Iran, Turkey seeking regime change in Israel via foreign interference, Likud MK tells 'Post'

Iran, Turkey seeking regime change in Israel via foreign interference, Likud MK tells 'Post'

AMICHAI STEIN

Likud MK Amit Halevi identified Iran and Turkey as the primary orchestrators of a strategic effort to sow internal division and achieve "regime change" in Jerusalem in an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

Halevi, a member of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, issued a stark warning regarding what he describes as sophisticated foreign intervention in Israel's domestic process.

While Israel’s use of paper ballots makes direct mechanical tampering with elections nearly impossible, Halevi emphasized that foreign actors can still influence the outcome.

"You can influence," Halevi said. "And as long as it is an Israeli citizen, that is excellent and desirable. But when it involves a foreign country with foreign interests and a hostile state is behind the influence, it becomes fundamentally invalid."

Halevi detailed what he described as the methods used by hostile actors, arguing that they exploit the digital sphere and financial leverage to manipulate the Israeli electorate. According to him, these states deploy budgets and capabilities far beyond the reach of any individual in order to identify and exploit "weak links" and "influential links" within Israeli society.

"Intervention can be, of course, in the digital age, through various digital means on social networks," he explained. "This is funding that leads to various actions by different people in different sectors and different regions... to eventually reach a result desired by the hostile state."

He further alleged that such influence operations often operate behind legitimate-looking organizations.

"I think it is right to mention mainly two countries whose open, undisguised aspirations to set the agenda in the Middle East and beyond are known to all," Halevi said. "I mean Iran and Turkey. The two have a part in this context of attempts to influence the elections in Israel. Both are bitter enemies, and both have detailed plans for the destruction of the State of Israel."

According to Halevi, the strategic objective of Tehran and Ankara is to project themselves as the region’s "kingmakers"-states capable of shaping the internal politics of neighboring countries.

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Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman dream:

Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman dream: Why a Turkish bid to reclaim the empire should worry U.S. Christians more than Jews

Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz

Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen has issued a stark warning about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions to revive the Ottoman Empire’s regional dominance, including a claim on Jerusalem itself. 

In an in-depth strategic analysis with the TOV Hebrew media network, Hacohen laid out a pattern of Turkish behavior, cross-border military expansion, sweeping maritime claims, and highly symbolic religious reversals, that he says amounts to a systematic project to project Turkish power far beyond its borders, reviving a 400-year Ottoman legacy (1516-1917) that once ruled almost the entire Middle East and stretched deep into Christian Europe. 

That history is exactly why the project should alarm Christians as much as it alarms Israel. Wherever Ottoman rule once expanded, Christian populations that had lived in those lands for centuries went into steep, often catastrophic decline, a pattern already repeating itself today in the very countries Erdogan invokes.

Hacohen points to Turkey’s “Blue Homeland” doctrine, a maritime strategy claiming vast stretches of the Mediterranean and its economic resources as Turkish territory, backed by an increasingly assertive Turkish navy. The doctrine’s clearest expression on land is Turkey’s continued military occupation of northern Cyprus. 

Erdogan has been direct about the scope of his ambition. “Turkey is larger than Turkey,” he has said, adding, “The borders of our hearts are elsewhere,” a reference to former Ottoman territory including Mosul and Kirkuk in modern Iraq. 

Turkey now operates military bases directly inside former Ottoman domains in Syria, Libya, and Somalia, a footprint Arab News has also documented, marking a sharp break from the deliberately isolationist foreign policy the Turkish republic’s founders established a century ago.

“The Harbinger of the Liberation of Jerusalem”

Nowhere has Erdogan tied this ambition to religion more explicitly than in his government’s decision to convert Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, for nearly a thousand years the largest cathedral in Christendom and the spiritual center of Eastern Christianity, back into a mosque in July 2020. Erdogan invoked the legacy of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II directly in announcing the move, framing it as a restoration of the sultan’s 1453 conquest rather than a religious or cultural decision made by his own government. But Erdogan did not stop at restoring history. 

In his own address announcing the conversion, he declared, “The resurrection of Hagia Sophia is the harbinger of the liberation of Masjid al-Aqsa in Jerusalem.” He was explicit that Hagia Sophia was only the first step, and that Jerusalem was the intended destination.

Erdogan has repeatedly and directly challenged the legitimacy of Israeli sovereignty over its own capital, using the same Ottoman-era religious framing. He told the Turkish Parliament flatly, “Jerusalem is our city, a city from us,” invoking the Ottoman Empire’s tearful retreat from the city during World War I and pointing to surviving Ottoman architecture, including Jerusalem’s Old City walls, as evidence of an enduring Turkish claim. 

In a public dispute with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over ancient relics, Erdogan said, “Turkey will not give even a single pebble belonging to Jerusalem to Israel,” describing the city as a sacred trust belonging to all humanity rather than to the Jewish state whose eternal capital it has been for three thousand years. After the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017, Erdogan convened an extraordinary summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and declared the American decision “against ethics, history, and consciousness, and completely null and void.”

