Shalom. 

The Trump administration has just unveiled its 20-point Gaza peace plan with the solemnity of a statesman and the customary swagger of the orange man child. The headlines include: hostages freed, Hamas disarmed, an international caretaker government installed. It all looks promising on paper, the kind of blueprint diplomats dream about. But we are in the Days of Awe, the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when Jews are asked to account for themselves, to choose repentance, renewal, and life. And IMHO, the bitter truth is this: Hamas has no interest in repentance, only in repeating the cycle of violence, repeating the rejection of peace, repeating its core obsession with killing Jews rather than building a home for Palestinians.

That’s the backdrop for Andrew Fox’s timely essay, “Waiting on Hamas with bated breath.” Fox, a renowned expert on urban warfare, suggests Hamas will play the long game. 

“A ceasefire means Hamas can regroup, reconstitute under the radar, even rebrand, and pivot to its next phase. Hamas will use the months and years after the end of hostilities to melt back into Gaza’s social fabric and prepare for an insurgency or revival further down the line. They also know that when the world’s media finally gets into Gaza and sees the destruction, the propaganda they can generate will increase Israel’s international condemnation. Lawfare will escalate.”

It’s a thoughtful take, and well worth your time. I have re-stacked it below. 

Where I part ways with Fox is in holding out even a sliver of hope that Hamas might surprise us. In these Days of Awe, Jews believe even the most hardened heart can repent. But Hamas is not built for “teshuvah”. Its DNA is struggle, not sovereignty. Its creed is rejection, not renewal. Which is why I believe this peace plan, like the ones before it, will be met not with awe, but with scorn.

In the days ahead, leading up to Yom Kippur, Jews will search their souls and pray to be written into the Book of Life. Hamas, by contrast, seems content to scribble only in the margins of death. Trump may bring twenty points to the table, but Hamas has never managed to honor even ten commandments.

I really hope I am wrong. We need to bring the hostages home.

Be safe everyone. 

Brad out.

https://mrandrewfox.substack.com/p/waiting-on-hamas-with-bated-breath?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web

Shabbat shalom!

And a belated “tip of the kippah” to Robert Redford, a man whose faith in truth-telling, in independent voices, and in disciplined storytelling helped define modern journalism. But for me, All the President’s Men wasn’t just a movie. It inspired me in 1976 to change my college major from Business to English/Journalism and probably cost my parents another semester of tuition, but the additional investment was well worth it. So, thank you Mr. Redford, may his memory be a blessing. 

The quiet persistence of Woodward and Bernstein, the stubbornness of chasing a lead even when no one else cared, those were the moments I replayed in my head when I first picked up a reporter’s notebook. Redford didn’t merely act the journalist, he produced the story. He bought the rights to the book, he consulted with Woodward and Bernstein, he insisted on accuracy, and often telephoned them daily to verify even small details.

In a time when too many believe that raising a flag or issuing a press release is a stand-in for power, we need Redford’s ethos more than ever. The idea that truths matter, that accountability must be earned, and that the gravest sins are those we refuse to spot even when they are spelled out in plain language.

Truth, unlike recognition, cannot be conferred by ceremony. Truth has to be pried loose, verified, and then defended. Which is why the spectacle of Britain, France, Canada, Australia and their fellow travelers rushing to recognize a Palestinian state felt like the exact opposite of what Redford championed. They were not chasing facts or demanding accountability, they were throwing confetti at a narrative, hoping applause would substitute for evidence.

Netanyahu, for all his flaws and theatrics, was right to call it what it was: a prize handed to terrorism, a blank check to Hamas (and Abbas!), a signal that hostage-taking and bloodshed are the price of admission to the club of nations. Recognition before de-radicalization is not statesmanship, it is malpractice. It robs the West of its only real leverage, the ability to say “change first”, then reward.

