יום שישי, ט״ו אלול תשפ״וFriday, August 28, 2026
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It is still not clear where exactly the Saudi deal fits in but it plainly needs some oversight.
Kazakhstan’s joining the Accords has real benefits for Israel. And it is the same for the U.S. which reportedly anticipates that current bilateral trade and other cooperation amongst the three nations will be substantially enhanced.
Requiring an end to all city contracts with companies doing business with Israel and to institute other BDS (Boycott, Divestment Sanction) policies would likely make the city’s investment climate highly uncertain.
To be sure, Hamas and Hezbollah justify their political power and arsenals as necessary for defending against Israel. But as we all know, their weapons and desire for “a state within a state” have generally been the triggers of the violent confrontations with Israel.
Mamdani will have to face reality even before the get-go. Hopefully Mamdani will abandon ideology and embrace things as they actually exist and not how he would wish them to be.
In fact, Vance’s performance even drew the ire of Jewish conservatives who, increasingly of late, have been warning of rising antisemitism on the right.
Issues like antisemitism, contempt for law enforcement and disrespect for the rule of law, promotion of racial politics and delegitimizing American traditions, history and achievement thus undermining the glue that keeps us together as a country.
As The Wall Street Journal reported, as Israeli troops pulled back to facilitate the deal’s freeing the living hostages still held in Gaza, Hamas surged security forces in behind them – a public assertion of authority intended to make clear the group remains the enclave’s governing power.
New York City will be facing enormous governmental, fiscal and social challenges in the next four years and we believe that the former governor, who to be sure, brings a lot of baggage to his candidacy, is without question still the best suited among the three major candidates to get his arms around them.
This, even though in the course of her campaign for Attorney General, Ms. James – who was a leader in the legal assault on Trump – herself declared that she was running in order to bring Donald Trump down.
While we can appreciate their dilemma, it is nonetheless dismaying that they have failed to distance themselves from some of his beyond the pale positions.
One widely made anti-Israel argument is that its alleged withholding or conditioning aid to Gaza as part of its war against Hamas amounts to collective punishment because it impacts negatively on the innocent as well as the guilty. But the thing is, the same collective punishment argument has not been directed at Hamas where it actually does apply.
Both the letter and resolution stipulate a demilitarized state with Hamas playing no role, but as noted, that is a pipe-dream and essentially just a wave to political correctness.
To be sure, we continue to believe Hamas perpetrated the Oct. 7 massacre primarily to derail the Abraham Accords.
While there may have been some apparent or technical irregularities on Trump’s part, they never rose to the level of violations about which anyone makes into a federal case.
To the extent that the so-called “moderate” Palestinian Authority can be trusted – not an easy notion to accept – it is the implacable Hamas enemy that will soon resume being in charge of compliance, whatever it is that will be required of the Palestinians and there is no doubt about their untrustworthiness.
His anti-Israel outrages including sympathy for Hamas are in a special category and a special concern for our community. It’s time we all wake up to what would be coming with a Mamdani victory.
In true cavalry to the rescue American tradition, U.S. ambassador to Israel said the other day that if Israel decided to apply sovereignty in parts of the West Bank the U.S. would respect that decision and would not dictate terms to Jerusalem.
It seems that the New York State legislatures, with its extreme leftist Assembly and Senate leadership, have no intention of forcing Mamdani into moderation should he be elected New York’s Mayor. Yet Mamdani can only do what he says he wants to do if the legislature lets him do it.
We can readily understand the dilemma the three top democratic elected officials faced. Undoubtedly, he is not their preferred candidate and as noted, a particularly fraught one at that.
What seems to rankle all of them is that the targets were ostensibly gathered to work on a cease fire and hostage release deal and the attack was therefore counterproductive.
We don’t know whether Smotrich reflected the views of Prime Minister Netanyahu and or the Israeli government when he spoke. And it is certainly not for us to choose for Israel.
The New York Sun has reported that Mamdani plans to spend $65million on gender affirming care and has promised to investigate New York hospitals that stop providing the services and create an Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs at City Hall. Would this really address a pressing need for the city? He should be asked to tell us how.
