Why is the media obsessed with violent Israelis?

Jonathan S. Tobin

Damage to a car set on fire by Jews in the Arab village of Deir al-Hatab, east of Nablus, on March 23, 2026. Photo by Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90.

The images from the Knesset shocked many around the world. When Israeli Minister of Security Itamar Ben-Gvir popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate the passage of a law imposing the death penalty on terrorists whose goal is to destroy the State of Israel, he was widely condemned for demonstrating execrable taste, for which he was admonished by Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana. Indeed, the blowback against the 62-47 vote in favor of the measure in its final readings went beyond disgust with the always-controversial Ben-Gvir. The law itself was widely denounced as an act of discrimination against Palestinian Arabs, who were, critics claimed, being singled out for punishment.

The international outrage about the so-called “racist” death penalty law is part of a familiar narrative about Israel that has become normalized in mainstream media coverage of the Jewish state in recent years. It fits in with the torrent of stories about an alleged epidemic of “settler” violence targeting innocent Palestinians and the ongoing effort to depict the war against Hamas in Gaza as a nonstop war crime if not an outright “genocide.”

A claim of moral equivalence

Taken together, such coverage paints a dismal picture of the political culture of a country dominated by right-wingers. It applies to all those who support the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but, in particular, those like Ben-Gvir, who are identified as settlers in Judea and Samaria. They are seen as not merely callous about the taking of life, but also as somehow the moral equivalent to terrorists and morally inferior to ordinary Palestinians.

In doing so, a press that is inherently hostile to the Jewish state can dismiss the arguments about the danger posed not just to Israel but to the West in general from Arab and Islamist terrorism. After all, if Israelis are racists eager to hang Palestinians and complicit in a wave of violence seeking to terrorize their Arab neighbors, then why should Americans or anyone else, for that matter, support the Jewish state?

The “genocide” blood libels about the war against Hamas have worked their way into mainstream discourse, rather than being dismissed as just another antisemitic attempt to delegitimize Israel. Claims that the capital punishment law is racist as well as barbaric, and that settlers are engaged in pogroms tolerated by the Netanyahu government, are just as dangerous.

Unlike the campaign to delegitimize a war against terrorists in Gaza that the overwhelming majority of Israelis support, many Israelis oppose the death penalty and take a dim view of the residents of Judea and Samaria for a variety of reasons. And even if they refute the “genocide” lies because they know them to be false, the Israeli left and even some centrists are all too ready to go along with the assertions that a government in which Ben-Gvir has an important cabinet post is dominated by extremists who have no place in government, let alone passing laws that offend their sensibilities and alienate the international community.

Demonizing the ‘settlers’

A considerable portion of the Israeli electorate also views settlers as religious fanatics who are an obstacle to peace, even while acknowledging that no Palestinian peace partner exists. They are willing to believe that some of those living across the so-called Green Line are likely guilty of everything that the Palestinians and their cheerleaders in the press and non-governmental organization allies say they’ve done. And that, in turn, generates a wave of criticism from liberal American Jews, who are easily persuaded to condemn what they see as Israeli wrongdoers betraying ideas about Jewish ethics and morality.

If the death-penalty law really was as racist as its critics claim—and if the reality of life in the “West Bank” really was one of routine Jewish violence in which Palestinians were living in fear—then those making these assertions might have a leg to stand on. The truth is that whatever one feels about the death penalty and how it might be implemented, the new Israeli law is not racist. It is a reasonable, if debatable, attempt to deal with a real problem.

At the same time, the narrative about “settler violence” isn’t merely false but also a bizarre inversion of reality. It is the Jews who live in the territories who are the victims of a daily tsunami of often murderous Palestinian violence. Indeed, most of the incidents in which such residents are supposedly engaged in thuggish behavior are either acts of self-defense against Arab attacks or Palestinian information operations designed to falsely claim ownership over land to which they have no right.

And yet, the Palestinian terror campaign being waged against Jews living in the territories is ignored by both the secular and Jewish media. Jewish groups, including some that are otherwise supportive of Israel, blindly accept the claims of biased observers like the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) or far-left-wing Jewish groups like B’Tselem, which are the sources for most of the allegations of settler violence.

