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Rejoining IDF, Ex-Envoy Michael Oren Warns: ‘We’re Fighting the Wrong War’
Former Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren in IDF uniform. Photo: Provided
Israel’s former Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren has traded his diplomatic credentials and suits for a dog tag and combat uniform by joining an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) rapid response counter-terrorism unit in a northern kibbutz, warning that the fall of the embattled north would pose the most significant threat to Israel’s central heartland.
Oren recently returned from Washington, DC, where he accompanied a delegation of displaced Israelis from the north for a series of talks and high-level meetings in the US capital. The former envoy criticized Biden administration officials for lacking adequate answers for the evacuees they met with, implying they expected the evacuees to simply accept living in close proximity to a terror threat.
“No one is going to go back to living, say, in Metulla, which is literally a war zone with 150 houses destroyed and with Hezbollah on the other side of the fence,” he said, referring to the powerful Iran-backed terrorist organization in Lebanon. Oren cited army estimates that as much as 40 percent of Israel’s evacuated north, numbering some 80,000 people, would not return home in the event of a ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza.
“We now know what terrorists on the other side can do to Israelis,” he added.
Oren asserted that Israel was misdirecting its focus with the fighting in Hamas-ruled Gaza to the south, investing its manpower and resources against the wrong enemy. “We’re fighting the wrong war. We should focus our main energy on the north, which is a strategic threat. Hamas was and is a tactical threat. It’s not going anywhere.”
Hezbollah, which wields significant military and political influence across Lebanon, has been firing drones, missiles, and rockets at northern Israel daily since October, when the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza began. The onslaught has forced Israelis living near the Lebanon border to flee to other parts of the country for safety.
Oren assailed the response by world leaders and global press to last week’s targeted assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas terror chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, and rejected claims that the killings would make hostage negotiations tougher and foil the chances for regional quiet.
“The reaction of the world was extraordinary. By eliminating two mass murderers, they’re saying Israel has jeopardized peace. You can’t make this stuff up,” Oren said. “What foils the chances for a hostage agreement [with Hamas] and for regional stability is not standing up to terror and not fighting.”
“Leaders of the United States and the world should thank Israel for eliminating the murderer of not just Israelis, and of Palestinians, but the murder of Americans,” he added.
Oren rejected claims that Israel was not operationally or logistically prepared for a full-scale war with Hezbollah, asserting that Israel had untapped resources ready for deployment. “We have conventional means that we’ve never used before, and we could use them now, like our submarine force,” he said, declining to elaborate further.
Kobi Levy, a resident of Kfar Blum who is part of the rapid response team alongside Oren, hailed the former envoy’s decision to dust off his uniform for the first time in over a decade. Oren fought in the First Lebanon War in 1982 in the Paratroopers Brigade.
According to Levy, many lawmakers and politically-affiliated groups, including the Brothers in Arms anti-government protest group, have briefly visited the kibbutz for what he termed “photo ops and empty promises.”
Oren, he said, “came with all his heart to listen. To us, the people of the north. He’s the only politician who understands exactly what the residents want.”
Levy also said that Oren wasn’t above doing whatever was needed for the team, from early morning drills to overnight guard shifts. He predicted that Oren, who also served as a deputy minister in Israel’s 19th Knesset, had a “bright future” ahead of him should he make a return to Israeli politics.
Asked if such a scenario was on the cards, Oren was coy. “Whether in a suit or a uniform, I’ve always been about service to our country and our people, and I’ll continue serving in any way I can.”
Former Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren in IDF uniform. Photo: Provided
For the meantime, Oren was happy to be the “oldest guy by far” in the rapid response squad. “I knew that if I wanted to advocate for the north, I needed to see it firsthand,” he said.
That experience has led him to discover things he would never otherwise have known. One example he gave is the lack of financial support for Kfar Blum, which was not evacuated by the IDF and therefore receives no compensation. More than 60 percent of the kibbutz’s residents have self-evacuated, including Levy’s own family which evacuated only last week over fears of a reprisal after last week’s double assassination. The kibbutz, once known for being the cultural center of the north with several music festivals, has hosted thousands of soldiers passing through in the past ten months of war, and authorities have yet to pick up the tab, Oren said. “They do it with love of course, but even just the water bill is a tremendous burden on this community.”
“I’m deeply impressed by the people here and their commitment to the north and to Israel,” he said.
