of the few Republican counties in the otherwise “very liberal California”. That, together with racist abuse at school, influenced her political outlook. “I thought going further to the Left would be the solution to the extremism I was seeing from the Right,” she says.

Huge demonstrations took place at universities across the US in the months that followed Oct 7, with protesters confronting the educational institutions with their demands – including to divest from Israel and cut ties with counterpart Israeli institutions.

While the movement was largely peaceful, some demonstrations turned violent and led to clashes with police. “One of our protests got out of hand, and that kind of made me take a step back,” says Thomas.

This was in June 2024, when several militant students broke into the office of Stanford’s president, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. “They spray-painted disgusting things, such as ‘Pigs taste best when dead’, ‘Death to America’, ‘Death to Israel’, and ‘Kill cops’,” Thomas recalls.

“I was confused by what our mission was. At what point did the pro-Palestine movement turn into this anti-Israel, anti-America movement? We completely lost sight of the victims we were claiming to be supporting and fighting for.”

Yet those behind the vandalism “doubled down”, she says, and justified their actions, “even though Jewish students said they felt unsafe”. She explains: “They felt like they couldn’t go to their classes, they were getting harassed and doxxed [having personal information published online] and things like that. Essentially, we completely lost our minds.”

A drastic change of heart

Then, in October 2024, Thomas was one of many students who received an open invitation to the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in Los Angeles. Recently opened in London, the exhibition aims to recreate the festival site where 413 people were murdered by Hamas, and many more were injured or taken hostage.

Nova exhibition

The recently opened Nova exhibition in London commemorates the 413 young people murdered by Hamas at the festival Credit: Jeff Gilbert

“Initially, I laughed, thinking, ‘What’s this propaganda?’” Something piqued her interest, however, so she decided to go. “I’d heard about the festival and was curious, but I’d only really heard the reasoning, ‘Well, why would you have a festival next to a contested border? Essentially, they were asking for it.’

“I was hoping it was going to reaffirm my position, that I would find Zionist lies and whatever. I went with a very closed mind.” Three hours later, Thomas emerged feeling “so lost”.

“I experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance – what I was seeing versus what I’d been told. It was like I arrived a year too late to a funeral. I had so many questions, but I really had no one I could talk to about this. All of my friends were from the encampment. I’d never met an Israeli or talked to them about their experiences – I was fluent in the state’s sins, but I was illiterate in its people.”

Seeing pictures and footage of the young festival-goers hit home for Thomas. “They were kids my age, just dancing, and then fleeing for their lives the next moment. I could see myself in them. I could have been sending a last ‘I love you’ message to my mum. I felt so much empathy and sadness.”

One element in particular changed everything – an audio clip of a jubilant Hamas fighter phoning his father to let him know he’d killed 10 Jews. “My heart sank because these [were meant to be] our martyrs. [This was] the resistance we were claiming we wanted. When we called for any means necessary, I didn’t realise that’s what it meant.”

Months later, Thomas was invited on a trip to Israel organised by a group combatting anti-Semitism on campus. “I knew if I was going to continue to speak on this, I needed to see it for myself,” she says.

During the 10-day trip last March, she met with Israelis, Ethiopian Jews, Palestinians, Druze and Bedouin. “I was shocked at how much diversity I saw – I didn’t even know Israel had black people,” she said.

On the fourth day, the group had to take cover during a missile attack. “Our guide told us to get on the ground, and I put my hands over my neck and prayed. “I thought about the irony of how I’d called for the divestment of the very system I was praying for,” she says. “It [the missile] didn’t care about my politics or what I posted or any of that. I was a target, a body on the ground, and I felt utterly useless.”

Fortunately the missile was intercepted and the trip continued, but the experience left Thomas shaken. She says it made her realise “how cushy and comfortable a life” she had in America, and that she’d not realised the “real consequences” of what she’d been calling for.

‘It felt like being stoned publicly’

Back home, she posted a picture of her trip online – a decision that cost her dearly. “My best friend of three years asked, ‘Is this in Israel?’ I said, ‘Yeah, do you want to talk about it?’ She immediately blocked me. I hadn’t even expressed anything. I literally said I went. Period.”

Her post opened the floodgates. “I lost every single friend”, while her classmates “posted really disgusting things”, including labelling her a “genocidal apologist”. Thomas says she was doxxed, and received death threats and racist abuse – and that her family was also targeted. “It was like a crusade and felt like being stoned publicly.”

She now takes a dim view of the encampment atmosphere. “It completely insulates you in this echo chamber and indoctrinates you. If you had any questions, you’d lose your social belonging – the last thing you wanted to be called was a Zionist.”

She adds that the protesters’ “attention turned into this hatred” and there were constant calls for the “normalisation of violence”. Some activists, for example, celebrated the assassinations of Charlie Kirk, the Right-wing political activist, and Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, she says.

The mental toll had become so heavy on Thomas that she stepped away from her studies late last year. What helped get her through this tough period is the new friendships she has formed, including some with Jewish students.

“They knew I came from the encampments and they engaged with me, intellectually argued with me, disagreed with me, but we still broke bread on Shabbat,” she says. “I learned from my [now] best friend that she was doxxed because of people within our movement. I know I have to repair some of those damages.”

‘Open your heart and put down those megaphones’

Thomas says her family are not politically engaged in the issue of Israel and Gaza and she has faced questions from her mother about her involvement. “She was just like, ‘Why are you doing this? It isn’t your burden to shoulder.’ She just wants her family to be safe and protected.”

But Thomas hopes that by sharing her story it will encourage others to experience the Nova exhibition. “I hope the people who are protesting will come – I just want them to go inside,” she says. “None of this is political. Just look and learn the stories – you don’t have to agree. Come in with an open heart and an open mind and put down those megaphones.”

As for Thomas, she hopes to return to university in September, but in the meantime, she is determined to do what she can to increase cross-community understanding. “A lot of us on the pro-Palestine side were recruited through empathy, so I think we can be reached through it too. Because of this unique perspective I have of what changed my heart, I think I can hopefully change other people’s.