26 May 2025 – IDF push forward in Gaza and Roro has a rant on The Israel Brief.
27 May 2025 – What IS happening with humanitarian aid in Gaza? Find out on The Israel Brief.
28 May 2025 – 600 days. Roro gets angry again on The Israel Brief.
29 May 2025 – Israelis heartbroken as 2 week old victim of terror passes away. Headlines on The Israel Brief.
30 May 2025 – Rolene Marks speaks to Rob Schilling about the latest in the Middle East. (Click here or on the logo)
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
Perspectives and insights from writers in the Arab media
In our latest newsletter,we have selected Middle East Arab writers addressing:
(1) In light of “significant rifts” between the US administration and the Israeli government, how do the major players in the region strategically proceed in a rapidly evolving political landscape?
(2) While harboring few illusions about a sudden US reversal in policy vis-à-vis Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) recognizes that new geopolitical currents are taking shape that demand its “engagement rather than passivity.”
(3) The surprise and sudden US lifting of sanctions on Syria deviating from the traditional approach of a “prolonged evaluation process.” What is driving this change in US thinking?
David E. Kaplan
Editor Lay of the Land
(*Articles translated by Asaf Zilberfarb)
(1)
ISRAEL’S STRATEGY FOR MANAGING TENSIONS WITH THE US By Tarek Fahmy
Al-Ittihad, UAE, May 17 Israeli media outlets have highlighted significant rifts between the US administration and the Israeli government, particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, stemming from disagreements over how negotiations and the ongoing conflict are being managed as well as over broader priorities shaping bilateral relations.
These tensions appear to go beyond transient political positions or reactive policies; they are not simply tied to how the Middle East is being navigated politically, nor are they a direct response to the tone set by President Donald Trump during his recent tour of the region.
They are also not just about the US president’s push to end the war in Gaza, secure a prisoner exchange deal, and confront the increasingly aggressive Israeli policies, especially following the release of American hostage Edan Alexander.
President Trump’s success in managing US relations with the Gulf states can be attributed to his understanding of their central role in guiding regional strategy, participating in diplomatic deals, easing tensions, and solving crises born out of the October 7, 2023, events and their far-reaching repercussions.
Regardless of the outcomes of President Trump’s visit to the region and amid efforts to redefine Arab-American ties, key developments are on the horizon, the most pivotal of which is the need to interpret American-Israeli differences through a strategic and political lens.
The current tensions may dissipate in the short term if a ceasefire is achieved and a prisoner exchange is completed, thereby restoring a semblance of normalcy to bilateral relations, especially since President Trump is actively advocating for de-escalation in Gaza, regardless of his specific proposals for managing the territory.
Such issues must be approached with a pragmatic understanding of the facts on the ground, particularly as Hamas appears to be shifting toward a more realistic stance that could mark the beginning of a new chapter in its engagement with the US administration, potentially transforming it into a significant actor in ongoing developments.
This evolution would likely be contingent on Hamas relinquishing control of Gaza in favor of an administrative committee overseen by the Palestinian Authority (PA), in alignment with both international and Arab calls for reforming the PA’s governance.
The scale of the changes following President Trump’s visit, along with their implications, will likely bring about further repositioning across the board.
Whether Israel embraces or opposes the unfolding events, disputes are bound to intensify if the US administration continues to engage directly with Hamas by supporting mediation efforts.
This scenario would establish a workable and necessary equation for future negotiations, though it would inevitably face obstacles, chief among them, the debate over Hamas’ role, even if it steps back from day-to-day governance.
Look who is not at the table! On his first visit to the Middle East since his inauguration, US President Donald Trump, skips visiting Israel and is seen here redesigning the Middle East chess board with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the Saudi Royal Court in Riyadh, May 13 (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Particularly complex will be the question of disarming Palestinian factions within Gaza and placing those weapons under a regulated framework, which will demand mechanisms and policy stances that go beyond the current scope of expectations.
Should the US initiative to distribute humanitarian aid in Gaza and modify governance structures prove successful, complications may still arise regarding the extent and nature of Arab involvement and the broader reconstruction effort.
This remains a contentious issue between Washington and certain Arab states that resist any American or Israeli presence, even temporarily – a position that could hinder forthcoming steps.
Naturally, once a prisoner exchange deal is finalized, the process would shift to the next phase of implementation, which has yet to occur given Israel’s resistance and the measures it continues to employ in Gaza.
Despite existing disagreements, this has not derailed the parallel positions held by the US and Israel, which appear to be coordinating measures while monitoring evolving political dynamics among all involved parties.
American diplomatic outreach to Hamas remains active, underpinned by the belief that the release of prisoners is a critical foundation upon which further progress can be made, especially under US pressure directed at the Israeli government to facilitate a new phase of engagement.
Without such efforts, diverging visions could deepen, resulting in a stalemate where Hamas – operating on a strategy rooted in the pursuit of legitimacy – emerges as the primary beneficiary of continued disunity.
The US administration, and President Trump in particular, appears to hold a clear long-term vision for managing this enduring friction with the Israeli leadership, one that includes the potential support for an alternative political coalition in Israel that is more open to compromise.
Such a development could precipitate the collapse or reformation of Netanyahu’s current coalition, though President Trump is unlikely to pursue this route unless a major breach in the relationship occurs – a scenario that, for now, seems improbable.
Although political differences will persist, they are unlikely to undermine the fundamental strength and durability of US-Israeli relations.
– Tarek Fahmy
(2)
THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY’S POST-WAR CHALLENGES By Fadhil al-Manasif
Al-Arab, London, May 17
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s upcoming visit to Lebanon cannot be divorced from the broader political landscape in which the Palestinian Authority is currently operating.
Abbas’s diplomatic tour, which began in Moscow and will continue through several Arab and international capitals, is not a ceremonial gesture but, rather, a deliberate attempt to reframe the PA as a credible and responsible actor at a time when regional dynamics are shifting and multiple initiatives are converging.
The stop in Beirut, in particular, goes beyond traditional diplomatic engagement to address one of the thorniest and most enduring issues in Lebanese-Palestinian relations:
the question of weapons within the Palestinian refugee camps.
A longtime source of mutual concern and caution, this issue is now being approached through a framework that enjoys consensus among both Lebanese and Palestinian leaders, grounded in a simple but decisive premise:
there can be no genuine security outside the authority of the Lebanese state, and no real stability without the exclusive control of arms by the state.
