“Despite hostility from the American left and right, Israel’s strategic position is better than ever”

Posted on March 25, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

FREE PRESS
The Free Press
Israel Is Unpopular. And It’s Never Had More Friends.
Eli Lake
March 24, 2026

Israel’s public image is in the toilet. On the socialist left, the Jewish state is portrayed as a genocidal colony. On the populist right, Israel and its supporters in America are conniving courtiers who bullied President Donald Trump to launch a war against Iran on its behalf. The numbers back it up too. A Gallup poll released late last month found that more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than the Israelis for the first time in the quarter century that Gallup has been asking the question. All of this might lead Zionists to despair for Israel’s future. In terms of soft power, Jerusalem is being pummeled by podcasts, protests, and social media. But that is only part of the picture. When it comes to hard power, the stuff of arms sales, diplomacy, and air space, Israel is on a generational run. READ MORE

FREE PRESS Coleman Hughes: The Myth of the All-Powerful Israel Lobby The idea that the most powerful country the world has ever known is being puppeteered by a country the size of New Jersey—and by a group that collectively accounts for 0.2 percent of the world’s population—is an extraordinary claim. You would expect overwhelming evidence. In reality, there’s little to substantiate it. Criticize America’s foreign and domestic policy as much as you want—there’s plenty to criticize. But don’t blame it on Israel or its supporters.

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“Joe Kent is out the door at the ODNI after blasting President Trump’s Iran policy. Is his boss Tulsi Gabbard next?”

Posted on March 24, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

TABLET MAG
Who’s the Boss?
Lee Smith
March 23, 2026

The podcasters and senior Trump administration officials who attached themselves like parasites to the president to draw power from him because they have no power of their own are losing in Iran. They’re losing because they have no influence over Trump or his MAGA base, which supports the campaign to stop the terror regime’s nuclear program, by anywhere from 82% to 95%. They’re losing because they lost the argument over Israel on the ground, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is proving to be America’s greatest wartime ally since Winston Churchill held off the Nazis until Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought America into World War II. And since the anti-Trump resistance is losing like Iran is losing, also like the Islamic Republic, they’re emptying their arsenal in scattershot fashion in the hope that they’ll hit something to ward off total defeat for at least one more day. READ MORE

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According to a recent survey by the Jewish Federations of North America, millennial Jews — the demographic where Birthright had the greatest penetration — were the only age group to have a majority identify as “Zionist”

Posted on March 24, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

JTA
Birthright participants are more Orthodox, more right-wing and more familiar with Israel than before Oct. 7
Andrew Lapin
March 23, 2026

…More than half of last year’s participants, 54%, had already participated in some variety of Israel programming, up from 38% in 2023, according to Saxe’s report. (Birthright loosened its eligibility requirements in 2014 to allow students who had visited Israel in high school to go again.) About 1 in 5 participants were Orthodox, a more than threefold growth from summer 2023, the last trips before the start of the Gaza war. And 38% of participants attended Jewish day school, up from 23% two years prior. The survey also detected a rightward political shift among Birthright participants. Forty-two percent of 2025’s Birthright participants identified as conservative, and 34% as liberal, a dramatic shift from 2023, when 20% identified as conservative and 57% as liberal. Those who do participate in Birthright still report that it deepens their connection to Judaism, and there is mounting evidence that connection is long-lasting. READ MORE

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“The Trump administration seems to have forgotten that Hamas is a terrorist group whose foundational principles and actions are centered on the use of violent Jihad and the destruction of Israel.”

Posted on March 22, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

GATESTONE
Begging Hamas to Disarm – The Misguided Approach of Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’
Khaled Abu Toameh
March 23, 2026

…Someone needs to inform [Trump negotiator] Mladenov that Hamas has already made a choice: to reject disarmament. Over the past few months, Hamas leaders have consistently dismissed demands to disarm and characterized disarmament as a “red line.” Hamas leaders have instead proposed long-term truces (5-10 years) rather than total decommissioning of arms. Another thing the “Board of Peace” and Mladenov do not seem to understand is that Hamas uses ceasefires with Israel to rebuild, regroup, and restock its arsenal and tunnel networks.  The tone of the latest US proposal to Hamas and Mladenov’s holiday greetings appears as if the Trump administration is pleading with Hamas to disarm. There is something deeply misguided – if not outright dangerous – about the idea that the US or other international parties should beg Hamas to lay down its weapons. To ask Hamas politely to disarm is fantasyland. The notion that the “Board of Peace,” no matter how well-intentioned, can persuade Hamas to relinquish its arsenal through dialogue alone ignores decades of evidence to the contrary. READ MORE

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“The $3.8 billion America sends to Israel annually isn’t aid. It’s one of the highest-return strategic investments in modern history”

Posted on March 22, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

COMMENTARY MAG
The Media’s Attempt to Drive a Wedge Between the U.S. and Israel
Seth Mandel
March 20, 2026

…It’s certainly true that Israel’s “brand” has taken a hit among U.S. voters. The Trump administration’s apparent contribution to that is based on three major examples in the CNN story. The first is Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s inartful answer to a question that was then chopped up by his critics and presented as proof that Israel dragged America into the war. The administration quickly cleaned it up, but there wasn’t much of a mess to begin with because the Trump team was clearly calling the shots from the beginning and anyone following the war knew immediately to dismiss any ginned-up rumor to the contrary. The second is Joe Kent’s resignation letter. As I wrote this week, the former counterterrorism official’s letter was so conspiracy-ridden that it accused Israel of being responsible for ISIS in Syria. So I chuckled when I read this part of the CNN story…READ MORE

FUTURE OF JEWISH Most Americans don’t realize how much they need Israel. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced recently that Israel would achieve full independence from American military aid, the response in Washington should have been something closer to panic — not because Israel desperately needs America’s $3.8 billion annual check, but because America needs what that investment buys far more than Israel needs the money. Strip away the rhetoric about shared values and historical bonds, which matter but aren’t the point here, and you’re left with a cold strategic reality: American power throughout the Middle East depends almost entirely on having one absolutely reliable partner in a region where literally everyone else is either actively hostile to the United States or so unstable they might collapse and flip sides at any moment.

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Ambassador Ettinger: “The demographic tailwind is now blowing in Israel’s favor. Israel’s Jewish majority in the combined areas of pre-1967 Israel and Judea and Samaria is not threatened. It is growing”

Posted on March 22, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

THE ISRAEL BIBLE
Why Israel Still Has Babies (And the Rest of the World Has Stopped)
Rabbi Elie Mischel
March 22, 2026

For decades, the most powerful argument against Israel’s future was demographic. The claim went like this: between the Israeli Arabs who are full citizens of the state and the Arabs of Judea and Samaria living under Israeli military administration, the Arab population in Israel was growing so fast that Jews would eventually become a minority in their own land…The bomb didn’t go off. It was a dud. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, the Jewish fertility rate currently stands at 3.09 births per woman, significantly higher than the Muslim fertility rate of 2.51. The annual number of Jewish births surged 74% between 1995 and 2025, while Arab births in the same period grew by only 21%. Jerusalem’s total fertility rate stands at 4.57 children per woman, more than triple the rate of Washington, D.C. ..Israel isn’t just outpacing the Arabs. It is outpacing everybody. It is the only country in the developed world with a fertility rate above the replacement level, at nearly double that of the next-highest OECD nation. READ MORE

ARUTZ SHEVA The three causes of the West’s crisis: Demography, demography and demography When Zohran Mamdani Defeated Andrew Cuomo, There Were More Muslims than Italian-Americans in New York. “Church in west London engulfed in flames. Another fire that broke out near a church in Northamptonshire is a suspected arson attack.” Two English churches set on fire at night within 24 hours must be a coincidence. As it must be a coincidence that, during the same hours, a church in Germany was also set ablaze. But if you look, you discover that churches in the United Kingdom have faced 3,237 criminal attacks, vandalism and arson between 2022 and 2024 (an average of 8 per day). Even more, 3,700, are the number of the attacks against British Jews in a single year. And then a coincidence looks more like a clue.

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“The federal government’s latest escalation of its battle with the Ivy League school could be the most severe yet. Harvard called the move “retaliatory” and vowed to defend itself”

Posted on March 21, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

POLITICO
Trump administration sues Harvard over alleged discrimination against Jewish students
Bianca Quilantan
March 20, 2026

The Trump administration on Friday sued Harvard University, accusing the Ivy League school of failing to address antisemitism and discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students. The federal government’s latest escalation of its battle with the university could be the most severe yet as it seeks to stop paying all existing grants to the school and demands Harvard pay restitution of all grant payments made since at least Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel. The lawsuit could also provide an opening to strip the school of all of its federal cash. Since Oct. 7, 2023, the Justice Department says Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard have been “harassed, physically assaulted, stalked, and spat upon,” “endured a hostile educational environment” and were “repeatedly denied access to educational facilities by antisemitic demonstrators.” READ MORE

