It is a game of chicken that they might not really want.

From where I am sitting, the strait being closed is not a terrible thing in the long run. I am not downplaying the problems of a high oil price and the loss of standard of living in the West. However, The longer it is goes on, the more this forces the Gulf Arab countries to bypass the Persian Gulf altogether. An obvious partner for this is Israel and the ports of Ashdod or Haifa, stable places where oil flows would never be disrupted if you had pipes going there. At the same time renewable energy is surging. This in turn means that we may see the light in the end of the dark tunnel, where the fossil fuel dictatorships have had such a stranglehold over our lives, bring an end to the fossil fuel era and mitigate climate change to boot. Oh the irony! While Greta Thunberg has completely been taken in by the fossil fuel dictatorships’ favourite cause, Donald Trump ushers in the era of electrification.

The “negotiation” between Iran and the USA is an unfunny joke. The Islamic Republic says it will reopen Hormuz if the United States lifts all sanctions and returns all the money withheld from them, so they once again have enough funds to stay in power, pay soldiers, missiles, and proxy forces, and restart their nuclear program. They do not want to discuss any of the issues that the US is demanding, only Hormuz. They believe that the blockade of Hormuz alone will force such a capitulation from the West. Alas for them, the blockade works both ways, and some technical experts say Iran will soon have to begin shutting down oil fields if they cannot export through Hormuz. Shutting down oilfields means it will be difficult and take time to reopen them. This is the regime’s only real source of income, and they could severely damage their own economy if they do not find a solution soon.

Why? Why will they not negotiate substantively about anything at all?

Hussien ibn Ali, 626-680 CE

Twelver Shiism, the religion underpinning the Islamic Republic, is built around one historical and religious event above all others: the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. The evil but powerful Umayyad caliph Yazid I, ruling from Damascus in today’s Syria, demanded that the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein ibn Ali submit to his rule. Hussein refused. Hussein and his followers, a band of seventy including women and children, were traveling from Mecca in today’s Saudi Arabia to Kufa in today’s Iraq. At Karbala he was surrounded by thousands of Yazid’s men. Yet he still refused to submit to the corrupt ruler. Yazid’s soldiers killed them one by one. Finally a particularly brutal soldier of Yazid beheaded Hussein himself. Hussein, however, would not submit until the very end.

Martyr of martyrs, Hussein refused to bow before overwhelming power. Hussein may have died physically, but morally and spiritually it was he that was the victor.

For the Islamic Republic, Hussein’s martyrdom is no historical trivia. It is a cosmological narrative about how the world works, a cycle repeating itself again and again throughout history. When Khomeini designated the United States as the “Great Satan”, they are going beyond the secular Soviet anti-Imperialist rhetoric from whence they found their enemy. They are casting the USA as a new Yazid I, the overwhelmingly powerful, corrupt force eternally trying to oppress the faithful. Hussein’s successors, meanwhile, must behave as Hussein would have. Never bow to powerful oppressors. Israel is the “Little Satan,” merely an extended arm of the Great Satan that has come to the Middle East to oppress the faithful. If you can cut off the arm you can hurt the Great Satan greatly, therefore Iran and Israel are locked in eternal struggle to the death. Perhaps we can detect a distortion of Zoroastrianism in this, where the struggle of light and dark is eternal, the Islamic Republic believes that they are the light and we in Israel are the darkness. Perhaps the 30 000 plus murdered protesters on January 8 and 9th would disagree.

Satan, in Muslim belief, is more than merely powerful and evil. He is not simply Sauron or Voldemort, but a force constantly trying to lure believers away from their faith with temptations and promises. Not entirely unlike the way antisemites imagine Jews secretly leading the world from behind the scenes, which is why antisemitism weaves in so naturally into the worldview of the Islamic Republic. The West is not merely trying to force the faithful to abandon their jihad. Nay, it is more shocking still. The United States, through its decadence, tries to seduce believers away from the faith with bikinis, cool music videos and hamburgers. Oh the horror!

The faithful, however, are uncompromising, like martyrs. They may be surrounded and possess fewer weapons, but what difference does that make? No one is going to make the faithful abandon their dream of nuclear weapons. No one will force them to give up on their beloved system of colonial genocidal proxy groups that exist to control the Middle East and destroy the Little Satan.

That is what Hussein would have done.

Surely.

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People use the word “terror” all too frivolously. After all, violence has been with us from the dawn of time, so you can draw parallells from almost anywhere—horrific wars of conquest thousands of years ago, political assassinations, or attacks on military targets carried out by irregular forces. For my purposes here I want to narrow it down significantly. Only those who target civilians in order to promote their political or religious ideas. It is this —the arbitrary violence against civilians—that hypnotizes the public and can function as a magnet for support given the right context. In the case of the Palestinians, much of the global support does not come despite terror; rather, the terror itself is the attraction.

Sam Harris pinpointed the problem: if you commit acts of terror, people will assume that you yourself have been treated badly. The worse the terror you commit, the worse people will assume you have been treated. I thought it was too simple, too banal, frankly too pointless. I made the mistake of assuming rationality. That this thinking goes through a cognitive process and arrive at that conclusion. That is, of course, not the case at all. This happens emotionally; chemically, no rational thinking needed.

Vincent van Gogh’s painting “Sorrowful Old Man” 1882.

The Passionate Search for Justice

Within the Western psyche, there is a deep tradition of justice through suffering. Greek tragedy loves stories about kings who become beggars or vice versa. Oedipus becomes a blinded exile after having been a king. Medusa was the prettiest girl in town but all that prettiness had forced poor old Poseidon to court her. This threw Athena into a fit of furious jealousy because… Well… Obviously. Of course Athena would turn Medusa into a monster for that, what was she thinking? In the mythological world of Greece, one was meant to tremble and show humility before the gods of Olympus. Yet in turn, the gods were always capricious, they could punish you at a whim, even if you had acted righteously. Tyche, goddess of chance, spins her wheel—the tragedy or triumph that follows is all terrifyingly random.

If we take a short odyssey from the Greek world to the far eastern shore of the Mediterranean, we find a very similar tradition. Yet here, the ideas of the rise and the fall take on a more systematic character, something more than mere chance. It becomes more than curiosity, more than dramatic twists in Sophocles’ plays or in Homer’s epics. In the Abrahamic religions, we encounter a more orderly version, where morality and a thirst for justice come to the fore. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have variations of the idea: that justice comes to the weak, and that the proud and arrogant will be put in their place. Chance is replaced with justice from the almighty.

Terror: Location, Location, Location.

For your terror to work the most effectively, you must choose the place with care. Hear ye! Hear Ye! Beware! If thy murder a group of villagers in Yemen or Afghanistan, the world will n’er talk about it. For Al-Qaeda to choose New York was great PR. Very nearly perfect for maximum impact; to strike where every camera is pointed is an unbeatable idea. Almost unbeatable. They were quickly followed by attacks in London and Madrid. Then came ISIS, which identified Paris—the City of Light—as a city to cast into darkness. Massive acts of mass murder that would provide a fast track to paradise.

But even striking at these centers of civilization does not have the greatest pull, and all but a smattering of those who came to join the Califate of ISIS, with its slave markets and crucifixions, were Muslims. However, none of these places, not Mesopotamia, not Madrid, London, Paris or even New York compares to the kind of superpower terror can acquire if it focuses its mass killings on the epicenter of the Abrahamic religions: Israel.

Yuval Noah Harari

Terror as Theatre

Yuval Noah Harari’s idea is that terror is theatre. As a historian, it comes as no surprise that his focus is time rather than place. He points out that terror only works in modern times. If you were to murder handful a few people in Jerusalem around the turn of the first millenium, no one would care—the news simply would not spread. To make any difference back then, you would need to capture a fortress, or at least kill some important potentate. You gain no military advantage through random terror; in no way do you weaken the enemy’s forces. Indeed, it was a worthless weapon until media caught up. Modern technology, however, has given us the golden age of terror. Now we receive terror on TV and on our phones; we can feel as though we are right there in the action ourselves. For the terrorist, the whole world is potentially an audience, and a surefire way to break through the noise is sheer brutality.

The terrorists themselves are no product of the Prophet and his companions, either, divinely inspired or otherwise. The cultural waters they are fishing in may very well take the words of the Quran as the word of God, but even so they are ever so modern. Multicultural even. The dress of the ISIS warrior is all Ninja fan fiction, the Al Qaida idea of tearing down skyscrapers was reportedly taken from watching too much of Godzilla destroying Tokyo. Say what you like about the Prophet Muhammed, but he was no connoisseur of Japanese 20th century cultural exports.

Media and theatre— Harari is correct. However, he takes the idea too far. He argues that the theatre itself is the whole point of terror. As is his wont, Harari writes in memorable metaphors. The metaphor he uses to describe the objective of terror is a bee flying around in a China shop with a bull. The bull is the enormous military power that modern states like the United States or Israel possess. The bee can only sting the bull; it is the bull that destroys the China shop. There is truth in this. Hamas knew full well that Israel would destroy Gaza after they attacked in such a savage manner. They built a tunnel system hundreds of miles long where no civilians were allowed to hide—only weapons and their fighters. The goal of seventeen years of building tunnels was to ensure that as many civilians as possible would die in Gaza, and that Israel would therefore lose the media war. Hamas did indeed win the media war—by miles.

This, however, is but a stepping stone to the real objective. Winning the media war is hardly Hamas’s ultimate goal. Harari, as an Israeli, ought to take the motive of the terrorist more seriously than this. The media war is merely a tool for a far more ambitious objective. They believe that winning the media war will cause everyone to abandon Israel, and without friends Israel can be defeated. Hamas seeks to defeat Israel, establish a caliphate, and cleanse the land of Jews. Hamas sees itself as the spearhead of Islam, avenging the centuries in which Islam has been subordinate to the West—a condition they seek to turn on its head.

A general rule is that just because an idea is nutty does not mean people do not believe in it. Hamas—and oh so many others—believe in their narrative deeply and sincerely. Hundreds of thousands of fighters and millions of civilians across the Middle East wake up every day with a single dream and vision: that if Israel were erased, the honor of Islam would be restored. The humiliation of having a Jewish state in the middle of the Muslim world is simply too great. War is the only way to restore the honour.

For Harari’s metaphor to work, the bee would not simply want to destroy the China shop, but to take over—albeit a battered shop containing nothing but shattered China. But bees do not own shops. The metaphor collapses.

Paul Berman

Terror and the Totalitarian Perspective

Paul Berman dives deeper into terrorism and its roots in his book Terror and Liberalism from 2002. He correctly notes that the politics of mass death hardly began with jihadists. There is a direct line from earlier totalitarian movements, both on the right and the left. Islamism is but one flavour of the totalitarian. “demagogic, irrational, authoritarian, and extremely murderous politics, a politics of mass mobilisation for goals that were not even possible to achieve” (p. 23).

This is important. There is a common notion that “terror is the weapon of the weak.” This is not entirely wrong, but it is misleading and only contributes to myth-making. Terror against the general public is something unscrupulous groups may use when they lack power, but if and when they gain power, they do not abandon terror—they are simply given the opportunity to systematise violence against their ethnic and political opponents.

Anarchists were the first to begin using indiscriminate mass murder as a strategy. Paul Berman recounts that Luigi Galleani created a group which, in the 1920s, detonated a bomb on Wall Street; 20 random people died in a symbolic act against global capitalism, in order, as Galleani wrote, “to light the spark of revolutionary victory” (p. 35, Berman).

There was, of course, no anarchist world revolution, I have a hunch this is because the anarchists couldn’t cooperate with each other for long enough to ensure victory. However, there was a very serious attempt at a communist one, forty percent of the world’s population lived under communism at its height. The connection between Stalin’s form of terror from the seat of power and Galleani’s terror from his apartment in New Jersey is smaller than one might imagine. The utopia both men sought to build through violence is deeply intertwined.

The shape of the violence changes, but not its purpose. When adherents of terror take power, they can use violence at any time and kill anyone, just as in a terror attack. The arbitrariness of the violence leads to a compliant and apathetic population. Dominance is the goal of terror, even if it is all too often romanticised as “resistance.” A great example of terrorists running a country is the Islamic Republic of Iran. The terror invariably creeps into the legal system and the security forces.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Not a force for good in the world.

