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The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets.
(JTA) – At one point in John Boyne’s new novel “All The Broken Places,” a 91-year-old German woman recalls, for the first time, her encounter with a young Jewish boy in the Auschwitz death camp 80 years prior.
“I found him in the warehouse one day. Where they kept all the striped pajamas,” she says.
The woman, Gretel, quickly realizes her mistake: that “this was a phrase peculiar to my brother and me.” She clarifies that she is referring to “the uniforms. … You know the ones I mean.”
Boyne’s readers are, in fact, likely to know what Gretel means, as “All The Broken Places” is a sequel to Boyne’s 2006 international bestseller “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” At a time when other Holocaust books intended for young readers have been challenged or removed from some American schools, the enduring popularity of “Striped Pajamas” has conjured up love and loathing in equal measure for its depiction of Nazi and Jewish youths during the Holocaust. It has sold 11 million copies, appeared in 58 languages and in major motion picture form, and been the only assigned reading about Jews or the Holocaust for countless schoolchildren, mostly in Britain. Yet Holocaust scholars have warned against it, panning it as inaccurate and trafficking in dangerous stereotypes about Jewish weakness.
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his Dublin home on Tuesday, the day “All the Broken Places” hit U.S. shelves, Boyne said he hoped readers would take his new book on its own terms — as a more sophisticated meditation on guilt, culpability and evil, for an adult audience rather than children this time. But he also wants to defend the original work that made him famous.
“I do feel it’s a positive contribution to the world and to Holocaust studies,” said Boyne, who estimates that he has personally spoken to between 500 and 600 schools about “Striped Pajamas.”
Not everyone agrees. A 2016 study published by the Centre for Holocaust Education, a British organization housed at University College London, found that 35% of British teachers used his book in their Holocaust lesson plans, and that 85% of students who had consumed any kind of media related to the Holocaust had either read the book or seen its movie adaptation.
That level of widespread familiarity with the book led many students to inaccurate conclusions about the Holocaust, such as that the Nazis were “victims too” and that most Germans were unaware of the horrors being visited upon the Jewish people, the study found.
A promotional image from the 2008 film adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” (Miramax)
As overall awareness of the Holocaust has decreased among young people especially, Boyne’s novel has become a casualty of its own success. Holocaust scholars in the United Kingdom and United States have decried the book, with historian David Cesarani calling it “a travesty of facts” and “a distortion of history,” and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre in London publishing a long takedown of the book’s inaccuracies and “stereotypes.”
“With the rise in antisemitism, such as it is in this country, and that so often manifests through trivialisation, distortion and denial of the Holocaust, this book could potentially do more harm than good,” Centre for Holocaust Education researcher Ruth-Anne Lenga concluded at the end of her 2016 study.
Boyne came to the Holocaust as subject matter purely on his own, having never been taught about the history growing up in Ireland. (He attended a Catholic school, where, as he has recounted publicly, he was physically and sexually abused by his teachers.) Reading Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as a teenager, Boyne said, “made me want to understand more.”
He would read many more Holocaust books during his twenties, from Primo Levi to Anne Frank to “Sophie’s Choice,” fascinated by the sheer recency of the atrocity. “How could something that seems like it should have happened, say, 1,000 years ago — because the death count is so enormous and so horrifying — how could that happen so close to the time that I’m alive in?” he thought. “And if it could, then what’s to stop it happening again?”
That fascination led to the publication, when Boyne was 33, of “Striped Pajamas,” which he’d always conceived of as a children’s story. In the book, Bruno, the 9-year-old son of a Nazi commandant, befriends Shmuel, a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner of the same age; it ends with Bruno donning the “striped pajamas” and following his friend into the gas chambers. Further driving home the fable conceit, an initial draft included a framing device of Boyne as a character reading the story to an audience of children, before an editor advised him to cut it.
During his writing process, Boyne said he was concerned with “the emotional truth of the novel” as opposed to holding to historical accuracy, and defended much of the book’s ahistorical details — such as moving the Auschwitz guards’ living quarters to outside the camp, and putting no armed guards or electric fences between Bruno and Shmuel — as creative license. A common critique of the book, that the climax encourages the reader to mourn the death of Bruno over that of Shmuel and the other Jews in the camps, makes no sense to Boyne: “I struggle to understand somebody who would reach the end of that book and only feel sympathy for Bruno. I think then if somebody does, I think that says more, frankly, about their antisemitism than anything else.”
