As Israel's image collapses, US billionaires move to silence dissent

Gregory Shupak

17 November 2025

Facing record opposition to Israel's genocide in Gaza, America's elites are seizing control of news and tech companies to suppress criticism and rescue a crumbling narrative

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israels-image-collapses-us-billionaires-move-silence-dissent

Public support for Israel in the United States has reached historic lows.

A Gallup poll in July found that 32 percent of Americans approve of the Israeli campaign in Gaza, while 60 percent disapprove, a 10 percent drop in support from the previous September.

Pew Research Center findings showed that a third of American adults (33 percent) say the country sends Israel too much military aid, a larger portion of the population than those who say the US provides the right amount (23 percent) or not enough (8 percent).

A majority of Americans hold a negative view of Israel and report being "extremely" or "very" concerned about its military strikes killing Palestinian civilians and about starvation among Palestinians in Gaza.

A New York Times/Siena poll revealed that there are slightly more Americans who sympathise with the Palestinians than those who sympathise with Israel.

Israel's popularity crisis is particularly acute among young Americans, with only nine percent of those aged 18 to 34 backing Israel's military action in the Strip. Forty-two percent of those in the 18 to 29 cohort say the US grants Israel too much military aid, compared to 21 percent whose opinion is that the US is giving the right amount or too little.

One influential ghoul after another - from Hillary Clinton to wealthy tech investors and members of Congress - has attributed this shift to TikTok, as if American youth are incapable of independently concluding that it is wrong to repeatedly set fire to tents filled with displaced persons.

Amid the decline in pro-Israel sentiment, which is functionally the same as a decline in support for US imperialism in and beyond the Middle East, the US ruling class is aggressively asserting control over powerful media organs.

Control of the narrative

On 25 September, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order mandating that for TikTok to continue operating in the US, one or more Americans had to own the majority of the platform.

Trump's actions, it is worth noting, build on the Biden administration's approach to TikTok, which also called for US control of the app, a position with bipartisan support in Congress.

Accordingly, a group of US investors led by the software firm Oracle is taking control of 65 percent of TikTok.

Oracle is set to oversee TikTok's US operations, provide cloud services for user data storage and secure a licence to take charge of the app's algorithm.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison is one of the top donors to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), a US nonprofit that effectively subsidises the Israeli military. He has said that he feels a "deep emotional connection to the State of Israel" and "we", seemingly a reference to Oracle, will "do everything we can to support the country of Israel". 

A similar process has unfolded in traditional news media. In August, the Ellison family's media company, Skydance - an outfit financially supported by Larry Ellison and run by his son, David - acquired Paramount, a movie studio that owns CBS and a host of cable channels.

Bari Weiss, a talentless behind-kisser and tattle-tale passionately opposed to free speech and to Palestinian freedom, has been named CBS News's editor-in-chief.

Now, the Ellison family has its sights set on Warner Bros Discovery, which owns HBO, TBS and CNN.

Media capture

While there is ample space for pro-Palestine messaging on TikTok, it is not as if traditional news outlets like CBS have a record of supporting Palestinian liberation.

CBS, like all major corporate media in the United States, far more often than not produces content favourable to US-Israeli objectives in West Asia.

For example, in the last year, the CBS News website ran 2,575 stories that mention Gaza, with only 388 containing the word "genocide".

In other words, in a period that mostly predates the Ellison-Weiss regime, only 15 percent of the site's Gaza coverage mentioned the crime of crimes, even as one credible source after another has concluded that Israel has carried out a genocide in the Strip.

Thus, CBS News already had a record of what I have previously called genocide denial by omission, a form of media distortion that helps enable genocide by reducing the likelihood that enough of the American population will accurately understand that their government is party to an extermination campaign to bring it to a halt.

CNN, for its part, helped manufacture consent for the Gaza genocide by making pro-Israel propaganda its official policy.

What the latest developments in the media landscape represent are, as with so much else in the Trump era, a movement towards vulgar, unabashed assertions of raw power that dispense with the typically hollow and hypocritical pretences of an open and democratic society that characterised America's recent past.

Losing legitimacy

The American state and the billionaires it serves know that they cannot win the Palestine-Israel debate, and they see that their colonial outpost is rapidly losing perceived legitimacy.

