ArchitectGuy on Israel

JEWISH JOURNAL
Hatred Opened the Door. A Missed Victory Held It Open.
Micah Danzig
November 4, 2026

Tuesday’s midterm results should alarm anyone who knows Jewish history, understands antisemitism or recognizes why Israel is central to the identity of the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jews. For me, the disaster isn’t that Democrats won or Republicans lost. It’s that politicians who demonize Israel, deny Jewish self-determination and explain away antisemitism are finding an increasingly receptive electorate in the world’s most important democracy. Whatever the Democratic Socialists of America and their growing roster of allies insist, Zionism is not “colonialism.” It is the national liberation movement of an indigenous people who reclaimed sovereignty in their ancestral homeland after nearly two thousand years of actual colonialism in that land. Israel is the one country where Jews don’t depend on others’ goodwill for their collective survival. The last few centuries have taught us, at the cost of millions of lives, what that dependence means. READ MORE

FREE PRESS
Why the Midterms Could Birth a New, Better U.S.-Israel Alliance
Liel Leibovitz
November 4, 2026

On Tuesday morning, just hours before the GOP suffered a historic shellacking in the midterm elections, Donald Trump came out with what he hoped would be a game-changing announcement: The U.S., he declared, would soon end its annual $4 billion military aid to Israel. The news should’ve made me happy—my Tablet colleague Jacob Siegel and I spent the last three years making the case for this exact policy. But there was little to celebrate about Trump’s declaration, because anyone listening closely to the president on Election Day, or to the vice president the following morning, would have realized that the administration is making very few right moves—and even then, always for the wrong reasons, and often with disastrous consequences. How so? To answer the question, and to understand why this week’s political upheaval may actually be very good news for anyone concerned with America’s strength and security, it helps to first understand precisely what U.S. aid to Israel is—or, more accurately, what it is not. READ MORE

FREE PRESS
I Documented ISIS’s Crimes. Then I Visited Auschwitz.
Omar Mohammed
October 27, 2026

On August 24, I landed in Warsaw at night. I have long held that a city reveals its identity after dark, so I took the 175 bus from the airport into the center to get a better sense of it. Something in that ride unsettled me. I have sat in my hometown of Mosul, Iraq, a city under ISIS occupation, and known exactly what I feared. On that bus, there was nothing I could point to, and yet my body reacted as if there were. I said afterward that I had smelled the ash of the dead—literally, still in the ground 80 years on. I had never been to Poland. I first learned of the Holocaust in Mosul, in 2004 or 2005, when satellite dishes became easy to get after the fall of Saddam Hussein. I watched documentaries on the Second World War, one after another, recording each of them—because in those years we still lived with the expectation that anything could disappear at any moment. READ MORE