“I’m not being sentimental; they are the embodiment of the Zionist ideal,” Oren added. “But the sense is that they’ve been forgotten.”
The post Rejoining IDF, Ex-Envoy Michael Oren Warns: ‘We’re Fighting the Wrong War’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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In Gaza, Hamas Is Medea

Displaced Palestinians, fleeing northern Gaza due to an Israeli military operation, move southward after Israeli forces ordered residents of Gaza City to evacuate to the south, in the central Gaza Strip September 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
In Greek mythology, Medea does the unthinkable. Pursued by her father, Aeetes, and his fleet, she turns on the person closest to her — her own brother, Absyrtus. She drives a sword into his side, then tears apart a body “made of her own flesh.” She places his head and hands in sight of her father’s ship; the rest she scatters across the shore. Aeetes, shattered by grief, must stop to gather the remains while Medea escapes.
The Romanian writer Vintila Horia, in his novel God Was Born in Exile, lingers on this moment. Medea, he writes, was “a plaything of the gods, who drive men to commit these hateful acts so that they can then punish them more effectively.”
Myths survive because they illuminate universal human behaviors. They are metaphors dressed as stories — allegories of devices we see repeated again and again. And in this case, the echoes are uncomfortably clear.
Today, Palestinian leaders, whether from Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, or the PFLP, play Medea’s role. They sacrifice their own people for survival, for wealth, for ideology. Absyrtus is the Palestinian people themselves: torn apart, scattered, turned into propaganda fragments. And the West becomes Aeetes, chasing after the wreckage, desperate to collect the consequences, always behind.
The “gods” are not divine. They are the powers who exploit Palestinians as pawns: Syria, Iran, Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and others. Wrapped in the cloak of a politicized Palestinian identity that seems to grant immunity, leaders and patrons have stolen aid, enriched themselves, and justified repression: homophobia, misogyny, fanaticism, antisemitism, corruption, and endless violence. The cloak also serves to extract concessions abroad — political, diplomatic, and economic.
Meanwhile, Aeetes, the West, pursues the trail. Responsibilities, negotiations, and concessions pile up. Security and rights recede. Appeasement, apologies, and money flow in, offered up as if tolerance alone could undo the crime.
Medea, in this story, is embodied by the Palestinian leaders and their minions. They are directly responsible for the theft, for the indoctrination, and for the tactic Khaled Meshal himself described: sacrificing their own people to wound, however briefly, the image of the Jewish State. Each “martyrdom,” each “jihad,” is sold as a step toward eliminating Israel.
Absyrtus is the people — trapped in a machinery of violence, indoctrination, victimization, and offering, for which UNRWA bears immense responsibility. Reduced to faces on campaign posters, to slogans shouted in Paris, Madrid, or American universities, their deaths are paraded before the world as bait. The West does not insist that Hamas be removed from power — so that the war will end; hospitals, schools, and mosques won’t be turned into fighting locations; and Palestinian civilians won’t be used by their government as human shields. Instead, the West, like Aeetes, dutifully chases after the violent repercussions of Hamas’ tactics, convinced that appeasement, tolerance, and aid can somehow reassemble what their leaders have destroyed.
This ritual has a lineage. From the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hassan al-Banna, down to Hamas today, the line runs long and unbroken. Death and hostage releases become theater, staged to desensitize their own people and foreign spectators alike.
Above all, Palestinians are sacrificed for a radical Islamist project of religious totalitarianism that seeks to advance westward, unopposed and unquestioned. This is what Hamas represents, and that is the true tragedy: not simply that people die, but that their deaths are wielded as weapons, as theater, and as excuses for hatred.
So long as the West keeps gathering the carnage that has been left behind, it will remain trapped in the tragedy. The only way out is to name the crime and hold the true Medeas to account.
Marcelo Wio is a Senior Analyst at CAMERA’s Spanish Department.
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Exposed: AP Freelancer in Gaza Praised Palestinian Terrorist Who Killed 37 Jews

Students at the Dalal Mughrabi Elementary Mixed School, which was built with funds from the Belgian government. (Photo: Facebook)
If the Associated Press (AP), one of the world’s largest news agencies, had done its due diligence before hiring Palestinian photojournalist Ismael Abu Dayyah, it would have seen him praising terrorists and posting anti-Israel content online.
Instead, Abu Dayyah was employed to report on the war in Gaza for the AP in 2024, and the agency still sells his images.
