Hildy

Husband, Father of two kids. Lifelong Cleveland Indians/Guardians fan

[Hildy @hildy_Ohio]

Props to @CWRU1stAmClinic and @PublicCitizen for your defense of the 1st amendment. The @BeachwoodOH wasted thousands of $$$ to argue an unconstitutional case. Beachwood should be ashamed they were a party to such a terrible action.

[First Amendment Clinic at CWRU School of Law @CWRU1stAmClinic]

NEWS: The Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court has denied the Beachwood Police Chief's motion in her defamation case seeking discovery into the identities of psuedonymous commentators, finding that they (including our client) engaged in protected speech.

https://t.co/90yZ4WLjXu

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

Countries that expelled or forced out nearly their entire ancient Jewish populations after 1948:

🇮🇶Iraq
🇾🇪Yemen
🇱🇾Libya
🇸🇾Syria
🇪🇬Egypt
🇩🇿Algeria
🇹🇳Tunisia
🇲🇦Morocco
🇮🇷Iran (post-1979)

850,000 Jewish refugees. No dedicated UN agency.

The majority rebuilt their lives in Israel. Their descendants form the plurality of its population today.

The world forgot on purpose.

[Adam Fisher @AdamRFisher]

Never ask someone if they "accept Israel’s right to exist.”

Ask them if they "accept Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people."

The first question is easily dodged by ideologues:

a) "No country has a right to exist," or;

b) "Yes, as a democratic country that doesn't show a preference for any one people or religion."

The second question gets to the heart of the dispute.

For Western anti-Zionists and communists, the objection is to the Jews as a people entitled to self-determination. And the idea of a Jewish State that favors Jews.

So when they say they object to any "ethno-state," ask them whether they similarly reject countries constituted as the national homes of particular peoples, such as Croatia, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Greece, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania & Albania.

And when they say they object to any country that shows a "preference for a religion," ask whether they object to the more than 80 countries that either have an official religion or give preferential treatment to one, including the UK, Denmark, Greece, Spain and Argentina. Or the 27 countries that have Islam as their official religion.

When they backtrack a little and say they object to Israel privileging Jewish immigration ask them whether they similarly object to Germany privileging ethnic German immigration, Armenia privileging ethnic Armenian immigration, or Greece privileging ethnic Greek immigration?

When they narrow it down further to objecting to not allowing the descendants of Palestinian refugees to immigrate, ask them whether a similar hereditary right should be granted to the descendants of war refugees from all 20th century wars?

When they change course and say “Israel is an apartheid state,” ask them what rights are denied to Israel’s 2m Arab citizens, who are prominent in medicine, academia, sport and business?

When they shift focus to the West Bank and say Israel shouldn’t rule over West Bank Palestinians without making them citizens, ask them when was the last time Palestinians demanded Israeli citizenship?

Ask them whether they know that more than half of the West Bank Palestinians (1.5 million) live under the non-democratic Palestinian Authority.

Ask them whether they know another 400k Palestinian residents live in East Jerusalem, where they are entitled to Israeli health insurance, National Insurance benefits, education, employment rights, access to Israeli courts, freedom of movement within Israel, and to vote and run in municipal elections.

Yes, Israel and the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) present complicated historical, legal and security questions.

One can criticize and oppose government policies without opposing Jewish self-determination, which since 1948 has been realized in the State of Israel.

Most likely the person you are speaking to really doesn’t like the idea of a Jewish State, but hasn’t yet settled on the reason. When the objection comes first, the rationale is flexible.

[Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸 @JacobALinker]

E1 is Israeli in the Taba offer which Arafat later acknowledged he ought to have said yes to.

It's also assigned to Israel in the 1995 Beilin-Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) framework agreement.

E1 is a massively overhyped issue. It wouldn't change much at all.

[facts about @destinationXIX]

One of the most persistent mistakes in Western discussion of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is treating Palestinian radicalism as a tiny fringe that ordinary Palestinians are desperately trying to escape.

However, the facts on the ground simply does not support that comforting story.

After decades of institutionalized incitement, rejectionism and glorification of “resistance”, radical ideas have become mainstream enough that any serious peace policy has to confront them.

And perhaps the strangest part is whom the West has chosen to call the Palestinian “moderates”.

Sure, compared with Hamas, the Palestinian Authority is moderate. But that is a remarkably low bar. When the benchmark for “moderation” is simply being less radical than a jihadist organization that carried out October 7, the word tells us almost nothing about them. Let's examine the evidence.