At the same time, efforts to improve ties with the US, despite the challenges posed by the Trump administration’s unequivocally pro-Israel stance, may be a tactical maneuver designed to reassert the Palestinian presence on the international stage. Effective diplomacy often requires engaging with even the most unbalanced interlocutors when doing so can build alliances or reduce pressure.
Shaking Hands about No Arms! Lebanese President Joseph Aoun (right) and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (left) declare at the Baabda presidential palace, east of the capital Beirut, on May 21, 2025 that all weapons in Lebanon must fall under state control, signaling the disarming of armed groups within Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Both leaders emphasized their shared view that “the era of weapons outside Lebanese state control has ended.”
In this light, the PA’s attempt to project itself as a moderate and responsible political entity serves not only to broaden its diplomatic appeal but also to challenge the prevailing Israeli narrative that seeks to equate the Palestinian struggle with terrorism. This explains the PA’s clear effort to distinguish its position from that of certain armed factions, particularly on contentious matters like the refugee camps in Lebanon.
The PA’s renewed focus on this issue is not a matter of settling internal disputes but a strategic decision driven by the need to demonstrate goodwill to its international partners, foremost among them the US administration. Through this initiative, the PA is recalibrating its message, asserting its independence from groups that reject the concept of state legitimacy, and signaling its willingness to engage the evolving regional reality from a place of responsibility rather than reaction.
While the PA harbors no illusions about a sudden policy reversal from Washington, it recognizes that new geopolitical currents are taking shape that demand engagement rather than passivity. The resurfacing debate over regional accords resembling the Abraham Accords is not occurring in a vacuum; rather, it reflects broader attempts to redraw the regional power map in the aftermath of the Gaza war.
Although these agreements were forged under different circumstances, they are now being positioned as a prerequisite for any post-conflict framework for Gaza, suggesting that the path forward is contingent on reconstructing regional alliances under American stewardship. The PA knows that its room to maneuver is limited, but it is determined not to be excluded from the discussions shaping the next phase of the region’s future.
The signals the PA is sending through its latest diplomatic efforts are in line with the aspirations of key decision-making capitals, which are eager to see a Palestinian entity capable of meaningful negotiation and of helping reorder the region’s priorities without resorting to reckless escalation or futile confrontation.
Yet this should not be mistaken for a willingness to accept any arrangement that undermines Palestinian rights or reduces the PA to a mere administrative extension of the Israeli occupation. Since Oct. 7, the regional and international calculus has undergone a profound transformation. The assumptions that once governed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict no longer hold, and global perceptions have shifted as well.
Within this altered framework, the PA now faces a pivotal juncture that could be defined as “to be or not to be.” What we are witnessing today is not a betrayal of long-standing principles, but, rather, a deliberate and thoughtful reassessment of how best to act under new conditions – an effort to craft a forward-looking strategy that balances principled political resistance with deft diplomacy, all while maintaining the inalienable right to establish an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.
– Fadhil al-Manasif
(3)
WHY LIFT SANCTIONS ON DAMASCUS? By Abdulrahman Al-Rashed
Asharq al-Awsat, London, May 18
Sanctions on Syria were expected to remain in place for at least a year, driven by concerns over the country’s uncertain political future, skepticism toward its new leadership, and apprehensions from regional powers such as Israel.
In US policy, the lifting of sanctions is rarely swift – it typically follows a prolonged evaluative process. Precedents like the US agreement with the Taliban, despite maintaining economic sanctions on Afghanistan for four years, illustrate how political agreements do not immediately translate into economic leniency.
Compounding this, there is an ongoing internal debate within the US administration about whether sanctions on Syria should be lifted at all.
It is within this complex context that a direct appeal to President Donald Trump, facilitated by a key regional partner like Saudi Arabia, emerged as the most expedient path forward.
This strategy, however, requires reciprocal efforts from Syria’s al-Sharaa government, which must demonstrate tangible commitments – namely, ensuring that local armed groups are brought under control, minority communities are protected, and extremist ideologies are actively countered, since failure to do so could ultimately undermine Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s own authority.
Opposition to lifting sanctions largely hinges on the premise that the new Syrian leadership remains designated as a terrorist entity and must first prove otherwise.
The US government has articulated a series of conditions, five of which President Trump emphasized following his meeting with al-Sharaa. These include:
– The withdrawal of all foreign fighters.
– Cooperation in the global fight against terrorism in Syria.
– The expulsion of Palestinian militias.
– The assumption of control over detention facilities holding ISIS members.
– The initiation of formal relations with Israel.
Before assessing the feasibility of these demands, it is worth considering why, as President Trump put it, the new Syrian regime deserves “a chance.”
First, the al-Sharaa government is now a political reality – one that international actors must contend with, much like other regimes in the region that rely on or tolerate militia alliances. Regime change is no longer a viable objective, returning to war is out of the question, and the Syrian people deserve an exit from the seemingly endless tunnel of suffering and instability.
Second, the removal of Iranian influence from Syria represents a historical turning point – not just for Syria but also for Lebanon and Palestine. It has helped liberate these areas from Tehran’s overreach, which, had it continued, could have irreparably destabilized the region.
Weakening the new government now could reverse this progress, either by creating a power vacuum or by inviting Iran’s return through a weakened Damascus.
Surprise Script. To rapturous appreciation besides Israel, US president Donald Trump (centre) meets with Syria’s interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa (right) at the invitation of Saudi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (left) after a surprise and well received lifting of sanctions on Syria. (Photo: X/Karoline Leavitt)
Third, if the al-Sharaa government fails to meet its obligations, sanctions can easily be reinstated. On the other hand, refusing to ease them could foster rebellion, descent into chaos, or drive Damascus into alliances that increase regional volatility.
Fourth, Israel’s presence looms large. Today, Israel is the principal strategic architect in the region, asserting its dominance and dictating terms on military presence and weapon distribution among its neighbors.
Comparing Damascus to Kabul is misleading, as Syria exists within Israel’s sphere of military influence, where any miscalculation invites swift response. This makes Israeli security interests both a constraint and a stabilizing factor.
Lebanon is already operating under what might be termed Israeli security management, and similar dynamics may apply to Syria.
Caught between the necessity of recognizing the current reality, fears of descending into chaos, and the risk of a renewed Iranian foothold, the international community’s safest course is to help Syria rebuild.
Conditions for cooperation are legitimate and must serve both Syrian stability and broader regional security. Syria remains central to a volatile geopolitical corridor, and abandoning it to chaos is certain to have severe consequences.
The most practical approach – albeit one not without risk – is to allow Damascus to restore itself. It is far preferable to cooperate with Syria now than to face a far more intractable crisis in the years ahead.
