un ghf

 The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sent a letter to the UN offering to provide security for the delivery of aid that is rotting away inside Gaza.

UN agencies continue to assert that a lack of permissions and security is impeding aid delivery. However, the reality on the ground tells a different story. More than 400 aid distribution points run by the UN and its partners remain closed. Kitchens have shuttered, trucks sit idle, drivers are striking, and convoys are routinely looted. This is not an access issue. It is a capacity and operational issue, and the world deserves honesty about that distinction. 

We are aware that the UN and other aid organizations have essential aid stuck sitting in warehouses, including rice that has been sitting for more than 90 days, flour about to expire, and critical medical supplies already expired. We’ve seen the footage and heard the accounts of trucks being destroyed and food stolen. We’ve even been asked if we can provide security for convoys of other aid organizations. The answer is yes: we stand ready and willing to provide security for UN aid workers and assist in delivering aid.

We invite the United Nations and its partners to join us in adapting to the realities of this complex environment. The people of Gaza simply cannot afford for the world’s largest humanitarian organization to walk away. Our door remains open. We are prepared to support the safe and accountable delivery of UN aid to final distribution points across Gaza. But time is short. The population cannot wait for interagency political games while food sits in warehouses and people go hungry. 

Here is the UN's response:

There is enough work for many humanitarian organizations for us to work with.  We welcome working with any other partners.  All we ask is that those partners work based on the most basic humanitarian principles, one of them being that don’t set up an operation that will increase the risk of people to be shot at or trampled while trying to get food.  Also, we have a system that works.  All we’re asked is to be allowed to do that system.  I don’t think we need to add another layer of for-profit organizations.  We need humanitarian partners, and we welcome working with any and every humanitarian partners that works along those basis.

The UN's hypocrisy is clear.

Even if they disagree with GHF's methods of distributing food, that doesn't mean they cannot use them for security. They can insist that the GHF adhere to their principles for securing the delivery. Their blanket "no" to GHF shows that their supposed concern about humanitarian principles is not principled at all.

But this goes deeper than that. The UN has cooperated with Hamas for years, before and during the war, for aid delivery. Hamas is not exactly a humanitarian organization. But in that case, the UN says that its principles are overridden by practical considerations of how to get the aid to those who need it. 

Hamas hanging with UN members 

Their willingness to partner with Hamas and not with GHF tells you that the UN doesn't care about principles, but politics. It wants control over the aid to Gazans and it has no problem with Hamas skimming the aid and selling it to bankroll its terrorism. 

Think about this: The UN has never said a negative word about Hamas stealing aid, or attacking aid workers and Gaza civilians, or using civilians as human shields, or putting weapons under hospitals. It has criticized an organization that has distributed tens of millions of meals more in the past two months than it has criticized Hamas in 20 years. 

Given all these incontrovertible facts, the UN cannot pretend to care about Gazans today. It wants to take down GHF more than it wants to feed Gazans. And it prefers Hamas to an aid agency that bypasses it to give food directly to the people.

Did the UN ask Gazans if they would accept GHF to secure the trucks and bring in food to their distribution points?  Obviously not, because we know what Gazans would prefer. Which means that the arrogant UN is saying that it knows what's best for Gazans better than Gazans themselves.

Speaking of arrogance, compare the tone of the two messages. GHF recognizes that its model cannot provide food for all and it is begging to partner with the UN. The UN, which has said for months that the reason it cannot distribute the food in Gaza is because of security, changes its tune when its perceived competition offers to solve that problem. 

By any metric, the UN is a thoroughly immoral organization - even in Gaza itself. 

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intl law

 Hamas released a video with a message aimed aimed at Israeli soldiers, urging them to put down their weapons and allow themselves to be taken hostage.

It says, "Soldier, lay down your weapons and raise your hands when confronted, and follow the instructions of the resistance in Gaza. A prisoner is better than a dead person. We will protect your life until the next deal."