The Philosophical Foundation of Totalitarian Terror. Blame the Germans.

The Qur’an itself contains many problematic passages about violence against those unbelievers in Islam and those who refuse to convert. But that in itself does not explain how terrorism came to the Middle East. The Egyptian researcher Hussein Abubakr Mansour discusses the influence of German philosophy in the Middle East. Otto von Bismarck became a role model for many in the Arab world after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Bismarck had unified the various German-speaking states into a single Germany; now Arabs wanted to unify the Arabic-speaking countries of the Arab world.

That the Muslim world adopted German philosophy thus became both the obvious choice and a devastating one for the Arab world. German philosophy, originating from Hegel, developed during the 20th century into the totalitarian movements we saw in communism and fascism, rather than the British-French-American liberal democratic tradition that led to the liberal democracies we see in the West. Great Britain and France were, to put it mildly, unsatisfactory role models for the Arab world in the early 20th century—they were the very colonial powers occupying the lions share of the Arab world.

The Birth of Totalitarian Islamism

The world’s largest Islamist organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, is a Hegelian pressure cooker. The movement takes the totalitarian and revolutionary ideas of the “new society” and the “new man” that were circulating when the movement was founded and places Islam over all of this like a wet blanket.

he Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1928, just four years after the caliphate in Istanbul was dissolved—the ultimate humiliation for Islam, according to the Brotherhood. It drew on antisemitism (later it would incorporate Nazi propaganda), communist ideas of anti-imperialism and armed revolution, and placed them squarely under the most radical passages of the sunnah in the Qur’an and other violent Islamic traditions. They were not alone in believing in revolution in the Middle East. Arab nationalism, the most obvious successor to Bismarck, was also authoritarian, anti-democratic, and in practice antisemitic.

Totalitarian Shiism

The most striking example of cooperation between revolutionary communism and revolutionary Islamism is Iran in 1979. The Iranian Revolution was made possible by an alliance between the left and the Islamists. The foundational ideas of the Islamic Republic were shaped in Paris, where Ali Shariati wove together Maoism, anti-imperialism, and Shia Islam, becoming Ayatollah Khomeini’s most important theorist in building the Islamic Republic of Iran. This framework was important in creating a distinctly Shia alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood. What Shia Islam contributed was the cult of Hussein, its great martyr, and the “twelfth hidden imam,” the Mahdi—a messianic figure who will emerge when the world is on the verge of being healed.

In this worldview, there are the mustakbirin—the arrogant, oppressive powers, above all the “Great Satan,” the United States, and the “Little Satan,” Israel. Israel is not “little” in the sense of being unimportant, but little because the Iranian regime believes it is easier to destroy, being geographically closer and merely an outpost of the United States and the West anyway, used to oppress Muslims. On the other side stand the mustadafin—the righteous and rightful resistance against the arrogant oppressors, led by—surprise— themselves. Only by eliminating the “Little Satan” in the Middle East can the process begin that will awaken the Mahdi from his mystical slumber. Israel must die for the world to be healed.

Like the Abrahamic roots, this long, intertwined relationship between the various revolutionary currents and the Middle East—in its communist, Arab nationalist, radical Shia or radical Sunni varieties—as well as the close connection between totalitarian worldviews and terror, tells us, again, that if you truly want to achieve major success as a terrorist, even among non-Muslims, there is only one place for mass murder and war crimes.

Israel.

Palestine, the Mecca of Terror

Palestinian terror is a morality play on every level. To portray Palestinians as Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” is not an empirical reality; it is a political and religious construct that fits the theatre of terror. Gaza City had a life expectancy before October 7 of 73–75 years, much like the Brexit Towns of England. The average salary was between 200 and 320 dollars a month- lower than in Israel, yes, but still higher than across the other border to Egypt, where the average salary is 150–300 dollars per month. This bears no resemblance to the extreme poverty found in other parts of the Arab world, where countries like Yemen and Sudan often fall well below the absolute poverty line of 50 dollars a month.

The amount of aid going to Palestinians exceeds anything else in the region; the aid Gaza received during the war was roughly ten times higher per capita than what war-affected populations in Sudan received. UNRWA, the world’s only refugee agency for people whose great-grandparents—not themselves—fled war, has an annual budget of about one billion dollars. Palestinians should be able to live good lives, but their leaders have prioritized anything but improving their lives— from terror to fancy villas in Qatar.

When it comes to Palestinian terror, what we see is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Terror groups steal the money coming in to build tunnels, command centers, and purchase weapons. Endless. Stocks. Of weapons. The education system indoctrinates children with the intense hatred that is needed to make them aspire to become martyrs. The population grows poorer, and misery increases. Terrorists start wars, and the area becomes war-torn. They gain sympathy, and funds, because no one likes to see a war-torn land, nobody wants to see a population suffer. And so they can buy more weapons and brain-wash more children, so support for terror increases. Well, that was the point all along. Around and around it goes. Nowhere do we move closer to resolving the conflict. But in terrorist eyes, the system works perfectly.

Without the moral theatre, the naked truth slowly emerges. These are criminal networks and death cults that are incapable of giving their people anything but death. Hezbollah is a drug cartel; Hamas is a mafia network. Their totalitarian ideology means they do not value human life. Their core belief is the racist conviction that Jews are Untermenschen who must be killed for the world to achieve redemption.

But because of the moral theatre—and the belief that “the terrorist strikes from below”—millions of people believe terror is something more, that it has a nobler purpose. You can see it every time you speak to a pro-Palestinian activist in the West. They see none of what is actually happening, but instead “elevate” the discussion into some vague notion of justice, of David and Goliath, of the oppressed who will finally be vindicated. But all this is postponing real justice and real progress.

Terror works because of our Abrahamic thirst for justice, and the totalitarian ideologies that have grown out of it. The more totalitarian movements are allowed to grow, the more terror there will be.

Alas, terror works.

This deadline was on witching hour, 03:00 Israeli time. My family and I sat waiting for it here in Israel. “Waiting” is actually the wrong word—we stayed up late, then came siren after siren, the regime in Iran probably sent every missile in the silo until the deadline. Then suddenly Trump says that Iran’s 10-point plan is “workable”. Now peace in the Middle East is here. Apparently. Gee whizz. Talk about an anticlimax. But how very, very Trumpy.

So what will historians say about this period? The age of Trump. How will they get through all the tweetomania and weird and wonderful speeches? All the methods of communication are made for headlines, to capture drama of the moment, like a butterfly in a jar that is so fragile you have to keep from dying, so you need new butterflies. The fire is stoked again and again so that not a single day, nay not a single moment passes without us talking about this one, single, solitary, human being. At the same time, the speeches are hard to watch. Sure, sometimes they are funny, but it’s difficult to even follow Trump’s line of thought or capture all the outrages in any kind of straight line. Once one faux pas has been made, he moves on to the next one. Its… Exhausting. Obviously, only thing that matters to him is that he is famous, more famous than anyone since Jesus.

There are two poles of the Trump-watching: either you ride the carousel of outrage, or you ignore everything Trump says and instead look at the decisions he actually makes in the end. You can do that and sometimes it works better. Yet, in the end, he is the one who determines what our region will look like for decades. He shows what he wants in the endless loop of the Trump Show. So neither approach is ideal. I try to resist the urge to become a Trump-watcher. As noted I cant even watch the speeches in full. It does my head in, frankly. Perhaps one day we will find the secret sauce, a perfect way to interpret the Trump phenomena, a new kind of historian with a new toolkit. Or perhaps you just get an endless churn of books about him that never end. Like Jesus, perhaps a book will come out about him every single day in centuries hence.

Many hate him in Sweden. No surprise there. In my more generous moods I can think that this is about what he has actually done. He treats Ukraine poorly and gives Putin far more respect than he deserves. It often sounds like he is Europe’s enemy. He talks about “taking” Greenland. His actual achievements in Europe are underwhelming to be sure. The one thing I can think of is that he has forced his allies to spend more on defense. Partly just by showing himself to be unreliable. Of course, it is deeply frustrating that he does not take the alliance with Europe seriously. But in my less generous moods I can posit that a lot of this hostility is about style. He blends the mafia boss, the cowboy, and the nouveau riche steel magnate from the Gilded Age. Power and wealth are there to be brandished. To rub in your face. It lacks any relation to the sophistication of the old world. The Brit in me says “gosh, how uncouth”, and “what has the old fool done now”. The Swede in me gives him rolling eyes galore.

Many like him in Israel. No surprise there. In my more generous moods I can think that this is about what he has actually done. He got hostages back from Hamas, brokered the Abraham Accords, and—with Israel’s help—managed to seriously weaken the Iranian regime. He calls himself the most pro-Israel president ever, and people believe it. But in my less generous moods I can posit that a lot of this is about style. The style suits the Middle East. This mafia-like approach is far more effective against fundamentalists than a constant belief in de-escalation and dialogue. Ultimatums, the willingness to use hard power, and to intimidate them—y’know, like a mafia boss, this is the only thing that works on regimes like Iran or groups like Hezbollah or Hamas. There is really nothing to talk about. The only “conversation” that works is getting them to act with a gun to their head. The Israeli in me says, “yoffi magia lahem”—good, they deserve it.

Trump is perhaps unique. At least in the democratic era. A little more like a Roman Emperor with the Bread and the Circuses, perhaps Nero. A little more like the Kaiser with all his ego and his pomp and circumstance. Yet less warlike than both. He seems to dislike democracy and speaks like a strongman. But there is so much about him that will only work in a democracy. The wars are designed for the news cycle and the memes. The news cycle is ment to keep him famous. The fame is meant to make him popular. Popularity is meant to get him elected. Even if we had to watch for his deadline at the Witching hour, the Eastern time was 8 PM, prime time TV. Coincidence? I think not. This is not the conviction of a dictator working to implement his ideological schemes, this is the relentless search of ratings.

Therefore he has this odd relationship to dictators, he likes their power and looks up to actual monsters like Putin, but he could never be Putin. Putin wants to dominate and control his neighbours according to a dream of Russian imperialism, to this end he sends up to a thousand men a day fall bleeding, dead, into the mud of the Donbas. Day after day, year after year. Trump could never stomach this kind of commitment. This is why he was surprised that the Iranian regime didn’t just give up when they saw the awesome firepower of the United States lined up in the ocean. If he were them he would just give up and claim victory anyway, gangsta style. But the Iranian regime are in a death cult, which is completely beyond the things he has met in real estate and reality TV.

Many Europeans panic when he throws out ideas about what he plans to do with the world. Many Israelis say he “understands the Middle East.” I think both may be wrong. He is who he is. He throws around bold moves because he is a headline magician. He uses threats as the basis of negotiations. He starts short wars where he can claim victory.

Money, power, glory, and ego. All of this. Not much more.

The world has to adapt. Now there is peace, apparently. Another news cycle has begun.

“Palestinians are equal in rights and duties and are equal before the law and the judiciary without discrimination…”

Draft Constitution of Palestine.

Excellent. This appears to be a constitution that cuts the mustard. Democracy and equality are indeed things we should value. There are many parts of the draft constitution, published by the Palestinian Authority (PA), like this quote that seem standardized, reasonable, and democratic.

There is just one small problem. Tiny really. That little pesky problem of the rest of the constitution. Reading all of it does make both democracy and equality impossible. Above all, it makes something even more fundamental to the positive development of society impossible: peace.

The dream of two states like Sweden and Norway

The diplomatic standard in the world—something all Swedish parliamentary parties, as so many parties around the world support—is the two-state solution: one state for each people. As a Swede, it is difficult not to agree. Our country’s current borders were determined in exactly that way. We separated from Norway, which so desperately wanted freedom that 99% voted for independence. Well then, they should of course have it. Pretty obvious more than a century on, but there were quite a few Swedish generals who thought the opposite, that we should bring down the boot on their fledgling state and stamp out all this nonsense of Norwegian statehood. Lets all be happy that they didn’t get their way.

The result of the separation was not only a remarkable split without war—it was an extraordinary success. During the 20th century, both countries, the former occupying power and the formerly occupied, grew stronger both individually and together. Today, the border is open with no border guards, trade is flourishing, and the rivalry has been reduced to both peoples joking making “Norway jokes” or “Sweden jokes”, pretty mild as rival nations go. Indeed, I am not the only Swede who feels immensely proud to be Scandinavian, when Norway crushes all rivals in the Winter Olympics, unless Sweden was one of the rivals, naturally.

