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ISRAEL

Don’t let anti-Israel bigots pose as free-speech champions The ‘pro-Palestine’ crowd’s selective defence of freedom of expression is hypocritical and self-serving. Daniel Ben-Ami

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/12/dont-let-anti-israel-bigots-pose-as-free-speech-champions/

It is more important than ever to remember that the right to free speech does not depend on what is being said. People have the right to make pronouncements, even if they are wrong, obnoxious or downright offensive. It should be up to the public to decide what to believe, rather than authorities outlawing ideas they deem illegitimate.

This reminder is particularly necessary given the Trump administration’s ongoing clampdown on free expression at American universities – ostensibly, in the name of tackling anti-Semitism. Most notoriously, it has arrested and plans to deport activist Mahmoud Khalil, one of the leaders of Columbia University’s Gaza encampments. One of the predictable but unintended consequences of this is that it has helped anti-Israel campus activists to portray themselves as free-speech heroes.

In reality, they are anything but. Their right to make outrageous statements should be defended, but not because what they say has any intrinsic merit. And when they engage in physical violence, as they sometimes do, a hard line must be taken against them.

A central element of the anti-Israel movement, the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, is aimed at denying freedom of expression to anyone with a connection to Israel. Yet genuine supporters of free speech must uphold the right for those they disagree with.

There is obviously a rational case to be made for Palestinian rights and self-determination. But the anti-Israel movement focusses much more on presenting Israel as the epitome of evil in the world and calling for its destruction. There are too many examples of activists on elite American campuses, including academics, who simply believe that Israel should not exist. Some have even claimed that Israel deserved what happened on 7 October 2023. Perhaps most notoriously, on the day of Hamas’s pogrom, 34 student organisations at Harvard held Israel entirely responsible for the attack against it. The same day that about 1,200 people – mostly Israeli Jews – were slaughtered and about 250 kidnapped, these organisations effectively justified the atrocities in a statement. A spurious call to ‘contextualise’ the attack was used to justify the largest killing of Jews since the Second World War. Nor was this an isolated incident. There were many instances of academics and student groups, particularly at elite universities, making such pronouncements in the wake of 7 October.

It is also striking that Hamas and Hezbollah flags have often been flown at anti-Israel student encampments. These are organisations that time and again have openly stated that their goal is to slaughter Jews. Hamas has made clear several times since 7 October that it intends to repeat such atrocities. Meanwhile, Hezbollah had planned to join the original attack, but – fortunately for Israel – hesitated before doing so.

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Today, in the Gatestone Institute Raymond Ibrahim asks: “380,000,000 Christians Persecuted for ‘Their Faith’: Where Is the Outrage?” https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21585/christians-persecuted

Well, the outrage is aroused only about Israel and its defense struggle against genocidal enemies. rsk

Another week where the media has again put tiny Israel “front & center” almost to the exclusion of any other major world events.  This newsletter highlights Israel’s positive achievements and activities in the past week, that far outweigh its size. Michael Ordman

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
IDF soldier’s Righteous great-grandparents. Noah’s great-grandparents hid a Jewish woman in their attic in the Netherlands during WWII. Her great-grandmother’s brother hid a Jewish couple and their three children, earning recognition as “Righteous of the Nations”. Today, Noah is proud to serve as a soldier in the IDF.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-how-an-idf-soldiers-great-grandparents-saved-jews-during-the-holocaust/
 
Saving the Syrian Druze. The Ziv Medical Center in Safed has admitted 32 injured Druze, victims of fighting in Syria during the past week. They include two pregnant women. The IDF has also has established a forward mobile medical triage facility near the Syrian village of Hader and is also protecting the Druze from massacres.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/levant-turkey/artc-32-syrian-druze-so-far-treated-in-israeli-hospital   https://www.jns.org/idf-sets-up-field-triage-facility-for-syrian-druze-civilians/
https://www.jns.org/idf-strikes-in-syria-amid-violence-against-druze-community/
 