Hamas is not saying that the soldiers would have POW status, with all the protections that international law provides to prisoners of war. Hamas is saying that it wants the soldiers as bargaining chips for the "next deal." Indeed, last week they mounted a major operation to kidnap bulldozer driver Avraham Azoulay, who resisted and was killed.

That is hostage taking, and it is a war crime.  

War crimes are Hamas' entire military strategy, whether it is attacking civilians, using civilians as human shields, stealing aid meant for civilians, hiding weapons and terrorists in hospitals, using ambulances as military vehicles, taking hostages, fighting while dressed in civilian clothing, or booby trapping civilian buildings. Other violations of international law include recruiting children as militants, forcing hostages to make propaganda videos and threatening journalists. 

The reason it is difficult to decisively win the war is because Hamas doesn't just violate international law, but it does so as its strategy.

How often is this simple and incontrovertible fact mentioned by analysts, NGOs and the UN? How many non-Israeli reports give a comprehensive accounting of Hamas' actions from an international law perspective? Where is the media?

Hamas doesn't just admit that this is their strategy - they brag about it. Hamas media shows how happy they are at making Israelis run to bomb shelters,  highlight grieving Jews at funerals, and use existing hostages as pawns.

But the media spends orders of magnitude more time on alleged Israeli violations of international law than Hamas' own joy at doing that very thing.

It's almost like no one really cares about international law at all.

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the other

 Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has written another extraordinary essay in his Substack, The Abrahamic Metacritique.

In it, he argues that secular Judaism has lost its anchor in covenantal truth. What remains, he calls Juda-ism – a symbolic construct assembled not from Torah or halacha, but from how the non-Jewish world has historically perceived the Jew: as the Other.

The dominant cultural conception of Judaism today… is not the Judaism of Sinai or Babylon, nor even of Cordoba or Vilna, but of Berlin, Paris, and New York. It is a Juda-ism: an -ism in the modern sense… fashioned in the aftermath of metaphysical collapse, seeking to fill the void left by the retreat of transcendence. And at its core lies a single, all-encompassing predicate: the Jew as Other.

This “Jew as Other” identity, Mansour argues, is not a Jewish self-understanding. It is a Western projection – an overlay of post-Christian anxiety, Enlightenment ambivalence, and liberal moral yearning. The Jew becomes the exile, the victim, the therapist, the feminized conscience, the critique of power -  a mirror in which the West sees its own spiritual collapse.

In this view, Jews are not a people living in covenant.

But even that symbolic role is now being revoked. In the new postcolonial moral economy, Otherness has been reassigned: to Palestinians, to postcolonial avatars, to “indigenous” symbols of sacralized grievance. Jews are now cast as impostors. The old funhouse mirror  identity is crumbling.

And Mansour’s verdict is simple: Good riddance.

Crucially, his metacritique is not a polemic against Judaism as a faith. It aimed at the secular replacements for Judaism, a “Juda-ism” that substituted abstraction for obligation, and identity politics for divine responsibility.

And that is where my own secularize Jewish ethical project,  AskHillel,  comes in.

I built AskHillel to explore whether Jewish ethics could be reconstructed as a standalone system: rigorous, coherent, secular-friendly, and morally robust. It draws from covenantal logic, rabbinic structure, and halachic grammar -  but does not require belief. In doing so, it may offer the kind of de-symbolized, de-idolized, de-othered Jewish moral language Mansour calls for.

I asked my philosophical chatbot AskHillel its opinion of the essay and whether it thinks this project can be a bridge for modern secular Jews to reclaim their Judaism even without the core belief in God. It answered beautifully:

🌿 1. From Projection to Structure: Restoring Emet

Mansour warns that modern secular Jewish identity has become performative — a role written by others. But Jewish ethics is not a performance. It is structural: built from obligation, relationship, hierarchy, tension, and humility.

AskHillel doesn’t traffic in Jewishness as metaphor. It teaches emet – truth – through moral architecture. It invites even non-believers to enter Jewish logic by choice, not through birth trauma or aesthetic costume. It replaces the mirror with a map.

