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Those We Are Missing
The hostages and victims whose fate is still unknown
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Why Israel Should Annex the West Bank
A boy walks home in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Kida, Aug. 31, 2010. Photo: REUTERS/Nir Elias
To annex or not to annex. That is the question. Should Israel annex Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank? Many Israelis would say yes. After all, Judea and Samaria comprise the very core of the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland, plus it is vital for maintaining Israel’s security. Others, however, caution against it. And they have their reasons. The trouble is those reasons don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Those opposed to annexing Judea and Samaria say, for example, that there will be too much backlash from the international community, which will lead to a wide range of consequences for Israel. But of course, a lot of people said all hell would break loose when the US, under the first Trump administration, decided to move the American embassy to Jerusalem. Those people were obviously wrong. Israel suffered no major pushback from the international community. Similarly, the sky will not fall if the Jewish state declares sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.
People opposed to annexing Judea and Samaria also argue that annexing the territory would severely harm Israel’s Jewish character because it would involve absorbing 3 million Palestinians. Admittedly, I naively believed this to be true at one time. But in fact, this argument doesn’t hold water.
For one thing, there aren’t 3 million Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. In fact, this figure is highly suspect because it comes from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS). The Palestinians have always had an interest in inflating their population numbers to build a case against Israel annexing Judea and Samaria.
Indeed, the PCBS includes in its population count some 500,000 Palestinian residents who are overseas. It also includes hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are residents of Jerusalem and those married to Israeli Arabs, both of whom are included in Israel’s population figures. The truth is that the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria is closer to 1.85 million.
Moreover, if Israel was to annex Judea and Samaria, it would be under no obligation to give citizenship to every single one of the territory’s Palestinian inhabitants. But this would be practicing apartheid, right? Wrong. Many countries restrict eligibility for citizenship based on ethnicity, religion, etc. This is especially the case in the Arab world, where Palestinians in particular are excluded from citizenship in all but one country: Jordan, which, it should be noted, specifically bars Jews from becoming citizens.
In fact, in some Arab countries, acquiring citizenship is so restricted that the majority of residents are not citizens at all. The United Arab Emirates, for example, has a population of about 12.5 million, but just 11.5 percent are Emirati citizens. In Qatar, out of a population of just over 3 million, only 10.5 percent are citizens. And in Kuwait, with a population of approximately 4.9 million, expatriates outnumber citizens by 2 to 1. No one accuses these countries of being apartheid states, nor should they accuse Israel of practicing apartheid if it chooses not to bestow citizenship on Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.
Israel can also choose not to annex the whole of Judea and Samaria. In fact, many proponents of annexation have said that Israel should just annex Area C, which is under complete Israeli control per the Oslo Accords. Area C, which contains all the communities that Israel has built in Judea and Samaria, has a Jewish majority. About 500,000 Jews live in Area C, compared to approximately 300,000 Palestinians. Thus, if Israel wanted to, it could bestow citizenship on the Palestinians of Area C with minimal impact on the country’s Jewish majority as a whole.
Another popular argument against annexation is that it would prevent a two-state solution. This argument is moot because the two-state solution is dead. It died on Oct. 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel from Gaza, murdered 1,200 people, and kidnapped 251 hostages — while perpetrating widespread rape and torture in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Besides, the main impediment to the two-state solution has never been the threat of annexation, but rather the refusal of the Palestinians to accept the existence of a Jewish state. This is why the Palestinians have refused every offer of statehood dating all the way back to the 1947 UN partition plan.
Since the two-state solution has finally died, it’s time we bury it — by annexing all or part of Judea and Samaria and bringing it under Jewish sovereignty for the first time in two millennia.
The author is a freelance writer in Toronto, Canada.
The post Why Israel Should Annex the West Bank first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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The Golden Calf: A Reminder That Anarchy Is Closer Than We Realize
The Israelites dance around the golden calf, while Moses on the mountain receives the ten commandments of God. Photo: IMAGO/piemags via Reuters Connect
Writing for the Denver Post in 1896 about Mark Hanna — President William McKinley’s version of Elon Musk — the American writer Alfred Henry Lewis wryly noted that “the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had.”
It’s a sobering thought. Three days without food and all our carefully cultivated civility — laws, social norms, polite lines at the coffee shop — vanish in a second. We all like to think that society is safely held together by some higher moral order — but time and again, history suggests otherwise.
The unspoken contract — that the lights will turn on with a flick of a switch, that garbage will disappear from the curb like clockwork, and that your local bodega won’t suddenly go up in flames — is far more fragile than we’d like to believe.
And if one city has learned this lesson, it’s New York. Not once, but twice. Once when the city drowned in its own garbage, and once when it was plunged into darkness. Each time, a sudden vacuum in the most mundane, taken-for-granted systems led to utter chaos.
The first time it happened was in 1968. New York’s sanitation workers had been without a contract for six months, locked in a stalemate with Mayor John Lindsay. In February, fed up with his latest offer, they walked off the job.
Garbage collection is one of those invisible functions of civilization, something most people never think about — until it stops. And when 7,000 sanitation workers went on strike, densely packed New York turned into something out of a dystopian novel.
Within days, sidewalks disappeared beneath 100,000 tons of rotting waste. History professor Vincent Cannato describes the Lower East Side: “Garbage was piled chest-high. Egg shells, coffee grounds, milk cartons, orange rinds, and empty beer cans littered the sidewalk.”
The city reeked like an open sewer, and rats strutted through the streets like they had just been elected to public office. The New York Daily News declared it “a stinking mess,” and for once, no one accused them of exaggeration.
New Yorkers, never ones to suffer in silence, found ways to cope. Some reportedly joked about selling chunks of trash heaps to foreign tourists as “authentic New York artifacts.” Others, running out of options or patience, took a more direct approach: they loaded up their garbage and dumped it on the mayor’s front lawn.
It took nine days for the city to cave and meet the workers’ demands. Nine days to realize that the people they had ignored — perhaps even forgotten — were the only thing standing between New York and a full-blown landfill apocalypse. Order was eventually restored, the streets were cleaned, and life moved on. But not before the city got a front-row seat to just how fast civilization can unravel when an essential system collapses.
Fast forward to 1977. This time, it wasn’t garbage collection but electricity that disappeared, and the consequences were even worse. At exactly 8:37 pm on July 13, a lightning strike knocked out power to the entire city. Not just a block or two, not just a borough — the whole thing.
New York had been through blackouts before, but this one was different. In the famous 1965 blackout, people had stayed calm, waiting patiently for the lights to return. Strangers helped each other across darkened streets, shared flashlights, and even turned the ordeal into an impromptu street festival.
But 1977 was another story. It was a sweltering summer, crime was already at an all-time high, and the city was teetering on the edge. When the power cut out this time, there were no candlelit singalongs — just total chaos.
Entire city blocks turned into war zones. More than 1,600 stores were looted. Hundreds of buildings were set on fire. Brooklyn alone lost half its sneaker supply overnight, while in Manhattan, electronics stores were wiped clean, with looters hauling away televisions even though there was no electricity to turn them on.
When the lights finally flickered back on the following day, New York looked like it had been hit by an earthquake and a tornado combined. Because, as Alfred Henry Lewis might have put it, the only thing standing between civilization and anarchy is a working power grid.
Which brings us to Parshat Ki Tissa. The Israelites, fresh out of Egypt and still adjusting to the whole concept of freedom, had their own infrastructure crisis. They had Moses — reliable, steady Moses. Their leader, their guide, their direct line to God. And then, suddenly, he was gone — delayed on Mount Sinai longer than expected. Maybe he wasn’t coming back at all.
His absence created a vacuum, and in a panic, they did what people in crisis always do: improvise. If they couldn’t have Moses, they’d make a replacement. Enter the Golden Calf — a glittering idol stand-in for leadership. Chaos erupted, and by the time Moses returned, the damage was done. The lesson was painfully clear: remove a stabilizing force, and all bets are off.
The tragedy of the golden calf — and more recently, of the garbage strike and the blackout — is that none of it had to happen. Had the Israelites waited just a little longer, had New Yorkers been just a little more patient, disaster could have been avoided.
But people don’t handle vacuums well. When leadership disappears, systems break down, and the fundamental structures of daily life suddenly vanish. What replaces it is often unsavory or worse.
The real test of a society isn’t how it functions when everything is running smoothly. It’s what happens when something — be it a leader, a service, or even just the streetlights — suddenly isn’t there. Do people hold steady, trust that order will be restored, and keep their equilibrium? Or do they spiral, letting fear and uncertainty consume them? History, unfortunately, suggests that the latter is far more likely.
