Motaz Azaiza is forcing a reckoning the “pro‑Palestine” movement never anticipated. Because he’s celebrated by activists, politicians, and journalists and can’t be smeared as a “Zionist shill,” his admission carries weight: Gaza’s journalism space functioned under Hamas’s control, and any reporter who deviated from the group’s narrative risked “disappearing behind the sun.” That single truth reshapes how we understand the stories pushed out of Gaza since October 7 and explains why dissent against Hamas’s rule never surfaced publicly. Western journalists and outsiders, unaware of this coercive ecosystem, ended up amplifying Hamas’s information warfare rather than scrutinizing it.

The insufferable Hasan Piker, who has campaigned with NYC mayor Mamdani, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El‑Sayed, and several other Democratic candidates, claims that Jewish Americans who feel any affinity for Israel or support the Jewish state somehow invite violence onto themselves. He presents this as normal and even sensible. Many immediately condemned the remark as incitement and as an ignorant portrayal of Jews as responsible for the violence directed at them at a time when hate crimes are at historic highs. Others rushed to defend him, insisting he was not antisemitic and was merely criticizing “the Zionists,” even though the framing clearly targeted Jewish Americans as an entire group. What stands out is the double standard applied only to Jews. Do Palestinian Americans or Muslim Americans who support Hamas, a Jihadist and fascist organization, invite violence upon themselves? Do Muslims who advocate for Sharia Law, including interpretations used to justify beheadings, mass rape, and other crimes against humanity, invite violence upon themselves? Do Chinese Americans who do not speak out against Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs or Tibetans invite violence upon themselves? Do leftists or Iranians who support the Islamic Republic, the Cuban regime, or Maduro’s Venezuela invite violence upon themselves? Do Lebanese Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, who support Hezbollah invite violence upon themselves? Do Yemeni Americans who support the Houthis and their brutal, regressive ideology invite violence upon themselves? The list can continue, yet one truth is unmistakable. There is a fixation on treating diaspora and American Jews as uniquely deserving of violence or hate crimes because of their perceived or actual views on a foreign policy issue. No other community is subjected to this logic. Never allow anyone to convince you that this has anything to do with the Palestinian people, their cause, or genuine pro‑Palestine advocacy.

Gestapo in Norway? At the urging of several "pro‑Palestine" activists who recognized me and didn't like my presence, including individuals who openly supported Hamas at the Arendal Week political festival in Norway, Norwegian secret police stopped me and my friends, including three prominent Jewish advocates, and questioned us as if we were a threat. They took my ID and pressed me on "why I was well known," what my political affiliations were, and why I was attending the festival. I explained that I was a speaker with a fully booked event the day before, here to talk about a new book about Gaza and Hamas I had just put out, and provided clear information that should have dispelled any "suspicion." Despite our cooperation, the interrogation continued with increasingly inappropriate questions. I became frustrated, offended, alarmed, and demanded my ID back and an end to the detention. The Norwegians I was with described how they've never seen or experienced anything like that in their country before and were shocked by the questions they were asked by the secret police, presuming that they were criminals. Shortly afterward, some of the same "pro-Palestine" activists, or Hamas agents, appeared on my social media to leave hostile comments about my presence at the festival, making it obvious that they had filed the false report that triggered the police action. If Norwegian authorities are willing to behave like political enforcers toward a Gazan American and three Scandinavian Jews who are simply trying to engage with diverse audiences, all because pro‑resistance agitators want to sabotage my efforts to speak and share my work, it reveals a bleak reality about the current discourse on Israel and Palestine. It shows how deeply troubling and undemocratic influences are shaping perceptions and policy, driven by actors who reject pluralism and seek enforced conformity. Norway spends billions of its taxpayer money promoting democracy, freedom, and liberal values abroad. It should start by respecting genuine freedom of speech at home rather than becoming a tool for supporters of a foreign extremist movement. If this is how Norway wants to treat political dissenters and its Jewish community, then shame on it 💔

