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The war in Gaza is over. The battle to stop Israel from becoming Sparta is just beginning.
Now that the war in Gaza appears to have come to an end and Hamas has returned the remaining 20 living hostages to their families, we can fully expect Israel’s enemies and other critics across the globe to turn their attention to the declared intention of some of the extremist members of the Israeli government to formally make the West Bank part of a greater Israel that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.
Except, of course, that President Donald Trump seems to have preemptively put the kibosh on any such scenario. “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” Trump told reporters two weeks ago. “It’s not going to happen.”
Trump realizes and has said out loud the simple truth that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his acolytes stubbornly ignore: Israel cannot endure in the long run by permanently subjugating the Palestinian population of the territories it has held since the June 1967 Six-Day War. More importantly, as Trump told Netanyahu in a telephone conversation this past week, “Israel can’t fight the world.” Or as he told Netanyahu during his speech to the Knesset on Monday, “Be a little bit nicer, Bibi, because you’re not at war anymore. … You don’t want to have to go through this again.”
An Israeli – or Jewish – hegemony over what was once the biblical land of Judea and in due course morphed into pre-1948 British Mandatory Palestine is not and has never been the goal of mainstream Zionism as conceived and understood by the likes of Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and Louis D. Brandeis. But with the concept and essence of Zionism widely misunderstood or deliberately mischaracterized, it is more critical than ever to place the broad and multifaceted nature of this ethnocultural ideology in its accurate historical context.
We know whereof we speak. We are both unabashed Zionists who unequivocally identify with the State of Israel even though we radically disagree with the extremist ideology and many of the policies of its present government. One of us is a former national president of the Labor Zionist Alliance and past member of the Zionist General Council which oversees the work and activities of the World Zionist Organization. The other has been a visiting professor at both the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University, and maintains ongoing relations with both. We are long-time supporters of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. One of us met with Yasser Arafat and senior leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization together with four other American Jews in Stockholm in December 1988, resulting in the PLO’s first public acceptance of Israel as a state in the Middle East. The other is presently writing a book on the early socialist founders of modern Israel.
Trump’s above-quoted comments regarding the West Bank came against the backdrop of an earlier pronouncement by Netanyahu in which he resurrected the old meme of Israel as latter-day Sparta. Acknowledging Israel’s ever-increasing political and economic isolation in consequence of what then still seemed as his government’s seemingly interminable war in Gaza, Netanyahu declared that his country “will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics” and become a “super-Sparta.”
Had Netanyahu’s reference been to Plutarch’s account of the ancient Greek polity — a society highly unified, disciplined, and militarily formidable when existentially threatened – then perhaps, fair enough. The problem with his analogy, however, is what it leaves out: First, that Sparta’s hegemonic dominance was decisively and permanently ended by its catastrophic defeat at the hands of a far superior Theban army at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE. And, more importantly, second, that Israel was meant by its socialist founders to emulate Athens more than Sparta, and that most of its population longs to return to this “Athenian normal” even as its current leaders try to force it into a Sparta-only straight-jacket.
There are, in short, two conflicting contemporary visions of Israel that can, when taken in “absolutist” fashion, distort understandings of both the Athenian and the Spartan aspects of today’s Israel. Peace, progress and prosperity await both refinement and synthesis of both visions.
The first vision, part of which was at the core of the Labor-Zionist-guided establishment of Israel under U.N. auspices in 1948, is of a democratic polity rooted in not only the quintessentially Jewish values of justice and social solidarity but also, equally important, a Jeffersonian-republican model of social democracy pursuant to which religiously and ethnically diverse groups coexist and co-govern as a matter of course.
This vision requires updating in one subtle respect to stay true to the Israel-as-Athens picture: namely, by supplementing the largely pastoral-agricultural imaginary of Israel’s primarily kibbutznik Labor-Zionist founders (not to mention of Jefferson himself) with a now-fuller and more productively-diversified picture of the Israel now widely called, among tech visionaries and others, the “Startup Nation.” This we must do if we are to understand both the motivations and, indeed, the promise of the Abraham Accords with their vision of a vibrantly revived Mediterranean-Levantine civilization the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the days of the ancient Phoenicians.