If efforts are delayed, the damage may be irreparable. Since December, amid fear and cautious hope, the al-Sharaa government has made visible efforts to show openness and a willingness to cooperate; the next step is for it to move beyond gestures and deliver results.
The conditions set by the US – though diplomatically awkward – ultimately align with Syria’s long-term interests. A ban on foreign fighters is a universal expectation; counterterrorism is a global obligation.
As for the Palestinian groups based in Syria, many are remnants of the Assad regime’s network, used in conflicts against Arab states, especially in Lebanon – Hamas being the exception, as it did not originate in Syria.
It is expected that al-Sharaa will expel these militias, just as Jordan did in the past and Lebanon is attempting to do now.
Regarding the stipulation of establishing ties with Israel, it’s important to note that al-Sharaa and his ministers have previously expressed willingness to consider such a move within the framework of an Arab peace initiative.
Whatever additional concerns remain unaddressed here, the region can absorb and adapt to change, and that is preferable to letting Syria descend into the most dangerous form of disorder.
The Damascus government must recognize and distance itself from escalating regional and international tensions. In his public statements, President al-Sharaa has frequently indicated an openness to engagement and a desire to prioritize development and progress over confrontation.
– Abdulrahman Al-Rashed
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
(Courtesy of The Jerusalem Post where first published)
The accurate definition of genocide has come under scrutiny ever since the International Court of Justice accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza in its response to the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamasterrorists, which claimed the lives of 1,200 Israeli civilians and foreign nationals in communities in southern Israel, and revelers at the Supernova music festival.
Playing Politics. Disinterested whether the accusation of genocide is true or not, a woman holds this sign outside the ICJ in 2024 in South Africa’s case against Israel. Having instituted the case of genocide against Israel, South Africa now stands itself accused of genocide by the Trump administration.(Photo: Johanna Geron/Reuters)
The term, coined in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in his book ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in the wake of the Holocaust’, was defined as any attempt to destroy a group, in whole or in part, based on its national, ethnic, racial, or religious identity.
The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention not only criminalizes genocide, it also obligates state parties to pursue its enforcement. The convention was adopted in response to the Holocaust as the archetypal genocide. In recent decades there has been an expansion of the term to include a number of atrocities, well beyond the original genocide convention.
This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in some post-communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe. Lithuania, in particular has taken the lead in “widening” use of the term “genocide” to include Stalinist deportations and repressions.
Defining Genocide. Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the word “genocide” in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Tirelessly lobbying the UN for genocide to be added to international law, his efforts eventually paid off when on December 9, 1948, the UN approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
Often, these claims came with inflated numbers of victims. These cases are too many to mention. One such “victim inflation” was the plaques initially placed in Auschwitz, when Poland was under a Communist regime, which claimed that 4 million persons had been murdered in the camp. After Poland transitioned to a democracy, however, a team of expert historians revealed that the accurate number of victims was 1.3 million, among them 1.1 million Jews.
Former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko cited a tally of 10 million victims of the government-engineered famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33 – known as the “Holodomor” – calling it, in the superlative, “the greatest genocide.”
This is not just a matter of nomenclature, and not just about Lithuania. Over the past three decades, legislative assemblies across Europe have designated several atrocities as genocide. In 1994, Germany criminalized the “belittling, denying, relativizing… acts committed under National Socialist rule.” In subsequent years, other EU member states followed suit.
In 2008, the EU adopted a “Framework Decision on combating racism and xenophobia by means of Criminal Law, which meant that member states must make condoning, denying, and grossly trivializing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes a criminal offense.” This scope soon expanded to criminalize denial of “other internationally recognized crimes” as well.
DEFINITION OF GENOCIDE BECOMES LEGISLATED
As a result, numerous laws now define how we should interpret historical atrocities. France, for example, recognized the massacre of Armenians as genocide. The above-mentioned Lithuanian definition of genocide has been “widened” to include Stalinist deportations to Siberia and population transfers following World War II.
Genuine Genocide. Ottoman military forces march Armenian men from Kharput to an execution site outside the city. Sometimes called the first genocide of the twentieth century, the Armenian genocide refers to the physical annihilation of Armenian Christian people living in the Ottoman Empire from spring 1915 through autumn 1916. Of the approximately 1.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, at least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million died during the genocide, either in massacres and individual killings, or from systematic ill treatment, exposure, and starvation. (Courtesy of the Armenian National Institute)
In 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament recognized the 1932-1933 Soviet-engineered famine as a Ukrainian genocide, though the brutal Stalinist policies were aimed against economic and social groups (small farmers) and had devastating effects on many ethnic groups in several areas of the USSR.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, France, Germany, Finland, Ireland, and the European Parliament officially recognized that the Holodomor famine constituted a genocide.
Such memory regulations do not take into consideration that the historiography remains sharply divided as to the genocidal narration of the famine, and that many authoritative historians on the famine do not endorse the genocide thesis.
In some cases, inflated numbers have entered the official declarations of recognition, causing confusion rather than understanding. The current efforts also open up potential legal liabilities to those disputing the now-official narrative of the famine as a deliberate genocide of Ukrainians. These regulations risk hampering, rather than stimulating, critical inquiry into genocide.
Man-Made Famine. In 1932-1933, while the Soviet government sold massive quantities of Ukrainian grain to foreign markets, some 7 million Ukrainian men, women, and children starved to death. This deliberate attempt to crush the Ukrainian people by means of a man-made famine has become known as the ‘Holodomor’. That it was an unspeakable crime is not a question but did it amount to a genocide? (Photo: Alexander Wienerberger)
Nor do they provide a consistent approach to what constitutes genocide. For instance, the 1995 Srebrenica massacre is classified as a genocide by all EU-member states. The 33,000 Muslims there should have been protected by Dutch UN forces, but were abandoned to Serb forces. Approximately 6,500 males of combat age were murdered; women, children, and the elderly were released. What kind of ‘genocide’ was this? It was undoubtedly a war crime but not a genocide.
This crime against humanity is interchangeably referred to a genocide and an act of ethnic cleansing. The EU regulations, and national memory laws in member countries, affirm the genocidal narration.
However, theRwandan genocide of 1994 has not been universally recognized as such. Approximately 700,000 Tutsis and some moderate Hutus were slaughtered by radical Hutus intent on murdering the entire Tutsi population in Rwanda.
For some reason, which is difficult to identify, the United States refuses to recognize the mass murder of the Rwandan Tutsis as a case of genocide. One possible explanation is that the American refusal to send troops, or to encourage the United Nations to do so, remains highly problematic in light of the results of their failure to try and stop the mass murders.
