Sin título

This should concern everyone.

I can't believe this even needs to be said.

Londres, 2026

Dos judíos fueron apuñalados.

Dos sinagogas sufrieron ataques con bombas molotov.

Una organización benéfica judía fue blanco de un atentado.

Cuatro ambulancias judías fueron calcinadas.

Un comercio de propiedad judía fue incendiado.

El objetivo de los terroristas no es la política de Israel.

Son los barrios judíos. Los comercios judíos. La propia vida judía.

Pug

History destroys lazy narratives.

A 1929 French magazine headline declared:

“Arab fanatics massacre Jews in various neighborhoods of Jerusalem.”

That was 19 years before Israel existed.

Spare us the fairy tale that today’s terror is “resistance” to Israel’s creation in 1948.

It isn’t Israeli policy they hate — it’s Jewish existence.

Hamas is not resisting Israel.

It is trying to destroy it.

“Protestors” who repeat “resistance” rhetoric are laundering genocide with academic language.

Hard question for anyone serious about justice:

El titular de una revista francesa de 1929 dice lo siguiente:

«Árabes fanáticos masacran a judios en varios barrios de Jerusalén»

Esto ocurrió 19 años antes de que existiera el estado de Israel.

Ahórrenos el cuento de hadas de que el terrorismo actual es una «resistencia» a la creación del estado de Israel en 1948.

No es la política israelí lo que odian, es la existencia de los judíos lo que odian.

Hamas no está resistendo a Israel.

Está intentando destruirlo.

Los «manifestantes» que repiten la retórica de la «resistencia» están encubriendo el genocidio con lenguaje académico.

Una pregunta difícil para cualquiera que se tome en serio la justicia:

Baruch Dayan HaEmet

This was 19 year old Sergeant Idan Fuchs, a soldier in the 77th Battalion of the 7th Brigade from Petah Tikva who was killed in action in Lebanon

Oskar Schindler was not a good man.

He was a drunk. A charmer. A spy who wore a Nazi pin because it opened doors. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he didn't see a tragedy — he saw a market.

He leased a bankrupt Jewish-owned factory in Kraków, filled it with Jewish workers from the ghetto, and paid their wages straight to the SS. The workers got nothing. Schindler got rich.

By 1942, he was living like a king — expensive car, lavish parties, the best cognac money could buy — while the people running his machines went home to a ghetto being slowly strangled to death.

He was exactly who you think he was.

Then came the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto. March 1943.

SS troops moved street by street. Doors kicked in. Families dragged out. Bodies left where they fell. Schindler watched from a distance as an entire world was erased in an afternoon.

Something broke open in him that day that never closed again.

Oskar Schindler — the opportunist, the profiteer, the man who had built his fortune on human misery — made a decision that would cost him everything he owned.

He would get them out.

The camp commandant was Amon Göth — a man who shot prisoners from his balcony for sport. Schindler became his closest friend. His drinking partner. His most trusted confidant.

And then systematically deceived him for two years straight.

"This old man? Master machinist. Irreplaceable."

"The child? Unique skills. I need her."

"The woman with one arm? Critical to my production line."

None of it was true. Every exemption cost Schindler money — bribes paid in cash, liquor, black-market diamonds. His personal fortune slowly hemorrhaging, one saved life at a time.

When the Nazis began liquidating their own labor camps, Schindler pulled off something that bordered on madness: he convinced them to let him relocate his entire operation to Czechoslovakia — and take his workers with him.

He wrote a list. Over 1,200 names. Many had never worked for him. Elderly people. Children. Every name cost him money. He paid for every single one.

Then something went wrong.

Three hundred women were diverted to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The death camp. The gas chambers were still running.

Schindler sent his own secretary — a German woman — directly into Auschwitz to negotiate their release. She walked through those gates and promised seven Reichsmarks per worker per day.

She walked back out with 300 living human beings.

It remains the only documented case in Auschwitz's history of a large group departing alive while the camp was fully operational.

At his new factory in Brünnlitz, Schindler ran what was essentially an elaborate act of sabotage. Shells were deliberately manufactured incorrectly. Machinery "broke down" on schedule. Inspectors were bribed. For seven months, more than 1,200 men and women lived under his roof and his protection.

Not one bullet produced in that factory was ever used to kill a single Allied soldier.

May 8, 1945. Germany surrendered.

The workers gathered on the factory floor. They had melted gold from one of their own teeth to cast a ring. Inside it, they had engraved a line from the Talmud:

"Whoever saves one life saves the world entire."

They placed it in his hand.