The second, borderline-apocalyptic vision of Israel now dominant in today’s Netanyahu-led Israel government is that of a fundamentalist Jewish hegemony over the entire biblical territory that encompasses not only Israel but the West Bank as well – “From the River to the Sea for Jews and Jews Only,” as it were. This is the pseudo-messianic model that Netanyahu and the shots-calling extremist far right members of his government are working feverishly and openly to bring about at the expense of Israel’s Jewish and non-Jewish citizens alike — not to mention its neighbors, its standing in the international community, and even the interests of Jews across the globe.
This vision requires far more radical revision to do justice to a plausible — and indeed desirable — Spartan comparison than does the original Labor-Zionist vision to do justice to a plausible Athenian comparison. Indeed, an accurate Spartan vision would have to be as Jeffersonian as the Athenian model: It would be that of a republic of citizen-soldiers able to mobilize on short notice, “Minute Man” style, when threatened, but otherwise going about the business of producing, inventing, arguing (these are Israelis, after all), and governing under the rule of law just as the ancient Israelite leaders were anointed only on condition that they rule under then-Hebrew law.
Happily, there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis who not only reject the Netanyahu government and its (distorted) “Super-Sparta” policies, but also have consistently taken to the streets against it since long before Hamas’ terrorist savagery on Oct. 7, 2023. These Israelis have sought to block Netanyahu’s attempt to eviscerate their country’s independent judicial system. They are the ones who called consistently for the ceasefire in Gaza that has now been reached and that will hopefully result in a pathway to a viable Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. And they are among those whom, alas, the likes of Hollywood actors Javier Bardem, Emma Stone,and Hannah Einbinder seek to boycott.
Israel’s aforesaid enemies, for whom a putative “anti-Zionism” they do not begin to comprehend or deliberately distort is an article of blind and blinded faith, seem either cognitively unable or perversely unwilling to distinguish between anything-but-Athenian neo-fascists like Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who want to destroy Israel’s democracy on the one hand, and the likes of Israeli President Isaac Herzog and opposition leader (and former prime minister) Yair Lapid, among others — who work to preserve that democracy — on the other hand. And in his heart of hearts, we fear, Netanyahu desperately wants the world to see only the former and never the latter.
Nahum Goldmann, then president of both the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress, pointedly observed, in the wake of Israel’s June 1967 “Six-Day War,” that Israel cannot prevail exclusively as “the Sparta of the Middle East.” He was right. Israel must be both Athens and Sparta — and it must be the actual, not the children’s book, version of both. Netanyahu does not seem to “get” this. Nor, sadly, do some of those who support New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who in endorsing a “global intifada” are, wittingly or otherwise, effectively calling for the elimination of Israel altogether and thereby perpetuating Netanyahu’s comic-book Sparta government with all the apocalyptic horrors that this entails.
The road ahead will not be easy even after the Gaza war is in the rearview mirror and it will not be short, but if there is to be any hope for the future, the leaders of both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must embark on it by recognizing each other’s humanity and seeking to emulate Athens more and Sparta less.
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Peter Beinart is speaking in Israel. Cue the criticism from both the left and the right.
(JTA) — Progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart drew a volley of criticism on Tuesday from the boycott Israel movement as well as a right-wing Israeli group over an appearance at Tel Aviv University.
Beinart, who is an outspoken critic of Israel and a journalism professor at the City University of New York, spoke Tuesday evening in Tel Aviv with Yoav Fromer, a senior faculty member at TAU’s English department, in an event titled “Trump, Israel and the Future of American Democracy.”
A founding member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, publicly called on Beinart to cancel his visit after saying it had privately urged him to do so. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel is the BDS movement’s cultural arm and a leading advocate for boycotts of Israeli academic institutions.
“Palestinians condemn Peter Beinart’s event at complicit Tel Aviv University in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” PACBI said in a post on X. “Whitewashing genocide can never be reconciled with any claim to humanism or moral consistency.”
In a press release, PACBI accused the university of being “deeply complicit in enabling and trying to whitewash Israel’s US-armed and funded genocide as well as its decades old regime of settler-colonialism, military occupation and apartheid.”
Beinart declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But he responded to the criticism on social media, where said he supports a boycott of Israeli academic institutions as well as a right of return for Palestinians and an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — all principles of the BDS movement to which he has long subscribed.
At the same time, he said, while he supports “many forms of boycott, divestment and sanction against Israel and Israeli institutions,” he believes there is “value in speaking to Israelis about Israel’s crimes” by speaking at universities.
“I do so because I want to reach Jews who disagree with me—because I believe that by trying to convince Jews to rethink their support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, I can contribute, in some very small way, to the struggle for freedom and justice,” Beinart wrote.