Some of the messaging coming out of the College Democrats of America @CollegeDems convention in Washington, DC (the college arm of the Democratic National Committee) reflects a party drifting toward far‑left positions while advancing increasingly incoherent core platforms. Economic populism dominated the event, but so did some troubling personalities elevated to center stage to promote hate‑filled, anti‑American, divisive, and destructive agendas, the kind of figures one would expect Democratic leadership would want to avoid showcasing at a premier gathering for young voters. One such figure is Hasan Piker, a pro‑Hamas, pro‑Houthi, pro-Hezbollah, anti‑American, self‑described communist and rage‑bait provocateur who has incited hate, misinformation, and violence against me personally and many other Americans. He has repeatedly expressed support for acts of international terrorism, whether the attacks of 9/11, Hamas’s massacre on October 7, or other violence targeting the United States and its allies. As the Democratic Party scrambles to reinvent itself amid shifting voter dynamics, surrendering the party’s direction to extremist leftism is the worst possible move. Allowing DSA‑aligned activists and their recent political wins to hijack the narrative, the platform, and the trajectory of the party, heading into the midterms and the 2028 presidential cycle, will only deepen the crisis. Nothing good comes from indulging college students who have abandoned learning in favor of emotionalism, who staged ineffective encampments that divided the country, or who champion radical policies that are unachievable at scale and rooted in a sustained effort to delegitimize the United States, Western civilization, and basic democratic norms. It is a profound irony that Democrats are embracing the very people who helped produce the party’s 2024 electoral losses, and that some Democratic officials treat me as an “outlier” simply because I refuse to adopt increasingly popular extreme and ideologically driven positions. I say all of this as a concerned Democrat who wants the party to succeed, not self‑destruct.

Hamas is a genocidal cult: Recently uncovered documents from slain Hamas leader and October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar reveal the depth of his depravity and the extent to which he knowingly steered Gaza toward catastrophe. Handwritten notes drafted a year before the attack show Sinwar anticipated a ferocious Israeli counter‑offensive, even speculating, in his own words, about the possibility of an Israeli nuclear retaliation on Gaza. Despite uncertainty over whether Iran or Hezbollah would join the fight, he outlined a plan to deploy up to ten thousand fighters from Gaza to seize Israeli towns, expel civilians, hold hostages, and wage what he described as a life‑or‑death battle. These notes align with earlier documents from Sinwar’s archive detailing his intent to use extreme brutality to maximize terror, fear, and psychological trauma among Israelis. The implications are stark. Hamas’s crimes against humanity were not only committed against Israelis but also against the Palestinian people. The fascist organization employed ISIS‑grade tactics, fully aware that the attack went far beyond any military objective and could provoke overwhelming Israeli retaliation. Sinwar’s delusions were matched only by his ignorance: Israel does not need nuclear weapons to inflict devastating harm on Gaza. Yet Hamas deliberately launched an intentionally genocidal assault, predicting, and banking on, an Israeli survival response that would devastate Gaza and then be weaponized for global sympathy. In doing so, Hamas sacrificed 2.3 million Palestinians for a propaganda strategy. This alone should compel the immediate, unconditional, and unequivocal rejection of Hamas by anyone claiming to support Palestinian rights. It should erase any doubt that Islamist extremists pose an existential threat to Palestinian survival, freedom, and the possibility of building a society not dragged into wars its rulers knowingly design to be catastrophic. When you are the weaker party facing the most far‑right government in Israel’s history, your obligation is to safeguard your people, not gamble their lives on apocalyptic fantasies. Hamas’s failure to do so is a betrayal worthy of absolute condemnation. It forfeits any Hamas claim to political relevance and demands that those responsible for October 7 be treated as traitors and murderers of their own people.

The ceaseless headlines about Hamas “ending its government” in Gaza and “preparing to give up control” are yet another ruse and a nothing‑burger dressed up as a concession by the terror group, which has zero intention of relinquishing real power or disarming. Similar announcements like this have happened frequently in the past. The resignation of the head of the so‑called “Emergency Committee,” or Hamas’s post–October 7 governing façade, is simply the removal of a figurehead. His duties have already been quietly assumed by another “temporary” Hamas administrator while everyone pretends to wait for NCAG, the incoming Technocratic Committee, to take over. Hamas has already announced that its administrative and technical staff will continue working until NCAG arrives, fully aware that the new transitional governing body will lack the capacity, personnel, or infrastructure to run Gaza. This is Hamas’s plan: recycle its current/existing apparatus into the new administration expected to emerge from the Trump Administration’s transitional process overseen by the Board of Peace. What we’re seeing is the sloppy rollout of a long‑predicted strategy: Hamas shifting from direct control to indirectly reigning, Hezbollah‑style. It’s cheaper, it shields the group from accountability, and it allows new civilian faces to absorb public anger while Hamas retains decisive control over every meaningful lever of power in the Gaza Strip. None of this resembles disarmament. Hamas’s al‑Qassam Brigades are working nonstop to repair tunnel networks and rebuild munitions stockpiles using unexploded ordnance and Israeli bombs from two years of war. Yet the media coverage of this non‑event has already reframed Hamas as cooperative, reasonable, even constructive; a narrative shift that obscures Hamas’s role as the primary obstacle to Gaza’s recovery. And this is landing successfully and working well for Hamas; not only with outlets, voices, and platforms who are typically softer on the terror group, but even in some mainstream political discourse, where some are treating this as tantamount to the initiation of disarmament or the start of Phase II of the ceasefire. The timing is no coincidence: this move by Hamas comes one week after the Board of Peace met in Cyprus and agreed to pursue “Plan B,” the approach I’ve long advocated: moving Gaza’s civilian population across the “Yellow Line” and draining Hamas of access to resources and human shields it relies on. Ultimately, Hamas “dissolving its government” will be judged by simple metrics like whether Gazans can share posts on Facebook without being tortured, beaten, or dragged into hospital interrogation rooms, abuses that continued from October 7 until just last week. Until that changes, the headlines are theater, and Hamas’s grip in Gaza remains intact.