A French exoskeleton in Israel. An IDF soldier, severely wounded in Gaza, took his first steps in recovery at Sheba Medical Center. Sheba is one of the few places in the world that offers the Atalante X robotic exoskeleton developed by the French-American company Wandercraft.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/severely-injured-idf-soldier-walks-again-thanks-to-robotic-exoskeleton/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_xnLd4yqDg
 
Chai. In celebration of Israel’s 77th Independence Day, internationally acclaimed singer Netta Barzilai has partnered with the Jewish Agency for Israel to release a new rendition of the iconic Israeli anthem “Chai.” The 1983 Eurovision Song has been reimagined to reflect Israel’s resilience in the face of current challenges.
https://www.jns.org/netta-barzilai-teams-up-with-jewish-agency-to-drop-independence-day-tune/
 
Look! How marvelous our people are.  (TY Ted Belman & Rhoda) Great article by Arlene Kushner highlighting Israeli resilience.  https://arlenefromisrael.info/look-how-marvelous-our-people-are/
 
Chance Gaza border encounter leads to new VC. “Only in Israel” story where a meeting between two IDF reservists resulted in the founding of Venture Capital organization TBC VC that has raised $35 million in three months for investment in Israeli startups. It will also donate money to non-profit Gav Lalohem to help others.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/35-million-vc-fund-launches-thanks-to-reservists-chance-encounter-on-the-gaza-border/   https://www.gavla.org.il/gav-lalohem-ngo-2024/
 
Help support therapy for Israeli soldiers. Beit Binyamin, near the spiritual town of Tzfat, is a therapeutic respite center for IDF soldiers and their families, displaced families and struggling spouses and parents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysXhDvC7PpA  https://causematch.com/beitbinyamin25/igno/
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DEKpADkRdfV/?igsh=a3pucm90NW91dGd1 https://beitbinyamin.org/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Successful life-support treatment. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Inspira Technologies (see here previously) used its INSPIRA ART100 system at Westchester Medical Center, New York to circulate and oxygenate a patient’s blood. It marked the first real-world implementation of Inspira’s innovative life-support technology.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inspira-technologies-announces-successful-treatment-123000786.html
 
Safer cardiac treatment. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s CardioVia has just received U.S. FDA clearance for its ViaOne system. It provides safe (no needle) access to the pericardium – the thin sac protecting the heart where new minimally invasive treatments are having much success over conventional, risky, heart surgery.
https://www.cardiovia.com/
 
Breakthrough treatment for massive blood loss. (TY Ron M) Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the IDF’s Medical Corps have discovered a peptide to activate Protein Kinase C-epsilon (PKC-ε) and significantly improve survival rates of patients (including wounded soldiers) who suffer massive blood loss.
https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/bkler7vgxg
 
Monitoring vital signs from a distance. During the Covid-19 epidemic, Professor Yonina Eldar of Israel’s Weizmann Institute led the development of radar technology to remotely check health. Her lab has unveiled BRAHMS, the Bio-Radar Health Monitoring System which uses AI to analyze subtle chest movements.
https://www.israel21c.org/noncontact-radar-unit-monitors-patients-vitals-remotely/
https://www.weizmann.ac.il/math/yonina/manya-igel-center-biomedical-engineering-and-signal-processing
 
Live long and prosper. Researchers from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University have analyzed the differences in protein sequences across mammals with varying lifespans. They discovered that long-lived whales and humans have specific post-translational modifications (PTMs) that may protect against age-related diseases (e.g. cancer).
https://www.newswise.com/articles/new-research-reveals-nature-s-secret-to-healthy-longevity
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58762-x.epdf
 
How bacteria take control of infected cell. Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have discovered that the protein CsrA in bacteria creates a “control center” inside a cell that manages the activation of disease-causing genes. Future treatments that disable the control center should stop infections before they take hold.
https://www.afhu.org/2025/04/29/a-hidden-control-center-how-bacteria-regulate-their-attack-strategies/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58829-9#Sec2
 
$125 million donation to Tel Aviv University. Blackstone Investment firm president Jonathan Gray and his wife Mindy are donating $125 million to Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Medicine – the largest donation in the university’s history – to increase the number of doctors in Israel. The faculty will now bear the couple’s name.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/blackstone-president-to-donate-125-million-to-tel-aviv-universitys-medical-school-nyt/  https://israfan.com/p/blackstone-gray-donation-tel-aviv-university
 
Celebrating Life. US ambassador Mike Huckabee received a United Hatzalah Defender of Israel Award at a special celebration for the Israel’s emergency response organization at the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem. He recounted the time when a UH responder saved the life of one of the delegates of a mission he was leading.
https://www.jns.org/huckabee-united-hatzalah-is-an-organization-worth-celebrating/
 

No, Trump isn’t about to recognize a Palestinian state Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/no-trump-isnt-about-to-recognize-a-palestinian-state/

Non-Shabbat-observant Israelis awoke on Saturday to fake news that, in Winston Churchill’s witty words, “got halfway around the world before the truth had a chance to put its pants on.”  

The baloney began with coverage by i24News of an item that appeared in The Jerusalem Post. So much of the Hebrew channel’s morning broadcast was devoted to what it was touting as a huge deal that other outlets picked it up and ran with it.

Ditto for social media, of course.

The trouble is that everything about the bulletin was wrong, starting with an inaccurate attribution of its origin. Indeed, anybody who bothered to check could see that the piece in the JPost was a reprint of a write-up in The Media Line.

Perhaps one could chalk the mix-up to lazy journalism. But the depiction of the story’s content—about U.S. President Donald Trump’s imminent trip to the Middle East—doesn’t warrant even that much of an ill-deserved pass.

The chyron of the TV segment was: “Report: Trump to recognize a Palestinian state.”

Naturally, a flurry of panic or glee ensued, depending on the views of those highlighting the “scoop.” Yet all one had to do was peruse the article to realize that there’s “no there there.”

It isn’t until the fifth paragraph that the author, Ali Hussain, mentions the controversial topic. The passage, which opens with a question in bold letters (“Will Donald Trump recognize a Palestinian state?”), reads as follows:

“A Gulf diplomatic source, who declined to be named or disclose his position, told The Media Line, ‘President Donald Trump will issue a declaration regarding the State of Palestine and American recognition of it, and that there will be the establishment of a Palestinian state without the presence of Hamas.’

“The source also added, ‘If an announcement of American recognition of the State of Palestine is made, it will be the most important declaration that will change the balance of power in the Middle East, and more countries will join the Abraham Accords.’”

An anonymous source from an unnamed country surmising about something that hasn’t happened isn’t news. Nor does Hussain claim that it is.

In fact, he goes on to cite others—on the record—refuting the above. One is U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who “denied the statements made by this source on X/Twitter Saturday afternoon, saying that Israel has no better friend than the U.S.”

A new low for the Pulitzer Prize How gross to give the commentary prize to a man who denigrated the Israeli hostages. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/09/a-new-low-for-the-pulitzer-prize/

Back in normal times, many moons ago, it was frowned upon to denigrate women who’d been kidnapped by violent men. It would have been seen as especially sick to disparage women who’d been seized by an army of anti-Semites during a bloody carnival of Jew-killing. Speaking ill of such victims would likely have earned you scorn in decent society. Not anymore. Now it wins you the Pulitzer Prize.

This year’s Pulitzer Prize for Commentary has gone to Mosab Abu Toha, a writer from Gaza who lives in the US. The prize is overseen by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The judges praised Abu Toha’s essays in the New Yorker for showing the world ‘the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza’. They had rather less to say about his online hysterics, in which he called Israeli hostages ‘killers’ and denounced the BBC as ‘filthy people’ for daring to suggest the Bibas kids were murdered by Hamas.

The sleuths over at the Honest Reporting website have uncovered Abu Toha’s digital bitching. And it ain’t pretty. He flipped following the release of the British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari in January this year. ‘How on Earth is this girl called a hostage?’, he asked on Facebook. She’s a ‘soldier’, he said, who had been ‘detained’ by Hamas. And ‘this is the case [for] most of the “hostages”’.

Note those scare quotes. It’s amazing how hateful punctuation can be. The implication was as clear as it was vile: these aren’t real hostages. They’re not innocents. They’re occupiers who were taken as prisoners of war by Hamas. Here, Abu Toha both legitimised Hamas, treating it as a normal army doing normal army things, and denigrated the hostages, even going so far as to rob them of that title. ‘Soldiers’, ‘occupiers’ – ie, the fuckers had it coming.

John Fetterman: Sluggish Schizophrenic? Once praised, John Fetterman now faces Soviet-style smears from the left, deemed mentally unfit for defying party orthodoxy and supporting Israel. By Stephen Soukup

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/10/john-fetterman-sluggish-schizophrenic/

Readers of a certain age or a certain educational predisposition will undoubtedly recall the name Andrei Sakharov—for good reason. Sakharov was a hero, a dissident, and a brilliant man who paid an enormous price for his convictions. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The European Parliament honored him for his bravery and sacrifice by naming its coveted human rights award after him. He was, in short, an extremely impressive person.

Before he became a brilliant human rights and peace activist, Sakharov was a brilliant physicist, one of the most brilliant of the twentieth century. He was the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, at the tender age of 32. For his work on developing the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb, Sakharov was named a “Hero of Socialist Labor” three times—in 1953, 1956, and 1962. He was a member of the Soviet Atomic Energy Commission and is credited as being a key contributor to the advancement of the Soviet thermonuclear weapons program.

Near the end of the 1960s, however, Sakharov’s concern about the (literal) fallout from nuclear testing morphed into concern about nuclear weapons in general and then into peace activism and advocacy for civil liberties. His manifesto, “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” was smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1968, was published by the New York Times, and turned Sakharov into an international icon, a respected and admired dissident.

Just over a decade later, Sakharov openly criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, prompting the Brezhnev regime to take drastic action against him. In the conventional telling of the story the dissident and his wife (fellow physicist and activist Yelena Bonner) were arrested and exiled to the closed city of Gorky. In truth, what happened to Sakharov was much more nefarious. He wasn’t just exiled or “banished.” And he was never officially “arrested.” Rather, he was removed from the proximity to power for what the Brezhnev regime called “his own good.” On December 9, 1983, The New York Times explained precisely what that meant:

A prominent Soviet official implied at a news conference today that Andrei D. Sakharov, the physicist and human rights campaigner, was mentally disturbed. The official, Vitaly P. Ruben, who is chairman of one of the two houses of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal Parliament, called Dr. Sakharov “a talented but sick man” and said an article the physicist published in the West earlier this year had invited an American nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.

The Destruction of History for a Lie That No One Believes by Seth Mandel

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/the-destruction-of-history-for-a-lie-that-no-one-believes/

“Israel is the only trustworthy steward of the region’s history. Those dark ages the academic world is working so hard to bring about? The state of Israel is what stands in their way, and it isn’t going anywhere.”

There is a war on history so ruthless and pervasive that I should say up front that there is, believe it or not, a silver lining. Two, actually.

But first, the bleak part.

When it comes to Jewish historical sites in the holy land, even your most “moderate” academic seems to turn into ISIS—a destructive force seeking a new and permanent dark age.

But because academic archaeological journals aren’t exactly the stuff of ratings, we don’t hear about it very much unless we go looking for it. So credit to journalist Amelie Botbol, who has been following an important story playing out in obscure places.

At Fox News, the Tel Aviv-based Botbol highlights recent stories from an Israeli news service that deserve attention.

In late April, the Press Service of Israel (TPS) covered the blacklisting of researchers who study ancient sites in Judea and Samaria, because the area is over the “green line” and thus considered occupied territory by the UN. Now, one might suggest that, occupied or not, the preservation and exploration of history is pretty important.

And it is—which is why those who undertake it get blacklisted if their areas of study encompass Jewish historical sites.