Oslo II did not merely give the Palestinians territory and self-government. It imposed reciprocal obligations. Article XXII required Israel and the Palestinian leadership to “foster mutual understanding and tolerance”, abstain from incitement and hostile propaganda, and take legal measures against incitement within their jurisdictions. The security provisions also committed the parties to preventing hostile acts and terrorism.

Yet the PA spent decades building precisely the opposite culture.

Consider education. An EU-commissioned study by Germany’s Georg Eckert Institute examined Palestinian Authority textbooks and documented antisemitic narratives, glorification of violence and examples portraying violence against Israelis as legitimate resistance. Terrorist Dalal al-Mughrabi - the commander of the 1978 Coastal Road massacre - is presented as a model of self-sacrificing “resistance”. Maps frequently present the entire territory between the Jordan and Mediterranean as Palestine, without Israel.

Think about what that means.

The supposedly "moderate" Palestinian government - not Hamas - has educated generations of children in a national narrative in which Israel can disappear from the map, terrorists become heroes and violence against Israelis becomes “resistance”.

This is the institution Western governments routinely propose as the foundation of a future Palestinian state.

And then there is what became known as “Pay for Slay.”

Mahmoud Abbas announced in 2025 that the old prisoner-payment system would be replaced by a needs-based welfare system.

Yet Palestinian Media Watch has continued documenting payments afterward. In May 2026, it reported that the PA Ministry of Finance itself paid 1,500-shekel grants to what Palestinian officials called the three “fighting sectors”: prisoners, the wounded and families of “martyrs.”

Earlier in 2026, PMW also published notices from the PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs instructing released prisoners - including prisoners released in the 2025 hostage deals - how to register banking information to receive salaries.

So consider the extraordinary absurdity of our terminology:
This is the “moderate” Palestinian Authority.
The radicals are Hamas, we are told.

The moderates are the government that teaches children to glorify terrorists, continues payments connected to prisoners and “martyrs”, refuses to abandon the demand for millions of Palestinians to “return” into Israel to change the demographics to a no longer Jewish state, and presides over official media that still publishes antisemitism.

And I mean still.

On August 12, 2026 - just days ago - Palestinian Media Watch reported that the PA’s official daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, published an antisemitic tirade blaming Jews themselves for historical hatred and persecution against them, attributing it to their supposedly “disgraceful behavior”.

Not Hamas.
Not Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The official newspaper of the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority.

That raises a rather uncomfortable question:
If this is Palestinian moderation, what exactly does Palestinian radicalism look like?

@EinatWilf has spent years asking another question that exposes the problem beautifully.
She challenges people who accuse her of generalizing about Palestinians to do something remarkably simple:

Find Palestinians who will publicly say, in their own voice, that they want peace alongside a Jewish state - and who explicitly understand that this means abandoning the Palestinian “right of return” into Israel.

Not “two states” followed by millions of descendants of refugees violently charging into Israel.

Not a "Palestinian" Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza plus demographic transformation of Israel into another Arab-majority Palestinian state.

A Palestinian state beside a permanently Jewish state.
Wilf says she has been issuing that challenge for roughly twenty years.

People either come back with nobody - or with the same four or five courageous Palestinians she already knows and promotes.

That distinction matters because Western diplomats constantly tell Israelis that Palestinians have accepted the two-state solution.

But accepting a Palestinian state next to Israel while simultaneously demanding a hereditary “right of return” for millions of Palestinians into Israel is not accepting two states for two peoples.

It is demanding one Palestinian state immediately - and reserving a mechanism for eventually transforming the Jewish one into another Palestinian state.
Wilf calls this the War of Return.
And the Palestinian leadership has never meaningfully prepared its population to give it up.

Is this just the Palestinian authority government?
The numbers measuring public opinion after October 7 are extraordinary.

According to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research - a Palestinian polling organization, not an Israeli advocacy group - in its October 2025 survey:
53% of Palestinians said Hamas was correct to launch October 7.

Not in October 2023, before Palestinians knew what the war would cost them. Then the numbers were much higher.

Two years later.

After Gaza had been devastated.
After displacement, destruction and enormous suffering.
A majority still said launching October 7 was the correct decision.

The figure was 59% in the West Bank and 44% in Gaza.

That West Bank - Gaza divide deserves far more attention than it receives.

