RSS
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.
RSS
Italy, Spain Deploy Naval Vessels to Protect Flotilla on Course for Gaza
A Palestinian flag is seen as people gather at the port of Ermoupolis before the departure of two sailing boats, Electra and Oxygen, part of the Global Sumud Flotilla aiming to reach Gaza and break Israel’s naval blockade, on Syros island, Greece, Sept. 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Giorgos Solaris
Italy and Spain have deployed naval ships to assist an international aid flotilla that claims it has come under drone attack while trying to deliver aid to Gaza, potentially ratcheting up tensions with Israel, which strongly opposes the initiative.
The Global Sumud Flotilla is using about 50 civilian boats to try to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza, which for nearly two decades has been ruled by Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group that openly calls for the destruction of Israel. Many lawyers, parliamentarians, and activists, including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, are on board.
The Italian defense ministry said a frigate that was dispatched on Wednesday, hours after the GSF was reportedly targeted on its way to Gaza, would be replaced by another vessel, adding that the aim was to protect people.
“It is not an act of war, it is not a provocation: it is an act of humanity, which is a duty of a state towards its citizens,” Defense Minister Guido Crosetto told the upper house of parliament on the decision to send a ship.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Wednesday he will join Italy in sending a military warship to protect the flotilla. He told a press conference in New York where he has been attending the UN General Assembly that the citizens of 45 countries were on board to deliver food to the population of Gaza and express solidarity with their suffering.
“The government of Spain insists that international law be respected and that the right of our citizens should be respected to sail through the Mediterranean in safe conditions,” he said. “Tomorrow we will dispatch a naval vessel from Cartagena with all necessary resources in case it was necessary to assist the flotilla and carry out a rescue operation.”
FLOTILLA REJECTS CYPRUS AID COMPROMISE
The Italian foreign ministry said Belgium, France, and other European nations had asked them to help provide assistance to their citizens on the flotilla if needed.
Italy had proposed a compromise whereby aid supplies could be dropped off in Cyprus and handed over to the Catholic Church’s Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which would then distribute them in Gaza. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said Israel backed the idea.
However, the Italian delegation rejected that suggestion on behalf of the flotilla on Thursday.
“Our mission stays true to its original goal of breaking [Israel’s] illegal siege and delivering humanitarian aid to the besieged population of Gaza,” the Italian group said in a statement.
The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said it would not comment on reports that it was in discussions about the flotilla.
Italy sent a first frigate on Wednesday, hours after the flotilla said it was targeted by drones that dropped stun grenades and itching powder on the vessels as they sailed in international waters 30 nautical miles (56 km) off the Greek island of Gavdos.
No one was hurt, but some damage was caused to the vessels.
Previous activist attempts to break the naval blockade on Gaza were stopped by force by the Israeli military.
ISRAEL ASKS IF THIS IS AID OR PROVOCATION?
In 2010, 10 Turkish activists were killed by Israeli commandos who raided the Mavi Marmara ship leading an aid flotilla towards Gaza.
Italian Prime Minister Meloni, a traditional ally of Israel, stressed on Wednesday that no use of military force was expected by her country’s navy, and criticized the flotilla initiative as “gratuitous, dangerous, and irresponsible.”
The flotilla has blamed Israel for the drone attack.
Israel’s foreign ministry did not respond directly to the accusation, but invited the flotilla to drop humanitarian aid at any port in a country near Israel, leaving it to Israeli authorities to take it to Gaza, or else face consequences.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said, in a post on X, that the flotilla‘s rejection of the Italian proposal to drop the aid off in Cyprus showed “that their real purpose is provocation and serving Hamas.”
“Israel will not allow vessels to enter an active combat zone and will not allow the breach of a lawful naval blockade,” he wrote.
SAILING AT SLOW SPEED
The flotilla said early on Thursday that its vessels were sailing at slow speed in Greek territorial waters, had been subjected to “moderate drone activity” during the night, and were heading towards international waters “later today.”
Some of the people on flotilla vessels have decided to disembark and are being replaced by other activists, Annalisa Corrado, an EU lawmaker for Italy‘s opposition Democratic Party who is on one of the boats, told Reuters.
“It is clear that tensions are rising, and with them, risks are also rising. Those who disembark have decided that these levels of risk are no longer compatible with what they are willing to bear.”
Israel launched its nearly two-year-old war on Gaza in response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on the country by Hamas terrorists which killed some 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage.
RSS
Israel Strikes Yemen’s Sanaa After Houthi Drone Attack on Eilat
Smoke rises from the sites of Israeli airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 25, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
The Israeli military said it struck targets linked to Yemen’s Houthis in Sanaa on Thursday, a day after the internationally designated terrorist group claimed a drone attack on a hotel in Israel‘s Red Sea resort of Eilat.
The Houthi-run health ministry said two people were killed and 48 wounded in the attack, which it said hit civilian and service facilities. Civil defense teams were still working at the scene.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the Houthi general staff’s control headquarters, security and intelligence compounds, and military camps were among the targets attacked by its air force.