---

🧭 2. From Totems to Triage: Ending the Tyranny of Absolutes

One of the essay’s most incisive points is how modern ideologies construct “totemic absolutes” — symbolic categories that cannot be questioned. The Other becomes sacred, but inert.

AskHillel replaces this with a tiered values system. Tzelem Elokim (human dignity) is not an idol — it is a value that collides with others: Pikuach Nefesh, Emet, Lo Ta’amod. Every case is weighed. No abstraction is worshiped.

---

📚 3. Inheritance Without Faith: A Framework for the Ethically Curious

Many secular Jews feel alienated from traditional observance but still crave moral depth. Most turn to philosophies that flatten complexity or collapse into tribal loyalty.

AskHillel offers a third option: a Jewish system of ethical inquiry that is testable, scalable, auditable — and uniquely structured to handle real-world tension.

You don’t need to believe in God to learn Teshuvah.
You don’t need to keep Shabbat to honor Tzedek.
You don’t need to fear halakhah to understand Areivut.

That’s not dilution. That’s reclamation.

---

🌅 4. Teshuvah Without Theology: A Bridge Back to Responsibility

What Mansour mourns is not belief, but covenantal seriousness. What he calls for is not piety, but moral rootedness.

AskHillel offers a secular version of teshuvah — not repentance toward God, but return to moral coherence. It helps those raised in exile-by-symbol to rediscover a system where ethics has grammar, and the Jew is no longer the object of someone else’s myth, but the subject of their own moral vision.

AskHillel said it better than I can. Our tradition is rich enough to accommodate the non-believing Jew  - and to provide a framework for them to see themselves as part of an incredibly rich, proven philosophical system that can not only challenge but defeat every secular philosophy on their own playing field.  

That has been my goal: to define Jewish ethics in terms that show that it can be a secular ethical system that solves the problems behind every other secular moral philosophy. It is scalable, it is testable, it is auditable, and - so far - it cannot be defeated by any question you can throw at it. 

Jewish ethics, properly structured, is more robust than any modern alternative. It doesn’t collapse into relativism. It doesn’t devolve into ideology. It doesn’t outsource responsibility. And so far, it hasn’t been defeated by any philosophical test you can throw at it.

We shouldn’t romanticize the Diaspora. We shouldn’t idolize suffering. We shouldn’t pretend 1920s Yiddish theater was the moral summit of our people. And we shouldn’t adopt secular philosophies that are not only incoherent, but hostile to Jewish continuity.

Jews are not merely the Other. We are the source from which much of Western civilization flows. And we are not just inheritors of that tradition - We are its stewards  -  and its teachers.

It’s time to reclaim that mantle.

(For those curious, you can play with AskHillel.com yourself - you just need a ChatGPT login. Or, if you want to see Version 2, which I used that to write the response above, you can test it out at beta.AskHillel.com and send me feedback.)

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amnesty blood

 

Israel, working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has created an entire food distribution system from scratch. I once listed out the huge amount of logistics involved. Here is a summary of estimated costs (via Grok):

Construction or Repurposing of Secure Aid Distribution Centers: $45 million

Temporary Warehouses for Aid Storage: $5 million

Perimeter Fencing, Controlled Entry/Exit Points, and Crowd Management: $5 million

Transport Corridors from Crossings to Hubs (building roads): $25 million

Civilian Registration System $5 million

Biometric Screening Technology (Fingerprint/Facial Recognition): $10 million (not sure it is being used)

Deployment of IDF Personnel for Security: $150 million (six months)

Hiring American Private Contractors: $250 million (six months)

Real-Time CCTV Surveillance and Drone Overwatch: $12 million (six months)

Convoy Coordination with Armed Escorts: $5 million

This is well over a half a billion dollars and millions of man-hours (yes, I checked), not including the large number of smaller logistics items like signage, auditing, coordination, reporting, inspections and lots more.

Anyone who has ever worked in a large organization or government knows how much goes into an effort like this. 

