Avi Stiefel

I can't believe I am actually doing this

[Rachel Riley MBE 💙 @RachelRileyRR]

This is truly shocking. Most people aren’t aware the true state of what’s happening in some schools but the speed of decline has been staggering.

Telling a 5 year old they’re a baby killer?

Teaching small children to hate? Rotten.

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

Thank you for this. Truly. I hesitated to even reply since you demonstrated your quality of professionalism and approach to research fully for all readers. But…

You don’t know me, and I don’t know you beyond what any reader can glean from a simple Google search. But your unsubstantiated article, combined with your unprofessional and toxic responses here and those to Andrew Fox, speak volumes.

Thank you for further clarifying your “Breaking the Silence” style of investigative journalism. Reliance on anonymous soldiers reached through personal connections, paired with extraordinary dependence on your own personal experiences in battles that are not analogous to Gaza.

Again, you clearly don’t know me or the details of my research. But to discount it as being “hosted,” as if that somehow makes your work more credible, is ironic. I too used personal IDF connections from prior research in Israel, but not to conduct anonymous interviews. I conducted hundreds of attributable interviews and embedded with numerous IDF units in Gaza starting as early as December 2023. I interviewed multiple division, brigade, battalion, company, and platoon commanders in the midst of their battles. I visited command posts from company level to service level. I pursued a defined set of research questions and validated claims across multiple sources. Because I was given access you were not, or because you chose not to pursue that access in service of a predetermined narrative, does not change the fact that you are making sweeping assertions on limited data while leaning heavily on personal experience that does not map cleanly onto this conflict.

You also appear not to know my professional background. That should not matter for the validity of research or the evidentiary basis of claims, but your repeated appeals to personal authority do. Your statements, “I fought and commanded in urban combat… I fought house to house for five weeks in Fallujah… conducted hundreds of strikes,”to Fox and to me “You are a student of urban war… I have personally authorized hundreds of strikes. That gives us a very different perspective,” are presumptuous and unprofessional. I did in fact command in high intensity urban combat during two year long deployments to Iraq, including Kirkuk, Al Hawija, Baghdad, and Sadr City. But you will not see me using that experience as a substitute for evidence, as a cudgel to dismiss others, or as a license to make unsubstantiated claims about fundamentally different battles with radically different contexts and variables.

You also dismiss the judgments of senior military leaders from numerous countries, particularly the United States, who obtained access you did not and who, unlike anonymous sources, put their names to their assessments. You imply they merely saw what the IDF wanted them to see, as if they lack the professional competence to discern facts from interviews, briefings, terrain walks, operational patterns, and their own command experience. That presumption is offensive. These leaders did not simply provide quotations. They signed their names to formal assessments and reports. A small sample includes:

https://t.co/9nFTeGj82J

https://t.co/9QTpFUj84x

https://t.co/LGFSVb6yWX

But they are all fools, right? And you, relying on anonymous interviews, are the only one who uncovered the truth.

You also rely heavily on what reads like a romanticized version of the Second Battle of Fallujah while ignoring the decisive conditions that shaped it. Fallujah was a city from which approximately 85 to 95 percent of civilians had already evacuated, leaving an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 insurgents.

As General (ret.) Jim Rainey, Task Force 2-7 Commander said during my interview with him on the operating environment of the Second Battle of Fallujah:

“What was interesting is because of the effective messaging, IO campaign pressure that the Marines had put on Fallujah, coupled with some pretty effective humanitarian work, the general feeling was that the city was largely devoid of civilian population. Unlike when I fought in Najaf or Baghdad, where it was an intermix of friendly and enemy, the cordon was set, the innocent people had moved out of the city, and the people remaining were there to fight to the death. It had a last stand feel to it.”

Or the TF 2-7 FSO that described putting an artillery round in every vehicle in front of the main effort just to ensure it was not an IED.

Yet you emphasize having conducted “hundreds of strikes” and hundreds of collateral damage and proportionality assessments over five weeks. Understood.