The Palestinians who actually experienced the consequences of Hamas rule and October 7 were less supportive of October 7 than Palestinians living under the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority, but the concern was never about the violence against Jews - just the cost of the inevitable Israeli response.

The same poll found that 60% were satisfied with Hamas’s performance during the war - 66% in the West Bank and 51% in Gaza.

And then comes perhaps the most revealing number:
Palestinians were asked whether Hamas should disarm in order to permanently end the Gaza war.

69% said no.
In the West Bank, opposition reached an astonishing 87%.

Only 29% supported Hamas disarming.

This demolishes one of the most comforting Western explanations for Palestinian militancy: that Palestinians simply want the fighting and “occupation” to end.

Here they were presented with precisely that bargain:
Disarm Hamas and permanently end the war.
More than two-thirds rejected it.

This demonstrates the depth of the radicalization problem.

Even after October 7, Hamas remains electorally competitive. Among Palestinians who said they would actually participate in elections, Hamas received 40% in the West Bank and 49% in Gaza, versus 29% and 32% for Fatah respectively.

And when asked about political methods, 41% supported returning to armed confrontation and an armed intifada.

In virtually any normal society, having more than four out of every ten people endorse renewed armed confrontation would itself constitute an enormous radicalization crisis.

Meanwhile, only 31% supported a political agreement explicitly described as ending the war and "occupation", creating a demilitarized Palestinian state and normalizing relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Two-thirds opposed it.
In the West Bank, support fell to just 22%.
So what exactly are Israelis supposed to conclude?

For thirty years, Western diplomacy has often proceeded from an assumption that there is a basically moderate Palestinian society being prevented from making peace principally by Israeli policy.

But look at the evidence together.

The supposedly moderate government violates the spirit and obligations of Oslo not only by maintaining a political culture of incitement, but also by building a police force that has effectively become an army of around 70,000 personnel - far beyond the 10,000 permitted under the agreement.

Its education system glorifies terrorists.

Its official media continues publishing antisemitic rhetoric.

Payments associated with prisoners, wounded Palestinians and “martyrs” continue despite highly publicized promises of reform.

Its leadership will not tell its population that the “right of return” into Israel is over.

Only a tiny handful of Palestinian public figures appear willing to publicly articulate the essential compromise underlying genuine two-state peace: their state beside the Jewish state, not their state as a first stage toward replacing the Jewish state.

Meanwhile enormous portions of the population continue to support Hamas, oppose its disarmament, deny October 7 atrocities and regard the decision to launch October 7 as correct.

Perhaps we should finally stop pretending that tiny handful of Palestinian currently represent the dominant Palestinian political culture.

That cannot be solved by drawing another border on a map, or recognizing a non-existing state of “Palestine. If anything, that would make things worse.

You cannot build peace merely by creating a "Palestinian" state while leaving intact the ideology that teaches the next generation that Tel Aviv is occupied "Palestine", that terrorists are national heroes, that millions retain a right to settle inside Israel, and that Hamas should keep its weapons even when disarmament would end the war.

Germany did not become peaceful merely because World War II ended.
Japan did not become peaceful simply because somebody negotiated different borders.

The ideology that produced the war had to lose legitimacy.
The same principle applies here.

Palestinian statehood without Palestinian deradicalization does not solve the conflict. It risks giving the conflict sovereignty, borders, diplomatic recognition and an army.

If the international community genuinely wants a Palestinian state living peacefully beside Israel, the standard cannot simply be:
Give them a state and hope moderation follows.

It should be the reverse:
End government incitement.
Remove antisemitism and terrorist glorification from schools.
End payments and honors that reward terrorism.
Teach the truth about October 7.
Build institutions that punish terrorism rather than romanticize it.
Teach that Jews possess legitimate national rights too.
Publicly abandon the “right of return” into sovereign Israel.
And make acceptance of a permanent Jewish state - not its eventual disappearance - the foundation of Palestinian politics.

Then statehood can become the culmination of peace rather than another stage of the war.

Until the West is willing to acknowledge just how deep Palestinian radicalization has become - even inside the institutions it calls “moderate” - it will continue prescribing diplomatic solutions to an ideological problem.

[Hildy @hildy_Ohio]

@JL_Baseball I’m in 117. It’s been fun to watch!!!

[Brianna Wu @BriannaWu]

Here what Abdul El-Sayed’s sister, a professor at the University of Chicago, had to say about October 7th.

