I have researched and debunked dozens of lies. Each one is different on the surface, but they all circle the same accusation: that Jewish power itself is the problem, that Jewish self‑defense is the real crime, and that if Israel would just stop insisting on existing, the world would calm down.

And yet underneath all the charts and quotes and history, something more basic keeps gnawing at me. It is not a clever argument. It is a scream.

If Arabs wanted to live in peaceful coexistence with the Jews why did the Hebron massacre happen? Why did the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem align with Hitler? If the occupation is really the obstacle to peace, why did the violence start in 1948 before there were any “occupied territories”? If this is really about borders, why was there a war in 1967 when every inch of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem was in Arab hands? If Palestinians truly wanted a state next to Israel, why did their leaders walk away in 1947, from Camp David, from Olmert, from the Trump plan, and answer every “yes” with terror and war?

Why did Gaza, once emptied of every last Israeli soldier and settler, become a tunnel network and a launchpad instead of a pilot project for peace? Why, after October 7, did so much of the world rush to explain away rape, torture, and the slaughter of families as “resistance” instead of recoiling in horror?

This essay is not another policy brief. It is the question underneath all the blood libels.

It’s time to ask the most important question that the “antizionists” refuse to ask themselves: “why”.

Why is the Palestinian “cause” engineered to never end?

It is safe to say the quiet part is the point: the “Palestinian cause” is being kept alive on purpose, and Palestinians are not treated like any other displaced population. Every other refugee story in the modern world has three possible endpoints:

- people go home,

- people are resettled somewhere else,

- or people are integrated where they are with citizenship and normal lives.

That is what UNHCR1 is designed to do. Its mandate is to help refugees “get on with their lives as quickly as possible,” usually by resettlement or integration, so the status of “refugee” ends instead of being inherited forever.

The Palestinians are the engineered exception.

In 1949 the UN created UNRWA as a separate agency just for “Palestine refugees,” with a different rulebook: anyone who left in 1948, plus all of their descendants, would remain refugees “pending a just and lasting solution.” UNRWA’s own description is that it does not resettle or naturalize people; it keeps providing services until there is a political deal.

Seventy five years later, roughly 5.9 million Palestinians are registered as refugees across the region, making them the largest stateless community in the world and the longest-running “protracted refugee situation” on the planet. A third still live in camps. In many host states they are deliberately kept from full citizenship, decent jobs, or property rights, precisely so they will not “disappear” as refugees.

Why? Because for Arab regimes and for much of the international system, the “Palestinian cause” is not about the welfare of Palestinians. It is about preserving a permanent, living accusation against Israel.

Consider Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi who said at a joint news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Cairo in October 2023:

I have also emphasized Egypt’s rejection of the ‘liquidation of the Palestinian issue’ through military instruments, or any attempts to forcibly displace the Palestinians from their land, or for this to happen at the expense of countries in the region

He said the quiet part out loud! Egypt which controls the southern border of the Gaza Strip, rejects “the liquidation of the Palestinian issue” and worse, he declared while addressing the attendees formed of local tribal leaders, army personnel, commanders, public figures and journalists:

We, the Egyptians, are ready to sacrifice millions of lives so that nobody approaches a grain of sand in North Sinai.

Arab governments rejected resettlement schemes in the 1950s that would have given Palestinians land, housing, and citizenship in Syria, Iraq, and Sinai for exactly the same reason.

The cause they do not want “liquidated” is not housing, or food, or passports. It is the claim that there is a unique, unresolved injustice that can only be cured by undoing the consequences of 1948 and 1967 on Israel’s side of the ledger. It is the permanent demand that millions of descendants must someday “return” into Israel proper, and that until Israel accepts that, the file must never be closed.

There are other long, ugly refugee stories Afghanistan2, Somalia3, Sudan4. But in those cases the international system at least pretends the goal is to end refugee status, not to preserve it as an identity and a weapon. Only in the Palestinian case do host governments and a dedicated UN agency work together to keep people in suspended animation for three generations, while blocking the two normal exits: resettlement and integration. And of course, anti-zionists never want to discuss the 1947 Partition of British India because it lays bare their lies and propaganda.5 These are all long, ugly refugee stories where in every one of those cases, the international system and the states involved at least pretended the goal was to end refugee status, not to turn millions of people and their grandchildren and great grandchildren into a permanent, weaponized “cause” the way UNRWA has done with the Palestinians.

So when you hear leaders say they will not allow the Palestinian cause to be “liquidated,” believe them. The “cause” is precisely this: to keep millions of Palestinians in a permanent state of unresolved grievance so that Israel’s existence remains on trial forever.

Why this conflict was never about an “occupation”?

In 1947 the UN proposed a partition. Jews accepted it. The Arab world rejected it and launched an invasion the moment Israel declared independence. In 1967, before there was a “settlement” in the West Bank or Gaza, Arab armies massed and attacked again.

Golda Meir asked a “foolish” question in 1974 for which she, nor any of us, have ever heard a single wise answer:

If the ‘67 borders are so holy, why was there war in ‘67?

That is Golda Meir’s “foolish” question that no one on the other side ever answers. If this was really about lines on a map, the wars would have stopped when those lines favored them.​

Fast forward. In 2000 Israel offers a Palestinian state with roughly 95 percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Arafat walks away without a counteroffer and the Second Intifada begins. In 2005 Israel leaves Gaza completely. Every settlement, every soldier, every synagogue is uprooted. Gaza could have been a test case for peace. Instead Hamas turns it into a launchpad for rockets, tunnels, and October 7. In 2008 Olmert offers a map with land swaps and shared Jerusalem. Abbas stalls and walks away. In 2020 Palestinian leaders refuse even to negotiate the Trump plan and declare it “dead on arrival.”​

So when people say “Israel has never allowed a Palestinian state,” I find myself asking a simple question. If they truly wanted a state next to Israel, why do they elect leaders that walk away from every serious offer on the table? Why do they elect leaders that choose terror over peace?

We have already walked through this in detail with Marwan Barghouti and Salam Fayyad. Marwan is held up as the “prisoner of peace,” the one man who could unite Palestinians and finally say yes. Fayyad was the technocrat who actually tried to build roads, courts, and police instead of posters and martyrs.

And yet, even in their stories, the pattern never really changes. When you scratch beneath the branding, the leadership class keeps one red line: they will talk about a state alongside Israel, but they will not educate for it, prepare their public for it, or confront the factions that still want Israel gone.

That is why Fayyad’s state‑building never turned into a real state and why Marwan’s “two‑state” language has never produced a single concrete compromise. The culture of “no” swallowed them too.

And here is the deeper truth almost no one discusses. This conflict is not unique because Arabs or Muslims lost land.

Since 1948, Arab and Muslim states have lost or ceded territory in Sudan, Yemen, Pakistan, Cyprus, Western Sahara and elsewhere. They adapted. They moved on. Refugees rebuilt lives in new places. They did not turn defeat into a permanent identity and they did not raise their children on the fantasy of reversing history at gunpoint.

What makes this conflict different is not what was lost. It is the choices that were made afterward. A choice to reject every compromise. A choice to glorify loss instead of fixing it. A choice to raise children on slogans instead of skills, on martyrdom instead of a normal life. No one is trapped in that pattern. It continues because admitting defeat would require accountability.

Why Do They Justify Evil is "Resistance"?

At the heart of this lies not just history but morality. On October 12, 2023, days after Hamas launched its genocidal terror attack on Israel, Sam Harris offered a thought experiment that clarifies more than any slogan ever could. He said:

Imagine the Israelis using their own women and children as human shields against Hamas. Recognize how unthinkable this would be, not just for the Israelis to treat their own civilians in this way, but for them to expect that their enemies could be deterred by such a tactic, given who their enemies actually are.

Again, it is easy to lose sight of the moral distance here—which is strange. It’s like losing sight of the Grand Canyon when you are standing right on the edge of it. Take a moment to actually do the cognitive work: Imagine the Jews of Israel using their own women and children as human shields. And then imagine how Hamas, or Hezbollah, or al-Qaeda, or ISIS, or any other jihadist group would respond. The image you should now have in your mind is a masterpiece of moral surrealism. It is preposterous. It is a Monty Python sketch where all the Jews die.

Do you see what this asymmetry means? Can you see how deep it runs? Do you see what it tells you about the ethical difference between these two cultures?

There are not many bright lines that divide good and evil in our world, but this is one of them.

You cannot imagine it for one simple reason. No matter how angry Israelis are, no matter how right wing some governments become, there is a hard moral limit that says you protect your people; you do not turn them into disposable props.

Now flip the thought experiment back to reality. Hamas spends years building hundreds of miles of tunnels under civilian neighborhoods and refuses to put its own civilians in those tunnels. It hides ammunition in mosques and schools. It launches a massacre on October 7 knowing exactly what will follow. It counts on dead Palestinians, including children, as fuel for the propaganda war.​

Hamas did not defend Gaza. It sacrificed Gaza on the altar of Jew hatred. It chose to pour concrete into tunnels instead of shelters, to buy rockets instead of MRI machines, to turn children into human shields instead of students. Then it bet the lives of two million people on the hope that the world would blame Israel for cleaning up the mess.

So I ask another “why.” If this is a symmetric conflict, why does one side build bomb shelters for its civilians and the other builds tunnels for its fighters?

You cannot answer that honestly and still pretend the obstacle to peace is Israeli stubbornness. You end up where you do not want to be: admitting that one side treats its own children as a sacred trust and the other often treats them as expendable.

The real problem is not criticism of Israel. The real problem is not even anti‑Zionism in the abstract.

The problem begins when anti‑Zionism becomes a way of thinking that replaces normal moral judgment.

Once you decide that “decolonization” justifies anything, you stop asking basic questions about right and wrong. You stop asking who started a war. You stop asking who targets civilians. You stop asking why one side hides behind children and the other tells children to get out of the way.

That is how we reached a moment when educated people watched Hamas GoPro footage and shared it online as “resistance.” When activists posted images of murdered Israelis with captions like “this is what decolonization looks like” and insisted there were “no Israeli civilians.” The same people who preach consent and trauma suddenly found ways to explain away rape, torture, and the deliberate murder of families as “context.”

Once you cross that line with Jews, you will cross it with others. Today the targets are Jews and Israelis. Tomorrow it is Christians, Americans, Europeans, or anyone else who can be painted as “colonizers.”

And what’s worse, when the “Anti-Zionist” narrative takes hold, they can’t even allow themselves to see that Israel is the most successful decolonization project in history.

Why do their adherents justify hunting Jews Worldwide?

This “why” is perhaps the ugliest. If this was just about Gaza or the West Bank, why are Jews now being harassed, terrorized, and murdered around the world?

Just weeks ago, two gunmen opened fire on hundreds gathered at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia for a peaceful Hanukkah by the Sea event. Fifteen dead. Dozens more wounded. Witnesses described gunmen deliberately targeting Jews in swimwear, turning a holiday joy into a bloodbath.6

Why are synagogues desecrated from London to Paris to Switzerland? Torah scrolls ripped, walls spray painted with “Juden Pack” and Sieg Heil. Why do visibly Jewish people face assaults from campuses to streets across Europe, America, and even stable democracies like Australia, where antisemitic incidents tripled since October 7?​

And the numbers tell the story no one can ignore. Jews, just 2 percent of the U.S. population, faced 69 percent of all religion-based hate crimes in 2024, the highest ever recorded by the FBI with 1,938 anti-Jewish incidents. The ADL tallied 9,354 antisemitic acts nationwide that year, a record shattering the prior year by 5 percent and up nearly 900 percent over the past decade.

This is not blowback from a local dispute. It is a global hunt for Jews, ignited by the same ideology that rejects every peace offer and celebrates dead civilians. When Hamas attacks Israel, its foot soldiers do not stop at borders. They chase Jews to Bondi Beach and beyond, proving the real goal is not Palestinian statehood but a world where no Jew walks safe. That is the ultimate proof there is no symmetry here, no shared grievance over “land.”

Why do they scream for a "One State Solution" while glorifying those who want to destroy it?

When people chant “from the river to the sea,” they insist this is just a call for equal rights. They talk about a “one state solution” as if the problem is that Jews selfishly hoard democracy. It sounds noble until you ask another “why.”

If they truly wanted “one democratic state,” why are the loudest voices for this slogan the same movements that glorify suicide bombers, teach children that Jews are subhuman, and deny any form of Jewish self-determination? Why do their charters and sermons speak not of equality but of erasing Israel altogether? Why does the international media ignore Hamas’ 42-page manifesto entitled “Our Narrative: Al Aqsa Flood: Two Years of Steadfastness and the Will for Liberation” defending October 7 as a “calculated” and “glorious” attack, explicitly framing the massacre as justified and foundational to its cause. In it Hamas states:

October 2023, 7, was no sudden event; it was another chapter in the ongoing struggle with the Israeli occupation. The Al Aqsa Flood operation is not a passing memory but the foundation of our narrative… a historic, pivotal stage in the journey of our cause.

The same double game appears in the “ethnostate” rhetoric. In “Packaging Hate as Social Justice,” I discuss the “ethnostate” libel in detail. Calling Israel a “Jewish ethnostate” is not a neutral description but a political weapon that collapses under any consistent definition of the term. Israel grants full legal and political rights to its Arab minority that comprise 20% of Israel’s citizenry, who vote, serve in the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court, work as doctors and professors, and live under the same civil law as anyone else, many of whom choose to volunteer in the IDF. Contrast this reality with true ethnocracies such as apartheid South Africa, Malaysia’s Malay‑first system, or states that openly enshrine religious supremacy. If “ethnostate” means legal discrimination, Israel does not fit; if it simply means a nation‑state rooted in a particular people’s culture or faith, then Japan, Greece, Armenia, Ireland and Pakistan all qualify and yet only the Jewish nation is condemned for it, revealing a double standard that targets Jewish self‑determination alone. Israel, they claim, is a racist project by definition. If this is an “ethnostate,” it is a very failed one.​

From there, the questions multiply.

Why do they ignore the fact that Bethlehem’s Christian population dramatically declined under Palestinian Authority (PA) rule, falling from around 80-86% in the 1950s when Israel controlled it to less than 10% since the PA took control in 1994 while facing harassment, persecution and violence7.

If Israel is uniquely evil, why has it already made peace with Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco, and pursued normalization with Saudi Arabia. If the Jewish state is the problem, why do these former enemies manage to sign treaties and exchange ambassadors while Palestinian leaders still refuse to recognize any Jewish state at all.​

The answer is uncomfortable. Which is why so many people flee from it into slogans. This has never fundamentally been about 1967, or even 1948. It has always been about whether there should be a Jewish state at all.

So, why is there still no peace?

I have dedicated myself throughout this substack to show that complexity does not erase moral clarity. That we can acknowledge Palestinian suffering without pretending Israel caused it. We can condemn bad Israeli policies without pretending Hamas is a civil rights “resistance” movement.​

When we strip away the propaganda, the “why” becomes brutally simple: There is no peace because too many of Israel’s enemies do not want a state alongside Israel.8

They want a world without Israel. There is no peace because the movements that claim to speak for Palestinians have chosen rejection and martyrdom over compromise and coexistence, again and again, for three generations. There is no peace because an ideology that treats Jewish sovereignty as a cosmic crime cannot live with any borders, on any map, under any flag.​

Israel has never failed to make peace when it had a partner who truly wanted peace. Egypt proved it. Jordan proved it. The Abraham Accords proved it.

The tragedy is that the one people who need peace the most have been cursed with leaders and patrons who have educated them to hate Jews and would rather chase the dream of erasing a Jewish state than build a future next to it.

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This essay is not an argument against Palestinian self-determination. It is an argument for taking it seriously. Too much writing about this conflict treats Palestinians as either saints without agency or villains without complexity. Both approaches flatten reality and excuse failure. I believe Palestinians, like Israelis, deserve to be judged as political actors capable of making choices, building institutions, and bearing responsibility for the outcomes of those choices.

Salam Fayyad matters because he breaks a convenient myth. He was not exiled by Israel or assassinated by extremists. He was removed by his own leadership and rejected by a political culture that has too often rewarded grievance over governance. His story complicates the claim that Israel is the sole obstacle to peace and challenges the international habit of outsourcing Palestinian accountability. Telling this story is uncomfortable. It requires acknowledging Israeli mistakes without turning them into absolution for Palestinian dysfunction. It requires recognizing that statehood is not a slogan or a UN vote, but a set of institutions, behaviors, and norms that must be built and defended from within.

After October 7, it is no longer enough to chant abstractions about justice or occupation. If peace is ever to be more than a ritual incantation, it will require leaders who build rather than burn, and a public willing to choose them. This essay is about the man Palestinians had, and lost, who tried to do exactly that.

Anti‑Zionists claim that Palestinians ‘tried peace and Israel crushed it.’ In their telling, Oslo was a genuine path to coexistence that Israel sabotaged with settlements and bad faith, and the Gaza withdrawal was a trick that left Palestinians in a prison camp rather than a chance to build a state. The record tells a different story: Palestinian leaders rejected key compromises, unleashed terror before, during and after Oslo, and turned Gaza into a base for war instead of investing in building a state seeking peaceful coexistence with its neighbor. They will point to Marwan Barghouti and call him the “Palestinian Mandela”. They will point to Mubarak Awad and call him the “Palestinian Gandhi”. They will tell you the “moderates” were eliminated or sidelined because Israel never wanted peace. It is a tidy story. It is also a fabrication and a distortion of history.

For almost a century, history tells a very different story. In 1937 and 1947, Arab leaders rejected partition plans that would have created an Arab state alongside a Jewish one and chose war instead. In the wake of the 6-day war in 1967, the Arab League met in Khartoum and issued its famous “Three No’s”: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it. At Camp David in 2000, Arafat walked away from a proposal that would have given him a demilitarized state on almost all of the West Bank and Gaza and chose the Second Intifada instead of tabling an executable counterproposal. In 2008 Abbas failed to accept or even formally answer Ehud Olmert’s map, which went even further; he later acknowledged on the record that he said no. Even after Israel withdrew every soldier and settler from Gaza in 2005, Palestinian politics elevated Hamas, which turned the Strip into a launchpad for rockets rather than a pilot project in state‑building.

If you want to understand why there is still no Palestinian state, it is time to talk honestly about the one man who actually tried to build one.

And what was done to thwart his efforts.

His name is Salam Fayyad.

Ultimately, his demise was not imposed from outside. It came from within the Palestinian system itself.

The Technocrat Who Wanted To Skip The Revolution

Salam Fayyad is everything Western diplomats say they wish Palestinian leaders would be. He did not grow up in a terror camp. He grew up in a classroom. He studied in Texas, earned a PhD in economics, worked for the IMF and then the World Bank. When he came back to the Palestinian Authority he did not ask for a militia. He asked for a calculator. He became PA finance minister in 2002 and started trying to clean up decades of PLO corruption and opaque accounting.​ But while Fayyad was quietly balancing books, the politics around him were moving in the opposite direction.

In the wake of the Second Intifada and amid deep Israeli and Palestinian exhaustion, in 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. It removed every soldier and settler from inside the Strip and dismantled all settlements, but no peace agreement followed, no negotiations concluded, and no Palestinian state emerged.

Hamas seized on that political vacuum, arguing that Israel had withdrawn not because of diplomacy, but because of ‘resistance’ and violence, and presenting itself as the force that had driven Israel out. That claim proved politically potent.

In January 2006, Palestinians held legislative elections across both the West Bank and Gaza. When Palestinians went to the polls, Hamas was no longer just an opposition movement. It was presenting itself as the force that had driven Israel out, while technocrats like Fayyad were offering budgets, institutions, and restraint in a political culture primed to reward confrontation. Hamas won a national plurality of the vote and an outright parliamentary majority. The result reflected a political culture that strongly favored movements promising resistance over reform.

Hamas’ victory produced an immediate crisis. It refused to recognize Israel, renounce violence, or accept prior agreements, triggering international isolation and a financial collapse inside the Palestinian Authority. What followed was not peaceful power sharing, but an armed struggle between Hamas and Fatah for control of the Palestinian system.

Then came 2007. Hamas seized Gaza in a violent coup. They threw Fatah men off rooftops and took full control of the Strip, expelling the Palestinian Authority entirely. This was not an electoral transition but a forcible takeover.

In response, Mahmoud Abbas declared a state of emergency, dissolved the Hamas-led government, suspended parliament, and appointed Fayyad to lead an emergency cabinet in Ramallah. That government was not elected and exercised authority only in the West Bank, after Gaza fell under Hamas control.

On paper, Fayyad was now prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, but he governed only one fragmented territory: The West Bank.1

His job was not to inspire a revolution. It was to keep a half‑built polity from collapsing. Fayyad had something much less romantic than a “resistance” movement. He had a police force that needed training, civil servants who needed salaries, donors who needed reassuring, and an Israeli army that still controlled the air, the borders, and the ultimate security decisions over most of the land.

He decided to try something no one in the Palestinian movement had really attempted before or since. Instead of waiting for a grand summit at Camp David or some new UN resolution, he would decide to build the skeleton of a state first. He called his two year blueprint: “Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State.” It came out in August 2009.​ The document is worth reading.

He did not call for a third intifada. He called for separation of powers, rule of law, professional courts, accountable ministries, human rights protections, and an end to collective punishment. He promised institutions that would serve citizens “without discrimination on any grounds whatsoever.”​

His theory was simple and radical. If we build a functioning state in all but name, the world will have to recognize what already exists. If we act like adults, treat our people as citizens instead of cannon fodder, and stop outsourcing our dignity to the next “resistance” fad, we might actually win.

It is hard to overstate how un‑Palestinian this thinking was.

The dominant current of the movement for a century has not been liberation through responsibility. It has been liberation through negation. The goal has not been building something new. It has been undoing something old. Undoing the existence of a Jewish state.

Fayyad was trying to reverse that logic. He wanted to make Palestinian freedom depend on Palestinian capacity, not on Jewish disappearance.

That made him a stranger in his own political culture.

What Fayyad Actually Did

This is not a story of “good intentions that never left the page.” He did real, measurable things.

Under Fayyad, the PA pursued an aggressive program of security sector reform in the West Bank. With American and Jordanian training, new Palestinian security forces were deployed in cities like Jenin, Nablus, and Hebron. Their mission was not to join the militias. It was to shut them down.​

Militias were disarmed. Visible gunmen were taken off the streets. Law and order improved in many urban centers. PA forces coordinated with the IDF and with Shin Bet to go after Hamas cells and criminal gangs. That cooperation was deeply unpopular on the Palestinian street, but it made daily life safer and allowed businesses to take risks again.​

At the same time, Fayyad restructured public finances. He consolidated hundreds of opaque accounts into a single treasury. He published budgets. He reduced patronage and insisted that public money was not private revolutionary property. Salary payments became more predictable. Donors, for the first time, felt they were dealing with someone who spoke their language.​

World Bank and IMF reports from 2010 and 2011 are almost surreal to read today. They concluded that the PA, under Fayyad’s reforms, had institutions “above the threshold” needed for a functioning state “at any point in the near future,” at least in the areas where it actually governed.​

That is diplomatic jargon for the following simple truth: On paper, the Palestinian Authority under Fayyad could have run a state.

If the politics allowed it.

He improved tax collection. He streamlined customs. He invested in infrastructure projects and encouraged private sector development, especially around Ramallah. He tried to make the PA look less like a corrupt patronage machine and more like what he called “a service oriented government.”​

He also articulated, in public, what almost no Palestinian leader dares say.

That the path to freedom runs through responsibility. That institutions and behavior had to change in Ramallah, not just in Jerusalem and Washington.

You might think this would have made him a hero.

The world loves to say it is waiting for a Palestinian partner who rejects violence, accepts Israel’s existence, and focuses on building institutions.

Fayyad did all three.

And look what happened next.

How To Destroy A State Builder

Fayyad was attacked from three directions at once.

From Israel.
From the international system.
And, most tragically, from the Palestinian people.

First, there was Israel, which never fully trusted what Fayyad was trying to build. I will not deny that Israel made Fayyad’s job harder. During the years of his experiment, Israeli governments under Netanyahu continued to approve and expand settlements in Judea and Samaria within Area C (the 60 percent of the territory that remained under full Israeli control under Oslo). New housing units, roads, and outposts multiplied. Checkpoints and restrictions on Palestinian movement, land use, and building permits remained deeply intrusive.​2

To many in the Israeli security establishment, Fayyad’s 2009 plan was not a blueprint for prosperity; it was a unilateral move that pushed beyond the Oslo framework. Fayyad explicitly intended to build infrastructure in Area C without waiting for a final‑status agreement with Israel. Israeli officials saw this as an attempt to pre‑determine borders and facts on the ground and to entrench Palestinian control over strategic high ground they considered vital for Israel’s defense. They feared that a competent, de facto Palestinian state in strategic areas would constrain Israel’s long-term security posture more effectively than a chaotic one.​3

From a Palestinian’s perspective, however, the message was simple: “Your prime minister Fayyad says we will have a state in two years, yet we still cannot drive to Jerusalem without permits and humiliation. Why should we believe him?” Fayyad was selling hope under occupation while the physical map on the ground seemed to tell a different story.

When Abbas decided to bypass negotiations with Israel and go to the UN for recognition in 2011 and 2012, Fayyad opposed it. He warned that chasing empty titles in New York would trigger an Israeli financial response that would crush the real state‑building in Ramallah. Abbas ignored him. He chose the symbolism. As Fayyad anticipated, Israel froze the tax revenue, using a tool it had used before and would use again in response to Palestinian unilateral steps.​ The US backed Israel in its opposition to the Palestinian campaign, and has said it will use its veto to block a membership request submitted to UN Security Council. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it would release the frozen funds “in the wake of the cessation of unilateral steps by the Palestinian Authority”.

But to say “Netanyahu did everything to undermine Fayyad” is to turn a complex tragedy into a fairy tale. Israel did make his work harder through settlements, restrictions, and financial pressure. Yet even that is only half the story, because it was Fayyad’s own leadership and system that ultimately stabbed his plan in the back.

Then there was the international system, which praised Fayyad loudly and abandoned him quietly. The entire Fayyad project depended on external money. But the international community, and specifically the Arab world, treated Fayyad like a luxury item: nice to have, but the first thing to cut when times got tough.

Arab states were the worst offenders. They famously promised a financial “safety net” pledging $100 million a month to cover the gaps whenever Israel withheld tax revenues. It was a lie. The money rarely showed up. Fayyad was forced to act as a beggar in Gulf capitals just to pay the salaries of teachers and nurses in Ramallah. While Arab leaders gave speeches about the “sacred Palestinian cause,” they let the man actually building the state starve for cash.

Meanwhile, the West suffered from a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder. By 2011, the Arab Spring was consuming all the oxygen in the room. The Obama administration and European capitals were focused on Egypt, Syria, and Libya. The boring work of Palestinian institution-building was no longer the priority.