Let’s be clear for readers. Fallujah and Mosul were not merely “urban battles.” They were urban battles conducted within counterinsurgency campaigns.

In Fallujah, U.S. and Iraqi forces fought to remove insurgents from an insurgent held city on behalf of the Iraqi government.

In Mosul, Iraqi forces and a coalition fought to defeat the Islamic State as a governing insurgent entity and to restore state authority over territory and population.

Even between these two battles, the rules of engagement, collateral damage estimates, and authorization authorities varied significantly, including across different phases of the Battle of Mosul itself.

In both cases, the campaign logic was counterinsurgency. The objective was the restoration of sovereign control, governance, and legitimacy.

Gaza is not that.

Gaza is not a counterinsurgency campaign.

And it matters because you repeatedly treat Fallujah and Mosul as interchangeable templates for Gaza. You draw direct comparisons on collateral damage estimate limits, proportionality assessments, and the definition of concrete military objectives, as if the presence of urban combat alone makes these battles analogous. It does not.

Urban warfare is the environment.

Counterterrorism is a method.

Counterinsurgency is a type of conflict defined by a specific political structure and objective.

Fallujah and Mosul sit squarely within COIN campaigns. Gaza does not.

Which brings us back to your claims of superior credibility. Conducting “hundreds of strikes” in a city where most civilians had already departed is not a credential. It is a critical context variable. If anything, it underscores why casually transferring conclusions from Fallujah to Gaza is analytically unsound.

Finally, when you dismiss basic facts in your responses to Andrew Fox, it reinforces a pattern of confident claims exceeding your data. You asserted:

- Egypt blocking civilian evacuation is not a factor. False.
- There is no proof of extensive tunnel networks and large scale IED emplacement. False.
- Every civilian death was investigated in Mosul and only the WCK incident was investigated in Gaza. False, and indicative of unfamiliarity with IDF legal and investigative processes.
- Israel was never in an existential battle in Gaza. False.

If your argument is that Gaza should be evaluated through the lens of Fallujah and Mosul, then you owe readers the discipline to compare like with like. Political structure, host nation partnership, feasibility of evacuation, insurgent size, composition, strength, capabilities, subterranean preparation, intelligence density, mission, and strategic objectives. You have not done that.

Instead, you have made sweeping assertions based on limited and anonymous inputs, then attempted to close debate by appealing to personal experience.

That is not research. It is rhetoric.

You were right on one point. I do have a vastly different perspective than you. I also appear to be working from a different dataset of urban warfare and civilian harm mitigation history and analysis. Call me a student. Call me a scholar. I consider myself both. Here are fourteen chapter length historical case studies I published, including Fallujah I, Fallujah II, Mosul, Hue, Gaza, Kyiv, etc. Perhaps they might help, or at least provide a template to doing your "research": https://t.co/msyJFLqr8D

[Keren Zelwer @KerenZelwer]

I’m still not sure that everyone understands the connection so I’ll say it again.

The Jewish victims of the Bondi attack who were honoured today in parliament are the same people who have been vilified by antizionists for over 2 years.

They are the same people for whom Randa Abdel Fattah denies the right to ‘cultural safety’.

They are the same people who extremist Islamic groups preach hate against, including Hizb Ut-Tahrir.

And they are the same people who ugly, hateful chants are directed at each time a pro Palestinian protest takes place.

So until the right to safety for the Jewish community is valued HIGHER than the right to direct hate against them ….words of condolence will be appreciated, but the violence will not end at Bondi.

Antizionism is a hate movement.
#bondi #antisemitism #Australia

[Fardad Farahzad | فرداد فرحزاد @FardadFarahzad]

The Iranian uprising has become an awkward dilemma for much of the left. It is openly pro-Western, unapologetically secular, and explicitly hostile to political Islam. There is no favored “exotic victim” to romanticize, no anti-American slogans to recycle, no colonial guilt to put to use and for that very reason, exposes how selective so many proclaimed solidarities really are.