“This boycott is very clever,” Moshe Gutman, head of a preservation nonprofit, told the news service. “After having publications rejected repeatedly, archaeologists learn to avoid Judea and Samaria entirely. The scientific community is effectively driven away from the area.”

Indeed, the story is full of examples of academics and researchers losing their standing, access, and career paths for the crime of even participating in studies of ancient Israel. The idea is simple, if diabolical: Even if a few archaeologists defy the ban, they’ll have nowhere to publish their findings.

Is Trump really turning his back on Bibi and Israel? Don’t bet on it Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/is-trump-really-turning-his-back-on-bibi-and-israel-dont-bet-on-it/

It doesn’t take a degree in political science to sense an ulterior motive in recent reports about a rift between U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The effort to promote the alleged schism isn’t exactly covert, after all.

No, it emanates from two sets of extremists: isolationists in the Trump camp and anti-Netanyahu Israelis. The former consider the slogan “Make America Great Again” as an excuse for staying out of the world’s conflicts, as though battles abroad, even against radical Islamists bent on toppling “the Great Satan” and annihilating the small one, are of no concern to Americans.

These particular MAGA Republicans view anyone who supports the use of military force to defeat Iran and its proxies as a “neocon warmonger” willing to risk American lives on behalf of the Jewish state.

Antisemitic undertones aside, Israelis with separate false claims—among them that Netanyahu is prolonging the war in Gaza at the expense of the hostages to preserve his coalition—are happy to echo the schism narrative. This group includes protest leaders and their parrots in the media who consider Bibi more dangerous than a nuclear Iran and its terrorist tentacles.

Though Trump’s confusing statements on what a deal with the Islamic Republic would entail—a complete dismantling of its entire nuclear program or only that which is enriching uranium for military purposes—have provided fodder for journalists jumping on the opportunity to publish havoc-wreaking accounts, nail-biters should take the storyline with a grain of salt.

The same goes for hysteria over his announcement on Tuesday of a truce with the Houthis. Since the Iran-backed terrorist group had “capitulated,” and promised to stop attacking ships in the Red Sea, said Trump, the U.S. would cease bombing in Yemen.

Europe’s Illegal Land-Grab: Part III by Karys Rhea

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21492/europe-illegal-land-grab-part-iii

The international community continues to conspire against the reality of Israel’s existence by testing the limits of its sovereignty and threatening the Jewish right to self-determination and self-defense.

The EU would never allow an external entity to abridge the sovereignty of one of its own member states in this way, nor would it endorse such behavior anywhere else.

“To think that the Palestinians are only enraged about settlements is also fatuous nonsense. Talk to the 15-year-olds. Their grievance is not just with Israeli settlements, but with Israel. Most Palestinians simply do not accept that the Jews have any authentic right to be here.” —Thomas Friedman, New York Times, October 31, 2000.

The progressive international public has fervently bought into the red herring of Jewish settlements while hypocritically remaining silent regarding settlement activity in Western Sahara, northern Cyprus, Ceuta and Melilla, Tibet, Kashmir and the Falkland Islands.

The mainstream media and cultural apparatus conveniently ignore the history of these Jewish “settlers,” many of whom are indigenous to the region but whose parents or grandparents were forcibly expelled from the West Bank or parts of Jerusalem in 1948 when Jordan seized and occupied territory. Instead of acknowledging them as descendants of refugees merely returning home…

Those who understand the scope of this have witnessed how the plan of former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is part of a much bigger strategy of illegal land use that extends to the Negev Desert in the south and to the Galilee in the north, all driven by a European-supported narrative that replaces Jewish history with the 20th-century fiction of Palestinian-Arab nationalism.

The international community continues to conspire against the reality of Israel’s existence by testing the limits of its sovereignty and threatening the Jewish right to self-determination and self-defense. Palestinian-Arab society, among the most antisemitic in the world (long before Jewish communities in the West Bank were part of the picture), in which Palestinian Authority government-controlled television, media, textbooks and mosques encourage violence against Jews, praise Adolf Hitler, characterize Jews as “apes and pigs,” and deny the Holocaust, use Jewish “settlements” as a smokescreen to distract from their real agenda based on a single belief held for centuries: Jews do not belong.