Ukraine does not recognize the 1915 massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide; its foreign ministry actively opposes campaigns to recognize the event as such.
THE THREE I’s
We suggest that every tragedy that might be classified as genocide be tested by the three I’s of intent, implementation, and implications:
The intent, in such cases, is to deliberately murder a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group, with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Implementation reflects the goal of the perpetrators, the scope of the murders, the cruelty of the perpetrators, and the inability of those targeted to survive.
Implication refers to the degree of damage inflicted on the victims, and what possibility they have to survive/recover.
Justice and historical understanding can only succeed if the historical inquiry into past tragedies is open and free from ideologically imposed censorship.
About the writers:
Per Anders Rudling is an associate professor of history and Wallenberg Academy Fellow at the Department of History, Lund University, Sweden.
Holocaust historian Efraim Zuroff has an MA and PhD in Holocaust Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For the last four decades, he has played an important role in bringing Nazi criminals to justice as the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
Unveiling the contours and contrasts of an ever-changing Middle East landscape Reliable reportage and insightful commentary on the Middle East by seasoned journalists from the region and beyond.
Also available on YouTube @The Israel Brief – Simply click on the red subscribe button to receive alerts when a new report is posted.
What’s happening in Israel today? See from every Monday – Thursday LOTL’s The Israel Brief broadcasts and on our Facebook page and YouTube by seasoned TV & radio broadcaster, Rolene Marks familiar to Chai FM listeners in South Africa and millions of American listeners to the News/Talk/Sports radio station WINA, broadcasting out of Virginia, USA.
Instead of choosing an engagement ring and than a wedding dress, their parents were left to choose headstones. The gunning down of Israeli embassy staffers in Washington DC, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, affirms the message already being understood, “Jew are no longer safe anywhere.”
Articles
Please note there is a facility to comment beneath each article should you wish to express an opinion on the subject addressed.
(1)
REBEL, RABBLE OR WORSE?
Understanding the menacing mentality of the Houthis, look not to the deserts sands of Yemen but to the urban landscapes of Europe and America. By David E. Kaplan
Timeless Terror. By appearance, it’s easy to pass the Houthis off as a frightful aberration arising from the desert sand in the Arabian Peninsula, but their attitude and intent towards Jews is no different to their ‘civilized’ peers pounding the pavements and podiums across Europe and the Americas.
It’s not “crying wolf” to name antisemitism when it appears, it’s crying warning. By Allan Joffe
Thoughts on Track. Marchers prayed and wept as they proceeded through the Auschwitz complex as these who sat down on the very train track that had brought millions of Jews from across Europe to their death. Why has the Nazi mission to rid the world of Jews resurfaced or did it never leave?
Attending the Noval Music Festival on October 7, 2023 – “a cross between Woodstock and Auschwitz” – Yuval survived and then sang for her country. By Jonathan Feldstein
Singing of Survival. Listening to Abba (dad) over the phone to “play dead”, Yuval Raphael would lie beneath dead bodies in a shelter for 8 hours while terrorist would spray wildly with machine gun fire. Suffering a head wound and broken leg, Yuval would survive to sing for Israel in the 2025 Eurovision in Basel.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
Understanding the menacing mentality of the Houthis, look not to the deserts sands of Yemen but to the urban landscapes of Europe and America.
By David E. Kaplan
Trying to fathom why a strange-looking folk we Israelis had once never heard of keep lobbing missiles in our direction since they fired their first (literally “out of the blue”) in November 2023, I stare at this photograph of the Houthis taken in Sana’a, Yemen on March 28, 2025.
Howling Houthis. With fists raised, brandishing weapons from axes, spades and daggers, Houthi protesters and their supporters on annual al-Quds Day in Sana’a, Yemen, March 28, 2025 direct their vitriol towards Israel. (Photo: Reuters/Khaled Abdulla)
Fueled with hatred against Israel, I can make our a few of the protestors holding up copies of the Koran but for the most part they are brandishing ‘weapons’ of bygone ages such as axes, spades, swords and daggers. They project the collective crazed look that one could imagine on the faces of the Visigoth or Hun hordes about to sack ancient Rome or the Sudanese Mahdi on its frenzied assault on Khartoum in 1885. What few ‘modern day’ firearms I can make out look like wooden riffles – something out of the Anglo Boer War (1899-1902). I could be looking at a history book off my bookshelf instead of a front page of a newspaper.
It is so easy to dismiss these desert tribesmen as an aberration, a surprise desert menace. However, these Houthis with their crazed appearance in tribal attire arising to strike fear from the desert sands of Yemen have much in common with those who pound the urban pavements of Europe and the Americas. Poles apart culturally, these Houthis share the same ‘targeted’ hate of Jews and Israel as the ‘hordes’ of professors and students at campuses across the Western world, their political leaders, the media and the ‘ordinary’ folk that attend football matches and pop concerts. They may look very different but they are no different when it comes to attitudes towards Jews – either against the individual Jew anywhere or the collective Jew – Israel. In this context, the behavior of the strange looking Houthis is not an aberration but the norm. Their menace lies not in their appearance but in their intent which is evident in Saana as it is in Sydney. Replace the backdrop of arid Yemen desert with the Sydney Opera House and protestors shouting “gas the Jews” and the same malicious hatred is all too evident. It is no less evident in Philadelphia, USA when this past Passover, a 38-year-old ‘ordinary’ auto mechanic, Cody Balmer, set fire with a homemade Molotov cocktail to the home of Jewish governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. This ‘ordinary’ man faces charges of attempted homicide, aggravated arson, terrorism and other crimes. And now in the US capital, Washington, two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington DC, Yaron Lischinsky, an Israeli citizen, and Sarah Milgrim, an American a young couple about to be engaged were gunned down in cold blood as they were exiting an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. They were targeted for death for no other reason than that they were “suspected” by the killer of being Jewish. He did not know personally who he was killing as long as they were Jews.
Arsonist’s Message – No Jew is Safe. Fortunately, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and his family were in a different part of their residence on the eve of Passover when it was set ablaze by Harrisburg man, 38-year-old auto mechanic, Cody Balmer. (Photo: Commonwealth Media Services)
What’s more, the killer wasn’t of Middle East descent or a Muslim but one Elias Rodrigues of Chicago, a graduate from the University of Illinois Chicago with a degree in English, currently working at the American Osteopathic Information Association. Before that position, his LinkedIn profile says, he was “an oral history researcher and production coordinator at a Black history site.”
His friends and neighbors are apparently “surprised”.
