VOICE OF ZION
The hostages are coming home!
Yonah E
October 9, 2025

…Today the Middle East wakes up redrawn — not with ink on paper, but with courage, deterrence, and divine wrath. The lesson is eternal: you touch a Jew, you pay a price. You burn a kibbutz, your city burns back. You hold our babies hostage — you will meet soldiers who move like thunder and carry the fury of 4,000 years. When I made Aliyah last year, I thought I knew what Zionism meant. I didn’t. I know it now. It’s standing on the soil of your ancestors while rockets fall, and still sending your kids to school. It’s burying friends and still raising the flag higher. It’s loving this land so much that fear becomes irrelevant. I walk through Efrat and see a people reborn in their own ashes — families who lost everything but refuse to bow. This is the new Jew. We are not the broken ghosts of 1938. We are not the frightened whispers of the Warsaw Ghetto. We are the descendants of Maccabees, armed with tanks and Torah, with faith and fire. READ MORE

MIDDLE EAST FORUM Gregg Roman: Israel’s Hostages Come Home, But At What Price? The arithmetic of this exchange should give everyone pause. Israel will release over 1,700 Palestinian prisoners, including 250 serving life sentences for the most heinous acts of terrorism. These aren’t stone-throwers or protesters. These are the architects of the Park Hotel Passover massacre, the planners of the Sbarro pizzeria bombing, the orchestrators of attacks that turned school buses into crime scenes. Each has blood on their hands and expertise in their heads. Hamas is trading 48 hostages—20 living and 28 dead—for 1,700 experienced operatives—a massive force multiplication that transforms tactical defeat into strategic victory. Every released prisoner returns to Gaza or the West Bank as a hero, a symbol of resistance, armed with years of additional training and burning with renewed purpose.

FUTURE OF JEWISH We are all October 8th Jews now If October 7th was the day that broke the Jewish world, October 8th was the day that remade us. The images emanating from southern Israel on October 7, 2023 — the burned bodies, the stolen children, the laughter of murderers — tore open something ancient and fragile in the Jewish soul. On October 8th, when the carnage was still fresh, we began to see with devastating clarity what we had long tried not to see: that the safety, belonging, and sympathy we once believed we had earned in the modern world were illusions. The spell was broken. October 8th was when the world changed for Jews, and when Jews began to change for the world. For decades, many of us Jews believed that the Holocaust had finally secured us a place among the civilized.