[David Keyes @DavidMKeyes]

🚨 92 million Iranians simultaneously apply for Palestinian citizenship so someone might say a fucking word about what's happening to them

[Ofra Haza Stan Account @anaraintuitive]

Dear American Jewish groups,

On Oct 7th, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, they knew they could not defeat Israel in combat. Their aim, instead, was to defeat Israel in a war of disinfo. A global propaganda assault, that so defamed Israel and the Jewish people on the global stage, that Israel would be abandoned by all its allies.

They activated supporters around the globe to disseminate their propaganda, many of whom took to the streets or social media. They hoped to dehumanize Jews to such a degree in the global public imagination, that all violence enacted against Jews could be justified; all self defense by Jews from violence could be condemned.

The campaign was so massive and savvy that they managed to succeed in this effort with large swathes of the Western population.

Just like the Nazis of Germany had Big Lies, Antizionists of Palestine, also have Big Lies:

Genocide Libel
Apartheid Libel
Colonizer Libel

Antizionist libels are not critique. They are not analysis. They are not politics.

They are a hateful smear campaign.

Antizionism is a Jew Hate movement.

It is your responsibility to educate the public on this matter.

No one should be left wondering if the libels are true. No one should be waking up in the morning, asking themselves “is Israel committing a genocide in Gaza???”

Everyone should know that this is an antizionist hate trope. Not a credible accusation.

Jewish politicians like Scott Weiner should not suddenly create videos promoting Genocide Libel propaganda on behalf of the antizionist hate movement.

Every single Jew should know what antizionist libel is. That it’s Big Lies used to justify and incite violence against Jews.

This should be your central message. You should be educating as many people as possible. You need to get your act together. The onus is on Jewish groups to stop the antizionist hate movement. No one else will do it for us. We are running out of time on this.

@ADL @UJAfedNY @JGreenblattADL @SFJCRC @maazaction @LekhtNaya @adam_louis52328 @EinatWilf @StopAntisemites

[Jeffery Mead @the_jefferymead]

You know what’s interesting..?

If Israel limits press access in Gaza, it faces nonstop outrage.

Iran cuts internet access nationwide to slaughter its own citizens, and the response from those same people is silence.

The double standard is quite obvious and pathetic..

[Adam Louis-Klein @adam_louis52328]

Today we must look closely at the evolution of Islamist spectacle warfare, a strategy that continues to evade critique within our universities. The first stage was developed by Al-Qaeda and realized with 9/11: a media-saturated display of terror meant to dramatize Islamist power and Western vulnerability. That attack was theatrical in its staging, but it lacked the second stage that Hamas has now perfected.

We now see a two-stage model, precisely tailored to moralized logics of guilt, grievance, and victimhood. The first act is still one of sadistic violence—filmed murders, mutilations, livestreamed atrocities, all designed to terrorize and to project power through cruelty. But the second act is even more important: the calculated exploitation of civilian suffering. Through mediatized human sacrifice, disinformation, and the systematic infiltration and manipulation of human rights organizations, Hamas and other genocidal actors curate a spectacle of victimhood in which their own responsibility for suffering disappears.

[Terry Lee Watkins Jr. 王瑞民💜💙 @TerryWatkinsJr1]

I dont want to be this guy, but does no one notice that for the better part of last year we were inundated with news of an Israeli led Palestinian famine but it by no accounts has come to fruition?

Will there ever be some accountability on that?
I too was concerned mind you.

[Adam Louis-Klein @adam_louis52328]

A brief note on the claim that Jewish indigeneity is merely a form of “hasbara.” The term hasbara itself is an antizionist libel, used to strip Jews of credibility and to deny them the right to name their own oppression. It functions not as critique but as a means of delegitimating Jewish self-description, and is therefore best understood as a form of epistemic injustice.