Israelis were also “surprised” on October 7, 2023! No more…
Jewish killers today come not only in the shape of those on motorcycles, hang gliders and Toyota Hilux trucks as they did on that fateful October 7 or Houthis shooting missiles from afar but they could just as easy be neighbors at any American or European city who are college grads or motor mechanics. They could be positioned anywhere on the political spectrum from left to right – it makes no difference whether they read a bible or prefer the comics, are familiar with mechanics, economics, anatomy or the philosophies of the ancient Greeks. Education is no prophylactic to the malady of antisemitism.
From Sanaa to Switzerland. How far removed in mindset and demeanor are these anti-Israel demonstrators outside the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest’s grand final in Basel on May 17, 2025 with the Houthis in Yemen? (Photo: Sebastien Bozon/AFP)
Writing in The Spectator, Jonathan Sacerdoti asserts in his piece ‘THE WASHINGTON SHOOTING IS A CHILLING WARNING TO JEWS EVERYWHERE’ that:
“Historians and genocide scholars have long noted that the most chilling acts are often carried out …. by neighbors, shopkeepers, schoolteachers – people who, under different circumstances, might have lived blameless lives. What changes is not their nature, but their perception: a slow erosion of empathy, a steady drip of propaganda, a creeping sense that certain lives are worth less.
In Rwanda, it was farmers with machetes. In Nazi-occupied Europe, it was train conductors, clerks, and landlords. When hatred becomes ambient – socially accepted, reinforced by silence – those who once passed you in the street become capable of terrible things. That is the true terror of genocide: not just the horror of its crimes, but the ordinariness of its perpetrators.”
Targeting Jews. Two members of the Israeli embassy staff – a couple about to get engaged – were gunned down outside an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Their ‘selection’ for execution was the same criteria during the Holocaust – they were Jews! (Photo: X / Embassy of Israel to the USA / @IsraelinUS)
Subject to the steady drip of media into “ordinary” society – whether on TV or online – the narrative against Jews takes hold and lubricates the path to murder. The complicity of the media in the “War against the Jews” was all too evident with last week’s vicious claim – a lie akin to a medieval Blood Libel – that 14,0000 babies in Gaza were “at imminent risk of death by starvation within 48 hours”. Despite the obvious implausibility of the claim where media in the ordinary course of another geographic scenario would have checked and rechecked their ‘facts’ before publishing, they not only failed to do so but outlets repeated it. As Sacerdoti noted:
“Activists shouted it and shared it as gospel, as if numbers so apocalyptic required no scrutiny at all.”
The reason is all too obvious for as Sacerdoti continues:
“What was dismissed as fringe now speaks from podiums and marches through capitals. This was more than a double murder; it was a marker.
The two people killed in Washington could have been me, my friends, my neighbours. Their lives ended on a street in the capital of the free world, while the man who killed them, red keffiyeh in hand, proudly shouted the slogan now barked constantly with increasing fervour on our very own streets, as crowds pass synagogues, Jewish families, and Holocaust memorials swathed in blue tarpaulin for protection: “free free Palestine”. We all know what it really means.”
It means that it is hunting season, and Jews are the prey – anywhere!
2 Israeli Embassy Staff Members Shot and Killed in Washington DC
Feature picture: From Yemen with Hate. Animated Houthis protesting against Israel on annual al-Quds Day in Sana’a, Yemen, March 28, 2025. (Photo: Reuters/Khaled Abdulla)
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
19 May 2025 – Operation Gideon’s Chariot – IDF expand ground operations and more on The Israel Brief.
20 May 2025 – White House emphatically denies any rift and more The Israel Brief.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
It’s not “crying wolf” to name antisemitism when it appears, it’s crying warning.
By Allan Joffe
(*First appeared in the SAJR)
I recently participated in the March of the Living, a journey of remembrance and reflection that takes thousands of Jews and others on the walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau. Marching alongside survivors, rabbis, teenagers, and dignitaries, I expected grief and outrage. I found those emotions, but I also encountered deeper, more unsettling realisations – about Jewish identity, the nature of evil, and the troubling patterns of silence that persist today.
Down on the Track. Marchers prayed and wept as they proceeded through the camp complex as these who sat down on the train track that had brought millions of Jews from across Europe to their death. (Photo: Getty)
One of the first things that struck me was the sea of Israeli flags. Everywhere I turned, it was Israeli flags, not American, not Canadian, not British, or South African, only Israeli. It wasn’t just a matter of national pride. It reflected something deeper: the vast majority of Jews today, whether religious or secular, weave their Jewish identity with Israel.
Among the most powerful things I witnessed on the march was the overwhelming sense of Jewish pride, solidarity, and resilience. Thousands of Jews, from dozens of countries, marched carrying Israeli flags and family memories, not in bitterness or anger, but in remembrance and hope. Their Jewish identity was something rooted in history, faith, and the unbreakable link between past and future.
It also struck me that in stark contrast to the marchers, a small but vocal minority defines their Jewish identity almost entirely through opposition to Israel. Jenny Manson, the co-founder of Jewish Voice for Labour, admitted with breathtaking candour that she “began to identify as a Jew in order to argue against the state of Israel and its behaviour.” In other words, Jewish identity – for her and many like her – isn’t a source of pride, culture, or continuity. Unlike the marchers, their Jewishness isn’t an inheritance but a hollow construct, worn only when it serves their campaign against their own people. The irony and cognitive dissonance are staggering. If their opposition were ever successful, if Israel were dismantled, their connection to Judaism would collapse with it.
As we marched from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the sheer scale of horror became almost impossible to process. Auschwitz-Birkenau wasn’t just a site of death, it was an industrial complex designed for the systematic extermination of human beings. The Nazis refined murder into an assembly line. Every detail, from the layout of the barracks to the chemical engineering of Zyklon B, spoke of cold, calculated efficiency. The Holocaust is often compared to other atrocities, but in its bureaucratic dehumanisation, it remains a category of its own. It was genocide engineered with industrial precision, and that horror echoes uniquely across history.
Remembrance on the Railway. Leaving messages and photos of Holocaust victims on the camp’s infamous train track. (Photo: Getty)
Another realisation gnawed at me during the march: the Holocaust wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t tucked away in forests or isolated deserts. It was right there, often within earshot and eyesight of Polish towns. Ordinary people lived nearby. They saw the smoke, they heard the trains, they knew. And it wasn’t only in Poland. Trains packed with Jews crisscrossed Europe, rumbling through hundreds of towns and villages. Entire communities watched cattle cars filled with human beings pass by, and the knowledge of what was happening seeped across borders and societies. The idea that people “didn’t know” is a comforting myth. In truth, many knew, and chose to look away.
