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Poetry for ‘Peace’ — Without Jews
The body of a motorist lies on a road following a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel October 7, 2023. REUTERS/Ammar Awad
When Benedict Cumberbatch stood on stage at the “Together For Palestine” event at Wembley Arena and solemnly recited lines from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, On This Land There Are Reasons to Live, many in the audience swooned, seeing it as an act of courage and humanism.
It wasn’t.
It was a performance — one that captures the moral blindness of much of the Western left (and extreme right) on this conflict. What Cumberbatch delivered wasn’t an ode to peace. It was the sanitization of a man who spent decades denying Jewish history, justifying violence, and romanticizing Jewish erasure.
And it was chillingly familiar.
In the 1930s, celebrated artists gave cultural cover to the Nazi Party. Richard Strauss led the Reichsmusikkammer as Jewish musicians were purged; and Leni Riefenstahl’s films, like Triumph of the Will, dazzled critics even as they glorified Hitler. Their art wrapped hate in beauty, and gave genocide’s ideology a veneer of sophistication.
That’s what Cumberbatch just did for Darwish — cloaking eliminationist ideology in lyrical packaging.
Romanticizing Erasure
The lines Cumberbatch recited are widely shared as “uplifting”:
We have on this land what makes life worth living…
This land is called Palestine, and it will remain forever Palestine.
But in context, this isn’t love of a homeland. It’s a rejectionist claim that all the land “will forever be Palestine,” with no acknowledgment of Jewish history, presence, or right to sovereignty.
There was never an independent “State of Palestine.” Before the modern Arab-Israeli conflict, “this land” was ruled by ancient Israelite and Jewish commonwealths and kingdoms, and then by a series of foreign empires: the Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, Islamic Caliphates, Crusaders, the Ottoman Empire, and the British Empire.
Jews have lived in Israel continuously for over 3,000 years — and even after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE and suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, Jews remained the plurality until the Arab-Islamic conquests. It was only after crushing the Bar Kochba revolt that the Romans even tried to erase Jewish identity by renaming Judea “Syria-Palestina.”
Erasing that history — as Darwish does here — isn’t universalism. It’s denialism.
Airbrushing Antisemitism
Darwish was not a wistful humanist. He was a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and for decades, he was one of its chief propagandists. His most infamous poem, Passers Between the Passing Words (1988), didn’t just reject Israeli policy — it rejected Jewish existence in the land:
Leave our land…
Get out of our blood. Get out of our memories.
Get out of us.
This wasn’t metaphor. Even at the time, Shimon Peres decried it as “a call for the destruction of Israel.” It portrayed Jews as alien “passers” to be purged from the land, from memory, and even from Palestinian “blood.”
And it wasn’t a one-off. In A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies (1967), Darwish depicted Israelis as soulless invaders “who come to our land to kill, and do not see the human in the human they kill.”
In Identity Card (1964), he accused Jews of having “stolen the orchards of my ancestors.” These aren’t just anti-Zionist statements. They are antisemitic – portraying Jews as greed-driven thieves, denying Jews any rootedness, humanity, or right to be in their ancestral homeland (and ignoring that before the Arabs rejected the partition plan in 1947 and launched a war to destroy Israel, every piece of land owned by Jews in “this land” had been legally purchased — mostly from Arabs and Turks).
Yet none of this seemed to trouble Cumberbatch. He simply delivered Darwish’s lines, framed as transcendent and beautiful, with the eliminationism and antisemitism airbrushed away.
The Western Left’s Moral Blinders
Much of today’s Western left has adopted a posture that treats complexity as colonialism and erasure as justice. They wrap themselves in keffiyehs, quote an antisemite like Darwish, and proclaim themselves defenders of the oppressed — all while ignoring that the ideology they romanticize rejects the Jewish people’s right to exist at all in their ancestral homeland.
They ignore that this same ideology — embodied by Hamas — led to the mindset that carried out the October 7 massacre, burned children alive, raped women, and kidnapped babies. They ignore that Hamas still openly declares its goal is to annihilate the world’s only Jewish state.
And they ignore that Darwish’s words helped cultivate generations of Palestinian Arabs to believe peace will come only once the Jews are gone.
This moral blindness lets them recast eliminationism as “liberation” — to celebrate a poet who told Jews to “get out of our blood” as if he were a harmless dreamer. It lets them cosplay righteousness while reinforcing the very ideology that perpetuates this conflict and keeps Israelis and Palestinians trapped in war.
Performance, Not Principle
If Cumberbatch truly wanted to recite poetry for peace, he could have chosen voices from Israeli and Palestinian coexistence activists — people who have lost loved ones, yet still work for reconciliation. Instead, he chose a man who dehumanized Jews as monsters and demanded they erase themselves from the land, from history, and even from memory.
That is not art in service of peace. It is art in service of erasure. And it is the perfect metaphor for the Western left’s approach to this conflict: a comforting performance that airbrushes antisemitism, denies Jewish history, and excuses the very ideology that makes peace impossible.