He also justified his decisions by reasoning that a novel like his shouldn’t be the basis for Holocaust instruction.
“I don’t think that it’s my responsibility, as a novelist who didn’t write a school book, to justify its use in education when I never asked for that to happen,” he said. “If [teachers] make the choice to use a novel in their classrooms, it’s their responsibility to make sure the children know that there is a difference between what happens in this novel and what happened in real life.”
Boyne added that he was “appalled” by a recent JTA report about a Tennessee school district removing Art Spiegelman’s graphic Holocaust memoir “Maus” from its curriculum. If teachers are choosing between teaching the two books, he said, “‘Maus’ is better, no question about that. And a much more important book.” (Earlier this year, Spiegelman himself took a swipe at “Striped Pajamas” by telling a Tennessee audience that no schools should read Boyne’s novel because “that guy didn’t do any research whatsoever.”)
“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” John Boyne’s 2006 bestseller, has been critiqued for the way it presented the Holocaust to children. (Illustration by Grace Yagel)
For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him.
Over the years, more research has been published about the book’s popularity in the classroom, which has led to more scrutiny of its factual inaccuracies. Other authors, Holocaust researchers and some educators have come out forcefully against the book’s use in the classroom. At the same time, Boyne said, his invitations to Jewish venues dried up.
The author has also been known to exacerbate the issue by sparring with his critics, even when they are respected institutions. Most infamously, in 2020, Boyne got into a Twitter feud with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which said his Auschwitz-set book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.”
The back-and-forth was provoked after Boyne criticized what he saw as the crassness of more recent Holocaust novels, such as “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris. Reflecting on the spat, Boyne said of the Auschwitz memorial, “I hope that they do understand that, whether my book is a masterpiece or a travesty, that I came at it with the very best intentions.”
Boyne conceived of the sequel shortly after finishing “Striped Pajamas.” It follows Bruno’s older sister Gretel as she lives in hiding after the war and successfully conceals her Nazi upbringing all the way into the present day. A preteen during the Holocaust, Gretel becomes gradually more aware of its horrors after seeing newspaper articles and documentaries and encountering former Resistance members and Jewish descendants of survivors (including one, David, who becomes her lover without knowing her true background).
Unlike “Striped Pajamas,” “All the Broken Places” is intended for adults. It’s filled with sex, violence, suicide attempts and bad language — and also some of the details of the Holocaust that were omitted from the first book. It mentions the Sobibor death camp by name, for example, and also takes the time to correct Bruno’s childish assumptions about the death camps being a “farm.”
But it tells the story from the perspective of a German who was directly implicated in the Holocaust. Throughout, Gretel reflects on her complicity in the Nazi regime, and her self-interest in hiding from authorities in the following years rather than trying to bring people like her father to justice. Missing from the book is any serious discussion of antisemitism as an ideology, and to what extent Gretel ascribes to it — though there is plenty of hand-wringing over postwar anti-German sentiment. In one shocking moment, a former S.S. lieutenant in hiding presents Gretel with a pair of Hitler’s eyeglasses and urges her to try them on; she is terrified to discover that this excites her.
The book’s reception has been mixed. While praised by publications including Kirkus Reviews (“a complex, thoughtful character study”) and the Guardian (“a defense of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature”), the New Statesman took Boyne to task for writing an “immoral” and “shameless sequel” that further erodes the “Jewishness” of the Holocaust.
At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with “All The Broken Places” alluding to criticisms of “Striped Pajamas.” “Writing about the Holocaust is a fraught business and any novelist approaching it takes on an enormous burden of responsibility,” he tells the reader. “The story of every person who died in the Holocaust is one that is worth telling. I believe that Gretel’s story is also worth telling.”
Still, “Striped Pajamas” has its Jewish defenders. One, the 24-year-old composer Noah Max, is behind a new opera adaptation of the book, to be titled “The Child in the Striped Pyjamas.” It will debut in London in January; a recent story by the U.K. Jewish Chronicle helped convince the film’s rights holder Miramax to waive a $1 million licensing fee for the project.