A Bid to Lead the Entire Muslim World

Erdogan’s Jerusalem rhetoric is not an isolated obsession. It is one piece of a broader campaign to position himself as the leader of the global Muslim ummah, a role the Ottoman sultans themselves once claimed through the historic Caliphate, abolished by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1924. 

Analysts have noted that Erdogan calculated the Hagia Sophia decision would resonate with Muslim audiences “from Los Angeles to Jakarta, from Pakistan to South Africa,” reinforcing his image as defender of the faith even as it damaged Turkey’s relations with the West. Erdogan has absorbed thousands of Muslim Brotherhood activists fleeing Egypt and granted them refuge in Turkey, sought to expand Turkish influence in Sudan, and worked to position himself as a rival to Saudi Arabia’s custodianship of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, all while presenting himself internationally as the foremost defender of the Palestinian cause and of Al-Aqsa specifically.

The contradictions in that self-image are glaring. Erdogan condemns Israeli control of Judea and Samaria while his own forces occupy northern Cyprus, parts of Syria, and have deployed into Libya. 

He casts himself as champion of Muslims worldwide while conducting military campaigns against the Kurds, who are themselves overwhelmingly Muslim. He postures as the Muslim world’s conscience on human rights while imprisoning journalists by the hundreds at home.

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Erasing The Map: Mamdani And The War Against Jewish History

Erasing The Map: Mamdani And The War Against Jewish History

PNW STAFF

Maps do more than identify places. They tell us whose history matters, whose identity deserves recognition—and who can quietly be made to disappear.

That is why a recent New York City map of immigrant neighborhoods created such an uproar. It highlighted 30 communities, including Little Pakistan, Little Yemen and Little Palestine. Yet Little Italy and several prominent Irish and Jewish neighborhoods were nowhere to be found.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised that changes would be made after fierce backlash from those communities. 

The map story reveals how easily official institutions can elevate one version of history while allowing another to fade from public view. A community does not need to be physically destroyed to be erased. Sometimes it simply stops appearing on the map.

That same battle over memory now stands at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The War Before The War

Long before missiles are launched or borders are redrawn, a different kind of war begins—a war over the past.

Israel’s opponents increasingly describe the Jewish state as an artificial European colony imposed upon an indigenous Palestinian population. In this telling, Jews are recent foreign settlers with no more authentic connection to Jerusalem than the British had to India or the French had to Algeria.

Once that narrative is accepted, Israel’s elimination can be repackaged as “decolonization.”

But it requires thousands of years of Jewish history to disappear.

The Jewish connection to the land did not begin with the Holocaust, the British Mandate or the founding of modern Israel in 1948. It reaches back to the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the reigns of David and Solomon, the temples in Jerusalem and the prophets whose writings still shape Western civilization.

Jerusalem was the center of Jewish religious and national life centuries before Christianity existed and more than a millennium before the rise of Islam.

Foreign empires repeatedly conquered the land. Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arab Muslim armies, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and the British all exercised control at different points.

Jewish sovereignty was lost, and large numbers of Jews were expelled or scattered. Yet the Jewish connection was never extinguished. Jewish communities remained in the land through centuries of conquest, while Jews throughout the diaspora continued praying toward Jerusalem, celebrating Passover with the hope of returning and preserving an identity inseparable from Zion.

The people were dispersed. They were not invented.

Rewriting Mary & Jesus

The struggle to rewrite Jewish history has now reached even into the Christian story.

A recent Muslim women’s retreat associated with New York City First Lady Rama Duwaji reportedly presented Mary as “a Palestinian woman who gave birth under occupation.” Such language illustrates the larger effort to impose modern political identities upon the ancient world.

Mary lived under Roman rule, but she was not a Palestinian in the modern national sense. She was Miriam, a Jewish woman living among the Jewish people. Her faith, family, worship, Scriptures and hope for the Messiah were all rooted in Israel.

Jesus was Jewish. His disciples were Jewish. The apostles were Jewish. The Gospel unfolded within Jewish history, Jewish prophecy and Jewish expectations.

Calling Mary “Palestinian” without explaining that identity is not historical clarification. It is historical replacement.

This effort to rewrite the biblical story is not new. Palestinian leaders have used similar language for decades. When the Palestinian Authority assumed control of Bethlehem in 1995, Yasser Arafat was reported to have welcomed visitors to the birthplace of “the first Palestinian Christian—Jesus Christ.” In 2013, Mahmoud Abbas went further, describing Jesus as a “Palestinian messenger” who became a light to the world. The political appeal is obvious: placing Jesus inside the modern Palestinian national story connects the Palestinian cause to Christianity’s most sacred figure, strengthens claims of ancient indigeneity and invites Christians worldwide to view the present conflict through the imagery of Bethlehem, occupation and suffering. 