The indestructible myth of famine in Gaza Universalism’s falsehoods are protected by a doctrine of infallibility Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/

Yet again, the myth has been revived that there is a famine in the Gaza Strip.

This claim, which has done so much to incite attacks on Jews, has been promulgated repeatedly by mainstream western media during the past 18 months of war. It is a lie that distorts yet another lie.

Time and again, UN agencies and NGOs have warned that famine and starvation are imminent. But this has never happened. More food has been admitted to Gaza than people need.

The problem has been that Hamas took much of it to feed themselves and to sell it on the black market to finance their infrastructure of war.

Nevertheless, the Gazans have overwhelmingly remained conspicuously well-fed, while the people who really have been starved are the Israeli hostages they hold captive. Yet the media has continued to insist that civilians in Gaza are being starved to death.

Two months ago, with an estimated four months’ worth of food supplies remaining in Gaza, Israel instituted a blockade on further aid transports to force Hamas to release the remaining hostages.

The Israel Defence Forces will now oversee food distribution in southern Gaza in order to stop Hamas stealing it and to funnel civilians into those areas, isolating and weakening Hamas to enable the IDF finally to destroy it. The United Nations has refused to accept this plan, demonstrating that its aim is not to alleviate Gazan suffering but to aid Hamas in its war against Israel.

Stupefyingly, it is simply impossible to change the wicked media narrative that Israel is starving Gazan civilians to death. Facts and evidence get absolutely nowhere. Many believe that this is because of the false and obsessive belief that Israel is a colonial oppressor. But this embrace of revolutionary Marxist ideology is only part of the reason.

These lies have penetrated far beyond the keffiyeh-clad hordes of demonstrators. In Britain and elsewhere, it’s now the accepted unwisdom across great swathes of the professions, administrative class and business world that Israel is starving children and committing war crimes in Gaza.

When confronted with facts contradicting every one of these claims, such people ask incredulously: “Are you really saying that you are right while everyone else — the UN, the international legal tribunals, the entire humanitarian establishment — is wrong?”

Israel’s fight for civilisation Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults is a vital account of 7 October and its aftermath. Cory Franklin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/09/israels-fight-for-civilisation/

“Along with spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, Douglas Murray one of the two best writers in the English language about this conflict. As Murray writes, history is constantly being rewritten and that’s why this book is so important. In writing it, Murray has done the cause of democracy, and the victims of one of our century’s most unforgivable crimes, an important service.”

Douglas Murray’s new book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of the West is a must-read on the Israel-Hamas war.

After 7 October 2023, Murray spent the better part of 18 months in Israel and Gaza, documenting the Hamas attack on Israel and its aftermath. His account of what Hamas did is instructive, harrowing and tragic. There was indiscriminate rape and murder, including that of babies and the elderly. Families were burned alive when attackers could not breach their safe rooms and so set their houses on fire. And partygoers were gunned down at the Nova music festival.

Murray points out that, in contrast with the Nazis, who tried to hide evidence of their mass slaughter, Hamas fighters recorded and proudly broadcast their own crimes. Who could forget the notorious young terrorist who, on the day of 7 October, called his parents in Gaza and boasted:

‘Hi dad… Open my WhatsApp now and you will see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!… I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and her husband. I killed 10! Ten with my own hands! Put mum on.’

His mother then expresses regret – only that she was not there with him to savour the moment.

Much of Murray’s focus is on the reaction in the West. He dismantles the myth that the world’s sympathy was with Israel in the immediate aftermath of 7 October, a solidarity which it supposedly forfeited with its subsequent invasion of Gaza. Nothing could be further from the truth. He reminds us of the immediate reaction on the streets of London and on Ivy League campuses in America. These protests were not entreaties for peace, but calls for the eradication of Israel. Within days of the massacre, student groups at Harvard issued a joint statement expressing solidarity with Hamas: ‘We, the undersigned student organisations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.’