Of course, the media is typically playing fast and loose with the facts. Even under the Biden administration, American defense officials were reporting that Israel was taking measures to spare enemy civilians from avoidable harm that were unprecedented in modern warfare.
According to The New York Times, the party’s divisions over Israel and the war in Gaza were on “messy display” at the meeting as members debated dueling resolutions about how to respond to Israel’s Gaza policy.
Although the court, by invalidating the fine, literally gutted the lawsuit and neutralized it, there was not a majority who were prepared to formally throw out the case altogether.
Of course, an enormously important part of the mix is the apparent full support of President Trump which sends a powerful message to Israel’s enemies.
Plainly, for that crowd, it is of no moment what the laws or tradition may require. What counts is whether the results work for you.
It is frightening to see that this sort of thing is embedded in our higher education. It is not hyperbole to suggest that our students – our future leaders – are in the thrall of dedicated ideologues who are proselytizing in the guise of educating.
Huckabee went on to challenge Starmer on how much food his government had sent to Gaza, noting that Israel has already contributed more than two million tons although Hamas seized much of it. Indeed, has anyone seen a malnourished Hamas terrorist in any of the pictures of them shooting their rifles into the air?
The Trump campus antisemitism campaign includes lawsuits and suspensions of massive research grants in the hundreds of millions of dollars. UCLA has recently had $584 million in research funding suspended.
The sense that Israel should give up trying to eradicate Hamas and that Hamas’s fictions had to be taken seriously despite its history of fabrications and staged crises was palpable and not at all helpful.
It is being alleged that President Obama intended to scuttle the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server and mishandling of highly classified information during her time as secretary of state and a reported Obama and Hillary Clinton plan to falsely tie Donald Trump to Russia.
It seems that Schumer, Jeffries, and Hochul may be willing to risk being labeled soft on antisemitism since antisemitism appears more and more to be finding a place in the Democratic Party.
The Columbia agreement prohibits programs that promote unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes in student admissions and faculty hiring.
The real anxiousness in the Trump camp likely is not about some one-off bombing of Syria in support of the Druze or even about Hamas targets in Gaza, but rather about the bigger picture, according to the Jerusalem Post.
How Judge Torresen’s ruling can be reconciled with the Supreme Court’s admonition about judges staying in their lane eludes us.
In truth, though, as recent events in the Middle East demonstrate, the relationship between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu was a function not of them complimenting each other but rather of their respective militaries complementing each other in meeting a shared challenge.
The eight justices noted, however, that they expressed no view on any particular plan because none was presented to them.
Although we believe President Trump has the healthiest respect for Israel’s contributions to the joint effort, we also believe that in his view, the U.S. was the indispensable party, making it all possible.
It is also unfortunate that, generally, the program is not closer to the voucher models used in some red states whereby parents are provided with education vouchers that can be redeemed at either public or private schools.
Of course, the piece de resistance was the decision at the end of the Court’s term in June, largely disallowing the imposition of temporary universal injunctions by district court judges.
Predictably, Mamdani’s answer to the question of where the money to pay for all of this largesse will come from will continue to be ever-higher taxes, thus feeding the non-affordability spiral. So, nothing really new here.
Despite the fact that district court judges typically issue rulings that only apply to the particular litigants in his or her court, the anti-Trumpers generally also asked the judge – again, usually successfully – to also grant the injunction nationwide applicability.
It was not for nothing that in the months before the military action that was eventually taken, the negotiations proceeded in spurts, as Israel and the U.S. were steadfast in trying to eliminate all of the loopholes of the early agreement, and with Iran unwilling to accept that the jig may finally be up.
While the president did not quite call for the ouster of the current regime in Teheran, or say that the U.S. would play any role in overthrowing it, he did seem to undercut what seemed to be a coordinated message from his top advisers that regime change was not something being contemplated.
The rulings came in a case brought by PEARLS (Parents for Educational and Religious Liberty in Schools) which has been waging a decade-long battle to secure the right of yeshiva parents to control the upbringing and education of their children.
Judge Mirocznik brings a wealth of legal experience to his new assignment.
Her deep compassion and commitment to fairness guide everything she does. Susan will be an unbiased, principled judge who will make us proud to have supported her.
In the 48th we urge a vote for Inna Vernikov.
.Let’s face it. The only candidates who have any chance of winning the Democratic Primary on June 24 are former NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo and NYS Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.
We think the president would do well to speak now about how, in its efforts to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, Israel is furthering an essential American interest.
It seems to us that the Democrats have not yet learned the lesson of the spectacular failure of lawfare to bring Donald Trump down.
We wonder if Iran be required to ship its existing uranium stock piles and nuclear plant infrastructure to countries outside its borders?
While the perpetrators were bound by a desire to protest, surely they all shared a desire to see Israel disappear – and obviously, they also turned to violence.
Colleges and universities are surely among the most important venues for the organization and refinement of ideas and opinions.
We find it hard to believe President Trump would really be upset with the Israeli threats to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. In fact, to paraphrase an old adage, if Netanyahu did not so threaten, Trump would ask him to.
While, Donald Trump is not, by any stretch, Barack Obama when it comes to Israel, the emerging Trump Middle East doctrine is eerily reminiscent of the Obama New Beginning speech at Cairo University at the beginning of his first term.
It is doubtful that the decision will have any significant impact on the issue of the constitutionality of public tuition assistance to yeshiva parents.
Can the knowing establishment of a center for terrorism ever be morally correct?
The rationale for Arab states joining the Abraham Accords during the first Trump term was that they were desperate for ways to deter Iranian aggression and, seeing the handwriting on the wall for economies based on oil revenues, to end their dependence on them.
So we rather think that the president’s new unfavorable stance towards Israel was likely fueled by a fear that an alienated Arab world would come to thwart his ability to proceed, full bore, to follow through on his America First agenda in the Middle East – think, expansion of the Abraham Accords – and not any animus towards Israel or its prime minister, per se, as some are suggesting.
For far too long, we have been told that some of our parents may not continue their religious traditions as to how to educate their children. If nothing else, this would seem to run afoul of our constitutional freedom of religion rights.
Iran of course, remains a major factor in the Gulf and its labyrinthian politics continue to loom large in the region, even if somewhat diminished.
While Ms. James and her cohort have taken some care to package their arguments in legalese, they are at base actually the stuff of traditional political campaigning.
We would have thought that President Trump would have at least coupled his call on Israel to unilaterally allow the entry of aid into Gaza with a call on Hamas to immediately release all hostages. But he didn’t.
Over the years, courts have generally held that non-citizens, even individuals who entered the United States illegally, have due process rights. Yet the current phenomenon of several million immigrants who entered the U.S. simply by crossing its borders into the country has perforce upended all prior notions of due process rights.
She did legal somersaults in order to conjure up a patchwork of violations of law on Trump’s part in applying for loans, which virtually all experts opined were arguably accurate, at any rate harmless and victimless, and knowingly accepted by the lending institutions themselves.
Although the Supreme Court agreed that the migrants were entitled to challenge their deportations and that they were also entitled to reasonable notice of impending deportation in order to contest them.
The logic of definitively confronting Iran now is manifest. Iran is at the center of a multi-tentacled proxy terrorist network that continues to plague much of the world and which will inevitably become intolerable.
Of course, it has long been known that Hamas has regularly treated Israeli aid trucks rolling into Gaza as mobile supermarkets, making available to them, the staples necessary for their survival.
Moreover, Hamas also continues to intentionally hold and use Israeli and American hostages as bargaining chips. Yet that ongoing outrageous human trafficking is not cited by Sanders as bearing on Hamas’s responsibility for the situation in Gaza. But Israel’s inadvertent causing of collateral harm to civilians is.
Indeed, as we see it, we Jews, as the intended beneficiaries of the leveraging of federal funding, are now seen as enemies of free speech, academic freedom, and medical research.
While no one ever knows for sure about these things, we are intrigued not only by the advent of the anti-Hamas outcry, but that it was allowed to continue for several days. Plainly, something is afoot in Gaza.
