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Ben Cohen

Ben Cohen, a senior analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column for JNS on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics.

UNRWA, in cooperation with the World Health Organization and UNICEF, began a campaign to vaccinate Palestinian children against polio due to the spread of the virus, in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, on Sept. 1, 2024. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90.

Polio vaccination campaign gives lie to claims of Israeli ‘genocide’

It’s hard to think of another state, particularly one enveloped in a war of survival, which would go to such lengths to protect children in the combat zone from a devastating illness.

September 6, 2024

Image from the Netflix docuseries “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial,“ released on June 5, 2024. Credit: Márton Kállai/Courtesy of Netflix.

The Nazification of anti-Zionism

It’s designed to make audiences, aided by the ubiquitousness of social media, despise all Jews.

August 30, 2024

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas (center) arrives to deliver a speech at Grand National Assembly of Turkey in Ankara on Aug. 15, 2024. Photo by Adem Altan/AFP via Getty Images.

Mr. Abbas goes to Moscow and Ankara

In his jaunts abroad, the 88-year-old leader of the Palestinian Authority reinforced the very message he hoped to undermine—that there are no credible, trustworthy leaders on the Palestinian side.

August 16, 2024

Herman Brusselmans with his partner Lena, with whom he had a son in February 2023, Oct. 15, 2023. Credit: Dirk Annemans via Wikimedia Commons.

An open call to murder Jews in a Belgian magazine

The pain caused by contemporary antisemitism is partly rooted in the fact that we can’t ignore it.

August 9, 2024

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan speaks during a press conference on the sidelines of the NATO 75th anniversary summit at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., on July 11, 2024. Photo by Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images.

Enough is enough: NATO must suspend cooperation with Turkey

Under the brutally authoritarian rule of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, its diehard Islamist president, it has stood out as the alliance’s greatest liability.

August 2, 2024

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visits Hutchinson Engineering, which makes parts for wind turbines, in the industrial town of Widnes in the United Kingdom, where he gave a speech, met workers and had a tour of the facility, July 25, 2024. Photo by James Glossop, WPA POOL/Getty Images.

Worrying signals on the Middle East from Britain’s new Labour government

When it comes to Keir Starmer, there is no doubting his personal detestation of antisemitism and his determination to root it out of his party. Still, recent foreign-policy decisions sound alarms.

July 26, 2024

An illustrative image of a hall at Oxford University. Source: DeepAI.

An ‘abject, squalid, shameless’ debate at the Oxford Union

An Israeli professor strikes back at the Union's disgraceful attempt to paint Israel as a genocidal, apartheid state.

July 19, 2024

Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. Credit: Thomas Good/NLN via Wikimedia Commons.

‘The Neck and the Sword’ is Rashid Khalidi’s distortion of history

The Palestinian intellectual is in denial of the long history of antisemitism in the Muslim world.

July 12, 2024

A stop on the London Underground. Credit: TheOtherKev/Pixabay.

Down and out in Paris and London

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that while the 2020s may not be the 1930s, they certainly feel like the 1930s.

June 28, 2024