Learning from Jewish Diversity: Over the past few weeks, the fractures within Jewish, Israeli, Zionist, and pro‑Israel circles have been impossible to miss. Religious, political, ideological, organizational, and strategic divides have erupted into open accusations: some are “too extreme,” others “too soft on Israel’s critics,” “reckless,” “undiplomatic,” “not pro‑Israel enough,” “sabotaging the cause,” or even “endangering Jewish safety.” Whatever one thinks of these claims, the reality is clear: Jewish communities and Israeli society contain a wide spectrum of socio‑religious and political diversity. Across that spectrum, there is space, sometimes narrow, sometimes wide, for people to express their unique identities, their Judaism, and their individual politics. The communal infrastructure is vast and enviable: JCCs, Federations, JCRCs, Hillel, Atid, AIPAC, Israel Policy Forum, J‑Street, JVP, the World Zionist Organization, ZOA, ICC, AJC, ADL, Birthright, and dozens more. Add to that the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox movements, plus the full range of political organizations in both the U.S. and Israel. This is not a monolith; it is a sprawling ecosystem. That is precisely why simplistic labels like “Zionist” obscure far more than they reveal. And it is why I often find myself wishing that Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Americans had anything comparable. Instead, there are fewer than a handful of national organizations, political and student alike, that enforce near‑total conformity on the Israel and Palestine discourse, despite the fact that Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Americans hold a wide range of views on Hamas, Gaza, Israel, peace, pragmatism, the U.S., and belonging. One of my deepest frustrations with certain Jewish groups of a particular political orientation is the role they expect me to play as someone from Gaza. Consciously or not, some want me to perform the part of the Palestinian victim who reinforces their own narratives. They recoil when I speak about Palestinian failures, Hamas’s catastrophic impact on Gaza, or my efforts to build bridges with center‑right Jewish and Israeli audiences. To them, these points “distract” from the larger story of Israeli wrongdoing. And if my words are cited by conservative pro‑Israel voices, that becomes the ultimate offense: “tokenization,” even though anti‑Israel activists routinely cite these same groups when convenient. The result has been predictable: invitations withdrawn, doors quietly closed, and participation discouraged. I failed to play the role they had scripted for me; a victim to be wielded in their internal communal battles. And for that, I was sidelined.

The Israel Collapse Industrial Complex: Since Hamas’s October 7th attack, a new genre of pseudo “political analysis” entertainment has flooded social media and YouTube in particular, about Israel’s “impending collapse,” or its inevitable destruction, doom, and the end of the Jewish state. YouTube serves me daily suggestions of highly produced videos, with ads, of various content creators, including those in Qatar who, during the Iranian bombardment of Doha just a few weeks ago, made a slick video about Israel’s imminent collapse, which is now a prolific theme across the “pro-Palestine” activist communities. Journalists, academics, advocates, politicians, humanitarians, students, social media influencers, aspiring figures, and vast numbers of diaspora Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians, and “allied” communities consume this content and use it to form their opinions and worldviews on how to think and speak about this issue. What’s incredibly disturbing is that this is the third iteration of this fantasy and the associated imaginative hopes, all of which have been at the core of the Palestinian people’s destruction and perpetual suffering for 80 years. It began with the pan-Arabists and nationalists who failed miserably, then with the Islamists of the past thirty years, and now, with a new mutation that’s made up of the intersectionality left, elements of the right, “wokesters,” ignorant Arabs and Muslims, clueless Westerners, malevolent grifters, and opportunists. I grew up in Gaza with Hamas’s prophecies, including those of the group’s founder, Ahmed Yassin, that Israel would collapse by 2020 or 2028, and listening to Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood figure Tareq Al-Suwaidan saying that prophecies predicted “Jews having a state for 80 years” after which it’ll collapse. The Palestinian people have been sold fiction time and again, by different ideologies, death merchants, failed nationalists, and others who used this cause to grift and achieve personal gain and glory. The last thing Palestinians need is another iteration of this delusional fantasy to keep the next generation trapped in radicalization, Jihad, violence, and hatred. It should be clear to everyone by now. Israel is here to stay. Israel is not going anywhere. There will be no erasure of the Jewish State. There will be no mass killing, deportation, conversion, or forced subjugation of millions of Jewish Israelis. Instead, what is needed is a radically pragmatic understanding of how both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis can be part of this land, make peace, achieve mutually beneficial arrangements, and reject the notion that either one is going to destroy the other. Do not be a participant in or consumer of the Israel destruction industrial complex if you actually care about the Palestinian people – be a builder and champion a future defined by what you stand for and want to see, not just by what you are opposed to and stand against.