His social media activity, however, casts a shadow over his objectivity and the AP’s hiring practices, which comes at a time when global media outlets are promoting an ongoing campaign on behalf of Gazan journalists.
Abu Dayyah used the social media platform X to glorify Palestinian terrorist Dalal al Mughrabi, who was responsible for the deadliest attack against Israeli Jews before the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre.
Abu Dayyah also praised the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — a proscribed terror group responsible for dozens of attacks against Israelis over the decades, including suicide bombings, rocket attacks, shootings, and in 2014, the barbaric murder of five Jewish worshippers in a synagogue in Jerusalem. He also celebrated its member Laila Khaled, who hijacked an airplane en route to Tel Aviv in 1969.
Abu Dayyah also posted content showing his profile picture on a map of Israel with a caption calling for the liberation of Jerusalem. Other posts by him called Hamas hostages “prisoners,” and labeled the establishment of a Jewish state as “Zionist Colonialism.”
Praise for Terrorists
In a post from March 2021, Abu Dayyah wrote:
And “Dalal Mughrabi” remains the bride of Palestine who chose resistance as her path and the homeland as her beloved, the legend who surpassed all military ranks. – Anniversary of martyrdom 11_March_1978.
Dalal Al Mughrabi was a Fatah terrorist responsible for the horrific 1978 massacre of 37 Jews, among them 12 children, in what was the deadliest terror attack in Israel’s history — until Hamas’ October 7 massacre.
Al Mughrabi led the “Coastal Road Massacre,” as it became known, when she and a group of terrorists infiltrated Israel from Lebanon, hijacked a passenger bus, and detonated it with explosives near Tel Aviv.
But for the AP’s Abu Dayyah, she is an icon. And he has been consistent in celebrating the anniversary of her “heroic” death not only in 2021, but also in previous years.
In 2022, Abu Dayyah also posted praise for Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled and the PFLP:
Leila Khaled, who is still a PFLP member and regularly calls for violence against Israel, took part in the 1969 hijacking of a TWA flight from Rome to Tel Aviv. A year later, she was part of a two-person team that attempted to hijack an El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York City.
By celebrating her “achievements” online, Abu Dayyah actively promoted and supported terrorism. He also included hashtags delegitimizing a Jewish presence in Israel, such as “Jerusalem is Arab” and “our land wants freedom.”
Abu Dayyah has a documented history of praising, supporting, and promoting violent terrorism, and should therefore have no place in any Western media outlets, where his photos — that only show destruction and casualties in Gaza but not terrorists — promote Hamas’ narrative and serve as an outlet for his bias.
Anti-Israeli Bias
How can Abu Dayyah be expected to cover the Israel-Palestinian conflict professionally and objectively if he is also posting images that express his deep anti-Israeli bias?
In 2021, for example, as Hamas launched rockets at Israel from Gaza, he posted a picture of himself covering Israel’s map, and called for the liberation of Jerusalem.
Another propaganda post Abu Dayyah published that week showed a masked Palestinian youth protecting Jerusalem’s al Aqsa compound — located on Judaism’s holiest site — from Israeli soldiers.
And last February, Al Dayyah called Israeli hostages who were held and tortured by Hamas “prisoners” — a bias so deeply ingrained that it unsurprisingly aligns with his view that the establishment of the Jewish state was “Zionist colonialism.”
Media Hypocrisy
The AP cannot feign ignorance. HonestReporting had already exposed numerous Gaza journalists for their anti-Israel bias, at best, or Hamas membership, at worst, by the time the AP hired Abu Dayyah in 2024.
At the outset of the Israel-Hamas war, we even exposed the antisemitic social media history of the agency’s Gaza correspondent — which led to his dismissal.
So why did the AP not bother checking Abu Dayyah’s background before he was hired? Do AP bosses not believe in due diligence — which should be a given in any respectable organization?
And what do the AP and other media outlets have to say about Abu Dayyah in light of their loud campaign on behalf of Gaza journalists — many of whom share his views or work side by side with Hamas?
“When will AP acknowledge a consistent and serious problem with too many of Gaza’s media workers?” said HonestReporting’s editorial director, Simon Plosker. “Ismael Abu Dayyah didn’t even attempt to hide his extremism from his employers, and it’s clear they didn’t even bother looking. Instead of launching campaigns that ignore journalists’ links to or sympathies for Hamas, it’s high time the media addressed the elephant in the room. Neither AP nor any credible Western media should employ Abu Dayyah again, and we call on AP to publicly state that the news agency will sever ties with him.”