So why can’t Israel and Palestine have that kind of development? Free trade. Open borders. Independence combined with economic cooperation? Cheering on each other at sports events?

This proposed constitution explains why.

Peace and cooperation through separation and osmosis.

Most Israelis need to see three interconnected elements among the Palestinians that would enable a future two-state solution. The first is recognition of Israel’s right to exist. The second is that the state must be demilitarized. The third is that the fundamental driving force of the conflict must come to an end—namely, the idea that millions of Palestinians must “return” to what is now Israel.

Is this what we are getting? Let’s take a look.

Does Israel have a right to exist according to the constitution?

What is most striking is what is missing from the constitution. Israel’s right to exist is not included in any form. The word “Israel” does not appear anywhere in the document. Nor is there any mention of borders. There is no assurance that the State of Palestine would exist only in the West Bank and Gaza, and no mention that Israel would exist on the other side of that line.

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Indeed, these are arguably the two oldest publicly celebrated rituals in the world, their original form, celebrated a mind-boggling three millennia ago. In this Bronze Age dawn of civilization, we speak of a time when only about ten written languages existed on earth, nearly all of them in the lands between Greece and Persia. It is no wonder this is called the cradle of civilization. One of these civilizations perched on the highlands of the East beyond the Fertile Crescent, the other at its far West kissing the sea, along the same green thoroughfare — a highway of culture threading deserts and mountains. It is two months’ journey, if by camel from Jerusalem to Persepolis, or ten days using the Royal Road with changing horses, as Herodotus described in the 4th century BCE. In ancient terms, this is like taking the red-eye across the pond.

Nowruz important day in the primordial Zoroastrian faith and for its priestly astronomers. With the arrival of Islam in Iran, authorities attempted several times to suppress the celebrations. They failed, yet the overtly Zoroastrian elements were diminished during the Middle Ages, transforming Nowruz from a strictly religious festival into a cultural celebration for all the peoples of Iran, encompassing multiple faiths, and spreading into Central Asia.

Unsurprisingly, Nowruz is tied to spring and the renewal this season brings. On Nowruz, people prepare many small dishes, each carrying its own symbolic meaning: the apple symbolizes beauty and health, garlic symbolizes medicine. Most important today is the vivid purple spice, sumac, symbolizing the triumph of light over darkness. This is what we hope for and pray for, alongside the vast majority of Iranians — an end to the darkness of the Ayatollahs.

Jews, of course, recognize the world of ritual dishes. Observing from Israel, it is fascinating how close it is in structure to Passover, recalling the ancient connections. Yet there are differences. The Hebrew calendar, like the Islamic calendar, follows the moon rather than the sun, as the Zoroastrians and later Christians did. On the 15th day of Nisan, the Torah recounts the Exodus from Egypt, a story far more grounded than musings on health, beauty, and light.

Even so, in Israel this also coincides with a new seasonal beginning: the end of winter rains marks the rebirth of the land, and the celebration of the barley harvest. Like sumac, the tale of Passover moves from darkness to light, exile to redemption. The Passover table, too, is divided into symbolic dishes: horseradish (maror) recalls the bitterness of slavery, saltwater represents the tears shed in bondage, and the egg (beitzah) stands for the grief of the Temple’s destruction — and for new life. That is what we need now: new life in the Middle East, following the fall of the Islamic Republic and its proxy networks. Freedom from oppression, for the people of Iran.

Why are these two celebrations so alike? Perhaps the connection lies in the Babylonian exile. Jerusalem fell in stages to the forces of King Nebuchadnezzar II: in 597 BCE, many leaders and scholars were taken to Babylon, and the First Temple was destroyed a few years later. Indeed, “Rivers of Babylon” is based on a psalm from that time. The original captures the lament even more certainly than Boney M.’s bright smiles and glittering spandex, millennia hence. Bitter tears were certainly shed, yet Judaism’s foundations were cemented: the idea of a God who no longer resided solely on his rock in Jerusalem but followed the Jews into exile, watching over them even in the distant land of the two Rivers.

Cyrus according to ai

Almost sixty years later, in 539 BCE, the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and its empire, stretching to the Mediterranean, allowing the Jews to return home. They remembered Cyrus not just as a king, but as the king, the standard against which all others were measured. He became the only non-Jewish king mentioned in the Bible as a true Messiah, a divinely anointed ruler

Much ink has been spilled on when the Book of Exodus was written, but it seems to have taken its final form during the Babylonian exile. It is hard to imagine that the story of the Egyptian captivity, perhaps six centuries earlier, was unaffected by their Babylonian plight. Furthermore, it is plausible that Persian culture, which saved the Jews with their messianic king, influenced Jewish ritual and symbolism: dishes, meaning, and the movement from darkness to light. Nothing is certain in the mists of time, but this may help explain why Nowruz, the Iranians’ most sacred day, mirrors the Passover Seder, Judaism’s second holiest day.

So this year, let us take the egg, dip it in sumac, and celebrate the triumph of light over darkness. Rebirth is coming with the light.

Nowruz Pirooz! Hag Pesach Sameach!

Pathologies of the West

Instead of actually talking about what is happening, how the war is unfolding and why, they seem to analyse the situation entirely according to their squabbles back home. The pathologies of the West are on proud display. This goes beyond Trump Derangement Syndrome, although there is certainly quite a lot of that going round. Rather, what is happening is deeper. It goes through Tacitus and his “we made a desert and called it peace”, onwards and upwards towards the tragedy of WWI, where all sorts of alliances made for the terrible war of “All is Quiet on the Western Front”, where war spreads everywhere, rendering the petty goals of the war pointless in comparison to the millions who died. Adding to the foundational modern war a century ago is the American pathology of Vietnam, where lies kept an unwinnable war going for a decade and a half. And then there is Iraq, that one foreign war that everyone in America seems to agree was a huge mistake. All this builds to a cacophony of voices that merge into one. As we shall see, these voices most of all tell us an awful lot about who the pundit’s deepest fears. But what on earth does any of this have to do with the threat of the Islamic Republic? I’m sorry. It’s not about you. It just isn’t.

Collective Therapy with the Pundits

Now let us take a closer look at this collective therapy session, where pundits talk about themselves and project it onto Iran. Just three, out of thousands of similar hot takes. Slavoj Žižek, Tucker Carlson and Rory Stewart. Or Left, Right and Centre.

Rory Stewart wants all the children to sit down and shut up.

Rory Stewart, Champion of Centrist Dads

Rory Stewart, on his podcast Talking Politics, issued a stern, fatherly warning: “This war could spiral into World War III if restraint is not exercised immediately.” Immediately! This instant! I am going to count to three... The lesson of all war in the Middle East seems to Stewart to be that everyone just needs to calm the hell down. The rule is that if you are a Middle Easterner, a foaming-at-the-mouth fanatic, the intelligentsia will pat you on the head and look sternly at the Jews, and say that old wife-beater canard: “Now look what you made him do”. Underlying all this rhetoric of de-escalation is the “don’t poke the bear” idea. In this world, the Islamic Republic is The Incredible Hulk – just don’t make him angry, whatever you do! In Israel this is ludicrous. How on earth would the Islamic Republic hate Jews more than they do because they have been provoked? Or Mark Ruffalo for that matter. This regime has spent a large portion of its GDP trying to get a nuclear weapon to destroy the Jews; they pay for proxy groups all over the Middle East just to drive away the Jews. But Stewart seems to believe that the most important thing is not to make them angry. Because then… they may start fighting the Jews. Dear God... What planet are these people on?

Tucker Carlson, Champion of Isolationism

In this, he is eagerly parroted by that most dangerous traitor to the West, Tucker Carlson: “What America is doing in Iran could very well drag us into a war the entire world will regret.” Of course, I am not putting the centrist dad of Stewart and the wild isolationism of Carlson in the same bucket; frankly I get exhausted talking about this ghastly man, it is just an example of how widely this pathology is shared.

Tucker doin’ Tucker

Slavoj Žižek, Wonder of the Left

If the far right and the centre feel the tingling of disaster looming, that is child’s play compared to what is discussed on the left. In a bid for the most melodramatic and frankly bonkers headlines of all time, Slavoj Žižek subtitles his piece “Iran is now de facto fighting not just for its own sovereignty, but for the global principle of sovereignty”. Oh, please. Spare me the indignation. What on earth are we talking about here? Slavoj? Really? In your fantasy world, the Islamic Republic is not just the stalwart of sovereignty, but its principal defender. This is beyond comical. The Islamic Republic’s stated goal is not just to “violate” the sovereignty of Israel; it is to implement the Final Solution on its people. Does the dearly departed Ayatollah, or his cash-hoarding son, now overlord Khamenei the Second Mojtaba, care much about Lebanon’s “sovereignty”, ya reckon? Or Yemen’s?

Slavoj philosophizes himself completely outside the world of logic.

We are talking about a religious conviction that believes that a gang of thugs should take over the Middle East so that the Twelfth “Hidden” Imam, a “tooth fairy character” in Christopher Hitchens divinely inspired prose, would come out to play. Where is the sovereignty in that?

Mojtaba is thinking deeply about sovereignty. Nah. Fooled you!

Pundit Apocalypse Fun

If you put all the punditry together in a merry group of Stewart, Žižek and Carlson whipping each other up into a frenzy at a bar, what you get is the fear of massive escalation. FOME. Woe is me! WWIII is neigh! when you are in FOME mode, you somehow think that if the holy sovereignty of the Islamic Republic is broken, the Hulk is unleashed, and somehow all of the Avengers will appear to help them. Now wait a goddamn minute, before the three start singing “War, What is it good for?” together. It is wise to ask who will be doing the fighting.

Don’t make Mark Ruffalo angry!

Friends of the Ayatollah

I hate to break it to you, Mr. Islamic Republic and all the apocalypse punters: last I checked, you don’t have a team of Avengers. You are a bit more like Gollum than the Hulk. You don’t have any friends. You have henchmen, like a mafia boss, groups you have paid to do your bidding. Your “friends” are mainly Hizbollah, Hamas, the Iraqi militias and the Houthis. They are a fickle bunch, it must be said.

Hamas, not otherwise known to cause amusement, is a hilarious example here. First they said that their sugar daddy in the Islamic Republic was doing great stuff in bombing Israel. Then sugar-daddy started bombing sugar-mummy Qatar. Qatar threatened to throw Hamas out of the country if they did not stop supporting the mad dog “bomb everyone” strategy of the regime in Iran. Hamas know where their bread is buttered, so they reversed course and said Iran was very, very bad. Even Hamas know that the Islamic Republic is done for! Even if our pundits do not. That… and the terror of knowing that, horror of horrors, the suites at the Four Seasons in Doha might not be gifted to them by the Al Thani family. I’ll say whatever you want, mummy, just give me back my jacuzzi!

Hamas in Qatar with Sugar Mommy money

Looking from Israel, Shaking our Heads

None of these pundits see what is so obvious when seen from Israel. The fact is that once you do the “Death to Israel” chant, you do not actually want everybody to just settle down. You want… y’know… “Death to Israel”, that thing you were chanting.

This war was always coming. The only scenario where Israel could avoid war with the Islamic Republic was if the Islamic Republic would crumble before the war came. It is not any war. It is a war to the death. Either the Islamic Republic falls or Israel is destroyed. That’s it. That is the meaning of “Death to Israel, Death to America”. It is not, and has never been, that the Mullahs want to change Israeli or US policy. It is the idea of exporting the revolution with ballistic missiles, terror proxies and nuclear weapons to destroy Israel and exterminate the Jews who live there, force the US out of the region and control it through their religious police and oppression. Then the Mahdi will awaken. Jeez. This sentence has to be said over and over. Just because it is insane does not mean that people don’t believe it, deeply. Just because it is insane it does not mean that this is not the state policy of the Islamic Republic.

It doesn’t have to do with WWI or Tacitus or The Incredible Hulk or the dear protectors of sovereignty of the IRGC. It does not even have to do with Trump and Netanyahu; they just happen to be the people in the driver’s seat right now. The navel-gazers of the West just will not listen. They refuse to believe that not everything is about the behaviour of the West. No, dear. It’s not about you.