That leverage mattered. By burning it for the sake of optics, these countries emboldened the very groups they claim to abhor. Hostage-taking, already the grotesque centerpiece of Hamas’s playbook, is now further validated as a strategy. If statehood is a prize won through brutality, then the rational move is more brutality.

The scene surrounding Netanyahu’s trip to the UN said it all. To get to New York, his plane had to take a carefully plotted route, skirting countries that would happily arrest him if an emergency forced a landing. Then, before he even spoke, dozens of delegations staged a walkout, denying themselves the very thing they pretend to prize, dialogue. They left the room rather than hear an inconvenient truth, that rewarding terrorism breeds more terrorism, that recognition without reform is not hope but surrender.

If the West had a Redfordian commitment to truth, here is what would have been required before the words “we recognize” ever left a diplomat’s mouth: complete release of the remaining hostages, dismantling of terror infrastructure, curricula that affirm coexistence rather than glorify martyrdom, explicit recognition of Israel’s right to exist, the dismantling or reform of UNRWA, and penalties that actually bite when commitments are violated. Absent these, recognition is not diplomacy. It is self-delusion.

If you want to know why de-radicalization must be a starting point, not an afterthought, open a Palestinian classroom textbook. In one sixth-grade reader, students are presented with a banner lifted from earlier nationalist writing: “There is no alternative to destroying Israel.” Elsewhere, children are drilled on math problems by counting the number of “martyrs” from the First Intifada, a grotesque exercise in normalizing bloodshed as if it were just another arithmetic word problem. Maps in geography lessons often show every inch of land from the river to the sea as “Palestine,” with Israel erased as though it never existed. This is not cultural nuance, it is indoctrination.

Britain and France insist recognition is a way to “keep hope alive” and “preserve the two-state solution.” In their telling, it is a symbolic gesture meant to reassure Palestinians that peaceful diplomacy has not been eclipsed by Hamas’s brutality. Statehood now, they argue, will strengthen moderates and give reformers something to defend.

That all sounds noble until you notice the absence of evidence. Moderates are not empowered by premature recognition, they are erased by it. Hamas doesn’t see Britain’s vote as an incentive to soften, it sees it as proof that violence pays. And the so-called moderates in Ramallah are left with nothing to trade, no incentive to demand reforms from their own society, because the prize has already been handed out.

The French foreign minister went further, claiming that recognition will “rebalance the playing field” by showing Palestinians that their aspirations are acknowledged. But this isn’t rebalancing, it is rewarding refusal. Imagine if after Munich in 1938, the Allies had said: “Well, we’d better give Hitler some more recognition or he’ll lose hope in diplomacy.” It is the same logic of appeasement, dressed up in 21st-century jargon. The field doesn’t get rebalanced, it gets tilted toward extremism.

Redford’s legacy is a reminder that democracy survives only when people are willing to dig, to question, to expose, and to refuse shortcuts. All the President’s Men worked because it showed two reporters sweating over small facts, not congratulating themselves for big gestures. Western democracies just did the opposite. They congratulated themselves for a symbolic flourish while ignoring the facts screaming in their faces, that the Palestinian leadership they are elevating still exalts terror, still educates its children to hate, and still clings to a fantasy of Israel’s erasure.

Readers of the JNR know that I favor a two state solution. But recognition before reform is a Humpty Dumpty moment. Once you’ve smashed the leverage on the pavement, all the presidents’ men and all the Western diplomats won’t be able to put a credible peace process back together again. If recognition were a currency, the West just printed counterfeit bills and handed them to Hamas. Redford knew better. You don’t build integrity with props, and you don’t win peace by subsidizing fantasies. You earn truth the hard way, or you don’t get it at all.

Stay safe everyone, and try to enjoy the weekend.

Brad out. 

Shabbat shalom! 