If a global news organization has no problem relying on biased journalists who praise the murderers of Jews, it cannot simultaneously decry their “professional” plight.
HonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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French Dishonor in New York: A Palestinian State as a Reward for Oct. 7

French President Emmanuel Macron is seen at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Photo: Reuters/Martial Trezzini
In late September 1938, faced with yet one more territorial demand from Adolf Hitler and gripped with fear at the prospect of another European war just after the end of the Great War, British and French leaders decided to meet with Hitler in Munich,
Although wary of Hitler and his repeated threats, Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Edouard Daladier, Prime Minister of France, chose to agree to Hitler’s demand to integrate part of newly-formed Czechoslovakia — known as the Sudetenland — into his Third Reich. The Czechs had no choice but to agree to the partition, which was being imposed on them by outsiders.
Chamberlain seemed persuaded that by giving in to Hitler’s demands and having the Nazi Chancellor sign a treaty whereby he announced that he had no further territorial demands, he had brought the risk of war to an end. He would even announce that this capitulation meant, as he put it, “Peace in our time.”
Daladier had no such illusion. Although he agreed to the treaty with Hitler, he was profoundly ashamed of the concessions he and Chamberlain had made. In fact, he was so ashamed of his behavior at Munich, that he was afraid to return to Paris. As his plane prepared to land at Le Bourget just outside of Paris, Daladier could see a very large crowd waiting for him. Fearful that the crowd might cause him harm in light of the Munich agreement, he ordered the pilot to circle the airfield and defer landing. Finally, he had no choice but to land, and he prepared to face the crowd’s hostility.
To his amazement, as he exited his plane, he was greeted by shouts of approval. He could barely believe his eyes and ears. He had feared being attacked and, instead, he was being acclaimed. His reaction was to mutter, “Ah, the fools [using a profanity]. If they only understood.” Daladier, the seasoned politician and intelligent student of history, knew very well that signing a treaty with a murderous thug like Hitler was an exercise in futility, or worse.
The experience of Prime Minister Daladier is well worth remembering as we witness the humiliating groveling of French President Emmanuel Macron in New York, as Macron — seemingly seeking to pacify a segment of France’s population — announces France’s recognition of a non-existent Palestinian State. That Macron has chosen to do this in the wake of the brutal massacre perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7, a massacre committed in the name of and with the seeming approval of many Palestinians, as well as at a time when Israeli hostages remain imprisoned in the tunnels of Gaza, is truly galling.
If Macron believes that by recognizing a Palestinian state at this time he is promoting peace in the Middle East, he needs to reread the history of the Munich conference.
Just as it was obvious that Hitler was lying when he promised that, if he was given the Sudetenland he would not have any further territorial demands, so Palestinian leaders are obviously lying as they suggest that recognition of a Palestinian state might bring an end to their desire to destroy Israel.
It is very likely that, having recognized Palestinian statehood at the United Nations, Macron will be given a hero’s welcome in Paris. But that welcome will be a hollow welcome. Just as Daladier was cheered on his return from Munich, Macron will be cheered by fools. The motley crew of fools will be made up of unassimilated immigrants, radical leftists, and indoctrinated students.
Sadly, Macron, the brilliant and articulate young man who seemed so promising when he first assumed office — quite unlike Daladier, the experienced and cynical politician — may not even be able to appreciate the error of his ways. In spite of his intelligence, Macron appears unable to understand that recognition of a Palestinian state now can only appear as a reward to Hamas for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
That is especially the case since Hamas terrorists continue their intransigence in holding hostages and refusing to lay down their arms, in spite of their evident military defeat. Macron, through his appeasement of terrorists, will simply have prolonged the agony of the very people of the region he purports to be helping and he will have made ultimate peace in the Middle East even more elusive.
Just as Chamberlain’s and Daladier’s negotiation with Hitler merely postponed the inevitable and assuredly encouraged Hitler to believe that intransigence could work, Macron’s false encouragement to the Palestinians will certainly prompt yet more violence and cost yet more lives. It will make France seem naïve and cynical.
Instead of adding luster to the history of France, Macron will have added another disappointing chapter to the roller coaster ride that is French history. In this case, as in 1938, there are plenty of fools, but potentially the greatest fool of them all may be the shameless and feckless French president himself.
Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of a national law firm. He is the author of Lobbying for Equality, Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights during the French Revolution, published by HUC Press.