Unless, of course, Benedict Cumberbatch truly wants Mahmoud Darwish’s “vision of peace” to prevail — a “peace” in which Israel and the Jewish people are erased from “this land.” And given what Hamas did during the hours it briefly controlled a sliver of Israel on October 7, we sadly already know exactly what that “erasure” would look like.
Because when art makes erasure seem beautiful, it helps pave the road to atrocity.
Micha Danzig is a current attorney, former IDF soldier & NYPD police officer. He currently writes for numerous publications on matters related to Israel, antisemitism & Jewish identity & is the immediate past President of StandWithUs in San Diego and a national board member of Herut.
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Jewish Columbia University Graduate Employees File Complaint Against Anti-Israel Union
Illustrative: Pro-Hamas Columbia University students march on Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Photo: Roy De La Cruz via Reuters Connect
Jewish students employed as graduate workers by Columbia University have filed a federal complaint against their campus labor union — Student Workers of Columbia, an affiliate of United Auto Workers (UAW) — alleging that its bosses devote more energy and resources to pursuing “radical policy proposals” than improving occupational conditions.
The National Right to Work Foundation (NRTW), a nonprofit organization which fights for worker mobility and freedom of representation that is providing the students legal counsel free of charge, announced the action on Monday. In a release shared with The Algemeiner, it said the students, who have formed the advocacy group Graduate Researchers Against Discrimination and Suppression (GRADS), are subjected to abuses which magnify problems inherent in compulsory union membership — chiefly that they may be forced to accept as representatives of their interests union bosses who act in “bad faith” and hold offensive beliefs.
At Columbia University, this issue has manifested in UAW’s unrelenting effort to inveigle school officials into adopting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and other measures, including abolishing relationships with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and Tel Aviv University.
“These and similar actions constitute bad faith bargaining … and violate the duty of fair representation that respondent union owes to all represented graduate students,” state the charges, which GRAFS filed at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
“Far from facilitating a more harmonious relationship between graduate students and the Columbia administration, UAW union bosses are simply ramping up radical extremism at a university that has already seen more than its share of chaos,” National Right to Work president Mark Mix said in a statement. “While it’s wrong from the start that any student is forced to accept union boss ‘representation’ they oppose, it’s even less acceptable that UAW union officials are trying to use their monopoly bargaining privileges to enforce their divisive politics on the entire campus, including undergraduate students.”
Experts told the US Congress earlier this month that antisemitism runs rampant in campus labor unions, trapping Jews in exploitative and nonconsensual relationships with union bosses who spend their membership dues on political activities which promote hatred of their identity and the destruction of the Jewish homeland.
Testifying at a hearing titled “Unmasking Union Antisemitism” held by the House Education and the Workforce Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, the witnesses described a series of issues facing Jewish graduate students represented against their will by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE) union.
During an interview with The Algemeiner after the hearing, Glenn Taubman, staff attorney for NRTW, said union antisemitism highlights the issues inherent in compulsory union representation, which he says quells freedom of speech and association. He pointed to the case of Cornell University PhD candidate David Rubinstein, who testified before the subcommittee about his own tribulations and a climate of hatred which evades being redressed because the ringleaders fostering it hold left-wing viewpoints.
“The only reason that David is forced to be represented by UE and is theoretically forced to pay them dues is because federal labor law allows that and in many cases requires it,” Taubman explained. “What I told the committee is that ending the union abuse of graduate students and people like David requires amending federal law so that unions are not the forced representatives of people who don’t want such representation.”
He added, “Unions have a special privilege that no other private organization in America has, and that is the power to impose their representation on people who don’t want it and then mandate that they pay dues because they quote-un-quote represent you. That is the most un-American thing that I can imagine.”
Rubinstein told The Algemeiner that he is a Democrat who supports many of the causes for which unions advocate but that what he described as UE’s support for Hamas leaves him no choice but to seek every avenue for disassociating with it.
“As a Jew, I cannot support an organization which spends its time not advocating for wages and health care but rather for ‘intifada revolution,’” he said. “The union antisemitism is empowered by the Cornell administration’s persistent weakness and consistent reneging on its promises to defend the rights of Jewish students.”
Rubinstein added that Cornell University president Michael Kotlikoff came close to exempting students from paying UE dues but abandoned the policy change after its members threatened to strike and thereby disrupt university operations.
“The threat of being terminated, the demands for money, and the constant harassment that others and I have experienced from UE would have never been possible had it not been for the weakness of Cornell leadership,” he added.
Campus antisemitism has drawn NRTW into an alliance with Jewish faculty and students across the US.
In 2024, it represented a group of six City University of New York (CUNY) professors, five of whom are Jewish, who sued to be “freed” from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) over its passing a resolution during Israel’s May 2021 war with Hamas which declared solidarity with Palestinians and accused the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and crimes against humanity. The group contested New York State’s “Taylor Law,” which it said chained the professors to the union’s “bargaining unit” and denied their right to freedom of speech and association by forcing them to be represented in negotiations by an organization they claim holds antisemitic views.