A great-grandson of Jews who fled Vienna when the Nazis arrived, Max told JTA he’d initially read the book “years before I was capable of absorbing testimony,” and that it inspired him to seek out actual survivor testimonies and to begin composing the opera at the age of 19. He compared its message to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ writings on moral relativism.
“Ultimately, the book motivated me to write an opera about the Shoah and integrate Holocaust education into my music,” Max said. “Any book capable of that is worthy of attention.”
Composer Noah Max (center) rehearses for his upcoming opera adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” to premiere in January 2023. (Courtesy of Noah Max)
Max’s passion for “Striped Pajamas” inspired at least one Holocaust group to change its mind about its educational merits. The Holocaust Educational Trust, a London-based group that advocates British educators on how to teach the Holocaust, had as recently as 2020 declared that “we advise against using” the book in the classroom.
But following what Max described as “richly fulfilling conversations” about “the story’s symbolic and artistic worth,” the trust fully endorsed the opera and, he said, has begun to rethink its view of the book. (The group did not respond to a JTA request for comment.)
Even with 16 years of hindsight and the chance to rethink his bestseller, Boyne said he wouldn’t change anything. Reflecting on his youthful audience, he said, “If they weren’t reading ‘Striped Pajamas,’ it’s more likely they would be reading something that has no relevance to this subject at all.”
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Important North Carolina Democrats Said Zionists Are Nazis — Many People Are Okay With It
Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, speaks after Democrat Josh Stein won the North Carolina governor’s race, in Raleigh, North Carolina, US, Nov. 5, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Drake
The North Carolina Democratic Party is at war with itself over Israel and antisemitism.
Earlier this month, I reported that leaders from the North Carolina Democratic Party’s (NCDP) Muslim Caucus had recently made hateful posts on social media. Elyas Mohammed, president of the caucus, described Zionists as “Nazis” and “a threat to humanity.”
Jibril Hough, first vice president of the same caucus, said “Zionism is a branch of racism/white supremacy and must be fought with the same intensity.” He described Zionists as the “worst of humanity.”
This month, Hough posted that Jeffrey Epstein could be alive and in hiding in Israel as part of a US/Israel conspiracy.
Now, two prominent North Carolina Democratic leaders have strongly condemned the statements by Muslim Caucus leaders.
Gov. Josh Stein told Jewish Insider (JI), “Antisemitic comments and conspiracy theories have no place anywhere, including in the North Carolina Democratic Party.”
Former Gov. and current Senatorial candidate Roy Cooper (D) told JI, “These reprehensible posts were an unacceptable expression of antisemitism and I condemn them in the strongest of terms.”
Stein and Cooper’s comments came promptly after many letters were sent by community members, including a powerful letter co-signed by the four local Jewish Federations directed to Gov. Stein and party officials. The Federations explained:
As Jews in North Carolina who support the existence of the State of Israel, and who represent broad cross-sections of our state’s Jewish population, we find this language hate-filled, insensitive, inflammatory, and threatening. It is incompatible with the standards of responsible civic leadership and it should disqualify any individual from holding a leadership role within a political party structure. Immediate corrective action is required.
The American Jewish Congress thanked Stein and Cooper for “making clear that antisemitism and conspiracy theories are unacceptable in the North Carolina Democratic Party.” The NCDP Jewish Caucus also thanked Stein and Cooper.
Mohammed and Hough responded by quickly doubling down on their statements, likely knowing that many in the party would support them.
Mohammed pinned (placed) his post calling Zionists “Nazis” to the top of his Facebook account.
Hough shared The Algemeiner column reporting his comments to social media, proudly quoting himself saying Zionists are the “worst of humanity.”
Rather than apologize, the Muslim Caucus issued a statement defending Mohammed, proclaiming, “We will not be silenced.” The NCDP Arab Caucus also re-posted a statement defending Mohammed.
Last week, the Jewish Democrats were asked on Facebook, “Do you accept Zionists?” Without answering directly, the Jewish Democrats of NCDP responded, “we accept everyone who treats human beings with dignity.” These comments were then promptly removed or hidden from public view.
Rev. Dr. Paul McAllister is chair of the NCDP’s Interfaith Caucus. The day after Stein and Cooper forcefully rejected Mohammed and Hough’s comments, McAllister posted a photo of himself on social media standing with Hough.
This comes as no surprise. McAllister is well known as a man who promotes hatred towards Israel. For example, McAllister endorsed and spoke on a panel, “The Genocide in Palestine,” which prominently featured Leila Khaled on the flyer. Khaled is a convicted hijacker and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, designated as a terrorist organization by the US government.
A small Jewish, anti-Israel subgroup of McAllister’s Interfaith Caucus posted on social media, “WE STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH ELYAS MOHAMMED.”
This subgroup, or sub-caucus, calls itself Jewish Democrats of NCDP and is openly referred to by supporters as the “non-Zionist caucus.”
Many Democrats believe this non-Zionist group was created to confuse the public into believing that Jews in North Carolina do not support Israel. The confusion is real and likely widespread.
For example, in a recent social media post, a commenter expressed confusion trying to distinguish between the much larger NCDP Jewish Caucus — which represents broad Jewish interests and statewide constituencies — and the very small Jewish Democrats of NCDP, which is the anti-Zionist sub-caucus.
Jewish Democratic leaders across the state have told me they believe the NCDP is violating its own rules by essentially allowing two Jewish caucuses. The NCDP’s Plan of Organization clearly states, “The party will recognize a single auxiliary or caucus for any specific purpose.”
Democrats point out that, for example, there are not two African-American caucuses or two LGBTQ caucuses that are trying to push different viewpoints. Democrats emphasize this is another example of how state party leaders implicitly allow, or even encourage, targeting and demonization of Israel and Zionists.
Jeffrey Bierer is a current member of the Democratic Party’s State Executive Committee. Speaking for himself and not any organization, he told me, “At least four of us [Jewish Caucus members] paid dues to the Interfaith Caucus and we never received any confirmation or information back.”
Bierer also told me he paid separate dues to the Interfaith Caucus’ Jewish Democrats group with the same result.
Bierer said, “We were 100% friendly and respectful and said we would like to get involved. We didn’t get any response. Zero response.”
I reached out to the Jewish Caucus regarding this issue. They provided me a statement that began:
In an effort to bridge religious and political divides, a few of our members attempted to join the NCDP Interfaith Caucus. Initially their membership fees were accepted, then when those members inquired about the lack of regular communication and meeting times, their money was later returned.
It is evident that the North Carolina Democratic Party should investigate this potential discrimination against Jewish members and members who identify with Israel.
The Muslim Caucus is newly formed and currently in the review process seeking “final approval” by the NCDP. The Muslim Caucus is prominently displayed on the NCDP’s website featuring Elyas Mohammed under the heading, “OUR PEOPLE.”
According to the NCDP’s Plan of Organization, caucuses are not just advocacy groups — they are included in, and contribute to, significant decision making and planning within the party.
The document explains, “Caucuses shall be represented on the NCDP Executive Council, the NCDP State Legislative Policy Committee and the Platform and Resolutions Committee by the State President or designated representative and participate in strategic planning for the NCDP.”
I have contacted State Chair Anderson Clayton and First Vice Chair Jonah Garson twice over the past few weeks, sending them quotes, links, and screenshots regarding the comments from Muslim Caucus leaders. They have not responded. Unlike Stein and Cooper, Clayton and Garson have not publicly denounced the comments made by caucus leaders.
Antisemitism within the NCDP is a systemic problem that goes well beyond a few caucus leaders. The NCDP has been targeting Israel for years. For example, on Saturday, June 28, 2025 — during Shabbat — the party passed six anti-Israel resolutions. One of these resolutions even accused Israel of taking “Palestinian hostages.”
Clayton has appeared in smiling photographs with Mohammed and Jibril over the past few years. It is expected and normal that a chair of a state party stands with caucus leaders. But now that Mohammed and Jibril have clearly distinguished themselves as hateful and have targeted a large share of the Jewish Democrats in North Carolina who believe Israel has a right to exist, it is also expected that Clayton and Garson publicly denounce these hateful statements. They have not.