Trying to stamp out content that makes Israel and the US look bad by occasionally giving audiences a partial glimpse of US-Zionist barbarism in Palestine is a sign of desperation rather than strength.

The gambit will not work.

Media outlets do not operate in a vacuum, and people are not empty vessels that news firms can simply fill with whatever they like.

Israel's image cannot be restored, and neither can that of the US ruling class, certainly not among young people who won't soon forget their peers being suspended, expelled or chewed up by the US's merciless deportation machine.

They won't soon forget their colleges turning riot cops against them or putting snipers on the roofs of school buildings during pro-Palestine student protests. They won't soon forget the mainstream media lying to them while Palestinian journalists showed them the grieving parents whose bereavement was enabled by western, and especially American, taxpayers.

If the Gaza "ceasefire" holds, the international movement in solidarity with Palestine may lose some of its energy in the West.

However, even if the frequency of mass demonstrations in western cities dwindles, the organisations and alliances formed after 7 October are not all going to disappear.

Indeed, many of these formations predate 2023, with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement having established nodes around the world and achieved numerous successes since its inception in 2005.

That institutional memory cannot be erased by media manipulation, nor can the experience, political organising skills and self-confidence that pro-Palestine activists have gained by fighting, and sometimes winning, through 20 years of BDS or two years of resisting genocide.

The Ultimate Goal of Jewish Settler Violence in the West Bank

In October, amid the two-year anniversary of the Gaza genocide, Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank hit an all-time high. And they will escalate – as long as they are allowed by U.S.-led West.

by Dan Steinbock | Nov 18, 2025

https://original.antiwar.com/Dan_Steinbock/2025/11/17/the-ultimate-goal-of-jewish-settler-violence-in-the-west-bank/

Last Thursday dawn, Israeli settlers set fire to the Hajja Hamida Mosque in the Palestinian village of Deir Istiya in the north of the West Bank. Photographs taken at the scene showed racist, anti-Palestinian slogans sprayed on the walls of the mosque, which was damaged in the blaze. Copies of the Quran – the Islamic holy book – were also burned.

October 2025 recorded the highest monthly number of Israeli settler attacks since the UN Humanitarian office (OCHA) began documenting such incidents in 2006. That’s more than 260 attacks resulting in casualties, property damage or both – an average of eight incidents per day.

Reminiscent of the Gaza atrocities, one in every five Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in 2025 across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is a child.

During this olive harvest season, settler violence has reached the highest level recorded in recent years, with the injury of more than 150 Palestinians and the vandalism of over 5,700 trees.

This violence is not a fringe phenomenon. It is deliberate, systematic and escalatory. Shunning all international condemnation, it seeks to establish new “facts on the ground.” It is ethnic cleansing aiming at involuntary population transfer and, unless disrupted, mass atrocities.

From vigilantes to state terror   

At the beginning of 2024, Zvi Sukkot, Knesset member of the Religious Zionist Party and a colleague of the self-proclaimed fascist Bezalel Smotrich, urged the government to “occupy, annex, and demolish all the houses [in Gaza], and build large neighborhoods and settlements.” It sounded harsh, but the zealot was consistent. He had a dream. What happened in Gaza would not stay there but spread to the West Bank.

A far-right Jewish settler living illegally in the West Bank, Sukkot is a former member of The Revolt, a violent Jewish terror group, which has engaged in numerous arson attacks. The group advocates the dismantling of the Israeli state to establish the Kingdom of Israel that follows Jewish Law rather than the rule of (secular) law.

In 2010, Sukkot was arrested in an investigation of a mosque arson and expelled from the West Bank for violent anti-Palestinian attacks. He had defended Jews suspected of firebombing a Palestinian family and been arrested for alleged involvement in “price tagging”; that is, vandalism and violent settler attacks against Palestinians.

As of 2017, the group was still active, in what the Shin Bet internal security agency calls “the second generation of…The Revolt.”

By early 2023, Sukkot had made it to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. And after October 7, Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed him to chair the Knesset Subcommittee for “Judea and Samaria” (read: the West Bank).

To the settlers, Sukkot is a success story reflecting the march of extremist settlers to the Israeli institutions in the past two decades.

