1. This is definitely a problem for the Israeli government. They don’t seem to have any answers. (Neither does neo, but of course it’s not her job.)

2. y81:

   The left joined with Arab anti-Israel propaganda over fifty years ago. The effort to make Israel a pariah nation has borne great fruit. At this point, except for some tiny island countries mainly in the Pacific Ocean, the US is really Israel’s only ally. The left (and some fringe elements of the right that we’ve been discussing recently) smells blood in the water and thinks this is the time to purge its party, win control of the US, and make Israel totally isolated.

3. I used to think leftists were just misinformed and unthinking. I now think the leadership at least is actively evil.

4. “Zohran Mamdani ally Linda Sarsour called for the ouster of Israel-supporting “corporate Democrats” in fiery remarks Thursday at the SOMOS political conference.”

   Do not “corporate Democrats” fund a large percentage of democrat contributions?

   Fanaticism is a self-correcting mechanism, in that inherent to fanaticism is the sowing of the seeds of its own destruction.

5. Geoffrey Britain:

   Not to Mamdani, I don’t think. And not to Sarsour’s preferred candidates. More the Soros type.

6. neo: Righteous complaint is not a solution to geopolitical problems, given that history is not a morality play and does not generally reward virtue (except in the tautological sense that the victors make themselves out to have been morally superior). The Israelis need to figure out a way to make friends globally, not prove endlessly to themselves and to you that they are morally justified.

   Generally, successful pacification of a conquered population requires locating and suborning local factions willing to cooperate with the occupying power in order to advance their own agenda. (Ask Caesar, or Champlain, or Petraeus.) The Israelis have failed to do this.

7. Israel’s “friends” at the moment (with the exceptions of Trump’s America—but for how long might that be?—Milei’s Argentina, El Salvador, along with several countries in Middle Europe, most notably Hungary(!), perhaps Taiwan, perhaps Georgia, perhaps Azerbaijan) are rather busy at the moment trying to figure out how best to destroy themselves.

   So much for “morality plays”…

8. y81:

   I don’t see that what you wrote has relevance to my views on what Israel needs to do. When have I ever claimed that “Righteous complaint is a solution to geopolitical problems,” or that “history is a morality play”? I think some naive Israelis might think that, but I don’t think it’s a majority opinion there, either.

   You say that “The Israelis need to figure out a way to make friends globally.” Are you aware of what they’ve tried? For instance, this sort of thing as well as this, or this regarding India. Fat lot of good it does Israel (except economically), because of the enormous amount of anti-Israel propaganda (including the Western MSM), plus the persistent evil of Jew-hatred, which is a very real thing and a shape-shifter for millennia.

   Nor is Israel united on what to do about its neighbors, all of whom have wanted to destroy it from the start, and most of whom still want to do so. But your suggestion – occupying their neighbors (all of them? Israel doesn’t have that kind of manpower) and “locating and suborning local factions willing to cooperate with the occupying power in order to advance their own agenda” would require an occupation that would not “make friends globally” (au contraire). Nor is it at all clear that it would even be possible to do that sort of thing with jihadis, since their main agenda is to kill Jews and destroy Israel, and they are more than willing to sacrifice their own people in the attempt.

   Nor did Caesar and Champlain have the modern world and the MSM and UN to contend with, nor did the populations they were subduing have champions all over the world. Plus, prior to 10/7, Hamas was actually pretending to cooperate with Israel in order to get economic benefit, but it was all a pretense while they prepared their mammoth terror attack based on intelligence they had gained through the worker program whereby Israel was employing Gazans who were pretending to be “cooperating with Israel in order to get economic benefit.” It led to 10/7.

9. I used to think leftists were just misinformed and unthinking. I now think the leadership at least is actively evil.

   — Kate

   Historically, what we call the ‘Left’ as a social/cultural impulse dates back to the French Revolution and the immediate aftermath, but it’s a phenomenon of the entire Western Christendom. For the past three centuries, the Left’s core impulse is to be against the traditional Western institutions and legacy and ways, sometimes for good, sometimes for evil, but always that impulse against.

   Thus over the last centuries we saw the Left ally with working class people against the elite business and aristocratic classes to improve working conditions, because the later groups were the ‘established West’ at the time. Ditto their at-one-time working to actually improve the status and acceptance of racial minorities. Sometimes they’ve done good, when the West was doing less good or bad things.

   The Left actually tended to side with Israel at one time, decades ago, because they saw themselves as thus opposing an often anti-Jewish Protestant establishment at home, and because the original Zionist movement was rooted in secularism and socialism (anti-West again).

   Now they side by reflex with the Islamists, again because of what they are against. They tend to side against Christianity (and now Judaism too), against capitalism, against America as the dominant state of the West. That’s why they were reflexively sympathetic to the USSR during the Cold War.