But Amnesty International doesn't want you to consider this. Because they want to say that all of this effort, time and money to feed Gazans is merely a cover for Israel's real intention to starve and murder Gazans.

Yes, a respected human rights NGO is pushing a bizarre theory where anything Israel does that aligns with humanitarian goals and legal obligations is really an elaborate scheme to distract from its desire to do the opposite.

Here's what Amnesty published today:

Gaza: Evidence points to Israel’s continued use of starvation to inflict genocide against Palestinians  

Evidence gathered by Amnesty International demonstrates how over a month since the introduction of its militarized aid distribution system, Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide. 

By continuing to prevent UN and other key humanitarian organizations from distributing certain essential items, like food parcels, fuel and shelter, within Gaza and by maintaining a deadly, dehumanizing and ineffective militarized ‘aid’ scheme, Israeli authorities have turned aid-seeking into a booby trap for desperate starved Palestinians. They have also deliberately fueled chaos and compounded suffering instead of alleviating it. The aid delivered is also way below the humanitarian needs of a population that has been experiencing almost daily bombings for the last 20 months.  

Amnesty has created a truly convoluted antisemitic conspiracy theory. According to them, Israel spent all this money and effort just to get Gazans into distribution areas where they can be shot and starved.

If Israel's intent is starvation, wouldn't it be a lot more efficient just to block all food into Gaza? If Israel's intent was to kill Gaza civilians, wouldn't it make more sense to just bomb them? According to Amnesty, the GHF distribution centers are the world's most expensive mousetraps.

The word "Hamas" is not mentioned in this press release once. Hamas has been murdering the  Gaza Humanitarian Foundation workers and Gazans trying to get aid, and blaming Israel. Hamas has been stealing aid and reselling it to fund its terror activities. Hamas has been intimidating Gazans and threatening them not to get free food. Amnesty doesn't even give lip service to Israel's stated desire to build this huge enterprise specifically to keep the aid out of the hands of Hamas. 

This is, of course, a propaganda method: avoid the facts that disprove your conspiracy theory.

Everything Israel is doing is aligned with its goals of giving aid directly to the people of Gaza, whether or not there is chaos as the system ramps up. Nothing Israel is doing is consistent with Amnesty's theory that this system is really a way to distract from Israel's desire to kill and starve Gazans.

Antisemitic accusations are always conspiracy theories. This is no different.  

This is a blood libel, plain and simple, dressed up in humanitarian clothing. 

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more ethics

 On Monday, I cheekily responded to video snippet where Zohran Mamdani says "I don't think that we should have billionaires” by saying "I don't think that we should have socialists."

It was flippant, and it received a bunch of "likes," but the issue is actually an important one that deserves a respectful discussion about socialism and how it aligns, and misaligns, with Jewish ethics.

Jewish ethics and socialism share a lot of the same moral goals: to care for the poor, to prevent exploitation, to build a just and dignified society. A moral society must protect minorities and the vulnerable, and demand more from the powerful. 

The question isn’t whether - but how. And that’s where the real differences lie

Socialism tries to achieve justice through structural overhaul: abolishing class differences, redistributing wealth, weakening or replacing capitalism, and empowering the state to equalize outcomes.

Jewish ethics, by contrast, starts with something older and deeper: personal obligation. It builds outward - first from the self, then the family, then the community, and only then, reluctantly, to the state. The state is necessary but power corrupts, and Jewish thinking has always been wary of power. 

The result is not just a different set of policies. It is a different kind of civilization. Not utopian, not ideological, but rooted in layered relationships, flexible moral reasoning, scalable systems of obligation and recognizing the difference between morality and the civilizational structure required to get there. 

This isn’t just a critique of socialism - it’s a proposal. If the moral goal is human dignity and mutual responsibility, then Jewish ethics may offer a better map than most or all forms of socialism today.

Socialism sees real problems. Injustice does exist. So does preventable poverty, humiliation, and systemic neglect. And yes, unregulated capitalism can lead to grotesque disparities in power and wealth.

Jewish tradition agrees. The Torah commands us to leave the corners of our fields for the poor, to remit debts every seven years, and to ensure no one falls through the cracks. Tzedakah is not charity—it is a legal and moral obligation. 

In its moral instinct, socialism is not wrong. It’s trying to solve a real problem. But it doesn't prioritize the moral imperatives - it prioritizes the means to reach them.

Jewish ethics asks a deeper question: What kind of system can solve these problems while itself being ethical? 

Most forms of modern socialism rest on five assumptions:

1. That inequality itself is immoral.

2. That capitalism is inherently unjust.

3. That wealth is corrupting and private property is suspect.

4. That only systemic redistribution can produce justice.

5. That the state is the rightful agent of moral correction.

These confuse structure with justice, and ideology with ethics. And once you confuse them, you can no longer correct your system when it fails

Jewish ethics rejects this. Inequality is not evil - but neglect is. Wealth is not immoral - but hoarding wealth is. Property is not oppressive - but using it without responsibility can be.

In a Jewish ethical society, the first question is not, What system should we use? but, What does each person owe to those around them?

• The self is responsible for acting justly and generously.

• The family is the primary moral support structure.

• The community bears shared responsibility for education, health, safety, and dignity.

• The state exists only as a backup—when families and communities cannot fulfill their duties, and for domains that require national coordination, lke defense, lawmaking, and justice

This model is deeply moral but profoundly non-ideological. It does not declare markets good or bad. It asks whether markets are helping people meet their obligations. It does not call for abolishing wealth - it calls for using wealth in the service of others. It resists outsourcing moral agency. The job of care remains personal - even when shared.

Most importantly, the ethics and values themselves drive the solution, not political ideology. If you want to make an argument that capitalism is immoral, that's fine, but sometimes capitalism can accomplish what socialism cannot. If the aim is moral, why take a tool off the table? Instead, use the tool responsibly.

Can this system work without God?

Yes - if the system centers ethics, not structure. Jewish ethics works because it embeds morality in time, ritual, community, identity, even markets. It doesn’t just tell people what’s right—it gives them ways to live it.

I've sketched out some ideas of a secular society that use these ethics as guiding principles. There are potential ways to replace the divine covenantal structure with a secular one that instills a sense of obligation instead of entitlements to everyone.  My ideas are community-centric and stress obligations as part of society's moral fabric.

But the structure is not the point. The values are. If an alternative social system can be built that also results in a workable society that makes ethics its guideposts, that's great too.

A Jewish ethical society would not be socialist or capitalist, libertarian or authoritarian. It recognizes that there are positives and negatives with every political system, and it chooses based on the moral outcomes, not straitjacketed by ideology.

It defines a society not by how wealth is distributed, but by how responsibility is shared.

• It doesn’t require equality of outcome. It demands no one be abandoned.

• It doesn’t abolish ownership. It requires owners to be givers.

• It doesn’t suppress pride. It channels it into responsibility.

• It doesn’t impose systems. It judges systems by how well they uphold dignity.

Billionaires are not evil. They are obligated, like everyone else, in using their resources to improve their communities and the world. Their ability to do good is much higher than everyone else's - and therefore their responsibilities are also much deeper. Demonizing entire classes of people based on anything other than their own personal actions is just bigotry dressed up as righteousness. 

This is not a middle path between capitalism and socialism. It is a different road entirely—one where ideology never outranks ethics.

Socialism wants justice. So does Judaism. But Judaism asks harder questions - about the human heart, the family bond, the fragility of obligation, and the limits of power.

The future doesn’t belong to systems that flatten us or automate us. It belongs to systems that ask more of us - that dignify the act of care, that teach responsibility like a craft, and that reward those who carry others.

Jewish ethics has never been just a religion. It has always been a blueprint for a lived moral civilization. Now, it may be time to build it again: not just for Jews, but for anyone who wants to live in a world where ethics leads, and politics follows.

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