Will it work? I have no crystal ball. Of course we feel safer in Israel when Khamenei, Larijani and the heads of the IRGC and the Basij are dead. Of course we feel safer that their weapons industry is being systematically destroyed. Of course we feel safer when the nuclear weapons sites are being targeted. If they have fewer weapons, fewer of us will die. This is the nature of war against fanatics, especially the endless extermination war that the Ayatollahs dream of. What we dream of is something else. A new, democratic Iran, friends with Israel and the West. It is no pipe dream; it is what most Iranians want.

However, if the regime somehow manages to survive this, the war is not over and will continue again in the next round. These are the basics. All the merry-go-round of the pundit class of the left, right and centre cannot change this.

Quds Day is the regimes version of a fun festival. A real treat. To whip up an extasy where their extremists fantasize about crushing the Jews and seizing “Al-Quds”. Jerusalem. But this year, on second thoughts, they may forgo the thronging crowds and settle for fireworks, to be seen on Iran State TV and Al Jazeera. Quds Day was instituted by the man himself, the man of Shiism as Darth Vader is the man of the Force, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He did this all back in 1979 and is meant to fall immediately after Ramadan. Khomeinis idea of an after-Ramadan party is to get together and shout Death to Israel. A party I may excuse myself from attending but a party none the less.

Fun fact: Al-Quds is an abbreviation of Bayt al-Maqdis, which is just Arabic for Bait HaMikdash in Hebrew, “the Holy House.” Quds and Kaddosh (or qadosh, if you prefer, that is Q-D-S) are the root. The Arabic word is built on the Hebrew word. The Muslim notion that the site is holy is based on the Jewish idea that the Temple in Jerusalem was the Holy House to begin with. The irony of having a “Quds Day” centered on defeating the Jews is a whopper. An oxymoron. The house is so holy, so therefore we must crush those who made it holy. Oh you don’t get it? Don’t worry. It makes more sense if you are shitfaced on antisemitism. I’m sure it all sounds awesome in Arabic. And Persian.

On the 28th of Feb, a missile from Iran fell right next to the Temple. So much for their holy mission. A waft of wind could have sent reduced Al Aqsa to a smoldering heap of rubble. The idea that the mullahs would be better stewards of the holy city and its sacred sites than Israel beggars belief. And now it is Ramadan. Ramadan Kareem! For those of my readers who celebrate. Amid the war, Israel allowed around 100,000 Muslim worshippers to enter Al-Aqsa on the Friday of Ramadan. This is unfortunately down from 320,000 who came last year under calmer circumstances. Excellent. Topp stuff. The more the merrier. Religious freedom is a vital part of a healthy democracy.

Now, how many Jews do you think could pray at the Western Wall if the Islamic Republic were to succeed in their wild fantasies of taking Jerusalem? We actually have a precedent for this. Not that wild fanatics like the Islamic Republic took Jerusalem, but at the mild mannered cultured king Hussein of Jordan. This proper gentleman was educated in Harrow and then went on to Sandhurst military academy. He was as British as me, that is, educated in Merrie Olde England but not British by blood or nationality. So what did this fine man do with the custodianship of the holy places? Well however high-minded his education may have been, he did not open the Jewish holy places to worship by the Jews, although he is said to have privately considered it. So if this fine Muslim ruler could or would not open the holiest places to Jewish prayer, imagine how the barbarians of the Islamic Republic would act if they were running the place.

The Western Wall, that Israelis call the Kotel and that bad-mannered people call the Wailing Wall, is part of the same Temple complex. It is considered Judaism’s holiest site. However, Israel does not allow Jews to pray on the top of the Temple Mount. This is Judaism’s original holiest site, the place where Abraham is said to have lain down Isaak for sacrifice before being stopped by the almighty himself. This is because Muslims built the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock on top during the 7th and 8th centuries, roughly 1,700 years after it was first built by the Jews. The beautiful Golden Dome was originally a display of dominance. Muslims were literally the kings of the castle, and the Jews were the dirty rascals. When Jerusalem was again under Jewish control after the Six Day War, Israel had to decide what to do with it. Wonderfully, and somehow very Jewishly, Israel said “Fine. You built a very nice house on top of our old house, you keep the house, we just want the one wall. That’s it. One wall. Our “Third Temple” is the state itself. We want to do stuff in the real world. You keep the house”. It is all a very decent, very manganous divorce. That is how you move on in the world.

Like most Israelis, I like this deal. I support this ban on Jews praying on the Temple Mount. It is according to the principal of not picking a fight when you don’t have to. Sure, in reality this is discrimination. Against Jews. Against religious freedom. But ya win some and ya lose some. Better to have the whole country than one house.

Let the mullahs celebrate their Quds Day; I just hope they do not have enough rockets for proper firework display. Just understand that their view of Al-Quds is emptied of significance, historically illiterate, religiously ignorant and ham fisted in its brutal goals. They want to attack the city, kill its citizens, and ethnically cleanse it of those who made it holy in the first place. They want to erase the mosaic of people that makes the city so fascinating and replace it with their version of violent Islamism.

Then they recon the Mahdi will come. I hope not. I hope the hidden Imam never rewards this kind of supremacist nonsense.

Haviv Rettig Gur gave us a fascinating insight into the development of the ideology of the Palestinians. There is a word which keeps coming up when we talk about the Palestinians and it is the word sumud: determination, steadfastness, the ability to stand your ground. The static sumud is a strategy built on the loss of the Six Day War, and represents the determination to stay on the land and not flee, Palestinian discourse posited that the refugee experience was not to be repeated. The resistance sumud is the rabbit hole of eternal resistance to Israel’s existence. Building on the example of the Algerian war of independence, the Palestinians initially thought that sumud might be the way to revolution, thawra, or liberation, tahrir. In Algeria, massive terror against the French-Algerian “pied-noir”, which led to them clearing the land of the French (and the Jews) and creating an independent Arab state.

Algeria is not Palestine

The problem for the Palestinians, of course, is that the Jews were not the French, and they didn’t have a France to “go back to.” The Jews were not colonists, but literally refugees. Refugees from Nazi Europe and the nationalist Arab world. But the Jewish refugees, uniquely, found themselves in the only land that had ever seen any Jewish independence. Terror couldn’t work, it could never get the Jews to leave, they had nowhere to go. Which is why they, and the Iranian regime, built another, darker idea than tahrir and thawra: muqawama, the resistance. The idea of resistance is darker because it goes from revolutionary, as in something with an end goal like the liberation of Algeria or Palestine, to outright nihilism. Sumud now becomes a word to be resilient at any price. It is not really looking for a better outcome, because the better place is found in the resistance itself. Sumud is its own reward. In its religious trappings, the muqawama is the celebration of death itself to get closer to your desired outcomes.

Sinwar led the most effective of the death cults of the logical endpoint of sumud and muqawama. Hamas

A Death Cult is Born

This is the place of the death cult, of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Already at the birth of the revolution, during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Iran would send children out with little keys, sometimes made of plastic, to clear minefields for the Iranian soldiers behind them. The keys were the keys to paradise. Death was redefined, not for the first time in history, as glory. The mukawama and sumud of Hamas led to the 7th of October massacre and the inevitable devastation of Gaza that followed. In a way, it makes no difference if they really believe that the Mahdi, the Shia Messiah, will come once the Al Aqsa Mosque is liberated for Shia Islam or that Palestine will be “free” if it is free of Jews. The path itself is the goal, as Pooh Bear the Taoist would say. And the path, in this case, is death itself. It’s all good. Paradise is waiting for you anyway.

Clock in Teheran on Palestine Square, counting down to Israel’s destruction.

However, sumud is not the property of the Palestinians, and certainly doesn’t have to end in the death cult of the muqawama. Steadfastness is something that any people, any country can have a lot or a little of. Arguably, few have as much sumud as the Jews of Israel.

Sumud and the Roaring Lion War

Which brings me to the current war with the Islamic Republic of Iran. It seems that this war is all about sumud. All about who can hold out the longest. The sumud of the death cult of the regime in Tehran is not in question. It will fight for survival until it actually dies like its wicked leader, in ash and flame.

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The tyrant is dead! After 36 miserable years with Iran in his clutches, Khamenei is all gone!

Now we have to contend with the media war.

The PA Condemns Iran

It is hard to stop smirking at the fact that the Palestinian Authority released a statement condemning the Islamic Republic of Iran. The PA has a problem: many Palestinians support the Islamic Republic and Hamas’s attempts to kill as many Jews as possible, but the Islamic Republic wont stop attacking the Gulf countries in its “nuclear option” where it shoots at absolutely everyone in the region, sparking absolute fury. Abbas didn’t actually have a choice but it must have been agony. Oh to be a fly on the wall! Abbas grumpy face while he tight lipped tells the secretary to condemn the IRGC for being very bad terrorist… Baddies. Those footing the PA’s bill are primarily Saudi Arabia. They have to do as daddy says. Saudi would not look kindly if the PA suddenly said they supported the Islamic Republic attacking Saudi.

I am not at home.

“Oh, Abu Mazen!” shouts the secretary. “Its Bin Salman on the phone… Again…”

War Strategy of the Axis of Resistance

Way more seriously, we need to talk a bit about the war strategy used by the “Axis of Resistance.” As we all remember, this reached epic proportions in the war in Gaza. The strategy is to embed all weapons depots and command centers in hospitals, schools, mosques, and other sensitive sites like protected zones. In Gaza, they also built 500–800 km of tunnels where civilians could not hide. Only weapons, fighters, and hostages were allowed in the tunnels. Not one child.

The plan was always for Israel to pay a price in the media for attacking Hamas, or to refrain from attacking Hamas, leaving Hamas bases untouchable and allowing them to continue planning attacks against civilians and soldiers. This is a terror war because it uses terror tactics that disregard the rules of war and do not distinguish between soldier and civilian, whether among their own people or their enemies.

But Hamas hardly came up with this themselves. We can look back at the war in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis and see the same method of fighting. The Houthis hid in schools and hospitals, stole the food coming in for the suffering people, and complained about Saudi when famine they planned for inevitably arrived. And it worked. This long-forgotten conflict in the mountains of impoverished Yemen gained some media attention. Thanks to Al Jazeera’s gas money funding and a massive media campaign supporting the Houthies. Saudi had to back down.

Some poor, helpless Houthies under terrible Saudi attack.

It’s time to start connecting the dots. Yesterday, there was an explosion in Minab, southern Iran. It appears to have hit a school. According to Iranian state media, it was a girls’ school and many young girls were killed. Different media outlets report vastly different numbers, ranging from dozens to over a hundred. Iranian state media claimed it was an Israeli attack on a girls’ school. Little girls killed in bombings, media gold. This is meant to highlight Israel’s evil desire to murder children. Al Jazeera quickly spread the news. It is highly unlikely that Israel attacked in the area, as Israeli planes were not in that part of Iran at all, they were much further north. We do not know a lot of facts. We do not know if young girls were actually killed, and if so, how many. We do know that the school is located right next to an IRGC naval base. There are also reports that a missile fired by the IRGC malfunctioned and hit the school — something that has happened with hundreds of rockets fired by Hamas, killing many in Gaza. Of course we must leave open the possibility that the USA attempted to destroy the naval base and tragically killed young girls. But we must also recognize how valuable this type of story is for Al Jazeera likes to use. Perfect for propaganda for the mullahs.

Al Jazeera. The best propaganda piles of gas money can buy

Meanwhile, the same mullahs are bombing Doha, which must be a difficult time for Al Jazeera’s spin doctors and narrative makers. They run from missiles while writing articles to protect those firing them.

I can imagine one of them saying: “Are we the baddies?”

Itamar Ben Gvir with his noose, never loses an opportunity to make the country look as brutal as its critics say it is.

Adolf Eichmann, Israel’s last execution

The last person Israel executed was Adolf Eichmann in 1962, when he was hanged in Jerusalem. Eichmann was one of the chief architects behind the Final Solution in Hitler’s regime. He was dramatically captured by Mossad in Argentina in 1960 and smuggled to Israel. His trial had enormous political consequences in Israel and reshaped the way the Holocaust was understood around the world.

Before this, the Holocaust had hung like a shadow over the country, but it had been difficult to speak about it openly. Even though Yom HaShoah and Yad Vashem had already been established in the 1950s, public debate was limited. Labor Zionist ideology preferred to look forward — toward building the country with the image of the strong, armed Jew — rather than looking back into the bottomless pit of darkness symbolized by the powerless Jew, a raw and festering wound that lay less than a decade and a half in the past.

Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem

Eichmann’s trial changed this, as witness after witness stepped forward to recount their own experiences of surviving the Holocaust. It opened the door to debate and discussion. Hannah Arendt also transformed how we understand totalitarian regimes when she came to Jerusalem to observe the trial and coined the concept of the “banality of evil” — the idea that human beings, under extreme conditions, create a banality, a normality, a bureaucracy out of anything, even sending thousands of people a day to the gas chambers.

The Modern Equivalent of Nazis

The ideological similarity between Eichmann and someone like Yahiya Sinwar are not a coincidence. The Muslim Brotherhood adopted the entire framework of viewing Jews from the Nazis. The main Nazi mission was always to fight the “Elders of Zion”, the vast Jewish network of wealth and power from the humble Arian people. Jews were a cancer on the world. From Hamas point of view, they are the armed spearhead of the Muslim Brotherhood, fighting to end the vast colonial power of the Jews in the Middle East. Jews are a cancer to the Middle East, especially Jews with sovereign powers. It is true that the ideology of Hamas also has communist and Islamic roots, but as far as Jews are concerned, they are more like Nazis.

It is only logical that the violence therefore is similar. The moral difference between the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front (before the concentration camps were used during what has been called “the Holocaust by Bullets”) and Hamas’s Nukhba forces when they entered the kibbutzim on the 7th of October is nonexistent.

The difference instead concerns power and capacity. The balance of power between the Jews and Eichmann was the reverse of the balance between the IDF and Hamas. Hamas did not manage to commit genocide at scale simply because they were stopped by the IDF.

Yahiya Sinwar, the face of modern violent Jew-hatred.

So the top Hamas leaders who are captured — should they be executed like Eichmann? Fortunately, most of those who planned October 7, 2023, have been eliminated in the field, so we do not face this dilemma regarding the Sinwar brothers and Mohammed Deif.

Beyond the political and ideological goals of Hamas and similar groups, there is another argument in favor of the death penalty. This issue is different for Israel than for most countries. The enemy uses kidnappings strategically, as bargaining chips to secure the release of their worst murderers from prison. The more murderers who sit in prison, the greater the incentive for Hamas to kidnap civilians or soldiers.

The Balance of Power

On the other hand, the imbalance of power does matter — not in the childish, simplistic way many pro-Palestinian activists argue: because Israel has more weapons than Hamas, Israel must be the villain. The Starwarsification of conflict, that the rebels are always the good guys like Andrew Fox said. Rather, power entails responsibility. With great power comes great responsibility, Spiderman said. How true. Israel is a country deeply scarred by war, and the path to a mentality of revenge is short. It is a slippery slope toward casual executions.

One argument that does not hold in this case is deterrence. We are speaking about Islamist fanatics who embrace death. The death penalty would simply give them a podium, hardly deter other terrorists.

Ultimately, this is also a question for the democratic world. Internationally, dictatorships account for the vast majority of executions, with Iran and China far ahead of others. Those who call Israel fascist must reckon with the fact that Israel has not had the death penalty at all since Eichmann. Mass murderers receive life imprisonment, unlike in the Middle East, but very like the West.

Most democracies do not have the death penalty. It is a mark of democracy that we should safeguard.

For me, this is the strongest point.

Ari Shalit

When I meet Ari Shalit at an Americanized shopping center by the coast, he does not fit any of the stereotypes. A neat kippah shows that he is religious. But his soft Gothenburg accent and mild manners clash with the prejudice. He tells me how he came to become a settler. He himself does not like the word; he calls it a slur.

““Settler” is a word from propaganda — settlers and the occupation, the occupation and the settlers. The vast majority of those who live there are middle-class, decent people with families. Today the settlements have existed for four generations. People like to focus on those with an striking look, those with long curls and weapons slung over their shoulders.”

Shalit is, like so many other Swedish Jews, the child of parents who fled the Holocaust.

“The entire family fled from Germany to Norway in 1938. In 1942, when Norway — after Nazi Germany’s occupation of the country — began rounding up all the Jews in Norway for deportation, they fled to Sweden.”

A relative was saved when the shop she was in showed her a back door so she could escape the police who were searching for Jews. Of the roughly 2,000 Jews who lived in Norway before the war, around 770 were murdered in the various concentration camps, mainly Auschwitz. Many of those who survived did so because of the long porous border with Sweden.

“Germany is victorious on all fronts,” it says, in German, on the Storting (the parlement in Oslo) in Norway during Nazi Germany’s occupation.

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That he now appears in the Epstein files is tragic, ironic, shocking, and in another sense not entirely surprising.

Jeffrey Epstein

Personally, I don’t think the Epstein files say very much about world politics, beyond the obvious: if you have enough money, you can build a network among the most influential people in the world. Epstein was like a Bourdieusian nightmare. You can cash in your capital — cultural, financial, or political — in order to be part of Epstein’s network, where everything is at your disposal, from private jets and lavish parties on tropical islands to broken teenage girls.

So why do I say that it is unconnected to world affairs? Because these rich and famous people may have shown us their rotten morals, but Epstein himself was a moron. He was not pulling the strings of the world and had no agenda beyond getting more money and more chicks. Like a living, breathing, gangsta-rap song. Well, the living and the breathing part is over… Good riddance to that. But the network itself was scattershot. From Ehud Barak to MBS, from Steve Bannon to Noam Chomsky, from Clinton to Trump, from Nobel scientists to royal families. It is true that intelligence agencies probably had a field day listening in and manipulating where they could, and it is true that Epstein got sensitive information from Peter Mandelson, information he could use to get even richer.

Let’s be real, this is always true of the relationship between the rich, the government, and intelligence agencies. Intelligence agencies try to get information and the rich try to get richer. This is not rocket science. You have uncovered no great secret.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky on his friend Epstein

Not everyone in the network necessarily knew about the rotten core of the Epstein enterprise, but after Epstein went to prison, people should have known better and distanced themselves. Some did not. Like Chomsky. So Chomsky writes:

“I have seen the horrible way you are being treated in the press and in public. It is painful to say, but I think the best way to proceed is to ignore it. I have had plenty of experience, though of course not on this scale. A Google search will bring up tons of hysterical accusations of all sorts, even groups devoted to vilifying me, I pay no attention to it (…)

What the vultures really want is a public response, which then provides a public opening for an onslaught of venomous attacks, many from mere publicity seekers or assorted cranks (…)

That is particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed around abuse of women, which has reached the point where even questioning an accusation is a crime worse than murder.”

Noam Chomsky (2019)

Chomsky’s wife says that Epstein manipulated him — that is probably true, the man was a master manipulator. But it is also an insight into how deeply and easily Chomsky allowed himself to be manipulated. It is not as if he says, “Oh, tough luck old chap.” This is a deep identification with Epstein as the real victim. A total lack of self-awareness. It is also revealing. Note that Chomsky plays the victim himself, “even groups devoted to vilifying me, I pay no attention to it.” I am sure there are people who hated Chomsky, this is the fate of all public intellectuals, even a very minor one like myself. However, the fact is that Chomsky has been spectacularly wrong on so many issues through the years, and the idea that he should ignore any criticism could be indicative of his actual thinking. Let us not forget, the man’s road to intellectual stardom was to downplay and dismiss the Khmer Rouge genocide, where Pol Pot’s thugs murdered some 1.7 million people of a population of 8 million (1975–79), in Cambodia (Kampuchea).

Chomsky on the World

Paul Berman made an interesting observation about Chomsky already in 2002. After Chomsky had written a pamphlet about 9/11 titled “Was There an Alternative?”, he once again brought up the tropes that he had bandied around for decades — and blamed the attacks on the United States itself. American aggression is always the evil, and attacks on the United States are therefore always revenge.

“Chomsky sees a possibility of accounting for every last quirk of human behavior by invoking a tiny number of factors (…) the first of those factors is a greed for wealth and power, which is embodied in the giant American corporations (…) They command the services of the government and they buy and bully journalists

and intellectuals to create (…) a world where the general public bends to the corporations’ will.”

Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (2003)

Paul Berman sussed out Chomsky in 2003

One understands how attractive this is. It is a simple world to make sense of. A particular American form of socialism, in which all the evil in the world comes from one’s own country. In Russian socialism, you were of course only permitted to be proud of the Soviet system, so patriotism was mandatory. But these kinds of American socialists are condemned to hate themselves. It is a perpetual navel-gazing exercise. Me, mommy. It’s all about me.

The distance between the populism of MAGA, that America can do no wrong, and the populist left, that America can do no right, is less than we might imagine. They are both silly arguments but only one of them has a chance of winning elections. Also, what should be obvious for anyone apart from people like Chomsky, is that we are not living in a perfect world, but the USA is a lot better than its dictatorial rivals. Among a great many other things, there is no Chinese Chomsky who lives in China, because you can’t be a “China critical scholar” and expect not to be arrested.

Chairman Chomsky Thought

There are several sorts of socialism. There was the communist utopia, that turned out not to be a utopia at all, but was at least a kind of clear ideology, a civilization to itself. There is social democracy with its welfare state, with clear gains for society as well as some drawbacks. Chomsky was neither. He started out as an anarchist, but this is not his claim to fame. His true fame came from the fact that he would support anyone who was anti-American, from Pol Pot to Saddam Hussein or the Ayatollah. This is not a vision. It is an anti-vision. Chomsky ended up being like Peter Stormare’s magnificent character (I always need the Swedish angle) in The Big Lebowski:

“We are nihilists! We believe in nothing!”.

Peter Stormare as Uli Kunkel aka Karl Hungus in The Big Lebowski

Chairman Chomsky Thought is also very close to a conspiracy theory. The world is ruled by a shadow realm of American financial interests spreading across a world that only longs to be freed of them. Naturally, Chomsky believed the same about Israel — that it was an American outpost that had to be liberated by anti-Americans — whomever they may be… Even if he had kind things to say about the kibbutz movement.

Conspiracies, Conspiracies all around

The whole idea that the world is run from one place with its dirty tentacles everywhere, obsessed with money, may be the pillar of Chairman Chomsky Thought, but it is also exactly the logic that made the Epstein scandal as enormous as it is. Epstein did indeed rule over an empire with a rotten core and tentacles everywhere. Epstein truly was what Chomsky believed the United States as a whole to be.

This whole anti-American, anti-Israel thinking might all be theoretical fun and games for the scholar jetting around in Epstein’s private jet, but around the world people actually took this stuff seriously. Bin Ladin, for one, had a couple of Chomsky books on his shelf, more than any other Western writer. Why wouldn’t he? This is the kind of banal worldview that permits any violence as long as it is directed at the West.

Some random Chomsky fan.

Conspiracy theories, in turn, always have a tendency to boomerang back to the Jews. It certainly does not help that both Epstein and Chomsky were Jewish. In the nest of conspiracies and conspiracy theories that is Epstein, the great losers are of course the underage women who were exploited — but also the public’s tendency to sink deeper into conspiratorial thinking — and with that comes the Jew-hatred.

Chomsky was feeding the beast of resentment, grievance, and Jew-hatred. It is almost irrelevant if he knew this is what he was doing.

Well done to the two old fools. They really made the world worse than they found it.

Solutions to the Conflict

I was asked a question at a recent lecture. The question. The question of all questions. How do you solve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and perhaps between Israel and the Arab world more broadly? As Israel approaches its 80th anniversary, a solution seems farther away than ever. Many careers have risen and fallen over this issue, from American presidents to every student of Middle Eastern studies who has grappled with the problem.

Nachum Kaplan has written an excellent essay on this conundrum that seems to captivate the entire world. He begins by showing, quite simply, that the two-state solution is the most popular solution discussed internationally—perhaps even the only one. The article contains many quotes, but one that stands out is: “There was a strong demand for a two-state solution. There is consensus among us.” — Josep Borrell, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs.

This is hardly surprising. It is the obvious solution: two states for two peoples. There are many ways in which Israelis and Palestinians are unlike each other. Different languages, religions, political systems, you name it. Therefore separation is something of a sacred cow in international discourse. Indeed, not only abroad. A large part of Israel agrees with the two state principle, provided that it can lead to genuine peace and real security.