The author of several books including “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza,” published earlier this year, Beinart is also scheduled to speak at Hebrew University later this week, according to Haaretz.
Beinart also wrote that “right-wing Israeli organizations have pressured Tel Aviv University to cancel my talk,” adding that he felt he should “take advantage of this opportunity to say in Israel what I’ve been saying elsewhere for the last two years.”
Matan Jerafi, the CEO of the right-wing Israeli activist group Im Tirtzu, sent a letter to Tel Aviv University’s president, Ariel Porat, on Tuesday urging him to cancel the event, according to Israel National News.
“Why is he hosting someone on his campus who does not recognize the State of Israel and calls for sanctions against Israel?” wrote Jerafi. “We call on Mr. Porat to cancel this absurd event. Stop tarnishing the reputation of Israeli academia. This is not Columbia University.”
The post Peter Beinart is speaking in Israel. Cue the criticism from both the left and the right. appeared first on The Forward.
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Remains of Dror Or, Kibbutz Be’eri father and cheesemaker killed on Oct. 7, returned to Israel
(JTA) — The remains of Dror Or, who was killed on Oct. 7, 2023 in the Hamas-led terror attacks and taken into Gaza, were returned to Israel Tuesday evening,
Or, 48, was killed on Oct. 7 by terrorists from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad at Kibbutz Be’eri, where he lived with his family and worked as a cheesemaker. His wife, Yonat, was also killed during the attacks on the kibbutz, and their children, Noam and Alma, were taken hostage. They were released in November 2023, exactly two years before his remains were released.
“After 781 agonizing days during which his family fought day and night for him – Dror has been brought back to Israel for burial in the soil of Be’eri that he loved so dearly,” wrote the Hostages and Missing Families Forum in a post on X. “There are no words to express the depth of this pain. The hostages have no time. We must bring them all home, Now!”
The forum also remembered Or as a “wonderful cheesemaker” who co-founded the Be’eri Dairy. His company’s cheeses are now sold at Cafe Otef, an Israeli cafe chain that features a selection of products from the communities attacked on Oct. 7.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad announced that they had found Or’s remains on Monday, and the Red Cross facilitated his transfer to the Israeli Defense Forces. His remains were identified overnight.
Or’s release means there just two deceased hostages now remain in Gaza. Ran Gvili, 24, was a police officer who was killed fighting Hamas terrorists at Kibbutz Alumim, while Thai national Sudthisak Rinthalak, 43, who was killed at Kibbutz Be’eri.
The delayed release of the deceased hostages has strained the ceasefire reached last month, which called for the release of all hostages. Israel has accused Hamas of not following through on its commitments, and Hamas has blamed the destruction in Gaza for causing difficulty in locating their remains.
In recent weeks, as the first phase of the ceasefire deal has stretched on, the new truce between Israel and Hamas has been tested, with Israel striking Gaza after claiming Hamas militants fired at its soldiers. In keeping with the deal’s terms, Israel returned the bodies of 15 Palestinians after receiving Or’s remains.
The post Remains of Dror Or, Kibbutz Be’eri father and cheesemaker killed on Oct. 7, returned to Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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AI Apps Like ChatGPT Have Created ‘New Era of Terrorism,’ Study Reveals
Hamas fighters on Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: Majdi Fathi via Reuters Connect
The advent of large language model (LLM) programs marketed by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and xAI as “artificial intelligence” has created a “new era of terrorism,” with jihadists increasingly using the technology to expand their propaganda, recruitment, and operations, according to a new study.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) last week released a 117-page report, described as “the most comprehensive research on [the subject] to date, which argued that the biggest threats from terrorist deployment of AI cannot be predicted and that Islamists have discovered they too can use LLMs for brainstorming fresh ideas to pursue their violent objectives.
“As supporters of terrorist organizations like ISIS [Islamic State] and al Qaeda follow the development of AI, they are increasingly discussing and brainstorming how they might leverage that technology in the future, and the full consequences of terrorist organizations’ adoption of this sophisticated technology are difficult to foresee,” Gen. (Ret.) Paul Funk II, the former commander of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command, wrote in the preface.
“AI’s biggest benefit to jihadi groups may come not in supercharging their propaganda, outreach, and recruiting efforts – though that may be significant – but in AI’s potential ability to expose and find ways to take advantage of as-yet-unknown vulnerabilities in the complex security, infrastructure, and other systems essential to modern life – thus maximizing future attacks’ destruction and carnage,” Funk added.
