Thurman Merman

Jews can’t be “settlers” in a land that they’re indigenous to.

Zionists won because Zionism is a pragmatic movement. Build institutions. Master agriculture, tech & arms. Absorb millions of refugees. Win wars when forced to fight. Adapt or die. Others chased utopias or denial, Zionists built a thriving innovative state in a hostile region.

The New School just sent an angry email to its student body saying that despite the vote of the student senate, Hillel will still get funding. The administration criticized the senate for trying “to hold students responsible for the acts of governments.” Note: In this case, the students are literally funded to go to Israel and play a support role for the IDF.

These 2 Hamas /Flotilla leaders will be prosecuted in Israel.

On his 50th birthday, the wife of Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, presented him with a cake depicting a gallows.

For over two decades, the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization have fundamentally abandoned their institution building mandate under the Oslo Accords, resorting to internationalizing its national project via top-down lawfare at the UNGA 10th ESS, ICC, and ICJ. They have systematically sacrificed the material wellbeing of Gazans for an elite diplomatic agenda in New York and The Hague, while inciting the vacuum to be filled by militant capture, and in Gaza Iranian proxy warfare that precipitated October 7. Because the 'federal' PLO rejectionist shell has failed, Israel in coordination with transactional Arab stakeholders like the UAE, the US-led Board of Peace, and cultivated diaspora professional networks can now step in to facilitate localized capacity building. If we can establish secure municipal enclaves east of the yellow line, we can bring these communities into compliance with Art 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (internal self-determination) as an interim, reversible Oslo compatible pathway toward final status. The biggest challenge is ensuring a separation of powers between the armed groups (many with extremist ties and criminal backgrounds) and local civilian boards. Further, for these enclaves to have legitimacy and be internationally certifiable, Israel and its partners have to solve an internal Village Leagues paradox: the local armed groups holding the perimeter and policing must be prevented from extorting the civilian administrators managing the interior. What's the payoff? If successful, then by charting a course toward basic freedoms, socio-economic inclusion, and stability that a real segment of the Palestinian public actually seeks (most pessimistically by the best available surveys, around 25-35%), but which the Muqawama project has consistently denied them, we can break the shell of the rejectionist PLO and see a more stable, peaceful creature take flight in Gaza. Gaza can then be viewed as a race between two competing agendas under incubation: a 2005-07 reset under the Beijing Declaration's cover and a captured Ncag, and a local legitimacy pathway that builds in the vacuum of that empty shell. Once you look at it that way you can see that Hamas's refusal to disarm is a gift, provided Israel holds off clearance beyond the yellow line in favor of hardening a new reality east of the line. Israel has a narrow window to convert geographic depth into strategic depth by executing a strategy built on three pillars: a positive normative case that preempts international lawfare, internal separation of powers to prevent warlordism, and a geographic 'hold and institutionally harden' logic that weaponizes time against its adversaries.

Probably the most hilarious thing about the Left and Israel is that Israeli socialism by far the ONLY successful implementation of actual socialism and they completely ignore it.

This is like saying Mike Huckabee is indigenous to Ethiopia because they have a continuous ancient Christian presence. Religions are not indigenous to land. Neither Ivanka Trump (convert), nor an Ashkenazi Jew, nor an Afghan Jew, nor a Yemeni Jew, nor an Ethiopian Jew, can claim to be indigenous to the Levant because of a tiny indigenous population of Levantine Jews who share their religion but not their ethnicity.

Ben Gvir celebrated his 50th birthday yesterday with many government ministers in attendance and Netanyahu calling to wish him Happy Birthday. This was the cake they made him...