Yiddishe kop, neshama, un mensch. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. Rooted Cosmopolitan. American, and proudly so.
Joined January 2017
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Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸 retweeted
BREAKING: Brave UNRWA teacher in Gaza speaks out against the culture of death being cultivated in the schools. Teachers around her are “aggressively pushing” ideologies of killing and violence onto their students. (Source: @JusoorNews)
Will @UNLazzarini be held to account?
Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸 retweeted
This.
Harvard poll of young voters out this week showed enthusiasm to vote *lower* than in recent midterms.
Meanwhile a usual argument for Torah study by non-haredim is that it helps preserve the culture.
Presuming this is true*, encouraging yeshiva students to go out and promote certain mitzvot and educate other Jews would do more to further this objective.
Even if you’re secular, it is pretty problematic to not even know rudimentary Jewish prayers and practices. One ought to at least know what it is that one is opting to forgo (and a comparable principle could be applied to Haredi exposure to the secular world, for what it’s worth).
In all likelihood, simply exposing Haredi youths more to what exists beyond their communities would have positive consequences for their desire to be more broadly engaged.
Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸 retweeted
A new Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry 2025 annual report on reproductive health states that the neonatal mortality rate (meaning deaths within the first 28 days after birth) in 2025 was 9.1/1,000 births. That appears in line with pre-war World Bank data for Gaza and the West Bank, well below the Arab world average, and slightly below the figures for nearby countries like Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt.
However, previous MOH reports place the neonatal mortality rate for Gaza in 2018-2022 at between 6-7/1,000 births. It's not clear what accounts for the discrepancy: the MOH and World bank metrics could be slightly different or the West Bank may simply exhibit higher rates of all of these negative reproductive health metrics (pulling the World Bank figure, which includes both, up). The second explanation is unlikely, however, since the West Bank outperforms Gaza on almost all metrics.
Looking at MOH data alone, there is a clear increase in neonatal mortality between 2022 and 2025. In either case, neonatal mortality remains much higher than the rate in high-income countries, however, including Western countries, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel (2-3/1,000). 🧵
Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸 retweeted
Fascinating, this is a good sign that conditions were not created to prevent births. Another good sign.
A new Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry 2025 annual report on reproductive health states that the neonatal mortality rate (meaning deaths within the first 28 days after birth) in 2025 was 9.1/1,000 births. That appears in line with pre-war World Bank data for Gaza and the West Bank, well below the Arab world average, and slightly below the figures for nearby countries like Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt.
However, previous MOH reports place the neonatal mortality rate for Gaza in 2018-2022 at between 6-7/1,000 births. It's not clear what accounts for the discrepancy: the MOH and World bank metrics could be slightly different or the West Bank may simply exhibit higher rates of all of these negative reproductive health metrics (pulling the World Bank figure, which includes both, up). The second explanation is unlikely, however, since the West Bank outperforms Gaza on almost all metrics.
Looking at MOH data alone, there is a clear increase in neonatal mortality between 2022 and 2025. In either case, neonatal mortality remains much higher than the rate in high-income countries, however, including Western countries, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel (2-3/1,000). 🧵
Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸 retweeted
SCOOP: The State Dept has started asking career diplomats up for promotion if they voted for Trump in 16, 20, 24.
Federal law prohibits politically based hiring for career staff.
State tells @washingtonsun it's screening for "fidelity" and execution of the president's vision👇
Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸 retweeted
באופן חריג: ישראל השיבה היום לעזה באמצעות הצלב האדום את גופתו של תושב הרצועה שמת בישראל בנסיבות לא ידועות כשהיה עצור שבוע לאחר 7 באוקטובר 2023, בתום מאבק משפטי שניהלה משפחתו באמצעות ארגון "גישה". לפי הארגון, רג'אא סמור עבד בהיתר בישראל ונעצר לאחר ה-7.10 כמו עזתים אחרים ששהו -->
You would need a sustained policy of 20 to 30 years of divide-and-integrate and aggressive cultural programming for a one state proposal to work.
It would be very difficult and there’d be massive international pressure against it because it would require giving the Israelis a blank check to engage in a very authoritarian manner.
It would also require a shift in Israeli attitudes, because the default Israeli view is that they don’t want to be responsible for the culture and wellbeing of Palestinians. Even when Israel directly controlled the WB, they didn’t do much to censor the schoolbooks of anti-Israel incitement or police the sermons given out in the mosques.
I also doubt the Israelis are culturally cognizant enough to do it very well.
The Arabs in the State of Israel are tremendously opposed to the idea of being put under Palestinian leaders’ rule because they don’t want to live in an authoritarian dump.
The Palestinian Authority, Gaza, and sovereign Israel are also three cantons de facto.
Since yesterday, Daniel Klein, professor of economics at George Mason University and Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan and the editor of Informed Comment, have signed our petition endorsing a Federal Israel Palestine based on the Swiss canton model.
petitions.com/statement_of_s…
Who the people were to begin with mattered though. Treating different contexts as though everybody is a blank state divorced from long-standing cultural attitudes and historical-national narrative is dubious.
George Mitchell tried the northern Irish approach in the Middle East. It didn’t work well.
Aiming for solutions is a fool’s errand. There is simply better and worse. Nothing is ever fully resolved, and historical disputes have lasted for centuries. The most you can reasonably pursue is a better equilibrium in any given moment.
Otherwise the cantons idea is an Israeli one. It was the preferred policy of the Labor and General Zionists in the mandatory period. And until Oslo Israeli Jews routinely spoke in terms of “autonomy” or “federation” with open borders for a kind of cantonal arrangement.
The Palestinians don’t want it. And at this point the Jews don’t either. Too much bad blood for the foreseeable future.
The Israelis could try to set up a series of Palestinian cantons on a “make peace with those who are up for it” approach, I suppose. But you’d quickly see accusations of Israel creating Bantustans.
Rwanda is a minority dictatorship, Bosnia is an internationally-imposed confederal thing always teetering on collapse, and the IRA was nowhere near as violent as Bosnia, Rwanda, or the Palestinians, the IRA was cut off from financial and armed support with the fall of the USSR and Reagan-Bush crackdown on Irish-American terror financing and Vietnam surplus being shipped, and the Irish Catholic public always disliked the IRA’s violence unlike the Palestinians who routinely endorse “armed resistance” in surveys.
It’s very different.
The PA and Gaza de facto already are cantons, and the best natural experiment here would be the EJ Pals whose views are only 20 points more moderate than West Bankers’.
The Palestinian mainstream rejects the legitimacy of Jews on the whole to be there at all. Until you fix that, you can’t achieve anything.
Imagine if somebody showed up and took 3/4 of your house. Then they say you should all fully share the house. You’d say it’s still illegitimate that they’re there at all because they had no right to the house to begin with.
That’s how the typical Palestinian views the situation.
The Arabs in Israel are tremendously opposed to the idea of being put under Palestinian rule because they don’t want to live in an authoritarian dump.
Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸 retweeted
Arabs from Awarta attempted to burn down the grave of Elazar Hacohen (Ahrons' son) located in their village.
Question: If they are the "real Jews", as some people online here claim, why are they burning down an ancient Jewish grave?
@infinite_jaz says there were "young Palestinians armed only with stones" and Heidi Levine says the violent attackers were "teenage thugs."
A lot of what's going on is squabbling bands of bellicose teenagers.