As Liel Leibovitz wrote in Tablet, “Why They Lie About Jewish Terrorists,” and Gadi Taub detailed in “The Settler Violence Myth,” the assertions that thuggish extremist Jews have been allowed by the Israeli government to run riot in Judea and Samaria are simply false.

Not every claim of Jewish misconduct against Palestinians is necessarily untrue. Supporters of Israel don’t have to apologize for the fact that a few people out of a Jewish population of several hundred thousand residents of the territories might be guilty of illegal behavior. But as Leibovitz and Taub make clear, the assertions that the settlers are engaged in an indiscriminate and unprovoked campaign of violence against Arabs is out and out wrong.

An epidemic of Palestinian terror

Breaking down the incidents cited as definitive proof of misconduct, the assumptions about settler violence are easily exploded. Most of these alleged crimes turn out to be the opposite of what is often asserted. Rather than Jews seeking to intimidate Arabs, most recorded instances of Jewish violence turn out to be cases of the so-called settlers defending themselves against rock-throwing or worse. The same is true for contentions that Jews are stealing Palestinian land, uprooting olive orchards of long standing and using force to pressure Arabs to flee their homes.

As Leibovitz points out, “In 2024, there were more than 6,300 Palestinian terror attacks against Jews in Judea and Samaria, leading to 27 murdered Israelis and more than 300 wounded. The deadly trend continued last year, too, with 5,051 attacks by Palestinians, during which 24 Israelis were murdered and 400 wounded. Those included 458 attacks with Molotov cocktails, 655 attempts to blind drivers with laser pointers, 286 explosive charges and 19 terrorist shooting assaults.”

Compare that to OCHA’s claims that 1,400 incidents of settler violence occurred in 2024 and 1,700 such crimes occurred in 2025.

Even if OCHA’s data is to be believed, when lining up the two sets of numbers, the story comes across very differently than the headlines in outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian, PBS or even the liberal Times of Israel about a troubling rise in Jewish gangsterism in Judea and Samaria.

But the point is, no one should believe claims put forth by the United Nations about Jews behaving badly in the territories any more than they should accept the world body’s skewed accusations about Israeli actions in Gaza or any other topic concerning the Jewish state. Taking a deep dive into these statistics, as Leibovitz and Taub have done, shows a thinly veiled effort to gin up a scandal for which there is little or no evidence.

The Jews residing in the territories which form the heart of the ancient Jewish homeland are living in a state of virtual siege, and rather than being encouraged or enabled in violence by the government in Jerusalem or the Israel Defense Forces, many living in these communities feel they are not given adequate protection. That is why a small minority of them sometimes engage in actions that are either misconstrued as “Jewish terrorism” or are, in fact, cases of illegal retaliation against those who are trying to make their lives hell.

But rather than condoning wrongdoing, the IDF seeks to stop them and arrest Jewish perpetrators. That stands in stark contrast to the policy of the Palestinian Authority, which rewards terrorism against Jews with salaries and/or pensions for those who commit such crimes, as well as to their families. In Israeli society, those accused of misbehavior against Arabs are pariahs and derided as extremists. Palestinians who shed Jewish blood are treated as heroes.

An Israeli conundrum

And that is also the context in which the new death-penalty law should be understood. Rather than being considered as nothing more than evidence of Jewish lust for violence or even revenge, it is an attempt to solve a serious problem for which Israel’s critics have no solution.

In just the last decade, there have been several thousand incidents of Palestinian terrorism against Israelis. Even if you treat the Oct. 7 attacks—the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—as a singular event, the total of every other such event in which hundreds of Jews were murdered and thousands maimed and wounded amounts to several thousand.

Yet each time a Palestinian Arab commits an act of cold-blooded murder, he or she can be confident that sooner or later, they will avoid punishment. That’s because they know that Hamas and other terror groups are always seeking to kidnap Israelis in an effort to force Jerusalem to free terrorists in exchange for ransoming them. Even those who have committed the most bestial of crimes, including those that occurred on Oct. 7, when the slaughter was particularly depraved and involved what American legal scholars call “aggravating factors” in death-penalty cases such as rape, torture and kidnapping, have been let loose. They return to their homes or go into comfortable exiles, acclaimed as heroes and paid generous sums as a reward for their terrorism. Applying the death penalty to those who committed such despicable crimes may be controversial but it would certainly be justice.

