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2 weeks ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
There is a silence that comforts — the silence of awe before the sacred, the pause of grief, the reverent hush of memory. And then there is another kind. A silence of erasure, of complicity, of moral failure. A silence that does not heal but distorts. Such is the silence that surrounds the mass displacement of Jews from the Arab world in the middle of the 20th century — a silence so vast, so enduring, that it has become a second exile.
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3 weeks ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
It is June again, and with it comes Pride Month—flags hoisted, statements issued, brands temporarily reborn in rainbow hues. From Westminster to Waitrose, everyone is “celebrating diversity.” And yet, there is something disconcerting about the ease with which this ritual is performed in the West, especially by those who, in other contexts, remain oddly silent about one of the most egregious and violent threats to LGBTQ+ people worldwide. I refer not to populist reactionaries.
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1 month ago | 
intpolicydigest.org | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
Two Israeli embassy staffers, murdered in Washington, D.C. Their killer: Elias Rodriguez, now in custody. A name unfamiliar to most, yet heavy with consequence. For all the headlines that fixate on him, the deeper question remains—one that polite diplomacy rarely dares to voice: Was he a lone actor, or was he a weapon in the hands of something far larger? We must resist the instinct to file this under domestic aberration.
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1 month ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
Let us, for a moment, imagine the headlines: “14,000 Babies to Die in 48 Hours”. Not from disease, nor natural disaster, nor famine — but, by implication, at the hands of the Jewish state. This was not tabloid hysteria. This was not war propaganda from the seventh-century stylings of Iran’s Supreme Leader. This was a claim made by none other than a senior United Nations humanitarian official, Tom Fletcher, during a BBC interview.
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1 month ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
In an age awash with hashtags, slogans, and placard profundity, it has become unfashionable—if not positively subversive—to ask that history be treated with care. Today, history must emote. It must rally. It must rattle cages, preferably while rhyming in iambic chants. It must, above all, serve a cause. And so we come, inevitably, to the Nakba. The Arabic word Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” has assumed a near-sacrosanct status in modern discourse on the Middle East.
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1 month ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
If ever there were a moment in which Britain’s political soul seemed to slip quietly into the Thames, it is surely now. This week, with unnerving synchronicity, senior Conservative MPs—those once presumed to embody gravitas and prudence—joined their Labour counterparts in a call for Britain to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. That they should do so mere days after British security services thwarted a terrorist plot against Israel’s embassy in London is not simply a lapse in judgement.
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2 months ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
It is a singular misery of our time that brutishness, masquerading as virtue, is now applauded as courage. The recent antics of the Irish rap group Kneecap at Coachella — one of the grand carnivals of Western self-congratulation — ought to serve as a final exhibit in this ongoing farce. Standing before a sea of adoring and mindless faces, Kneecap chose not to challenge power, but to flatter the basest instincts of the mob.
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2 months ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
By now we ought to have grown wearily familiar with President Emmanuel Macron’s fondness for grandstanding masquerading as statesmanship — that gallant little pirouette he performs each time he wishes to assert France’s moral relevance on the world stage. But his latest venture — the premature “recognition” of a Palestinian state by 2025 and a sanctimonious call for an arms embargo against Israel — is not merely vacuous diplomacy.
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2 months ago | 
intpolicydigest.org | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
In an era marked by the steady erosion of truth, Belgium’s decision to reject the International Criminal Court’s politically fraught warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands as a rare, timely act of moral clarity. It’s not merely a gesture of solidarity with a particular leader—it’s a firm affirmation of sovereignty, the right to self-defense, and a resolute commitment to justice.
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2 months ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
Imagine them: the survivors. Their faces hollowed by hunger, their wrists inked with numbers, their language orphaned from the world around them. They emerge not into welcome, but into indifference. From the crematoria of Poland and Germany, from the pits of Ukraine, from the train yards of Hungary—yes. But also from the alleyways of Tunis. From the rooftops of Aleppo. From the streets of Baghdad, Cairo, Tripoli, and Sana’a.