This is the bystander effect in its most extreme form – the phenomenon in which individuals don’t offer help to a victim when other people are present. Seeing it on such a massive, lethal scale forces uncomfortable questions about human nature. But it also forces questions about today.
Defying Death. With arm raised in defiance, walking out from the cunningly contrived ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ gate, where Jews entered 80 years earlier, never to leave. (Photo: Getty)
Over past months, we have seen this silence, and, at times, outright hostility, play out painfully across many parts of society. For example, universities, which once prided themselves on defending free thought and moral clarity, had students and faculty respond to the atrocities of 7 October not with empathy, but with strident hostility toward Israel and often toward Jewish students themselves. In some cases, it wasn’t merely individuals but the institutions themselves that adopted stances indistinguishable from antisemitism. Meanwhile, faculties and students in science, technology, engineering, and medicine largely remained passive bystanders. Even today, many within these fields haven’t meaningfully confronted the moral failure of their silence. Their grievance is narrowly framed:
This isn’t merely an institutional failure; it’s a collapse of moral courage at the very hour it was most needed.
Hostage Survivor. Kidnapped on October 7, IDF surveillance soldier and released hostage Agam Berger and her mother participate at the March of the Living on April 24, 2025 (Yossi Zeleger/March of the Living)
Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism, has described antisemitism as a virus that mutates. In the Middle Ages, we were demonised as Christ-killers, accused of blood libels and poisoning wells. In the 19th century, we were vilified as capitalist exploiters and simultaneously as revolutionary subversives. In the 20th century, we were depicted as a racial threat to Aryan purity. Today, we’re denounced as colonial oppressors for having a sovereign state. The language and justifications change; the hatred remains constant. It’s precisely because of this relentless mutation that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted a working definition of antisemitism, a definition that recognises that denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, such as by claiming that the existence of Israel is a racist endeavour, is itself a form of antisemitism.
We don’t need an impossibly high bar to recognise antisemitism. History teaches the opposite: we need a low bar. We need to be alert to the early signs, the coded language, the double standards. Waiting until antisemitism becomes undeniable has always meant waiting too long. It’s not “crying wolf” to name antisemitism when it appears, it’s crying warning.
After 7 October, the painful reality became impossible to ignore. The silence across much of the world was profound. The hesitation, the equivocation, the indifference, all made clear that even in the face of unspeakable brutality against Jews, outrage would be rationed, sympathy would be conditional, and solidarity would be rare. As Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, and bestselling author known for his work on ethics, religion, and the human mind, bluntly observed:
“Who can be counted on to defend the Jews but the Jews.”
Many Jews who had lived comfortably in secular or universalist identities, people like Harris himself, found themselves transformed into “post-7 October Jews”. Not necessarily more religious, but far more aware: of vulnerability, of abandonment, and of the need for Jewish self-reliance.
Singing Survivors. Released hostage Agam Berger and Kibbutz Be’eri survivor Daniel Weiss (r) whose parents were murdered on October 7 perform at March of the Living on April 24, 2025. (Yossi Zeleger/March of the Living)
Of course, there are courageous non-Jewish voices of solidarity today, just as there were righteous gentiles during the Holocaust. Voices like John Spencer, Douglas Murray, and Richard Kemp have stood with Jews when many others wouldn’t. But they are too few and far between. Their courage only highlights the broader loneliness.
Marching from Auschwitz to Birkenau, I felt pride in our resilience. We’re still here. We carry the memory of the dead, and we stand defiant against those who would wish to erase us.
About the writer:
Allan Joffe is a businessman based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is married with three children and recently participated in the March of the Living, an international Holocaust education program.
*Feature picure: Participants with Israeli flag walk along the infamous rail track leading to the gate of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland, during the annual March of The Living to honor the victims of the Holocaust on April 24, 2025. (Photo: Wojtek Radwanski/AP).
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
Attending the Noval Music Festival on October 7, 2023 – “a cross between Woodstock and Auschwitz” – Yuval survived and then sang for her country.
By Jonathan Feldstein
“Hang up the phone and play dead.” This harrowing advice from Yuval Raphael’s father saved her life on October 7, 2023, and brought her to the spotlight in Basel, Switzerland as Israel’s representative to Eurovision last week.
Most Americans have never heard of Eurovision, and surely not a 24-year-old Israeli, Yuval Raphael.
Dream On. Time has passed but not the antisemitism since Theodor Herzl was photographed on a balcony in Basel in 1901. Seen last week was Nova massacre survivor and Israel’s representative to the 2025 Eurovision in Basel, Yuval Raphael recreating the iconic image on May 16, 2025. (Bettman Archive; Nitzan Livnat/Kan)
On October 7, 2023, Yuval was at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel along the Gaza border, located in a wooded area with an adjacent lot on which a stage had been set up for all night music and dancing. Thousands of young people camped out all night.
At 6:30 in the morning, when Hamas began firing thousands of rockets at Israel as cover for the invasion that they had planned for months, the Nova festivalgoers became easy targets. The assault included terrorists in improvised propelled hang gliders who were shooting from the air, as countless other terrorists shot, raped, sexually mutilated, tortured, kidnapped, and burned to death as many people as they could. 364 people, out of 1200 that day, were massacred on the site of the music festival, making it a cross between Woodstock and Auschwitz.
Yuval and her friends fled to a crammed fortified concrete bus shelter, about 50 people taking cover in a tiny space meant for a handful of people to take cover for a few minutes from rockets that have plagued southern Israel for more than two decades. These bus shelters were meant to protect from rockets and shrapnel, not from terrorists with AK47s, RPGs, and grenades.
Before her Eurovision fame, Yuval testified at the UN:
“The next thing I remember is that…one girl was just grabbing my hand really hard. She was really scared, and I was like ‘everything’s going to be okay.’” Suddenly a Hamas terrorist stood at the entrance to the shelter shooting wildly to kill anyone and everyone. I turned around to the girl who was holding my hand, and she was no longer with us. She was dead.”
Yuval was terrified. She called her father telling him that many people inside the shelter had been murdered. In a conversation no parent could ever be prepared for, Yuval’s father told her to pretend that she was dead, to hide under the corpses of her friends and others, and not make any noise. Throughout the day, terrorists kept returning to the shelter, spraying the inside with bullets.
Yuval remained inside the shelter for eight hours, suffering a head wound and broken leg. Finally, after hiding underneath corpses, Yuval and ten other survivors were rescued from the shelter. Out of about 50 people inside the bus shelter, four out of five were murdered.