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“All of Paul Ehrlich’s predictions were not just wrong: They were laugh-out-loud wrong, almost the precise opposite of what would actually occur over the following decades and generations”

Posted on March 21, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

FREE BEACON
Insect-ifying Humanity: The Paul Ehrlich Legacy
Nicholas N. Eberstadt
March 21, 2026

…There were no mass famines in the 1970s, nor have there been any since. Deadly hunger crises in our era are caused by killer governments (Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge; Ethiopia’s Derg; North Korea’s “Dear Leader”), never by Ehrlich’s “population overshoot.” But that is just a foretaste of how completely and utterly wrong Ehrlich got humanity’s future. In the decades since The Population Bomb, human numbers have more than doubled—from about 3.6 billion in 1968 to around 8.2 billion today. Yet in spite of the scale and the tempo of this unprecedented surge of humanity, the world and all its regions are dramatically, incontestably more affluent today. And despite decidedly more rapid population growth in poorer countries over the interim, global per capita GDP was over two-and-a-half times higher in 2024 than in 1968, according to World Bank estimates. READ MORE

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“From a purely military perspective, what has been achieved over the past weeks is nothing short of extraordinary – and the president is still at the beginning of his tenure”

Posted on March 19, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

JEWISH CHRONICLE
Trump’s time advantage: the key to the Iran war strategy
Yaakov Katz
March 17, 2026

…When Israel launched its campaign against Iran in June 2025 during what became known as the 12-day war, it carried most of the operational burden, sending its air force 2,000 kilometres to strike nuclear facilities, missile bases, and critical elements of Iran’s military infrastructure. The United States played an important but what is best defined as a supporting role, deploying B-2 bombers to hit the hardened nuclear sites of Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow. But what began then has since evolved into something far more significant. Operation Roaring Lion, as it is known in Israel, and Operation Epic Fury, as it is called in Washington, are unfolding under a president who is not approaching the end of his tenure, but rather still at the beginning of it. Donald Trump has nearly three years remaining in office, and that fact alone impacts the calculus in Tehran in ways that should not be underestimated. READ MORE

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“Israel ramps up ground maneuvers and mass evacuations in Southern Lebanon as it moves to dismantle Hezbollah’s presence south of the Litani River and impose a new “Yellow Line” security reality”

Posted on March 19, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
IDF primed for full-scale invasion of Southern Lebanon
Shimon Sherman
March 19, 2026

Over the past two weeks, the Israel Defense Forces has been steadily ramping up pressure on Hezbollah as Lebanon increasingly emerges as a parallel front to Iran in “Operation “Roaring Lion.” In recent days, the IDF has begun supplementing its intensive aerial bombardment with infantry maneuvers. While these operations have not yet reached the scale of a committed ground offensive, the deployment of elite infantry, heavily armored battalions and specialized engineering units across multiple axes indicates that beachheads are being formed for full-scale invasion. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz indicated the government’s commitment to push military policy on the northern front to its logical conclusion. The goal of the operation is “to remove threats and protect the residents of the Galilee and the north,” Katz said in a recent briefing, adding that Israel wishes to permanently dismantle all of Hezbollah’s surface and subterranean infrastructure in southern Lebanon. READ MORE

REUTERS Israel and Lebanon expected to hold talks soon, Israeli officials say Israel and Lebanon are expected to hold talks in the coming days aimed at securing a durable ceasefire that ‌would see Hezbollah disarmed, two Israeli officials said on Sunday, though the timing and terms have yet to be agreed. Beirut is forming a delegation for talks but no date has been set. Lebanon needed clarity on whether Israel would abide by President Joseph Aoun’s first point — a demand for a full ceasefire to allow negotiations to take place, three Lebanese officials said ⁠on Saturday. The expected talks were first reported by Israel’s newspaper Haaretz on Saturday. A Lebanese official said on Sunday that Lebanon has not yet received official notification from Israel on discussions.

FDD Lebanons’ second chance This conflict could finally free Beirut from Hezbollah. Lebanon still fails to grasp the sequence of cause and effect, or the realities it faces. Therefore, Israel will likely continue disarming Hezbollah unilaterally through overflights, targeted operations, and retention of strategic buffer zones (such as hilltops) until Beirut demonstrates a genuine commitment to ending perpetual conflict and embracing the rewards of bilateral peace with the Jewish state. If it wants to stop the war, Lebanon is not likely to get a break from Israel. However, it will certainly be welcomed if agrees to join the Jewish state in finishing off the pro-Iran militia.

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