As a member of The Revolt, Sukkot could only firebomb a few Palestinians, mosques and churches. It wasn’t efficient. Now he is in a position to shape the future of the land. He is no longer fighting those in charge. He is in charge.

How did the Messianic far-right march into institutions they once hoped to pull to pieces? Ostensibly, democratically. With the rise of the Jewish dual state, the Netanyahu cabinets have subverted the secular democratic state. The parallels are alarming. Similar trajectories broke the back of the Weimar Republic a century ago.

Ironically, the Israeli settlement policy was first developed by the Labor governments, which paved the way for the foxes to take over the henhouse. 

The rise of Jewish settlements   

Since the 1970s there has been a tacit collusion between the Israeli state and the settlers. It is a symbiotic system. The state takes over land, while the settlers, who seek land to further their agenda, engage in violence against Palestinians to achieve their expulsion.

Occasionally, the two cooperate directly, but the preference is to retain an arm’s length distance, to preserve the semblance of the rule of law. The ultimate aim of settler violence is to foster Greater Israel; that is, a Jewish-only space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

A new stage ensued in 2018, when the Basic Law codified that “the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and strengthening.” In keeping with this principle, Israel has dispossessed Palestinians in the West Bank to use their land to build new settlements and to expand existing ones.

According to international law, an occupier must not confiscate land for the needs of the occupier. So, Israel came up with the legal acrobatics of “declaring” instead of “confiscating” land. Based on a subversion of the Ottoman land law from 1858, this bizarre interpretation allowed Israel to take over 16 percent of the West Bank prior to October 7; or 500 to 5,000 dunams per year. Amid the Gaza genocide in the first half of 2024, declarations of state land shot to 24,000 dunams. In other words, while Gaza was burning, Israeli occupation authorities were rushing to take over the West Bank.

Under the labor coalition, the number of settlements grew slowly until the election triumph of the Israeli hard right in the late 1970s. That’s when Prime Minister Begin initiated a huge and purposeful settlement policy to take over the West Bank. In the process, the Jewish settler population soared from a few thousands to over half a million in the West Bank prior to October 7, 2023. 

In parallel, Israeli governments have encouraged increasing Jewish settlement in Jerusalem. Since 1967, it has more than tripled to 600,000, whereas the number of Palestinians is close to 390,000. The tacit objective has been to maximize the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, while increasing the Jewish population in Arab East Jerusalem.

Settler violence   

Following the rise of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet in late 2022, the efforts to achieve Jewish supremacy in the West Bank have escalated dramatically. Taking advantage of the Gaza War, groups of violent settlers have carried out organized operations to expel Palestinian communities, through threats, intimidation, property damage, and physical assaults.

Settler Violence Incidents

Until recently, Israeli and international media have characterized instances of settler violence as “rampages,” which suggests violent but uncontrollable behavior, involving a large group of people. In reality, the violence has been systemic and coordinated.

After the settler violence in Huwara in February 2023, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, head of the military’s Central Command in charge of the West Bank, described the rampage as “a pogrom done by outlaws.” He deliberately used the term referring to mob attacks against Jews in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century. As a result, Fuchs himself was targeted for assassination by Kahanite settlers, according to Shin Bet. It wasn’t the first time. In 2007, then-prime minister Ehud Olmert lashed out at settlers in Hebron, who attacked Palestinians and their property. Like some other Israeli leaders, Olmert called the attacks a pogrom, which made him the target of far-right settlers, supported by U.S. billionaires like the late casino tycoon, Sheldon Adelson.

Referring to antisemitic violence in Russia, the term “pogrom” is usually defined as an officially tolerated organized massacre. In this sense, the pogroms by the Jewish settlers in the West Bank are indeed reminiscent of those in Kishinev and elsewhere, as many Israelis suggest.

More than a century ago, Jews knew only too well the consequences of mobs rushing into Jewish neighborhoods while calling for “Death to the Jews!”

Today, Palestinians know exactly what will follow when Jewish settlers burst into Arab neighborhoods crying for the “Death to the Arabs!”

Settlements as a Security Burden   

Ever since the 1970s, the settlers and their U.S. financiers have argued that the settlements ensure Israel’s security. In this view, settlers allow the residents of Tel Aviv to breathe easy because the settlements are good for national security.