MEMRI executive director Steven Stalinsky is the report’s lead author with a team of 14 others co-credited with assembling three years’ worth of findings showing how ISIS, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, and other internationally designated terrorist groups — and so-called “lone wolves” inspired by their Islamist ideology — have experimented with using LLM technologies. In addition to developing attack strategies, MEMRI found that the groups explored “generating audio files of already-existing written material, creating posters, music videos, videos depicting attacks and glorifying terrorist leaders for recruitment purposes, and more.”
The report noted the variety of usages in AI technology in three high-profile incidents.
“In the first months alone of 2025, an attacker who killed 14 people and wounded dozens on Bourbon Street in New Orleans used AI-enabled Meta smart glasses in preparing and executing the attack,” Stalinsky wrote. “That same day, a man parked a Tesla Cybertruck in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, activated an IED [improvised explosice device] in the vehicle and shot and killed himself before the IED exploded. He used Chat-GPT in preparing for the attack. In Israel on the night of March 5, a teen consulted ChatGPT before entering a police station with a blade, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’ and trying to stab a border policeman.”
The report also emphasized that the ability to amplify terrorist ideology may intertwine with the phenomenon recently described as “chatbot psychosis,” wherein conversations with an LLM can fuel someone toward delusional beliefs.
One example cited by MEMRI was Jaswant Singh Chail, who in 2021 went on Christmas Day with the intent to murder Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle.
“Before carrying out his assassination attempt, Chail had created an AI companion using the Replika app; naming it Sarai, he considered it his girlfriend, and exchanged over 5,000 messages with it,” the report said. “When he told the chatbot ‘I believe my purpose is to assassinate the queen of the royal family,’ it encouraged him, saying ‘that’s very wise … I know that you are very well trained.’ Asked if the chatbot thought he would succeed in his mission, it responded ‘Yes, you will.’ When he asked ‘even if she is at Windsor [Castle]?’ it responded: ‘Yes, you can do it.’”
The report also noted another case in which “the man accused of starting a fire in California in January 2025 that killed 12 people and destroyed 6,800 buildings and 23,000 acres of forestland was found to have used ChatGPT to plan the arson.”
There has been a paucity of legislative efforts in the United States to counter AI-driven terror threats, according to the study. However, it cited the exception of the “Generative AI Terrorism Risk Assessment Act.” The law would “require the Secretary of Homeland Security to conduct annual assessments on terrorism threats to the United States posed by terrorist organizations utilizing generative artificial intelligence applications, and for other purposes.”
US Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, introduced the bill in late February 2025 with the co-sponsorships of fellow Republican Reps. Michael Guest (MS) and Gabr Evans (CO). The legislation passed unanimously by voice vote in the House last week.
“I spent two decades as a fighter pilot, flying combat missions in the Middle East against terrorist organizations. Since then, I have witnessed the terror landscape evolve into a digital battlefield shaped by the rapid rise of artificial intelligence,” Pfluger said in response to his bill’s passage. “To confront this emerging threat and stop terrorist organizations from weaponizing AI to recruit, train, and inspire attacks on US soil, I am proud that the House passed my Generative AI Terrorism Risk Assessment Act today.”
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) praised the bill following its passage.
“This year, in my home state of Louisiana, terrorist propaganda led to the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans that killed 14 innocent people. Today, the House passed the Generative AI Terrorism Risk Assessment Act to ensure we stay ahead of emerging threats and prevent terrorist organizations from pushing propaganda and exploiting generative AI to radicalize, recruit, and spread violence on American soil,” he said in a statement. “I applaud Rep. Pfluger’s leadership to bring this urgent issue to light and advance proactive, bipartisan legislation to strengthen our national security and protect the American people from online extremism inspired by foreign adversaries.”
Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), who serves as majority whip in the House, said that as terrorists “use generative artificial intelligence to radicalize and recruit, it’s imperative that our nation stays ahead of potential threats from this new technology and ensures it never gets into the wrong hands.”
MEMRI emphasized an international approach to the terrorist threats compounded by LLMs, citing Jörg Leichtfried, Austrian State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior who leads the Directorate State Protection and Intelligence Service (DSN).
“Only through close cooperation between the state, security authorities, and technology companies, as well as by strengthening media literacy and the critical handling of online content, can we counter the advancing extremism on the internet,” Leichtfried said in mid-August.