Their silence sends a message that Jewish members of the North Carolina Democratic Party, and all members who support Israel’s right to exist, are not valued or respected.
Rabbi Emeritus Fred Guttman of Temple Emanuel in Greensboro, who formerly served on the executive committee of the state’s Democratic Party, explained:
What has occurred demonizes Jewish supporters of Israel and increases the risk of violent acts against Jews in North Carolina. This is extremely serious…Those in leadership positions should continue to speak out clearly and condemn it…Leadership carries responsibility, and failure to address antisemitism undermines the safety and integrity of the community. We certainly do not need a repeat in North Carolina of tragedies such as Bondi Beach, Manchester, England, or the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
The North Carolina Democratic Party should take prompt action to unequivocally demonstrate that antisemitism, and discrimination against Jews and those who identify with Israel, will not be tolerated. Jewish safety — and equal treatment for all — depends on it.
Peter Reitzes writes about antisemitism in North Carolina and beyond.
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How to Respond When Your Friends Cite Hamas’ Casualty Numbers
The head of an anti-Hamas faction, Hussam Alastal, fires a weapon in the air as he is surrounded by masked gunmen, in an Israeli-held area in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, in this screenshot taken from a video released Nov. 21, 2025. Photo: Hussam Alastal/via REUTERS
Not long ago, a very intelligent friend asked me a sincere question.
He wanted to know whether, as a Zionist, I was disturbed by what he took to be a settled fact: that Israel had “killed 300 people in a tent while trying to get one terrorist.”
He wasn’t hostile. He wasn’t chanting slogans. He was genuinely troubled and trying to reconcile that number with my support for Israel.
What shocked me was not the question itself, but the assumption behind it. He works with numbers for a living, yet it had not occurred to him to ask the most basic question: “Is that figure actually true, and who produced it?” He had simply absorbed it as unquestionable reality.
When I explained that such numbers almost always trace back to Hamas-run institutions in Gaza, laundered through media outlets and NGOs that treat them as neutral sources, it was clearly a new way of looking at the war for him.
The conversation revealed something I see on a much larger scale: people who would never trust Hamas with their bank account are trusting it with their moral judgment.
When I describe Hamas’ listed death toll in Gaza, I describe it as the “casualty-number war.” It’s not just about how many people have died. It’s about who is doing the counting, what they are counting, and how those numbers are deployed to turn a complicated war into a morality play with ready-made villains and victims.
Hamas understands this perfectly. Its “Ministry of Health” in Gaza is not some independent public health office. It is part of a totalitarian structure that answers to the same regime that launched the October 7 massacre, embeds fighters and rocket launchers among civilians, and openly celebrates “martyrdom.”
Yet Western media outlets, NGOs, and politicians routinely preface their coverage with the same passive formulation: “According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than X thousand people have been killed…”
Once that sentence is accepted as neutral, the argument is already half lost.
These headline numbers blur together every possible category of death: combatants and non-combatants, people killed by Hamas’ own rockets or internal violence, people who died of illness or old age, and people whose deaths are simply unverifiable.
There is rarely a breakdown by cause, location, or affiliation. The message is not “here is our best attempt at a complex casualty record.” The message is, “Israel killed this many people; now explain yourself.”
Western institutions, meanwhile, have powerful incentives to accept this framing. Journalists on deadline want a single, authoritative-sounding figure. NGOs need dramatic numbers to drive fundraising and campaigns. Politicians want an easy way to signal moral outrage without learning the underlying details. “According to Gaza’s Health Ministry…” gives them all exactly what they want.
The result is that Hamas’ tally becomes something close to sacred. To question it is treated as denial of suffering, rather than as basic due diligence.
To be clear, this does not mean that the real toll of the war is small, or that civilian deaths are imaginary. They are not. Wars in dense urban environments, against enemies who hide behind civilians, are always tragic. But tragedy does not excuse deception, and compassion does not require us to outsource moral judgment to a terrorist organization.
There is another trap we must avoid, however, and it lies on “our” side of the argument.