“We have now delivered a powerful strike on numerous terror targets of the Houthi terror organization in Sanaa“, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a post on X.
The strikes are the latest in more than a year of attacks and counterstrikes between Iran-backed Houthi terrorists in Yemen and Israel, part of a spillover from the war in Gaza.
The strikes targeted the Dhahban power station and several residential neighborhoods, the Houthi-run Al Masirah TV reported.
The strikes came as a pre-recorded speech by Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi was being aired.
On Wednesday, at least 20 people were injured after a drone launched from Yemen hit a hotel in Israel‘s Red Sea resort city of Eilat, the Israeli ambulance service said.
Israel in August carried out a strike that killed the prime minister of the Houthis’ administration and several other ministers, the first such attack to kill senior officials of the Islamist group.
RSS
The UN Is Obsolete; Israel’s Defense of Itself Just Proved It’s a Good Thing
Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani attends an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, following an Israeli attack on Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, at UN headquarters in New York City, US, Sept. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
For decades, the UN has been a forum for anti-Israel bias and symbolic gestures. This week’s General Assembly drama — mass recognition of a Palestinian state, lectures about ceasefires, and leaders publicly abandoning hope in the institution — only confirms that the world no longer relies on a body built for moral posturing rather than practical action.
The UN was born to prevent genocide and keep the peace. Yet this week’s General Assembly laid bare how far the institution has drifted from that founding purpose.
World leaders poured into New York to declaim, condemn, and recognize; the headlines were dominated less by meaningful enforcement than by theatrical denunciations and symbolic recognitions. Several European governments used the UN stage to formally recognize a Palestinian state — an outraged diplomatic rebuke to Israel that, while loud, offers no practical mechanism to stop terrorism against Israel or feed the starving. The actions by countries to recognize a state of “Palestine” are real and consequential as a political signal, but they are not a solution to the operational realities on the ground.
What the General Assembly specializes in is moral theater. Speeches this week ranged from calls for immediate ceasefires and humanitarian corridors, to scathing rebukes of Israel’s campaign against Hamas.
Spain’s king and many other leaders pressed for an immediate halt to the fighting; others used the platform to assert global values and moral outrage. At the same time, US President Donald Trump used his podium to excoriate the institution itself and to make clear that Washington will not allow the UN to dictate a policy that weakens the Western moral order, or Israel’s right of self-defense. The cacophony played out on live television; the result was clarity, not consensus: the UN can supply rhetoric, not remediation.
The practical consequences of the UN’s paralysis have been obvious for months. The Security Council — the only UN organ able to issue binding measures — has increasingly been reduced to spectacle, as members trade accusations and resort to vetoes. This week’s special council sessions underlined the growing isolation of the US position and the paralysis of the council. Many states demanded immediate steps to halt Israel’s operations, while Washington insisted that any meaningful move must condemn Hamas and protect the chance of a ceasefire-for-hostages deal.
The UN’s failure is not merely rhetorical — it extends to the world body’s humanitarian role. We have now seen governments and publics lose confidence in the UN’s ability to prevent aid from being diverted and weaponized. The controversies over aid distribution in Gaza — including the UN Office of Project Services tracking that many aid consignments have not reached their intended destinations and US officials pointing to extremely high interception figures — have fed a crisis of credibility. Washington and Jerusalem’s response was to back new mechanisms to deliver life-saving assistance outside the UN framework; critics call these moves dangerous and partial, but they are a pragmatic response to a broken distribution system. The dispute over how much aid has been diverted, and by whom, is contested; what is not contested is the loss of public trust in the UN’s delivery capabilities.
If the UN cannot be trusted to apply its own neutrality standards, safeguard aid, or protect civilians impartially, then it ceases to be the practical instrument the world needs. This week’s events show something more uncomfortable: large parts of the international community prefer symbolic condemnation to hard enforcement. Countries can — and increasingly do — act through coalitions, bilateral arrangements, and ad-hoc institutions when lives are on the line. The rush to recognize a Palestinian state at the General Assembly is an example of symbolism substituting for the painstaking, security-first work required to disarm terrorists, free hostages, and then build lasting institutions.
For Israel, the lesson is blunt: survival cannot be outsourced to an assembly of speeches and resolutions. When Hamas masterminds mass murder and holds hundreds hostage, a world that treats that barbarism as merely another item for debate is failing the very cause the UN was created to defend. Israel has thus acted — and, in doing so, exposes the UN’s limited role. Some will call that action unilateral or ugly; others will call it the only realistic choice left in a world where the most binding international body is paralyzed by politics. Either way, this week’s General Assembly demonstrated that the UN provides a stage, not a strategy.
The UN may survive as a diplomatic forum. It can still host conferences, deliver statements, and register condemnations. But its transformation from an authority that organizes collective security into a global soapbox is now complete. If the international order is to be more than rhetoric, democratic states must stop pretending that a broken multilateral institution can substitute for decisive leadership and accountable coalitions capable of both providing aid and stopping terror. The UN’s obsolescence is no tragedy — it is an invitation for effective, moral action to migrate from podiums to policy.
Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx