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The Iran War: Peace Through Strength
Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, visits Hezbollah’s office in Tehran, Iran, Oct. 1, 2024. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
George Washington once observed, “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” And as it turns out, sometimes the best way to preserve peace is to go to war — and finish the job.
Until October 2023, Israel — and, to a large extent, the United States as well — operated under a doctrine that seemed sensible enough: avoid war whenever possible, and when provoked, respond in a limited, carefully measured way.
When rockets were fired, Israel retaliated just enough to signal displeasure. When terrorist leaders threatened destruction, their words were dismissed as overheated rhetoric, aimed at rallying an eager audience of haters rather than signaling an intention to wage war. And when enemies amassed weapons, the assumption was that overwhelming military superiority would deter their use.
The theory behind this approach was simple. Escalation is dangerous, and war is costly — financially and, of course, in human lives. Restraint, it was believed, would keep life relatively stable. Israel responded when necessary, but always carefully, operating on the assumption that a rap on the knuckles would be enough to signal that continuing attacks was a bad idea.
The problem, as October 7 revealed with horrifying clarity, is that not every enemy shares this logic. For some enemies, it isn’t about equilibrium or stability; it’s about inflicting violence on those you hate — again and again, without pause or restraint.
For decades, Israel’s main adversaries — Hamas, Hezbollah, and above all the Iranian regime — made their intentions clear. Their slogans were blunt: “Death to Israel,” “Death to America.” Israel, like much of the West, preferred to believe these words were exaggerations, not literal plans.
And so life went on. Gaza was tolerated as a hostile enclave, and every so often Israel “mowed the lawn.” Hezbollah, entrenched on Israel’s northern border with tens of thousands of missiles, was considered a threat that would never fully materialize. Iran, distant and absorbed in its own problems, was seen as dangerous but manageable.
The hope was that monitoring, occasional strikes, persistent warnings about a nuclear Iran, and deterrence would prevent catastrophe.
Then came October 7. The brutal massacre on Israel’s southwestern border shattered those assumptions. The belief that terror groups and their backers could be contained collapsed overnight. The idea that economic incentives or agreements might moderate radical regimes suddenly looked naïve.
Israel — and under President Trump, the United States as well — realized something fundamental: you cannot coexist with movements or regimes whose very purpose is your destruction. The rules of the game have changed.
The new doctrine is simple: if terrorists and radicals are running for their lives, they cannot threaten yours. When those plotting your destruction are forced onto the defensive, their ability to act collapses.
Over the past two years, the consequences of this shift have been dramatic. Hamas’s military structure has been dismantled and its leaders eliminated. Hezbollah’s leadership was taken out, and much of its vast missile arsenal destroyed.
And now, in a stunning development few would have imagined possible even a month ago, the Iranian regime itself has suffered devastating blows — its supreme leader eliminated in a precision strike and the IRGC crippled.
For decades Iran acted as the conductor of the anti-Israel, anti-America orchestra, funding and arming terror movements across the region while feverishly pursuing a nuclear weapon. The regime assumed it could operate safely behind its proxies, directing violence from afar while remaining immune to consequences at home. That illusion has now been shattered.
What Israel has finally rediscovered is an ancient truth: when there is a serious threat, delay is dangerous. It must be confronted quickly and decisively. This principle is not only a lesson from modern security doctrine; it has deep roots in Jewish tradition, vividly illustrated in Parshat Ki Tisa.
The central drama of this portion is the catastrophic episode of the Golden Calf. After forty days of waiting for Moses to descend from Mount Sinai, something shifts in the Israelite camp. Egged on by the pagan hangers-on who joined the Israelites during the Exodus, the people demand a replacement leader, and within hours they have constructed a golden idol.
Interestingly, most of the nation did not actively participate. They stood on the sidelines as this shocking desecration of the covenant with God unfolded before them. Perhaps they assumed it didn’t really affect them — that life could continue as normal as long as the upheaval remained confined to a relatively small group.
But when Moses descends the mountain and sees what has happened, the Torah describes an extraordinary sequence of events. Moses does not attempt to “mow the lawn.” He does not deliver a carefully calibrated response. He does not negotiate with the idolaters or seek a diplomatic compromise. Instead, he acts with stunning decisiveness.