Sadly, we have just passed day 700 of Israel’s war with Hamas. Seven hundred days since October 7, 2023, the day Hamas carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Seven hundred days of tunnels and rockets, funerals and rubble, endless cease-fire talks that, lately, yield nothing but more stalling. And above all, seven hundred days of agony for the hostages and their families, who wake each morning not knowing if their loved ones are still alive in Hamas’s tunnels of cruelty.

The attempted genocide of that day did not end with its victims. It tore something open in the Israeli psyche. They live now with a rawness they cannot shake: the knowledge that their neighbors danced in the streets as Jews were slaughtered, that women were raped as trophies, that children were dragged screaming into Gaza and remain there still. The damage is not only physical but spiritual. Israelis carry both the grief of October 7 and the burden of a world that treats their self-defense as a crime.

It is against this backdrop that we must ask: how does one fight a war against an enemy like Hamas? Unlike the Nazis, who however diabolical, cloaked their genocide in euphemism and bureaucracy, Hamas aired their atrocities live. They paraded women through the streets, filmed themselves burning families alive, and posted the carnage online. Hitler said “resettlement”; Hamas says “resistance.” Evil once wore a mask. Now it boasts openly.

The Allies in World War II understood a fundamental truth: appeasement is suicide when your adversary’s ideology is extermination. Churchill warned, “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.” The Allies didn’t negotiate with Hitler; they demanded unconditional surrender. Berlin burned not out of cruelty but necessity.

Israel faces the same reality but under different rules. Hamas has perfected a trick Hitler never mastered: embedding themselves in hospitals, schools, and mosques so every bomb dropped becomes propaganda. Allied commanders never faced such a trap. Israel does, has fallen deep into that trap, and is now pilloried for daring to fight back.

The ongoing cease-fire negotiations illustrate the futility of compromise. Hamas refuses to surrender, disarm, or give up its rule in Gaza. What they demand is a “pause”, a cease-fire that would leave their power intact, their ideology unbroken, and their hostages still in chains. Imagine if Hitler had asked the Allies in 1945 for a cease-fire that left the Wehrmacht in Berlin and the SS in charge of the camps. It would have been absurd. Yet today, the world pressures Israel to accept precisely that.

This has left Israel in a position the Allies never faced: it has become a pariah. In 1945, the Allies emerged from the rubble of Europe as liberators. Civilian deaths in Dresden or Hamburg were tragic but accepted as the cost of ending tyranny. Israel, by contrast, is condemned not because its war is unjust, but because of the way it is forced to fight it. Images of destruction dominate global screens, blotting out the moral clarity of the cause. The mainstream media gobbles up and amplifies Palestinian propaganda turning it into social media click bait that not only feeds anti-Israel sentiment, but also ignites and fuels historic levels of antisemitism in the Jewish diaspora around the world. 

And yet, what is the alternative? To fight with “restraint” against such zealotry is to guarantee stalemate, hostage deaths, and Hamas’s survival. To fight as the Allies once fought is to invite condemnation and isolation. Win the war and lose the world, or lose the war and invite another October 7.

This raises the uncomfortable question of complicity. Yes, there are children beneath the rubble, innocent in their suffering. But Hamas was elected in 2006 and never ousted. Crowds cheered on October 7. Schools teach martyrdom. Most damning of all, not a single Palestinian has risked themselves to provide information about the Israeli hostages. Even under Nazi terror, there were Europeans who defied the Gestapo to hide Jews. In Gaza? Silence. Where are the Schindlers? That absence of moral courage is itself an indictment.

But Israel’s struggle is not only about Israel. The world itself has a stake in the defeat of Hamas and the jihadist ideology it embodies. A movement that sanctifies terror, revels in atrocity, and brands genocide as “resistance” cannot be allowed to survive. Its vanquishing is not merely an Israeli imperative but a global one. Yet, astonishingly, the world flirts with rewarding this terrorism by granting Palestine statehood at the United Nations this September. To do so would be to hand Hamas a victory it could never achieve on the battlefield and signal that murder and hostage-taking pay. It would be like the Munich Agreement in 1938 that rewarded Hitler for his agression, dressed up in diplomatic language.