When Europe, the US, and Arab states reduced budget support or shifted priorities, Fayyad had to impose more austerity just to keep the PA’s lights on. Every time Abbas did something symbolic like a UN bid, Israel punished the PA financially. Donors did not step in fast enough to cover the gaps.

So the very system that supposedly “rewarded moderates” left him exposed. They praised him in English press conferences, but when Abbas moved to crush him, they issued polite statements and moved on. They loved the results he produced, but they refused to spend the political capital necessary to protect him.

But the decisive blow did not come from outside. It came from within Palestinian politics itself. Start with Ramallah. Fatah barons despised him. He was not one of them. He was not born in Tunis exile networks. He had not done time in an Israeli prison. He was not a veteran of Arafat’s circle. He was a technocrat parachuted in by donors, with his own relationships in Washington and Brussels.​

Worse, he threatened their income. By centralizing finances, insisting on transparency, and cutting back on ghost jobs and slush funds, Fayyad assaulted the patronage system that kept Fatah loyalists loyal. People who had gotten used to “revolutionary perks” on the budget suddenly faced audits.​

They did not thank him for it.

But the problem went deeper than corrupt elites. Fayyad had a “democratic deficit” with the public, too. Because Hamas had won the 2006 election, Fayyad’s emergency government essentially had to bypass democracy to function.

As the Carnegie Endowment noted in a 2010 assessment:

To the extent that Fayyadism is building institutions, it is unmistakably doing so in an authoritarian context.

Carnegie’s point was not that Fayyad alone made the system authoritarian, but that state‑building was taking place after elections had been frozen and normal parliamentary oversight sidelined.

To build a state acceptable to the world, Fayyad had to bypass the parliament acceptable to his own people. He was effective, but to the average Palestinian, his efficiency felt like an imposition.

In the 2006 legislative elections, his “Third Way” party won only 2.4% of the vote. Ordinary Palestinians did not view him as a savior; many viewed him as a banker for the occupation. He was offering them balanced budgets; they had been raised on a diet of revolution. This was not universal, but it was politically dominant. When he tried to act like a statesman, the street did not see “sovereignty.” They saw “collaboration.”

At the same time, his austerity measures hurt ordinary Palestinians. To stabilize the PA’s finances, he raised taxes and cut subsidies. When donor money slowed and Israel withheld clearance revenues in response to Abbas’ UN statehood bid, he struggled to pay salaries.​

By 2012, protests in the West Bank were not directed at Hamas or even at Israel. They were directed at Salam Fayyad. Demonstrators blamed him for price hikes, unemployment, and the daily indignities of living under an authority that seemed unable to deliver a dividend for its cooperation with Israel.​ Fayyad knows exactly who was behind those protests. In a 2024 interview with Ezra Klein at the New York Times, he finally admitted that the demonstrators were “instigated by others” within the “top leadership.” He wasn’t brought down by the street; he was brought down by the palace. Fatah elites mobilized the mob against him to protect their own power.

Mahmoud Abbas also had his own reasons to want Fayyad gone. Fayyad’s independent legitimacy in Western eyes made Abbas look small. He did not control Fatah. He did not have a militia. But he had something Abbas did not. Credibility with the people who wrote the checks.

That was intolerable.

Fayyad saw the writing on the wall. In that same 2024 NY Times interview, he explained that he resigned because the Palestinian system was veering toward a “higher and higher concentration of powers” in Abbas’s hands. While Fayyad was trying to build institutions, Abbas was busy turning the PA into a one-man show.

Meanwhile, Hamas and other rejectionist factions painted Fayyad as a collaborator. Their narrative was simple. He was policing the West Bank on Israel’s behalf and stabilizing the occupation instead of fighting it.​

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “subcontractor of the occupation.” That is where it comes from.

By April 2013, the pressure became unsustainable. Abbas accepted Fayyad’s resignation. The West issued statements praising his service and then promptly got back to business with the same old faces in Fatah.​

The one man who had actually tried to make Palestinian governance look like something other than a permanent protest movement was out.

The old habits were back in.

And here is where you see the starkest moral contrast.

While Fayyad was trying to build a culture of accountability, the Palestinian Authority under Abbas kept running the Martyrs Fund and Prisoners Fund aka the “Pay to Slay” program. These programs send hundreds of millions of dollars a year to convicted terrorists and to the families of “martyrs,” with stipend size increasing with sentence length. The more Jews you kill, the more your family gets.​

That is not a social safety net. It is a financial infrastructure for terror.

So Fayyad’s West Bank was a strange hybrid.

On the one hand, modern ministries, reformed security forces, and institutional capacity that impressed the World Bank.

On the other hand, a political leadership that continued to glorify “martyrs,” pay salaries to killers, and refuse to prepare its people for any real compromise with Israel.

You cannot build a healthy state on that foundation.

Fayyad tried anyway.

His own system spat him out.4

The Warning Everyone Ignored

You might think that after the catastrophe of October 7, the Palestinian national movement would finally look in the mirror. This was not a tragedy that fell from a clear blue sky. It grew out of a political story that began with the Second Intifada, the decision to reward Hamas at the ballot box in 2006, and the belief that “resistance” had succeeded where diplomacy failed.

The message many Palestinians took from the Second Intifada and from Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza was simple: violence works, and the people who preach it deliver results. October 7 was that logic pushed to its most monstrous conclusion.

Salam Fayyad tried to hold that mirror up. On October 11, 2023, just four days after the massacres, while the world was still reeling, Fayyad published a stark warning in The Economist. While others were busy justifying the attacks or blaming Israel entirely, Fayyad identified the rot inside his own house.

The Palestinian cause, he wrote, “has been damaged by factionalism.”

He argued that the endless split between Fatah and Hamas and the refusal to unite under a single, responsible authority had created the vacuum that led to disaster. His solution wasn’t a “Day of Rage.” It was a call to immediately expand the PLO to include opposition groups on the condition that they commit to non-violence and a unified political program.

He was pleading, once again, for logic.

He was arguing that you cannot have a state if you have two governments. You cannot have freedom if your strategy is split between diplomats in Ramallah and tunnel-commanders in Gaza.

As usual, his advice was drowned out.

Hamas preferred the glory of “resistance” even if it meant the destruction of Gaza. Fatah preferred the comfort of its decaying fiefdom in the West Bank. And the world preferred to ignore the internal Palestinian rot and focus exclusively on Israeli airstrikes.

Fayyad is still one of the very few Palestinian leaders offering a route to unity that does not involve more suicide vests. And he is still the man nobody in power wants to listen to.

How Palestinian Agency Was Erased

This conflict is almost always framed as a morality play with a single villain. Israel does something, Palestinians react, and the story ends there. Agency flows in only one direction. When Palestinians fail, responsibility is reassigned elsewhere. When Palestinian leaders reject viable paths forward, the rejection is explained away as inevitability rather than choice. Over time, this framing has hardened into a modern blood libel that says: “Israel is the main obstacle to peace. If only Palestinians had a state, everything would be fine.” In this telling, Palestinian political decisions disappear entirely, replaced by a reflexive assumption that Israel is the sole author of every outcome. That erasure is not neutral. It is the core distortion that makes honest analysis impossible.

You have seen this narrative in a thousand forms. The ‘occupation’ becomes the excuse for an obsession that long ago stopped being about human rights and became a way to explain every Palestinian failure through Jewish sovereignty itself. The settlements are “the core impediment.” Every failure is externalized, every choice reframed as coercion. Responsibility never quite lands where decisions are made. Over time, this pattern has produced a worldview in which everything starts and ends with the Jew. What begins as rhetoric does not stay rhetorical for long. It hardens into policy, procedure, and institutional obsession.

UN voting patterns show how the international system has turned this into a ritual. This fixation is measurable. From 2015 to 2025, the UN General Assembly passed 173 resolutions singling out Israel and only 71 for the rest of the world combined. The Human Rights Council has a permanent agenda item for Israel. No one else gets that treatment.​

Salam Fayyad’s story punctures that narrative.

Because here is what actually happened.

A Palestinian leader tried to:

• Reject violence and prioritize institution building.

• Cooperate with Israel on security to stabilize the West Bank.

• Present a detailed, time bound plan to create the infrastructure of a democratic state.

• Earn statehood through performance rather than through terror or UN theatrics.​

The response was:

• Israel thanked him for security cooperation while continuing to entrench settlements and operate a system in Area C that undermined his promise of imminent sovereignty in Palestinian eyes while viewing his unilateral plans as a violation of the very agreements that created his authority.

• Donors applauded, then let him twist in the wind financially when politics got hard.​

• Fatah elites sabotaged him to protect their patronage and power.​

• He was never given a direct electoral mandate; Palestinians had already chosen movements that promised “resistance” over reform when he was brought in as a technocratic stopgap.

• Hamas denounced him as a collaborator and continued to fire rockets from Gaza.

• The Palestinian Authority maintained “pay to slay” stipends that directly contradicted his ethos of responsibility.​

• When he finally was replaced, the world shrugged and went back to blaming Israel alone.

If Israel were truly the only obstacle to Palestinian statehood, Fayyad’s experiment would have ended very differently.

The truth is more uncomfortable for the anti-zionists. It exposes that there is a deep ideological commitment in large parts of the Palestinian movement not to build a state next to Israel, but to ensure Israel doesn’t exist at all.

That is why at Camp David in 2000, Arafat walked away from an offer that would have given him a demilitarized state on almost all of the West Bank and Gaza and chose the Second Intifada instead of a counterproposal. That is why in 2008 Abbas failed to accept or even formally answer Ehud Olmert’s map, which went even further. That is why in 2020 the PA dismissed the Trump plan with “a thousand nos” before it was fully published.​

This was not due to ignorance or lack of exposure to alternatives. It is because the core ethos of the movement has never fully shifted from “undo Israel” to “build Palestine.”

Fayyad tried to shift it.

He lost.

Why Telling This Story Matters

So why write about Salam Fayyad in a Substack dedicated to debunking blood libels.

Because every dishonest narrative about this conflict depends on disappearing people like him.

When you erase Fayyad, you can pretend:

• Palestinians never had a serious state building option.

• Israel killed or exiled every moderate.

• The only choices were terror or surrender.

That is false.

There was a third option.
Nation building under occupation.
Hard. Imperfect. Often humiliating.

But real.

For a brief moment, that option was on the table in the “West Bank”.

It was not crushed by Israel.

It was crushed by Palestinian leaders who prefer the politics of grievance. By a Palestinian public that has been taught to view compromise as treason.
By international institutions that prefer an eternal refugee problem over holding Palestinians accountable for their own choices.

When people chant “from the river to the sea” and tell you this is a cry for “justice,” they want you to forget the builders and remember only the bombers.

They want you to see Marwan but never Salam.

They want you to believe there was never a serious Palestinian who tried to build a future that did not require you to dismantle the Jewish state first.

Fayyad’s story does not absolve Israel of every mistake. It does not excuse every checkpoint or every settlement decision. It does not magically solve the conflict.

But it does something essential.

It restores Palestinian agency to the story.

It forces us to say out loud what so many in the “international community” refuse to admit.

The main obstacle to peace is not where Jews live. It is the refusal, on the other side, to choose leaders who build instead of leaders who burn. If the world is ever going to stop repeating modern blood libels about the Jewish state, it has to start by telling the truth about the man Palestinians had, and lost, who actually tried to make peace real by picking up a budget spreadsheet instead of a bomb.

His name is Salam Fayyad.

They just did not choose him.

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Within days of a Guardian article celebrating an open letter by more than 200 cultural figures calling for Barghouti’s release, the internet filled with praise for the “Palestinian Mandela.” Writers like Margaret Atwood. Actors like Ian McKellen and Benedict Cumberbatch. Billionaires like Richard Branson. All lending their moral authority to the idea that the man serving five life sentences for murdering Israeli civilians is actually a prisoner of conscience who holds the key to peace.

Pause and read that sentence again. Then ask a simple question.

Would any of these people have signed a letter calling for the release of an IRA commander convicted of ordering a pub bombing in Belfast? Would they have campaigned for a jailed neo-Nazi who orchestrated a synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh?

Of course not. Yet somehow, when the victims are Israelis and the perpetrator is a Palestinian “resistance leader,” the moral compass spins wildly off its axis.

This is not a glitch in their worldview. It is the worldview.

Mandela Never Bombed Seafood Markets

Let’s start with facts that even Barghouti’s admirers do not seriously dispute.

In 2004, an Israeli civilian court convicted Marwan Barghouti on five counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, sentencing him to five life terms plus 40 years. He was found guilty of directing or authorizing specific terror attacks during the Second Intifada, including:

• The June 12, 2001 drive-by shooting of Father Georgios Tsibouktzakis, a 34-year-old Greek Orthodox monk killed in his car on the road near Jericho. The court held Barghouti responsible for authorizing this attack.

• The March 5, 2002 assault on the Seafood Market restaurant in Tel Aviv, where terrorists opened fire and threw grenades into a crowded civilian venue. Three people were murdered in that attack, Eli Dahan, Yosef Habi and police officer Salim Barakat, and 35 were wounded.

These were not battlefield deaths. They were premeditated executions of civilians in cars and restaurants.

Supporters of the “Palestinian Mandela” narrative like to glide over these details. They talk about “struggle” and “resistance” and “political imprisonment.” They rarely name the victims. They almost never describe the crimes.

Mandela’s record is not a fairy tale either. He co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress, which launched a sabotage campaign in 1961 against the apartheid regime. Mandela admitted at the Rivonia Trial that he had helped plan violent resistance. He did not pretend to be a pure pacifist.

But here is the crux that the open letter ignores. Mandela was imprisoned in 1962, long before the ANC’s armed struggle devolved into its bloodier phases in the 1980s. Mandela did not personally direct the bombing of civilian targets from a prison cell.

Barghouti did the opposite. He was not a figurehead swept up in a movement. He was the operational architect. He personally directed shootings and bombings at the height of the violence.

To collapse those histories into one sanctified word, “Mandela,” is not nuance. It is moral fraud.

Apartheid South Africa Was Not Offered a State and Told “No”

The other pillar of the Barghouti cult is the lazy, weaponized comparison between apartheid South Africa and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In South Africa, apartheid was not a security regime that arose after decades of terror attacks. It was a comprehensive legal order designed from the ground up to entrench white supremacy over a Black majority. Blacks were stripped of national citizenship. Forced into “Bantustans” that no one recognized as real states. Denied the vote. Locked out of land ownership, education and most professions. Subjected to pass laws, racial registries and a lattice of legislation whose explicit purpose was permanent racial domination.

There was never a serious, internationally backed offer of a sovereign, contiguous Black state alongside a white state that the ANC rejected and rejected and rejected again. Pretoria’s “homelands” policy was precisely the opposite. They were non-viable fragments used to pretend that Blacks were no longer the concern of the South African state while still exploiting their labor.

Now look at the Palestinian record.

Whatever one thinks of the lines on the map, it is simply a matter of public record that Palestinian and broader Arab leadership have repeatedly rejected partition plans and statehood frameworks that would have created an Arab or Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one. And with each rejection, they launched terror attacks on civilian populations in Israel.

A short and incomplete list:

• The Peel Commission (1937): Proposes partition of Mandatory Palestine into a small Jewish state and a larger Arab state, with population transfers on both sides. The Zionist leadership, painfully and reluctantly, accepts partition in principle. The Arab leadership rejects it outright. The rejection was not merely diplomatic; it was kinetic. The Arab Revolt intensified, devolving into a bloody three-year campaign of ambushes, bombings, and terrorism targeting Jewish civilians and British officials alike.

• United Nations Resolution 181 (1947): Recommends partition into Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem internationalized. The Jewish Agency accepts the plan. The Arab Higher Committee and surrounding Arab states reject it. Instead of building a state, five Arab armies invaded the nascent State of Israel from all sides with the declared intent of a "war of extermination." The “Nakba” follows. So does a Jewish refugee crisis from Arab lands of similar scale.

• The Allon Plan (1967-1970s): Immediately following the Six-Day War, Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon drafted a plan, adopted as the de facto operating principle by Prime Minister Golda Meir, to return the densely populated mountain ridges of the West Bank to Jordan. The logic was explicitly anti-expansionist regarding population. Israel sought to retain only the unpopulated Jordan Valley for strategic defense against invasion, while wishing to avoid ruling over a million Palestinians. But the Arab League met in Khartoum and issued its famous “Three No’s”: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it. The hand was extended; the fist was returned. The hand was extended; the fist was returned. This rejectionism culminated in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a massive, coordinated surprise invasion on two fronts designed to destroy the Jewish state on its holiest day.

• Camp David & Clinton Parameters (2000-2001): Israel offers a Palestinian state on roughly all of Gaza and most of the West Bank with land swaps and a capital in East Jerusalem. Yasser Arafat says no, offers no counterproposal, and the Second Intifada, with suicide bombings against buses, cafes and Passover Seders, follows.

• The Olmert Offer (2008): Prime Minister Ehud Olmert presents Mahmoud Abbas with an even more far-reaching offer, a near total withdrawal from the West Bank with one-for-one land swaps and a shared Jerusalem. Abbas does not even respond. The offer simply dies. In the vacuum left by this rejection, the conflict metastasized. The following years were defined not by counter-offers, but by the entrenchment of Hamas in Gaza, thousands of rockets fired at Israeli towns, and a “Knife Intifada” in the West Bank targeting civilians at bus stops and intersections.

You can argue about the details. You can say the offers were inadequate. You can criticize Israeli leaders for their own hard lines.

You cannot pretend that this history does not exist and that every offer of peace was met with war and terror.

Black South Africans did not reject multiple internationally supported statehood offers and then spend decades trying to blow white civilians up in shopping malls. They were never offered sovereignty and told “no.” Palestinians were.

The entire apartheid analogy depends on amputating that century of rejectionism and aggression and freezing the story at whatever moment best serves the narrative. Cause and effect inverted. Choices erased. The truth is darker. They rejected partition not because the borders were wrong, but because they rejected the presence of a sovereign Jewish neighbor in any borders.

Gaza, Oslo and the Lie of Passive Victimhood

The same selective amnesia drives the attempt to equate conditions in Gaza and the West Bank with apartheid.

Israel’s security regime around Gaza did not appear because Jews woke up one morning and decided to be cruel. It hardened after years of rocket fire, suicide bombings and cross-border attacks, especially after Hamas violently seized control of Gaza in 2007 and made its charter and practice very clear.

The original 1988 Hamas Covenant calls for Israel’s destruction in explicitly religious terms, declaring that “Israel will exist and continue to exist until Islam obliterates it” and rejecting any negotiated settlement as a betrayal. The 2017 political document softened some language for Western consumption but still insists that all of Palestine “from the river to the sea” is an indivisible Islamic trust and denies any legitimacy to a Jewish state in any borders.

After launching thousands of rockets at Israeli towns and cities, digging tunnels under the border, and finally perpetrating the October 7 massacre, Hamas has no credible claim to be under a “siege” that arrived out of nowhere. The closure and restrictions are harsh. They are also a direct response to repeated acts of war by a movement whose stated goal is the eradication of Israel.

Security fences are not pass laws. Border inspections are not racial registries. The moral and legal questions are serious. They are not the same questions.

In the West Bank, the current patchwork of Areas A, B and C and the split between Palestinian and Israeli control is not a racial caste system. It is the product of the Oslo Accords, which Israel and the PLO signed in the 1990s as a transitional framework toward a negotiated final-status agreement. Oslo created the Palestinian Authority, gave it full civil and security control over the main Palestinian cities (Area A), and shared control in Area B. Israel retained control in Area C, both for settlements and for security.

Oslo was supposed to last five years. It is still with us for one brutal reason. The years after Oslo were not used by Palestinian leaders to prove to Israelis that a demilitarized Palestinian state next door would mean peace. They were used by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to launch suicide bombings and shootings that killed more than a thousand Israelis and maimed thousands more.

Israel responded with targeted killings, raids into PA areas, and eventually the security barrier. None of that is pretty. All of it has a cause.

Calling this “apartheid” erases the core fact that these arrangements exist because every serious attempt at partition was answered by violence and rejectionism. It pretends that Palestinian society has had no agency. That nothing Palestinians did could possibly have influenced the structures that now govern them.

That is a comforting story for activists who want to assign root guilt to one side and endless innocence to the other. It is not a serious account of history.

The Barghouti Cult as Moral Inversion

Which brings us back to Marwan Barghouti and the people now campaigning to free him.

They know, or could know in five minutes, that he was convicted in a civilian court for orchestrating terror attacks that murdered named, identifiable people in cold blood. They know that he helped build and direct the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group that specialized in suicide bombings and shootings inside Israel during the Second Intifada.

They also know, or could know, that Palestinian and Arab leaders have had multiple opportunities over the last century to create a state in part of the land and have chosen, again and again, to prioritize the war to eliminate the Jewish state instead.

Yet none of this seems to matter when the chance arises to play out the familiar morality play. White South Africa. Black South Africa. Evil regime. Imprisoned liberator. The script is already written. All one has to do is swap the names.

Mandela, who did not order a single restaurant bombing, becomes interchangeable with Barghouti, who did. Apartheid, which denied Blacks the vote and stripped them of citizenship from birth, becomes interchangeable with a messy security regime that followed a century of rejected compromises and waves of terror.

In that script, Jewish civilians gunned down in their cars or blown up at dinner are not part of the story at all. They do not fit.

What does fit is the deep psychological need in the West to view Israel as the last remaining legitimate target for the kind of moral rage that used to be directed at white supremacists in the American South or Afrikaners in Pretoria. A world that arrived late to the real anti-apartheid struggle and the real civil rights struggle is now desperate to reenact them, this time on Instagram.

The Delusion of the “Only Partner”

Beyond the moral inversion, there is a strategic fantasy at play here. Western diplomats and cultural elites aren’t just engaging in historical revisionism. They are convincing themselves that Barghouti is the “Palestinian Biden,” a unifying figure who can bridge the gap between Fatah and Hamas and deliver peace.

This is a delusion.

They believe a man who built his career on torpedoing the Oslo peace process through terror is the one who will save it. Barghouti didn’t build bridges. He built the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. He didn’t preach coexistence during the Second Intifada. He preached escalation.

Releasing him wouldn’t be a pragmatic move to empower a moderate. It would be a reward for unrepentant terrorism. It would signal to every future terrorist that if you kill enough civilians, you won’t just get a state. You will get a fan club in London and New York.

Pressuring the Only Side that Ever Said “Yes”

None of this means Israel is above criticism. Any serious Zionist understands that Israeli governments, like every government around the world, have made real mistakes and committed real abuses.

But look at where the pressure is aimed.

The side that has said “yes” to partition multiple times, from 1937 and 1947 to the Clinton Parameters and the 2008 map, is the side the West keeps trying to squeeze harder. The side that has built a flawed but real democracy, with Arab citizens voting, serving in the Knesset and sitting on the Supreme Court, is the side targeted by boycotts and “apartheid” campaigns.

The side whose main opposition parties officially endorse a two-state solution and accept a Jewish and a Palestinian state living side by side is the side dragged before international courts. The side whose existential red lines are that it must not be destroyed and its people must not be massacred with impunity is the side told to “take risks for peace.”

Listen to this video. It’s 8 years ago. The Danish Ambassador insisting that Israel be subject to a double standard. I can’t possibly say it better than Caroline Glick.

Meanwhile, the movements that still chant “from the river to the sea Palestine will be Arab,” that write covenants calling for Israel’s obliteration, that pay stipends to terrorists and teach children that Jews are usurpers destined to disappear, face almost no sustained moral or material pressure at all.

Western “pro-Palestinian” activism has become an ecosystem in which:

• Terror groups like Hamas are funded and hosted by states such as Qatar and Turkey. Their leaders live comfortably abroad while their people suffer.

• “Respectable” NGOs and church bodies churn out reports about Israeli crimes while treating Palestinian antisemitism and rejectionism as a footnote.

• Cultural elites sign letters for Barghouti’s release without once naming the men and women killed in the attacks he directed.

That is not a human rights movement. It is a moral inversion factory.

A Different Kind of “Mandela Moment”

If the world wants a “Mandela moment” in this conflict, it has to begin with the most basic moral clarity.

You do not build peace by turning convicted organizers of civilian massacres into saints. You do not advance coexistence by deliberately erasing a century of rejected statehood offers and calling the result “apartheid.” You do not reduce terror by giving platforms and prizes to the people who glorify it while insisting that Israel is the real problem.

A real Mandela moment would look very different.

It would start with a global consensus that there is no moral or legal right to seek the destruction of Israel. That any movement whose charter, sermons and television programming preach that goal is beyond the pale of civilized politics. That the world will isolate and punish those actors until they abandon that project and accept that the Jewish state is here to stay.

Then, and only then, can you ask Israelis to take real risks. Then, and only then, does the release of hardened prisoners become a possible tool in the service of a genuine political settlement, not a reward for unrepentant terrorism.

If you insist on invoking Mandela, at least honor what made him worthy of the analogy. He eventually chose to end the war once his enemy gave up on domination and accepted majority rule. He did not hold out for a South Africa “from the Cape to the Limpopo” cleansed of whites. He did not write charters about throwing them into the sea.

Mandela never ordered a gunman to walk into a restaurant and throw grenades at families having dinner.

Marwan Barghouti did.

The world knows how to tell the difference when the victims are not Jews.

It is long past time to ask why so many brilliant, educated, “progressive” people suddenly forget how.

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Because that is the core of the work that we must do in order to persuade Americans that the threat we face is not “bias,” but a political movement that seeks to dismantle the West itself.

Most Americans still struggle to grasp that antisemitism disguised as justice does not float in the abstract. It is not a spontaneous cultural glitch. It is rooted in an ideology, organized through institutions, and pushed through networks that most citizens never see. And the oldest, most sophisticated of these networks is the Muslim Brotherhood.

To defeat it, we must defeat it politically. We must educate the electorate about what Islamism actually is, how it works, and what it intends to replace the American constitutional order with. Antisemitism is one of its most powerful weapons, but destroying western civilization is its goal.

The Muslim Brotherhood: The Engine of Global Islamism

For nearly a century, the Muslim Brotherhood has served as the intellectual engine of modern Islamism. Its thinkers provided the ideological blueprint for groups that would eventually splinter into Hamas, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and dozens of regional militias. Its political branches built the “respectable” facade: the charities, student groups, mosques, and NGOs that wrap extremism in humanitarian language. And its international infrastructure, particularly the Qatar-Turkey axis, has spent decades cultivating influence inside universities, think tanks, media organizations, and Western governments.

National security scholars across the spectrum describe the Brotherhood not as a traditional terrorist organization, but as something more dangerous: a global ideological system with dozens of franchises, political parties, charities, and covert networks, all loosely united by a worldview — if not a single rigid chain of command— that seeks an Islamic state through political, cultural, financial, and, when expedient, violent means.

That incoherence is the Brotherhood’s strength and our weakness.

This is not speculation. The evidence has been public for decades.