The claim that Jewish conceptions of indigeneity are reactive, or merely a response to settler-colonial discourse, gets the history exactly backward. It was not Jewish return that adapted itself to settler-colonial theory. Rather, the exceptionalized application of settler-colonialism to Israel emerged in reaction to indigenous return itself. Fayez Sayegh’s 1965 intervention marks this reversal. Jewish peoplehood had to be rendered a fabrication in order to deny the rights of an indigenous people to their ancestral homeland.

On this account, the assertion of distinct nationhood within the territory is transformed into a form of “exclusive racism,” attributed to an ontologically alien people. What this achieved was a moral inversion in which return is described as colonialism, and indigeneity is denied by definition.

[Adam Louis-Klein @adam_louis52328]

What occurred in academia with the rise of antizionism was, in effect, a coup. Rather than justify their positions through open debate or principled argument, antizionist academics wielded intimidation, majoritarian power, and institutional authority to exclude Jews from the realm of serious discourse—by fiat. This is why anyone who tries to engage antizionists on their own conceptual terms quickly finds them disarmed. Their position does not rest on justification but on the performance of legitimacy—on the forceful appropriation of concepts, narratives, and moral signifiers that should be available to everyone, Jews and non-Jews alike, both inside and outside the academy. Antizionism in academia is not a discourse, but a regime.

[Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom]

I’m not Jewish. I’m married to a proud Jewish woman. I’m a proud Zionist and a fierce supporter of the state of Israel.

A truth: What makes antisemitism so uniquely dangerous is that it’s always had a home and it’s always been a real threat on BOTH the left & the right.

An observation: Whenever I speak that truth, whenever I say antisemitism is found in unacceptable numbers on BOTH the left & the right, most people on the left tell me it’s only a problem on the right, and most people on the right tell me it’s only a problem on the left. They’re both wrong.

[(((Jew))) @JoshMalina]

I want to believe that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but then a Holocaust survivor, celebrating Hanukkah — a story of Jewish survival against long odds — is murdered by a stranger 75 years later, simply for being Jewish.

[Casey Babb @DrCaseyBabb]

If you aren't aware of what's going on right now, let me break it down for you. Jews worldwide are being hunted down and killed. It's only day three of Hanukkah, and already we've seen:

1. Jews murdered by a jihadi father-son duo in Australia that seriously wounded many people, including my friend @Ostrov_A (thinking of you, brother).

2. Students at @BrownUniversity were murdered in a class being taught by Rachel Friedberg, a Jewish professor who leads the school's Judaic Studies program.

3. A Jewish professor of nuclear physics at M.I.T. was murdered in his home today.

4. Orthodox Jews in New York were violently assaulted on the subway.

5. Violent Palestinian protestors disrupted a peaceful Hanukkah celebration in Amsterdam. Dozens were arrested after police had to physically surround families celebrating the holiday to protect them.

6. A Jewish family in California had their home hit by gunfire because they had Hanukkah decorations up. One of the criminals shouted, "Free Palestine."

7. An Islamic terrorist attack has been foiled in Poland at a Christmas market.

8. An Islamic terrorist attack has been foiled in Germany at a Christmas market.

9. A Palestinian terrorist attack was foiled in California.

10. France has cancelled its NYE celebrations because of the terrorist threat level.

11. Canada's Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre has said that a terrorist attack in Canada is now "a realistic possibility."

I've been studying terrorism for 20 years, and I've never seen things this bad. The West is under attack – full stop. The question now is, what the hell are we going to do about it?

[Naya Lekht 🇮🇱 🇺🇸ניה לכת @LekhtNaya]

When you demonize a people for so long, when you construct them as villains , there is no other solution but to annihilate them.

The violence against Jews is preceded by years of anti-Jewish libels such as the blood libel, the colonizer libel, apartheid state libel, ethnic cleansing libel, and genocide libel.

If you want to know how is it that the European world was ready to exterminate an entire population, it happened through libels that demonized jews and prepared them for extermination.