Moses’ return, much like the end of the blackout or the arrival of the garbage collectors, came too late to undo the damage. The people had already revealed their true selves. And while the immediate crisis was resolved — Moses shattered the idol, the worst offenders were punished — the deeper question remained: why does it take losing something to realize how much it mattered?
The story of the golden calf has shaped Jewish civilization for millennia — precisely because it warns us what happens when a vacuum is allowed to fester. That’s why it’s in the Torah — to remind us, year after year, that the barrier between civilization and anarchy is thinner than we imagine. And it’s up to us to keep it from breaking down.
The post The Golden Calf: A Reminder That Anarchy Is Closer Than We Realize first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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New York Times Cheerleads for “Pro-Hamas” Mahmoud Khalil
A taxi passes by in front of The New York Times head office, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters / Carlo Allegri
On March 9, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Secretary of State Rubio posted on X, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” President Trump himself posted, “ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of @Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come.”
Anyone who expected straight-down-the-middle, impartial coverage of this issue from the New York Times would be disappointed. Instead the paper’s news columns have turned themselves into cheerleaders for Khalil and his supporters, portraying him as a free-speech martyr.
In the four-and-a-half days since Khalil’s arrest, the Times has published at least 11 articles about it, with credits to no fewer than 13 reporters and two opinion columnists. The opinion columns set the tone with hyperbolic alarmism. “This Is The Greatest Threat to Free Speech Since the Red Scare,” one opinion headline put it, overlooking the McCain-Feingold campaign speech restriction legislation championed by the Times itself, signed into law by President George W. Bush, and eventually found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
The news articles read pretty much the same. One piece was by Eliza Shapiro, who last attracted notice for a flawed investigative series that targeted Orthodox Jewish schools in New York. Shapiro’s latest article included this passage, “the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association, which has been calling for aggressive action against pro-Palestinian demonstrators, praised Mr. Khalil’s detention in a series of social media posts, calling Mr. Khalil, without evidence, a ‘ringleader’ of the chaos at Columbia.”
These Columbia protesters are not “pro-Palestinian.” They are anti-Israel, pro-terrorism, and pro-Hamas. Likewise, it’s loaded to say the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association has been “calling for aggressive action” against the students who have been disrupting campus activities, including classes. The Jewish alumni have been calling for defensive action to protect the Jewish and Israeli students from the violent assaults, harassment, and social ostracism that has interfered with their education.
In the same sentence, the “without evidence” is such garbage—a classic tell of Times aggression toward whomever the phrase is applied to. The Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans offered up evidence including a New York magazine article describing Khalil as a “lead negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest,” a group that has called for “total eradication of Western Civilization” and that the New York Times itself, in a brief moment of lucidity, acknowledged in an October 2024 headline “Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Hamas.”
Another Times reporter whose slant was clearly visible was Ana Ley. Her article acknowledged, “Mahmoud Khalil, 30, emerged as a public face of students opposed to the war, leading demonstrations and granting interviews.” So much for “without evidence.” But there, too, the bias shows; the students weren’t actually “opposed to the war”; they support Hamas’s war against Israel, that is, “armed resistance.” What they oppose is Israel fighting back in self-defense, with American assistance. A print version of Ley’s article included quotes from Israel boycott advocate “Sophie Ellman-Golan, the communications director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice”; Ben Wizner of the ACLU; and a Columbia professor supportive of Mahmoud Khalil. That’s three sources on Mahmoud Khalil’s side, and virtually no representation of the point of view that supports deporting disruptive student protesters who are non-citizens. Perhaps the Times newsroom thinks this point of view is so reprehensible that Times readers need to be protected from exposure to it.
Columbia gives out the Pulitzer Prizes, which are a key to career advancement at the New York Times. Maybe the Times is hoping for a Pulitzer for its all-hands-on-deck defense of free-speech martyr Mahmoud Khalil? The free-speech aspect of the issue seemed somehow less salient to the Times newsroom when the Israel-haters at Columbia were disrupting the class of an Israeli professor, preventing him from speaking. It is almost enough to make a reader wonder whether whether the Times cause is really free-speech, as a universally applied principle, or if what they are really dug in committedly in favor of is the ability of Columbia students and graduates to cheer on Hamas without any significant adverse consequences.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
The post New York Times Cheerleads for “Pro-Hamas” Mahmoud Khalil first appeared on Algemeiner.com.