He wept. Then said something that silenced the room:

"I could have done more. This pin — I could have sold it. Two more people. My car — ten more people. I didn't do enough."

The people he had saved had to convince him he had done enough.

He never quite believed them.

After the war, Schindler had nothing. No factory. No fortune. Every business venture failed. The man who had once bribed SS officers with cognac was now surviving on handouts.

The handouts came from his workers.

The Schindlerjuden — Schindler's Jews — sent him monthly payments for the rest of his life. They brought him to Israel. They fed him. They kept him alive.

The man who had bankrupted himself saving them was kept alive by their love.

He died on October 9, 1974, in Hildesheim, Germany. Sixty-six years old.

His survivors carried his body to Jerusalem. He was buried in the Catholic Cemetery on Mount Zion — the only former member of the Nazi Party ever given that honor.

His gravestone reads:

"The Unforgettable Rescuer of 1,200 Persecuted Jews."

Here is what lingers about this story.

Schindler wasn't born a hero. He walked into Poland as a profiteer and spent years being exactly that. What changed him wasn't religion, ideology, or a lifetime of noble character.

It was a single act of witnessing. Of refusing to turn away.

He saw what was happening. He saw that he — uniquely, specifically, with his connections and his access and his willingness to lie to monsters — could do something about it.

So he did. And it cost him everything.

Today, the descendants of those 1,200 people number in the tens of thousands. They exist because one deeply flawed man, on one terrible morning, looked at what was happening around him and decided he could not live with himself if he did nothing.

You don't have to be a good person to do a great thing.

You just have to choose to see.

The systematic extermination of the Jews began, not with gas, but with the “Holocaust by Bullets” via mobile death squads called Einsatzgruppen that followed the German army into the Soviet Union. And the Allies knew about it from minute one.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the USSR. Five days earlier, Reinhard Heydrich briefed the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen on their mission: follow the Wehrmacht and murder every Jew they could find.

In village after village and town after town, they dragged Jews from their homes, marched them to pits or ravines, forced them to dig their own graves, and shot them. Men first.

Then, from August 1941 onward, all women, children, and even infants too.

Local antisemites, particularly from Lithuania, Ukraine and Latvia, often enthusiastically collaborated and even joined in on the mass slaughter of the Jews.

And the level of bloodthirsty butchery was truly savage.

Babies were torn from mothers’ arms and shot or smashed against trees. Entire families were machine-gunned into ditches. Jews were forced to watch their loved ones die before their own turn came. Germans experimented with lining Jews up two, three, four Jews at a time and trying to shoot them all through the neck with a single bullet. It was sick sport.

Nothing about the Einsatzgruppen’s “mission” was “war." This was industrialized extermination with pistols, shovels, and some of the most sadistic mass human behavior ever recorded.

By the end of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered more than 1 million Jews. 

By December of 1941, the Nazis began their first large-scale gassings using mobile gas vans at Chelmno, the first extermination camp. More death camps followed with Belzec (March 1942), Auschwitz II (March 1942) Sobibor (May 1942), and Treblinka (July 1942). 

But the Einsatzgruppen kept on killing. Gassing would become the main method of extermination by the Summer of 1942.

Current estimates (especially following the groundbreaking work of Father Patrick Desbois’ Yahad-In Unum project) place the total number of Jews murdered just by the Einsatzgrupppen by war’s end at between 1.5-2 million.

Now, here's the part almost no one talks about: the Allies knew about the extermination campaign against the Jews almost immediately.

British codebreakers at Bletchley Park were reading the Germans’ own radio traffic in real time, and the Einsatzgruppen and Order Police sent daily tallies back to Berlin that included the exact numbers of Jews shot in specific towns and villages (the recordings got sloppier as time went on with some going unreported - especially those carried out by local collaborators instead of Germans). 

Every detailed report sent back to Berlin was intercepted and deciphered by the British within days, and sometimes within mere hours, of the mass killings.

That’s right. The Allies had precise, irrefutable intelligence on the “Holocaust by Bullets” from the very first days of the invasion in June of 1941.

And yet, the Allies refused to name what the Germans were doing publicly. They buried the reports. They spoke only in vague terms about “atrocities” or “Nazi brutality.” They never highlighted that this was a deliberate campaign to exterminate the Jewish people. The Allies knew their efforts could lose support if it was seen as a “Jewish war.”

And so, there was no public declaration, there were no urgent warnings to Jewish communities, and there were no serious efforts to reverse the illegal White Paper of 1939 that closed British Mandate Palestine to further Jewish immigration.

The horror was known to the Allies and was deliberately downplayed.

Why? The answer was always the same: saving the Jews wasn’t a “military priority,” only "winning the war" was a military priority.

Regardless, it is historical fact that the systematic murder of Jews began in June 1941, and the free world looked away.

So, Jews take it seriously when people and groups and countries threaten to and try to once again annihilate us. And now that we are a sovereign people again, we don’t have to rely on foreign codebreakers, foreign politicians, and foreign generals to decide whether we live or die. Now, we like having friends, but we ultimately defend ourselves.

I know people can say anything on social media, but wow, they really do say anything on social media…

WHAT...ARE YOU?

Are the Jewish people a religious group? An ethnic group? An ethnoreligious group? A race?

While the Jewish people are not a race, Judaism is a religion, and the Jewish people are an ethnic group, meaning that Jews constitute an ethnoreligious group, or an ethnic group with a common religious practice.

But there’s a caveat: every single one of these labels has been retroactively applied. When Jewish identity began to form, none of these social constructs existed. Instead, the earliest Jews saw themselves as a nation, or an עם in Hebrew, not to be confused with a modern-day, post-French Revolution nation state. 

A nation in this context describes a people with a shared history, culture, and territory, but a nation differs from an ethnic group in that it sees itself as having a common political destiny.

TWO HEBREW WORDS FOR NATION

Jews call ourselves עם ישראל, or Am Yisrael, meaning the People/Nation of Israel. Jewish texts predominantly use two words for “nation”:

Goy (גוי), used to describe a nation in the general sense, though it’s also used to describe the Nation of Israel.

Am (עם), whose root comes from the Proto-Semitic ע־מ־ם , describing a joining, connection, or kinship. Thus, am has no neat translation into English but exists somewhere between “a nation” and “a people.”

Understanding how Jews have historically self-defined, and understanding the etymology of such definitions, especially for a people that place such heavy emphasis on letters and language, is crucial in understanding what Jewish identity is and isn’t. 

As a long-oppressed people, outsiders have long imposed labels on us, labels that we later internalized. But none of these outside, imposed labels can accurately embody who the Jewish people are.

WHAT'S IN A NAME: ISRAEL

Having discussed the term “am,” we must now ask: what does the word “Israel” say about Jewish national identity? Israel appears in Jewish texts in various contexts:

Am Yisrael, or the Nation/People of Israel.

Bnei Yisrael, or the Children of Israel, translated in English as “Israelites.” This can mean “the descendants of Jacob (also known as Israel)” in the tribal sense, or “the residents of the Land of Israel/Kingdom of Israel.”

Eretz Yisrael, or the Land of Israel, named after Am Yisrael, meaning “the land belonging to the Nation of Israel.”

Mamleket Yisrael/Malkut Yisrael, referencing either one of the two historic Kingdoms of Israel that once stood in Eretz Yisrael (the United Monarchy in 1047-930 BCE, or the southern Kingdom of Israel in 930-722 BCE, respectively).

THEOLOGY VS. ARCHEOLOGY 

There are two etymological explanations for the name Israel.

The theological explanation: Israel, in Hebrew, means “one who struggles with God.” Jacob takes this name after wrestling an angel, and thus, his descendants become the Children of Israel or the Nation/People of Israel.

The archeological explanation: in the Ancient Near East, nations tended to name themselves after their most important national deity. “El” is the generic Hebrew word for God.

Where the two explanations meet: while it was common for ancient nations to name themselves after their national deity, the Nation of Israel named itself after a struggle with God, emphasizing the specific nature of their relationship with the divine.

ERETZ YISRAEL, MEDINAT YISRAEL

Some antizionist Jews today argue that Eretz Yisrael, as described in the Torah, describes not a physical place but a metaphorical, spiritual dimension, and that it bears no relation whatsoever to Medinat Yisrael (the modern State of Israel). Is this true?

Though Eretz Yisrael bears deep spiritual significance, throughout Jewish history, it has always been understood as a physical territory. More importantly, its existence as a physical place is extensively corroborated by archeological findings and secular historical record.

Of course, the modern-day State of Israel is a modern nation state, not an ancient kingdom. But just as the modern [Greek] Hellenic Republic (year of independence: 1821) is not the same entity as Ancient Greece as depicted in the Odyssey or the Iliad, nobody would reasonably argue that today’s Greece bears no cultural, historical, and national relation to Ancient Greece.

A COMMON POLITICAL DESTINY

In antiquity, particularly in the Ancient Near East, national identity and spirituality were not two separate concepts, but one and the same. All ancient nations had their national deities: the Greeks had their Greek pantheon, and the Egyptians had their pantheon, too. Assyria named itself after its national god, Ashur, and the Nation of Israel named itself after El, which was once the most important deity in the Canaanite pantheon but later merged with YHWH to form the Hebrew God as we know Him today.

All of these ancient nations had national origin stories that merged folk mythology with their oral and written histories. For example, the Ancient Greeks had the Trojan War as their national origin story.

Jews have a national origin story, too: the story of Exodus, as depicted in the Torah, after which loose, semi-nomadic Hebrew tribes coalesced into a single nation, eventually establishing the first Kingdom of Israel.

JUDAISM, THE RELIGION

Antizionists, including, sadly, antizionist Jews, often claim that it was Zionism that reformulated Judaism as a national identity, but as mentioned, Jewish religious and national identity were considered inextricable from each other from the very beginning. 

Even the word “Judaism” itself doesn’t come from Hebrew, but is instead derived from the Greek word “Ioudaïsmós” and is how the Ancient Greeks described Jewish cultural practices.

"...In this first occurrence of the term, Ioudaïsmós has not yet been reduced to the designation of a religion. It means rather 'the aggregate of all those characteristics that makes Judaeans Judaean (or Jews Jewish).'”

Rabbi Shaye J.D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness

SO WHAT HAPPENED?

Prior to the advent of Christianity, the persecution of Jews generally happened in an imperialistic context, in the sense that foreign empires conquered the Land of Israel and subjugated its native subjects, suppressing their culture and traditions. After the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, the persecution of Jews took on a religious nature, but even Jews who converted to Christianity were subject to suspicion and even persecution, as occurred during the Spanish Inquisition under the doctrine of “Limpieza de Sangre,” or Purity of Blood. 

Then came the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, as Europe contemplated emancipating its Jewish population.

Napoleon agreed to emancipate French Jews, so long as they gave up their Jewish “national interests.”

Eager to assimilate, many Western European Jews started calling themselves “citizens of the Mosaic persuasion” — as in, regular citizens who simply happened to attend the “church” of Moses.

A COMMON POLITICAL DESTINY

The idea that the Jewish people are a nation, sharing a common political destiny, did not die with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, nor with the forced displacement of Jews from their homeland.

To be certain, Zionism as a political national sovereignty movement can be traced back to the late 19th century, as empires fell and national groups in both Europe and the Middle East began vying for national sovereignty. But while the term proto-Zionism is often associated with mid-19th century groups such as Hovovei Zion (Lovers of Zion), the truth is that proto-Zionism is the running theme of Jewish history, from antiquity to the First Zionist Congress.

Indeed, Zionism itself is named after the Return to Zion, a historical event dating back to 539 BCE.

ZIONISM, THE ORDINARY AND THE EXTRAORDINARY

Whether you support or oppose Zionism, Zionism’s success – actually managing to establish a sovereign Jewish state after 2,000 years of statelessness and exile – is, in some ways, historically extraordinary. But in most other ways, modern political Zionism is perfectly ordinary.

Zionism, as a Jewish national sovereignty movement, arose at the tail end of the 19th century, a time period when empires were falling apart and different national groups in Europe, the Middle East, and beyond began vying for their own independence. Just as other nations pursued their own nation-states congruent with their national identities, so did the Zionist movement, including not just the Arabs but other minorities in the Middle East like Kurds and Assyrians. Singling out Zionism as somehow especially nefarious means singling out the Jewish movement for national self-determination in a sea of other parallel movements for national self-determination.

One might argue that Zionism was unique in that it was driven almost entirely by the Jewish Diaspora, at least in the beginning, but this actually not such a historical outlier, either. A similar story could be said for the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire, which was financed and organized almost exclusively by the Greek diaspora.

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The Passover Massacre occurred this day (March 27) in 2002 at the height of the Second Intifada (you know, what marchers & so-called academics keep calling to “globalize”) when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew up a Passover seder murdering 30 & injuring 140.

As Jewish families (many of them elderly, including Holocaust survivors) gathered in the dining room to begin their Passover Seder, the Hamas terrorist (Abdel-Basset Odeh) walked in disguised as a woman and detonated his bomb in the crowded hall.

The scene was one of unimaginable carnage: blood-soaked tables, shattered holiday joy, families torn apart while celebrating freedom from slavery - the very story of the Exodus they had come to retell.

This was not "resistance." It was the deliberate massacre of civilians targeted precisely because they were Jews observing one of Judaism's holiest nights.

Context also matters as this bloody intifada was launched by Yasser Arafat after he rejected a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital at Camp David, at Taba, and via the Clinton Parameters.

Less than two years later, by the spring of 2002, deadly suicide bombings inside Israel had become an almost daily occurrence.