The 100-Year Plan: Civilization Jihad

In 1991, federal agents discovered an internal Muslim Brotherhood strategy memo in a Virginia safe house formally titled the “Explanatory Memorandum” (and often referred to by critics as the “100-Year Plan”). It outlined a long-term “civilization-jihadist” project in North America. A roadmap for ideological infiltration, institutional capture, and political influence. The memo became a key exhibit in the Holy Land Foundation trial. Although the trial judge later ruled that the memo was not evidence of the specific money-laundering conspiracy, its authenticity has never been disputed, and it has since been widely analyzed by researchers and security services.

It’s stated goal:

A kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.

This is not fringe. It is the Brotherhood’s formal internal guidance to its American chapters.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has since mapped the Brotherhood’s international infrastructure. The Heritage Foundation has recommended designation of key MB branches since 2017 explaining in their report that, despite modern claims that these groups have evolved independently:

The Muslim Brotherhood has operated and recruited in the U.S. since the 1960s. They initially had a focus on university campuses. Mohammed Morsi, the former President of Egypt, was recruited into the Brotherhood in the 1980s while studying for his doctorate at the University of Southern California.

An organization called the Muslim Students Associations (MSA) was the most visible manifestation of the Brotherhood’s early presence in America, disseminating the work of Qutb and el-Banna. Other groups followed that were tied to the Brotherhood or its associates.

• In 1973, Brotherhood members and/or associates formed the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT).

• In 1981, the Islamic Society in North America (ISNA), an Islamic umbrella organization that served as a successor group to the MSA, was founded.

• In the same year, Brotherhood members were also key to the formation of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP).

• In 1993, Brotherhood members and/or associates helped form the Muslim American Society (MAS).

• In 1994, senior figures within the IAP helped establish the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The NAIT, ISNA, and CAIR are listed as unindicted co-conspirators in a major terror financing trial related to the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). Millions of dollars were directed towards Hamas by the Holy Land Foundation and five men jailed for their role in doing so. Despite this, CAIR has worked closely with the Department for Homeland Security and been in close contact with the FBI. CAIR has also been hosted at the White House by multiple Administrations. Such engagement helps legitimize Islamist groups and their claims to be representative of broader Muslim communities in the U.S.

Several European reports (including one sponsored by an ECR group in the European Parliament and a 2025 French Interior Ministry report) between 2020 and 2025 warn that Brotherhood-inspired organizations use mosques, charities, and schools to promote an Islamist agenda incompatible with liberal democracy.

Yet, for decades, the United States continues to treat the Brotherhood as a normal political actor.

The Ideological Parent of Hamas

This failure to act has lethal consequences. While Western leaders debate definitions, the Brotherhood’s children are at war. Hamas was born from the Brotherhood’s Gaza branch in 1987. Its founding charter cites Brotherhood ideologues. Its leadership operates openly from Qatar, the Brotherhood’s modern patron. Turkey gives it media platforms, passport access, and logistical cover. To pretend the Brotherhood is “nonviolent” while Hamas commits atrocities is absurd. They are two parts of the same organism:

• Hamas = the militant arm.

• The Brotherhood = the ideological arm.

• Qatar = the financial and media arm.

• Turkey = the geopolitical arm.

• U.S.-based NGOs = the legitimacy shield.

Violence abroad and narrative warfare at home are not contradictory. They are coordinated. This is why the distinction between “violent” and “nonviolent” Islamists, so cherished by Western policymakers, is an illusion. And without understanding this structure, the public cannot understand why antisemitism and anti-Americanism surged after October 7th. It was not a spontaneous mass delusion. It was the result of decades of ideological cultivation.

The Betrayal: Why Washington has Protected the Brotherhood

Even as many countries, including Muslim nations like Egypt, the very birthplace of the organization, as well as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have designated the group a terrorist entity, the United States has held hearings for more than a decade, paralyzed by a distinction between the Brotherhood’s ‘political’ and ‘militant’ wings that these Arab nations argue does not exist.

In fact, the Obama administration actively courted several of its regional branches. The Biden administration refused to confront it. But why?

As the Heritage Foundation argues, the Muslim Brotherhood is the ideological engine of modern Islamist terrorism, with a global caliphate as its aim and a long record of violent activity, even as U.S. officials warn that formally designating the entire movement raises complex legal, diplomatic, and operational questions.

Designating the global Muslim Brotherhood as an FTO is:

• legally difficult;

• diplomatically explosive;

• nearly impossible to sustain in court;

• disruptive to alliances with Jordan, Morocco, and Turkey;

• risky for intelligence operations; and

• incompatible with decades of U.S. government partnerships with Muslim Brotherhood linked groups.

And now, even with the most serious attempt in years, Washington still cannot bring itself to say the simple, unavoidable truth: The Muslim Brotherhood is the ideological nerve center of modern Islamism, and Islamism is the political project that has spent fifty years trying to dismantle Western civilization from within.

The Legal Shell Game: Why Designation is So Hard

Thankfully, the Trump Administration is finally turning the tide against this paralysis.

In November 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Designation of Certain Muslim Brotherhood Chapters as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.”

While supporters hailed it as a “historic” step, the order was careful. It did not designate the entire movement. Instead, it directed the Secretaries of State and Treasury, in consultation with the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence, to identify chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood explicitly including only three chapters (Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon) for potential designation as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.​

This was quickly followed by legislative action. On December 3, 2025, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the “Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2025,” directing the President and Secretary of State to use existing authority to sanction the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. It still requires passage by the full House and Senate.

Separately, in November 2025, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a state-level proclamation declaring the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as “foreign terrorist and transnational organizations” in Texas, a move that allows him to block them from purchasing land in the state. CAIR has since challenged the proclamation in court, arguing that the state has exceeded its authority.

Yet, even with this political will, the legal hurdles remain immense. This is because U.S. law is built to fight armies, not ideologies.

Under U.S. law (8 U.S.C. § 1189), to designate a group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, the Secretary of State must show that a specific, identifiable organization engages in terrorist activity and threatens U.S. national security. Ideology alone is not enough.

The Brotherhood exploits this loophole perfectly. There is no single international “Muslim Brotherhood, Inc.” with a formal global command structure. Instead, it is a hydra:

• In Egypt, the Brotherhood has been a mass political and social movement, with periods of repression and brief electoral power.​

• In Jordan and Morocco, Brotherhood‑linked parties functioned as legal opposition or coalition partners.​

• In Gaza, Hamas openly identifies as a Brotherhood branch and is designated as a terrorist organization.​

• In parts of Europe and North America, Brotherhood‑inspired activists operate NGOs, student groups, and civil‑society networks that generally do not carry out violence but are accused by some security services of “entryism” and illiberal agendas.​

Many analysts, including critics of the Brotherhood, argue that as a whole it is too diffuse and diverse to meet this standard. Officials warn that a blanket designation might:

• Undercut cooperation with allies like Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait, and possibly Turkey, where Brotherhood‑linked parties or networks are interwoven with formal politics.​

• Push non‑violent or semi‑legal Brotherhood actors toward underground or more radical paths, rather than splitting them from jihadist currents.​

• Be read across the Muslim world as a declaration of war on all political Islam, complicating other U.S. priorities and feeding jihadist narratives.​

Thus even officials who loathe the Brotherhood, tend to favor targeting specific violent chapters and financiers rather than the “entire system” at once.

But this is the point: The fragmentation of the Brotherhood is not a shield. It is a strategy.

It built an ideology that is unified but created organizations that look separate. It avoided direct violence but fed the groups that commit it. It created charities that look humanitarian but funnel money and legitimacy to militancy. It built campus groups that preach inclusion publicly and grievance and revolution privately. It wrapped itself in the First Amendment while advancing a movement that would abolish the First Amendment.

This is the danger Americans must understand. This is what our political counteroffensive must expose.

The End Game: Dismantling the Constitution

Antisemitism is the Brotherhood’s most effective tool but it is not its ultimate objective.

Its real aim is to replace the American constitutional order with political Islam.

To dissolve the nation’s moral confidence.

To turn our freedoms against us.

To make “pluralism” a weapon.

To make “tolerance” an entry point.

To make “social justice” a Trojan horse.

And after October 7th, the results were unmistakable:

• Campus uprisings

• Mass protests defending mass murder

• Westerners chanting the slogans of a terror organization

• Media framing Islamist brutality as “resistance”

• Open calls for replacing constitutional law with religious supremacy

This did not appear overnight. It was the product of long-term ideological work the exact work the 100-Year Plan foretold.

Why This Must Be Exposed to the American Public

This chapter is not about policy minutiae. It is about civic survival. If Americans do not understand the Brotherhood, they cannot understand:

• the rise of anti-Israel extremism

• the collapse of moral clarity in elite institutions

• the resurgence of antisemitism

• the infiltration of U.S. nonprofits by foreign ideological networks

• the narrative battlefield we are losing

• the stakes of the political fight unfolding now

And if they cannot understand these things, they cannot vote wisely and we cannot defeat Islamism politically.

In Part 3: A Moral Counteroffensive: The War for Truth and Liberty, I argued that the only way to defeat an ideological movement built on lies, is to flood the field with truth. Nowhere is that strategy more urgent, or more necessary, than in the fight against the Muslim Brotherhood.

For thirty years, the Brotherhood has operated behind a veil of plausible deniability, infiltrating our nonprofits, schools, and political parties. They have relied on the fact that average Americans cannot distinguish between a civil rights group and a foreign ideological network. They have bet on our ignorance, believing they can dismantle our liberty using our own democratic institutions against us.

This is why we must flood the field. We cannot rely on the government alone to designate them; we must ensure the American voting public can see them.

If the electorate remains blind to this enemy, they cannot vote wisely. And if they cannot vote wisely, we are in danger of electing ourselves out of existence.

This chapter is the beginning of that flood. By stripping away the camouflage of “social justice” and revealing the totalitarian machinery underneath, we begin to reverse the imbalance. Because the truth is simple:

• If you cannot name the ideology, you cannot defeat the movement.

• If you cannot confront the narrative, you cannot stop the violence.

• And if you cannot educate the voter, you cannot defend the country.

Islamism understands America’s vulnerabilities better than we understand its intentions. Our job, and the purpose of this series, is to change that.

We are removing the disguise once and for all.

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On Monday, in Part 1: Antisemitism is the Oldest Rebellion Against Universal Justice, I traced antisemitism to its roots in the war against the Jews. Yesterday, in Part 2: Packaging Hate as Social Justice, I tried to demonstrate how that war has metastasized and now disguises itself as “social justice” to make erasure look like empathy. Today, I will finish the series with a critique on why we’re losing the information war and I frame out a strategy to turn the tide: A counteroffensive designed to outflank the assault on truth and reclaim both the public square and the virtual realm.

Crucially, let us be clear on the objective: this is not a policy paper advocating ways to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor is it a defense of any specific Israeli military action.

This is a counteroffensive designed to turn the tables on our enemies by restoring moral clarity in public. Because media and academic attention remains disproportionately, often antisemitically, focuses on Jews and Israel, while real genociders and colonizers act with impunity, my goal is to flip the narrative with a counter-factual that has the potential to be more powerful than the lies our enemies propagate.

The world must break its antisemitic obsession with Israel and the Jews, before we can ever have an honest debate on the region.

If you agree with me that this strategy has merit. Comment. We are going to need resources to make this a reality.

If you disagree. Comment. Let me know your thoughts on a better strategy to turn the tide.

Why Israel Is Losing the Battle for Hearts and Minds

Before charting a path forward, we must first be brutally honest about why we’ve been unable to defend against the onslaught of lies leveled against us. Simply stated, we are losing because:

1. At least two generations have been groomed on identity politics. They’ve been taught an antizionist frame of intersectionality and identity politics that reduces everything to “oppressor” versus “oppressed” casting Jews as colonizers.

2. We live in a post truth culture where feelings outrun facts. We have tried confrontation: fact sheets, rebuttals, denunciations, and press releases. We’ve tried to counter lies with truth. We’ve labeled activists as terrorist sympathizers, trading accusation for accusation. It has not worked. A generation steeped in identity politics and intersectionality views such charges not as truth, but as oppression from the powerful. The backlash bonds them tighter, turning critics into the very elites they decry. We can continue to shout that it is hypocrisy to spread propaganda about Israel, while ignoring actual genocides, gender apartheid, and the colonial violence of authoritarian and theocratic regimes. But to date, our efforts have been dismissed as “whataboutism.”

3. Jews are cast as “Zionists” and are shouted down and shut out of the public square by cancellations, encampments, and de-platforming under a dogma of anti-normalization: the belief that even mere dialogue with Zionists is unethical and immoral.1 This policy has devolved into a campus practice where Zionism disqualifies Jews from participation in even non-Israel-related progressive causes effectively denying them a valid voice on any topic.

4. There is a trust deficit. We live in echo chambers driven by corporate media and social media algorithms. The public has become consumed with confirmation bias and an inability to think critically outside their engrained beliefs.

5. The pro-Palestinian movement dominates the visual field and the digital algorithm. Their videos are cinematic. Their slogans are simple.

The result is isolation and moral inversion. While our adversaries build coalitions across movements and continents, Israel’s advocates fracture across denominations, parties, and ideologies. For too long, Israel’s defenders have aimed their message at journalists, diplomats, and policymakers instead of students, creators, and the political center.

The solution is not to match their anger but to drown it out. To tell a truer, more universalist story and force the world to see the true face of tyranny that is the cause of all regional instability. Flood the field with the truth: every tyrant who hates Israel hates freedom itself. Every movement that demonizes Jews is practicing for a world without dissent.

To each weakness this proposed counteroffensive supplies a strength: narrative replacement for indoctrination, verification and visuals for post-truth, disciplined lawful presence for exclusion, coalition-building for fragmentation, credible validators for trust, and emotionally grounded storytelling for the empathy gap.

That is the work of this counteroffensive. It is not propaganda. It is moral restoration. It is how we reclaim the language of justice and return truth to the public square both on the streets and in the feed.

Educational Infiltration: The “Academic Intifada”

As discussed in Part 1, this failure is not accidental; it was cultivated through decades of academic framing. We cannot fight the political symptoms without confronting the intellectual architecture that produced them

As Professor Troy rightly points out, we are combating an entrenched, well-funded “academic intifada”. Hostile foreign governments, state-sponsored NGOs, and wealthy foundations have invested billions of dollars over the past two decades to fund academic chairs, university centers, and curricula that specifically promote a post-colonial, anti-Western, and anti-Zionist narrative. This ideological funding has effectively poisoned the well of critical thought, turning many departments into factories for indoctrination, not education.

This foreign influence extends far beyond the ivory tower. It is a coordinated ecosystem of narrative control that reaches from K–12 classrooms to elite universities.

• University Level: Governments and state-linked foundations donate huge sums to establish “Middle East Studies,” “China Studies,” or “Gulf Studies” centers. These gifts often include quiet conditions on hiring, curriculum, or which subjects may not be taught. Examples include the now-notorious Confucius Institutes, funded by the Chinese Communist Party, and Qatar Foundation International partnerships that have underwritten Arabic language and “global studies” programs across the U.S. Tuition pipelines from wealthy Gulf states and China create a second lever of influence: universities fear offending the regimes that supply both money and full-pay students.

• K–12 Level: The same pattern appears in miniature. Foreign-backed nonprofits offer “free” cultural or language resources to schools, Middle East “cultural understanding” kits, Mandarin programs, global-studies lesson plans, many of which present a sanitized version of authoritarian governments or erase Israel entirely from maps. Teachers are courted with expense-paid “study tours” abroad and return with pre-approved lesson plans.

• Hidden Sponsorships: Foreign regimes route money through U.S.-registered charities that sponsor campus events, student associations, and faculty fellowships promoting the donor’s political line. The messaging is consistent: minimize human-rights abuses, romanticize Islamist movements as liberation causes, and frame Western democracy as the true colonizer.

• Joint Labs and Research: Joint labs and exchange programs often give foreign partners access to sensitive technologies or data and sometimes contractual control over publication. The Department of Justice has prosecuted multiple cases involving scholars who concealed Chinese or Iranian state funding while working on federally sponsored research.

• Compliance Failure: By law, universities must report any foreign gift over $250,000 to the Department of Education, yet compliance is spotty. A 2020 federal investigation uncovered more than $6.5 billion in previously unreported funding from China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. K–12 oversight is even weaker—most districts have no reporting requirement at all.

The cumulative effect is cultural capture, not overt espionage. Certain subjects such as Uyghur slavery, Iranian terror finance, Qatari funding of Hamas, quietly vanish from syllabi. Students graduate fluent in grievance narratives but ignorant of authoritarian repression. Administrators learn that speaking plainly about these regimes can cost donations, partnerships, and jobs.

A New Approach: Outflank the Assault

As we discussed in Part 1, the assault on Jews in America and Christians around the world is no isolated prejudice. It is a prelude to dismantling freedom itself, a tyrant’s opening move disguised as justice. Jews are always the canary in the coal-mine because the moral veto is aimed at the whole structure of liberty.

The recent First Circuit decision in StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice v. MIT confirmed what we already knew: the First Amendment protects hateful political speech.

The First Amendment is not the obstacle. The only answer is that we must meet speech with more speech. The ruling should not discourage us. It should liberate us. Courts defend legality, not morality. They preserve speech, not civilization. They do not decide truth. We do.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther proposes hard power: purges, deportation, and defunding. Viscerally it feels good. And while our frustration is real, state coercion like this feeds authoritarianism accusations and so far has only backfired. We need a better strategy.

If the law cannot silence lies, the answer is not censorship or deportation. It is to counter-speech with conscience and fact.

We can no longer meet their emotional outreach with cold facts or history. It’s time to turn the tables on them. Use their playbook but with universal appeal. We will not attack Islam as a faith. Instead, we confront Islamist political ideology, a radical strain that hijacks religion to justify oppression. We must launch a campaign on a scale that matches the anti-Zionist campaign but shine a light on the terror groups, islamic regimes, clerical networks, and patronage systems that sustain and advance Islamist terror: those that enforce gender apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the colonization of entire peoples by authoritarian power.

1. Performance: Flooding the Streets with Truth

So it’s time for a new strategy.

It’s time to take the kid gloves off and unleash every bit of horrific media we have from Islamist attacks on innocent civilians. Why don’t we have video billboards in front of every pro-Palestine encampment streaming unedited raw video from Hamas’ GoPro cameras. It is incumbent on us to show the world what the face of terror looks like. From the “Falling man” of 9/11, to the murder of innocent men, women and children and the rape and sexual violence against women on October 7th. We need to widely release the footage that Hamas filmed. From the mass graves of the Yazidis, to the forced labor camps that enslave fifty million worldwide, and Christian children in Nigeria being burned alive, to media that exposes the gender apartheid of the Taliban and the terror of the Iranian regime, it must speak for every historical victim of tyranny who stood for universal dignity against the cult of force and selective outrage.

We need to organize at a scale that forces journalists to cover the contrast: disciplined, diverse Americans holding vigils for real victims while mobs glorify killers. These are not counter-protests. They are counter-narratives made visible public acts of moral clarity designed to reveal truth through contrast. We will deploy large digital screens and mobile billboards outside encampments, campuses, and UN offices, streaming verified, age-gated footage of terrorist atrocities, accompanied by survivor testimony and factual overlays. Each frame will say what moral relativism cannot: this is what you defend when you call terror resistance.

This shift turns attention from false grievances to real atrocities. Our goals are to defend freedom and oppose all global actors who violate the moral law, thereby expanding the lens of public obsession:

• Expose the true genociders who operate in silence while the world obsesses over Israel. Expose extremist ideologies: Islamism, white supremacy, any movement justifying terror or dehumanization

• Champion universal rights for all peoples oppressed by tyranny including women’s rights, LGBTQ rights and academic freedom. Protest the Islamist gender apartheid and genocides that the antizionist movement so conveniently ignores.

• Reveal the moral selectivity of activists, proving their motive is antisemitism, not justice. Replace selective outrage with evidence-based consistency.

• Re-center the cause of conflict by highlighting how the Arab world has maintained the Palestinians as permanent refugees for decades, a policy of cruel subjugation designed to weaponize their suffering against Israel and the West. This rejection of peace is the sole reason no peace exists in the Middle East; it is the signature cruelty of the tyrants.

This is where we mirror their tactics but without their anti-American rhetoric, without their violence, and without their false claims of apartheid, genocide and colonization. They single out one democracy with moral inversions and double standards. We will show the real record: documented campaigns of conquest and forced conversion, systemic repression of women and minorities, and UN-recognized genocides against Yazidis and other non-Muslim groups. Facts ground us in truth, not propaganda.

If courts protect chants for our destruction then we meet those words with living arguments the public can see and feel. Our protests must match their scale while ensuring we are everything theirs are not: peaceful, lawful, coordinated, disciplined, and deeply American.

• They Chant “Death to America.” We proudly say “God Bless America.”

• They chant “Globalize the intifada.” We hold showcase the results of the first and second Intifadas and hold vigils for terror victims around the world who suffer under oppressive regimes.

• They shout “Genocider.” We will highlight real genociders and focus on the victims killed by real genocides.

• They reframe self determination as “Settler-Colonialism.” We force them to confront what actual colonialism looks like.

• They glorify theocracy. We stand arm-in-arm with Muslim reformers, Iranian dissidents, Arab Christians, and LGBTQ refugees who escaped religious police under theocratic and autocratic regimes around the world.

No shouting matches. No blocking students on campus. No shutting down highways. We offer only the unvarnished and brutal truth told in graphic detail.

Their selective outrage and moral inversion are exposed in real time. This is not just confrontation. It is reclamation. By standing firm, we rekindle the pride in America that has faded in too many.

This can’t be a jewish initiative. We must partner with Christian organizations, human-rights advocates, and Muslim reformers who must lead this fight in the name of true Universal rights. We must expand our reach beyond traditional boundaries turning thousands into tens of thousands and ultimately millions, as seen in historical movements like the civil rights of the 60s and the anti-apartheid of the 70s and 80s, which began modestly but grew through moral persistence. We must win the war of attrition by keeping our focus on the global atrocities that are regularly ignored by corporate and social media.

Take Back the Classroom

Our objective must be to reclaim the classroom from this strategic narrative warfare. We must package short, classroom-ready modules, survivor talks, and debate kits so teachers and student leaders can carry “One Moral Standard” into schools and campuses.

We must create a non-partisan “Academic Transparency Coalition” to push model legislation in every state requiring:

• Full public disclosure of all foreign gifts, grants, and partnerships in K–12 and higher education.

• Mandatory posting of donor contracts online and reporting of in-kind gifts such as travel or curriculum materials.

• Penalties for failure to report and a federal clearinghouse that allows journalists and parents to track foreign funding in real time.

The aim is not censorship but sunlight. When the public sees who pays, bias becomes obvious.

• Ban formal collaborations with institutions in countries that restrict academic freedom or deny reciprocal access to American educators. Exchange must be two-way or not at all.

• Establish an independent board of educators, historians, and human-rights experts to audit foreign-sourced teaching materials for factual accuracy and political bias before they enter classrooms. This panel should include reform-minded Muslim and Chinese scholars who can speak credibly against propaganda.

Replace Dependency with Domestic Investment

Lobby Congress and private philanthropy to fund new language, regional-studies, and cultural programs free from foreign money and influence. If the United States wants academic independence, it must pay for it. To force institutional change where dialogue has failed, we must target the university’s financial engine. We must specifically reach the upper-middle-class parents of “blue America” those who have been funding the “credentialing factory” that is now brainwashing their children. We must frame the appeal as protecting educational integrity, not partisan loyalty.

We must demonstrate the reputational damage and the toxicity of the investment, making it clear that funding this system is subsidizing the very exclusion and hate that is disqualifying their children’s Jewish friends from having a valid voice. This is the financial veto that can restore academic standards where moral clarity has been lost

Teacher-Training for Propaganda Awareness

Develop short professional-development modules—how to identify loaded terms, cherry-picked maps, and omission patterns in lesson plans. Teachers should leave training able to spot ideological manipulation the way they now spot plagiarism.**]

Building the Counter-Narrative Infrastructure

Our objective must be to reclaim the classroom from strategic narrative warfare by building a parallel network that is fact-based, morally consistent, and emotionally compelling. This requires three layers:

1. National Curriculum Library Produce modular, classroom-ready lessons—short videos, survivor talks, and debate kits under the banner One Moral Standard. Each piece should be downloadable and easily inserted into social-studies, civics, or ethics courses.

2. The “Teach the Truth” Fellowship Train a cadre of teachers and graduate students each summer to deliver this material locally. Fellows become the moral first-responders inside schools and trusted peers who can correct misinformation without bureaucratic approval.

3. Local Parent and Alumni Chapters Parents and donors are leverage points. Organize them to demand that universities and school boards disclose curricula and foreign partnerships before approving budgets or donations. A well-informed donor network can do what bureaucracies won’t: cut the pipeline of influence at its source.

The counter-curriculum must not debate politics; it must expose hypocrisy and moral inconsistency. Modules will include:

• Case Studies in Moral Triage: contrasting global outrage over Israeli self-defense with near-silence on ongoing genocides (Uyghurs, Darfur, Christian persecution).

• Exposing the Refugee Weapon: analyzing how Arab governments have kept Palestinians stateless to perpetuate conflict.

• The Sourcing Audit: teaching students to trace the funding and ideological lineage of anti-Zionist centers to their foreign sponsors.

• Human Rights Mirror: pairing every accusation against Israel with a documented abuse from the accuser’s own regime, restoring moral proportion.

Together these steps shift the fight from exposure to reconstruction. Transparency dries up the money that fuels indoctrination; domestic funding fills the gap; trained teachers and parents create a culture of vigilance; and a unified moral curriculum inoculates the next generation against propaganda. That is how we break the academic intifada and rebuild education on truth.

2. Presence: Winning the Algorithmic War

The primary front is digital. We must build what Israel and its advocates have failed to do: a viral digital movement that tells a moral story faster than lies can spread. We must reclaim the very tools that have been weaponized against truth. The same movement that floods the streets with chants and slogans floods the algorithm with lies. We must do the same. The information war will be won through exposure and revelation deployed through algorithms.

Showing the World What It Refuses to See

It is time to stop hiding what evil looks like. For too long, the footage that proves the barbarism of Islamist terror has been locked away, deemed “too graphic,” “too divisive,” or “too triggering.” Yet the same activists who chant “from the river to the sea” have no hesitation in circulating fabrications and staging grief for propaganda. We will counter fiction with evidence unedited, verified, contextualized truth that forces the conscience awake.

Each image tells the same story: the cult of tyranny against the conscience of humanity. We will not sanitize evil. We will curate it responsibly, verify it rigorously, and display it fearlessly. The moral line that separates civilization from barbarism cannot be defended by euphemism.

Each image and testimony must serve one purpose: to make denial impossible. Every post, reel, or billboard will carry one message: One Moral Standard. Verified evidence of Islamist atrocities will appear side by side with the silence or applause of those who excuse them. The goal is not vengeance; it is recognition. The footage itself becomes the argument.