Military victory alone is not enough. The Allies understood this. Nuremberg was not just punishment, but education. German society was forced to confront its complicity. Schools were rebuilt, curricula rewritten, propaganda dismantled. Over time, Nazism went from proud ideology to global shame. Israel must insist on the same for Gaza: not just the destruction of Hamas’s tunnels and arsenals, but the dismantling of its ideology. Gaza’s textbooks must change. Its mosques must stop preaching martyrdom. Its political culture must learn that power flows from compromise, not jihad.

This is not fantasy. The Arab world itself has begun a process of de-radicalization. Saudi Arabia, once the prime exporter of Wahhabi jihad, has reined in clerics, rewritten textbooks, and turned toward modernization. The UAE has built a model of pragmatic Islam that tolerates Jews, hosts interfaith conferences, and prizes economic growth over holy war. Even Egypt and Jordan, once sworn enemies, have kept peace with Israel for decades. If Saudi Arabia can de-radicalize after 9/11, if the UAE can pivot from Salafi preachers to the Abraham Accords, why not Gaza?

This is why Richard Haass argues in Foreign Affairs that Israel cannot settle for permanent occupation. A two-state solution is not a gift but a necessity. It is Israel’s only chance to remain Jewish and democratic without being consumed by perpetual war. Just as the Allies rebuilt Germany with the Marshall Plan, Israel and its partners must rebuild Palestine with a program of de-radicalization and state-building. It will take time. It took decades for Germans to own their shame. But history shows it is possible, if reconstruction follows destruction.

So yes, Hamas earns the label “worse than Nazis.” Not in scale, but in shamelessness, in reveling in bloodshed, in the silence of those who cheer or stay quiet while atrocities are committed in their name. Israel must finish what the Allies once finished: the unconditional defeat of genocidal ideology. But the story cannot end there. Churchill warned in 1946 that “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”Victory without reconstruction is merely the prelude to another war.

It happened in Germany. It is happening in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. It can happen in Palestine. But only if the world insists on de-radicalization as surely as it once insisted on de-Nazification. And if today’s cease-fire negotiations teach us anything, it is this: peace cannot be built on Hamas’s terms. It can only begin once Hamas, like the Nazis before them, is stripped of both power and legitimacy, even if doing so leaves Israel condemned in the court of world opinion.

Stay safe everyone!

Brad out. 

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Shabbat shalom!

The horror in Gaza continues to rattle my sensibilities. I’m not sure what the F is going on there anymore. Thinking about the current situation there, I am reminded of the TV show “House” where the good, but cynical doctor House would admonish his staff about their patients, that “everyone lies”. That is how I feel about all the actors in this most abysmal Gaza horror show. All the major actors lie: Bibi and his coalition of nut jobs, Hamas, Palestinians, the United Nations, and worst of all, the mainstream media. 

The Greek philosopher Plato told us a story about prisoners chained in a cave, forced to watch shadows on a wall and mistake them for reality. They never saw the fire behind them, let alone the actual figures casting the shadows. The lesson was clear: truth is not what flickers in front of your eyes, but what lies hidden in the shadows, waiting to be sought and revealed.

Today the Gaza war has its own cave. And the shadows have grown darker still. This week, the world’s leading authority on food crises, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, formally declared a famine underway in Gaza City. It is the first such declaration in the Middle East. More than half a million people are said to be in catastrophic conditions, with children suffering the brunt of hunger and disease. Innocent civilians are paying a horrendous price for a war they did not choose.

The suffering is undeniable. But the shadows still mislead. A famine in Gaza does not prove Israel has adopted a deliberate policy of starvation, which would be a heinous war crime. It shows instead how Hamas’s diversion of aid, Israel’s ill considered policy halts, and the collapse of international coordination have converged into a man made catastrophe. The fire behind the shadows is still there, but few are willing to turn their heads toward it. And Bibi’s denials only fan the flames that cast even darker shadows. 

Israel made a huge strategic error when it briefly stopped all aid from entering Gaza in early March 2025. Yes, there was an estimated six month surplus of supplies already inside the territory, (a fact ignored or buried by the media) but the optics were catastrophic. Even if the cutoff was temporary and no Gazan would have gone without food for months, the policy gave Hamas a propaganda gift wrapped in blood red ribbon. Headlines screamed starvation while omitting mention of those warehouses.

At the same time, Israel and its U.S. backers rolled out the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, positioning it as a replacement for UN led aid. It was a strategy I once agreed with, bypassing UN pathways that Hamas had long manipulated. But its execution was disastrous. Instead of restoring impartial aid and running the new system in parallel, the GHF’s militarized, centralized distribution centers, complete with biometric screening and contractor guarded hubs, became choke points. Aid groups rebelled, demanding a return to the UN system. The optics were worse than the March cutoff, and the media ran with the shadow: Israel weaponizing hunger. The fire behind the wall never got seen.

Plato’s allegory reminds us that escaping the cave requires confronting reality, not shadows. A powerful voice bringing some of that reality is Eitan Fischberger, writing recently in Future of Jewish Substack. After spending time embedded with the IDF inside Gaza, she described walking past “pallets of flour, bottled water, diapers, medical supplies, and jars of baby food — provided by the World Food Programme, UNICEF, and donor countries — sat untouched while people just miles away searched for their next meal.” Those supplies weren’t blocked by Israel. They had already cleared the checkpoints. They were stalled because the United Nations refused to deliver them. Fischberger’s argument is blunt: “The supreme aim for the UN isn’t helping Gazans; it’s maintaining control over the humanitarian system that keeps it relevant.”

She also pointed to UNRWA’s longstanding entanglement with Hamas, from employing staff linked to terrorism to storing weapons in schools and clinics. Whether or not every Israeli intelligence claim holds up, the evidence of deep rot is undeniable. Her conclusion is clear: famine in Gaza is driven not only by war, but by an aid ecosystem that Hamas exploits and the UN refuses to reform.

That conclusion reinforces the larger point: this crisis is not Israel’s singular moral failure but the collapse of a corrupt aid structure that international institutions refuse to confront. And yet, in the cave of global opinion, the shadow projected is that of an Israeli policy of starvation.

From that moment, the accusation hardened into a permanent narrative: Israel is deliberately starving Gaza. The UN repeats it, human rights groups echo it, and especially The New York Times gives it journalistic weight. But scratch beneath the surface, and the framework collapses.

Israel has allowed tens of thousands of trucks carrying food, water, and medicine into Gaza since October. Egypt and Jordan have participated in distribution. The real choke point is Hamas, hijacking convoys, hoarding fuel, taxing aid to fund its terror infrastructure. Satellite images and eyewitness accounts confirm warehouses brimming with relief while civilians queue outside. Yet The New York Times prints front page photos of skeletal children paired with captions like “Aid fails to reach Gaza.” Fails to reach because what? The subject, Hamas, is excised. Language becomes propaganda.

Enter Nicholas Kristof, columnist for the New York Times. To be fair, Kristof is not a hack or a cynic. He is, by most measures, a compassionate man with honorable intentions. He has spent decades shining light on forgotten atrocities, often when no one else was looking. Right now, he is one of the few prominent voices consistently calling out the real genocide unfolding in Sudan, and for that he deserves credit. Kristof actually gives a damn, and unlike many of his colleagues, he has put his career on the line more than once to cover stories most readers would rather ignore.

But even good men can be misled by shadows on the cave wall. In his recent column, Kristof thundered:

“Israel has killed an estimated 18,000 children and is starving a population.”