First he shatters the tablets. Then he completely destroys the calf, grinding it into powder and scattering it on water. Then he confronts the people and demands that they make an immediate choice (Ex. 32:26): מִי לַה׳ אֵלָי — “Whoever is for God, join me.”
No equivocation, no wishy-washy middle ground: you are either with me or against me. The tribe of Levi rallies to him, and the rebellion is crushed before it can spread any further and cause irrevocable damage.
Commentators emphasize that Moses’ actions were not impulsive rage but deliberate leadership. The Ramban explains that breaking the tablets was meant to shock the nation into grasping the gravity of the situation.
Rav Hirsch observes that Moses’ call eliminated ambiguity: in moments of existential crisis, neutrality is impossible — one must choose. The Sforno adds that swift punishment of the instigators prevented the sin from becoming normalized. Moses understood what history repeatedly confirms: some crises must be confronted decisively.
Had Moses hesitated, what began as a limited aberration — serious though it was — might have metastasized into something far worse. If he had attempted compromise, or even hinted that the problem could be contained, the rot would have set in, and before long everything might have collapsed.
Instead, decisive action restored clarity. The Golden Calf was destroyed. Those who built it were eliminated. And then the covenant was renewed with a second set of tablets. The lesson is unmistakable: destructive forces must be confronted with overwhelming force before it is too late.
That pattern — crisis, decisive response, and renewal — recurs throughout Jewish history. In our own time there have been painful moments of reckoning. As a result, both the Western world in general and Israel in particular have had to rediscover the necessity of strength.
For far too long, the United States and Israel hoped that a cautious approach toward Iran and its proxies would stabilize the region. But peace and tranquility are not built on illusions. When a regime like Iran spends decades arming itself and its proxies while openly proclaiming genocidal ambitions, those ambitions cannot be ignored. If they are not confronted, the threat only grows — and eventually leads to disaster.
The war against Iran — aptly codenamed “Epic Fury” — may well be seen as a turning point. It marked the moment when the strategic assumptions that shaped the Middle East for decades were finally set aside.
The Jewish people learned long ago that survival demands difficult decisions and decisive leadership. For a time Israel drifted away from that mindset. But the ancient lesson still resonates — and has now returned with renewed conviction.
The lesson is clear: when those who threaten your destruction are confronted with resolve and strength, they can be defeated.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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US Senate Vote to Block Arms Sales to Israel Fails — but Raises Questions About Future Democratic Support
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks to the media following a meeting with US President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington, US, July 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
A failed Senate vote to block US arms sales to Israel has further exposed a deepening divide within the Democratic Party, one increasingly defined by younger voters and liberals whose views on Israel are shifting rapidly.
The Senate on Wednesday rejected two resolutions led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would have halted roughly $450 million in weapons transfers to Israel, including bombs and bulldozers. The measures failed, ensuring the sales will move forward. But the margin, and who supported the effort, marked a significant political inflection point.
Of the 47 Senate Democrats, 40 voted in favor of blocking sales of bulldozers and 36 voted in favor of blocking transfers of so-called “dumb” bombs. The failed vote represents the largest show of opposition to military aid for Israel within the party in recent memory. While previous efforts spearheaded by Sanders drew support from a smaller bloc, this vote saw roughly 80 percent of Senate Democrats vote against transferring aid to the Jewish state, signaling a seismic shift in the dynamic between the Democratic Party and Israel.
Further, many traditionally stalwart supporters of Israel, such as Democratic Sens. Elissa Slotkin (MI) and Cory Booker (NJ), voted in favor of Sanders’s resolution, signaling that anti-Israel sentiment has migrated from the far-left fringes of the party into the mainstream.
That change is closely tied to evolving public opinion, especially among younger Americans.
Recent polling, including newly released data from the Yale Youth Poll, shows that younger voters are far more critical of Israel than older generations. Large shares of voters under 30 now support restricting or even ending US military aid, a position that departs sharply from the long-standing bipartisan consensus in Washington. Polls show that a supermajority of Democrats believe that Israel has committed a so-called “genocide” in Gaza, an assertion which lacks little evidence and has been boosted by foreign entities tied to Iran.
Data also suggests that increased social media consumption aligns with more skeptical attitudes toward foreign policy regarding Israel. Those who receive their news from social media, especially youth-centric platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, are far more likely to exhibit anti-Israel animus than those who consume traditional broadcast news media.
The Senate vote reflects the increasing pressure of Democratic lawmakers to stake an aggressive stance against Israel. Several lawmakers who backed the resolutions argued that continued arms transfers should be reconsidered amid the expanding regional conflict involving Iran and mounting humanitarian concerns. They argued that the Trump White House has not sought out appropriate congressional approval for the ongoing war in Iran. Many also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct, suggesting that he has escalated hostilities in the region rather than acted in self-defense from existential threats. These same voices expressed dismay at civilian casualties in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza.
The lawmakers largely framed their votes not as opposition to Israel’s existence, but as a challenge to current policies and the use of US-supplied weapons.
Opponents, including most Republicans, maintained that US military support remains essential to Israel’s security, particularly as tensions with Iran escalate. They warned that blocking arms sales could weaken a key ally in a volatile region.
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), an organization dedicated to increasing support for the GOP among Jews, framed the vote as reflective of a broader anti-Israel sentiment within the Democratic Party.
“There is only ONE pro-Israel party, and it is the Republican Party,” RJC wrote on X.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the group J Street, endorsed the vote as an “encouraging” sign of progress.
“It’s encouraging to see a growing number of senators recognize that unconditional US military support for Israel is no longer tenable in light of the Netanyahu government’s policies. The work now is to translate that shift into action: alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, stopping violence on the West Bank and pursuing paths to end the ongoing fighting across the region,” Ben-Ami wrote.
A self-proclaimed “pro-peace, pro-Israel” lobbying organization, J Street has come under fire for allegedly not doing enough to combat antisemitism or anti-Israel narratives within liberal political circles.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), one of the most strident defenders of Israel in Congress, criticized his party’s turn against Israel, saying in a new CNN interview that they have “boxed themselves in” by supporting Sanders’s resolution. He dismissed the notion that Democrats would become more likely to support Israel with a change in Israeli leadership.
“When Netanyahu goes, and you’re now on record with this, you’re going to revert back and say that now that he’s gone, I can now start sending offensive weapons?” Moskowitz pondered.
Despite the failure of the resolutions, the size of the Democratic vote in favor underscores how quickly the political landscape is changing ahead of the 2028 presidential election.
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Duke University Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine Over Antisemitic Political Cartoon
Aerial view of Duke University on Jan. 6, 2026. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Duke University has suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter and impounded its money for posting an antisemitic political cartoon on social media, The Duke Chronicle reported on Tuesday.
According to the student paper, the illustration depicts a pig labeled “Zionism” hoisting a Star of David as its arm interlocks with another pig, labeled “US Imperialism,” hoisting the Torch of Liberty. The image was created in 1970 by political cartoonist Emory Douglas, a Black Panther party official who harbored hostility toward the US and Israel.
The Chronicle said the image elicited no fewer than 10 formal complaints from Jewish students for showing a blatant antisemitic trope. Historically, depicting Jews as pigs has been done to reduce them to the status of animals and mock the fact that dietary restrictions forbid Jews to eat pork. The Nazis notoriously did so, but the practice reaches back further into history, when medieval Germans proliferated the Judensau drawings which portrayed Jews drinking pig’s milk and excrement.
In a statement to the Chronicle, SJP denied that it intended to endorse the cartoon’s antisemitic messaging, saying it “was never intended to be antisemitic” and that anti-Zionist activism is “not the same as targeting Jewish people.”
This was not the first time that the anti-Zionist group posted antisemitic imagery. In 2024, the Harvard chapter of its faculty spinoff, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FJSP), posted a political cartoon of a Jew lynching an African American and an Arab. In the illustration, a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David and containing a dollar sign at its center dangles a Black man and an Arab man from a noose. In its posterior, an arm belonging to an unknown person of color wields a machete that says, “Liberation Movement.”
Such activity is an integral part of the playbook of anti-Zionist and antisemitic messaging on social media, scholars have found.
From 2013 to 2024, the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University studied over 76,000 posts created by Students for Justice in Palestine and its affiliates, finding that over half, 54.9 percent, included only a single, evocative image.
“In contrast, Reels (5.3%) and Videos (4.9%) are used far less frequently,” the institute said in a report based on its research. “Based on these descriptions, we see a strong preference among campus-based anti-Israel groups for static visual formats, suggesting that this type of bimodal content represents the highest form of shareability within activists networks.”
To boost their audience and reach, pro-Hamas groups also post together in what ISCA described as “co-authored posts,” of which there were over 20,000 between 2013 and 2024. Their content set off strong emotions in the individual users exposed to them, inciting incidents of antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and violence. Such outrages, it added, increased in proportion to the concentration of anti-Israel groups on a single campus, evidence of “particularly strong” correlation.
ISCAP’s conclusions can be found in the real world, as SJP and its network of student groups have helped fuel a historic wave of antisemitic incidents on college campuses over the past two and a half years — from spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew” to gang assaulting Jews at Columbia University’s Butler Library.
SJP has also expressed its hope of inciting insurrection in the US and amassing a jihadist army.
In 2024, the national SJP organization proclaimed on X that the anti-Zionist student movement is a weapon for destroying the US, saying that “divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal” but enacted with the later goal of initiating “the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself.” On the same day the group issued the statement, Columbia University’s most strident SJP spinoff, created after SJP was suspended, was reported to have distributed literature which called for “popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to a previous event. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Netherlands Reports 867 Antisemitic Incidents in 2025 as Cases Remain at Alarmingly High Levels
March 29, 2025, Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands: A pro-Palestinian demonstrator burns a hand-fashioned Israeli flag. Photo: James Petermeier/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Antisemitism in the Netherlands remained at alarmingly high levels last year, according to newly published figures, as Jews and Israelis across Europe continued to face a persistently hostile environment marked by harassment, vandalism, and targeted attacks.
On Wednesday, Dutch authorities released a new annual antisemitism report showing 867 registered cases in 2025, a figure that remains at deeply troubling levels and virtually unchanged from the 880 antisemitic incidents recorded the previous year.
Even though Jews make up less than 0.3 percent of the Dutch population, anti-Jewish hate crimes account for 26 percent of all discrimination cases.
Eddo Verdoner, the Dutch national coordinator for combating antisemitism (NCAB), said the data reflects a worrying normalization of antisemitic incidents and called for sustained, coordinated action to address them.
“We have been recording hundreds of antisemitic incidents each year for years now. What I fear is that we are slowly getting used to figures that are unacceptable, that hatred is becoming the new normal,” Verdoner said in a statement.
“The figures once again paint a worrying picture, underscoring the need for decisive action in schools, online, and in the courtroom,” he continued.
The newly released report shows a decrease in violent antisemitic incidents, with 34 cases compared to 42 in 2024. However, local police registered an increase in antisemitic threats in 2025, with 93 cases compared to 88 the previous year.
Of the 867 registered incidents, more than 400 involved Jewish individuals or institutions in everyday settings, including residential neighborhoods, public streets, and areas around Jewish buildings and cemeteries.
In light of these figures, Verdoner called on authorities to strengthen enforcement and prevention efforts, prioritizing higher detection rates, expanding Holocaust education, and placing greater emphasis on Jewish life as a way to counter ignorance and prejudice.
“At the moment, Jewish life in the Netherlands can almost only continue thanks to the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, the police, and interventions such as cameras and bulletproof glass,” he said.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, the Netherlands has seen a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In one of the most controversial incidents, local authorities opened an investigation last year into Batisma Chayat Sa’id, a nurse who allegedly stated she would administer lethal injections to Israeli patients.
In another instance, Amsterdam-based Jewish columnist Jonath Weinberger publicly denounced rising antisemitism in health-care settings, saying she was denied medical care by a nurse who refused to remove a pro-Palestinian pin shaped like a fist.