The Sanctification of Death Is Becoming Israel's Political Norm

Haaretz Editorial

Dec 9, 2025

https://archive.ph/jxT0m

"A wide and deep moral abyss separates us from our enemies," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasts at every opportunity. "They sanctify death, we sanctify life." But this week, his ministers provided depressing proof of the extent to which that statement has turned on its creator. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and members of his party came to a Knesset committee hearing on a bill to mandate the death penalty for terrorists wearing pins shaped like a noose on their lapels.

This pin is "a nauseating takeoff on the hostage pins" commonly worn while the Israeli hostages were in captivity, as MK Gilad Kariv (Labor) aptly said. But the original pin symbolized the sanctity of life, while the pin worn by Ben-Gvir and his colleagues sanctifies death. It's hard to imagine two symbols more opposed to each other. It's no accident that the politicians wearing the noose pins were the same ones who opposed every proposed hostage deal.

Sanctifying death has become blatant, public and demonstrative in Israel, whether through calls for starving residents of the Gaza Strip, celebrations of the massive death toll in Gaza or the normalization of violent attacks in the West Bank. This pin fits its wearers like a uniform. If Israeli society doesn't eject them from its midst and put this worldview back on the fringes from which it came, the sanctification of death will become the political norm in Israel.

During the committee session, a representative of the Israel Medical Association said that Israeli doctors are bound by international conventions that completely forbid them to have any involvement, whether active or passive, in executions. "Our knowledge must not be used for any purpose that doesn't involve promoting health and welfare," he said. But the bill Ben-Gvir is pushing would require doctors to be hangmen. It demands that they choose the poison and the dose and then prepare the body for the lethal injection.

A legal opinion drafted by the committee's legal adviser also thoroughly eviscerated the bill. The problems are obvious. It would eliminate judges' discretion; it would make the death penalty mandatory, which isn't true even of the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law; it would apply only to Palestinians in the West Bank, thereby violating the principle of equality before the law; and it completely contradicts international conventions that Israel has signed.

The opinion also noted that no legal system is immune to error, and the death penalty leaves no way to correct a mistake. But then, we shouldn't forget that in the eyes of Ben-Gvir and his Kahanists, even babies are potential terrorists if they are Arabs, so no mistake is possible in imposing the death penalty.

The law isn't just unacceptable from a constitutional and moral standpoint. It is also completely pointless from a security standpoint. Not one single study has ever shown that the death penalty deters terrorists. If Israel still wants to see itself as a country that sanctifies life, it must throw the noose pin and the worldview it represents into the dustbin of history.

Militarism Without Strategy: How the 2025 National Security Document Institutionalizes Perpetual Conflict

by Peter Rodgers | Dec 10, 2025 |

https://original.antiwar.com/Peter_Rodgers/2025/12/09/militarism-without-strategy-how-the-2025-national-security-document-institutionalizes-perpetual-conflict/

On December 4, 2025, the Trump administration released a document claiming to herald a “Golden Age of Peace”; yet a careful reading reveals an entirely different picture: a roadmap for institutionalizing chronic militarism and perpetuating conflict in a new form. The new U.S. National Security Strategy portrays Trump as the “Peace President” who has allegedly “achieved peace in eight global conflicts,” yet the same document simultaneously authorizes the use of “lethal force” in other countries, the expansion of military deployments at borders, and the weaponization of economic tools. This apparent contradiction is not accidental; it is part of a structural logic that links claims of non-interventionism with the reality of expanding military dominance.

The 2025 National Security Strategy reveals this operational redefinition of “peace through strength”—which in practice means the continuation of militarism, though no longer through direct occupation but through more complex mechanisms of regional control and economic coercion—across three key dimensions: first, the revival of the Monroe Doctrine, declaring the Western Hemisphere America’s “natural sphere of influence” and justifying military intervention against any “foreign threat”; second, the securitization of migration, transforming borders into military frontlines and legitimizing armed force deployment; and third, the legitimization of unilateral military operations on foreign soil under the banner of counter-terrorism and anti-cartel operations – all of which, beneath the rhetoric of peace, institutionalize the continuation of American militarism in a new guise.

The document crowns the president “The Peace President” and claims he has quietly ended eight wars around the world. In the very same pages, however, it calmly authorizes American forces to cross borders and use “lethal force” inside other sovereign countries, expands military deployments along entire continents, and turns economic tools into weapons of coercion. This is not a contradiction by accident; it is the whole design. It allows the government to say “we don’t want war” while building a system that keeps everyone on the edge of one.

From the viewpoint of anyone who has spent a lifetime studying real peace – the kind that lets children walk to school without fear, the kind that keeps hospitals open and fields planted – this document does not describe peace at all. It describes what scholars sadly call “structural violence”: a quiet, everyday violence that does not always make headlines with explosions, but that shortens lives all the same through fear, hunger, and the slow grind of sanctions and threats.

At the heart of the strategy is a new version of an old idea: the United States gets to decide what happens in the entire Western Hemisphere, and no one from outside – China, Russia, Europe, anyone – is allowed to have a say. They call it the “Trump Annex” to the Monroe Doctrine, but to families in Mexico, Colombia, or Honduras it simply sounds like a new declaration that their countries are not fully their own. The document says, in plain words, that American troops may enter any neighbor’s territory to hunt drug cartels, using deadly force whenever they judge it necessary, without asking permission and without going through the United Nations or any court. Drug cartels are criminals, yes. But turning a crime problem into a shooting war across borders has been tried before in Latin America, and the only things it ever produced were widows, orphans, and deeper hatred.

We have already seen the first signs: quiet navy raids on boats far out at sea, warships gathering off the coast of Venezuela, rumors of plans that look a lot like forced regime change. None of this is announced as war. No congress votes. No Security Council resolution. It is war by another name, hidden behind the phrase “border security.”

The document keeps repeating that America is done with interventionism, that it is neither hawk nor dove, neither realist nor idealist. Those words are carefully chosen so that any action – no matter how aggressive – can be made to fit. When Washington likes an authoritarian ally in the Middle East, it says “we don’t interfere in how others govern themselves.” When it dislikes a government in Latin America, the same principle disappears and the marines are suddenly an option. Rules, in this new vision, are not principles; they are tools to be picked up or discarded depending on power and convenience.

What we are left with is a strange kind of permanent half-war: no official declarations, no clear battlefields, just an endless low hum of menace. Troops on hair-trigger alert along borders that used to be neighbors. Economies strangled until they gasp. This is not the architecture of peace. It is the architecture of exhaustion, designed to keep everyone too afraid or too poor to challenge the new order.

Real peace – the kind human beings have always longed for – looks entirely different. It looks like a Guatemalan village where the army is no longer needed because the land reforms finally happened. It looks like a hospital in Sana’a or Gaza that never runs out of electricity. It looks like two teenagers, one Palestinian and one Israeli, playing football together without soldiers watching. It looks like a planet whose leaders decided that burning the future to win today was no longer acceptable.

The 2025 National Security Strategy does not move the world one millimeter closer to any of those things. It moves us further away.

For anyone who believes peace must mean justice, dignity, and shared survival, this document is not a celebration; it is a warning bell in the night. It shows how easily the word “peace” can be emptied of meaning and filled instead with the sound of marching boots and the silence of empty clinics.

The responsibility now falls to the rest of us – ordinary people everywhere, communities, cities, smaller nations, movements of conscience – to keep alive a different voice. A voice that insists real security comes from schools that stay open, from fields that yield enough food, from air that children can still breathe in fifty years.

If we let this gilded version of “peace” become the only story told, then the golden age will belong not to humanity, but to fear.

And that is a future none of us should accept.

I was canceled by three newspapers for criticizing Israel

Editors at right-leaning publications stopped responding to my emails after I wrote columns critical of the war on Gaza in other media outlets.

Dave Seminara

Dec 09, 2025

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/canceled-criticizing-israel

As a freelance writer, I know I have to produce copy that meets the expectations of editors and management. When I write opinion pieces, I know well that my arguments should closely align with the publication’s general outlook. But I’ve always believed that if my views on any particular topic diverged from an outlet I’m writing for, it was acceptable to express those viewpoints in other publications.

But I’ve recently discovered that this general rule does not apply to criticism of Israel.

In fact, it appears that publications I’ve had an ongoing relationship with up until recently have canceled me for articles I wrote in other media outlets that were critical of the Israeli government and the Israel lobby in the United States.

In recent years, I penned more than 100 columns for prominent right-leaning publications, including The Wall Street Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, and The Daily Telegraph. I’ve covered woke corporations, illegal immigration, inflation, foreign policy, the State Department, censorship, Florida politics and a host of other issues. I never once pitched a column concerning Israel to the aforementioned publications because I know the editors and leadership at those outlets are staunch backers of unlimited U.S. aid to Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his merciless assault on Gaza, not to mention President Trump’s efforts to deport foreign critics of Israel, his administration, and other related issues.

I have never seen an opinion column in The Journal, City Journal or The Telegraph expressing compassion for Palestinian victims of Israel’s military assaults. In fact, quite the opposite. For example, Ilya Shapiro, a contributing editor and the Director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute, said in a since deleted tweet, “Ethnic cleansing would be too kind for Gaza.” That comment isn’t an outlier. The prevailing wisdom at these publications is to excuse and defend the behavior of the Israeli government, regardless of the situation.

And so, when I wanted to express my disgust at the outrageous number of civilian casualties in Gaza — the Israeli military has killed at least 70,000 Palestinians according to the U.N., including more than 18,000 children — and lament the Trump administration’s efforts to deport people for criticizing Israel, I never considered pitching editors at those three publications.

Between November 2023 and May 2024, I published several columns, including for The Spectator and on my personal Substack, Unpopular Opinions, criticizing Israel and U.S. policy toward Israel. I think my critiques were mild — for example, I never categorized Israel’s actions as a genocide. Given Israel’s flagrant human rights violations, my commentaries were well within the boundaries of how most Americans feel about the carnage in Gaza. For example, in a column I wrote in November, 2023, I noted that:

“I was horrified by the October 7 Hamas attacks. And I was disgusted to see some self-proclaimed pro-Palestine advocates celebrating or justifying the barbaric attack act. This was a horrific act of terrorism, and there’s no excuse for it.”

But I added that I was disappointed with “how many conservative politicians and conservative media refuse to articulate any concern for thousands of innocent Palestinians killed or the more than one million rendered homeless.”

In subsequent columns, I criticized the Republican Party for its fixation on Israel and argued how hypocritical many on the right are in conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism in order to silence critics of the Jewish state.

None of my editors at The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph or City Journal ever said a word to me about what I wrote in these columns. But my relationships with these three outlets deteriorated rapidly and dramatically after I started covering the topic. Prior to being cut off by the Wall Street Journal, I published 34 opinion columns for them since 2017. My relationship with the opinion editor, James Taranto, was good enough that when he visited Tampa, where I live, in 2022, he and his wife took me out to dinner.

I knew where Taranto stood on Israel, having once called Rachel Corrie, an American citizen who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting Israel’s settlement policy, a “dopey…advocate for terror.” Prior to writing critically of Israel, my success rate in pitching columns to Taranto was roughly 30-40% positive. Since then, he has rejected 12 consecutive pitches, all on topics unrelated to the Middle East. Previously, he would send a generic one-liner when he rejected an idea. “I won't be able to use this, but thanks for letting me see it.” Lately, my pitches don’t even merit a formal rejection. I went from being a regular contributor and on friendly enough terms to socialize after-hours, to being ghosted.

My apparent dismissal at City Journal, where I contributed 62 columns from 2020-2024, took longer and my editor there, Paul Beston, was kinder, but the result was the same. Rather than ignoring me, Beston would apologetically respond to my pitches weeks or even months later once the idea was too late to publish. He also stopped asking me to write columns for the website. Around the same time, the Manhattan Institute, which produces City Journal, fired prominent conservative economist Glenn Loury for being too critical of Israel, so perhaps there was a purge of Israel critics afoot. At least one other Manhattan Institute fellow who was critical of Israel, Christopher Brunet, was also fired last year.

My seeming dismissal at the rabidly pro-Israel Daily Telegraph, where I contributed 30 columns from 2023-2024, was similar to the City Journal experience. My editor there, Lewis Page, was cordial enough, but he, too, started to ignore my emails and stopped asking me to write for his publication. In one case, he asked me to write a column but then never published it.

Is it a coincidence that these three prominent, pro-Israel publications all stopped publishing me last year as I started to criticize Israel in other outlets? It’s conceivable, but quite unlikely given the zero tolerance for dissent on Israel that now permeates much of conservative media.

RS asked Taranto whether the Journal had stopped publishing me because of my views on Israel. Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot — whom I did not work with — responded that Taranto had passed on our inquiry and said, “I don't recall ever reading a piece by Mr. Seminara on Israel or Gaza, so I have no idea what his views on those subjects are.”

Lewis Page at the Telegraph said my version of this story is “false” and that neither he nor anyone else at his publication knew that I had been critical of Israel. He added that the paper has not “consciously stopped using” my copy.

A spokesperson I do not know and never worked with at City Journal said that they are unaware of my position on Israel. Of course, I don’t expect any of these publications to say, “We stopped commissioning you because we don’t agree with your position on Israel.”

The bottom line is that my views on Israel and U.S. policy toward Israel are in line with those of the majority of Americans and even of a majority of American Jews. According to a Washington Post poll conducted in October, 69% of American Jews think Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza and 39% believe it is guilty of genocide. A Pew Research poll released around the same time revealed that 59% of Americans have a negative opinion of the Israeli government. And in a September New York Times/Sienna poll, 35% of Americans said they sympathize with Israel, while 36% said they side with Palestinians.

I am not sorry for criticizing Israel even though it has cost me professionally. In fact, I was probably too cautious and diplomatic in my critiques. But I think it’s a very sad statement on conservative media when news outlets that many Republicans trust have so little tolerance for dissent on a critical issue that undermines American national interests and damages our credibility around the world.

During the crazy, cultural revolution days of 2020, when statues were being toppled and progressives were claiming scalps on a weekly basis, I thought it was just the left that embraced cancel culture and silenced enemies through intimidation. Now I know better.

 

On Israel, Trump Should Echo Reagan

Being firm about American interests and limits in the Middle East is healthier for both nations.

Anik Joshi

Dec 3, 2025

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/on-israel-trump-should-echo-reagan/

President Donald Trump is attempting to secure his foreign policy legacy in the Middle East. Not satisfied with the Abraham Accords, he is looking to bring a more permanent peace to the region and successfully mediate the Israel–Gaza war. American politicians haven’t found it difficult to stand up against Palestinian intransigence in the past, but, if Trump is to succeed, he has to also stand up to the Israeli government. He should take a lesson on how to do so from none other than President Ronald Reagan. 

Although today the reception of Reagan’s legacy with Israel focuses on how he strengthened the relationship through the 1985 free trade agreement or his strong support of Soviet Jewry, there was a time when he held a firm line against the Israeli government that drew very similar complaints to those Trump has articulated. 

In the early 1980s, much as it is today, Israel was at war with and invading its neighbors—Syria and the PLO in Lebanon. Much as is the case today, Israel maintained technological dominance over those rivals to a shocking degree: During the start of the war in 1982, in a span of just two hours, the Israeli armed forces shot down 85 Syrian MiGs and destroyed nearly all the country’s deployed Soviet-supplied SAM batteries. Israel continued to advance and by June had reached Beirut, which the army besieged, firing thousands of artillery rounds into the capital. 

Israel succeeded in forcing the PLO to withdraw, but not without infuriating the United States and Reagan, who threatened to sanction Israel and described the bombings to Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin as a “holocaust.” Reagan applied real pressure—within 20 minutes of a phone call between the leaders, during which he warned the behavior was going to threaten the relationship between the U.S. and Israel, Begin ordered a halt to the bombing. Reagan himself was shocked by the power he had to force the issue. There was no talk of standing with Israel above all else after this. The president was infuriated by the intransigence of an ally.

By August, Reagan’s envoy, Philip Habib, was able to achieve a ceasefire between the warring parties, and the PLO withdrew by September. Nevertheless, tensions remained extremely high, leading to the assassination of the Israeli-backed Lebanese president-elect. Shortly thereafter, Israel sent their allied Lebanese forces into civilian refugee camps filled with elderly men, women, and children, where they committed one of the bloodiest massacres of the war. Men were castrated; children died in the arms of their mothers. Tom Friedman’s reporting on what happened later earned him a Pulitzer. The response from American officials was strong and direct. Everyone, from Morris Draper to George Shultz to Reagan himself, was left horrified by the fact that an American ally permitted the massacre to happen. 

There are lessons aplenty here for the current administration if it should so choose to learn them. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, who’s the superpower here? Reagan knew the answer and was surprised at the power he could project on that basis. Yet many American politicians seem to have forgotten it. Once more, Israel is isolated in its neighborhood and is dependent on American military might to back it up; once more, the U.S. is ready to sign up for more Middle East adventures. The lesson of Reagan and Lebanon is twofold. First, there is little reason to expend American blood in a region that does not want it and where the agenda is unclear. Second, if there is to be involvement, whether that be troops or weapons, America has not just a say but arguably a veto on where and when those are to be used. Countries seeking a more independent foreign policy are welcome to find one—to the extent it isn’t subsidized by the American taxpayer. 

Trump was elected on winding down foreign wars, not signing up to perpetuate horrors in the name of an ally. It is unlikely there will be appreciation in all quarters for this, but ultimately these decisions are to be made by the superior partner in the relationship. In Reagan’s time, that was the United States. Time will tell who it is during Trump’s.

Syrian president accuses Israel of 'exporting crises' to distract from Gaza 'massacres'

Ahmed al-Sharaa also called on Israel to abide by deconfliction accord and withdraw from territories seized after the fall of the Assad dynasty

By Reem Aouir in Doha

Published date: 6 December 2025 

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/syria-president-accuses-israel-exporting-crises-distract-gaza-massacres

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa accused Israel on Saturday of "exporting crises" to other countries as a way to divert attention from the "horrifying massacres" it is committing in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Addressing the Doha Forum in the Qatari capital, Sharaa claimed that Israel was attempting to justify its actions against several Middle Eastern countries under the false pretext of "security concerns".

"Israel… tries to run away from the horrifying massacres committed in Gaza, and it does so by attempting to export crises," Sharaa said in conversation with CNN's chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour.

"Israel has become a country that is in a fight against ghosts," he said, before adding that Israel was exploiting the events of 7 October to justify an aggressive posture. 

"Since we arrived in Damascus, we sent positive messages regarding regional peace and stability… and that we are not interested in being a country that exports conflict, including to Israel," Sharaa said.

"But in return, Israel has met us with extreme violence," he added, saying that Israel had carried out more than 1,000 air strikes and 400 ground incursions since the fall of the Assad dynasty on 8 December 2024.

The interim leader also reiterated his call for Israel to withdraw from territories seized by Israel since then, and claimed that negotiations were under way with the United States for an Israeli withdrawal.

Israeli forces crossed into southern Syria as the Bashar al-Assad government fell, and continue to occupy a United Nations buffer zone - the strategic heights of Mount Hermon - which overlooks Israel, Lebanon and Syria.

Earlier this week, US President Donald Trump issued a veiled warning to Israel, and said it should not interfere with Syria's "evolution" after it carried out a deadly raid that killed more than a dozen people.

"The United States is very satisfied with the results displayed, through hard work and determination, in the country of Syria," Trump wrote on his social media platform, TruthSocial.

"It is very important that Israel maintain a strong and true dialogue with Syria and that nothing takes place that will interfere with Syria's evolution into a prosperous state," he added.

'Sustainable peace'

In his conversation on Saturday, Sharaa expressed his support for the 1974 disengagement agreement with Israel, adding that tampering with it "and seeking other agreements such as a demilitarised zone… could lead us to a dangerous place".

"Who will be protecting this buffer zone or this demilitarised zone if the Syrian army or Syrian forces aren't going to be there?” he asked.

Sharaa also told the forum that the Assad government had left behind deep sectarian divisions, but claimed his "administration prioritised reconciliation and forgiveness to build a sustainable peace".

The president pointed to economic recovery as a driver of stability, noting efforts to convince Washington to lift the Caesar Act sanctions, which he said were originally imposed to punish the former regime.

Despite lingering challenges, Sharaa insisted Syria was on a "positive path toward stability and economic growth".

He stressed that today, "everyone is represented in government according to competence, not sectarian quotas", describing this as a new path from which others could learn how to manage affairs after wars and crises.

He added that Syria’s reconstruction was not tied to individuals but to institutions, calling this "the greatest challenge of the transitional phase the country is going through".

 

THE RECONQUEST OF AMERICA BY THE UNITED STATES

The strategy of the Donald Trump administration to remove Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela and replace him with a ruler “friendly” to the United States (presumably the opposition candidate in the 2024 presidential elections, Edmundo González) has a larger objective: to “reconquer” the United States’ undisputed dominance in the Americas.

Trump and his key collaborators have redesigned the United States’ hegemonic policy in the world, acknowledging that they cannot maintain their dominance over the entire planet. The excessive military presence (more than 900 military bases worldwide) and the associated economic costs are too burdensome for the American economy and society. Therefore, they have decided to concentrate their resources and attention on their geographically closest areas: the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific.

While Trump has not relinquished the American presence in the Middle East (as evidenced in Gaza); Central Asia and Africa, it has undoubtedly established that its priority is in what it considers the traditional area of ​​influence of the United States, that is, America, Europe and part of the Asia-Pacific region.

And of course, Trump cannot accept the existence of Latin American countries outside the US sphere of influence, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, or those with overly “independent” foreign and/or economic policies, like Brazil or Colombia.

Thus, Trump is using the Venezuelan situation to send a clear message first to Cuba and Nicaragua, but also to other Latin American countries that resist following the lines dictated from Washington.

Trump wants all of Latin America to fall in line with Washington in its strategic competition against China, to unconditionally support key US allies, such as Israel in the Middle East (hence the new initiative by Trump's ally, Javier Milei of Argentina, to launch the so-called “Isaac Agreements” in Latin America); and for the region to be favorable for US investment and trade, given the significant advances China has made in the region over the last two decades (for example, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, and Bolivia have larger trade relationships with China than with the United States). It remains to be seen whether the military, economic, and diplomatic pressure on the Maduro regime will finally force him to relinquish power and allow the United States to reconquer Venezuela as another piece on its hegemonic chessboard.

The fact is that if Maduro remains in power in the coming months, rejecting the "exit" demanded by Trump (exile in Cuba, Russia, or even Iran), then the US president will have to make a crucial decision. Whether or not to directly attack the Venezuelan government and armed forces, with all the implications this would have on the international community, the global oil market, the way the United States relates to Latin America, and even the diplomatic response of its European allies; anticipating, of course, the condemnation that China and Russia would express for such a blatant violation of international law.

Furthermore, a segment of the movement that supports Trump (MAGA) opposes continued armed interventions in various parts of the world, and the pretext that the attack on Venezuela is to stop the flow of drugs to the United States is untenable, given that practically 70% of that flow arrives through Mexico.

So, Trump found himself between a rock and a hard place, because if Maduro does not give in to the blackmail, it will force Trump to take military action, and such an action could have many unforeseen consequences for the United States and the world.

The billionaire family poised to rewire U.S. media in Israel’s favor

Having acquired Paramount and CBS and eyeing TikTok and CNN, the Ellisons are constructing a pro-Israel information empire with unprecedented reach.

By Will Alden December 4, 2025

https://www.972mag.com/ellisons-paramount-tiktok-israel-media-empire/

In early September, the Hollywood producer Lawrence Bender — known for his work with Quentin Tarantino on films including “Pulp Fiction” and “Inglourious Basterds” — had what he later described as “a really tough conversation” with the investors in “Red Alert,” an Israeli miniseries that dramatizes the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.

With just weeks remaining before the anticipated release on the second anniversary of the attacks, the show, produced by Israeli mass media company Keshet Media Group, was struggling to secure distribution outside of Israel. The news environment was far from favorable: Israeli fighter jets had just attacked a residential compound in Qatar, and a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions that were “implicated” in the genocide in the Gaza Strip had collected thousands of signatures in Hollywood.

“No one’s going to want to buy something from the Israelis,” Bender, an executive producer of “Red Alert,” told the investors, as he recalled on stage at a Jewish National Fund–USA conference the following month. Among those investors was the Israel Entertainment Fund, which JNF–USA established last year with the Israeli streaming service Izzy to produce television and film for international audiences, with a focus on projects filmed in the “Gaza Envelope” region of southern Israel. “We were pretty stressed about what we were going to do,” Izzy CEO Nati Dinnar‏, interviewing Bender on stage, recalled.

According to its backers, “Red Alert” is essentially a work of Israeli propaganda at a moment when a majority of Americans view Israel’s government unfavorably. The Israel Entertainment Fund, in a slide deck featuring “Red Alert,” says that its projects benefit Israel by “educating viewers and altering perceptions.” Bender said that “our purpose” in making the show was to “change the conversation” about Israel among Americans, Europeans, and other viewers abroad.

A deal to reach that crucial international audience materialized only after Bender encountered David Ellison, the upstart Hollywood mogul, at a memorial service in September. With financing from his tech billionaire father, Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison, David Ellison had recently merged his Skydance Media with the old-line movie studio Paramount. “It would be my honor to be a partner in this,” he emailed after watching “Red Alert,” according to Bender. “In Hollywood, that’s a rare thing,” Bender said at the JNF–USA conference, describing the studio head as “a big supporter of Israel.”

Ellison’s “fast ‘yes,’” as he put it, to an Israeli government-aligned drama offers a window into his thinking as the 42-year-old mogul and his octogenarian father — the largest shareholder in his son’s business and among the richest individuals in the world — construct an empire across TV, film, news, and social media. After acquiring Paramount for $8 billion over the summer, and the broadcast network CBS along with it, he finalized a $150 million deal for reactionary online outlet The Free Press in October and installed its CEO, the Zionist pundit Bari Weiss, as the top editor of CBS News. Ellison was drawn to Weiss in part because of her “pro-Israel stance,” according to The Financial Times. 

Under Ellison, Paramount Skydance (as it is now known) has also been vocal in its opposition to any boycott of Israeli films and filmmakers: In response to the September pledge, which was signed by celebrities including Emma Stone and Javier Bardem, Paramount was alone among major studios at the time in publicly condemning the effort as “silencing individual creative artists based on their nationality.” (A month later, after a group called UK Lawyers for Israel issued a legal warning, Warner Bros. Discovery said in a statement that “a boycott of Israeli film institutions violates our policies” on discrimination.) At the same time, according to reporting by Variety, Paramount leadership has blacklisted individual artists deemed to be “overtly antisemitic.” 

If, as Bender seemed to suggest, David Ellison’s embrace of a work of hasbara is “rare” in today’s Hollywood, the Trump-aligned Ellisons appear set to expand their media empire in the coming weeks. Paramount Skydance is reportedly favored by the Trump administration in the auction for Warner Bros. Discovery — a far bigger conglomerate that includes a news network in CNN and a premium TV asset in HBO Max, in addition to the Warner Bros. movie studio. And Larry Ellison’s Oracle is among the group of investors slated to acquire the American operations of Chinese social media platform TikTok, in a deal blessed by the White House.

Should these deals go through, the result will be a degree of media control by a single family without parallel in modern American history, and potentially a singular opportunity for Israel advocates to reach a broad U.S. audience. In the words of a publicity spot for “Red Alert” on Israel’s Keshet 12, after Ellison’s Paramount+ streaming service had acquired the worldwide rights to the series, “Tens of millions of people around the world are finally going to see our story.

Israel’s ‘most important weapon’

It is the TikTok deal in particular that analysts say could markedly change the information that millions of Americans receive about Israel. After two years of livestreamed genocide — including numerous TikTok videos posted by IDF soldiers themselves — the political views of a generation of young people “have been shaped by what they’ve seen” online, explained Lara Friedman, the president of the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation for Middle East Peace.

“You have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza,” Sarah Hurwitz, a former speechwriter for President Obama, said at a Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) conference in November. Hurwitz lamented that, when she tries to persuade young Jews of her pro-Israel beliefs, “they are just seeing, in their minds, carnage, and I sound obscene.” And at a conference this week organized by the right-wing Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, Hillary Clinton called it “a serious problem” that young people were learning about October 7 and what came after “from social media, particularly TikTok.”

Faced with the evidence of genocide, Zionist apologists “can’t explain that away,” Friedman told +972. “So what they’re going to do now is get hold of the means by which that information is spread.” Meeting with social media influencers in New York in September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel’s “most important” “weapons” were “on social media,” and he described the deal for TikTok, with its 170 million American users, as “the most important purchase that is going on right now.”

In addition to acquiring an ownership stake in the U.S. app, Oracle is expected to run data security for the platform and oversee changes and updates to the algorithm. Most likely, Larry Ellison and his billionaire co-investors will come under immediate pressure from Zionist groups including JFNA, whose CEO recently described TikTok as “the largest and worst offender” in “spreading hate and antisemitism online,” and said that “the deal engineered by President Trump presents us with a moment of great hope.”

Yet Ellison probably won’t need much persuading to align with Israel-friendly priorities. A major Republican donor and political ally of President Trump, the Oracle co-founder is also a major supporter of Israeli causes, having given $16.6 million to Friends of the IDF in 2017, then the largest gift in the organization’s history. In 2021, Oracle’s then-CEO Safra Catz told the Israeli outlet Calcalist that the company’s “commitment to Israel is second to none.” If Oracle employees “don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel,” she said, “then maybe we aren’t the right company for them.” That same year, Netanyahu, Israel’s opposition leader at the time, vacationed on Ellison’s privately owned Hawaiian island.

The billionaire also enjoys a close relationship with former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, having poured at least $130 million into the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — which, in turn, has promoted Oracle’s services across the Global South. Blair was named as a leader of the Gaza transitional authority in the Trump ceasefire plan that was approved by the UN Security Council in November.

In predicting how the new TikTok might operate, free-expression advocates point to Elon Musk’s apparent suppression of his critics and other disfavored accounts on X, and the attendant flourishing of far-right voices there. The official X policy is “Freedom of Speech, not Freedom of Reach,” which advocates say gives Musk leeway to effectively censor content deemed objectionable by making it harder to find.

Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz wrote recently that TikTok’s new owners “will undeniably leverage the platform to push pro-MAGA messaging.” Israel, too, will likely be a major subject of censorship and control, Lorenz told +972. “You’re not going to hear from Palestinians,” she said. “You’re just going to be exposed to more and more propaganda. It’s going to be harder and harder to find accurate information.” 

The Ellisons’ likely domination of a broad swath of U.S. media, Lorenz argued, has no analogue in the United States. “Parallels that come to mind are places like Russia or China or India — places where there is no free press, no free speech, no ability to speak truth to power.”

‘We have a Gen Z problem’

The strategies used by the Israeli government and its supporters over the years to cultivate a positive image in traditional media — including expenses-paid press junkets and hasbara efforts to portray Gaza-based journalists as undercover Hamas operatives — fall short when it comes to TikTok, which is a regular source of news for 43 percent of American adults under 30, according to a recent Pew survey. “You’ve got a generation that is going to see a headline, and rather than look at that headline, they’re going to say, ‘I’m going to go look for the video. I want to see it for myself,’” Friedman told +972. “It’s very hard to control the narrative in that kind of era, and it creates a new imperative to control what information is able to be spread.”

When former U.S. President Joe Biden signed a bill in April 2024 to ban TikTok in the United States absent a sale by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, the official rationale was lawmakers’ concern about the Chinese government’s potential access to Americans’ data. But support for the legislation, which necessitated the currently pending takeover by U.S. firms, can also be traced to Zionist anxiety over Israel’s image on the platform.

At the Munich Security Conference in February of this year, former Republican Congressmember Mike Gallagher — who introduced the sell-or-ban bill with his Democratic colleague Raja Krishnamoorthi in 2022 — said that the bill was “dead until October 7. And people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform, and our bill had legs again.” 

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature,” then-Senator Mitt Romney said at a McCain Institute forum in Arizona in May 2024, not long after the bill’s passage. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

By that point, American Jewish groups including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) had been sounding the alarm about TikTok for months. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, on a Zoom call in the fall of 2023, was recorded saying, “We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem. And our community needs … to put our energy toward this, fast.” (The ADL has confirmed the authenticity of the recording.)

On March 6, 2024 — one day before the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted unanimously to advance the TikTok bill to the House floor — the leaders of JFNA said in a letter to the committee, “Our community understands that social media is a major driver of the rise in antisemitism, and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.” Referring to the legislation by its bill number, the letter said, “A vote for HR 7521 is a vote against antisemitism.”

David Ellison has pushed back on the idea that politics plays a role in his business decisions. “I’m not going to be in the position of ever making political statements. We’re an entertainment company first,” he said at a Bloomberg conference in Los Angeles in October, adding that Paramount’s official statement about the boycott was “a statement that discriminating based on where somebody is from is wrong” and that he stood by it.

At the same time, Ellison allowed that the “value system” of The Free Press “really does align with the value system that we believe in.” Later in the conversation, he described President Trump’s just-announced Gaza ceasefire plan — which, according to the Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada, would “entrench permanent Israeli control” of the Strip — as “a historic accomplishment and one that we should all be happy” about.

A changing of the guard

Owners do not typically exercise direct editorial control over American news media, and analysts caution against overstating the Ellisons’ influence even as they seek to extend their reach from CBS to CNN. Complicating matters further, the latest bid by Paramount Skydance for Warner Bros. Discovery includes minority financing from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, according to Variety — three governments that might push back on a staunchly pro-Israel agenda. 

What’s more, CNN is hardly a bastion of left-wing politics to begin with. As one staffer told The Guardian in early 2024, the cable network has a “systemic and institutional bias” in favor of Israel. CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, for example, have frequently relied on Israel-friendly talking points in their coverage of U.S. campus protests. At the same time, CNN has produced hard-hitting journalism about Gaza, including a report this week detailing how the Israeli military has bulldozed corpses into unmarked graves, in apparent violation of international law. 

It is such coverage that may be at risk, with the Ellisons having demonstrated a willingness to make major personnel changes that — as with the promotion of Bari Weiss to run CBS News — could entrench political biases at the media properties under their control. In a late October round of layoffs at CBS News, Variety reported, “the ax conspicuously fell on those whose reporting featured an anti-Israel bent.” Among those terminated was the seasoned foreign correspondent Debora Patta, who had reported vividly on the killing in Gaza and, according to The New York Post, had recently signed a new three-year contract. 

Patta’s work had come under attack in August by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who, in claiming that a video interview he’d given her had been misleadingly edited, echoed President Trump’s 2024 lawsuit against CBS (filed before his return to the White House) over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview; Paramount, with its acquisition by Skydance under federal review, settled that suit for $16 million. Weiss herself reportedly added Patta’s name to the dismissal list, while saving the job of a Rome-based correspondent who professed pro-Israel views and asked to be assigned to cover Gaza.

Whatever the Ellisons’ intentions, their moves are being greeted as evidence of a new approach friendly to both Israel and Trump. “They let the Zionists into Hollywood tonight,” Eve Barlow, a pro-Israel social media personality and writer, said on Instagram after attending the L.A. premiere of “Red Alert” on the Paramount lot. 

In an interview with “60 Minutes” on Oct. 31, two days after the CBS layoffs, Trump praised Weiss as “a great new leader.” Reminding the interviewer, Norah O’Donnell, that “‘60 Minutes’ was forced to pay me a lot of money,” Trump said that CBS’s “new ownership” was “the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.” And Larry Ellison has reportedly discussed, in a recent conversation with a senior White House official, firing CNN hosts whom Trump does not like.

The same week as Trump’s “60 Minutes” interview, David Ellison schmoozed with fellow Hollywood bigwigs at a dinner honoring Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, the executive he may soon dethrone. The glittery event at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel was hosted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which, through its film division, co-produced “One Day in October,” an October 7 anthology drama that debuted in the U.S. on Zaslav’s HBO Max. Like “Red Alert,” one reviewer noted, “One Day in October” leaves out Israel’s oppression of Palestinians to “focus almost entirely on the survivors of the attack,” and in so doing, imply that “overwhelming force is a justified response.”

With Warner Bros. Discovery on the auction block, the gala for Zaslav had valedictory undertones. Presenting the studio boss with an award for his philanthropy and efforts to fight antisemitism, Steven Spielberg said that Zaslav “shares a certain ethos with the moguls that built Hollywood.” In his own speech, Zaslav shared an insight from his experience owning a broadcast network in Poland and resisting attempted censorship there: “When the government controls the news, that is the end of democracy.”