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Bottom line: they’ve spent three years shrieking about genocide, backed by academic fraud. Now it’s collapsing, they’re throwing smoke to cover tracks.

The Lancet papers claiming hundreds of thousands dead, the IPC and UN panels loaded with anti-Israel activists claiming famine (now conclusively disproven) and genocide, made-up testimony and faked x-rays by doctors taken to Gaza by a charity connected to an actual terror group, the staged vids, AI images and beheaded doll photos put out by Hamas themselves… all bullshit. All of it. The “Gaza genocide” is the greatest hoax of all time, enabled by social media, antisemitism, and gullibility.

Now we know that the population of Gaza *increased* since the war began and a comparatively tiny proportion of non-combatants died. What you are seeing now from people like Mehdi is nothing but rhetorical sleight of hand to keep the hoax going, even as it falls apart.

[Aizenberg @Aizenberg55]

🧵Pro-Hamas @DropSiteNews reported an IDF strike on the Cairo School's prayer room in Gaza on July 25, 2025 as killing civilians only.

But Hamas confirmed the TRUE target, at minimum: Commander Muhammad Fayyad. EVERY Gaza school strike has been misreported this way. Detail: 1/

[Hildy @hildy_Ohio]

@LockedGuardians @JL_Baseball @jeffMLBdraft where has this team been?!?!?!?!

[Medium Buying @MediumBuying]

57 years ago today/tomorrow --

Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface of the Moon and Armstrong became the first person to step onto the Moon's surface

The Apollo 11 Moon landing is considered the most-watched TV broadcast of all time with an estimated viewership of 125-150 million in the United States and 650 million around the world

[Hildy @hildy_Ohio]

@andrewwimer Great webinar. Thanks!

[Jonah Platt @JonahPlatt]

Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan says he can debunk Israel's defenders in under 60 seconds.

His method? Reading a list of names really fast.
That's not an argument. That's a filibuster with a bibliography.

Fine. Start the clock.

Here's the problem with his fifty sources: it's one source wearing fifty costumes.

The UN cites Amnesty. Amnesty cites a different UN report. That one cites the BBC. The BBC cites UNRWA. UNRWA cites the Gaza Ministry of Health. The Gaza Ministry of Health is Hamas.

Even a member of his own genocide scholars association has a name for this: "citation washing."
Congratulations. You just traced fifty "independent" voices back to one terrorist press office.

Now, a few of his star witnesses.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars? $30 and you're in. Emperor Palpatine is a member. So is Cookie Monster.

Amnesty? Their own report — page 101 — calls the established legal standard too "cramped" to reach a genocide finding. The law as written wouldn't convict Israel, so they loosened the law.

B'Tselem said the quiet part louder — their report openly adopts "a broader analytical framework" than the legal definition. That's lawyer-speak for "we changed the rules."

The UN? The General Assembly passed 17 resolutions against Israel in 2024. Seven against the entire rest of the planet combined. North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia — one each. Sudan, where actual mass slaughter is happening right now? Zero.

And here's a name Mehdi will never read off his list: Alice Wairimu Nderitu.

The UN's own Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Their in-house expert. The one person whose entire job was answering this exact question. She looked at the evidence, looked at the law, and refused to call Gaza a genocide.

Her reward? "Hounded, day in, day out. Bullied, hounded, with protection from nobody." Her words. Then her contract quietly wasn't renewed.

She said the pressure to declare a genocide "never happened for any other war. Not for Ukraine, not for Sudan, not for Democratic Republic of Congo."
The UN's genocide expert said no — so the UN got a new genocide expert.

Oh, and one more name he forgot: the jihadist terrorist group Hamas. The original proponent of the genocide libel — the source his fifty sources trace back to. Somehow they didn't make the list. Neither did any of the scholars, military experts, former hostages, survivors, and millions of common-sense humans united in rejecting the claim.

Instead of rattling off a list of "because they said so," how about evidence? Millions of warning leaflets. Humanitarian corridors. Polio vaccines. 130 babies born a day. The Jewish birth rate during the Holocaust was statistically zero. That's what genocide looks like.

Fifty sources quoting each other isn't fifty sources. It's an echo chamber with footnotes.

So, Mehdi's big question: Who do I believe?
Wrong question. It's not about Who. It's about What.