That same year, NRTW prevailed in a discrimination suit filed to exempt another cohort of Jewish MIT students from paying dues to the Graduate Student Union (GSU). The students had attempted to resist financially supporting GSU’s anti-Zionism, but the union bosses attempted to coerce their compliance, telling them that “no principles, teachings, or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees” to the union.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iran, China, Russia Pledge Coordinated Action Against European Efforts to Reinstate UN Sanctions on Tehran
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian addresses the 80th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the UN headquarters in New York, US, Sept. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon
Iran, China, and Russia have pledged coordinated action against European efforts to reinstate United Nations sanctions on Tehran, denouncing them as “illegal” after repeated negotiations failed to reach an agreement over the Iranian nuclear program.
On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs Kazem Gharibabadi met with his Chinese and Russian counterparts to explore deeper diplomatic collaboration amid escalating tensions with the West.
“We agreed on coordinated action against the unlawful efforts of Germany, France, and the UK to bring back sanctions that had been lifted,” the Iranian diplomat said.
Last month, Britain, France, and Germany formally initiated the 30-day process to activate the snapback mechanism, accusing Tehran of violating the 2015 nuclear deal meant to curb its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief — a move Iran condemned as “unjustified and unlawful.”
Russia and China, both signatories to the 2015 nuclear deal, have backed the Islamist regime in Tehran while firmly opposing Europe’s efforts to reinstate UN sanctions.
Facing the looming threat of economic sanctions and still reeling from its 12-day war with Israel, Iran is seeking support from its allies to restore and strengthen its defense capabilities.
On Wednesday, meanwhile, Mohammad Eslami, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization (AEOI), announced that Tehran signed an agreement with Moscow to build more nuclear power plants in the country, further deepening their ties.
Earlier this year, Russia pledged to build eight nuclear power plants in Iran, including four in the southern province of Bushehr.
According to a press release from the AEOI, the newly signed deal aims to expand bilateral cooperation on the “peaceful use of nuclear energy,” with the goal of strengthening energy security, advancing technology, and promoting sustainable development.
This week, Iran also received Russian MiG-29 fighter jets, while the country awaits delivery of more advanced Sukhoi Su-35s, emphasizing the regime’s latest push to rebuild its military capabilities.
“Once these systems are fully in place, our enemies will understand the language of power,” Abolfazl Zohrevand, a member of the Iranian parliament’s National Security Committee, told local media.
The Iranian lawmaker also claimed that Tehran is receiving China’s HQ-9 and Russia’s S-400 air defense systems “in significant numbers.”
According to the Associated Press, Iran has also started rebuilding several ballistic missile facilities as part of a wider effort to restore its missile program, which was significantly damaged during its war with Israel.
The United Kingdom, France, and Germany — collectively known as the E3 — have offered to delay the reimposition of UN sanctions for up to six months to allow more time for negotiations on a long-term agreement over Iran’s nuclear program.
However, the offer depends on Tehran restoring access for UN inspectors, addressing concerns about its enriched uranium stockpile, and engaging in talks with Washington.
Unless Iran and the European powers reach a deal to postpone the reimposition of sanctions within the next few days, the snapback process will move forward.
Speaking at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian vowed that the country would withstand any renewed sanctions and continue pursuing its national interests, emphasizing that Tehran would “never bow before aggressors.”
Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is solely for peaceful civilian purposes. However, Western countries have accused Tehran of seeking the capability to develop nuclear weapons.
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Slovenia Imposes Travel Ban on Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during ‘Christian Conference’ in Jerusalem, July 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Slovenia on Thursday imposed a travel ban on Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a government statement, after last year officially recognizing a Palestinian state and in July banning two far-right Israeli cabinet ministers.
“With this action Slovenia confirms its commitment to international law, the universal values of human rights, and a principled and consistent foreign policy,” Neva Grasic, the Secretary of State at the Foreign Ministry, said according to the government’s X account.
EU member Slovenia imposed an arms embargo on Israel in August and introduced a ban on imports of goods produced in Israeli communities in the West Bank.
Grasic said the government acted against Netanyahu because he stands accused by the International Court of Justice of committing war crimes in Gaza. Netanyahu adamantly denies the charges.
“The public is aware that proceedings are underway against him for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Grasic said.
“With this decision, the government is sending a clear message to the state of Israel that Slovenia expects consistent compliance with the decisions of international courts and international humanitarian law,” she added.
The tiny Alpine country along with other European countries has repeatedly called for a ceasefire in Gaza and increased aid deliveries to the enclave.
In July, the government imposed an embargo on exports, imports, and transit of arms to and from Israel, two weeks after it declared Israel’s national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich persona non grata over “genocidal statements” and incitement of violence against Palestinians.
In August, Slovenia introduced a ban on imports of goods produced in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and approved an additional aid package for Palestinians in Gaza.