In reality, the settlements are a security burden for Israel. ln the past decades, there have been no major war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Yet, due to the Separation Wall and fragmentation of the West Bank, the line of defense that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is required to protect is today about five times the length it would be without the settlements.

Stunningly, before October 7, the IDF had to deploy more than half its active forces, and in crisis situations even two-thirds of them, in the West Bank. That was more than the forces allocated to guarding all other fronts combined (Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the Jordanian border along the Arava).

Worse, these allocations had to be coupled with a large contingent required to protect the settlements. According to estimates, some 80 percent of IDF forces in the West Bank were allocated to settlement guard duty, while the only 20 percent focused on defending the borders of the pre-1967 Israel.

Furthermore, the IDF presence and operations have contributed to several major uprisings, which penalized economic prospects in Israel as well. If Israeli military presence in southern Lebanon was the architect of Hezbollah, its presence in the West Bank and Gaza has served as the midwife of Hamas.

The brutal occupation has divided Israel internally and isolated it externally. It is responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the genocidal atrocities in Gaza. None of this was inevitable. None of it was warranted.

And none of it could have happened without the continuous flows of arms and financing by the U.S.-led West. 

As Israel Keeps Killing Palestinians, Tlaib Leads Bill Recognizing War on Gaza as Genocide

“After over two years of slaughter, forced starvation, and mass atrocities in Gaza, the global consensus is clear: The Israeli government has committed genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.”

by Brett Wilkins | Nov 16, 2025  

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2025/11/16/as-israel-keeps-killing-palestinians-tlaib-leads-bill-recognizing-war-on-gaza-as-genocide/

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and 20 Democratic colleagues on Friday introduced legislation that would officially recognize Israel’s 25-month war on Gaza as a genocide, a move that came as Israeli forces continued killing Palestinians in the coastal strip and violating a tenuous ceasefire with Hamas.

Tlaib (D-Mich.) – the only Palestinian American in Congress – introduced H.Res. 876, which, if passed, would “officially recognize that the state of Israel has committed the crime of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza” and affirm that it is official US policy to “prevent and punish the crime of genocide, wherever it occurs.”

“The Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza has not ended, and it will not end until we act,” Tlaib said in a statement Friday. “Since the so-called ‘ceasefire’ was announced, Israeli forces haven’t stopped killing Palestinians.”

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office (GMO), Israel has violated the ceasefire agreement 282 times as of November 10, 2025 – exactly one month after the US-brokered truce took effect. Alleged violations include airstrikes resulting in massacres, shootings of civilians, property demolitions, and raids beyond the ceasefire’s “yellow line” buffer zones.

GMO says Israeli forces have killed least 242 Palestinians and injured more than 620 others during the truce.

This, in addition to the at least 249,000 Palestinians who have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces since October 2023, including upward of 10,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the ruins of Gaza, which could take decades to clear. Around 2 million Palestinians have been starved, sickened, and forcibly displaced. Many others have been arbitrarily imprisoned, tortured, and allegedly subjected to rape and other sexual abuse.

“After over two years of slaughter, forced starvation, and mass atrocities in Gaza, the global consensus is clear: The Israeli government has committed genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” Tlaib noted.

She continued:

Palestinians in Gaza have attested to this genocide for over two years and it has been concluded by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and highly respected international, Palestinian, and Israeli human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, Al-Haq, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Forensic Architecture, and the University Network for Human Rights.

The resolution calls for the United States to “respect its obligations under the Genocide Convention by employing all means reasonably available to it to prevent and punish the crime of genocide.”

These include:

• cessation of relevant arms and equipment transfers;
• investigation and prosecution of individuals and corporations in the United States implicated in the crime of genocide;
• compliance with the orders of the International Court of Justice and the investigations of the International Criminal Court (ICC); and
• targeted, lawful sanctions with respect to the state of Israel and individuals or corporations involved in or facilitating the commission of genocide.

“Impunity only enables more atrocity,” Tlaib warned. “As our government continues to send a blank check for war crimes and ethnic cleansing, Palestinian children’s smiles are extinguished by bombs and bullets that say made in the USA.”

“To end this horror, we must reject genocide denial and follow our binding legal obligations under the Genocide Convention to take immediate action to pursue justice and accountability to prevent and punish the crime of genocide,” she added. “We must hold individual perpetrators and complicit corporations to account. We must stop sending weapons to a genocidal military. We must follow international law and use all means available to us, including sanctions, to bring this genocide to an end.”

Despite existing laws prohibiting US assistance to foreign security forces that commit gross human rights violations, the United States – which grew into a world power in part via genocide of Indigenous Americans – has provided arms and diplomatic cover to the perpetrators of genocides in Paraguay, Guatemala, Bangladesh, East Timor, Kurdistan, and Gaza over the past half-century, while turning a blind eye to other genocides.

Under the Biden and Trump administrations, the US has provided Israel with more than $20 billion in armed aid while thwarting efforts to end the genocide by vetoing numerous United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions.

The Trump administration has also slapped sanctions on ICC judges after the tribunal issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation.

Trump has also targeted individuals and nations who seek justice for Palestinians, acknowledge the Gaza genocide, or recognize Palestinian statehood.

Tlaib’s resolution is co-sponsored by Democratic Reps. Becca Balint (Vt.), André Carson (Ind.), Greg Casar (Texas), Maxine Dexter (Ore.), Maxwell Alejandro Frost (Fla.), Jesús “Chuy” García (Ill.), Al Green (Texas), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), “Hank” Johnson Jr. (Ga.), Ro Khanna (Calif.), Summer Lee (Pa.), Jim McGovern (Mass.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Mark Pocan (Wis.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Delia Ramirez (Ill.), Lateefah Simon (Calif.), Nydia Velázquez (NY), and Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ).

The resolution – which is unlikely to get through the Republican-controlled Congress – is also endorsed by more than 100 organizations.

“This resolution is an important step towards recognizing Israel’s actions against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip for what they are – genocide,” Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa advocacy director Elizabeth Rghebi said in support of the measure.

“The US ratified the Genocide Convention which imposes a duty on states to prevent and punish the crime,” Rghebi added. “Amnesty International calls on all members of Congress to urgently support this resolution and ensure the US begins taking the actions necessary to prevent and punish Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”

Beth Miller, political director at Jewish Voice for Peace Action, said that “for over two years, the US has been a full partner in the Israeli government’s genocide against Palestinians. Presidents and members of Congress have denied and erased Israel’s ongoing atrocities in Gaza, shielded Israel from accountability in the international arena, and attempted to dehumanize Palestinians.”

“Congresswoman Tlaib and the original co-sponsors joining her on this historic resolution are making clear that this complicity must come to an end,” Miller added. “These representatives are heeding the call of the overwhelming majority of Americans who want to see an end to his genocide and a halt to US support for war crimes.”

Jewish communities must confront their complicity in Israel's genocide

Antony Loewenstein

13 November 2025 

After more than two years of war, Jewish support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza requires accountability, moral clarity and an urgent reckoning across Israel and the Diaspora

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/jewish-communities-must-confront-their-complicity-israels-genocide

here's a desperate need for a moral reckoning among the global Jewish population after more than two years of Israeli-inflicted horrors in Gaza.

From the mass starvation of Palestinians to AI- and cloud-enabled killing, Jewish complicity, both in Israel and across the Diaspora, has been a profound moral failure.

I write this as a Jew who has spent decades opposing Israel's suffocating hold on the Jewish Diaspora, and as a man whose family was murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

Since 7 October 2023, we have witnessed a genocide on our watch, as Jews and as citizens.

Now is the time for accountability - including international war crimes trials - not only for those who actively participated in it, but for Jews who wholly embraced the carnage from London to Sydney out of racism, fear, revenge or sheer bloodlust.

Never forget that those who committed the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 weren't only the ones carrying out the physical violence; they also included those who promulgated hate speech on the radio.

With an Israeli Jewish population that overwhelmingly views all Palestinians in Gaza as suspect, if not outright hostile, the need for this moment is clear.

It's hard to describe what the post-7 October 2023 environment has been like in many Jewish communities.

It has ranged from outright hostility towards any publicly expressed criticism of the Netanyahu regime to, perish the thought, any Jew disagreeing with the stated policies of an Israeli government that repeatedly announced its desire to eradicate all Palestinians.

And then there are the ethical contortions around the proper way a modern, humane Jew should feel about Israeli soldiers proudly celebrating killing, destruction and rape in Gaza, the West Bank and beyond.

What, exactly, is the moral quandary in condemning genocidal behaviour and intent?

Still, far too many Jews dismiss or ignore these abominations as outliers - black sheep in the Israeli military or governmental establishment.

It's a convenient myth, but deluded thinking about the real nature of the Zionist state from its inception to today.

Palestinians have always been viewed as a threat to a Jewish majority in Israel. Ethnically removing or killing them has never been far from the minds of many Israelis and their supporters in the West.

Moral collapse

"It's us or them." This has been the essence of Zionist thought from the earliest political Zionist writings in the 1890s to the present day.

More than 120 years after the birth of political Zionism, it's impossible to separate theory from reality.

Zionism has led us to a point in history where Israel can justify a mass killing campaign in Gaza in the name of "self-defence", and much of the western political and media establishment will defend, arm and endorse it.

Jehad Abusalim, from Deir el-Balah in Gaza and now Executive Director of the US-based Institute for Palestine Studies, writes that:

Gaza's rebellion has been a rejection of a draconian and tyrannical vision for what life in the 21st century might look like... Gaza showed that the poorest, most isolated, and besieged people on earth could still live - and die - for a cause. It showed entire generations that subjugation can be refused, even when the cost is unimaginable, beyond what most people can fathom. But Gaza did more than inspire. It exposed the enemy. It revealed corrupt politicians, inept political parties and systems, and the fragility of the so-called international order.

Thankfully, a growing number of American and western Jews have rejected Israel's genocidal campaign, opposing Netanyahu's scorched-earth policy and correctly characterising it as a catalogue of war crimes.

Zionist reality

Despite these positive trends, especially among younger Jews in the Diaspora who refuse to accept Israeli supremacy as integral to Judaism, much of the Jewish establishment has remained steadfast in its backing of Israeli actions.

Jewish scholar Shaul Magid explains that this is because the spirit of assassinated far-right Rabbi Meir Kahane inhabits the thinking of many in the western Zionist establishment and underpins its proud partnership with an extremist Israeli government.

A visceral hatred of Arabs, Islam and Palestinianism is ubiquitous in these circles.

It helps explain why many in this community either said nothing after 7 October or backed Israeli actions with full-throated support.

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York has exposed this mindset in all its ugliness.

While it's a democratic right to oppose Mamdani on policy grounds, the mainstream Jewish establishment - including rabbis - focused solely on his criticism of Israeli actions and unapologetic anti-Zionism, accusing him of antisemitism and of posing an existential threat to Jews.

It was an absurd and dangerous accusation, and yet, as Jewish journalist Peter Beinart observed, there's nothing these so-called Jewish leaders won't do to demand complete obedience to Israeli state policy, even when Israel is credibly accused of genocide, the pinnacle of all crimes.

"What else are these Jewish leaders willing to sacrifice for the idolatry of unconditional support for the state of Israel?" Beinart asked.

"Well, complicity in a mass campaign of anti-Muslim bigotry," unleashed by Mamdani's main opponent, Andrew Cuomo, and his far-right media allies.

These are the "Jewish values" that many Jewish leaders espouse, and yet it's a Jewish abomination to cast your lot with genocidaires.

Kahane's legacy

Not to be outdone, a few hours after Mamdani's win, Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, a man with a long record of palling around with the global far right, tweeted that "the city that was once a symbol of global freedom has handed over its keys to a Hamas supporter, one whose stance is not far removed from the jihadist fanatics who murdered three thousand of its own people 25 years ago".

As a "solution", Chikli invited New Yorkers to move to Israel.

These are the Jewish values of Kahane: supremacy and hate.

While they're not shared by many Jews who despise how our religion has been hijacked by Zionist idolatry, they still represent a sizeable number of Jewish leaders who claim to speak for us all.

This is why a moral reckoning is needed in the Jewish faith: separating Zionism from Judaism and disassociating from an Israeli government, and most Israeli Jews, whose vision is an ethnically pure Jewish nation.

Gaza has been the trigger, but these issues have been with us for decades.

It can't happen soon enough.