Recently, a claim circulated online that Hamas had “admitted” to losing 50,000 fighters and was preparing to pay stipends to their widows. It was an appealing narrative: if true, it would imply that the majority of Gaza’s war dead were Hamas’ own armed operatives, not civilians. Many people repeated it enthusiastically.
The problem is that the underlying evidence does not support such certainty. The 50,000 figure appears to come from extrapolations about an aid program for widows and vague statements in local media, not from a clear, formal admission of combatant deaths by Hamas itself. Israel’s own estimates of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters killed are much lower — on the order of tens of thousands, but not double that.
In other words, some of Hamas’ critics were tempted to do what they rightly accuse Hamas of doing: leaping from suggestive data to definitive, emotionally satisfying numbers.
That may feel good in the moment, but it ultimately weakens our case. If we want the world to take casualty manipulation seriously, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard than Hamas does.
So how should we think and talk about Gaza casualty numbers?
First, always ask who is counting. A figure produced by a Hamas-run bureaucracy and laundered through sympathetic NGOs is not equivalent to an independent forensic assessment. That does not mean every number is automatically false; it means we must treat it as a political artifact, not a neutral statistic.
Second, ask what is being counted. Are natural deaths and pre-existing illnesses being folded into “war fatalities”? Are internal killings, executions of “collaborators,” gang violence, and misfired rockets landing in Gaza all being quietly attributed to Israel?
Are combatants and non-combatants being distinguished, or are they all being described as “civilians,” “women,” and “children”? If those questions are not being asked, the headline number is not serious.
Third, examine the incentives. Hamas gains strategically every time the West believes that almost every death in Gaza is an innocent civilian killed by the Israel Defense Forces. That perception fuels accusations of “genocide,” drives diplomatic pressure, and legitimizes further violence under the banner of “resistance.”
Conversely, Hamas has every incentive to hide its own fighters among civilians, both physically and statistically.
Fourth, be honest about uncertainty. We will probably never know the exact distribution of deaths in Gaza by category. That is the nature of war, especially in closed, authoritarian environments. But we can say, with confidence, that the picture is far more complex than the nightly news suggests.
We know that a significant share of the dead are combatants. We know that some deaths are caused by Hamas’ own actions, whether through misfires or internal violence. We know that some reported “war casualties” would have occurred from natural causes even in peacetime. A morally serious discourse must reflect that complexity.
For ordinary readers and viewers, the question becomes: what can I actually do when confronted with someone like my friend, who has been told that Israel “killed 300 people in a tent to get one terrorist” and accepted it as unquestionable fact?
A few simple moves can help:
- Slow the conversation down. Instead of arguing about whether 300 is “too many,” start with “Who gave you that number?” That alone often changes the entire frame.
- Separate grief from propaganda. It is possible to say, “Every innocent life lost is a tragedy,” while also saying, “That does not mean Hamas’ numbers are accurate, or that Israel is committing the crimes you’ve been told about.”
- Insist on categories, not just totals. Ask whether the figure distinguishes between terrorists and non-terrorists, between people killed by Hamas and those killed by Israel, between battlefield fatalities and natural deaths. Most numbers in circulation do not.
- Refuse to play by Hamas’ rules. Do not feel compelled to accept a Hamas-run institution’s tally as the starting point for every moral conversation. We are not obligated to let Israel’s enemies define the terms of debate, whether in language or in arithmetic.
My friend and I ended our conversation on good terms. He did not walk away with a perfect spreadsheet of Gaza casualties — neither of us has one. But he did walk away with a new question lodged in his mind: “Why am I letting Hamas tell me what to think?”
That, ultimately, is the goal. If we care about truth, about Israel’s legitimacy, and about the real human beings — Jews and Arabs alike — whose lives are at stake, we cannot allow a terrorist organization to be the world’s official statistician. We do not have to accept a calculator held in the same hands that fired the rockets and sent the “martyrs.”
We can insist on something better: honest categories, transparent methods, and a refusal to surrender our moral judgment to those who openly seek our destruction.
David E. Firester, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC, and the author of Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception (2025).
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Iran Has Terrorized International Waters for Decades — Now India and the World Have Had Enough
Navy forces of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution commandos and missile boats in Great Prophet IX Maneuver in the general area of Strait of Hormuz, Persian Gulf. Photo: Sayyed Shahab Odin Vajedi/Wikimedia Commons.