   This is also why their historical political alliances tend to break down after a while. Their allies may share temporary goals, but they rarely want to wipe out the West or erase Christianity or anything like that. Thus their alliances with the Israelis, with organized labor (at the rank and file level), and now with black and hispanic voters in the USA and working class voters in Europe, too) tend to break down after they accomplish whatever specific goal united them.

   It’s why environmentalism keeps rising higher as a Lefty issue. Gaia can’t repudiate their claim to speak for her, after all! Not the way Labor did, the way minorities have begun to, etc.

10. “The Israelis have failed to do this.”

    I am not going to claim everything Israel has done is perfect, nobody is perfect. But the biggest reason BY FAR for Israel’s geopolitical problems is the following:

    There are 2 billion Muslims, and less than 20 million Jews. Oh, I almost forgot, the Muslims control a significant portion of the world’s energy supply.

    In fact, Israel is lucky even to have the US. For a long time after Israel was created much of the US security/defense establishment was not friendly towards it and there is still a faction like that. Antisemitism may have been a factor but again the main reason was likely, “The Arabs have all the oil, screw Israel”.

    Furthermore I suspect this is also a large part of the reason the left turned against Israel though not the only one. In Israel’s very early days communist nations were not unfriendly. The communist government of Czechoslovakia supplied arms to Israel in the late ’40s. But by the mid-50s the Soviets had thrown in with the Arabs and the marching orders against Israel were sent out to the left. And it is likely that one of the reasons for the switch was oil, though “Third World” politics also undoubtedly played a role with Israel being seen as a “settler colonialist entity” etc ad nauseam.

11. Well, Mamdani has a mandate.

    Let’s see how he and his glorious cohort can use it to destroy NYC, the ZIO monstrosity, and DJT (not necessarily in that order).

    And how fast.

12. @y81

    My my my, are you trying to obtain to coveted Zaphod Award for getting Banned for Jew Hate? Because it seems like you are striving to either obtain that or the getting banned for being an asshole without due justification, especially to our host. I’ve seen a. Steady drip drip drip of your posts on this with a truly toxic, head up ass, trolling tone and this absolutely foul tinge of downplaying the achievements of Israel and its hardships, and the attacks on Jews.

    Lest people think I am making this up, I present some prior comments on this subject from you.

    https://thenewneo.com/2025/04/16/some-good-news-on-the-education-front-from-christopher-rufo/#comment-2797667

    https://thenewneo.com/2025/04/16/some-good-news-on-the-education-front-from-christopher-rufo/#comment-2797718

    https://thenewneo.com/2025/09/16/is-israel-winning-the-war-but-losing-the-world/#comment-2822590

    https://thenewneo.com/2025/09/19/speech-as-incitement/#comment-2823081

    And some of my responses:

    https://thenewneo.com/2025/04/16/some-good-news-on-the-education-front-from-christopher-rufo/#comment-2797715

    https://thenewneo.com/2025/04/16/some-good-news-on-the-education-front-from-christopher-rufo/#comment-2797765

    https://thenewneo.com/2025/09/19/speech-as-incitement/#comment-2823157

    And now I realize I never got around to doing my historical rebuttal to you on the “winning the war losing the world” post. Thanks for the reminder.

    Our host has been rather gentle to you, I would argue too much so. She has not accused you of being a Jew Hater, so let me have the honor of opening with that particular charge. To be fair you are not a big enough idiot to play the role of Bob Sykes or Zaphod openly by ranting too much about Jews or how Israel had no right to exist or defend itself from October 7, but the through line is basically undeniable when you carefully look.

    One of the new differences between Jew Hate on one hand and legitimate or honest criticism of Israel or various Jewish groups is dishonestly and hypocritically imposing a standard on them that you do not apply to any others. This is very evident in this post of yours, and in the “winning the war losing the peace” post where you consistently downplay their victories and overplay their problems, and in the Rufo post where you outright tried to gaslight us about anti Jewish demonization and even violence on campus and tried to mock Neo for arguing Jews should be treated as a protected groups

    All of this would be bad enough as is. But you also act like a foul asswipe and genuine midwit or outright idiot. As shown by your simultaneous attacks on our host and others while peddling abject nonsense, like “Unilateral Free Trade” from the “Real Economist” who never the less could not bother to explain why other countries do not do it if it is so phenomenal.

    https://thenewneo.com/2025/04/14/a-nation-of-cobblers/#comment-2797321

    https://thenewneo.com/2025/04/14/a-nation-of-cobblers/#comment-2797554

    This is definitely a problem for the Israeli government.

    It’s not just a problem for the “Israeli Government”, shitheel, given what has repeatedly happened to their civilians. It isn’t even just a problem for Israelis. It also hurts others. American nationals have repeatedly been killed, injured, or enslaved in anti-Israeli terror attacks. American campuses have been held hostage to thuggery, blood libel, and coordinated disinformation from the likes of SJP.