Yuval always loved singing, but after the massacre, both as a way to honor those lost and a means of personal therapy and demonstrating resilience, she entered Israel’s popular Hakochav Haba (“Future Star”) TV reality show; the winner of which represents Israel at Eurovision. Yuval dedicated her singing to “all the angels” murdered at the Nova festival, affirming, “Music is one of the strongest ingredients in my healing process.” Yuval won. Israeli Arab singer, Valerie Hamaty came in second, having performed with another October 7 survivor, demonstrating hope and coexistence.
Yuval arrived in Basel, targeted by terrorist supporters and numerous death threats. It’s astounding that having survived a music festival that brought people together from many nations, she was confronted by the same hatred at the world’s Super Bowl of music festivals. Throughout her time in Basel, Yuval had unprecedented security to protect her and other members of the Israeli team. She received no grace from the haters who simply branded her as evil, because of her nationality, and despite of what she survived.
At Eurovision, Yuval sang “A New Day Will Rise” conveying the message of remembering and honoring the generation of youth, Israel has lost. The song is in English, French, and Hebrew. The Hebrew verse is, appropriately from the Song of Songs (8:7): “Many waters cannot quench love, nor can rivers sweep it away.”
“Staying Alive”. When 24-year-old Yuval Raphael took center stage Saturday night at the Eurovision Song Contest in Basel, Switzerland, she stood there not only as a talented Israeli but a defiant and resilient Israeli. Just 589 days earlier, Yuval was hiding under a pile of dead bodies in a roadside bomb shelter that turned into a death trap for dozens who fled there from the Supernova music festival on October 7. Of some 50 people in the shelter, she was one of only 11 who came out alive. (Photo: REUTERS/DENIS BALIBOUSE)
Despite the protests against Israel that included the support of 70 former Eurovision participants and a man making a threatening gesture of slitting a throat as Yuval and the Israeli delegation walked by as well as a few countries petitioning the Eurovision to disqualify Israel, Yuval’s song gelled perfectly with this year’s Eurovision theme of “Unity Shapes Love.”
Protester threatens slaughter as Yuval Raphael walks Eurovision Song Contest carpet with bodyguard
Explained Yuval:
“It captured exactly the message that I want to share about resilience and unity. The song is strong and powerful, but also soft and loving. When I sing it, I feel secure and open-hearted. All its lines are strong but, ‘Everyone cries, don’t cry alone,’ is beyond powerful. We all go through hard times, and because doing so is a shared experience, supporting and loving each other is crucial.”
Eurovision has a dual system of voting with each participating country selecting its own panel of judges and offering its highest coveted “douze (12) points” to any nation’s representative other than their own. Viewers around the world are also able to vote. Yet to prevent stuffing the ballot box and an unfair advantage of more populous countries, individual voters also cannot vote for their own nation’s representatives.
Yuval was ranked 5th place going into the competition. In the end, she won the popular vote from around the world, moving her up and finishing second only behind Austria’s representative. Israelis are full of pride and hope that despite the world’s high-profile antagonism, maybe this is a sign that the pro-Hamas Israel haters are in reality little more than a loud and unpleasant minority.
Highlighting this axis of hate was at the same time Yuval won the popular vote from the world, the Iranian-backed Houthis fired yet another ballistic missile at Israel from Yemen, sending millions of Israelis to their bomb shelters in the middle of the night.
As a woman who looked death in the eye and survived the October 7 massacre – thanks in part to her father’s haunting advice – Yuval Raphael overcame death threats in Europe and came in second. She’s being celebrated for showing the same resilience and love for life that Israelis have demonstrated since October 7, albeit not without its trauma that we all still are dealing with.
Welcome Home Yuval. Israel’s Yuval Raphael received an emotional welcome at Ben Gurion Airport after winning 2nd place at Eurovision 2025! Capturing hearts across Europe, Yuval is not only a musical talent but also a survivor of the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre at the Nova music festival.
It is that same genocidal hatred and threats against Jews, exemplified in Basel with that pro-Hamas protester making a gesture toward Yuval that he was going to slit her throat, that nurtured the people and the ideology that gave rise to October 7.
Citizens of the world would be wise to remember this, and celebrate along with Israelis even if they had never heard of Eurovision or Yuval Raphael before.
Jonathan Feldstein - President of the US based non-profit Genesis123 Foundation whose mission is to build bridges between Jews and Christians – is a freelance writer whose articles appear in The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Townhall, NorthJersey.com, Algemeiner Jornal, The Jewish Press, major Christian websites and more.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
Unveiling the contours and contrasts of an ever-changing Middle East landscape Reliable reportage and insightful commentary on the Middle East by seasoned journalists from the region and beyond.
Also available on YouTube @The Israel Brief – Simply click on the red subscribe button to receive alerts when a new report is posted.
What’s happening in Israel today? See from every Monday – Thursday LOTL’s The Israel Brief broadcasts and on our Facebook page and YouTube by seasoned TV & radio broadcaster, Rolene Marks familiar to Chai FM listeners in South Africa and millions of American listeners to the News/Talk/Sports radio station WINA, broadcasting out of Virginia, USA.
Yuval Raphael at the 2025 Eurovision perform – “New Day Will Rise”
128 years after Herzl stood on a hotel balcony in Basel and dreamt of a future Jewish state, the manifestation of that dream appeared in the form of Yuval Raphael – standing aloft in the same city at the 2025 Eurovision and sang her country into second place, with a powerful rendition of a ‘New Day Will Rise’. 19 months earlier, Yuval was playing dead in a shelter at the Nova Music Festival on October 7, 2023; hiding under a pile of bodies in a roadside bomb shelter for hours, with shrapnel embedded in her leg, until she was ultimately rescued. How fitting she concluded her performance in Basel, staring ahead but facing the world and said: “Am Yisrael Chai” (“The People of Israel Live”) https://youtu.be/R1J7nJXLKAg
Articles
Please note there is a facility to comment beneath each article should you wish to express an opinion on the subject addressed.
(1)
NOT NORMAL BUT THE NORM
Where are your kids and grandkids when the siren sounds? By Jonathan Feldstein
Dropping with Dread. Israeli children waiting for their school bus, drop to the ground and hold their hands to their heads as sirens sound the warning of an incoming ballistic missile from the Houthis in Yemen. Is this ‘normal’?