A.B. Yehoshua (1936–2022) was one of Israel’s great writers, who came to believe in a federal solution to the conflict.

The two-state solution, however, is not the only possible solution. Kaplan goes on to list a range of alternatives: a one-state solution; a federation between the two entities, as proposed by the great writer A.B. Yehoshua toward the end of his life, when he believed it was too late for a two-state solution; a three-state solution in which Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza are separate states; an Arab reunification in which Jordan takes over the West Bank (which was in fact Jordan’s plan well into the 1980s) and Egypt takes over Gaza (a piece of land the Egyptians want about as much as they want gangrene). There is also a gradual reduction of the most difficult aspects of military rule combined with trust-building measures, as the Bennett–Lapid government sought to pursue. Or why not Jared Kushner’s “Deal of the Century,” which focused on economic integration alongside a “near-state” for the Palestinians?

There is no shortage of ideas. What is in short supply are people who understand the conflict in depth. But if you listen carefully and filter out a great deal of noise, you can find those who do.

Listen to those who have changed their minds

Above all, it is valuable to listen to those who have changed their views on the conflict—people like Hussien Abubakr Mansour, who rejected the Muslim Brotherhood’s view of Israel, or Einat Wilf, who moved away from the Israeli peace movement’s perspective on the conflict. I could list many more, but you get the point.

Why listen especially to those who have changed their minds? Psychologically, it is difficult to change one’s views about anything at all, especially views rooted in values learned at a young age. One does not discard everything one has learned overnight; it is a process in which previously held beliefs are stress-tested, bit by bit. What holds up may remain; what does not must be discarded. This is a great judge of character. To say loudly and clearly: I was wrong. If you look at those who have never changed their minds about anything, the difference is clear.

Lila Abu-Lughod’s description of discovering settler-colonial theory is indicative. She describes how she felt liberated when she found it—extatic. At last, she had a framework with which to intellectually place the Jews who came to the Middle East into a category: “settler-colonial.” Lo and behold, this aligned perfectly with what she had learned as a child—that Jews were evil oppressors. What a surprise. Abu-Lughod may be one of the most respected Palestinian intellectuals out there, but she has never changed her mind about anything fundamental. Reinforcing one’s prejudices with ever more arguments is easy peasy—but it is pseudo-intellectual rubbish.

So how do you solve the conflict? To begin with, we need an honest understanding of why the conflict has not been resolved for so long.

Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865) was the genius who identified an invisible source of infection and succeeded in preventing it. He could not know that what he had discovered would later be called bacteria.

Invisible bacteria: seeing the conflict from the outside

In the 1840s, at Vienna’s hospital, the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, doctors did not understand why so many mothers and infants were dying from childbed fever. As men of science, they set out to find the cause. In the mornings, they examined all the mothers and babies who had died recently. Armed with what they learned from these autopsies, they then proceeded to assist with childbirth in the afternoons. Yet the deaths continued. Not only that—they increased!

In earlier times, one might have involved priests to drive out the demons murdering the children. The scientists, however, wanted to do better than the petty superstition of previous generations. Yet more and more mothers and infants died, so they examined more and more bodies. And still, more kept dying. Why?

Eventually, the genius Ignaz Semmelweis arrived at the answer. Something invisible was transmitting the infection. He had discovered bacteria, even though he did not know that this would be the name it would be given. These doctors, modern men of science determined to solve problem through experiment, knew nothing about this invisible threat. As a result, they did not wash their hands between conducting autopsies and assisting with childbirth. It was the doctors themselves who were infecting the next mother and the next baby.

Semmelweis proposed washing hands with chlorinated lime before delivery, and the deaths disappeared almost overnight.

The point of the story is simple: sometimes, you are the problem. You are spreading something you do not understand.

Ceasefire! Only now? Or forever?

1. Protesters who spread the bacteria

I think about this problem when I see so many people engaging on behalf of the Palestinian cause. There are two kinds of pro-Palestinian activists. On one side are those who want Israel to disappear; on the other are those who simply want an end to war and conflict and to the death and suffering they produce. I am speaking here only about the second group. They want peace—and so do I. The problem is a misdiagnosis that leads to a misguided solution. Just as the doctors who failed to wash their hands missed the bacteria, we risk missing what actually drives the conflict—or even making it worse—through “activism”, through the constant “autopsy.”

The bacterium that drives the conflict is hatred of Israel. Anti-Zionism: hatred of Jews distilled and redirected into hatred of the Jewish state. This is the bacterium that infects generation after generation. The idea that Israel is not a normal country, that it belongs to a special category uniquely saturated with sin—because they are Christ-killers, sorry, child-killers, sorry, settler-colonialists. This is what blocks a solution.

So when you attend a demonstration carrying the slogan “Ceasefire now!”, you may become like one of the doctors spreading the infection further. Your analysis may well be that fewer people should die. That is good. A ceasefire is good. Peace is good. Everyone involved with the dying children in the hospital—from the doctors to Semmelweis—agreed that it was bad that children were dying. The difference was that the doctors did not know what they were doing wrong, and it took Semmelweis to identify the invisible threat. In the same way, protesters who keep “performing autopsies” often fail to understand that hatred drives the conflict and ignites the wars.

As a result, they often do not understand that a ceasefire must apply to Israel’s enemies as well. They may not even understand why Hamas—a super-spreader of the hatred bacterium—must be disarmed. If Hamas is not disarmed, it will restart the disease, more people will die in massacres it carries out, and still more pointless wars will follow.

“Ceasefire now!” risks becoming “More wars later!”—through the doctor-cum-activist.

The catapult: it can be loaded with anything

The catapult: seeing the conflict’s narratives from inside Israel

Israeli politics is driven by fear. This is what characterizes Israel—and the Jews—politically. It is the fundamental emotion surrounding the intense focus on security. Being powerless without land has not worked out well for the Jewish people; therefore, you make sure you are strong enough to defeat your enemies. A guarantee against external threats.

But there are also threats from within—real and imagined. This ancient fear, that Jewish strength is eroded from the inside through internal division—the same kind of division that allowed the Babylonians and the Romans to crush the Jews and destroy the Temple—is another constant factor in Israeli politics. It is no fantasy. Israel cannot afford to be deeply divided. The United States will always survive internal division; Israel’s enemies, by contrast, are all around.

Take October 7th. Sinwar saw that Israel was internally divided over judicial reform and the mass demonstrations it triggered, and he moved to his brutal work—perhaps believing that the moment had come for a final solution to the “Israel problem”.

1. Fear: the basic Israeli debate

The debate over the two-state solution is therefore marked by fear, as Micah Goodman showed in his book Catch-67. One side portrayed an unbearable security risk in having a Jewish state that is far too small—barely twenty kilometers wide where I live. The other side portrayed an unbearable security risk in incorporating three million Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank under Israel’s control, and perhaps even two million Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. Fear was the emotion underlying the arguments on both sides.

At present, talk of a two-state solution is moribund in Israel. But the fear lives on.

Micah Goodman.

For two examples of rhetoric, we can ask ourselves which kind of Israeli poses the greater threat? Is it Amichai Eliyahu—Israel’s Minister of Heritage—who in November 2023 said that Israel should drop an atomic bomb on Gaza? Or is it David Grossman, perhaps Israel’s greatest living author, who in August 2025 helped normalize the genocide libel by agreeing to it? Both statements are profoundly damaging. I wish that neither Eliyahu nor Grossman had said what they said. But be careful to these statements more weight than they deserve. It is easy to misunderstanding of how this bacterium of anti-Zionism works.

2. The catapult: the rhetorical weapon against Israel

I apologize in advance for the mixed metaphors, but if we think of anti-Zionism not as a bacterium but as a weapon—a catapult—we can better understand how it actually functions. The catapult is aimed at Israel, and it can be loaded with anything: from paper airplanes, hay, and grass to bombs, grenades and rockets. Sometimes the accusations against Israel are absurd, such as “pinkwashing” or “greenwashing”—the idea that Israel promotes environmentalism or is kind to gay people in order to hide its evil crimes. These are like paper airplanes. Believing them is ridiculous. It is disturbing that so many people do believe them, but the premise itself is absurd. The dynamics surrounding tolerance for homosexuality in Israel are entirely separate from the conflict with the Palestinians. “Queers for Palestine” is like loading the catapult with grass. It is laughable folly. It disapates into dust—just like a pile of grass launched from a catapult—once it hits the air, or reality.

Aww… sweethearts. Adorable.

3. The catapult: what kind of ammunition?

When the catapult is loaded with an accusation of genocide from Grossman, however, it becomes a real bomb. It hurts when it lands. Israel’s world-famous author signs on to a falsehood because it feels morally righteous. When Eliyahu proposes actual genocide via an atomic bomb, that is another—well—bomb. This is a government minister actively advocating mass death against an ethnic enemy. Not a good look. I am as frustrated as anybody.

These bombs exist for a mix of reasons. For Grossman, it is important not to lose touch with the international left. The international left speaks of genocide in Gaza, so he must relate to that discourse. Grossman combines the physical destruction in Gaza with what people like Eliyahu say and drops his critical eye. “Yes,” he says. “Israel is committing genocide.” The payoff for the anti-Zionists is immediate: “Look—even Grossman says it!”

Eliyahu, for his part, is part of Israeli troll culture. Israeli troll culture is just as awful as it is everywhere else. But it also sounds very Middle Eastern. In the Middle East, people talk like this. “Death to” one enemy or another is fully normalized. “Cut off the head of” this or that opponent is exactly the language used by Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran. But he is a minister. So his statement becomes a tasty morsel for the anti-Zionists: “Look at what government ministers are saying!”

So we mix the international left’s narrative and style of speech with the way the Middle East speaks, together with the fear that drives all debate in Israel. It is an explosive combination.

4. Focus on the catapult, not the ammunition

The problem with the entire debate is its focus. How damaging are the bombs? That is often where the whole discussion ends up. One can—and should—say clearly that this is not good for Israel. But this cannot be the main focus. The main focus should instead be the catapult. All the catapult can do is to hurl things at Israel; that is its purpose. Everything said inside Israel that is used as ammunition by the anti-Zionist hate movement must be seen through this lens. The catapult never changes direction. It does not fire to the right at Syria, to the left at Iran, or straight back at Hamas or Hezbollah. Its also a catapult, it doesn’t do compliments.

Focus on the catapult. See its hypocrisy. See the bacterium. See the hatred coursing through the body politic—the hatred that aims the catapult.

Inside Israel, we can call each other traitors and nazis all day long, but it is pretty pointless, as are these outrageous statements mentioned above. Because Grossman knows, and Eliyahu knows, that their children and grandchildren will one day have to sit together in a trench facing Israel’s enemies. This was the experience of the hostages. They sat together, religious and secular, right and left. They were in the same tunnel, teaching us a lesson that we are all in the same boat.

The solution does not lie in reaching out to the international left; they have embraced anti-Zionism. The solution does not lie in speaking like Islamists; everything they touch rots to a pile of mold.

The solution within Israel lies in seeing one another, speaking honestly, and finding a way forward.

So what is the solution?

Hussien Abubakr Mansour dismisses the very idea of “solutions.” Once the bacterium, the hatred, is removed, he argues, everything else becomes a technical matter. Where does the border run? Who administers what? Like the border between Sweden and Norway—it is an administrative boundary between cultures that has no bearing on war or peace, or on economic cooperation. Einat Wilf believes the solution is “Arab Zionism,” in which Arabs abandon the idea that Israel must disappear so that millions of “refugees” can “return.” This is also Nachum Kaplan’s conclusion, that a majority of the Arab world does not accept Israel’s existence.

At some point, we have to talk about hatred—the bacterium, or the catapult—as the engine of the conflict.

Those on the Palestinian side who have moved beyond hatred, such as Realign for Palestine and Samer Sinijlawi, nevertheless argue for a two-state solution and separation. As long as that is the case, I believe it is worth supporting such a development in the long term—or at the very least, not closing the door on it entirely.

If hatred—the bacterium, or the catapult—is allowed to persist, then no solution is possible.

The point is that without hatred, everything is possible.

Raw Skåne

The series does not duck the hard questions. It feels like an anthropological investigation into the deepest secrets of the wide open plains of Skåne. It goes straight into the mud and the earth, under the skin, deep into the roots of the potato, beet and rapeseed society. When the main character Dani (Krista Kosonen) asks, “Why do people stay here?”, we all nod along sagely in agreement. Why the hell do they? We learn that Dani moved there from Finland, and speaks with that most beautiful of dialects, the singing style of Finnish-Swedish we got the pleasure to hear last year in the Eurovision surprise comedy hit Bara Bada Bastu. But she was with child so she was out of options. She therefore became one of the outsiders who stayed — so is basically talking about herself. In classic cop-buddy tradition, and very much to her frustration, a patrol partner is forced upon her. Malik (Mohammed Nour-Okleh), is pretty annoyed himself, especially at being called an intern which he is not. Malik is also an outsider he is from the inner city of Malmö and speaks Arabic with the street kids in town. The streets of slush and concrete are a far cry from the mud and the tractors.

They may both be outsiders, but Dani has lived in this bleak Skåne-fields for far too long. Her son is deeply entangled in drugs and welfare-fraud clans. Malik, the urbanite, is the only one who remains entirely outside this swamp called Synden, The Sin, ruled by the iron fist of the clan elder Elis (Peter Gantman).

Synden on Netflix. Peter Gantman, Krista Kosonen, and Mohammed Nour-Okleh.

It shines a harsh, cold light that exposes the raw truth about Skåne. The Scanian countryside is portrayed as an obvious clan society, siphoning off welfare benefits and infested with drug gangs. They distrust the state and the police, preferring instead to administer justice through honor-bound systems, as is their ancient way. Without doing the spoiler thing, I can say that the series doesn’t even shy away from taboos surrounding honor killings. That takes true grit.

This is, of course, a world we Stockholmers cannot comprehend — indeed, it’s a relief there are subtitles. That meowing sound of their accent is so hard to make out.

You ain’t in Södermalm no more, boy.

I’m floored. I had no idea it was this bad. Still, there’s an ever so faint, nagging suspicion that this isn’t really Brösarp they’re portraying after all.

Crime-ridden Brösarp. Don’t let the well trimmed hedges fool you.

Honour Societies and Dignity Societies

Political scientist Jonathan Haidt refers to this kind of society—clan-based and hierarchical—as “honour societies”. They place great value on social reputation, status, and, of course, honour. He contrasts these with “dignity societies”, where the individual and the individual’s inherent, inalienable worth are considered most important.

Haidt’s field of study is the United States. He argues that this distinction largely explains the political divide between Democrats and Republicans. Republicans from the heartland and the South tend to distrust the state; their mythology centers on the family taking care of itself and one another, with the honour system dispensing justice the American Dream is achieved with the help of family and church. The Democrats’ strongholds, by contrast, are the liberal coastal regions. There, the focus is on the individual—an individual who is not backed up by a family, clan, or church and therefore needs rights. As a result, Democrats often prioritize rights and social protection from the state, such as various forms of social safety nets. The mythology of the American Dream is about being able to make it big with the help of a justice system that is fair.

Its all about honour for Clint. If you hurt his pride, you will reap the whirlwind.

All due respect to the culture wars of America, they are indeed quite the spectacle. But there are far more extreme forms of “honour societies” than Oklahoma—especially in countries where the state is weak. Now where could that be? And there are far more extreme cases of “dignity societies” than New York, places where individualism, secularization, and trust in social safety nets are a lot more robust. Now where could that be?

What we see in Synden is a classic confrontation between “honour” and “dignity” societies, and a reminder of how violent the former can be. The main character, Dani, is torn between family and the state—between “honour” and “dignity.” Malik, on the other hand, is the only character in the entire series who stands fully on the side of the state and, therefore, “dignity.” Time and again, he urges Dani to follow the rules, and he looks on, bewilderment when he encounters these all these confusing foreign Scanian clan structures, with their crime and their honour.

Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map of the World (2005–2014)

How does this work internationally?

Inglehart and Welzel made a similar observation, but on a global scale, in 2014. The map is based on World Values Survey data from roughly 2005–2014. It places countries along two dimensions: how traditional or secular people’s values are (the Y-axis), and how much they prioritize survival and security versus self-expression and individual freedom (the X-axis). Sweden ends up high and far to the right, actually the most extreme case in the world. While many Muslim-majority countries appear right at the bottom and to the left.

This is not exactly the same as the distinction between dignity and honour, but it extremely close. The pattern is easy to see—especially since those who emphasize traditional values often have strong clan structures, while those who talk about “self-expression” most often emphasize individual rights. With such large groups that have been immigrating to Sweden from these countries, you have the extremes of the graph living side by side. The distance is not between Perstorp and Stockholm, but between the immigrant-heavy areas and the rest of Sweden.

Read more

War is almost upon us.

Trump has presented a list of demands to the Islamic Republic that are entirely reasonable to sensible people: stop the apocalyptic nuclear weapons program, stop supporting the genocidal organizations around the Middle East, abandon the ballistic missile program that exists solely to terror-bomb Israel, and recognize Israel. In a sane world, this is reasonable. But the ayatollah was presented with only one of these demands a mere eight months ago yet preferred to go to war—which he lost badly. Now, after the mass murder of their own citizens, the price has only gone up.

Instead of complying, the ayatollah’s close aide says that Iran intends to terror-bomb Tel Aviv the moment they are attacked. I believe him. You shouldn’t believe every threat from extremists, being a pompous macho megalomaniac is par for the course for Islamists.

But when it comes to murdering random people, especially the hated Jews, I believe him.

The world slows when you wait for war. That lethargic feeling. Fatalism sets in. My wife just canceled her trip to England; she felt she couldn’t leave the children when the war is coming. We could, of course, all go somewhere else. But we have a life here—and we can’t take the cats with us. Normality is an underappreciated part of life. You miss it only when it is gone.

Besides, hatred of Jews and Israelis isn’t something you can flee. It’s everywhere. Just yesterday, someone tried to murder Jews in New York. So, if we would go, we would need to keep a low profile, not speak Hebrew, try to avoid telling anyone where you moved from. Avoid certain places, people and conversations. Always be on your guard .The hatred cages you. Hems you in. .

No. We’ll probably stay here. Clean out the shelter one more time. Check the batteries in the transistor radio and keep watering the plants. Pergola lemala. Pergola lemata.

Of course, there is always the cheery thought that being in Israel and waiting for war to come is a lot better than being somewhere else in the region waiting for war to come.

In Gaza, the regime has built enormous tunnel systems, but they’re not for regular folk, they are for themselves and their weapons. It’s part of the human sacrifice strategy that wants women and children to die—the more, the merrier.

In Iran, it’s the government itself that does the killing: if you dare say you don’t want to live in a theocracy, you’re mowed down, imprisoned, raped, or executed. In Rojava, there is actually a form of government that wants to protect you—but what good is that when your allies stab you in the back and help the jihadists murder, rape and expel you?

In Israel, we have a society and the instruments of the state built to protect the population. From the Iron Dome to mandatory bomb shelters.

That is unusual.

All the Jews who has died in war and terror since the founding of the state amounts to roughly the same number of Jews who died at Babyn Yar, outside Kyiv, for a few days in 1941—a massacre of dreadful scale, yet perhaps only a footnote in that time of Holocaust. The total number of Israeli Jews that died in these 76 years doesn’t even equal the number of protesters the government of the Islamic Republic murdered on January 8 and 9, 2026. The difference between state and no state, totalitarian terror and democracy.

No—having a state that exists for its citizens, and is also strong enough to protect them, is a special thing. It’s a special thing for the Jews and a special thing for the Middle East.

Take extra special care of it. Don’t for a second believe that it is normal.

All of you who live in democracies—feel how precious they are. Each one is a miracle.

Outside, there is only death.

Good night and good luck.

Zita Cinema. Birger Jarlsgatan. A Gem of Stockholm’s Cultural Life.

Now Zita gives us an insight into what it means to be chic, intellectually trendy and culturally sensitive today. It offers the latest of the refined intellectual fashion embraced by the greatest of our enlightened cultural elite. The crème de la crème. Anti-Zionism.

These— our most enlightened citizens, the educated, radical clique of the radical chic. Those that I once looked up to, those whom I aspired to become—are now showing the depth of their half-knowledge. This is the Dunning–Kruger curve: knowing a little is worse than knowing nothing at all. Knowing a little often produces the most confident claims—and the most wrongheaded ones. Nothing is more self-assured than anti-Zionism. Few ideologies do as much harm.

No Thanks! No Tishbi at Zita

To show its devotion to anti-Zionism, Zita and declares itself an “apartheid-free zone.” Zita adds that it intends to boycott all goods and services coming from “Israel’s apartheid regime.” They bend the knee to BDS. This hip proclamation is backed up by a large Palestinian flag in the entrance, along with a donation box.

So what does a boycott actually mean? We can be fairly sure they don’t care whether the Intel chips in their phones come from Israel. We can assume they weren’t selling Tishbi wines at the bar to begin with. What it mainly seems to mean is that they won’t screen Israeli films or invite Israeli film directors. Hooray! Who wants to hear from them anyway? A party-pooper might point out that Israeli filmmakers are not, generally, ultra-nationalists or even supporters of Netanyahu. But… Jeez. Toby… That’s not the point! It’s the principle—as Hasse Alfredsson said when he burned a poor mans money in The Simple-Minded Murderer. That film could, incidentally, be seen at Zita as recently as July 2024.

Stellan Skarsgård in Den Enfaldige Mördaren 1982 (yeah, you are right. It’s Alexander’s and Gustaf’s and Bill’s dad)

Hang on… If this noble boycott applies to people like filmmakers, does it also apply to cinema-goers? What about Jews, and others who believe Israel should exist? In that case, Zita could adopt a new slogan: “Fighting Apartheid With Apartheid.”

Catchy.

If you want to take a look at the mental gymnastics required to sustain anti-Zionism in its Western form, look no further than the film it’s screening. Zita is now screening a film about the Holocaust—and not just any film. It is the harrowing Shoah, from 1985, by Claude Lanzmann. Over 9.5 hours, it presents interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators. Many have already pointed out that Lanzmann was a lifelong Zionist, and that much of the film was made in Israel with Holocaust survivors. For some reason, this is exempt from the rules of their wonderful “apartheid free zone.”

Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, 1985

The One-Eyed King

What on Earth is going on here?

I suppose in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king—but in this case, it simply means that those who see part of reality lead those who know nothing. Anti-Zionism in the Western world is based on this kind of selective knowledge, as Zita demonstrates. You must know what you should talk about and what is taboo according to anti-Zionist dogma. Zita permits, nay mandates, discussion of the Holocaust in all its gut wrenching details. Seeing without flinching the horror of industrial mass murder is a requirement—otherwise they wouldn’t be showing Shoah.

However, a taboo comes in directly after the Holocaust. Under no circumstances should you speak about what happened to those who survived the murder machine by fleeing to Israel. Indeed, that is why so many of the people Lanzmann interviewed ended up there. In the real world, Israel was almost the only country in the world to accept Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 1940s, certainly the only place within reach of the majority. These Jews were not necessarily Zionists—they simply had nowhere to go. Anti-Zionist mythology, however, claims that these millions of people were instantly transformed into evil oppressors and the thieves of the land.

This is very similar to what I read a pro-Israel priest in Iraq wrote about his older countrymen: they mourned the disappearance of all the Jews from Baghdad, where 25% of the population had been Jewish before World War II. Yet the same nostalgic Baghdadis hated Israel, Israelis and everything connected to Israel.

But… it’s the same people.

The same.

People.

They needed a safe place in the world. They found it in the only country that had ever been Jewish. It was not only those who came from the Holocaust; also those who fled Iraq and other parts of the Arab world, where Jews were ethnically cleansed, had only one place to flee. These are the people who created Israel, more than the ideological Zionist who came earlier. Israel functioned as a massive refugee camp for a long time for Jews fleeing the same scourge of antisemitism. In the East and in the West. To call these survivors “oppressors” is pure manipulation created after the fact.

Anti-Zionism, or “if she floats, she’s a witch.”

This is a version of “if she floats, she’s a witch.” The medieval equivalents to Zita, the cultural crème de la crème, developed a foolproof method to determine if someone was a witch. She was thrown into the water: if she did not drown, she was a witch, saved from drowning by witchcraft. Therefore she should be burned at the stake. If she drowned, maybe she hadn’t been a witch after all. In the same way: if Jews died in Auschwitz, they might not have been guilty of being a “cancer on society”, like the Nazis said they were. If they survived however… They are a cancer onto the Middle East.

Brilliant.

Revolting.

The one-eyed perspective is chosen. It is not random

The one-eyed king is not randomly one-eyed. No—this distinction between what is important and what is not in history is carefully chosen. This instrumentalization of certain parts of history comes from the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union, as well as Islam, Islamism, and the Arab world’s pull toward totalitarianism. This is the gigantic blind spot: the birth and development of anti-Zionism after World War II. The decades of propaganda that built the model “if she floats, she’s a witch.”

Out now! At Zita!

Anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein argues that anti-Zionism is the largest anti-Jewish hate movement in the West and distinguishes it from the antisemitism that culminated in Nazism, because the focus is different. Louis-Klein summarizes the main points as follows: Israel is perceived as colonial (or settler-colonial), apartheid, and genocidal. These traits are attributed to the Jewish state and do not change depending on which party is in power, or whether there is war or peace.

This fact alone should raise suspicion.

Johannes von Leers aka Omar Amin. The Nazi propagandist who didn’t have to quit his job in 1945, but continued under Nasser.

It was not only the survivors of the Holocaust that are forgotten, swept away from view by the propagandists. So too are its perpetrators. Why do most educated people in Europe know the name Himmler but not the SS man in the Arab world? This is the man who did the most to fuse Nazism with Islam: Hajj Amin al-Husseini? Why do most know Goebbels but not his subordinate, Johannes von Leers? Von Leers probably converted more people to violent antisemitism than his boss. But his great deed was not only from when he was part of the Nazi propaganda machine. It came afterwards, when he ended up in Egypt and set up a propaganda factory in 1957 at the court of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Let us remember that Nasser was perhaps the most influential Arab since Abu Bakr in the 7th century.

Another key part to what is missing from the chic anti-Zionists is the origin of Soviet anti-Zionism. This is really where they get all the vocabulary from. The Soviets created modern anti-Zionism in order to influence its allies in the Arab world. Soviet demonology from 1974–1986 against Israel and Zionism probably converted more people to Jew-hatred than Hitler did. Certainly more from the countries of the victors of the war. These propagandists came up with the ingenious method of removing the word “Jew,” from Jew hatred. Indeed claiming to oppose antisemitism, while openly calling themselves anti-Zionists. They attribute all the evil traits traditionally associated with Jews to Israel. They were Soviet propagandists who labeled Israel as the embodiment of “racism, imperialism, capitalist expansion, murder, crime, terror, prostitution, and even Hitlerism” (Korey, p.13. 1995)

Trofim Kichko, the Ukraine-born Soviet propagandist who reformulated antisemitism into anti-Zionism.

True education, beyond the ideologically chic, requires removing one-eyedness and seeing the whole history. The war against the Jews did not begin in 1933, nor did it end in 1945.

I could tell all this to Zita—if they haven’t already banned me for my Israeli passport.

You can always choose to open your eyes.

Both of them.

Here we are at the cusp of war. A repeat of the The Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran in June 2025. This previous war was called “Rising Lions” by Israel. Mivtza Am KeLavi, the maning breaks down into Mivtza “operation” in modern Hebrew together with Am KeLavi “people like a lion” in Biblical Hebrew. The biblical phrase is from Numbers 23:24:“Behold, a people shall rise like a lion, and lift itself up like a lion”. However, in English, it was cleverly given the plural, not “a lion” but “Rising Lions”. Why? This is the Lion of Israel and the Lion of Iran rising. Ancient civilizations spanning the millennia, connected from the time of Cyrus the Great.

The Real and the False Flag of Iran

The current flag of the Islamic Republic is the only national flag in the world that contains text in a language that is not the country’s own: Allahu Akbar is written in Arabic, not Persian. The phrase appears 22 times, representing the 22nd of Bahman in the Iranian calendar—corresponding to 11 February 1979, the day the Islamic revolution, or coup, succeeded. For that reason, many see it as completely the creation of the regime, in no way representing all Iranians. It is a foreign flag, symbolizing the power, violence, and Islamism of the ruling mullahs.

Iranian protesters instead raise the lion-and-sun flag, the flag from before 1979. The lion and the sun have also long been symbols of Persia and Iran (Shir o Khorshid). Although the symbol itself was probably introduced by the Seljuk Turks in the 13th century, it has a much longer prehistory. It is an astrological, pre-Islamic symbol with roots going back as far as ancient Mesopotamia.

The Sun and the Lion in Western Asia

Several astrological and theological traditions merge here. For astrology, a particular favorite of the Magi at the Persian court, the Sun God is said to dwell in the astrological sign of Leo. In the pre-Jewish theological traditions of the Levant as well as Mesopotamia, there was the great sun god Shamash or Shemesh, which gave Hebrew its word shemesh and Arabic its shams for sun. Interestingly, Shamash could also be symbolized by a lion. The lion and the sun are thus united by mythology and astrology across Western Asia.

Perhaps the look of the great mane of the lion looked like the shining sun. Perhaps the immense strength of the lion made its connection to the great life-giver, the sun, self-evident to the world’s earliest civilizations.

The Jew and the Lion

For Israel and the Jews, the connection to the lion does not come only from pre-Jewish tradition but also enters the Bible. As we have seen with the quote above, lions are mentioned fairly often. The Lion of Judah and Israel is specifically mentioned in Genesis (49:9). The patriarch Judah, one of Jacob’s sons and the forefather of one of Israel’s twelve tribes, is described as a gur aryeh, a “young lion.” Judah’s bloodline was later linked to King David and his son Solomon. Since biblical times, the territory of Judah has included both Jerusalem and Hebron. In Christian tradition, king Davids bloodline also links to Jesus (Matt 1:1 among many others), leading to lions becoming a popular motif throughout Europe, not least in England.

Judah under the Prophet Isaiah 8th C BCE

Bob Marley and the Lion

As a slightly off topic curiosity, there is the lion mythology going in a completely different direction. Lions played a major role in the mythology in Ethiopia, where Emperor Haile Selassie was said to descend from the line of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. With Solomon we of course have the Gur Arieh of Judah mentioned above. So lion imagery has long been used in Ethiopia but Heile Selassie expanded this use massively.

This in turn influenced Rastafarian culture in Jamaica, which explains why we have songs like Bob Marley’s “Iron, Lion, Zion.” The Rastafarians believe that they, like the Jews, were a people far from their homeland who needed to return home. As black people brought to the New World centuries ago, against their will, Rastafari culture arose as a yearning for a return to Africa. This would finally happen under the great biblical, divinely ordained king, Haile Selassie. For Rastafarians, Ethiopia is Zion.

As would happen in Iran five years later, in 1974 there was a coup in Ethiopia. A marxist junta, the Derg, took control of the country. For Rastafarians, this rule was the revenge of “Babylon”, a wicked turn of events against God’s plan. They therefore long for the return of the Emperor. All the time using this biblical, West Asian imagery.

Emperor Heille Selassie 1892-1975

The Real Lion

While people through the millennia have lauded the Asiatic Lion (Pantera Leo Persica), becoming the emblem of countless kings and emperors, the animal itself has not commanded the respect it so justly deserved. Humankind simply wouldn’t leave it alone. It was once found all over Western Asia, from ancient Israel to India. But it was hunted for sport by all manner of people, from Assyrian kings to Romans to the Persian kings. Even the great Persian kings Xerxes and Darius hunted lions. But the final blow came from trophy hunters who came from the colonial powers in the 19th century to exercise their merciless blood-sport. These Europeans, far from home, killed some of the last remaining Asiatic lions. In Iran, the very last one in the region died in 1940. Thus, humans exterminated the real Asiatic lion in Western Asia. However, there is hope. There is a tiny population that survived in Gir forest in Gujerat, India.

They too, ale vi, should expand back into their ancient homeland.

Asiatic Lion, similar to the African Lion but slightly smaller

The Return of the Lion

The lions are indeed coming back. From Israel to Iran the lion will come. With the lion comes the light of the sun. As the Magi would believe, so must we. It will shine on the limitless bravery of the Iranian people trying to rid themselves of oppression and darkness.

The lion is rising.

There is no stopping it now.

Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna)

The Sweden Democrats

The Sweden Democrats, the party Åkesson leads, was created by Nazis. One of its founders was Gustaf Ekström, who served as an SS officer between 1941 and 1943 and remained a Nazi until his death in 1995. It is sickening to recount his poisonous words: “All the time we felt that we were fighting against the extensive power of world Jewry over Europe and other parts of the world,” he said proudly on Swedish television in the 1990s. During the 1980s and 1990s, the party was formed by Ekström, other former “old guard” Nazis, and younger people from the white power and skinhead movements around Bevara Sverige Svenskt (BSS, Keep Sweden Swedish).

What happened under Åkesson’s leadership was an attempt to shed much of what made the party unelectable to the broader public. This culminated in the declaration of “zero tolerance for racism” in 2012. Not least, the party has become increasingly pro-Israel, something that makes its history of antisemitism more ambiguous.

Instead, it focuses on crime, immigration, and Islam. This strategy has been extraordinarily successful in opinion polls. Coming to Israel and supporting Israel is a no-brainer if one wants to mobilize the previously under-mobilized segment of Sweden that supports Israel, while also washing away the stench of Nazism. Of course, many people call this putting lipstick on a pig, yet it has worked very effectively. Not least because the Swedish Left massively hammers home this point to the in that same hysterical way that the Left talks about Israel. Shouting about something is sometimes pretty ineffective. Today, it is Sweden’s second-largest party, polling at around 20–21 percent. But it is, and remains, the world’s largest party with Nazi roots.

Ziv Nevo Kulman, Israels ambassador to Sweden will not meet with the Sweden Democrats.

Israel

So what is Israel to do with this party? The answer is just as ambiguous. Ambassador Ziv Nevo Kulman does not want to meet them at all, which is hardly a surprising stance. But Chikli has chosen to invite them to Israel. That choice is also not hard to understand.

Israel is at war. In war, everything becomes simple. You are either with us or against us. Israel has faced a great deal of “against us” in this war, and when someone shows up wanting to be a friend, it is hard to say no. As Churchill said when people complained that he was making common cause with Stalin against the Nazis: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”

Churchill’s main enemy was the Nazis. Part of what made him so unique and successful was that he never lost his laser focus on that fact. That focus would ultimately come at the price of the entire British Empire and an alliance with unsavory dictators like Stalin. But Churchill never wavered.

Right now, Israel is at war with the Islamic Republic of Iran and its puppets in Hamas and Hezbollah, and their genocidal friends. This is the main enemy, not the new right in Europe. This so-called “Axis of Resistance,” headquartered in Tehran, has been deeply inspired by the very same repulsive ideology represented by Ekström. The Iranian regime and the other radical islamists, too, believe they are “fighting the extensive power of world Jewry” when they send armies and missiles to destroy Israel. Its not actually a coincidence. Nazism was never thoroughly discredited and comprehensively beaten in the Muslim world in the way it was in Europe by Churchill and his allies. Nazi propagandists found fertile ground in the Middle East. Europe exported Nazism to the Muslim world and the Muslim world is exporting it back to Europe. Lovely.

Now, given this focus of most of the people of Israel at that threat, if someone from Ekström’s old party now says they want to remake themselves entirely and cooperate with the Jews, many in Israel—especially on the right—find that perfectly acceptable.

Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli invites Åkesson to Israel

Beware the hard right of the West

Of course I think it is better that Åkesson comes to Israel rather than spreading antisemitic libel. However, personally, I will always view the Sweden Democrats with suspicion. It is not only their past. It is that the contemporary hard right’s affection for Israel does not have to be genuine, or particularly durable. Not genuine, because it cannot be separated from the engine that drives the hard right: the idea that there are too many Muslims in Europe. Not durable, because many of the gateway figures of this movement, such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, have already begun mixing old, rancid antisemitism with new, fashionable “anti-Israel” rhetoric.

This risks recreating the monster that culminated in the Holocaust.