I believe incontrovertible evidence. Population data. Millions of tons of aid. Hard casualty numbers. Weighed against the actual legal definition — not a list of people and organizations quoting each other.

Because I fact-check.
Time.

[AG @AGHamilton29]

Tell me you don’t know anything about history…

Look up Black September. Jordan had to actively fight and then expel most of the Palestinian leadership and 20K militants + families after continuous terrorism and attempts to overthrow the government. They expelled then to Lebanon, where the same group continued their terrorism and violence.

Only after that was Jordan’s government able to create a reasonably peaceful society and thus able to also pursue co-exist with Israel.

The Israeli Arabs have the same DNA but live peacefully within Israel. But they receive real educations and focus on the well being of their families instead of pursuing terrorism for the sake of destroying Israel. That’s the difference and the main reason why the Palestinians in Gaza/West Bank don’t have their own state yet.

[HonestReporting @HonestReporting]

1/
Stop the presses: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) @pressfreedom has launched a full review of its "journalists killed in Gaza" list - and just showed board member @Nikasoonshiong the door.

This didn't happen by accident.

It happened because HonestReporting helped put them in an untenable position. 🧵

[Hildy @hildy_Ohio]

@nut_history Jose Ramirez!! #11

[Eugene Kontorovich @EVKontorovich]

A reminder: there were no Israeli soldiers in Lebanon when Hezbollah joined in Hamas's genocidal attack in the days after Oct. 7th, and depopulated the northern section of Israel. Leaving Lebanon with Hezbollah emboldened and set to receive billions from a newly-flush Iran is not possible, and would itself lead to more war.

[Open Source Intel @Osint613]

Marco Rubio, Senate floor, September 2015

“I do want to be recorded for history’s purposes, for I know what is going to happen with regards to this, if it goes through. Iran will immediately use the money it is receiving in sanctions relief to begin to build up its conventional capabilities. It will establish the most dominant military power in the region outside of the United States and it will raise the price of us operating in the region. They’re going to build anti-access capabilities, rockets capable of destroying our aircraft carriers and ships, continue to build these swift boats that are able to come on us, these fast boats that are able to swarm our naval assets, and they’ll make it harder and harder for U.S. troops to be in the region.

“They’ll also work with other terrorist groups in the region to target American service men and women, and they may or may not deny that they’re involved but they will target us and raise the price of our presence in the Middle East until they hope to completely pull us out of that region.

“They’ll also continue to build long-range missiles, missiles capable of reaching the United States. Those are not affected by this deal, and they’ll continue to build them as they have been doing.

“And then, at some point in the near future, when the time is right, they will build a nuclear weapon, and they will do so because at that point they will know that they have become immune, that we will no longer be able to strike their nuclear program because the price of doing so will be too high.

“This is not just a work of imagination. It exists in the world today. It’s called North Korea, where a lunatic possesses dozens of nuclear weapons and a long-range rocket that can already reach the United States. And we cannot do anything about it. An attack on North Korea today would result in an attack on Tokyo or Seoul or Guam or Hawaii or California. And so the world must now live with a lunatic in possession of nuclear weapons.

“And this is the goal Iran has as well, to reach a point where they become immune to any sort of credible military threat because the price of a military strike would be too high. And then they become an established nuclear weapons power. And never in the history of the world has such a regime ever possessed weapons so capable of destruction. Iran is led by a Supreme Leader who is a radical Shia cleric with an apocalyptic vision of the future. He is not a traditional geopolitical actor who makes decisions on the basis of borders or simply history or because of ambitions. He has a religious apocalyptic vision of the future, one that calls for triggering a conflict between the non-Muslim world and the Muslim world, one that he feels especially obligated to trigger. And he’s going to possess nuclear weapons?

“This is the world that we are on the verge of leaving our children to inherit, and perhaps we ourselves will have to share in.

“So I want to be recorded for history’s purposes, if nothing else, to say that those of us who oppose this deal understood where it would lead, and we are making a terrible mistake. And I fear that passage of this deal will make it even harder for us to prevent it.

“And I hope there’s still time for us to change our minds, but here’s the good news: Iran may have a Supreme Leader, but America does not. In this nation we have a republic, and soon we will have new leaders, perhaps in this chamber, but also in the executive branch. And I pray that on their first day in office they will reverse this deal and reimpose the sanctions and back them up with a credible threat of military force, or history will condemn us for not doing what needed to be done at this critical moment in the world’s history.”