The death penalty exists in Israel, but to date, only one person—Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann—has been executed in the Jewish state. Many in Israel, as is true elsewhere, oppose capital punishment in principle. Even Jewish religious law, which allows for the death penalty, places rigorous limits on its application.

But as long as terrorists who commit murder are given, at best, life sentences for their crimes, that sets up a situation not only in which they will eventually be freed, but also a situation in which Palestinians are incentivized to kidnap Jews. And that is exactly what happened on Oct. 7.

Many Israelis believe that the only solution is to execute the terrorists before they can be freed in hostage exchanges.

Will that deter terrorism? That is far from clear, especially since many of those who murder Israelis are motivated by thoughts of martyrdom in the jihad against the Jews.

Nor is it likely that Israel’s liberal-dominated Supreme Court will allow the death-penalty law to be implemented, though, as in many of their other egregious interventions and power grabs, their assertion of a right to overrule the legislation is entirely unsupported by law and inherently anti-democratic.

Still, creating a legal mechanism that removes one major incentive for murders of Jews is not racist. It is simply an attempt to find a way to avoid a cycle of violence in which terrorism is rewarded.

Nevertheless, the argument that this law is more evidence of Israeli barbarism is absurd. While many democratic countries have outlawed the death penalty, the practice is far from rare around the world. In the United States, where some states allow the death penalty and others do not, fewer than two dozen murderers are executed on an annual basis. But executions for a variety of crimes (including for sexual preferences and behavior that is defended as a basic human right in the West) are widespread in Arab and Muslim countries, including in Palestinian-controlled territory, as well as elsewhere in the Third World. China executes thousands of people every year for an unspecified series of offenses against its tyrannical regime, as well as keeps approximately a million prisoners in the laogai, Beijing’s own modern version of the Soviet “gulag archipelago.”

Seen in that context, Israel’s efforts to deter a wave of terrorist murders against its citizens ought not to be considered an outrage or even controversial.

An ideological agenda

So, why are mainstream and even liberal Jewish news outlets treating the death-penalty law, as well as the often distorted if not outright false reports about an epidemic of “settler violence,” as a major issue? And why are they doing this while also refusing to cover the far larger incidence of Palestinian and Islamist terrorism against Israelis in Judea and Samaria?

The answer is simple. It’s part of the general ideological assault on Israel and Jewish rights that has its roots in Soviet disinformation. It has been amplified and weaponized by woke ideological advocates of toxic ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that treat Israelis and Jews as “white” oppressors of Palestinian “people of color.” In this formulation, the former are always in the wrong, no matter what they do, and the latter are always the victims, regardless of their commitment to terrorist violence in their genocidal war against the Jewish state.

Seen in that light, people of good faith and conscience ought not to be duped into believing this false narrative about Israeli violence and moral equivalence to Palestinian crimes. It’s not just based on out-of-context reasoning and unreliable statistics. The claims about the death penalty and the settlers are rooted in antisemitic tropes and false arguments. To lend them credibility isn’t an example of principle, whether on the part of Jews or others. It’s evidence of either bad judgment or bad faith.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

ADL Releases ‘Leaderboard’ Ranking Popular Video Games and Their Efforts to Combat Antisemitism

Shiryn Ghermezian

“Fortnite,” a game accessed by over 25 million users a day, being played on a mobile phone. Photo: Public Domain

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released on Wednesday an Online Gaming Leaderboard that ranks popular video games on how effectively their policies and in-game safety features curb antisemitism, hatred, and extremism in their online multiplayer games.

The video games were ranked based on their “advanced,” “moderate,” or “limited” protections. The assessment was made using criteria, assembled by the ADL, that examine policies to prevent antisemitism and hate (40 percent of the score) and in-game tooling to prevent antisemitism and hate (60 percent of the score).