A week after an investigation exposed the sexual abuse and exploitation of desperate and aid-seeking Palestinian women in Gaza, who face the threat from Hamas, the aid system, and societal neglect, major outlets and “pro-Palestine” activist groups ignored it entirely. Instead of addressing the findings, many dismissed the reporting, defended Hamas, or simply looked away. Now, however, a Guardian story alleging sexual offenses by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank is receiving widespread attention, commentary, and engagement. The issue isn’t whether sexual harassment and abuse by Israelis occurs; it undoubtedly has. The problem is the stark double standard: silence when Palestinians harm Palestinians, outrage only when Israel is the perpetrator. Nearly 90% of Gaza’s 2.2 million people have been displaced, many losing homes, income, and basic security. In such conditions, vulnerable women and children are at obvious risk of exploitation. Yet their sexual abuse and suffering drew no meaningful response from “pro‑Palestine” activists, human‑rights groups, international bodies, or governments. The timing of the Guardian piece, just days after the Daily Mail’s investigation into sexual abuse and early marriages in Gaza, suggests an effort to redirect attention back to Israeli wrongdoing rather than confront serious, internal problems in Gaza. It functions as a way to deflect from sexual offenses committed by Hamas and others, and to shield those responsible from scrutiny.

The past two weeks have presented a series of challenges, prompting me to step back and take stock, away from social media and the general public. The war with Iran has revealed deeply disturbing trends and realities about how many people are unable to have nuanced thoughts or to exercise and compartmentalize critical thinking that separates their disagreements from the current administration, with overt support for the despicable Iranian Regime. Hamas in Gaza has been allowed to hold two million Palestinians as hostages, killing, torturing, and disappearing people, and preventing any progress toward rehabilitation and reconstruction. Israeli settler violence is out of control in the West Bank, and many seem perfectly fine with it. The state of “pro-Palestine” activism is in an embarrassing disarray, with the Palestinian cause in the diaspora being championed by the worst possible combination of extremists, agents of hatred and chaos, close-minded, highly unintelligent people, and promoters of terrorism, violence, antisemitism, and false narratives. There is a never-ending cacophony of noise, unenlightened voices, and threats that come my way, always requiring security or the involvement of authorities to speak at events or just carry on. There is also a never-ending stream of really unconvincing, dumb commentary by supposed experts, journalists, and activists, whose relevance relies on vomiting continuous trash that keeps masquerading as helpful insights. Then there is Washington and its brilliant culture, where many fake, uncompelling people act as backstabbing wolves, always hiding in sheep’s clothing. The most consequential city in the world is populated by a large number of government, NGO, and academic leftovers who contributed to the disastrous US foreign policies that brought our country to where it is today. Though I believe in my work and I am ruthlessly focused on seeing progress towards a better pathway forward, the truth of the matter is that every single day consists of dealing with a Hamas-controlled Gaza, a Smotrich / Ben Gvir-dominated Israeli government, a confused and hesitant US administration, hopelessly useless and destructive “pro-Palestine” communities, and a large number of Arab and Muslim Americans living in parallel universes either totally disengaged from life in the Western world or fully enmeshed in the most destructive social and political positions that make working with them nearly impossible now. One of my chief struggles is that, in an effort to reach unreachable audiences, I have pulled back on some of my harsh critiques and my desire to be brutally honest and transparent about my thoughts, truths, feelings, observations, assessments, analyses, and commentary. This has been especially true since arriving in Washington and creating the Realign For Palestine project, which is no longer just about what I think but about the bigger picture. And in that sense, I miss being able to truly speak my mind without “offending” people I am trying to build bridges with, but often appear so uninterested and unwilling to engage. However, in that spirit, I have decided to go forward and continue sharing my thoughts online and in person without holding back. My goal remains to be constructive and a builder, not a destroyer. However, when one builds, this sometimes requires tearing down unhelpful narratives and structures that hinder progress and growth. Whether you are “pro-Palestine,” “pro-Israel,” “pro-Trump,” “pro-Iran, “pro-Gulf,” or anything else, the only way to defend your position and views is through evidence or logical argumentation, not emotions or mis/disinformation. My top priority right now is exposing Hamas and focusing on how they have played a horrendous role in destroying the Gaza Strip, eroding Palestinian values, decimating the Palestinian people, and proving that anyone who supports them is a hateful, anti-Palestinian fascist.