    Even if you utterly ignore the moral dimensions of this – as you seem wont to do given your cretinous recent conduct – perhaps a free trade absolutist as you (one so fanatical you oppose even reciprocal tariffing of even the PRC) can understand the fact that terror attacks and targeting of Americans abroad imposes a block on trade and transport at least somewhat similar to that of a tariff but with none of the defensible benefits of it, in effect jacking up prices and undermining supplies. This bullshit happening in American academia hurts the economic and competitive advantages of free discussion and research in the sciences and scholarship, with compounding problems.

    Even you should be able to grasp that, if you were being honest.

    But being honest would not allow you to try and minimize the issue and isolate it as being merely a problem for Israel or the Jews, which as I mentioned before seems to be a pernicious, disgusting through line of yours.

    They don’t seem to have any answers. (Neither does neo, but of course it’s not her job.)

    As Neo pointed out, it’s not for lack of trying. But generational disinformation and demonization hurts.

    Moreover it looks like the Israelis do have at least some attempts at an answer, as do many of their friends. It wasn’t Charlie Kirk’s job either but he sent a lengthy and detailed note to Netanyahu about the plight of information warfare and what Israel should do to defend itself on that front shortly before his murder.

    https://nypost.com/2025/09/29/us-news/charlie-kirk-wrote-of-his-deep-love-for-israel-in-letter-to-netanyahu-about-how-to-counter-rising-opposition-to-the-jewish-state-in-the-us/

    And around the time of said murder I started seeing ads on YouTube discussing the horrors of October 7th and interviewing survivors and veterans. And while you might argue this is muh algorithm sorting stuff to me based on what I had seen before it is still stuff I flatly had never seen before in spite of seeking out pro-Israeli content, so something changed. Ditto the investigations into Jew hatred and Israeli demonization in places like the BBC and Wikipedia. So it looks like the Israelis and their allies have begun adjusting and have had some results.

    But I am guessing you wouldn’t know that because you have your head wedged so far into the sniping at Neo game the sun don’t shine on your skull.

    Righteous complaint is not a solution to geopolitical problems,

    It is almost painful when you try to miss a point.

    No, righteous complaint is rarely a solution to geopolitical problems. It is often, however, the prompting instigator for many solutions to geopolitical problems (“The Nazis have waged war across Europe!” “The Japanese are brutalizing China and French Indochina!” “The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe is unjust!” All of which raise the question of: what can be done about it?).

    It also often is PART of the SOLUTION to geopolitical problems on multiple levels, as our enemies realize given things like Holocaust Inversion, Temple Denial, denial of the criminal nature of SJP and AntifA, and so forth. Firstly it serves to highlight what is happening and seek support, and also to drive wedges among the enemy or unsympathetic neutrals by trying to highlight hypocrisy and dishonesty. It also serves to help reinforce and maintain morale and unity among “our side” for a long haul. Which is one reason why Sun Tzu the Bronze Age Chinese Flat Earther told of the Moral Law as a factor in war and politics.

    given that history is not a morality play

    This is hilarious coming from you given how you have repeatedly treated it as such when it comes to trade, uncritically citing “Real Economist” Cochran and his literally suicidal demands for Unilateral Free Trade.

    Secondly, leaving aside religious or eschatological possibilities or concepts, that does not address the fact that parts of history can play out like a morality play. And even more can be framed as such. See: the Melian Dialogue. Which so many people misunderstand the context of, leaving aside how it is probably tinged by Oligarchic propaganda and fictionalized. Midwits like yourself see it as an elaboration of how the strong do what they can and the weak suffer as they must, of amoral realpolitik in some of its rawest and brutalist form, which to a point it is.

    What you ignore is when its final version and the wider work it is in were refined: in the years after 404
    BC, AFTER the same Imperial Athens that plays the role of the villain and ostensible victor in the Melian Dialogue was utterly defeated in the War by the Spartan-Theban-Corinthian League and Melos repopulated by former refugees and restored to independence, in part due to the palpable moral disgust and strategic ramifications of Athens’s attack on and destruction of Melos.

    The Strong must also suffer as they must, and cannot in fact do as they will. And Athens’s posturing on that is presented as an aspect of Hubris – believing oneself to be Godlike, one of the greatest of sins both to the Ancient Hellenes and to us – and an indicator of catastrophic overreach. Overreach that other actors that may or may not have been more or less moral than it could take advantage of and trumpet.

    It is folly to believe much of the “Arab Street” will care much about the moral horror of innocent Israelis and foreigners being enslaved, sexually abused, and murdered at a peace concert. But it is also folly to discount that any of them will be moved from it, or that the ramifications of it cannot be presented to the wider world such as governments reliant on foreign trade and travel or their public with a “this could be you. You have practical reasons to stop this.”

    and does not generally reward virtue (except in the tautological sense that the victors make themselves out to have been morally superior).

    There is so much wrong with this it is. It even funny.

    Firstly: “Look at how Smurt and Sophistikated I is, I is using complex words like Tautological n shieet and talking about how morality and virtue r not rewarded in the nihilistic half baked sense that often passes fur realism and realpolitik!”

    No, no you’re not being smart, you’re being a real midwit who has studied just enough to realize that virtues are not always unalloyed positives and that sometimes the side we view as more virtuous and moral loses. But you have not studied enough and lack the awareness and logic to start asking yourself why this is or considering why sometimes it is.

    PS: “Victors make themselves out to be morally superior” is not exactly the narrative I would be peddling given the thin ice you should be with your track record of Jew baiting here, given what it is close to.

    Secondly: The idea that history or politics or war do not reward virtue is the pseudointellectual sophist’s half baked grasp of the matter. Ignoring the many different forms virtue can manifest and its possible advantages as well as downsides. The US has many virtues and vices, and both have practical downsides; Trump got elected in part due to pointing out how many foreign powers and allies or “allies” were taking advantage of us and our generosity. That is a very real downside to virtue. But the other side of the equation is it has given us a reputation and capacity to make deals.

    As much as the Western Euros, Turd World countries, or so on like badgering about how perfidious and untrustworthy and imperialistic the US is, and as much as we sometimes have been, they know they can make a deal with or cooperate with us and expect us to stick to it. This is how North Korean sailors hijacked by Somali Jihadist pirates know they can cooperate with the US Navy, for instance.

    Machiavelli said that The Princeps must be like both the fox and the lion, and be able to project the impression of virtue but be able and willing to violate those virtues in necessity. This is something truly effective leaders and governments can tap into, and is responsible for many of their great victories, and also failures if and when they get the balance wrong.

    The Israelis need to figure out a way to make friends globally, not prove endlessly to themselves and to you that they are morally justified.

    True, but a key part of that will be proving to others that they are morally justified. Especially given how important blood libels and demonization are to our enemies and their strategies against us. It cannot and should not be only part of the strategy – and it is not – but it also is foolish to ignore.

    Much as you are. Much as you have.

    Generally, successful pacification of a conquered population requires locating and suborning local factions willing to cooperate with the occupying power in order to advance their own agenda. (Ask Caesar, or Champlain, or Petraeus.) The Israelis have failed to do this.

    This is idiotic on a grand scale. The Israelis have been cooperating with and supporting various clans in Gaza willing and able to fight against Hamas and its coalition. Much as they supported the Phalangists in Lebanon and Druze and Kurdish militias in Syria. The FACT that you seem to ignore this speaks to who is ultimately the fool here. If anything the problem has not been from Israel being incapable of identifying and suborning local factions historically, it has been in sustaining the will and capacity to fight for as long as needed, especially in the face of urban war and hypocritical double standards and demonizational propaganda.

    There is much about that issue that is worth discussing. I just have no reason to believe you are in any way capable of doing so honestly or competently.

    PS: All three of the names you dropped, seemingly at random, took pains to cultivate their reputations as effective dealers and trustworthy patrons. This becomes especially obvious if you read Caesar and study his ability to exploit things like Optimate brutality in the Hispanic Campaign. Turns out that suborning local factions and getting defections helps if you display some level of virtue and can project that. Who would have thunk?

13. Hmmm……being forced out of your political party for your religion and/or support of something. Why does that sound familiar?

    Indeed history does rhyme.

14. I agree with Neo they think NOW is the moment.

15. If formerly dem Israel-supporters want to join the republican party, which side would have to hold their collective nose?

16. The remnants, Schumer and Shapiro have already castrated themselves and will be defenestrated like a Czech patriot in 1948 or a gay in Gaza.

17. Looked at dispassionately, the Republican Party is the right place for the Jewish mainstream, but they themselves have never seen it that way bar those New York City Jews who found the Democrats’ clubhouse politics repellent (see Louis Lefkowitz, Jacob Javits, Roy Goodman). The Mamdani phenomenon will generate some instances of re-assessment, but I doubt a mass re-alignment. Still, a guy can dream.

18. Art Deco:

    US Jews definitely once saw their home as the GOP. Until the Depression, Jews in the US were majority Republican. The shift occurred not just because of FDR and the Depression, but because of shifting Jewish US demographics. To generalize, the older group of Jewish immigrants were mostly from Germany, and in the 20th century Eastern European Jews came to dominate. The groups were very different from each other, both culturally and politically and even religiously.

    These days, religious US Jews are strongly to the right, and I’ve discussed the rest many times before.

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