Fortnite was rated the best at implementing safeguards to combat antisemitism, following by Call of Duty, Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto Online, Roblox, Madden NFL, Valorent, Clash Royale, Counter-Strike 2, and PUBG: Battlegrounds.

The ADL said it has conducted the first-ever detailed public evaluation of video games and how their safety measures address the issues of antisemitism, hate, and extremism in online gaming environments. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) provides age and content guidance but does not assess what video game companies are doing to keep players safe from hate and harassment during their online gaming experience.

The Online Gaming Leaderboard was co-produced by the ADL Center for Technology and Society (CTS) and the Ratings and Assessments Institute (RAI). The former, in partnership with gaming analytics firm NewZoo, surveyed hate, harassment, and extremism in online games in the US from 2019 to 2023 and those findings provided “the foundation for the evaluation,” according to the ADL.

“When a parent wants to know if an online game is safe for their child, there has been no one-stop shop to understand how a particular game approaches online safety,” said Daniel Kelley, senior director of CTS. “This leaderboard addresses that critical gap by offering the most comprehensive evaluation of safety measures in online multiplayer games to date, with a focus on how companies manage antisemitism and extremism.”

“Without strong safeguards, these platforms can become breeding grounds for harassment and hateful activity that harms players directly, normalizes hateful ideologies and damages trust,” added Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the ADL. “This leaderboard provides the transparency that parents, gamers, and the industry need to understand where companies are succeeding and where urgent improvements are necessary.”

The ADL said it privately shared its findings with each gaming company before publicly releasing the Online Gaming Leaderboard on Wednesday. Some companies “engaged with ADL to clarify issues or make improvements to their policies and tooling, while others did not respond.” The ADL also developed a Best Practices Guide for gaming companies that provides strategies for how they can better combat antisemitism and hate.

W kamienicy w Krośnie znaleziono kolejne granaty. Fot. Muzeum Rzemiosła w Krosnie

W kamienicy w Krośnie znaleziono kolejne granaty; powiększa się historyczny arsenał

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Po znalezieniu kolejnych granatów w kamienicy przy ul. Blich w Krośnie (Podkarpacie), zapadła decyzja o rozszerzeniu badań archeologicznych. Eksperci prześwietlą przewody kominowe oraz drewniane podłogi dawnych cel, gdzie spodziewają się odkryć przedmioty osobiste ukryte przez aresztantów.

Unlike Israel, many of America’s NATO allies aren’t really allies

Jonathan S. Tobin

The transfer of remains of six U.S. soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait to Dover Air Force Base, Del., March 7, 2026. Credit: Daniel Torok/White House.

It is axiomatic that Israel’s greatest diplomatic challenge rests on a single unavoidable truth. The Jewish state has only one real ally on which it can depend right now: the United States. Yet at the start of the sixth week of war against Iran, it’s becoming clear that the same may be true for Washington. It has formal alliances with many nations—notably, the 31 other members of NATO. But when push comes to shove, it turns out that the only truly reliable ally of the United States is the country with which it has no formal alliance: Israel.

Predictably, critics of President Donald Trump are blaming this state of affairs on him and his confrontational attitude toward NATO allies, particularly Western European nations like the United Kingdom, France and Spain.

They argue that he has launched an unnecessary and costly “war of choice” that the Europeans are wise to stay out of. Moreover, they also say that the diffidence, if not outright opposition, of NATO members to joining in the Iran war is due to Trump’s belligerent approach to them. He has badgered them to contribute more than token amounts to their own defense, which has been largely funded by the generosity of American taxpayers for the last 80 years, and threatened serious consequences if they refuse. Worse than that, his demands that Denmark, for instance, allow the United States to take over Greenland is considered nothing less than a threat that they say is analogous to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

NATO is the problem, not Trump

Still, the notion that it is Trump’s behavior or “America First” beliefs that are sinking NATO is to mistake a reaction to a dilemma for the problem itself.

NATO was vital to stopping a wave of postwar Soviet aggression from swallowing Western Europe into Moscow’s Communist empire in the years after the conclusion of the Second World War. It continued to deter the Russians for 40 years until their “evil empire” collapsed under the weight of its own failures and contradictions, as well as its inability to match former President Ronald Reagan’s strengthening of America’s strategic capabilities.

Since the end of the Cold War, it has struggled to find a way to remain relevant. Its major Western European elements aren’t just too militarily weak to help shoulder the burden of defending the West. The British, French, Italians and Spanish lack a credible defense deterrent, as is true of most of the other smaller countries. The only NATO allies who actually act like allies are in Eastern Europe, such as the Czechs and Hungarians, though they are too small to make a difference and have limited ability to help vis-à-vis Iran.

All of Trump’s predecessors in the last 30 years tried to get them to take defense seriously; however, due to their largely polite approach, which was all carrot and no stick, the Europeans ignored them. Their lack of defense spending helped them grow rich, though it also left them unable to do much other than to appeal to the United States when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

But the rot goes deeper than merely the finances of the alliance.

Western Europeans are alarmed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism and his quest to reassemble the old tsarist and Soviet empire. They are right to despise him, even though his failure to conquer Ukraine means the fears about him swallowing up Eastern, Central or Western European nations (something that was a real possibility when the Soviets had a vast army in the middle of Germany during the Cold War) are more hysteria than a real possibility.

Appeasers, not allies

That said, the Europeans have no interest in containing, let alone confronting, the threat from Iran’s terrorism, missiles and nuclear ambitions. The Islamists hanging on to power in Tehran consider themselves at war with the entire West—not just the “Great Satan” (the United States) and the “Little Satan” (Israel). Though they’ve already proved that their terrorists and missiles can reach Europe’s capital cities, London, Paris, Madrid and Rome act as if the battle to remove this deadly peril is someone else’s job.

These governments have been eager to appease Iran. Their policies on this question have been primarily driven by a desire to continue to do business with the ayatollahs over the years, rather than do something about the way the theocracy threatens Europe and the West. Cowed by antisemitic Muslim migrants-turned-voters they’ve imported from the Middle East and North Africa, their leaders behave as if they are innocent bystanders in a struggle that solely concerns Tehran’s quest to wipe out Israel or to make trouble for the United States.

Though their resentment against Washington can be at least partially explained by their antipathy to Trump, the foundation of their unwillingness to act on Iran predates even his first administration. And it has grown not so much because of their distaste for Trump. Rather, it is because support within these countries for the notion of them having a responsibility to defend the West against militant Islam has largely diminished to the point of irrelevance in the last two decades. Even worse, their hostility to Israel, which has become more overt due to the surge of Jew-hatred around the globe but particularly among their own populations, has fueled a reluctance to do anything about a country like Iran.

All of this adds up to a situation where—like many, if not most of Trump’s domestic critics—America’s European allies are rooting for defeat simply because it would harm the U.S. president and the Israeli prime minister. They equally view Benjamin Netanyahu as a thorn in their side because of their pro-Palestinian foreign-policy agendas.

That ought to lead serious American observers to stop reflexively speaking as if NATO is as important and functional as it was 40 years ago and to start questioning its future. Instead, the U.S. foreign-policy establishment and Democrats merely blame Trump for his justified suspicions about the continued utility of the alliance and hostility to the multilateral organizations like the anti-Israel United Nations.

Weakness and betrayal

More to the point, their attitude toward the Iran war calls into question why NATO is still needed.

After all, the Europeans haven’t been asked to do much to help the military campaign to stop Iran that the United States and Israel are conducting. Even if they were willing, they couldn’t do much. For example, the mighty British Royal Navy that once ruled the waves now has more admirals than ships, with fewer than two dozen warships afloat.

The British initially refused to allow American ships and aircraft to use their bases, but have since relented. And other nations—like France, Spain and Italy—have refused even to allow American resupply efforts for the war to use their airspace, let alone contribute to the war.

Allowing American planes to fly over their airspace is not a big ask, nor would it mean that these nations are participating in the war. Nevertheless, these governments think it is more important to signal their opposition to Trump and Israel to their domestic electorates than to contribute in some small way in a war that, whether they are willing to admit it or not, is being fought to make them all safer. What does a country need allies for if they are going to behave like this?

It’s true that the war on Iran doesn’t come without a cost. The Iranian threat to shipping in the Gulf of Hormuz has raised the price of oil worldwide. But as Trump has made abundantly clear, that is going to hurt the Europeans more than the United States because they are dependent on the oil that is transported through it.

It’s not clear whether the president’s threats to let the Europeans suffer, rather than to act to secure the right of free navigation in a key international waterway, are real or are just another case of Trump trolling his opponents. Nor do we know what the next steps in the war will entail.

But the assumption that Iran is somehow winning a war in which their military assets and leaders are being systematically knocked off—and that the powerful militaries of the United States and Israel are losing—simply isn’t credible. The notion that a campaign in which the two allies have flown more than 5,000 sorties into Iran with the loss of only a handful of manned planes and unmanned drones (and has the ability to rescue downed pilots deep in enemy territory, as they did this past week) is floundering against Tehran is ludicrous. The reason why so many supposed foreign-policy “experts” say so is because they are so invested in an American defeat and Iranian victory that sowing belief in this dubious position has become their skewed priority.

There is a risk that Trump will cut and run or conclude a deal that will strengthen Iran, rather than persevere until the regime gives in or falls. But so far, there is no real indication that he will do so. To the contrary, the idea that he would concede defeat at a time when the United States and Israel are in such a dominant military position seems rooted more in that same Trump derangement syndrome that motivates so much commentary about the conflict than in dispassionate analysis.

What we’re left with then is not so much another example of the complex relationship between America and Europe as it is compelling evidence that Western European nations stopped acting like U.S. allies long before the current war. It’s not just that these countries don’t believe in Trump. Their internal collapse in the face of a growing red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists is a product of the fact that, unlike the founders of NATO in the 1940s, they no longer believe in themselves either. This moral failure on Iran should only accelerate the process by which the United States concludes that it should worry less about opinion in London, Paris, Madrid and Rome—and more about the countries helping to defend the West.

There all sorts of nations that claim to be U.S. allies—from the frenemies in Qatar to actual Gulf state allies like Saudi Arabia, to friendly but unhelpful countries like Canada, to supposed allies like France that consistently vote against Washington in the United Nations and to the many good friends of America around the globe that mean well but can do little to provide direct assistance in an armed conflict.

But there is only one nation that has stepped up and shown that it can fight side by side with the United States, even if that means its own population is directly and continuously subjected to missile attacks. And that nation is Israel.

Only Israel fights with America

Other countries will cheer or jeer from the sidelines, but Israel not only has a powerful military but is willing to use it, along with its unmatched intelligence capabilities and operations, to fight a war alongside America. And it is doing so with the knowledge that Trump could end the war before the Jewish state has achieved the objectives that Netanyahu has set.

Contrary to the largely antisemitic myth that the world’s most powerful man in charge of a superpower was dragged into a war by the prime minister of a country the size of New Jersey with a mere 10 million people, this war was America’s idea. And it is being fought to protect America’s interests as well as Israel’s. Stopping nuclear and missile threats—and the world’s largest state sponsor of terror—isn’t a favor to Israel. It’s vital for the security of the Middle East, which affects the economies of all, as has been shown in Iran’s stranglehold of the Strait of Hormuz and international shipping.

A clear look at the events of the last two months doesn’t just show Israel’s value as an ally, even though there is no pact of alliance between Washington and Jerusalem as there is with America’s 31 NATO allies, which the United States is obligated to defend under that treaty’s Article V provision. It has also done invaluable damage to what remains of American support for the belief that the alliance is vital to the country’s defense.

Israel has friendly relations with other countries, including some in Europe. And it has strong security ties with key regional nations like Saudi Arabia, even though they remain under the table rather than out in the open. But it has only one genuine ally. There are no plausible alternatives, even when Washington is run by those who are lukewarm or worse about the relationship, as under the administrations led by former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

NATO may yet be revived at some point in the future. Even now, it still serves some use, if only to help ensure that Russia’s troublemaking can be contained. But the stark truth of 2026 is that it has largely become a vestige of the past that has outlived much of its usefulness.

At the same time, the idea that Washington’s affection for Israel is a hindrance to the pursuit of U.S. national interests or makes it difficult for it to make friends in the Middle East has been conclusively exploded by recent events.

It is the alliance with Israel that is the one irreplaceable asset for American foreign policy and security needs in the region. And one is hard-pressed to think of another such reliable ally elsewhere with both the military assets—and the willingness to use them in a difficult fight— and common values of democracy. It’s high time that American pundits and politicians, whether seduced by antisemitic tropes and arguments or wallowing in hatred for Trump, stop speaking of Israel as an American problem and start acknowledging this reality.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

Iran’s Internet Blackout Hits Record Length as Regime Tries to Crush Dissent in Digital Darkness

Ailin Vilches Arguello

People attend the funeral of the security forces who were killed in the protests that erupted over the collapse of the currency’s value in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 14, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

Iran’s internet blackout became the longest such nationwide shutdown ever recorded over the weekend, as the regime continued to face mounting military pressure, internal unrest, and growing isolation.

According to NetBlocks, an internet-monitoring watchdog that tracks global connectivity disruptions, Iran’s blackout entered its 37th consecutive day on Sunday, making it the longest nation-scale internet shutdown on record after authorities severed internet access as the war with the US and Israel broke out in late February.

The blackout continued on Monday, with the general public cut off from international networks for over 888 hours.

With the regime attempting to suppress internal opposition and silence domestic dissent, the blackout has effectively cut millions of Iranians off from independent reporting on the war and access to global news.

“We constantly find ourselves searching for ways to reconnect, just to be able to hear reliable news,” a 47-year-old woman in the central city of Isfahan told AFP on Saturday.

“Being without internet feels like being without oxygen to me. I feel trapped and suffocated,” a 53-year-old man in Tehran also said.

Iranian authorities have even warned that citizens suspected of accessing internet through virtual private networks (VPNs) — tools that bypass government censorship — could face arrest or imprisonment.

According to state media reports, Iranian security forces have arrested several citizens in recent weeks for using the Starlink satellite internet system, which allows users to bypass state-controlled terrestrial infrastructure.

Iran’s latest internet shutdown marks the second nationwide blackout in less than two months, after authorities previously imposed an 18-day outage in January during mass anti-government protests, which security forces violently crushed, leaving tens of thousands of demonstrators tortured or killed.

Human rights groups warn the regime has repeatedly used nationwide internet shutdowns as a tool to intensify its crackdown on opposition movements and conceal ongoing abuses from international scrutiny.

In recent years, Iranian authorities have accelerated efforts to sever the country’s reliance on the global web by advancing the regime-backed “National Internet” project aimed at consolidating state control over digital communications and information flows.

Meanwhile, the Islamist regime continues to face relentless pressure from US and Israeli strikes as the conflict escalates and prospects for negotiations become increasingly fragile.

In one of its latest attacks, Israel announced that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence chief Brig. Gen. Majid Khademi and Quds Force special operations commander Asghar Bagheri were both killed over the weekend.

This latest strike on leadership represents a “significant blow to Iran’s intelligence leadership at a time when the regime is already under sustained pressure,” an Israeli security official told Fox News. 

According to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Khademi orchestrated overseas terrorist operations and oversaw surveillance targeting Iranian civilians during the regime’s brutal crackdown on protests.

Part of Iran’s elite military force, Bagheri coordinated the recruitment of terrorist operatives across the Middle East and directed deadly attacks against US and Israeli targets abroad.

On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced the IDF also struck Iran’s largest petrochemical facility in Asaluyeh, a blow that has effectively taken offline the two plants responsible for roughly 85 percent of the country’s petrochemical exports, crippling a key pillar of Iran’s economy and export capacity.

Katz described the strikes as “a severe economic blow to the Iranian regime, amounting to tens of billions of dollars.”

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I have instructed the IDF to continue to attack the national infrastructure of the Iranian terror regime with all its might,” the Israeli defense chief said. 

“The Iranian terror regime will discover that the continued aggression against Israel and the cowardly and criminal fire at Israeli citizens will lead to the deepening of the economic and strategic damage it is paying and the collapse of its capabilities,” he continued.