How successive American Presidents – Democratic and Republican – have misread the Middle East. ByNeville Berman
Has World over a Barrel. “There are 6 words that Iran has used for decades,” asserts the writer – not in Farci but in English – that for some reason, no American President seems able to understand – “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”. Very few believed Hitler when he declared that he wanted a Jew-free Europe!
The Persian Gulf – Past, Present and Future ByMarziyeh Amirizadeh
A Gulf Apart. While the writer – a survivor of death row in Tehran’s notorious prison – applauds any effort to undermine the Islamic regime which “should be a US priority,” Trump’s idea of renaming the Persian Gulf and negotiating with the ayatollahs she argues, “are contradictory, and in the end strengthens the regime.”
Perspectives and insights from writers in the Arab media
Middle East Arab writers address: (1) The challenges within the PA that require more than choosing a successor to Abbas. (2) The demand of Hezbollah relinquishing its arms which it views as “sacrosanct”. (3) Comparing protests in Gaza against Hamas and protests in Tel Aviv against Natanyahu government.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
Where are your kids and grandkids when the siren sounds?
By Jonathan Feldstein
This is a picture of children lying on the sidewalk in my town, covering their heads with their hands to protect themselves from shrapnel from the ballistic missile that was fired (again) today at Israel. Of course, no hands covering heads will prevent shrapnel from doing tremendous harm, or death. It’s a protocol about as effective as children taking cover under their desks in the 1950s and 1960s in the US in the event of a nuclear attack. Maybe it makes one feel protected, but let’s be honest….
Dropping with Dread. With no adults around, Israeli children waiting for their school bus, drop to the ground and hold their hands to their heads as sirens sound the warning of an incoming missile from Yemen. (Photo: Facebook/public forum)
The air raid siren sounded at 7:44am today, sending millions of Israelis to bomb shelters unless, like hundreds of thousands of children like these, they were out, on their way to school, or parents taking their kids to school, or going to work.
Strangely, inappropriately but sadly true, the image was captioned that this is just another “normal” day in Israel. It’s normal from the perspective that we have been living like this not just for weeks, months or even years, but for decades. But it’s anything but normal, and cannot be tolerated. Israel’s immediate response was to warn Yemini civilians (I wonder how many are following Israeli warnings even in Arabic) to clear out of strategic port areas. By the time you read this, those strategic port areas may have been bombed “used by Houthis for weapons transfers and terrorism.” How nice that we warn their civilians. How silly to think they would ever afford us the same courtesy. Afterall, their goal – as with all Islamic jihadists – is to murder and maim as many of us as possible.
As we sat in the bomb shelter that’s part of our home, the family WhatsApp group got lively with everyone checking on one another, especially my daughter and son-in-law. Last night bedtime was interrupted as they put their four boys to sleep when Houthi terrorists fired a missile at Israel, almost exactly 12 hours earlier. This morning, where were they? Taking kids to school? Were the kids in school already, and if so, how did the teachers quickly scramble to get them all in a bomb shelter?
Jitters in Jerusalem. People ‘take cover’ in the open as the sound of sirens indicate a missile attack from Yemen, in central Jerusalem, March 27, 2025. (Photo: Reuters/ Oren Ben Hakoon)
It turns out that my oldest grandson was on a bus to school the moment the siren was sounded. He is six. What stress it must have caused him, rushing off on a school bus with 40-50 other kids, to take cover in the dirt or on the sidewalk like the children pictured here above.
What stress for the bus driver who had to manage that quickly and safely, and also deal with any panic among the children. What stress for my daughter and son-in-law, and us, not knowing where he was or if he was OK and how he managed to get through this, and without a phone to tell everyone he was OK, or scared, or just to be comforted from afar.
No, this is not normal. Not at all. But it is our norm.
This week, 77 years ago, the State of Israel declared independence from previous British, Ottoman, and other foreign rulers who controlled the Land of Israel for centuries, millennia actually, since the destruction of the Temple in the year 70, and the start of the exile of the Jewish people. When the UN voted to establish a Jewish state in the Jewish homeland six months earlier, the Arabs said “NO” – loudly and repeatedly. They rejected two states if one of the states was a Jewish state. Many, joined by hundreds of millions of other Muslims, still reject today the very right of Israel to exist.
Kids in Danger. Missile debris falls on kindergarten in northern Israel in February following a ballistic missile from Yemen. Shai Regev, head of education at Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek, said the kindergarten serves 32 children between the ages of 4 and 6 and was “… a huge miracle,” that the kindergarten had not yet opened. “… it was a terrifying scene that shows just how close the danger is.”
For 77 years, Israel has not had a single day of peace. We have had to innovate to be able to survive, spending trillions to defend ourselves, and to do so in ways that also involve added risk and massive expense to ourselves, trying to prevent civilian casualties on the other side, whether in Yemen today, or Gaza yesterday, or Lebanon six months ago.
This is not normal, but it is our norm.
This week, rather than reflecting on their own values, culture, and society being corrupt and broken, hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims, including Palestinian Arabs and many other Arabs and Muslims around the world along with their supporters in the West, will mark what they call “Nakba Day”. Nakba means ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic. Yet far from being enlightened to realize that their leaders have failed them all these decades and are the ones responsible for their dire situation, they will chant, protest, threaten, and burn things as they declare that their “catastrophe” is Israel’s very existence. This is the reality from Gaza to Tehran, from Saana to Syria, from Damascus to Doha.
This is their norm, and no, it’s also not normal.
But as long as their norm is to blame and burn, rather than take responsibility, make peace, and build for the future, this will also be our norm.
In a dozen years, my oldest grandson will go off to the IDF, probably as a combat soldier like his father. I pray that he does not encounter jihadi peers who look at him, at all of us, as the enemy, as illegitimate foreign occupiers. I pray that Palestinian Arabs will rise up not just to reject Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and their extremist Islamic backers in Iran and Qatar, but have a radical change of heart, and realize that by living in their “catastrophe”, it is in fact self-inflicted and self-fulfilling.
Houthis launch missile attack on Israel’s Ben Gurion airport
With President Trump being in the region last week meeting with terrorists in suits from Syria, Turkey, Qatar, the Palestinian Authority, and more, I hope that he delivered a message that will pave the way to a better future for all the children of the Middle East and where Israeli kids never, while waiting to catch their school bus have to suddenly bury their faces in the ground, “protecting” their heads from incoming missiles with their little hands.
About the writer:
Jonathan Feldstein - President of the US based non-profit Genesis123 Foundation whose mission is to build bridges between Jews and Christians – is a freelance writer whose articles appear in The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Townhall, NorthJersey.com, Algemeiner Jornal, The Jewish Press, major Christian websites and more.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