Today, the violence against Jews in America, London , Australia, Israel is not happening willy nilly: it is a direct result of libels deployed to mark Jews as demons.

[Adam Louis-Klein @adam_louis52328]

My thoughts on the awful events in Sydney, in the @TheFP. May this Chanuka be one of resilience, refusal, and courage.

“This latest assault only reaffirms the ongoing reality of anti-Zionism as an essentially violent ideology—one that drives out Jewish communities wherever it takes hold, through exclusion, discrimination, and even murder.”

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

During the worst of the days of the hunger crisis in Gaza in the past six months, Hamas deliberately hid literal tons of infant formula and nutritional shakes for children by storing them in clandestine warehouses belonging to the Gaza Ministry of Health.

The goal, as I said then, was to worsen the hunger crisis and initiate a disaster as part of the terror group’s famine narrative in a desperate effort to stop Israel’s onslaught against Gaza and force the return of the UN’s aid distribution mechanism, and away from the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Now, activists in the Strip are documenting the waste and deliberate disposal of tons of infant formula, nutritional children’s shake, and children’s powdered milk, which Hamas had hoarded away, given the saturation of the coastal enclave with humanitarian aid after the ceasefire two months ago.

When countless other Palestinian activists and I from Gaza said this back in July, August, and September, we were villainized, attacked, threatened, and made into pariahs by the “pro-Palestine” industrial complex and activist mafias, even though for Gazans, the evidence was so clearly apparent before our eyes. What those in the West continue to fail to understand is that there is no being pro-Palestine without also having a serious vigilance against Hamas’s continued manipulation of international public opinion to hide behind the Strip's civilian population's suffering, something that the terrorist organization’s own actions have led to and created.

Never allow yourself to be a useful idiot in Hamas’s propaganda. You can have compassion for the real suffering of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, and demand Israeli action to facilitate aid entry into the coastal enclave, while still holding Hamas accountable for its part in causing a hunger and starvation crisis in the first place.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

Yesterday, I spoke at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, along with @Nadav_Eyal, about Gaza, Hamas, Israel, the future of the ceasefire, and hopes for a better pathway forward. A student group, Facts on the Ground, sponsored the event as part of its efforts to encourage dialogue and engagement across the divisive lines in the Israel and Palestine conflict. Professor Javed Ali, a retired, seasoned national security professional, moderated the discussion, allowing us to explore various security, political, humanitarian, and geostrategic themes. 400 students, faculty, parents, and others were in attendance to hear a variety of thoughts and ideas, as well as clear disagreements between Nadav and I when it came to Gaza and Palestinian society.

Unfortunately, elements of the “pro-Palestine” mafia on campus showed up in typical fashion, cowardly hiding behind masks, displaying incendiary rhetoric, insults, lies, and disinformation, which is central to their activism and actions. To these ignorant agents of sabotage and chaos, many of whom who are motivated by hatred, ignorance, and support for Hamas, virtue signaling is the end goal. They could have joined the event and asked questions or listened to new perspectives. Their actions though speak volume to how higher education has failed miserably in preparing the next generation of critical thinkers and professionals, thanks in large part to the coddling of students by professors and the proliferation of safe spaces and trigger warnings.

Always say yes to more engagement, rational conversations, and respectful disagreements; never bowdown to academic terrorists, intimidation, or manipulative know-it alls.

[John Aziz @aziz0nomics]

The number of people who claim to support Palestinians but actually could not care less about Palestinians and just hate Israel is huge.

[Naya Lekht 🇮🇱 🇺🇸ניה לכת @LekhtNaya]

“Antizionism is an organized campaign to deny Jews sovereignty, indigeneity, and the right to live as a nation among other nations. It justifies, normalizes, and ultimately enables acts violence against Jews. Wherever it is presented, Jew hatred is flourishing; and these days it is thriving.”

https://t.co/mDJWAcTbx4