The theatricality of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) “Smart Control” maneuvers in the Strait of Hormuz this week is a calculated distraction from a far more consequential reality unfolding in the deep waters of the Indian Ocean.
While Tehran’s propaganda wing broadcasts images of high-speed boats and “intelligent” surveillance, the regime’s economic lifeblood is being systematically drained by an actor it once considered a reliable, if cautious, customer.
The confirmed seizure by India of three Iranian “shadow fleet” tankers — the Stellar Ruby, Asphalt Star, and Al Jafziyah — along with the dramatic boarding of the Veronica 3 by US forces, marks the operational debut of the Indo-Abrahamic Noose. These are not isolated incidents; they are the result of a coordinated maritime blockade designed to sever the IRGC’s economic lungs.
For years, the IRGC has operated on the assumption that the “Global South” — led by New Delhi — would remain a passive beneficiary of its illicit oil trade, providing a permanent escape valve from Western-led pressure. That assumption died this month. India’s transition from a neutral energy consumer to a proactive maritime enforcer signals a tectonic shift in the Indo-Pacific architecture.
By deploying 55 ships and 12 aircraft for round-the-clock surveillance, New Delhi has effectively shut down the “ship-to-ship” transfer networks used to mask the origin of Iranian crude. The seizure of the first three tankers, roughly 100 miles west of Mumbai, proved that the “shadow fleet” — the aging, uninsured vessels used to fund the “Axis of Resistance” — has lost its cloak of invisibility.
The IRGC’s “Smart Control” exercises, conducted amidst reports of a deep succession crisis in Tehran, are a desperate display of “atmospheric jihadism.” However, strategic reality is not dictated by camera-ready maneuvers in the shallows of the Gulf; it is dictated by the ability to move liquidity across oceans. When India acts as a maritime gatekeeper, it reinforces a fundamental truth: the “Iranian Threat” is no longer a sufficient deterrent against the national interests of rising powers.
What we are witnessing is the birth of the Indo-Abrahamic Alliance — a strategic pincer movement connecting India, Israel, the UAE, and the United States. This move follows a significant shift in Indo-American trade dynamics earlier this month. Washington is expected to slash tariffs on Indian goods from 50% to 18% this week. The economic incentive to align with a pro-Western security order has now been backed by kinetic maritime muscle.
This bloc — anchored by Israeli intelligence, Indian maritime muscle, and the strategic depth of pro-Western monarchies — is rendering the IRGC’s regional ambitions irrelevant. The meeting last week at the White House between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu set the stage for this enforcement, with both leaders agreeing to target the 80% of Iranian oil flowing to China. India’s intervention ensures that this isolation is not just political, but material.
India’s move also counters the “Lawful Islamist” narrative favored by other regional players. While powers like Turkey attempt to position themselves as mediators while quietly enabling disruptive actors, India’s clear-eyed enforcement of maritime law exposes the futility of such hedging. New Delhi has realized that the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC) cannot thrive in a sea patrolled by pirates and IRGC-funded proxies.
We are no longer debating whether normalization between Israel and the broader East is possible; we are observing its maturity into a permanent regional police force. This is the “Naturalization” of a pro-Western security order where the defense of trade routes is inseparable from the defeat of radical ideology.
As negotiations resume in Geneva this week, attended by high-level figures like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the Iranian delegation is finding its leverage non-existent. Tehran’s attempts to “bribe” Washington with economic concessions in aviation and mining ring hollow when their primary source of income is being impounded at sea.
The moral and strategic binary of the Middle East has never been clearer. On one side stands a desperate, murderous regime in Tehran conducting hollow drills in the Strait. On the other stands the Indo-Abrahamic Alliance, imposing a reality of law and order from the Mediterranean to the Indo-Pacific.
The IRGC cannot fund its proxies if its tankers cannot reach their destinations. By seizing these vessels throughout February, India and its partners have effectively recognized that peace is achieved only when the aggressor realizes their cause is terminal. The “shadow fleet” is being dismantled, the economic lungs of the regime are collapsing, and the Indo-Abrahamic Noose is anchored.
Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx