יום ראשון, י״ג תמוז תשפ״וSunday, June 28, 2026
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Vic Rosenthal created FresnoZionism.org to provide a forum for publishing and discussing issues about Israel and the Mideast conflict, especially where there is a local connection. Rosenthal believes that America’s interests are best served by supporting the democratic state of Israel, the front line in the struggle between Western civilization and radical Islam. The viewpoint is not intended to be liberal or conservative — just pro-Israel.
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We barely trimmed the weeds, with the IDF ordered to end the fighting before the Memorial Day and Independence Day celebrations this week, and the Eurovision song contest which will begin next Tuesday in Tel Aviv
Israel has the capability to completely destroy Hamas. But in countless minor confrontations and several operations that most people call “wars,” she has not done so. Why?
Let the New York Times apologize for years of continuous negative focus on Israel as well as the stupid cartoon. Or not apologize--does it matter?
Taken by itself, it seems that war between Israel and Iran is guaranteed. But there is one other possibility – the only alternative that I can imagine, given the objectives of the Iranian regime. And that is that the regime can be toppled by internal opposition encouraged by economic pressure from the US.
The fact that the letter from liberal Jewish leaders was addressed to Trump, rather than Netanyahu, shows even more strongly that they reject Israel’s pretension to self-government. The US, they think, guided by the “wisdom” of the leaders of its liberal Jewish community should force Israel to do its will. They are uncomfortable with a sovereign Jewish state, and would prefer a banana republic, with themselves calling the shots.
One might wonder if there is any other country in the world that relates to its soldiers like Israel does. I certainly don’t know of any. Our enemies see it as a weakness to be exploited, and do so whenever they can. But it is also a strength, a motivation the leads Israeli young people to volunteer to take risks, knowing that they are not alone. The nation stands behind them.
PM Netanyahu’s promise to extend Israeli sovereignty to the settlements – and not, by the way, “to annex the West Bank” as so many headlines have it – has re-ignited debate about these issues. But nothing’s changed. Here are some popular but false statements about Judea/Samaria and the Jewish communities that have been established there:
So what are these national rights guaranteed by the new law? Some are “only” symbolic, like the flag, the national anthem, the symbol of the state, holidays, and so on. But some are supremely practical and a matter of life and death: the Law of Return for Jews and the commitment to encourage the ingathering of exiles, Jews from around the world. These rights are what make it possible for Israel to be a place of refuge for persecuted Jews everywhere
What are Iran and Hamas thinking, and what do we do now?
J Street’s primary goal, like that of the numerous other anti-Israel organizations in the US, including the nominally “Jewish” If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as explicitly antisemitic ones like If America Knew, is to create antipathy and distrust for Israel, so that Americans will oppose pro-Israel actions by the US government – for example, the recognition of Israel’s possession of the Golan Heights
By recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, President Trump struck a blow against the idiotic principle of “land for peace”
Our legal system, and especially the Supreme Court, applies a double standard to Jews and Arabs. Precisely as is forbidden in the Torah, our judges lean toward those that they (wrongly) believe to be oppressed.
Israel has never been a “state of all its citizens” as Sela, who is supposed to be well-educated, asserted. Like Japan and numerous other countries, but unlike the US, Israel is a nation-state, a state in which – or by which – a particular people or culture expresses its right of self-determination.
Democratic allies in the Congress, even the Jewish ones, crawled away from punishing or even rebuking Rep. Ilhan Omar, to vote for a resolution that, by criticizing every imaginable kind of bigotry, ends up saying nothing. Even Omar, the original perpetrator of the antisemitic slander, proudly voted for it! Even for the US Congress, it was a remarkably craven display.
Balagan: chaos, total disorder, huge mess. Borrowed from Russian.
What I find the most egregious is the way the media – with the cooperation of the police and the prosecutor’s office – has been trying Netanyahu in public for at least the last three or four years, in order to demonize and delegitimize him as Prime Minister
The idea of swaps ought to be unacceptable to Israel, because it presupposes Arab ownership of all of Judea and Samaria. Why should Israel be required to compensate the Palestinians for taking its own land?
The leaders of the PLO and Hamas, who have programmed the murderers and who pay them, are also guilty of murder. Indeed Irfaiya and the other monsters are no more than hitmen. The root of the problem is planted higher up.
I don’t think there is a harder job in the world than being Prime Minister of Israel. There’s no room for mistakes. If he screws up, he – and the nation – pay the price right away. At the same time, the constraints placed on the PM by the exigencies of the coalition system, the too-powerful Supreme Court and Attorney General, and the intrusive and hostile media, limit what he can do. He bears all the responsibility, but has insufficient authority to do his job.
Perhaps decades ago we could have simply wiped out the PLO and reached some kind of understanding with traditional leaders among the Palestinian Arabs. Perhaps not. But today the “Palestinians” have taken on the mantle of Amalek. They must be defeated and disarmed, and those who see themselves as our enemies must be permanently expelled from the land of Israel.
I have a theory about Jew-hatred. An important component of it is contempt for Jews as physical beings. Anti-Semites think of Jews as powerful in occult ways, but they also see us as weak, not capable of asserting ourselves physically and fighting back. A good way to reduce antisemitism is to fight the enemies of the Jewish people aggressively.
I believe that the ultimate source of this enmity is the principle – literally an “article of faith” in the Muslim Middle East – that a sovereign Jewish state in the region is an abomination to Allah, and it is their religious duty to destroy it
Where is democracy, if an unelected elite, especially one that is diametrically opposed to the will of the electorate, is given almost unlimited power to run the affairs of the nation?
The earthquake that could propel the American Jews into our arms would be the mushrooming of anti-Jewish attitudes in the Democratic party and the broader society. Could it happen? Something similar seems to be occurring in Europe.
There is only one Jewish state. There are numerous versions of the democratic “state of all its citizens” in the world, but as time goes by and it becomes harder and harder for Jews to live in them, we are finding that Herzl, Ben-Gurion, and other Zionists were correct: a Jewish state is essential for the survival of the Jewish people
Did you know that there was a Palestinian-American in the House long before anyone else, who was in fact the only one who was actually a citizen of “Palestine,” and who had a Palestinian passport? And that he was Jewish?
There is one and only one Jewish state in the world, compared to 23 Arab states. Even if you accept the contention that there is a historic Palestinian people – and not just a group of Arabs of various origins that recently coalesced in opposition to the establishment of Israel – there is a state that was created from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and the partition of the Palestine Mandate that arguably is rightfully theirs, and that is Jordan.
In fact, Israel does not need anywhere near this number of parties. I would like to propose a simpler arrangement of only six parties. Here they are, with their platforms:
Personally I like the idea of a party that is firmly right-wing on security matters and which can walk the sometimes fine line between respect for Jewish tradition and religious coercion.
Iran would like to see the next war fought on Israel’s territory. It would like to see the casualties on its side being Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi, not Iranian. It would like to see Israel wounded, but itself come out unscathed. It is up to Israel to ensure that this doesn’t happen.
Israel’s leaders must realize that today we are living in a temporary strategic paradise, which can end at any time. If Theresa May, Trump, or Putin (or worse, all three) should be supplanted by their likely replacements, our freedom of action – diplomatic, economic, and military – would be severely circumscribed.
We have reached our breaking points. There are murders and attempted murders almost every day. We try to make agreements, to improve their living conditions, to use the minimum amount of force necessary to protect ourselves. We knock on roofs, shoot rubber bullets, issue work permits, dismantle communities because there is a claim of Palestinian ownership, approve the same building plans over and over without building. They kill Jews.
Uniformed soldiers were nearby, but they aimed and fired at the pregnant woman. Do I need to add anything? This is who (or what) the Palestinian Arabs are
Nobody in Jewish Israel wants to say that the ideal of coexistence with the 20% of our population that are Arabs is unobtainable, that we are getting farther away from it as time goes by rather than closer. But that’s how it seems today.
In the age of intersectionality, it is taken as a given that racism against blacks in the US and “oppression” of Palestinians by Israel are similar phenomena, and that opposition to one kind of oppression demands opposition to all. This analogy is embarrassingly stupid.
Recently Israel allowed herself to be humiliated by Hamas, which burned thousands of acres of her fields and forests, and then launched the most intense rocket bombardment in Israel’s history. Our response, bombing unoccupied military targets, was tactically significant but psychologically impotent. The Jew-haters were gratified, because the Jews lived up to the stereotype: powerful and controlling, and yet at the same time weaklings who are afraid to fight.
The fact that such a measure is seriously thought to be needed is an indication of the furious political/culture war that is being waged in Israel today, between a small avant-garde of academics, artists, and media people, and the rest of Israeli society.
There is no doubt that stepped-up attacks on Hamas and Hezbollah, which will necessarily cause civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon, will be met with a massive propaganda, diplomatic, and legal attack orchestrated by our European soft enemies. This is where our American ally, which still has great leverage in Europe, could step in.
Israel has decided to accept an unending war of attrition – which implies sacrificing the citizens of southern Israel, who will get no peace. Hamas demonstrated its ability to create chaos with a carefully calibrated attack in the South and threatened to extend it to the heart of the country, our leaders allowed themselves to be deterred and backed down. Hamas is in control. Hamas decides when to fan the flames and when to turn them down.
Israel could take a lesson from Donald Trump. You can’t recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, he was told, there will be unrest. You can’t move the embassy, they said, there will be riots. You can’t cut funding to UNRWA or demand that the PA stop paying terrorists. You can’t kill the Iran deal and re-impose sanctions. But he did all those things and the sky didn’t fall.
There is a serious effort being made by Russian actors to influence the social and political atmosphere in the US. The objective is to destabilize the country by encouraging extremism of both the Right and the Left, to exacerbate racial, religious, and class conflict, to stoke anger, increase polarization, encourage violence, and ultimately bring about the virtual or actual secession of segments of the population from the USA.
You are members of the Jewish people, not citizens of the world. You have a homeland, the State of Israel. Israel doesn’t need your money, but she needs you to ensure that your nation supports her in international forums and helps maintain military superiority against her enemies. Contrary to what her enemies say, Israel is the temporal center of power of the Jewish people, and her existence deters rather than encourages worldwide acts of Jew-hatred.
Jew-hatred is often compared to a virus because of the way it spreads and mutates, but I prefer the analogy of diabolical possession because of the way it twists its victims and causes them to commit acts of unspeakable evil.
Jacobs seems to believe that he knows what’s best for Israel better than those who live here, send their children to the army, and duck when rockets are launched at them. His movement has taken up the cause of transforming Israeli society into a replica of liberal America, whether Israelis like it or not.
One usually sensible journalist praised the decision to allow Alqasem to enter, because “it proves that the system works” and “showed just how democratic Israel really is.” But in fact it proved the opposite: that the system of laws does not work, because it is often overridden by considerations of public relations.
Despite all their sound and fury, the Jewish Federations no longer do very much for Israel, and they do nothing we cannot do for ourselves. We are not required to defer to them.
The people of Israel have a right to expect that the political/military establishment that it is paying so generously do its job and eliminate the threat of terror. That is, after all, in the social contract.
Kavanaugh has suffered greatly through this process and it seems to me that even if he is confirmed, his credibility and reputation have suffered a serious blow.
The 25-year disaster of Oslo still reverberates today, claiming yet another of its thousands of Jewish and Arab victims with the murder of Ari Fuld
There is a Palestinian people, but it is not a remnant of ancient Canaanites. It is a group that has coalesced quite recently, perhaps as recently as the 1960s, when large numbers of Arabs began to self-identify as “Palestinians.” The Palestinian people was forged by the conflict with the Jews in the past 100 years,
Do you want to fight on their terms, at a time of their choosing, or on ours? Do you prefer absorbing a 1973-style sneak attack or would you rather knock out the enemy’s offensive capability in a 1967-like preemptive strike?
Some pay lip service to the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. It upsets them when they encounter the condemnation of the anti-Zionist world., so they come up with reasons to oppose the Nation-State Law and other overt expressions of Zionism. But their real motivation is embarrassment.
How does Pres. Trump look from an Israeli point of view? What effects have his policies had on Israel? The answer, to the chagrin of many of my American friends, is this: no recent US president has done as much for the Jewish state as Trump.
Facebook will never do anything that will significantly impact its primary objective, which is to get people to spend more time scrolling through it and encountering ads.
Today many of Israel's elite are “post-Zionists,” citizens of the world. They are embarrassed by Zionist patriotism. How else to explain why they oppose the Nation-State Law which does nothing more than express the idea that the Jewish people have a collective right of self-determination?
Lauder and the liberal Jewish establishment in the US, along with their associates in the Israeli Left, in essence want us to give up our Zionist principles so that we will better fit their universalist worldview
The opposition to the Nation-State Law is couched in the most inflammatory language possible, including epithets like “racist” and “apartheid.” This is nonsense and is part of a larger campaign to paint the Likud government as made up of right-wing extremists.
The Jewish state is truly under siege. Not from the Hamasniks of Gazavic but from a coalition of the Israeli Left, Arab citizens and other non-Jewish minorities, European and American-funded NGOs, and liberal American Jewish organizations. Did I leave anyone out?
Everything in this story is surreal. Imagine: Hillel Garmi believes that Hamas is nonviolent, and Luhar Altman thinks that Israel should not have an army. And a Jewish Palestinian wishes for “many more like them.”
I see the law as absolutely necessary to protect the Jewish state against the post-Zionist elite and the European-funded NGOs. But I also see the reaction of the Druze to the law as a major failure of our leadership.
Why do they hate us? It doesn’t matter. It’s not worth arguing about who started it and who’s right or wrong, except as an academic exercise. What is important is that the conflict is not amenable to the solutions being offered
True democracy is difficult to obtain, and difficult to keep. We are fortunate in Israel to have the degree of democracy that we have
he law is intended to set a bottom line, to build a fence around the fundamental Zionist principles of the state and keep them from eroding. It also makes an explicit statement about what kind of state we are and aspire to be.
Why have the Arab nations have allowed the issue of Palestinian refugees to continue? One simple reason which I call the First Principle of Arab Leadership: it is always more important to hurt Jews than to help Arabs.
Israel is presently weathering an intensely hostile political climate in a world where ethnic nationalism is considered evil. Rather than hide who we are, we should broadcast it. It might not make the world like us any more, but at least they will better understand what we are fighting for.
We have things backwards. We are the stronger power, and thus Hamas should be the ones begging for negotiations. We are not deterring them. They are deterring us
explain it to me. Explain how Israel is so villainous that the good that Israelis do can be dismissed. Explain why it is so important that its conflict overshadows all the other disputes in our contentious world. Explain why they support “solutions” that imply the replacement of Israel by a Palestinian Arab state.
Why does the world try to maintain the laughable distinction between anti-Semitism, which they claim to abhor, and “criticism of Israel” that invariably includes demonization, delegitimization, and double standards? What forces them to take this position?
While Israel burns, world media fiddles tiny violins of unctuous sympathy fro the Palestinians.
The Rabbinut’s power is based on laws which have been passed because religious parties always are an essential part of coalition governments. This has been true for coalitions of the Left and Right since the founding of the state
The more Israel refrains from self-defense because of fear of legal consequences, the more she will be threatened with such consequences. The cycle must be broken, both because it prevents us from acting and because it broadcasts weakness to our enemies.
Many American Jews, especially younger ones, are not able to withstand the assault on their sense of peoplehood. It’s not surprising, because this identification has been suppressed by the American educational system and media from their earliest years.
The question shouldn’t be “how can we stop incendiary kites?” Rather, we should ask “how we can hurt the Gazans – o badly, so disproportionately, that they will be very sorry that they tried to burn our country.
Of course the Palestinians have a culture; it is unique among Arabs. It is all about their historic sense of injustice, their obsessive certainty that all of their misfortunes are somebody else’s (usually our) fault, and their endless creative pursuit of strategies, tactics, and weapons that they hope will finally bring them to their judenrein promised land.
The 'identity politics' that supposedly grew out of concern for human rights then turns around and negates those rights. This supposed progress turns back time, hurting us all.
There is no overall solution to Israel's media problem, but there are things that Israel could do...
Liberal Jews have distanced themselves from Judaism, the Jewish people, and Israel. They have very little left of their Jewish identity. But when Abbas blamed the Jews for the Holocaust, they finally had a problem.vi
Though I’ve been expecting a hot war soon, recent developments are changing my mind. The strategy of deterrence and interdiction seems to be working on our northern border, and firm resistance to Hamas’ attempts to overrun our southern one seems – so far – to be effective.
The issue that is presently driving the controversy is a series of Court decisions that have made it impossible for the government to deport any of the 38,000 African migrants that entered the country illegally since the early 2000s
American Jewish progressives use their DNA to justify vicious and damaging attacks on Israel. Creating organizations intended to demonize and delegitimize the only Jewish state. And you think that because of your Jewish parentage you somehow have a special right to do this!
The Diaspora is a dead end for Jews, both physically and culturally. You can make a case for the continuance of Jewish communities in the Diaspora, and you can find many areas in which Israel needs to improve. But the necessity and centrality of the Jewish state to the continued existence of the Jewish people is indisputable.
We’ll prevail. It will be terrible for us, but more terrible for our enemies. Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel was not reconstituted after thousands of years to be lost after only 70.
Iran’s fingerprints have been found on terrorist attacks all over the world, including Latin America and Europe. With Iran out of the equation, many problems though not solved, would be at least simplified.
Hamas benefits greatly from civilian casualties, which support its narrative of victimization and provide its supporters with fodder for “lawfare” against the IDF and diplomatic sanctions against Israel.
The position of the government is that only a small number deserve refugee status, and the rest are illegal immigrants who should leave the country one way or another. The majority of Israelis (66% of Jews and 50% of Arabs) agree.
it only seems reasonable in view of the extreme and violent hostility of much of the Arab population of the area to Israel and Jews, that Israel should follow Pakistan’s example and exclude “enemies of the state” from citizenship.
In recent years, the memes of Jew-hatred mutated into anti-Zionism. Instead of hating individual Jews, which is taboo, it’s possible to hate their collective expression of identity in the form of the Jewish state
The 'Palestinian Narrative' has various forms and incarnations, which may be more or less persuasive. But they all make several main false claims:
Many observers have said that Israel would be better off with a fully volunteer, professional army. Paradoxically, some of the best things in Israeli life come from the years of compulsory servitude dictated by universal conscription
Why are liberal Americans often so wrong about anything connected to Jews or Israel, despite the fact that they are seemingly obsessed with these subjects? Just ask the New York Times
Unfortunately, the attitude of the international community does not grant to Israel the same right of self-defense that every other nation is given. Even when Israel has been attacked, a the Islamic-European-NGO-media axis has defined Israel as the aggressor.
The problem is that the concept of “two states” is poisonously ambiguous. Everyone can understand it to mean something different, up to embracing diametrically opposite ideas.
Everyone thinks war is unavoidable, and most people understand, at least on an intellectual level, that this war is going to be one of the toughest in Israel’s history.
Of course Bibi has his flaws, but I think I join many Israelis who do not see among the potential candidates to lead the nation one that could better ensure our security. And that is the issue, light years ahead of the price of apartments and his wife’s taste in champagne.
The Reform rabbi successfully influenced the local Jewish Federation into converting a proud Zionist statement into a celebration of multi-cultural kumbaya, the consequence of his interfaith dialogue with local Muslims.
The treatment of the suspects in the arson murder of three members of the Dawabshe family in the Arab town of Duma is deeply disturbing. To put a not-too-fine point on it, the suspects probably did not commit the crime, were arrested for political reasons, and were tortured to obtain confessions. This in the State of Israel in the 21st century.
The biggest and most damaging error made by Israel was the massive sacrifice offered in the Oslo Accords, allowing the dying, irrelevant PLO to come back to life, and to insert its cancerous cells into her body.
The law is stupid, and probably impossible to enforce fairly. You can’t legislate history. What happened, happened. It’s important to know what and how so perhaps it will be possible to keep it from happening again.
The uniqueness of the Holocaust is that the Jews were targeted for extermination for their genetic content. The Nazis saw the Jewish people as a species. Their goal was that there would be no more Jews in the world, ever. The thoroughness with which they approached this task was remarkable. Nobody else got that treatment.
June 26, 2026 