It stands to reason that a good deal of today’s Washington decision-making will now come to be sifted through differing notions of separation of powers. That is, constitutionally, it matters who decides as much as what is decided.
What rankles the most in this episode is not the sheer counter-intuitiveness of it all. It is that the law flies directly in the face of explicit governing provisions of the New York State Constitution.
At this point, without any such impeachment issue yet before the high court, there should be no doubt that it was ill-advised for U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts to have intervened, as he did last week, with a public statement declaring that an impeachment would be improper...
But we seem to have been wrong about Trump and there is reason to believe that at long last an American president is really serious about doing something about the problem of antisemitism.
While Schumer’s thrust has a certain facial logic to it, it does seem hard to believe that Republicans would really enjoy unfettered power to run the government during a shutdown, unrestricted by what half of the nation may think.
Sounds plain to us that Hamas is trying to figure out how to get back into the game at some point, not leave it.
Like the notorious Trump criminal cases, the Adams variety also had the odor of creative and selective prosecutions that exploited technical and insignificant violations of law.
Elon Musk’s extraordinary deep dive into every nook and cranny of federal spending and employment reflects a desire to root out the waste and inefficiency – and possible corruption – that necessarily hobble the federal bottom line.
Israel has insisted that Hamas must acknowledge the overarching understanding that the precondition to phase two negotiations is that Hamas must disarm, cease to exist as a political or military entity and have no involvement in the post-war governance of Gaza.
Even the most cursory review of the curricula of the PA’s educational system would find pervasive demonization of Israel and Jews and support for terrorism.
The con side emphasizes that congestion pricing disproportionately impacts low-income individuals who may or may not have access to alternative transportation options and are forced to drive into congestion toll areas...
Trump’s real message to Hamas was that, as far as he was concerned, they were going deeper and deeper into the hole they have been digging for themselves which will soon lead to their demise.
Without putting too fine a point on it, then, Donald Trump seems to believe that controversial policy proposals are really offers of solutions that ideally will trigger a deliberative process which will inform debate and hopefully lead to a meeting of the minds – albeit with a changed playing field and center of gravity.
Indeed, the various past delays in turning over hostages could well be explained by Hamas’ fear of showing the world evidence of their barbarism.
What made their task easier was the fact that except, perhaps, for the Russian collusion adventure, there were some arguable issues with some of the facts of the various cases even if they were of minor significance.
Unfortunately, we have for too long acted as if open-ended profligate spending was ultimately manageable, and indulging in ideological environmental and social frolics while our adversaries realistically went about their business would not mortally wound us.
By all logic, with the creation of UNHCR, UNWRA became redundant and should have been dissolved. But it wasn’t. And in retrospect, there was method to the madness.
As the most powerful person in American government besides President Biden, he surely realized that his words would be taken by Israel’s enemies that a rupture in U.S. relations was coming. Did he think that would be a good thing for him to safeguard for Israel?
We got to wondering whether he was threatening that if Democrats were unsuccessful in the legislatures and the courts, they would resort to violence in the streets to get their way?
And while the plan might seem pie in the sky, never forget that it was Trump’s out of the box vision that led to the Abraham Accords and the peaceful relocation of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
In fact, AOC even trashed the ADL which had said that, at worst, Musk’s gesture was an awkward gesture in moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.
We suspect that much of it has been occasioned by Mr. Trump’s now famous threat that all hell will break out in the Middle East if the hostages were not released by the time of his inauguration.
In the light of the self-evident, almost decades long Democrat campaign of conjuring up legal cases against Donald Trump, several of his family members and colleagues, that concern seems rather rich.
Israel has earned the right to defensible borders and non-threatening neighbors, having been forced over the years to defend itself in wars of survival with its predatory neighbors precisely because of its defensive inadequacies. In a very real sense Israel has more than paid its dues.
The court’s ruling did not touch on Mr. Trump’s substantive presidential immunity or lawfare defenses. Nor did it appear to follow any heated debates over them.
August 28, 2026 