— New York Times, Aug. 16, 2025

It was a thunderous charge. To back it up, Kristof leaned on a July 24 New York Times article that has since been thoroughly debunked. That story quoted “Gazan doctors” and “aid officials” who painted a picture of systematic famine orchestrated by Israel. What it failed to mention was the Hamas affiliation of many of those sources, the existence of massive warehouses filled with food, and the systematic diversion of aid by Hamas itself.

Kristof, instead of interrogating these omissions, repeated them. And because of his reputation for compassion and integrity, his words carried even more weight. Shadows became reality for millions of readers. The correction? None. The damage? Immense.

And Kristof is not alone. Just a few months ago, the UN’s own humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC that “14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.” The statement spread across the globe in headlines. Within days, the UN admitted it was false — the real projection referred to children at risk of severe malnutrition over the course of a year, not imminent death within days. Fletcher himself expressed regret over his lack of precision, but the shadow remained on the cave wall. Thousands of readers never saw the correction, only the original, horrifying claim.

This is the tragedy of the cave: even the most honorable prisoners can be fooled by the shadows if they are not allowed to turn their heads toward the fire.

The Kristof episode, the Fletcher debacle, and the litany of uncorrected headlines are part of a pattern. Every Hamas health ministry casualty figure is printed as fact. Every accusation of indiscriminate bombing becomes front page headline. When the narrative unravels, the retraction is buried.

Remember the Al Ahli hospital explosion? Hamas blamed Israel, claiming 500 killed. The Times ran it uncritically. Only later did intercepted communications, forensic evidence, and independent intelligence confirm it was a misfired Palestinian rocket. But the world had already turned, and the shadow remained. The retraction? Just a footnote.

On the battlefield, Israel has degraded Hamas, destroyed tunnels, and decapitated leaders. But in the global court of opinion, Israel bleeds. Democracies are held to impossible standards. Terrorist groups are graded on a curve. Hamas is expected to sacrifice its own people. Israel is expected to avoid all civilian harm.

Part of the loss is Israel’s failure to tell its story as effectively as Hamas tells its lies. Hamas films funerals, orphaned children, cries famine. Israel shows graphs, convoys, and cautious press briefings, and wonders why the cave wall has more clickbait than the fire.

If Plato’s cave is to be broken open, one obvious step is to let the light in. That means Israel must allow independent journalists to work freely inside Gaza, so the famine and its causes can be documented truthfully. Independent journalism would not sanitize Israel’s mistakes, and it would not disguise the human suffering in Gaza. What it would do is separate fact from propaganda, the fire from the shadows. Without it, the world continues to rely on numbers and anecdotes filtered through Hamas, NGOs with political agendas, or headlines crafted in New York conference rooms. With it, the prisoners chained to the cave wall might finally turn their heads toward the fire.

Truth is not flattering. Civilians are suffering. Children are hungry. A famine has been confirmed, and that reality cannot be brushed away. But famine is not the same as a deliberate policy of starvation. It is the grim byproduct of a terror group that hijacks food, a government in Jerusalem that made catastrophic mistakes like halting aid and botching the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation rollout, and a world media ecosystem that amplifies shadows rather than exposing fire.

In my opinion, the only real starvation occurring in Gaza is that of the poor innocent hostages who are emaciated, denied contact with the outside world, and in some cases forced to dig their own graves. That is not a shadow on a cave wall. That is the unvarnished reality of Hamas’s barbarism.

Behind every photo of a desperate child is a Hamas operative diverting aid. Behind every Kristof column is a debunked story masquerading as fact. Behind every “Israel blockades Gaza” headline is a warehouse full of food Hamas will not release.

Israel has not lost its morality. It has lost control of the cave. Until more prisoners turn toward the fire, the shadows will keep winning.

Until then, stay out of the shadows and stay in the sunlight, but make sure you wear your sun screen, and as always, be safe out there everyone. And try to enjoy the weekend.

Brad out.