But the comparison depends upon an anachronism. Jesus was born into the Jewish people, worshiped the God of Israel, observed Jewish festivals, taught from the Hebrew Scriptures and was crucified by Rome under the title “King of the Jews.” To recast Him primarily as a modern Palestinian resistance figure does more than express solidarity with Palestinians; it appropriates His identity while severing Him from the Jewish history that explains who He was.

This should concern Christians as much as Jews. When the Jewish identity of Mary, Jesus and the apostles is minimized, Christianity is slowly detached from the biblical story that gave birth to it. The Bible becomes a collection of spiritual metaphors rather than the record of God working through real people, in real places, across real history.

Whoever Controls The Map

The controversy over New York’s immigrant map may appear insignificant beside the struggle over Jerusalem. Yet both involve the same basic question:

Who gets to appear on the map?

Historical erasure rarely announces itself openly. It begins with selective language, selective recognition and selective outrage. Certain identities are celebrated. Others become inconvenient. Eventually the public is taught that the inconvenient people were never truly there at all

Before Israel can be delegitimized politically, it must be erased historically. Before Jews can be portrayed as foreign occupiers, their temples, kingdoms, communities, prayers and centuries of attachment must be pushed outside the approved narrative.

A name is omitted. A history is simplified. An ancient people are reclassified as outsiders.

Then one day, the world looks at the map and wonders why they are still there.

Israel Watch: Holding Them at Bay

Holding Them at Bay

Jim Fletcher

Middle East dictators understand one thing very well.

Self-survival.

Men that have literally no regard for another human being often find themselves in charge of many other human beings. Even in the West. Probably a majority, or at least a healthy minority of past U.S. presidents did not care about people. They cared only about themselves. LBJ, Clinton, and Obama come to mind immediately.

In the Middle East, it’s no different.

Reports come out this week that a big thing keeping Iran from attacking Israel is the knowledge that such an effort would compel Israel to target and kill regime leadership.

They’ve done it already, of course. A whole community of Iranian nuclear scientists sleep with the fishes today. Over many years, it is assumed that Israel has killed them. That decision and success has kept Israelis safe. (One can assume that a political “rival” like Gadi Eisenkot, he of the recently formed Yasher Party, who advocates a two-state solution in the wake of 10/7, is not a serious threat to Netanyahu in October’s elections.)

But while the U.S. and Iran continue their sophomoric war (American strategy, frankly, is embarrassing and inconsistent), Iran hopes Israel sits this one out, because if the regional superpower does get involved, more Iranian leadership will die. From The Jerusalem Post:

“Iran is avoiding a broad, direct attack on Israel because it fears Israeli strikes on senior regime figures and institutions vital to its survival, Iran researcher Beni Sabti told 103FM on Sunday.

“’The strength of the public lies in Tehran, as we saw during the protests, and that is what Iran fears,’ Sabti said, explaining Iran’s concern over a possible Israeli attack.

“’The Iranian regime fears our involvement because they know that we are going straight to the center. We are targeting the most important part and focusing on senior officials.

“’They crossed a threshold on Sunday. There may be elements within the Revolutionary Guards that are beginning to pick at us and provoke us, testing how far they can go in angering Israel, and woe to them. There are always rogue elements within rogue elements. It has become like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Let me be clear: Iran has shifted into terror organization mode.’”

Indeed, Iran fears Israel. While Trump continues to make his threats that are now treated as a joke, Israel remains a lethal threat to the mullahs in Tehran. One of the Israeli specials is targeting individuals. Even now, the Mossad and elite counter-terrorism units operate deeply into Iran. Iran knows this but can’t stop it. That quite incredible.

I should say, the U.S. has recently taken down 116 communications towers, no small impact.

As always, many critical issues swirl together at the same time. Israeli elections, American elections, the war, and the knowledge that the clock is ticking on the Trump administration (2028). Given man’s ability to make the dumbest choice at the worst possible moment, it’s unclear if the American-Israeli coalition will remain intact long enough to finish the job.

The world is watching, and waiting.

Should We Be ConCERNed about CERN?

Should We Be ConCERNed about CERN?

Video

Could the Large Hadron Collider be opening cosmic portals? Examine the science behind CERN experiments and theories on extra dimensions. This analysis examines the Large Hadron Collider, looking past the standard scientific explanations to address persistent questions about its true capabilities. We review the facility's role in researching dark matter and how its high-energy collisions might interact with concepts of space and time that remain theoretical. This overview is designed for viewers interested in the intersection of particle physics and unexplained phenomena. We also address the visual symbolism surrounding the site, including the prominent iconography and imagery often associated with CERN experiments. By connecting the physical equipment to these cultural interpretations, we clarify why so many theories exist regarding potential cosmic portals. You will gain a clearer understanding of how the Large Hadron Collider operates and the specific scientific goals driving its current research into dark matter and extra dimensions.