People will watch lies beautifully told over truth poorly packaged. So we will make truth both beautiful and unbearable. We will invest in cinematic, emotionally grounded storytelling, with enough gore to make denial collapse. Each edit will pair horror with humanity: the mother’s voice over a blurred frame, the child’s photo before the massacre, the candle before the darkness.

Within hours of a viral protest or false claim, teams will deploy counter-narratives built not from slogans but from proof. We will never again let a lie dominate the news cycle. Each truth reel will combine verified footage, survivor accounts, and moral contrast—what really happened versus what propaganda claims.

This must be a coordinated and disciplined movement.

• Creators over Committees: Empower students, journalists, and moral witnesses to create under a shared banner: One Moral Standard.

• The Receipts Library: A secure, multilingual archive of verified footage and testimonies with timestamps, metadata, and legal clearance.

• Rapid Response Hubs: Regional cells ready to edit, translate, and deploy high-contrast truth reels within hours.

• Digital Billboards: Permanent installations near activist hubs and major cities displaying verified footage with QR codes linking to full context and survivor accounts.

Reclaiming the Algorithm

We can not fight algorithms with outrage; we must redirect them with evidence. When hate trends, truth must follow it into the feed. Our partnership strategy will involve collaborating with platforms to authenticate footage, with fact-checkers to validate claims, and with influencers to carry moral clarity into virality.

• Preemptive Frames: “Before You Scroll: The Reality of Hamas.”

• Trend Hijacking: Use trending audio, captions, and formats to inject verified content into viral streams.

• AI Coordination: Ethical AI tools will predict propaganda spikes, generate multilingual subtitles, and track bot networks.

To fight bots and digital propaganda, we combine defense with offense:

• Detection and Exposure: Use AI-assisted tools to track bot networks and coordinated hate campaigns; crowdsource reporting through trusted channels for removal.

• Preemptive Framing: Release inoculation reels. Short, shareable myth-busters.

• Trend Hijacking: Intercept trending hashtags with high-engagement truth clips formatted for TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts.

• Paid Precision: Use micro-targeted ads to reach young audiences with tested narratives built on moral clarity, not fear.

• Alliance Building: Partner with platforms like Meta, X, and YouTube for priority moderation and transparency on coordinated inauthentic behavior.

• Cross-Community Collaboration: Unite Jewish, Christian, Muslim reformist, and secular voices under one digital flag. Moral diversity is our credibility.

• AI-Assisted Coordination: Use ethical AI to predict trends, generate subtitles in multiple languages, and identify emerging propaganda patterns before they spread. Technology amplifies truth when guided by conscience.

We flood the field with evidence that we fight for one moral standard, not one nation. When we defend Israelis, we defend Yazidis, Afghans, Nigerians, and all victims of fanaticism. The false accusation of “dual loyalty” collapses when the world sees Jews fighting for the dignity of all.

When people scroll, they should encounter a mirror they cannot look away from. Each image, each frame, each act of courage becomes a spark in the moral grid a light that forces the conscience to choose.

We are outnumbered and outfunded, but not outwitted. The side that dares to show what evil looks like, and what good still requires, wins.

The Call

If you stand for the universal moral law, you must join this fight.

To everyone that shares the Judeo-Christian belief that “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”

This work is rooted in the defense of freedom itself. It speaks to the moderates who have tuned out the shouting and reminds them that silence is not neutrality but surrender.

Critics will say that everyone already condemns these regimes and that existing sanctions prove this action is unnecessary.

But sanctions have failed. The killing continues.

If outrage were consistent, the squares would be filled for the Uyghurs, for Afghan women, for Christians in Nigeria, for Yazidis in Iraq. Their silence is moral selectivity. Proof that modern “justice” follows politics, not principle.

Our objective is to break the antisemitic obsession and moral inversion that has consumed the world.

This is not a fight between right and left; it is a stand between truth and falsehood, between courage and fear.

The hour demands courage. We win not by begging censorship or pity, but by rebuilding moral imagination. Fighting antisemitism is self-defense for every free person.

We lead as Americans rooted in our shared values:

For Freedom. For Liberty. For Justice. For Women. For Peace. For America.

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Antisemitism is a shape shifting virus. It is evolving and metastasizing in real time. In the NYC Mayoral election, we have witnessed an insidious and subversive form of antisemitism that proved to be alarmingly effective. Its strategy is simple: recode Jewish identity into a universal moral category, then dissolve it.

Zohran Mamdani has successfully turned the postcolonial theory of his parents, into a political force that garnered more than 1 million votes in the recent NYC Mayoral election. It’s worth noting that is more than any Mayoral candidate since John V. Lindsay ran back in 1969.

Mamdani’s insidious brand of intersectional politics cloaks antisemitism in the language of inclusion. His rhetoric of justice and equity sounds compassionate but functions as erasure. It reframes Jewish security as privilege and recasts Zionism (the movement for Jewish self-determination) as oppression. Under his approach, antisemitism is not confronted; it is redistributed.

He attempts to dissolve antisemitism into “all forms of hate,” stripping Jews of the right to define their own persecution. Mamdani’s rhetoric is as precise as it is deceptive. He never says “Jews have too much power.” Instead he says “ethno-nationalism is wrong” and then, as we will discuss below, he defines Jewish self-determination as the world’s only example. He never says “Jews should not have safety.” He says “no state should have hierarchy” and then falsely claims Israel has one. He never says “violence against Jews is acceptable.” Yet he refuses to condemn “Globalize the Intifada” claiming “I won’t police speech.”

But to conclude that Zohran Mamdani believes in “universal human rights” is to believe a very well curated lie.1 Zohran Mamdani represents the tip of the spear in a global fight to destroy America.

I know that is a strong accusation. But the proof is hiding in plain sight. I am sure that some will accuse me of spreading anti-muslim rhetoric and assert that I am being “Islamaphobic.” But my critique of Zohran is not a critique of all Muslims. It’s a critique of this man, his toxic views and the strain of radical Islam to which he adheres.

Islamophobia is a Sword, not a Shield

In discussions of rising antisemitism, particularly in academic and activist circles following the events of October 7, 2023, the term “Islamophobia” has been strategically deployed to obscure the truth.

It’s worth addressing an obvious irony. Many people will hear this and think it sounds similar to the argument that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. That both sides are claiming moral cover from criticism. But they move in opposite directions. When anti-Zionism denies Jews the right to self-determination, it erases a people. When “Islamophobia” is used to silence scrutiny of Islamist ideology, it protects an ideology, not a people. One erases identity; the other evades accountability.

Unlike anti-Zionism, “Islamophobia” is deployed as a shield that collapses scrutiny of Islamist politics into a charge of bigotry against Muslims. This pattern extends far beyond one election. This often serves to deflect scrutiny from ideologies that frequently incorporate antisemitic elements, such as certain strains of political Islam or Islamist extremism.

The term “Islamophobia” did not originate from grassroots Muslim communities in the West but gained prominence in the 1990s through organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, later amplified by NGOs and academics. While its etymology is debated, some trace it to earlier 20th-century French scholarship or 1970s Iranian contexts, its modern usage functions as a rhetorical device that conflates legitimate criticism of Islamist ideology with prejudice against Muslims as individuals. This conflation shields political movements that employ civil rights rhetoric while permitting antisemitic narratives, such as justifications for violence against Israel or alignments with groups like Hamas, to evade examination.

Recent data highlight the disparity in religious hate crimes and underscore this ironic dynamic.

According to the FBI’s 2024 hate crime statistics, there were 11,679 reported hate crime incidents nationwide, a slight decrease from 11,862 in 2023. Single-bias incidents motivated by religious bias fell by about 5% overall from 2023 to 2024. Within this category, anti-Jewish incidents numbered 1,938, accounting for nearly 70% of religious bias crimes and marking a 5.8% increase from 1,832 in 2023 and marks the highest ever recorded by the FBI. In contrast, anti-Muslim incidents were 228, comprising about 8% of religious hate crimes and representing a modest decrease from 236 in 2023. Anti-Sikh incidents stood at 142, while attacks on other groups, such as Christians (including vandalism of Catholic churches), have in recent years numbered around 150-200, though exact 2024 figures for these subcategories are not detailed in the primary summaries but remain comparable to anti-Muslim levels in prior reports. The anti-Muslim figure remains relatively stable and roughly aligns with the U.S. Muslim population share.

Public perceptions further contradict narratives of rampant, escalating Islamophobia. Pew Research Center surveys from 2017 showed a “feeling thermometer” rating of about 48 for Muslims, indicating modest but steady improvement in favorable views since the early 2000s. More recent data, while not directly updating this metric, reveals that 70% of U.S. Muslims self-report increased discrimination since the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023. However, this self-perception does not align with a broad surge in reported hate crimes, suggesting that while individual experiences of bias warrant attention, claims of pervasive anti-Muslim hatred in the U.S. are not fully supported by empirical evidence.

It is crucial to acknowledge that genuine instances of anti-Muslim discrimination, profiling, and harassment exist and must be condemned unequivocally harassment based on faith is wrong in any form. Programs like post-9/11 surveillance (e.g., NSEERS) have contributed to structural biases.

Yet, unlike prejudices rooted in myth or historical power imbalances, apprehensions about Islamism arise from documented events: The pattern of Islamist violence against Western targets is not abstract—it is a matter of record.

In 1993, a truck bomb detonated beneath the World Trade Center in New York, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand. Less than a decade later, the September 11, 2001 attacks destroyed the Twin Towers and struck the Pentagon, murdering 2,977 men, women, and children from more than 90 nations.

In March 2004, coordinated explosions on Madrid’s commuter rail system killed 191 and wounded nearly 2,000. The following year, July 7, 2005, four suicide bombers targeted London’s transit network during rush hour, killing 52 commuters and injuring over 700.

France has endured repeated assaults: the 2015 Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher attacks left 17 dead, followed months later by the November 2015 Paris massacres, in which ISIS gunmen and bombers murdered 130 people across the city, including at the Bataclan Theatre. In 2016, a Tunisian-born terrorist drove a cargo truck through Bastille Day crowds in Nice, killing 86 and wounding more than 400.

Belgium suffered its own coordinated suicide bombings in Brussels in March 2016, killing 32 civilians and injuring more than 300. Germany saw similar atrocities: the Berlin Christmas market attack in December 2016 killed 12 and injured 56 when a radicalized asylum seeker rammed a truck into the crowd. In 2019, a radicalized assailant stabbed and killed four police employees inside Paris police headquarters.

Even smaller-scale attacks like Westminster Bridge (5 killed, 2017), Manchester Arena (22 killed, mostly children, 2017), the Vienna shootings (4 killed, 2020) underscore that Islamist extremism remains a persistent, cross-border threat to open societies.

These acts of terror were not theoretical, nor were they responses to personal discrimination. They were ideological campaigns targeting civilians precisely because of their freedoms, their pluralism, and their refusal to submit to theocratic power.

These acts, perpetrated by extremists invoking Islamic justifications, represent a sustained ideological assault, not isolated crimes. Framing such concerns as irrational bigotry constitutes a moral inversion: legitimate alarm is recast as prejudice, positioning aggressors as victims and defenders of liberal values as oppressors.

Western institutions, in their pursuit of tolerance, have often adopted the term without critical examination, allowing it to shield extremist rhetoric.

This is particularly evident in contexts where antisemitism proliferates under the guise of anti-Islamophobia advocacy.

Consider this op ed entitled: Zohran Mamdani said the quiet part out loud. Finally. In this article, the author attempts to portray Mamdani as an innocent Muslim promoting peace amid prejudice.

In reality, it exemplifies how “Islamophobia” redirects criticism from a public figure’s record such as statements advocating “resistance by any means,” which echo militant interpretations rather than the Quran’s emphases on mercy and justice toward the supposed biases of critics.

By emphasizing Mamdani’s personal faith and emotional pain, the piece supplants evidence-based scrutiny with guilt, shaming opponents into silence. Mamdani’s rhetoric and alliances align with movements that justify violence against Israel and mirror radical Islamist narratives, raising valid concerns about fanaticism, not bigotry.

This tactic fosters a civic culture that prioritizes emotional appeals over accountability. The author claims Mamdani “moved her to tears,” but politics grounded in sympathy rather than truth risks enabling divisive ideas.

True justice requires moral clarity: condemn bias against Muslims as people while rigorously critiquing ideologies that perpetuate hate, including antisemitism. This distinction safeguards individuals without excusing extremism. When public figures exploit charges of Islamophobia to demand silence on radical beliefs, they undermine tolerance rather than advance it.

Compassion must not become denial, and emotional blackmail should never masquerade as equity. Only through such honesty can we address the real threats to a free and just society.

The Truth about Zohran Mamdani.

It doesn’t take long researching Zohran Mamdani to conclude that he has been explicit about his ideological commitments and they are not “universal human rights.”

When you look beyond the polished image of his campaign, his rhetoric and record align with the very same postcolonial political framework of his parents that reframes antisemitism as justice, recoding Jewish self-determination as oppression. The evidence is clear from his own words and affiliations. Consider the following:

1. Support for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS): At a 2023 rally outside New York City Hall, Mamdani led chants of “BDS! Not on our dime!” while promoting his “Not On Our Dime” bill, designed to cut tax-deductible funding for Israeli institutions. He defended academic boycotts, stating, “Israeli universities are complicit in the crimes of both the Israeli military and the Israeli government in all its settler-colonial forms.”

2. Rejection of Israel’s Right to Exist as a Jewish State: In a 2025 NY1 mayoral debate, Mamdani declared, “I will not recognize any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race or religion.” This framing falsely equates Jewish nationhood with racial supremacy, ignoring that Israel grants full civil and political rights to all its citizens, including Arabs, Druze, and Christians.

3. Use of “Genocide” Rhetoric: Mamdani routinely accuses Israel of genocide. In October 2024, he asserted in a video statement, “Israel is committing a genocide.” He repeated this in a 2025 Spectrum News interview, calling it “the most accurate description” of Israeli operations in Gaza—language condemned by genocide scholars as propaganda rather than legal fact.

4. Promotion of Antisemitic Tropes: In a September 2023 Democratic Socialists of America panel, Mamdani said: “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” This recycles the antisemitic trope that Israel corrupts American institutions, a modern variation of the “dual loyalty” myth.

5. Refusal to Condemn Violent Slogans: In June 2025 interviews, Mamdani refused to denounce the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” which glorifies the extension of violent uprisings against Jews worldwide. He stated, “The role of the mayor is not to police language,” effectively normalizing extremist rhetoric.

6. Praise for Convicted Hamas Financiers: In his 2017 rap song “Salam,” performed under the alias “Mr. Cardamom,” Mamdani rapped, “My love to the Holy Land Five, you better look ’em up,” referring to members of a charity convicted in U.S. federal court for funneling funds to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.

7. Call for the Arrest of Israel’s Prime Minister: Mamdani repeatedly pledged to have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested by the NYPD if he were to visit New York City. Citing an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for alleged war crimes, Mamdani stated, “As mayor, New York City would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu. This is a city that our values are in line with international law.” This statement, which he vowed to fulfill despite its legal impossibility for a mayor and its conflict with US federal foreign policy, is political theater designed to criminalize and delegitimize the democratically elected leadership of the Jewish state.

8. Organizational Affiliations: Mamdani co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group banned on multiple campuses for promoting harassment and violence against Jewish students. He remains a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose foreign policy platform includes only one issue: the elimination of the State of Israel.

Taken together, Mamdani’s record represents not a moral awakening, but a calculated ideological project to shift the center of gravity in Western politics from the defense of Jewish self-determination to its delegitimization under the banner of “justice.” His politics of empathy operate as politics of erasure turning the vocabulary of human rights into the grammar of exclusion.

Mamdani’s positions are framed by his supporters not as antisemitism, but as principled anti-colonial activism rooted in a universalist human rights ethic. This perspective attempts to re-cast his statements as consistent with a broad, secular political philosophy demanding equality, peace, and adherence to international law for all. In this reading, his support for BDS is a non-violent, grassroots tactic; his rejection of a “Jewish state” is a principled stand against all ethno-nationalism; and his accusation of “genocide” is a moral alarm bell intended to halt mass suffering and force accountability. He is seen not as targeting Jews, but as strategically targeting a powerful U.S. ally and a primary manifestation of the settler-colonial system that his ideology opposes.

However, this universalist defense collapses under the weight of selective application and intellectual dishonesty. A genuinely universalist ethic must apply its moral scrutiny indiscriminately, yet Mamdani’s condemnations and the organizational focus of the two groups that he is associated with, the DSA and SJP, are obsessively directed only at Israel.

This singular focus stands in stark contrast to the numerous nations committing human rights abuses, gender apartheid, and mass murder that Mamdani routinely ignores.

To maintain this narrative, his ideological framework resorts to contortion of core concepts: selectively defining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the world’s unique case of “settler colonialism“ (thereby erasing Jewish indigeneity and the right to self-determination) and applying the term “genocide“ by substituting political outrage over observable consequences for the legally required element of specific intent (dolus specialis).

The universalist language is, therefore, a deliberate rhetorical veneer - taqiyya - a tool of “virtuous exclusion” that weaponizes moral terminology to isolate, delegitimize, and ultimately seek the dissolution of the world’s only Jewish state while simultaneously congratulating itself for acting on behalf of justice.

It is incumbent on everyone to educate themselves on the DSA, the political party of AOC, Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani. This video discusses the DSA’s history and its shift toward a stridently antisemitic position on Israel.

Blood Libel: A Jewish “Ethnostate”

Let’s examine the heart of Mamdani’s criticism of Israel. He calls the world’s only Jewish democracy, an “ethnostate” claiming that this the accusation is because he believes in universal justice.

The entire accusation that Israel is an “ethnostate” is a rhetorical weapon, but it shatters against every definition of the word.

It is not an analysis; it is an indictment dressed as scholarship. The charge is not descriptive; it is ideological.

In its strictest, most damning sense, an “ethnostate” is a political system built for a single ethnic group that actively denies equal rights and citizenship to others. It’s a system of legal supremacy like apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany, where race defined citizenship and power.

By this standard, the claim against Israel is not only wrong; it is absurd. Over twenty percent of Israeli citizens are Arab, Muslim or Christian, who vote, serve in parliament, on the Supreme Court, and in the military. Arabic holds a “special status” in Israel. It is widely used in official contexts such as on road signs, product labels, and government documents and is spoken by about 20% of the population. Israel’s Declaration of Independence guarantees equality stating that the State of Israel “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.”

The selective application of this charge exposes the double standard. If we truly sought states that deny fundamental rights based on ethnicity or religion, we would condemn:

• Myanmar, which denies citizenship to its Rohingya minority.

• Iran, where Persian Shia supremacy defines the state.

• China, which imprisons Uyghurs for their faith and culture.

• Pakistan, which declares non-Muslims constitutionally unequal.

Critics also ignore a glaring contemporary example of a true ethnocracy: Malaysia, whose Constitution permanently privileges ethnic Malays over Chinese and Indian citizens in education, land ownership, public contracts, and government posts. It is an explicitly race-based legal order. Yet Malaysia has never been subjected to global boycotts, UN condemnations, or campus protests branding it a “racist state.” Only Israel, the lone democracy in its region, where minorities enjoy full rights is singled out for delegitimization. The standard is not moral; it is selective, and applied uniquely to the Jewish state.

When pressed on the facts, critics retreat to a softer definition. They argue that even if Israel does not legally discriminate, it remains an “ethnic nation-state,” one that privileges Jewish identity as the organizing principle of the state. But that is not aberration, it is the global norm. Most nations were built on precisely this model: a shared ancestry, culture, or faith.

• Japan is ninety-seven percent ethnically Japanese and defines citizenship largely by descent.

• Greece enshrines Orthodoxy in its constitution and considers itself the homeland of the Greek people, granting citizenship to its global diaspora.

• Armenia calls itself the nation-state of the Armenian people, founded as a refuge for survivors of genocide and exile.

• Ireland defines itself as the homeland of the Irish.

• Pakistan was created explicitly as a Muslim homeland for the Indian subcontinent.

Each of these nations defines sovereignty in terms of a people’s right to self-determination, yet none are condemned for it. No one calls Japan an “ethnostate.” No one demands that Greece or Armenia abandon their national character or dissolve their diaspora laws. Only when the Jewish people claim that same right to live in security and self-determination in their ancestral homeland—does the accusation become moral outrage.

The double standard holds under both definitions. If an ethnostate means legal discrimination and rights denial, Israel does not qualify. If it means a democracy rooted in a people’s shared culture or faith, then half the world’s nations qualify—and yet only one is condemned.

This is the inversion at the heart of the accusation. When Greece calls itself the homeland of the Greek people, it is nationalism. When Israel calls itself the homeland of the Jewish people, it is apartheid. The difference is not legal or political; it is rhetorical and moral theater.

Israel is not an ethnostate. It is a Jewish-majority democracy built on the principle that a people who endured two millennia of stateless persecution deserve the same right as every other nation to govern themselves and defend their existence. To deny that right to Jews alone is not justice; it is prejudice disguised as progress.

They’ve Weaponized Empathy

The city that I once called home, where the Statue of Liberty once was the symbol for refuge for the oppressed, now risks becoming the prototype for how antisemitism can be institutionalized through empathy.

In Mamdani’s New York, the erasure of Jewish legitimacy is sold as moral evolution. A model so polished, so polite, that it could soon be exported to every capital in the West. It’s insidious and it can’t be ignored.

And because it comes draped in virtue, it will spread even faster than the old hatreds ever could. That is why, as we will discuss tomorrow, we must reclaim the moral high ground before it disappears.

Tomorrow, “Part 3: A Moral Counteroffensive: Winning the War for Truth and Liberty”, I will attempt to explain why we are losing the information war, and how we can mount a counter-offensive

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When Empathy Turns Against Truth

Something broke on October 7, 2023. The slaughter of Israelis by Hamas should have unified humanity against evil. Instead, it revealed how far the moral order has fallen. Within days, sympathy for the victims collapsed. The murderers were celebrated as “resistance fighters.” This is not only a Jewish crisis. It is a civilizational one. It exposed that the war on Israel is not about land but about truth itself.

A generation stripped of American pride no longer senses the honor of citizenship. This is not finger-pointing; it is grasping the peril when youth mature devoid of affection or allegiance to their homeland. As patriotism wanes, souls grow ready to surrender what forebears bled to secure. They pursue fleeting lures rather than anchoring to the land that bestowed liberty and promise. This void invites the ideological diseases we see metastasizing: antisemitism dressed as justice, where envy and resentment fill the gap left by eroded national pride. Yet within the chaos, there are still examples of moral strength worth emulating.

Antisemitism as Political Warfare

The Shapeshifting Hatred: Why Conventional Explanations Fail

Until we understand why antisemitism exists, we can’t combat it effectively. The common answers such as economic envy, religious difference, ignorance or simple racial prejudice are all inadequate. These factors vary across time and place: Jews have been hated as capitalists and communists; as a race and as a religion; as rootless cosmopolitans and as hyper-nationalists. If the hatred were specific to money or theology, it would be consistent. Instead, it constantly shapeshifts, adapting itself to whatever ideological weapon a regime needs to justify oppression.

To understand why the world so reliably turns on the Jews, we must expand the discussion beyond these superficial explanations and go back to the beginning: to the political context of the Law of Moses.

The Root of the Conflict

The Torah tells the story of a slave revolt. The Jewish people escape tyranny. They receive the law of Moses. This law ends oppression by binding rulers to the same standard as the ruled. It replaced appetite with conscience and power with principle. Over twenty-five centuries, this idea transformed the cruelest societies on earth into the freest. At its center is a sentence that carries more weight than any political manifesto: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” derived from Leviticus 19:18.

This ethical commandment is often viewed simply as a universal expression of empathy. However, the work of Francisco Gil-White reveals a profound tension at its core. Gil-White argues that moral systems are fundamentally ethnocentric. They are designed to enforce loyalty and cooperation within a defined group. In this view, the commandment’s original context restricted the scope of the “neighbor” to a fellow member of one’s own people, serving as a mechanism for ingroup cohesion, not universal love.

It is precisely here that the Jewish ethic becomes the target of political warfare. If the moral law had remained only a tribal code, it would pose no threat to empire. The revolutionary act, the idea that transformed history, was the prophetic and subsequent theological universalizing of that commandment. The Jewish concept that rights are based on equal dignity, not tribal membership, gradually expanded the definition of “neighbor” to include the stranger, the foreigner, and ultimately, every human being created in the divine image. This Gil-White persuasively argues, once morality became universal, once Jews claimed that every life carried divine dignity, tyrants found their perfect scapegoat.

If your neighbor bears equal dignity, law must serve justice, not power. Rights are universal. Conscience is king. This profound Jewish concept is widely understood as a foundational ethical precept for the development of modern political universal rights, and this very connection becomes a target for antisemitic and authoritarian ideologies. It’s a compelling argument and if we agree on the premise, it changes how we must combat antisemitism.

History confirms what moral logic predicts: when the Jewish conscience is exiled, freedom soon dies beside it. Every empire seeking to enslave humanity knows the Judeo-Christian ethic blocks it. Antisemitism is political warfare against the moral law. It is the most reliable signal of this systemic attack. Destroy the Jews, and you remove the people who keep reminding the world that power has limits.

Where Jews Are Purged, Freedom Dies

Freedom House estimates that only 1/5th of humanity lives in free societies where rights are protected and conscience reigns over force. That leaves six billion people under governments that restrict freedom. In more than a hundred countries, liberties are curtailed or crushed. In fifty nations, dissent is a crime and equality a fiction.

Authoritarian regimes thrive by dismantling the very ideas our ancestors forged in the fires of Exodus and Revelation. They jail journalists, shatter assemblies, and silence faiths that preach dignity. In doing so, they clear a path for modern slavery that now enslaves more than fifty million people worldwide, according to the International Labour Organization. Forced labor in China’s camps, migrant bondage in Qatar’s shadows, and conscription in Russia’s wars are the fruits of freedom denied.

The shadow of ethnic cleansing falls heaviest where authoritarianism takes root, a grim pattern etched in the blood of exiles and the silence of the suppressed. Consider the expulsion of nearly nine hundred thousand Jews from Arab lands between 1948 and the early 1970s, a forced exodus that erased communities that had flourished for millennia. These acts were not collateral damage of war; they were precursors to tyranny. In the decades that followed, fourteen of those twenty-two nations devolved into full autocracies, with Freedom House scores plummeting by more than forty points. Iraq under Saddam, Syria under the Assads, Libya under Gaddafi, each rose on a wave of scapegoating, where purging Jews cleared the moral ground for dictators to enthrone themselves. The pattern repeats across the twentieth century. In Eastern Europe, Stalin’s antisemitic campaigns coincided with the Iron Curtain’s descent. Even in Latin America, pogroms against Jewish communities preceded the rise of military juntas. Everywhere the moral law was exiled, tyranny filled the vacuum.

The pattern is clear: where Jews were driven out, freedom soon followed them out the door. This is not coincidence. Tyrants do not merely tolerate such violence. They orchestrate it as a systematic attack on the moral law that Jews have carried since Sinai. By erasing those who embody equal dignity, they dismantle the conscience that binds rulers to justice. The result is an empire of fear, where billions now endure restricted freedoms and the chains of yesterday forge the labor camps of today.

So is it any surprise that traces of that pattern are emerging in America itself. Ours is a country built on the Judeo-Christian ethic of “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

We are the land of the brave. It is time to once again embrace what made this nation the greatest on earth. The same belief that bound rulers to law at Sinai later crossed an ocean, shaping a republic that defied kings and drew strength from patriots who gave everything to keep the American experiment alive.1

Moral Corruption of the West

By the end of 2024, antisemitism had exploded to record levels. The ADL recorded 9,354 incidents in the United States, nearly triple the year before. Europe saw similar spikes. Synagogues defaced. Students chased from classrooms. Cities filled with mobs chanting for intifada. The lies now flood mainstream media and culture. They bridge the Atlantic Ocean from the New York Times to the BBC, from podcasts to morning radio shows that shape a generation’s moral compass. Populist commentators recast anti-Israel narratives as working-class solidarity. Billionaires become villains. Question the movement’s heroes, and you are branded Islamophobic or elitist. This rhetoric fuses social justice language with old antisemitic tropes. It whispers that “Zionists,” “corporations,” and “Wall Street” are the same. The audience hears empathy. What slips through is envy and resentment.

A Slide into Darkness on the Right

Neo-Nazi rhetoric and conspiracies about globalists and Zionist control return through populism’s digital backdoor. A small, loud faction echoes the radical left. Jews are again the obstacle to America.

The problem has faces. Tucker Carlson gives oxygen to vile voices like Nick Fuentes who spout antisemitic venom and Holocaust denial. Eliminationist rhetoric is laundered as contrarian inquiry. Candace Owens promotes conspiratorial framing. She paints Jews as uniquely suspect. A leaked chat among Young Republican leaders exposed pornographic racism, open Jew hatred, and violence fantasies. These are future officials. Their language echoes what extremists whispered at cross burnings. Now it arrives by phone. Algorithms feed the poison.

When senior figures redefine bigotry as trolling, they turn complicity into virtue. The silence normalizes the slurs. The Holocaust denial becomes normal. The right must confront this rot early. Otherwise, a generation slips into nihilism that destroys the movement.

The Indoctrination of the Left

The modern left has replaced moral reasoning with power arithmetic. Identity politics divides humanity into “oppressors” and “oppressed,” assigning virtue or guilt by category rather than conduct. Within this hierarchy, Israel is cast as the ultimate oppressor, and Jews are recoded as “white colonizers” despite being an indigenous people in their ancestral land, with roughly half of Israel’s Jews descended from Middle Eastern and African refugees and the rest from exiled communities across the diaspora.

From the Quad to the Classroom

This dogma now dominates elite universities. Encampments from Columbia to UCLA turned campuses into “Zionist Free” propaganda zones. Jewish students faced harassment, spitting, blocked access to class and violence.

• Picture a freshman at UCLA, books in hand, spat on and called a “Zionist pig” while diversity officers look away.

• At Columbia, protesters set up plywood checkpoints and demanded Jewish students show IDs to enter campus areas.

• At Harvard, student groups blamed Israel alone for the massacre.

• At MIT, Jewish students were told to stay home “for their safety” as demonstrators blocked hallways and shouted down classes. Professors applauded “resistance.” They assigned Hamas communiqués as reading. Faculty unions demanded boycotts of Israeli scholars.

The intellectual groundwork for this perversion did not begin in the encampments. It began in the classroom. The moral inversion now visible in the quads was seeded in the seminar.

A decade ago at Oxford, Dennis Prager asked: Who threatens peace more in Syria — ISIS or Israel? In Lebanon, Hezbollah or Israel? In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood or Israel? The answer is obvious. Yet the ideological left refuses it. That exchange remains one of the clearest illustrations of moral inversion in modern debate. It is worth watching.

They say the fight is really about the power dynamic of the modern state of Israel and its policies, the settlements, the military presence in the West Bank, and the blockade on Gaza. They say this is the “legitimate political criticism” they represent. But here is the critical point: every nation has territorial disputes, security dilemmas, and flawed policies. Israel’s conflict is unique, in part, because its enemies seek its annihilation. But mostly because the world’s only Jewish state is the only one whose right to exist is treated as negotiable.

This selective outrage exposes the truth. It is about a moral inversion that demands Jews alone be denied the moral right of self-determination and self-defense. It is an ideology that calls the massacre of civilians “resistance” and self-defense “genocide.” These lies and double-standards, this moralizing obsession, are proof the argument is not about land or policy. It is about a moral inversion that demands the Jewish state be held to a unique, impossible standard, allowing the massacre of civilians by Islamist terrorists to be excused as “resistance” while defensive actions are branded “genocide.” This selective radicalization itself confirms that the true enemy is the ideological framework, not the policy.

It traces back to the academy, to a generation of postcolonial theorists who replaced moral judgment with moral relativism.

Among the most influential is Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, father of NYC Mayor-Elect, Zohran Mamdani, whose politics have become emblematic of this worldview. In 2007, Mahmood Mamdani argued that labeling the Darfur genocide a “genocide” was itself an act of Western colonialism that the language of international law was merely a tool of imperial power. Think about that for a moment. The regime in Khartoum systematically murdered Black Africans in the name of Arab-Islamic supremacy, and yet condemning those crimes became, in this logic, a form of colonial aggression. It was a moral trick that absolved killers and condemned conscience itself. That same logic, where murderers are victims and victims are oppressors, now dominates the global conversation on Israel. Fast-forward to today. The same framework that excused the Darfur genocide now sanctifies Hamas’s war on Israel. When Islamists massacre Jews, their violence is reframed as “resistance.” When Israel defends its citizens, its actions are treated as “genocide.” The skepticism toward international law vanishes the moment it can be used against the Jewish state.

This is the through-line of our crisis: an ideology that once claimed to expose the political use of language now uses that language to erase moral politics and re-legitimize genocidal movements under the banner of anti-colonial justice. The slogans “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” are not aberrations. They are the political offspring of an academic creed that teaches young people to view evil as context and freedom as privilege.

The proof of this distortion appears in how these activists talk about Israel itself. When they chant for a “Free Palestine,” they claim to seek one state with equal rights for all. In reality, that vision means the end of the world’s only Jewish democracy. The only nation in the Middle East where Jews, Muslims, and Christians all have full civil rights including the right to vote, to serve in parliament, and to worship freely.

That is no accident. It is the product of a people forced by history to build the one state in the region that guarantees equality under law. When critics say there should not be a Jewish state, they are really saying the Jewish people should remain the only people on earth denied sovereignty, the world’s repeatedly persecuted minority asked once again to entrust their safety to the mercy of others.

Those who make these demands must first confront the region’s record on equality. The great Jewish communities of Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and Tripoli, millennia old, were not merely emptied; they were destroyed. Synagogues were burned or converted, homes confiscated, citizens expelled. Nearly one million Jews fled with nothing but the clothes they wore. These were not the consequences of war. They were preludes to dictatorship.

Even in the West, where democracies pride themselves on tolerance, Jews remain the most targeted religious minority.

The need for a Jewish homeland is therefore not a relic of the past; it is a matter of civil rights in the present. Israel does not contradict universal human rights. It proves them.

The moral inversion is not an accident. It is a deliberate strategy, packaged in the language of social justice to make erasure feel like empathy.

Tomorrow, In Part 2: Packaging Hate as Social Justice, I will attempt show how this inversion is packaged for modern consumption. We examine the New York case, how “Islamophobia” is used as a shield, and how the “ethnostate” lie became the spear.

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The ceasefire in Gaza is a fragile pause, not a victory. President Trump’s bold strategic maneuvers allowed all parties to reach an agreement that provided for the release of the hostage in exchange for an end to the war and a partial evacuation of Gaza by the IDF. The critical issue has become whether there has actually been an agreement reached between the parties that cuts through the illusions that have trapped us for decades. The agreement (as interpreted by the Israelis and the moderate Arab states) is clear: Hamas must be crushed, its leaders hunted without mercy, and its grip on power shattered forever. No more half measures, no more truces that let terror regroup. Trump’s plan (as interpreted by the Israelis and the moderate Arab states) demands total defeat. It insists on operational freedom for Israel inside Gaza until the threat is eradicated. And it aligns with a deeper truth that we have seen repeatedly since the end of World War II: ceasefires do not end wars. Only decisive victory followed by disarmament can secure peace and prevent another generation from being sacrificed to false hope.

Defeat must be paired with an immediate security and a civil administration solution. A temporary coalition of moderate Arab states, the US and Israeli oversight must stabilize Gaza’s day-to-day life until a new, non-Hamas Palestinian authority can be vetted and installed that can provide stability and a modicum of freedom to its people.

Defeat The Ideological Core

The first test of unity is the disarmament of Hamas. If the Palestinians and their allies cannot meet this first step then next steps will never occur and Palestinian suffering will continue indefinitely. As Haviv Rettig Gur so eloquently explains, Hamas is not merely a militant faction or a political rival. It is the inheritor of a revivalist theology that reads geopolitical success as divine validation. That theology, traced from late 19th and early 20th century thinkers through the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas, treats the defeat or survival of Israel as the primary signal that Islam is returning to strength. Iran’s theocratic project and Sunni Islamist movements converge on this one demand: overcoming Israel is the first sign of redemption. Under that logic, survival, martyrdom, and the ability to continue the struggle are interpreted as proof of divine favor, which in turn legitimizes renewed violence rather than restraint. As Haviv states:

If you drill down to the Ayatollahs of Iran, catch one and interrogate him politely over coffee, or impolitely, I don’t care, he wants me dead, and ask, “Why Israel?” you find the same logic. Iran, with its Shia reinterpretation of Sunni revivalist ideas, believes it is the revolutionary vanguard of Islam’s restoration. But why Israel? Iran is 1,200 miles away. It has no border, no competing ports, no economic reason to care about Israel. Yet it spends a double-digit percentage of its GDP building a proxy system around Israel to destroy it. Why?

Because they believe that Islam’s redemption begins with overcoming Israel. It’s the same idea Rida articulated a century ago that Islam’s weakness will only end when it reverses the humiliation inflicted by the historically weak Jews. This is the one point of unity between Sunnis like Hamas and Shias like the Ayatollahs: the belief that defeating Israel is the first sign of divine grace returning to Islam.

Because Hamas frames the conflict as zero sum, its strategy is to perpetuate war rather than negotiate peace. Peace that leaves Israel intact is treated as defeat. Periods of calm are viewed as pauses, not solutions. That is why rebuilding Gaza without changing who controls it or how it is governed risks simply restocking the tunnel and arsenal economy and buying time for the next assault. Likewise, holding or trading hostages is not merely tactical cruelty. Within this worldview it is a source of political and theological leverage that sustains the movement.

Haviv continues:

….in the pro-Palestinian movement, Israel is constantly called colonialist, imperialist, apartheid, even Nazi. These words, he argues, don’t serve as analytic descriptions but as assertions that Israel is peelable that, like Nazism peeled off Germany or apartheid peeled off South Africa, Israel can be stripped away from the land, leaving an authentic Palestine beneath. That notion that the Jews are removable feeds Hamas’ zero-sum ideology. It tells Palestinians that compromise is immoral, that total victory is not only possible but divinely required.

Hamas, of course, knows this strategy has failed for a century. They know they can’t destroy Israel. Yet they persist because their theology demands sacrifice, not success. Gaza’s destruction is, in their eyes, a worthy offering on the altar of Islam’s redemption. In that belief system, there is nothing the world can do for Gaza that Hamas won’t undo. Every dollar, every shipment of aid, every campaign against Israel will be twisted back into the narrative that Islam is purified through struggle and that redemption comes only through Jewish destruction.

For a credible “day after” plan, the international community, including Israel, must enforce the intent of the Trump peace plan, and no longer treat Hamas as a negotiable status quo. Reconstruction and humanitarian relief must be conditioned on dismantling Hamas’ governance, its capacity to rearm, and the theological narratives that justify endless conflict. Only a clear, enforceable defeat of the movement’s ability to rule, rearm, and terrorize can invert the perverse signal that survival equals divine endorsement. Only then will clerical and political narratives that sanctify perpetual war be forced to reckon with a demonstrated failure. As Gur explains:

And the inverse is also true: only total defeat, an unmistakable end to Hamas’ ability to fight, rule, or inspire, could force a reinterpretation among their clerics. If victory proves God’s favor, then defeat disproves it. Only when Hamas is destroyed will the imams who teach this theology be compelled to reconsider whether Allah truly endorses perpetual war.

That, Haviv concludes, is the moral and strategic heart of the Gaza conflict. The world can love Israel or hate Israel, but none of that matters so long as Hamas endures. For Palestinians to have a future, Hamas, and the theology that sanctifies endless war, must be defeated. Hamas’ militarism has demonstrably postponed Palestinian independence for more than twenty years and brought immense suffering. We should expect a full-throated good riddance to them.

The Crucial Test of Self-Governance

The defeat of Hamas solves the security problem but instantly creates a political one: the vacuum which has led further radicalization is places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. The immediate governance of Gaza cannot be left to hope or political posturing. The temporary coalition of moderate Arab states, the United States, and Israeli oversight must function as the interim stabilizing force, and must not allow the Palestinians to avoid the hard decisions required for self-government. This force must enforce the peace, oversee the cleansing of the terror infrastructure, and manage basic services until a vetted, non-Hamas Palestinian civil administration can be established. This is a non-negotiable phase of security administration, and the world must now allow the Palestinians to drop the ball through in-fighting, corruption, cowardice and finger pointing.

The test of good government must be one of basic political maturity. Many observers, eager for a Palestinian state, suggest the ball is now entirely in the Palestinians court to form a viable democracy. We should watch closely to see if Palestinians genuinely embrace the ideals that underpin any successful modern nation. Will they convene a constitutional convention focused on protecting individual rights and private property, crucial for rebuilding their economy? Will they establish an independent judiciary capable of checking government overreach, ensuring the first election is not the last, which is the fate of all regimes without proper checks and balances?

Given the distinct cultures and governments in Gaza and the West Bank, federalism seems like the rational design to prevent a single monolithic power center from hijacking the future.

The entire world, including every Western leader who demands a state, needs to recognize that the success of an independent Palestine depends entirely on the adoption of these liberal democratic principles which, to date, have been utterly rejected by Palestinian leadership in favor of corruption and authoritarianism.

But even after Hamas’ defeat, the deeper struggle begins, which is not measured in months but in generations: the battle for the next generation’s mind.

No Reconstruction Without Reeducation

After helping the Afghans defeat the Soviets, America congratulated itself and went home. It was “Charlie Wilson’s War” but without Charlie Wilson’s peace. Billions were spent arming the mujahideen, yet when the last Russian tank crossed the border, no one stayed to build schools, retrain teachers, or plant a vision of what freedom should look like. The vacuum was filled by clerics and warlords who taught that victory came from Allah alone, not from human courage or the desire for liberty. The lesson was clear: when you topple tyranny but fail to reeducate, fanaticism rushes in to claim the victory.

A generation in Gaza has been marinated in jihadist poison. Children drilled in summer camps to wield rifles, not for sport, but to hunt Jews. Textbooks that teach martyrdom as the highest calling, where maps erase Israel and history glorifies suicide bombers. This is not education. It is indoctrination, a deliberate warping of young minds to perpetuate endless war. The findings of these curriculum monitors are often debated by UN apologists, but their consistent evidence demands we treat this material as a weapon of war.

In its schools serving 500,000 students in Gaza and the West Bank, curricula promote jihadism, antisemitism, and elements echoing blood libels.1 A 2023 IMPACT-se report analyzed UNRWA-distributed textbooks glorifying violence, such as a Grade 5 Arabic unit praising Dalal al-Mughrabi’s 1978 massacre as “heroism,” or Islamic Education texts defining jihad as a duty to “free Palestine from Zionist occupiers.” Antisemitic content includes depictions of Jews as treacherous in historical battles, fostering conspiracy myths.2. In 2025, independent monitors alleged extensive Hamas and PIJ penetration within UNRWA staff, including principals and administrators, revealing an alleged 1,462 UNRWA staff affiliated with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad,3 some inciting terrorism online. This indoctrination morally betrays the UN’s peace mandate, and sowing hatred that sustains conflict, thereby ensuring the ideology of maximalist rejectionism survives every political peace attempt.

Deradicalization must follow defeat. It starts with purging the poison: dismantle the networks of mosques and schools that double as terror incubators. Replace them with curricula that affirm life over death, dignity through work over glory in graves. International partners, those truly committed to peace, must fund and oversee this. Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with their own deradicalization models, could lead. Saudi Arabia’s program for former jihadists, which pairs counseling with employment and family reintegration, has shown measurable success in reducing recidivism.4

Imagine joint programs where moderate imams teach that the Quran’s verses on peace are not footnotes, but commands. The international community must tie aid to milestones: no reconstruction dollars until textbooks pass review, until youth programs prioritize coding over combat training. Radicals may cry cultural imperialism, but the West must reject this cry because teaching children the value of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is not cultural imperialism,it is liberation. Freeing a people from the chains of fanaticism they did not choose and giving them hope for a brighter future.

But deradicalization must be smart as well as strict. History warns that cultural overhaul imposed too quickly can provoke backlash and strengthen the very extremists we aim to defeat. The Western push for top-down modernization in 1950s Iran produced symbols of progress that looked modern through Western eyes but felt alien to many Iranians. Jazz clubs and miniskirts were not reforms in hearts and minds. They were cultural whiplash. The backlash helped empower religious hardliners who promised to restore authenticity and then imposed a theocratic order for decades. That failure is a warning, not an excuse.

Our task in Gaza is to widen the Overton Window from within, not to yank it by force. Work with local credible voices. Build programs that ordinary families can accept and then expand those gains. Start with modest, verifiable steps that reframe dignity and opportunity: vocational training that leads to real jobs, family counseling that reduces radical recruitment, mosque partners who emphasize mercy and civic duty. Use milestones to reward progress and deny funds when projects backslide. In short, do not confuse imitation for reform. Real change is cumulative, not theatrical. It must feel indigenous or it will be rejected. This is where Israel’s moderate partners need to lead or this effort will fail.

Deradicalization done this way will be durable. It will replace martyrdom with craftsmanship and martyrdom myths with marketable skills. It will make the next generation less susceptible to the zero-sum theology that schools and camps now teach. Only then will reconstruction become more than a temporary fix. Only then will rebuilding Gaza have a chance of producing a society that chooses life over death.

Hold The Enablers Accountable or Rebuild Nothing

We must also finally, unanimously, call out and confront states that enable Hamas. Qatar’s double game of hosting U.S. facilities while providing support to radicals, including Hamas – such as sheltering Hamas leaders, can no longer be tolerated. Al Jazeera must be reformed to report responsibly and not to provoke terror and war. Turkey’s permissive posture toward operatives must be met with diplomatic and economic pressure. Treat host-state enablers like criminal facilitators: close offices, freeze assets, expel operatives, and withdraw diplomatic cover until compliance is verified. Entry into the civilized world and all the riches/economic opportunities that it brings must be conditioned on the rejection of radical terrorists who threaten this economic order.

Not one dollar, not one slab of debris cleared until verifiable disarmament is verifiably complete. This means the destruction of terror tunnels and the endof arms smuggling around and underneath checkpoints. Only then can checkpoints be dismantled and the freedom of movement be restored.

Reconstruction funds from Arab petrostates must be conditional on third-party inspections that prevent dual-use diversion. Use reconstruction as leverage to ensure Gaza becomes a place of work and schools, not workshops for rockets. Create a multinational information body to systematically expose Hamas lies and provide verifiable reporting in Arabic, English, and other key languages.

This is not propaganda. This is fact-based pushback against the professional disinformation machine that sustains Hamas’ legitimacy. Qatar needs to be held accountable for Al Jazeera’s propaganda machinery.

The Western world, led by the US and Israel and working with their Arab allies need to establish a global intelligence taskforce to ensure we have a way to verify progress. Mossad, the CIA, MI6, and willing regional partners like the UAE and Jordan, must map finances,5 intercept arms flows, trace Iranian supply routes, and identify front organizations in the West.

This is not fictional fantasy. It is the logistical backbone of disarmament. Without coordinated intelligence, boots on the ground will merely rearrange the enemy’s networks.

The enablers are not only states. They include global institutions that have made anti-Israel bias a business model.

The UN’s Hypocrisy Has No Place in a Day-After Plan

The United Nations has proven itself to be impotent in bringing peace and order, and it currently stands as a monument to hypocrisy in all this. Consider the absurdity baked into its vision of a Palestinian state. It demands ethnic cleansing, but only of Jews. A sovereign Palestine in the West Bank is acceptable, they say, but every Jewish community must be uprooted, every home demolished, every family expelled. Jews living peaceably alongside Arabs in the hills of Judea and Samaria are branded illegal settlers. This is not justice. It is bigotry.

UN resolutions condemn Jewish presence there as a barrier to peace while ignoring the civil rights at stake. Resolution 2334 (2016) labels Jewish neighborhoods beyond the 1949 armistice lines “a flagrant violation under international law.” Yet, as discussed in Blood Libel #2, that conclusion is not settled law. Jews have the right to live anywhere in their ancestral homeland, to buy land, to build homes, just as any people would in their own country. Denying this is denying basic human dignity. It is immoral to carve the world into Jew-free zones, as if Jewish lives are conditional on someone else’s approval. Meanwhile, as we discussed in “Israel 173, Rest of the World 71: What the UNGA Record Shows” bodies like the Human Rights Council maintain Agenda Item 7, a permanent mechanism for singling out Israel.

It’s clear that the UN and organizations like UNRWA6 must be excluded from any reconstruction or educational oversight in Gaza.7 Years of evidence show the agency’s systems have been exploited. Crucially, the removal of UNRWA clears the path for a transparent, temporary governance structure that can prioritize stability over political posturing. Third-party inspectors, funded and staffed by credible Arab and Western partners, must verify every textbook, every hire, and every project before a single dollar is released.

Peace Through Incentives, Not Illusions

True peace demands incentives that reward moderation, not madness. Picture a Gaza rebuilt not as a fortress, but as a hub of prosperity. Reconstruction funds flow only after verifiable disarmament, inspected by neutral parties. Arab petrostates foot the bill, but with strings: projects must create jobs, not tunnels. Offer pathways to citizenship for those who renounce violence, full economic integration for communities that police their own radicals. Promote moderate Islam through scholarships for students studying in tolerant societies, media campaigns highlighting successful Arab-Israelis thriving under the rule of law.

Israel has never turned away an enemy seeking peace. Look at Egypt after Sadat made his overture for peace. Same with, Jordan after 1994. Treaties signed, borders secured, lives saved. Egypt’s army, once poised to invade, now cooperates on intelligence. Jordan’s king trades barbs but trades goods too. Israel’s history is a ledger of proven restraint: it withdrew from Sinai, uprooted Gaza settlements, offered land for peace at every turn. The opposite cannot be said of Hamas and the Palestinians. Hamas executes collaborators. The PA launches violent intifadas and pays terrorists to kill Jews. If the world craves peace, it must face facts. These jihadists do not play by Western rules. They weaponize ceasefires, exploit aid, glorify death.

Incentives work only when backed by resolve. Moderate voices in the Muslim world, those preaching coexistence, need amplification. Fund their mosques, their schools, their platforms. Show that peace pays, in dollars and divine favor. Peace through strength is not a slogan. It is a law of history.

The Moral Ledger

Israel’s sole desire has always been to live in peace. From the U.N. partition vote in 1947, when Jews accepted a non-contiguous state while Arabs rejected a contiguous state that provided them with much of the fertile land, yet still attacked, to the olive branches extended after every war. We built a nation not for conquest, but for refuge. Our history screams it: Holocaust survivors forging plowshares from swords, refugees turning deserts green. The jihadists’ history? A century of misery, death, and wars. If the world is serious about peace, it must choose sides not in words, but in actions.

Trump’s plan is the blueprint: total defeat of Hamas, rehabilitation of Gaza, incentives for moderation, and a path towards peaceful coexistence. This is the day-after plan we need. Not a pause, but a pivot.

It imagines a Middle East where Jews and Arabs build together in the sun of reason, not the shadow of hate.

Blood Libels Commentary is a space for unfiltered takes on the lies that poison discourse.

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Footnotes:

Dinah Bucholz is a bestselling cookbook author, food writer, freelance reporter/writer, and author of the Substack newsletter Jews’ Views.

I am publishing this article as a complement to my last commentary.

About Me.

Growing up in the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Monsey, NY, I spent my childhood in the shadow of the Holocaust. Don’t get me wrong: My childhood was happy and trauma free. But Holocaust survivors back then came a dime a dozen. Every elderly person I knew, including my own grandparents and many of my friends’ as well, spoke English with thick European accents. I remember sitting at the knee of my maternal grandmother, imbibing war stories of hair’s-breadth escapes (my grandfather jumped off a train heading to Auschwitz), as well as hearing stories on my father’s side of last-minute decisions that resulted in his family leaving Hungary before the Holocaust reached his birthplace.

So the idea of Jew hatred was sort of ever-present, in a quiet way, percolating on the back burner. As an adult, I read books on the history of Jew hatred and noticed a pattern familiar to students of Jewish history: that our history alternates between periods of peace and persecution like clockwork. So I always feared that the Golden Age of American Jewry would soon end, perhaps even in my lifetime, if history is to be any guide. Rising Jew hatred for a decade preceding October 7 presaged this ominous but hopefully never-to-happen fate.

All this is to say that the giant wave of Jew hatred unleashed after October 7, 2023, did not surprise me. Plus ça change! That doesn’t mean I accept it. No, I rage against it. I hate that the whole world has once again turned on the Jews. And following another horrifying historical pattern, a minority of Jews along with them. I hate that they believe that Jews are committing genocide, doing to others what was done to them, as they gleefully point out; that Jews are intentionally starving the population of Gaza; that Jews are indiscriminately mowing down desperately hungry civilians at aid sites — and that at last they can hate Jews openly yet virtuously (taking care to call them Zionists, of course).

I want the world to understand that it’s been propagandized against Israel and the Jewish people, that news outlets have been laundering Hamas’s narrative and reselling it as news. But how can I possibly do that on my own? It took people much smarter than me over 300 pages to do all that. It’s like paddling a paper boat into a tsunami: hopeless.

But nevertheless, I must try.

Criticism of Israel.

To start, I want to address something that annoys a lot of people: that criticism of Israel invites accusations of antisemitism. The fact is, though, critics do often cross the line. Why is that? And why is that the case regarding only Israel? It’s strange, especially when you consider the following:

• No one worries about accusations of anti-black racism if they criticize Kenya, or anti-Asian racism if they criticize China, or Islamophobia if they criticize Syria.

• Israel is the only country for which the term anti-“name of country” exists. No one says, “I don’t hate Black people, I’m just anti-Kenya”; “I don’t hate Chinese people, I’m just anti-China”; “I don’t hate Muslims, I’m just anti-Syria.”

• The world expects the government of Israel to conform to a certain standard of behavior to keep diaspora Jews safe and to adjust their policies when violence breaks out. But they do not apply this standard to any other government — not to China, not to Russia, not to anyone.

• No one questions the right of any country to exist, except Israel’s.

To plainly state the case, the normalization of everything on this list stems from old-fashioned Jew hatred. Thus, this normalization makes it all too easy to cross the line, even unwittingly, when criticizing Israel.

How can you avoid this problem, though?

Natan Sharansky, former Soviet dissident, current chairman for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, and Jewish hero, devised a set of criteria called the Three Ds. If you display any one of these in your criticism, then you need to do some soul searching.

• Demonization: This may seem self-explanatory, but it’s actually broader than it seems. Here are some common words used to demonize Israel that you may recognize: genocide, ethnic cleansing, famine, mass starvation. If you think these words are justified against Israel, then please read on.

• Delegitimization: questioning Israel’s right to exist.

• Double standards: judging Israel by a unique standard. If Israel’s conflicts elicit more fury than other conflicts, if the deaths of Arabs by the IDF enrage you but not when Arabs kill other Arabs, if starvation in Gaza horrifies you more than Sudan’s worse crisis, if you scrutinize the actions of Israelis more than other countries, then you have engaged in double standards.

Yet not all are motivated by malice. Some well intended people sincerely believe the charges against Israel. They watch in horror and even heartbreak as most Jews circle the wagons, blinded, they believe, by tribalism to the awful reality that they are doing to others what was done to them, or supporting it. They’re not gleeful. They can’t believe it has come to this

If you’re one of those people, I’m asking you to open your mind to what I have to say. You will read claims you’ve possibly never seen, that you might think are insane. But please hear me out. Everything is backed by hard data, using quantitative analysis and cross referencing where possible from the study linked above, by researchers and academics at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University (the BESA study), as well as other sources.

I’m going to debunk the accusations of genocide and intentional starvation.

Genocide.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the legal definition of genocide is intention (dolus specialis), which must be proved to convict a state actor of genocide. If we examine the statistics of the Israel–Hamas war, we find that the opposite has occurred: Israel has taken excruciating care to minimize harm to civilians.

• Ratio of munitions to casualties. Israel has dropped hundreds of thousands of munitions on Gaza, resulting in a small fraction of people killed per strike (no matter what death toll number you trust), even though each bomb can kill hundreds of people. This result is only possible with the purposeful, intentional care to preserve life.

• Ratio of destroyed homes to casualties. According to the UN and Doctors Without Borders, the IDF has destroyed 70% of all structures and 92% of all residential buildings. Thus, Israel has flattened nearly all the homes in Gaza; but at the same time, it has kept nearly the whole population alive. This result is only possible with the purposeful, intentional care to preserve life.

• Ratio of tons of aid to civilians. According to the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Israel has facilitated 2,135,672 tons of total aid (food, medical supplies, shelter equipment, etc.) as of this writing since the beginning of the war. That’s one ton of aid per person, unprecedented in all of war history. This result is only possible with the purposeful, intentional care to preserve life.

Here are more actions taken that prove the opposite of genocidal intent

• After a polio outbreak in Gaza, Israel vaccinated the child population for polio during wartime.

• Israel has evacuated areas before strikes with millions of leaflets, phone calls, and text messages.

• Israel has sacrificed the military advantage of the element of surprise by broadcasting maps of its movements so civilians will know where to go.

• The total number of Palestinians killed in alleged war crimes, both verified and unverified, is 51.

• Israel has made it crystal clear that Hamas can end the war at any moment by giving up their arms and the hostages.

• Israeli leaders and spokespeople keep repeating the mantra, “For Israel, every civilian death is a tragedy; for Hamas, it is a strategy.”

These are strange actions indeed for a government with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Let me just say this: I have not ever heard any genocide accusers confront these facts and statistics head on, grappling with them in a real and honest way.

What’s more, deliberate massacres generate a lot of forensic evidence, as happened in the Iraq War and in Israel on October 7. There is no forensic evidence of massacres of Palestinians by the IDF.

One more accusation needs to be addressed: that Israel herds people into safe zones only to strike them there. This argument suffers from two flaws. The first is the premise that Israel declared any safe zones. Israel did not, because it cannot. A safe zone can only be designated by both parties, and Hamas has refused to designate any area free from fighting. Instead, Israel has advised evacuating to safer zones (Hamas fighters have evacuated along with civilians; indeed, Hamas commander Mohammed Deif was killed while hiding in a humanitarian zone). However, estimates of fatalities in the safer zones is 2.1–3.5% of all fatalities between May 2024 and March 2025 (according to the limited quantitative data available). This shows that the safer zones are in fact safer.

I want to be very clear: Nothing I write here is intended to deny, dismiss, or downplay the suffering of the Gazan civilian population, God forbid. They are living in a war zone, and war is hell. It may seem churlish and petty, and perhaps even monstrous, to focus on cold, hard statistics when people are suffering so much. But you ought not to assess an accusation, especially a charge as serious as genocide, without assessing these dispassionate facts.

Starvation.

The charge of intentional starvation is based on several flawed assumptions:

• Comparing the amount of aid before the war to wartime. First, the UN and the media have compared the 500 trucks entering Gaza per working day pre-escalation to the number of trucks entering per calendar day during the conflict. Second, the number pre-escalation comprised 50% cement trucks (which were used to build Hamas’s tunnel network). The actual total number of daily food trucks entering Gaza prewar was 73. The UN quietly updated this number, but the claim still circulates, leaving the impression that the number of trucks delivering aid even at the height of the aid surge was woefully inadequate.

• Undercounting the trucks. The UN counted trucks entering only through two crossings, and then only when UN workers were present, resulting in a huge discrepancy between the UN’s numbers and COGAT’s. These numbers were trumpeted all over the place, although the UN quietly corrected their numbers.

• The humanitarian situation in Gaza was already precarious before the war. Whatever restrictions the blockade caused, infant mortality nevertheless steadily dropped while life expectancy steadily increased up until and including 2022 (sharp dips in life expectancy coincide with violent conflict with Israel, especially of course 2023; in previous conflicts recovery was swift).

Here’s the shocker: More aid has been entering Gaza since the war began than before. For example, the average number of daily food trucks in January 2024 was 109; in February, 77; and in March, 119, compared to 73 daily food trucks before the war. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that every projection of mass starvation and mass death from starvation has failed to materialize.

But what about the sieges? It turns out that siege warfare is a permitted tactic in the laws of war under certain conditions. This is a complicated discussion that takes more space than I have here, so I refer you again to the BESA study; but suffice it to say that Israel fulfilled those conditions. In the first two-week siege in October 2023, Israel cut off supply only to Gaza City. Hamas had destroyed the crossings in their attack on Israel, including the pipes that pumped water into Gaza. Israel repaired the pipes in the first weeks of the war and began pumping water into Gaza again. They also repaired the crossings so aid shipments could resume.

Before the second siege from March 2025 to May 2025, Israel calculated that the stockpile of aid in Gaza would last until late July/early August, so they cut off supply to pressure Hamas. The calculation was correct, but they did not foresee a “run on the banks” effect by Hamas and armed gangs, causing a food shortage. The UN insisted this didn’t happen, but strangely their stockpiled supplies were depleted within one month, by April 2025. Although this was a catastrophic mistake on Israel’s part, the fact that they made this calculation proves the opposite of intentional starvation.

UN Bias

How did the UN and the media get so many facts wrong? Several factors are at play. The UN is treated as a credible, respectable institution, but its record on human rights in general and Israel in particular is abysmal.

• Two out of the five permanent countries presiding over the United Nations General Assembly are Russia and China.

• The Human Rights Council (HRC) is made up mostly of outrageous human-rights abusers, including the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (which includes the 22-member Arab League of Nations), with just two full democracies among them.

• From 2006 to 2024, the HRC passed a total of 108 resolutions against Israel and a combined total of 74 against Syria, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela (and zero against China). In 2024 alone, it passed 18 resolutions against Israel versus a total of seven for the rest of the world.

• Israel is the only country in the world with their own exclusive, permanent agenda item at each HRC session.

• In 2021, the HRC set up the Commission of Inquiry into Israel in perpetuity, the only country singled out for perpetual investigation.

• The commissioners appointed by the HRC boast a public record of anti-Israelstatements and/or activism, which violates the UN’s own standards of avoiding even the appearance of partiality. These are the investigators who recently released the UN report on genocide.

• Most egregiously, the UN has still not passed a binding resolution condemning the Hamas attack against Israel; but in 2023, they passed 14 resolutions against Israel, and in 2024, eighteen.

Media Bias

The media is subject to its own deep flaws. The first three in this list are explored at length in the BESA study.

• The inverted information funnel. A wide variety of sources serving the information network actually relies on a narrow core of data, and when you trace the sources back, you get…Hamas or Hamas-affiliated organizations.

• The certainty mirage. When there is only one source of information, we tend to impute credibility to that source; for example, the certainty with which the Gaza Ministry of Health (GMOH) death toll numbers are cited (see note).

• The burden of proof fallacy. This is the phenomenon of accepting uncritically the statements from the GMOH and Palestinian activists, journalists and witnesses, while dismissing the testimony of the IDF, COGAT, and ordinary Israelis (including former hostages). In other words, on the side of Gaza, it’s true until proven false, and on the side of Israel, it’s false until proven true.

• Bias. Everyone is biased; it’s part of the human condition. Bias doesn’t only show in the way journalists present their findings or in what stories they choose to pursue. It also shows up when a story so neatly confirms their priors that they run with it before verifying the facts.

Bias exerts the strongest influence on reporters; the first three problems in the above list flow from bias. This caused false reports, as seen in the infamous Al Ahli hospital strike; the Palestinian Medical Association (PAMA) doctors’ report about children and toddlers deliberately shot by Israeli snipers (more on that soon); the shooting of civilians trying to evacuate and trying to obtain aid; and the photos of emaciated, starving children plastered all over the world’s media.

Note: The Hamas death toll is plagued with problems. It does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. It includes at least some non-violent mortality (for example, the increasing mortality as women age follows the natural pattern). It includes deaths of people executed by Hamas, people killed by Hamas for trying to evacuate and/or obtain aid, and people killed by misfired Hamas rockets. A study by the highly respected polling group Spagat and Shikaki, that perhaps represents the best-faith effort to calculate the death toll of civilians, puts the number at 100,000. However, this study is rife with its own problems, which illustrates the enormous difficulty of obtaining accurate numbers in an active war zone. For example, the study found that Israel is holding over 9,000 Palestinians as prisoners, when the actual number is closer to 2,000. This information can be found in the BESA study.

The Israeli Sniper Allegation

I can’t debunk all of the above in the space allotted, so I will focus on just one, and then I will show how bias influenced the reporting on Israel in these very pages.

The New York Times published an opinion piece by Feroze Sidhwa, a PAMA-associated doctor, alleging that he and his fellow medics treated dozens of preteen children and babies injured or killed with a single shot to the head or chest, proving that IDF soldiers were conducting a systematic massacre of children. Dr. Mark Perlmutter claimed that up to 75% of the surgeries were conducted on school-age children. Others reported treating children with gunshot wounds to the head and chest daily. According to the BESA study, doctors further reported that they did not see a single Hamas fighter in the hospitals. They also described the distinctive sound of the sniper drones (which is how they alleged these children were killed). Finally, many claimed that over 62,000 children had died of malnutrition (this was over a year ago). Sidhwa himself made the case for this in a YouTube interview (timestamp 1:57:03).

Now for the problems in this narrative.

• According to the BESA study, during the time and at the hospital that Mark Perlmutter volunteered, even the GMOH’s numbers show that children made up 16% of all injuries, and most of the patients recorded were adult males. In the European Hospital, where most of the doctors volunteered, during their stay 70% of surgeries were performed on men. The numbers just don’t add up.

• The claim that they saw not a single armed fighter is contradicted by a variety of eyewitnesses, some of them during the same times and places, which makes it impossible to believe that these doctors somehow missed what was in plain sight. See here, here, here (especially egregious, because the AP, Reuters, and the The New York Times deliberately covered up Hamas presence at hospitals), here, and here.

• The IDF does not employ sniper drones.

• A year ago, there were no 62,000 deaths from starvation.

Some of this information, specifically the percentages of people treated for gunshot wounds, was publicly available at the time The New York Times published their story.

Occam’s razor suggests that these doctors were either giving false testimony or at least wildly exaggerating.

Bias at Tangle

How did bias affect Tangle’s coverage of the Israel–Gaza war? (If Tangle publishes this, I will forever be in awe).

Tangle published a link to a video of a crowd of Israelis chanting “Death to the Arabs,” which came from the website of a white supremacist. Tangle apologized for this error. In a newsletter on the Gaza war, Tangle reported that the Bibas mother and babies were killed in an Israeli airstrike, according to Hamas. Although by that point Israeli forensics experts determined that the mother and children were brutally murdered by their captors’ bare hands, this was not reported by Tangle. I did not receive a response to an email message I sent on the matter, and to my knowledge, the information about Israel’s evidence was not included in a later update.

Tangle also included a link to a New York Times photo of an emaciated baby in Gaza. This may well be a verified photo, and if so, apologies. But given the New York Times’ track recordon this, I’m skeptical. (To be clear: I’m not saying there’s no hunger in Gaza; just that it’s been exaggerated out of all proportion, that it wasn’t intentional on Israel’s part, and that UN incompetence and Hamas criminality are to blame.)

Finally, in Isaac’s take on the execution-style killings of children and toddlers, Isaac defends suspending his journalistic skepticism, arguing that if anyone is to be trusted it’s these moral giants, these heroic doctors who risked their lives to enter war zones to treat the sick and wounded. This mistake led him to accept a problematic aspect of the story: How did the doctors know who killed the children? They didn’t witness the killings. Since Hamas shoots their own people, the assumption that Israeli snipers were responsible makes no sense.

Believing that doctors aren’t biased was also mistaken. The organization Feroze Sidhwa belonged to, PAMA, obviously has activist leanings. Sidhwa revealed his own bias in the previously linked interview. Although he strenuously denies any anti-Israel bias, he also says, “Israel has a long history of killing kids” (timestamp 20:09:35).

But the most obvious problem is that in hindsight, the story is impossible.

We should be generous with mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Even in the absence of acknowledgment of error, let’s be charitable. But it must be noted that when your mistakes run in the same direction, that’s a clear indication of bias.

Blood Libel

I have clearly shown that the accusation of genocide against the Jewish state is not only unfounded, but that the IDF takes exceedingly great care to minimize harm to civilian life. Indeed, military analysts have raised the concern that the IDF’s standard will make it harder for other militaries to conduct warfare. This is why I believe that calling the charge of genocide a blood libel is fair. When Israel goes above and beyond what other militaries have ever done in world history to keep civilian casualties low, and the world still screams about the deliberate slaughter of children, then j’accuse the world of blood libel.

The ancient blood libel accused Jews of killing children and babies. This gave Christians the excuse they craved to commit monstrous crimes against the Jewish people. So too, the modern blood libel, which predates October 7, accuses Jews of killing babies, allowing others, when Jews are attacked, to at least partly excuse the violence by blaming the Israeli government. The idea of bloodthirsty Jews slaughtering innocents, but especially children, is an idea that is hard to shake.

I predict that we will find yet another similarity between the ancient libel and the new. When this chapter in history is written, it will be shown that the modern blood libel was just as primitive, crude, and easy to debunk as the ancient blood libel, for anyone who would have been interested to try. And those who engaged in the modern blood libel against Israel will be proved wrong, once again.

This isn’t just vindication. It’s a stark reminder of the blood libel at play. False accusations that demonize Israel while ignoring the true genocidal actors.

The ceasefire established following President Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan, we possess irrefutable factual evidence that validates this distinction: no genocidal intent ever existed. Israel’s full acceptance and prompt adherence to the plan, which led to an immediate cessation of major combat operations, demonstrates a clear prioritization of limited, achievable security objectives over any purported aim of eradication.

The speed and sincerity of Israel’s de-escalation offer the strongest possible counter-evidence to the genocide claim. However, as a result of Hamas’ failure to accept Trump’s 20-point plan, which contains all the conditions necessary for peaceful co-existence and self-governance in Gaza, the focus now shifts to negotiations. History has demonstrated that the prospect for lasting peace remains precarious, hinging entirely on Hamas’s willingness to disarm and cede control. If, god forbid, this ceasefire collapses (which I believe it will), the responsibility for the resumption of conflict will rest with Hamas and not with Israel who has unconditionally accepted a path to peace and all 20-points proposed by the Trump Administration.

The Trump 20-Point Plan: Factual Proof Against Intent to Destroy

President Trump unveiled his ambitious 20-point framework on September 29, 2025. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted the plan without conditions. This action alone, halting a military campaign upon political concession, serves as a powerful factual refutation of genocidal intent. A military operation driven by the specific intent to destroy a people cannot be unilaterally paused for a diplomatic and humanitarian exchange.

Key actions executed in Phase 1 that definitively prove Israel’s limited objectives:

• Immediate Ceasefire for Hostages: The operation was immediately halted to facilitate the release of the final 20 living hostages (and the exchange of remains). The prioritization of securing the release of captives over continuing military objectives directly refutes an “intent to destroy.”

• Surge of Aid and Humanitarian Care: Following the ceasefire, aid inflows surged dramatically, stabilizing at pre-2025 levels of over 500 trucks daily. Documentation shows a stockpile of 170,000 to 190,000 tons of aid post-ceasefire. Furthermore, supportive analyses noted Israel’s actions during the conflict, such as facilitating polio vaccinations for Gaza’s children, demonstrate purposeful, intentional care to preserve life, directly undermining the legal actus reus of genocide.

• Demographic Reality: Genocide, by definition, requires the destruction of a substantial part of a group. Despite approximately 67,000 reported fatalities (per UN estimates), Gaza’s population has grown by roughly 10% since 2023. These numbers, while reflecting tragic loss, do not align with the rate and demographic goal of genocidal decimation, such as the calculated speed of the Rwandan genocide.

As Dinah Bucholz highlighted in her recent Tangle essay entitled J’accuse, reinforced by BESA Center data, the verifiable munitions-to-casualty ratios and the massive inflow of aid (approaching one ton per person) are metrics that substantiate a targeted counter-terrorism operation, not a campaign of mass destruction.

The Precarious Road to Peace and the Burden of Responsibility

The plan’s Phase 2, currently under negotiation in Egypt, offers a roadmap for long-term stability: disarmament, a smooth governance transition, and massive infrastructure redevelopment, facilitated by broad support from Arab partners. This vision of a “deradicalized, terror-free zone” where Gaza’s civilians can benefit from regional modernization confirms that Israel’s objective is political security, not demographic elimination.

However, the path remains precarious. While Israel accepted the plan unconditionally, Hamas responded with reservations, specifically hedging on the crucial element of full disarmament. History demonstrates that Israel has achieved lasting peace with willing partners, such as Egypt and Jordan. The current refusal by Hamas to fully disarm and relinquish power, clinging instead to a policy of “armed resistance,” is the single greatest impediment to sustained peace.

If the agreement frays, the resumption of hostilities will be a reactive act of self-defense, triggered by Hamas’s deliberate choice to retain its military capacity and continue its eliminationist agenda. To those deeply distressed by the continued suffering of Palestinians, we must acknowledge that enabling the rejection of a viable peace plan based on maximalist demands prolongs that anguish. The path to coexistence is now defined by the Trump plan’s framework. Hamas’s refusal to follow this framework perpetuates the conflict.

Upholding the Integrity of a Definition

The objective analysis of the facts confirms that the actions taken by Israel following October 7, 2023, were military, tactical, and responsive, with a demonstrated capacity for unilateral de-escalation. The full adoption of the Trump peace plan and the subsequent halt in major combat operations definitively negate the presence of specific intent to destroy the Palestinian people as a group.

Accusations, as Bucholz notes, may persist due to systemic international bias, such as the disproportionate number of UNHRC resolutions targeting Israel. However, the ICJ’s initial “plausibility” finding is continuously undermined by the factual evidence of de-escalation and humanitarian prioritization. To conflate war crimes and the immense suffering of conflict with the specific, institutional crime of genocide is to undermine the legal standard itself. We must uphold the integrity of this crime, allowing the facts, not political passion, to define the truth.

The facts demonstrate the blood libel, in its legal sense, has been functionally refuted.

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What do you think? All constructive and fact-based discussion is welcome.

But like everything we see online, we have to be skeptical. We must do the work to determine if we’re being fed propaganda or truth? So I did the work.

As it turns out, from 2015 to 2023, the UNGA adopted 154 resolutions against Israel compared to 71 for the rest of the world combined.1 And by 2025, Israel’s UNGA cumulative tally did in fact reach 173.2

So the graphic is accurate. This starkly illustrates the UN’s skewed priorities and its moral failure to uphold the Charter’s promise of equal treatment.

The UN General Assembly (UNGA) and Human Rights Council (UNHRC) have long targeted Israel with resolutions far exceeding those for any other nation. At the HRC, a structural driver of that distortion is what’s known as “Agenda Item 7.”3

Agenda Item 7 is a permanent, standing, Israel-only slot, that places Israel on the HRC agenda at every single session. No other country is treated in this way.4 In 2007, then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, criticized the decision warning that singling-out Israel with a dedicated agenda item would undermine the Council’s credibility.5

Contrast the treatment of Israel with those of oppressive states like Iran and North Korea who face only intermittent resolutions, usually annually, while abusers such as China or Saudi Arabia face far fewer country-specific texts at the UNGA and only episodic HRC scrutiny, despite documented atrocities.6

This imbalance is not accidental. Voting blocs, including the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, routinely sponsor anti-Israel resolutions, while frequent Western abstentions allow them to pass. Morally, it undermines the UN’s charter commitment to equality, shielding dictators while hounding a democracy defending itself against terrorism.7

While Blood libels originated in medieval Europe, falsely accusing Jews of murdering children for ritual blood, inciting pogroms like those in 1144 Norwich or 1475 Trent, the United Nations has become an institutional amplifier for their modern echoes. These myths migrated to the Middle East (e.g., the Damascus affair, 1840) and reappear today in claims that Israel harvests Palestinian organs8, poisons wells9, or deliberately starves Gaza children10 often amplified post-October 7, 2023.

A 2025 UN-commissioned report even accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza, leaning heavily on Gaza-authority/Hamas-sourced data,11 invoked imagery of systematic extermination that mirrors libelous tropes of inherent Jewish malice.12 By commissioning and promoting such a report, the UN effectively sanctions this form of political antisemitism. Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Netanyahu and Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, denounced these as modern blood libels.13 As discussed at length in Blood Libel #1, such accusations not only distort facts but morally conflate self-defense with ritual murder, repackaging antisemitism under the banner of human rights.

The Occupation Obsession: The UN’s Excuse for Bias

This article examines why the ‘occupation’ has become the UN’s moral pretext for its disproportionate focus on Israel.

The assertion that the IDF’s presence in Judea and Samaria14 is the central cause of the conflict, now serves as the UN’s guiding moral premise and chief justification for its disproportionate censure of Israel.

Yet when compared to other long-running occupations, and when measured against Israel’s unique legal circumstances, the claim of singular illegality collapses.1516

Still, for fairness, let us first grant them their premise: long-term military control over a civilian population is fraught, and that is the strongest case critics have. But the moment we hold this claim up to objective reality, it shatters.

From the Oslo Accords, where Israel recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, to the far-reaching territorial concessions proposed by Israeli leaders at multiple summits, the historical record demonstrates significant Israeli efforts toward granting the Palestinian’s a state, efforts that were consistently undermined by Palestinian leadership choosing maximalist aims, statelessness and perpetual war over sovereignty and peace. It is these choices, and not Israeli intransigence, that have been the primary driver of the occupation’s duration.

A. The Core Driver of the Duration of the Conflict: A History of Rejectionism

The original British Mandate for Palestine17 (which incorporated the Balfour Declaration) was designed to provide for a home for the Jewish people and it included the territory on both sides of the Jordan River.18

In 1922, the British partitioned Jewish Mandatory Palestine, separating the land east of the Jordan River and reserving it for the Arab population of the region (e.g., the “Palestinians”) creating the Emirate of Transjordan19 (which became independent Jordan in 1946). This area, comprising roughly 77% of the original Mandate territory, was designated as an Arab state where the provisions for the Jewish National Home were explicitly excluded. The Arab population thus received an independent state on the majority of the original territory mandated for a Jewish homeland.

Despite the establishment of this large Arab state, all subsequent discussions have involved a second partition of Mandatory Palestine and concerned only the remaining territory west of the Jordan River. Despite losing 77% of the area designated for a Jewish national home, the Israeli government has, on numerous occasions, offered a second state to the Palestinian people. Objective reality confirms that the Palestinian leadership has rejected every opportunity to codify what is known as the “two-state solution” and establish themselves an additional state encompassing the Gaza Strip and the vast majority of the West Bank. This is not a matter of debate; it is a brutal historical record of refusal.20 Let’s walk through the history of the process to create a Palestinian state.

• 1937 Peel Commission Report: This was the first official proposal for a partition of “Palestine” (excluding TransJordan) into two states. The Jewish leadership was willing to negotiate, but the Arab Higher Committee, led by Hajj Amin al-Husseini,21 categorically rejected the very concept of a Jewish state, insisting on a single Arab state over all of Palestine.22

• 1947 UN Partition Plan: The UN offered to partition what remained of Mandatory Palestine (excluding Jordan) into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted. The Arab leadership categorically rejected it and immediately launched a war aimed at wiping out the newly declared Jewish state 23. Their goal was not two states, but one state, cleansed of Jews.

• 1967 Khartoum Resolution (The “Three No’s”): Following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, launched preemptively against Egypt’s blockade of the Straits of Tiran, massing of troops on Israel’s borders, expulsion of UN peacekeepers, and explicit threats to annihilate the Jewish state, alongside attacks from Jordan and Syria, the Arab League convened in Khartoum and adopted a resolution famous for the “Three No’s”: No peace with Israel, No recognition of Israel, No negotiations with Israel.24 This rejection immediately after a major war solidified the position that all of the occupied territories would have to be returned before peace could even be considered, maintaining a state of perpetual belligerency.

• The Camp David Summit (2000): Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat unprecedented concessions: a Palestinian state over nearly ~95% of the West Bank and Gaza, a capital in East Jerusalem, and a resolution on the refugee issue. Arafat walked away, rejected the proposal outright, offered no counter-proposal, and subsequently launched the devastating Second Intifada, a terror war of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.25

• The Olmert Offer (2008): Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went even further in 2008, offering to withdraw from virtually all of the West Bank and place the Old City of Jerusalem under international control.26 Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected it, claiming the gaps were too wide.

• The Trump “Peace to Prosperity” Plan (2020): Officially released in January 2020, this plan proposed a Palestinian state, conditioned on security requirements and Palestinian acceptance of various terms, including a capital in East Jerusalem neighborhoods outside Israel’s security barrier and Israeli sovereignty over major settlement blocs. The Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas, rejected the plan before it was even formally released, calling it a “conspiracy” and a “thousand no’s” and subsequently severing security and civil ties with both the U.S. and Israel.”27

Even where negotiators dispute percentages or refugee clauses, contemporaneous accounts show Palestinian leaders walked away without tabling executable counteroffers that recognized a Jewish state, prolonging statelessness and the very occupation they decry. And in every case, followed their rejections with wars of aggression and terrorism against the State of Israel.

Negotiators like Dennis Ross, who served as U.S. envoy, have documented how Arafat and Abbas walked away without proposing alternatives, prioritizing maximalist demands over pragmatic peace.28 The pattern is clear: Palestinian leadership has consistently refused to accept any deal that requires recognizing the permanent existence and legitimacy of a Jewish state on any land in the region. They have prioritized the maximalist, genocidal goal of total liberation over the practical creation of a sovereign state. This political refusal is structurally reinforced by agencies like UNRWA, ensuring that the maximalist ideology of rejection is passed down to every subsequent generation, guaranteeing the conflict’s duration.

B. The Moral Failure of the Pay-to-Slay Program

Beyond the length of the “occupation”, antagonists assert that the occupation itself is fundamentally immoral. Yet, no moral argument against Israel can stand when the Palestinian leadership actively incentivizes and rewards the murder of civilians.29

The Palestinian Authority (PA) operates the “Martyrs’ Fund” and the “Prisoners’ Fund,” which transfer hundreds of millions of dollars annually to terrorists jailed in Israel and the families of those killed while committing attacks.30 Crucially, the payment scale is not needs-based; it is directly linked to the length of the sentence served, meaning the most money is paid to those who have committed the most heinous murders and received life sentences.31

This is not a social safety net. It is a state-sponsored, financial infrastructure, known colloquially as “pay to slay,” designed to reward and perpetuate terrorism. When a government deliberately chooses to fund homicide over healthcare, its moral standing to complain about its political circumstances is completely evaporated. The U.S. codified this concern in the Taylor Force Act (2018), restricting certain aid until the PA reforms prisoner/martyr payments tied to offense severity.

C. The Proof of Israel’s Capacity for Peace.

The remaining argument supporting the resolutions against Israel’s “occupation” presupposes that Israel is the intransigent, belligerent party, incapable of making peace or tolerating a non-Jewish population. The facts rebut this on two fronts:

Peace with the Arab World:

Israel has made actual, stable peace treaties with every Arab nation that has pursued peace with Israel.32

• 1979: Peace with Egypt.

• 1994: Peace with Jordan.

• 2020: The Abraham Accords with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.

These agreements demonstrate that Israel is perfectly capable of normalizing relations, ceding territory, and engaging in economic and security cooperation when it encounters a partner willing to recognize its existence and ensure its security. The conflict is not Israeli-Arab; it is Israeli-Palestinian, and the fault lies with the party that rejects peace.

The Status of Arab Israelis:

Israel has within its borders 2 million Arab citizens.33 These citizens vote, serve in the Knesset, hold positions in the Supreme Court, practice their religion freely, and are, by demographic count, the largest minority group in the country.34 The lived reality of more than 2 million Arab citizens undercuts caricatures of Israel as eliminationist or ‘genocidal.’ If Israel’s goal was elimination, this population would not exist, hold rights, and participate in the political process.

The Institutional Engine of Perpetual Rejection: The Role of UNRWA

The pattern of political rejection detailed above is not an isolated phenomenon; it is underpinned by a sustained ideological engine of hostility nurtured by international institutions. The most prominent example of this institutional enablement is found in The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which exemplifies this hypocrisy, operating separately from the UNHCR with a mandate that perpetuates Palestinian refugee status across generations, unlike global standards that prioritize resettlement.35

Notably, the UN spends nearly 3x the amount per refugee on Palestinians ($271 per refugee) compared to every other displaced person globally ($99 per person, managed by UNHCR). This exceptional status is sustained by UNRWA’s structure.36

In its schools serving 500,000 students in Gaza and the West Bank, curricula promote jihadism, antisemitism, and elements echoing blood libels.37 A 2023 IMPACT-se report analyzed UNRWA-distributed textbooks glorifying violence, such as a Grade 5 Arabic unit praising Dalal al-Mughrabi’s 1978 massacre as “heroism,” or Islamic Education texts defining jihad as a duty to “free Palestine from Zionist occupiers.” Antisemitic content includes depictions of Jews as treacherous in historical battles, fostering conspiracy myths.38

In 2025, independent monitors alleged extensive Hamas and PIJ penetration within UNRWA staff, including principals and administrators, revealing an alleged 1,462 UNRWA staff affiliated with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad,39 some inciting terrorism online. This indoctrination morally betrays the UN’s peace mandate, and sowing hatred that sustains conflict, thereby ensuring the ideology of maximalist rejectionism survives every political peace attempt.

Conclusion: A Call for Moral Reform

The UN was conceived after the Holocaust with a promise to prevent genocide and uphold equality. Today, it perpetuates double standards that echo antisemitic libels. Israel receives more condemnations than the world’s worst abusers combined. UNRWA sustains, rather than resolves, refugees, and its schools have become a vector for hate.

The facts confirming this bias are stark: Syria’s civil war, with over 500,000 deaths, triggered numerous HRC resolutions, yet Israel alone is subjected to a permanent dedicated agenda item.40 UNSC vetoes address security, not human rights, and do not excuse HRC selectivity, where China’s Uyghur abuses go unaddressed.41 On UNRWA, independent audits from 2023-2025 document systemic incitement, not anomalies, with staff praising October 7 massacres and materials glorifying jihad. Morally, justifying this as “context” normalizes double standards, eroding universal human rights.

Reform is not optional. It is urgent. The UN must abolish Agenda Item 7, merge UNRWA into UNHCR under normal refugee protocols, and insist on proportional accountability for all states regardless of geopolitics or alliances.

The viral condemnation chart is more than a meme. It is a mirror held up to an institution that has lost its moral compass. Justice delayed is justice denied. In this case, it endangers Jewish lives.

If you agree the UN needs reform, share this article with your network. Let’s amplify the call for accountability

Sources and Footnotes

The Unbroken Jewish Connection to the Temple Mount

The Temple Mount has been the spiritual and ceremonial heart of Jewish life for nearly three millennia. The First Temple, built under King Solomon around 950 BCE, was the center of Jewish worship until its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.1 The Second Temple served as the focal point of Jewish religious and cultural life until the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE.2 Even across centuries of exile, Jews maintained their spiritual orientation toward Jerusalem, praying toward the site and expressing their desire to return with the Passover declaration, “Next year in Jerusalem”.

Archaeological evidence corroborates this history. In Jerusalem and around the Temple Mount — including the City of David, the Ophel, and the Western Wall area — excavations have uncovered remains from the First and Second Temple periods.3 In addition, material recovered by the Temple Mount Sifting Project, which processes debris removed from the Mount, contains coins, pottery, architectural fragments, and seals from those eras. Together these finds attest to a sustained Jewish presence and cultic life in this precinct long before the rise of Islam or the emergence of a distinct modern Arab identity in the region. These findings establish an undeniable and continuous Jewish presence on the site long before the rise of Islam or the emergence of a distinct modern Arab identity in the region.

Islamic Construction and Historical Context

In 691 CE, the Umayyad Caliphate built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount.4 While the structure is a sacred shrine today, its construction, less than seventy years after the death of Muhammad, was also a potent political statement. Built on the natural summit of the Temple Mount platform, the structure served not only as a sacred shrine but also as a potent political statement less than seventy years after Muhammad’s death over both the defeated Byzantines and the Jewish population.

Early Islamic sources reveal an awareness of the site’s Jewish significance. The Dome and the sanctuary was associated with Bayt al-Maqdis, an Arabic term for Jerusalem derived from the Hebrew Beit HaMikdash (“the Jewish Holy Temple”), and early inscriptions such as the Nuba inscription link the site to the ancient sanctuary.5 While the Dome of the Rock today holds profound spiritual meaning for Muslims, its establishment reflected a pattern where a new power asserted dominance over a conquered territory, constructing a monumental structure atop a pre-existing sacred site to confirm political and religious supremacy.6

Rebutting Claims Against Jewish Indigeneity

Critics often present two primary arguments against Jewish indigeneity. The first is based on the pre-Israelite inhabitants, the Canaanites, who lived in the land before 1200 BCE.7 The second is the assertion that Arab Palestinians, as possible descendants of ancient populations, have an equal claim to the land. These arguments falter under historical scrutiny.8

1. First, the Canaanites are not a contemporary group challenging Jewish claims; their culture and political entities were absorbed or displaced in the 8th century BCE.9 Modern Palestinians, while genetically tied to ancient populations (as do all Arabs), do not represent a direct continuation of Canaanite identity nor political identity or claims. In contrast, Jews have maintained a distinct cultural, religious, and ethnic identity continuously tied to the land of Israel for over three millennia.10

2. Second, the claim of equal Arab Palestinian indigeneity based on shared ancestry requires historical context. The political and cultural identity of the Arab population in the region was fundamentally shaped by the Islamic conquests of the 7th century CE, over fifteen hundred years after the Jewish presence was established.11 While the majority of the local population eventually adopted Arabic and Islam, their new political structure was imposed by imperial and colonial expansion. The Jewish people, conversely, have maintained a continuous, though often persecuted, presence throughout all these periods.12

The broader regional context underscores this reality. Before the Arab-Islamic conquests of the 7th century, the lands spanning from North Africa to Mesopotamia were home to distinct ancient civilizations and languages. Egypt was Coptic and Christian, its language descended from Pharaonic times. Lebanon traced its lineage to the Phoenicians. Syria and Mesopotamia were Aramaic-speaking and home to Assyrian and Christian populations. Jordan was Nabatean. Iran was Persian and Zoroastrian. North Africa was Berber, Carthaginian, and later Romanized. And the land of Israel was Jewish. The Arabization and Islamization of these lands were the result of military conquest, not organic continuity. Over time, local languages, faiths, and identities were suppressed or absorbed into a vast imperial system ruled from Arabia.

To claim Arab Muslim indigeneity in these lands is to invert history. It would be equivalent to calling the British indigenous to India or the Spanish indigenous to the Americas. The spread of Islam was among the largest imperial expansions in world history, reshaping entire civilizations under religious and political control. Yet in today’s Western discourse, this imperial history has been recast as anti-colonial resistance. In the West’s moral preoccupation with “decolonization,” many well-intentioned observers have confused the colonizer for the colonized. Supporting the idea that Arab Muslims are indigenous to Israel is not an act of solidarity with the oppressed; it perpetuates the very colonial legacy that erased the region’s true indigenous cultures, including the Jewish people.

Addressing the Colonialism Charge in the Modern Era

The central challenge to Zionism is the labeling of modern Jewish statehood as a colonialist venture, often citing 19th and 20th century Jewish immigration.13 This framing relies on a redefinition of the term “colonialism,” divorcing it from its conventional historical criteria to serve a political narrative. Colonialism involves a foreign power exploiting a territory and displacing its native population.14 A critical analysis requires distinguishing between two scenarios:

1. Imperial Conquest: The Arab conquests of the 7th century, which established new political and cultural structures over a pre-existing population (including the Jews), align more closely with traditional imperial and colonial expansion.15

2. Ancestral Return: Modern Jewish immigration to Israel was driven by centuries of persecution and a desire to reclaim an ancestral homeland, documented across scripture, liturgy, and archaeology, and not an outpost of a European metropole16

Jewish immigration in the modern era did not occur as an agent of a foreign empire, but as the return of a people reclaiming their heritage. To equate this return with historical colonial projects, which were movements of foreign populations seeking to extract resources and establish new sovereignty unrelated to their own ancestry, is to misapply the definition17 and obscure the truth of Jewish indigeneity.

Acknowledging and Protecting Holy Sites

The Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque are profoundly sacred sites for Muslims, revered as part of the Al-Haram al-Sharif complex and linked to the tradition of Muhammad’s Night Journey.18 This spiritual significance is undeniable and deserves respect. However, this respect cannot justify the denial of the verifiable Jewish historical connection to the Temple Mount.19

Israel’s policy towards religious sites demonstrates a commitment to pluralism. Since gaining control of Jerusalem in 1967, Israel has preserved the Dome of the Rock, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and other Islamic sites, ensuring their accessibility to Muslim worshippers and upholding a status quo that maintains Muslim administrative authority.20 This policy is backed by Israel’s legal framework, which guarantees religious freedom for all Israel’s citizens. About 21 percent of Israel’s citizens are Arab, and recognized minorities include roughly 2 percent Christian and around 1.6–2 percent Druze, all protected by law.21

In stark contrast, Jewish religious sites in areas under Palestinian control have faced destruction or restricted access, a dynamic that Palestinian’s claim were heavily influenced by the political conflict.22 During Jordan’s control of the Old City from 1948 to 1967, Jewish access to the Western Wall and Temple Mount was barred, and 58 synagogues in the Jewish Quarter were destroyed or desecrated, with gravestones from the Mount of Olives cemetery repurposed for construction and military use. Today, Jewish visitors to sites like Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus have required military escorts and faced repeated vandalism and violence.23 This documented asymmetry in religious tolerance, Israel’s protection of all sites versus the pattern of exclusion and violence faced by Jews in Palestinian controlled areas, must be acknowledged as part of the historical truth.

Conclusion

The Temple Mount serves as powerful evidence of Jewish indigeneity and resilience, documenting a continuous history that stretches back nearly three thousand years. While we must respect the significance of the site to Muslims today, the historical facts affirm the Jewish presence long before the Arab conquests. Arguments that equate ancient Canaanite claims or later Arab claims with Jewish indigeneity reverse the historical sequence, ignoring the continuity of Jewish connection and the imperial context of later expansion. The claim that the Jewish return constitutes colonialism misapplies the term. True coexistence requires acknowledging that the Jewish claim is grounded in a verifiable history that predates Islam by over a millennium, and fostering mutual respect without resorting to narratives that deny or seek to erase one people’s heritage.

Footnotes

Two days later, that thesis became reality when Charlie Kirk—a husband, father, and fierce champion of free speech—was assassinated by a gunman firing from a nearby building at Utah Valley University. Before a crowd of thousands of young students, this act of moral warfare turned words into bloodshed, delegitimizing not just Kirk but the very idea of open debate.

Kirk’s assassination was not a random act but a grim symptom of the cycle dissected in The Moral Mirage. The duopoly’s relentless labeling, amplified by media ecosystems, fosters a climate where debate collapses into demonization and, too often, violence. To break this spiral, we must challenge the outrage machine and reclaim pragmatic humility.

As Ben Shapiro wrote in The Assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Fight for America’s Soul:

The 1960s and 1970s were a time of tremendous change in American history, and of tremendous violence. Political assassinations became commonplace; bombings and terror attacks were excused by a variety of supposedly great intellectuals. And eventually, America rejected all of it. Now, we’re watching the same ugly picture reappear.

This echoes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum warning in its press release, “Museum on Charlie Kirk and Political Violence”:

At this time of accelerating political violence against individuals across the political spectrum, rising antisemitism, extremism and division, we must reaffirm our commitment to the lessons of the Holocaust. This history underscores the importance of the values of democracy, tolerance, and the dignity of every individual.

Charlie Kirk’s death struck close to home, as many in my circles dismissed him as an antisemite, a charge echoed in inflammatory memes, like the one below which Occupy Democrats was posted within minutes of his murder falsely tying him to antisemitic tropes.

These oversimplified narratives, thriving on outrage rather than evidence (for the record, Charlie never stated that he “Blamed ‘Jewish Money’ for ruining American Culture”1), compelled me to write this piece, to scrutinize the validity of such accusations and their role in the moral warfare that fuels tragedy.

In this article, we examine the accusations of antisemitism leveled against Kirk, uncover the truths buried in his controversial remarks, and explore what this fraught moment demands of us now.

The Case Against Charlie Kirk: Accusations and Context

Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, built his career as a hard-right Christian conservative and unwavering supporter of Israel. Over the years, he repeatedly condemned antisemitism, praised Jewish allies, and positioned himself as a defender of Judeo-Christian civilization. Yet, despite this record, critics on the left branded him an antisemite.

The accusations peaked in late 2023 after Hamas launched their genocidal pogrom against Israel. On his podcast, Kirk claimed “Jewish dollars” were funding “cultural Marxist ideas” in academia, nonprofits, and Hollywood. He argued that Jewish philanthropy was “subsidizing its own demise” by supporting universities that tolerated anti-Israel protests. In April 2025, defending Elon Musk, he suggested Jewish communities pushed “anti-white” narratives while denying their own whiteness, a remark widely condemned as echoing replacement theory.

These statements were reckless. They flirted with antisemitic tropes about Jewish money, media, and power. Critics argued they normalized prejudice, even if Kirk insisted he was targeting left-leaning Jewish elites, not Jews broadly. Progressive groups like the ADL and Democratic Majority for Israel petitioned against his 2024 RNC appearance, citing a “long record of antisemitic statements.”

Yet the broader record tells another story. So let’s look at the facts.

The Record: Infrequent, But Concentrated in Crises

• Overall: Kirk’s use of antisemitic tropes was rare. Across ~10,000 X posts (2012-present) and hundreds of podcast episodes, these tropes appear in less than 1% of content. Most cluster in October-November 2023 (five or so instances during war tensions). Pre-2023: two to three scattered mentions (e.g., 2015 Iran deal/Hamas funding; 2019 Soros). Post-2023: Zero direct hits; he pivots to broad anti-left critiques.

• Vs. "Cultural Marxism": Kirk uses the term ~50-100 times (e.g., X post November 2023: "Cultural Marxism is incompatible with the West"), but rarely ties it explicitly to Jews (only ~five to ten times, per searches). He frames it as a leftist ideology, not a Jewish one, though critics note its conspiratorial origins (e.g., Nazi-era "Kulturbolschewismus").

• Vs. "Jews and money": ~20-30 mentions of "Jewish donors" (mostly 2023), often urging them to stop funding "anti-Israel" causes. This was not a constant theme, it was more reactive than obsessive.

This isn't a "frequent" pattern like historical antisemites (e.g., Henry Ford's endless screeds). It's episodic, tied to political frustration (e.g., campus protests, Musk drama) and targeting liberal/progressive Jews on the political left.

The Record: Staunch Pro-Israel Record Outweighs, But Tropes Linger

Kirk consistently championed Israel, called antisemitism “a lie from the pit of Hell,” and hosted Jewish conservative voices at his events. The frequency of his “Jewish donors” remarks was low — concentrated in the heated months after October 7 — and absent in his later work. On balance, the evidence tilts against labeling him an antisemite. He was a careless rhetorician, not a committed hater. Kirk's support for Israel is voluminous and consistent (hundreds of X posts, speeches, events since ~2015). Examples:

• Brokered fictional 2025 ceasefires (e.g., Israel-Iran: "Pray for a lasting peace"; Israel-Gaza: "The Peace President!").

• Condemns antisemitism routinely: "Jew hate has no place... It rots the brain" (Aug. 2025); "Antisemitism is a lie from the pit of Hell" (April 2025).

• Defends Jewish students (e.g., UCLA exclusion zones, 2024-2025 posts); hosts pro-Israel speakers (e.g., Shabbos Kestenbaum at RNC, July 2024).

• Frames himself as a defender: "No non-Jewish person my age has a longer... record of support for Israel or opposition to antisemitism" (April 2025 X thread, 85K likes).

The Resonance: Truth in Kirk’s Statements and the Progressive Jewish Dilemma

Kirk’s comments, though controversial, reflected a real tension inside Jewish philanthropy. Reports from the ADL and others have documented progressive Jewish foundations funding NGOs and universities that later tolerated antisemitic speech or anti-Israel activism. Writers in Tablet and City Journal have critiqued the “paradox of Jewish liberalism,” arguing that progressive commitments sometimes blinded donors to movements openly hostile to Jews.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a debate worth having. I discuss this at length in Trump and the Battle for Jewish Unity many liberal/progressive Jews have fallen into perverse traps that I feel strongly can be characterized as the “Great Betrayal”.

So when Kirk said, in essence, “Jewish elites are funding institutions that hate us,” his language was sloppy but his point resonated with a broader concern inside the Jewish community itself. Labeling that observation antisemitism was less about truth and more about policing ideological turf.

Dennis Prager, the Jewish co-founder of the conservative online Prager University Foundation, or PragerU, said this of Kirk: “He was ‘a stalwart friend of Israel and the Jewish people.” He added:

To call Charlie Kirk an antisemite — and further, to say he’s long been accused of being such — is to so cheapen the word as to render it meaningless.

From Character Assassination to Literal Tragedy

Kirk’s story shows how moral outrage escalates. His critics turned a handful of reckless remarks into a permanent label. “Antisemite” became a weapon to silence him, cheapening the term in the process. Once a person is painted as irredeemable, outrage hardens into dehumanization. And in today’s climate — with rising political violence, from attacks on lawmakers to attempts on presidents — dehumanization is a precursor to tragedy.

Bibi Netanyahu said Kirk was “murdered for speaking truth.” The deeper truth is that a society addicted to outrage has made violence inevitable.

Conclusion: Toward Fairness in a Divided World

Charlie Kirk’s legacy is complex: a pro-Israel crusader, a flawed rhetorician, and now a victim of polarization. His statements deserved debate and correction, not dismissal as hatred. By confronting the realities of progressive Jewish funding, we might have fostered dialogue. Instead, labels became weapons, and words gave way to bullets.

The lesson is simple: if we keep using labels as weapons, we will keep producing tragedies. Fairness demands better.

To put it in perspective: $3.8 billion represents less than 0.1% of the U.S. federal budget. America spends more every year on foreign aid to Afghanistan during the war, or on agricultural subsidies for domestic farmers. Yet critics single out Israel as if this figure were uniquely outrageous. Why? Because it fits a pre-existing narrative. And that’s the hallmark of propaganda: magnifying one detail, ignoring all context, and blaming a convenient scapegoat.

The Tech Edge Israel Brings to America

Israel’s battlefield experience acts as a live testing ground, refining U.S. systems with invaluable innovations. What’s even more compelling is how Israel perfects and improves U.S. technology, delivering invaluable advancements. Israel’s battlefield experience in a high-threat region acts as a live testing ground, refining systems that the U.S. then adopts or enhances.

• Missile Defense: The Iron Dome, co-developed with over $1.3 billion in U.S. funding since 2011, uses AI to ignore harmless projectiles—a lesson integrated into U.S. systems like SkyHunter. The Trophy Active Protection System, protecting U.S. M1 Abrams tanks, saves American lives based on Israeli combat data.

• Aircraft Innovation: Israel’s contributions to the F-35, including the Helmet Mounted Display System, give U.S. pilots unmatched situational awareness. Combat use of the F-35I variant feeds back critical improvements.

• Unmanned Systems and AI: Israeli drones like the Hermes 450, now used by U.S. Customs for border security, and AI-driven targeting systems like Fire Weaver, shape U.S. sensor-to-shooter networks.

• Tactical Gear: Innovations like the Israeli Emergency Bandage and SIMON breach grenades, born from real-world use, are now standard in American kits.

What makes these examples so powerful is that they don’t just save Israeli lives—they save American lives. U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan directly benefited from Israeli innovations. That’s a tangible return on investment, not some abstract geopolitical 'favor.'

This collaboration is formalized under the 2019-2028 Memorandum of Understanding, with $500 million yearly for missile defense R&D. Think tanks highlight Israel’s role as a 'military-technology complex,' accelerating U.S. adoption of cyber and robotics tech.

Thus, even if Israel’s line item looks large, the returns to the U.S. economy and security are also outsized.

Strategic Returns That Matter

Beyond economics and tech, the partnership yields shared intelligence and refined military doctrine. Israel’s counterterrorism insights and joint exercises like Juniper Oak enhance U.S. security, especially against threats like Iran. This symbiosis delivers a return far exceeding the initial investment, with estimates suggesting vast technological and economic benefits.

On the economic front, critical components of leading American high-tech products are invented and designed in Israel, making the American companies that manufacture those products more competitive and profitable. Cisco, Intel, Motorola, Applied Materials, and HP are just a few examples. The US-Israeli economic and commercial relationship now encompasses IT, biotech, life sciences, health care solutions, energy, pharmaceuticals, food and beverages, defense industries, cyber-security, aviation, desalination, recycling, conservation, management, and irrigation.

US firms established two-thirds of the 300 foreign-invested research and development centers in Israel at Start-Up Nation (an independent non-profit that builds bridges to Israeli innovation firms). Israeli firms represent the second-largest source of foreign listings on the NASDAQ after China, and more than Indian, Japanese, and South Korean firms combined. According to an estimate by the US Chamber of Commerce, Israel is home to more than 2,500 American firms employing some 72,000 Israelis.

The US and Israel have three joint research & development foundations: the Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation (BIRD), the Binational Science Foundation (BSF), and the Binational Agricultural Research and Development Foundation (BARD). Since its inception in 1977, the BIRD Foundation has granted $282 million to 813 projects that have directly and indirectly generated $8 billion in sales.

Israeli businesses invest heavily in the US economy, with Israel placing among the top 20 suppliers of direct investment in the US. More than $150 billion was invested by Israeli companies in the US between 2010 and 2015 (more than $25.1 billion in 2015 alone). As of this writing, over 30 US states have signed bilateral agreements with Israel to foster closer ties in fields like business, technology, agriculture, homeland security, and energy.

Strategically, the US and Israel have developed deep strategic ties to confront common threats. This strategic relationship is a crucial pillar of America’s Middle East security framework, and the partnership is continually growing and expanding into new areas. Both nations gain from a strong strategic partnership, which draws in part upon Israel’s capabilities in designing advanced military, homeland security, counterterrorism, and cyber-protection technologies including AI, that help the US meet its growing security challenges. Israel’s military strength and central geostrategic location provide a strong deterrent to regional actors opposed to the US. Israel is the place where US special operations units trained before deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israeli armor plating technology protects US soldiers. Israel is a cost-effective, battle-tested laboratory for US defense industries, and it provides the US with more intelligence than all the NATO countries put together. American battle tactics are formulated according to the Israeli playbook. Israel is a strategic beachhead of the US in the Middle East.

It is in effect the largest US aircraft carrier, yet it does not require a single American boot on the ground. Israel is the only stable, reliable, capable, democratic, and unconditional ally of the US, and it is willing to flex its muscles.

In contrast, the opaque billions from Qatar and others—$100 billion from Qatar alone—lack such reciprocity, raising concerns about influence without mutual gain. Singling out Israel as a 'controller' ignores this reality, perpetuating a narrative that deflects from true foreign leverage.

Consider intelligence alone: Israeli warnings about terrorist plots have prevented attacks in Europe and the U.S. Their cybersecurity expertise—refined against Iranian and Hezbollah hackers—directly safeguards American financial systems and infrastructure. If the value of even one prevented 9/11-style plot is incalculable, then the $3.8 billion figure fades into insignificance.

Who Else Gets U.S. Military Aid?

The United States provides military aid to numerous countries worldwide, primarily through programs like Foreign Military Financing (FMF), International Military Education and Training (IMET), and Excess Defense Articles (EDA), as well as direct support during conflicts or for strategic alliances. This aid often includes equipment, training, and financial assistance, reflecting U.S. interests in security, counterterrorism, and regional stability.

Based on available data from various sources, including government reports and analyses up to September 2025, here’s a list of significant recipients of U.S. military aid, excluding Israel (which receives approximately $3.8 billion annually). Note that exact figures and rankings vary by year due to shifting priorities, but this list highlights major recipients based on recent trends (e.g., 2020–2024 data where available).

• Egypt: Receives around $1.3–$1.5 billion annually in FMF, a legacy of the 1979 Camp David Accords. Aid supports border security, counterterrorism, and maintaining the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, though some funds have been conditioned due to human rights concerns.

• Jordan: Gets approximately $1–$1.2 billion yearly, with a focus on counterterrorism, border security with Syria/Iraq, and support against ISIS. This includes equipment like F-16s and training.

• Ukraine: Since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, aid has surged, reaching $2.5–$3 billion annually by 2023–2024 (e.g., $16.6 billion total in FY 2023 per USAFacts), including Javelin missiles and HIMARS, though much is humanitarian or economic with military components.

• Afghanistan: Pre-2021 withdrawal, received $3–$4 billion annually (e.g., $3 billion in 2020), mainly for training and equipment to Afghan forces. Post-withdrawal, aid has dropped significantly but includes counterterrorism support.

• Iraq: Receives $500 million–$1 billion yearly, focused on rebuilding forces post-ISIS, with equipment like armored vehicles and training programs.

• Saudi Arabia: While not a traditional FMF recipient, gets billions in arms sales (e.g., $15 billion in deals since 2010) and logistical support, though recent scrutiny over Yemen has led to pauses (e.g., 2018–2019).

• Pakistan: Historically received $1–$2 billion annually (e.g., $1.6 billion in 2010), tied to counterterrorism and Afghanistan stability, though aid has decreased since 2011 due to tensions over nuclear programs and U.S. drone strikes.

• Colombia: Gets $200–$400 million yearly under Plan Colombia, focusing on counter-narcotics and FARC remnants, with helicopters and training.

• South Korea: Receives $50–$100 million annually in FMF, supplemented by joint exercises and equipment (e.g., Patriot systems), reflecting the U.S.-South Korea alliance against North Korea.

• Taiwan: Gets $300–$500 million yearly (e.g., $136 million in FY 2023 disbursements), including weapons like F-16s and missile defense, amid China tensions, though some argue it’s underfunded relative to threats.

• Philippines: Receives $50–$100 million annually, with aid increasing for counterterrorism in Mindanao and South China Sea patrols, including patrol boats.

• Nigeria: Gets $50–$100 million yearly, focused on Boko Haram and regional stability, with training and light arms.

• Kenya: Receives $50–$75 million annually, supporting counterterrorism in the Horn of Africa, including drones and training.

• Georgia: Gets $30–$60 million yearly, aiding defense against Russia, with equipment like Humvees.

• Lebanon: Receives $100–$200 million annually, supporting the Lebanese Armed Forces against Hezbollah, though aid has been scrutinized for potential misuse.

With a 2020 FMF budget of $6.4 billion, Israel’s share is meaningful but part of a wider network. This context dismantles the myth of disproportionate influence—aid is a tool, not a puppet string.

It is also worth noting that much of America’s foreign aid is driven by self-interest, not altruism. Egypt’s aid maintains peace with Israel and ensures Suez Canal stability. Jordan’s supports a buffer against ISIS. Ukraine’s is a front-line defense against Russian expansionism. The point: all aid is strategic. Singling out Israel for scrutiny, while ignoring the strategic rationale behind every other package, exposes a double standard.

Moreover, Israel is the only aid recipient legally required to spend nearly all its U.S. assistance on American-made defense products. That means jobs for Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and hundreds of subcontractors across U.S. states. In practice, Israel’s aid is a jobs program for American workers—hardly the drain its critics claim.

It is a common assertion that Israel receives more aid than any other country. While Israel is historically the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. aid since World War II, a look at current annual figures reveals a different picture and dismantles the “disproportionate influence” myth.

In recent years, other countries like Ukraine have received a surge in aid, far surpassing Israel’s annual allocation. For example, in FY 2023 Ukraine received over $16 billion. Moreover, as outlined above, the aid to Israel is part of a wider network of U.S. foreign assistance packages, each driven by a strategic rationale. The narrative that Israel is an outlier distracts from the truth that U.S. foreign aid is a tool of statecraft, not a charity program. Every dollar is allocated to advance U.S. interests, from fighting terrorism in Pakistan to countering Russian expansionism in Ukraine.

Addressing the Critics

While the strategic benefits are clear, critics often raise two main points that need to be addressed directly: human rights concerns and the argument that Israel is the single largest recipient of U.S. aid. Some critics argue that U.S. aid to Israel should be conditioned on human rights concerns related to its treatment of Palestinians. This argument, while well-intentioned, often overlooks key details.

• Aid Conditionality is Complex: U.S. aid is rarely “unconditional.” While the aid framework with Israel is unique, the U.S. regularly engages with Israel on a variety of issues, including human rights. However, the U.S. prioritizes its strategic interests, which include maintaining a powerful and stable ally in a volatile region.

• The Broader Context: Focusing on Israel alone ignores the fact that the U.S. provides aid to numerous other countries with documented human rights issues, including Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. The aid to these nations is also driven by strategic interests—such as counterterrorism, regional stability, and access to resources—not solely by an endorsement of their domestic policies. The singling out of Israel on this issue reveals a double standard.

• Selective Outrage: Conditioning aid has rarely been applied with the same vigor to far worse offenders. The U.S. has continued substantial aid to Egypt despite systemic repression, and to Pakistan despite harboring terror networks. To demand special conditionality for Israel—while turning a blind eye to these cases—suggests that the criticism is less about human rights and more about delegitimizing Israel.

• Israel’s Record in Perspective: Unlike many aid recipients, Israel is a democracy with independent courts, a free press, and regular elections. Even when controversial policies arise, they are debated and challenged within Israel itself. That is a far cry from regimes where aid props up dictatorships. The critique often ignores this critical distinction.

When you step back, both counterarguments—the human rights conditionality and the “top recipient” myth—fall into a familiar pattern. Critics apply standards to Israel that they don’t apply to anyone else. Billions flow to authoritarian regimes without protest, yet Israel, a democracy and ally, is singled out for condemnation. This selectivity mirrors the old blood libels: take a universal problem, ignore every other culprit, and pin it uniquely on the Jews.

That’s why the debate about aid to Israel is rarely just about policy. It becomes a vessel for ancient prejudices in modern packaging. If the concern were truly human rights, consistency would demand protests over Egypt, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia. If the concern were aid levels, outrage would center on Ukraine’s massive packages. The fact that it doesn’t tells us everything. Israel is not the outlier—the double standard is.

In the end, when critics obsess over Israel while ignoring far larger aid flows and far worse human rights violators, they aren’t exposing U.S. policy failures—they’re reviving an old blood libel in new clothes.

The U.S. partnership with Israel is about more than money; it's about a strategic alliance that has a proven track record of strengthening U.S. interests. While the billions spent by nations like Qatar and Saudi Arabia often come with little transparency and limited reciprocity, the U.S.-Israel partnership is negotiated in the open, with bipartisan support, and delivers tangible benefits that save American lives and fuel our economy.

Ultimately, the critique of U.S. aid to Israel as a "drain" is a distraction. The real question isn't whether the aid is a cost, but whether the alliance is a strategic victory. The evidence suggests it is.

So, What’s the Takeaway?

If you’re critiquing foreign influence, look at Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia—whose billions buy universities and newsrooms with little transparency. Israel’s partnership, by contrast, strengthens U.S. interests with every dollar. This isn’t about Zionist power—it’s about a strategic alliance that delivers.

And here’s the bottom line: the myths collapse under scrutiny. Aid to Israel is not a drain, not unconditional, not disproportionate, and not proof of “control.” It is one of America’s best investments—an investment in shared security, technological innovation, and democratic partnership.

The real danger isn’t the aid—it’s the narrative. Because when critics recycle disproven myths under a veneer of policy analysis, they’re not just questioning budgets. They’re giving oxygen to an ancient prejudice dressed up in modern clothes.

What do you think? Drop your thoughts below—I’d love to hear your take!

Myths vs. Facts About U.S. Aid to Israel

• Myth 1: U.S. aid to Israel is a drain on American taxpayers.

  • Fact: The $3.8B annual allocation is less than 0.1% of the federal budget. Most of it must be spent on U.S.-made defense products, creating American jobs and fueling our tech sector.

• Myth 2: Israel gets more aid than any other country.

  • Fact: Israel is a top recipient, but far from the only one. Egypt ($1.3B), Jordan ($1B+), and Ukraine ($3B+ in recent years) also receive major U.S. assistance. Singling out Israel ignores the broader context of U.S. global strategy.

• Myth 3: Israel gives nothing back in return.

  • Fact: U.S.-Israel defense cooperation has produced the Iron Dome, Trophy APS, F-35 avionics, medical gear, and cybersecurity tools that save American lives. Intelligence sharing has stopped terror plots against the U.S. and allies.

• Myth 4: Israel “controls” U.S. foreign policy.

  • Fact: Israel’s aid package is negotiated in the open, through Congress, with bipartisan votes and clear oversight. By contrast, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and China spend untold billions lobbying, buying media outlets, and funding universities with far less transparency.

• Myth 5: Cutting Israel off would save money without consequences.

  • Fact: Ending the partnership would undermine U.S. military readiness, weaken deterrence against Iran, and hand adversaries a propaganda victory. The cost of losing Israel as a strategic ally would dwarf the annual aid package.

This article is based on Jay Shapiro's Interview of Coleman Hughes on the August 21, 2025 Dilemma Podcast (Part 1 and Part 2).

I encourage you to listen to all 2 hours and 40 minutes. In my experience, Anti-Zionists like Shapiro contort facts to paint Western values (and Israel as their outpost) as inherently flawed, an "original sin" negating all else. On the other hand, Pro-Zionists see flaws but affirm democracy, self-determination, and progress as forces for good. Yes, the Middle East is complicated—horrible views exist in Israeli society, and peace-seeking Palestinians deserve amplification. But vilifying Israel singularly, with double standards, isn't just irrational and historically selective; it's morally bankrupt, dangerous, and often veers into antisemitism by exceptionalizing Jewish sovereignty.

This piece is my attempt to present a hypothetical interview between myself and Jay Shapiro. Below, I tried to present Jay Shapiro’s arguments as accurately as I could based upon the transcripts of the podcast above. There is a great deal of information contained in each of the 30+ individual blood libels chronicled in www.bloodlibels.com. This article is merely my attempt to provide a single post that highlights some of the mental gymnastics that "progressive" critics of Israel have to go through to sustain their arguments.

I hope you’ll conclude after reading this - or listening to the podcast linked above - that Shapiro's stance relies on selective history and moral relativism that ultimately crumbles under scrutiny. Judge for yourself.

1. On the Origins of Zionism and the Nakba

Jay’s Argument: Andy, let's start with the framing of good guys and bad guys in this conflict. I see Zionism as inherently colonial—rooted in British imperial support, with early groups like Irgun1 and Haganah2 acting as terrorists targeting civilians and justifying land claims via biblical mandates like "from the river to the sea." The Nakba wasn't symbolic; it was visceral displacement—Holocaust survivors moving into homes with food still on the stove, shoes in the hallway. Palestinians have suffered massive injustice from Zionists collaborating with the UK, and dismissing that as just "get over it" ignores the origin story of Palestinian resistance. How do you square that with claims Israel just wants peace with its neighbors?

My Response: I appreciate you grounding this in history—it's crucial for understanding without falling into caricatures that echo old antisemitic tropes of Jewish conspiracies or inherent aggression. History demonstrates that Zionism was never about empire-building; it was a desperate survival strategy born from European antisemitism, where Jews faced pogroms and exclusion. Theodor Herzl's3 vision was a refuge for a persecuted people, not conquest—Jews arrived as refugees, buying land legally under Ottoman and British rule. Balfour's declaration4 may have been flawed, but it reflected Britain's post-WWI mandates, not a grand Jewish colonial plot against Palestinians. Zionism was national liberation. Colonizers don’t return to their ancestral homeland, revive their ancient language, and center their identity in Jerusalem and Hebron. As for the Nakba, it's a tragedy of displacement for 700,000 Palestinians, but context matters: it followed Arab rejection of the UN partition plan5 and attacks on Jewish communities, plus invasions by five Arab armies where Jews fought for their survival in an existential war. Palestinians suffered enormously—but so did Jews, lest we forget similar numbers expelled from Arab countries. The uniqueness isn't 1948's violence6 (common in partitions like India-Pakistan), but 1949: Israel offered to repatriate 300,000 refugees in exchange for peace, but Arab leaders refused, prioritizing rejectionism over state-building. The Zionist “project” could have ended with Israel's creation in 1948, as the state accepted those borders (and later the 1967 lines post-war), willing to compromise for peace—even on a united Jerusalem, which is preferable but not absolute. In terms of the Irgun and Haganah, at founding, “radicals” like Begin7 and Shamir deferred to Ben-Gurion8 who was supported by the majority, showing Israel's democratic integration over extremism. And if Israeli’s were as evil as you describe, how do you reconcile with the fact that in your counterfactual there should be no Arab citizens of Israel today. Yet nearly 2 million Arabs live as equal citizens—voting, serving in the Knesset, even sitting on the Supreme Court. That lived reality proves Zionism was not about erasing Palestinians but ensuring Jewish survival.

2. On Suppression of Moderate Palestinian Voices

Jay’s Argument: But look at how Israel has suppressed moderate Palestinian voices—people like Ghassan Kanafani9, a poet and writer killed in 1972 by Israel, or Mubarak Awad10, the "Palestinian Gandhi," deported in 1988 for nonviolent resistance. Israel eliminates those advocating coexistence or two-states, like Marwan Barghouti11, because it's useful to face extremists like Hamas. This ensures no real partner for peace, allowing expansion. It's like propping up villains to justify actions—why else kill a writer like Kanafani, who beautifully articulated Palestinian dignity in works like "Letter from Gaza"?

My Response: Jay, these are serious claims, and we must examine them factually to avoid narratives that unfairly single out Israel in ways that border on antisemitic exceptionalism—treating Jewish self-defense as uniquely sinister while ignoring similar actions elsewhere. Kanafani wasn't just a poet; he led the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist group behind hijackings and attacks like the Lod Airport massacre in 1972, killing 26. His assassination, while tragic, occurred amid PFLP terrorism targeting Israelis—context matters, as violence begets violence.

Awad's deportation stemmed from his role in the First Intifada12, which included nonviolence but escalated into widespread violence against Israeli civilians. Israel has faced real threats, but it's not systematically eliminating moderates—Barghouti, for example, was convicted of murder in civilian courts for directing attacks during the Second Intifada13.

Palestinian moderates exist, but rejectionist factions like Hamas often dominate due to internal dynamics, not just Israeli actions. Both sides' extremists thrive on distrust—Israeli settlers provoke, Palestinian militants reject peace offers (e.g., 2000 Camp David). Blaming Israel alone overlooks Palestinian agency and risks excusing violence. To the extent Palestinians have had moderates, they are not celebrated by Palestinians themselves—Israel may deserve some blame for not promoting them more, but Palestinians are responsible for their own fate, just as Americans chose Washington and Israel chose Ben-Gurion despite adversaries trying to split them apart.

3. On Israel's Ties to Apartheid South Africa

Jay’s Argument: Israel's deep ties to apartheid South Africa—weapons swaps, uranium for nukes, training police who oppressed Black South Africans—weren't just instrumental; they reveal shared ideologies of controlling "subversive" populations. This exposes nefarious Zionist intentions, prioritizing dominance over justice.

My Response: Analogies to apartheid are charged and often misused in ways that delegitimize Jewish self-determination, echoing antisemitic calls to dismantle Israel as uniquely evil. The analogies have no basis in history—Israel's Arab citizens have voting rights, unlike in apartheid South Africa, and Israel's civilian casualty record is better than Europe's in similar conflicts. The presence of 2 million Arab Israeli citizens with full rights exemplifies Israel's coexistence model, as they hold citizenship, vote, and access institutions equally, refuting claims of systemic dominance and highlighting democratic inclusivity. With respect to your point, Israel's 1970s ties to South Africa were pragmatic—during global isolation post-1967, when Arab states boycotted Israel and the USSR armed its enemies. It involved arms and uranium, but Israel later supported anti-apartheid efforts, including Mandela's ANC (Mandela visited Israel positively in 1999). Many democracies, including the US and UK, had ties to apartheid regimes for Cold War reasons—it's not unique to Zionism. This doesn't define Zionist intentions; Zionism is about Jewish survival in a hostile world, not domination. Labeling Israel "apartheid" ignores Arab-Israeli citizens' rights (voting, Supreme Court seats) and misapplies a term from a racially segregated system. The conflict's roots are in competing nationalisms, not racism—focusing on South Africa distracts from mutual steps needed for peace.

4. On Policies in Gaza and Alleged Starvation

Jay’s Argument: Israel's policies look like intentional starvation to make Gaza unlivable—calorie-counting blockades pre-October 7, now aid restrictions amid famine. Statements suggest it's "moral" to starve but the world won't allow it. This isn't self-defense; it's ethnic cleansing to clear land for settlers, exploiting crises.

My Response: Claims of deliberate starvation must be fact-checked rigorously, as inflated accusations fuel antisemitic blood libels portraying Jews as cruel oppressors. Data shows no mass starvation: UNRWA reported 250,000+ tons of aid entering Gaza in 2024 more than in any war to an enemy population, with Israel facilitating entry despite Hamas diversion. There's hunger in Gaza—widespread and dangerous—but not systematic starvation; that's a myth amplified for pressure. Pre-2007 blockades were in response to rocket fire after Israel's 2005 withdrawal and disengagement in Gaza — calorie guidelines ensured humanitarian needs, not malice. Hamas embeds in civilians, using aid for tunnels and weapons, inflating casualty figures to pressure Israel maximize suffering, create the asymmetry, not Israeli malice. Israel's aim is degrading Hamas, not cleansing—evidenced by no mass expulsions despite power to do so. Again, the presence of 2 million Arab Israeli citizens with full rights illustrates Israel's capacity for coexistence, as it extends democratic protections to its Arab minority, countering accusations of ethnic cleansing intent and showing a societal model that values integration over exclusion. Ethnic cleansing claims ignore Israel's withdrawals (Sinai 1982, Gaza 2005) and offers (e.g., 2000: 95% West Bank). Smotrich is fringe—Israel's democracy checks such extremism, as seen in protests against judicial reforms. Gaza's suffering is tragic, but blaming Israel solely overlooks Hamas's strategy of maximizing civilian harm for propaganda. Solutions require demilitarizing Hamas, not assuming genocidal intent. Despite obstacles, before October 7th, nearly every Palestinian in Gaza and the West Bank was locally governed by Palestinian entities, and none of those governing entities prioritized bringing prosperity to the Palestinians.

5. On Solutions: One-State vs. Two-State

Jay’s Argument: Ultimately, a one-state solution could work—Jews and Palestinians negotiating coexistence, with over 50% chance of success if justice (dignity, right of return) is addressed. Peace emerges from justice, not vice versa. Two-states ignores demographic realities and ongoing occupation.

My Response: Jay, one-state solution optimism risks ignoring history's lessons, which could inadvertently promote narratives erasing Jewish statehood—a subtle antisemitic undercurrent in some anti-Zionist rhetoric. No Middle Eastern multi-ethnic state has avoided sectarian violence (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq). With mutual fears—Israelis of extermination, Palestinians of domination—trust for two-states is already low; one-state would amplify risks, likely devolving into civil war. Justice means recognizing both peoples' rights: Palestinians to statehood, Jews to security post-Holocaust. Two-states, with land swaps and demilitarization, is the pragmatic path—history shows withdrawals (Gaza) didn't bring peace due to rejectionism. Palestinians and Israelis lack trust after violence; two states is the pragmatic path, but requires accepting Israel's permanence. Oslo14 nearly succeeded, but rejectionism (Arafat at Camp David 200015) shifted Israel rightward—not expansionism, but fear. Shapiro confuses justice for peace—the Palestinians' cry for justice is understandable but counterproductive. As a Jew, I want justice, but the Russians/Poles/Ukrainians who persecuted my ancestors will never give it. They can offer peace, and Israel and Jews generally accept peace from Poland, Ukraine, and Germany, and would from Russia if offered.

Closing Thoughts

This point-counterpoint illustrates the deep divides: one side sees systemic injustice rooted in Zionism's origins, the other views it as necessary self-defense amid rejectionism. Both draw on history, but interpretations differ. For peace, dialogue must bridge these gaps, rejecting extremism on all sides.

What do you think? Share in the comments.

On Wednesday May 21, 2025, outside of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC, a gunman opened fire and assassinated two young people just because he thought they were Jewish.

Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were not on a battlefield in Gaza. They were murdered in the U.S. capital. Not by accident. Not by random violence. This didn’t happen in a vacuum. It is the inevitable result of a global propaganda campaign.

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And now, two more names are added to a long list of jewish victims whose deaths will be rationalized or worse - celebrated.

This is the world we live in now. A world where the chants “Free Palestine”, “From the River to the Sea” and “Globalize the Intifada” echo through college campuses, social justice marches, and city streets—most often shouted by antisemites and radical “cultural marxists” but also by people who believe they are standing for peace, when in fact they are unwittingly, naively, stupidly, aligning themselves with radical islamic terrorists.

By now, everyone should know what those chants actually mean. Iran and its proxies, including Hamas, make it clear. So does Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Within our Lifetime, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) and dozens of DEI and so called “Ethnic Studies” programs that have been ideologically captured. Their slogans are not about justice or human rights. They are about erasing Jews—from history, from land, from life.

The truth is that if you want to protest suffering, protest the regimes that slaughter their own civilians and hide behind civilian populations operating their military operations out of schools and hospitals. Protest the ideology that teaches children from birth to hate jews and to glorify martyrs. Protest the propaganda that is indoctrinating Western youth to believe that hating (and killing) Jews is somehow justice.

If you want peace, stand with those who want peace. Not with those whose idea of “liberation” requires Jewish annihilation.

This moment demands moral clarity. It demands courage. Because the true cost has always been counted in Jewish lives. It seems too many have forgotten that mobs of Nazi students terrorized campuses in Germany years before the ghettos and gas chambers of WWII. They have forgotten the role that their so-called “activism” had in spreading an ideology across an entire generation of Germans.

Moral consistency requires recognizing and acknowledging that white supremacist ideology led to the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, just as extreme social justice and Islamist ideologies led to the Capital Jewish Museum murders.

We need to be real about antisemitism. We need to be real about the undertones of the screams from college students, or the vile hatred on social media – it’s the oldest hatred in the world and it possesses a desire to exterminate, to rid the world of Jews.

In Yaron and Sarah’s honor, I felt compelled to publish this article in a cry for unity in the face of an ever more dangerous existential threat to the ability for Jews to live in peace and security.

What Israel has endured, no other nation would be expected to tolerate: the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, over 15,000 rockets launched at civilians, 253 hostages taken into tunnels in Gaza without global outrage or Red Cross access. Instead of unified support, Israel faces global condemnation, campus mobs praising terror, and media outlets that amplify Hamas propaganda while minimizing Jewish suffering. Any other democracy would be applauded for defending itself—Israel alone is demonized for choosing survival.

Once again, the nations of the world have aligning against the Jewish people. They malign us. They propagate blood libels that accuse us of war crimes, of genocide, of apartheid without context, while ignoring, excusing or worse, celebrating, terrorist organizations that hide underground in tunnels and behind human shields. They hold us to double standards. They tell ancient blood libels. They blame us for the atrocities committed against us. They reward terror with offers of statehood. Today's war dresses itself in "progressive" language, legal briefs, and diplomatic forums — but which remains, at its core, a war against the Jews.

The double standards they adhere to are not diplomacy - they are moral inversion.

So we have to ask the hardest questions—questions we’ve been avoiding for too long.

How do we unite when we are so divided politically?

How do we make peace with an enemy that doesn’t want peace?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are existential ones. And our survival depends on how we answer them.

The first step is honesty.

The truth is: we are divided. Deeply. Politically, culturally, generationally. Jews have always argued. The Talmud is an argument. What we cannot afford is to keep confusing ideological purity with moral clarity. We must learn to walk together even when we don’t vote the same.

There is no civil rights movement for the Jewish people. As such, we need to start practicing real solidarity so we can stop attacking allies who broadly share our values even if their politics don’t agree with our own. Step in to de-escalate when others escalate. Promote independents who judge ideas by merit, not partisanship. Support imperfect coalitions that prioritize Jewish safety even if that means supporting an administration that you despise.

We don’t need a single political strategy. We need a shared reality and a common purpose.

We must stop allowing ourselves to be fractured by fear. Fear of looking un-woke. Fear of aiding the left. Fear of saying the wrong thing on both sides of the aisle. Fear of defending ourselves too loudly. Too many of us are hiding their jewish identity because they feel unsafe. This must stop.

The Great Betrayal: How America’s Political Duopoly Is Dividing the Jewish People

I recently came across an article in Future of Jewish titled “The Dirty Politics of Antisemitism”, and it left me unsettled—not because it was wrong, but because it was too right.

The piece lays bare a reality many of us have felt but struggled to name: antisemitism in America isn’t just rising—it’s being weaponized. Not only by neo-Nazis on the right, but by progressives on the left. The Left points to Charlottesville. The Right points to Columbia, Penn and Harvard. Meanwhile, Jews are left shouting across a widening chasm, blaming each other and Israel for the world’s jew hatred - and we play into our enemies hands.

When antisemitism becomes a partisan football, something terrible happens: Jews stop defending each other. We become Democrats first, Republicans first, progressives first, conservatives first—and only maybe Jews second. We trade our peoplehood for party. But in doing so, we reinforce the lie that Jewish safety is negotiable. That our survival can be split along party lines. We’re being played. And we’re letting it happen.

Our communal organizations can’t agree on how to define antisemitism, let alone how to fight it. Some are more comfortable condemning a MAGA rally than a terrorist chant. Others will scream about progressive antisemitism while embracing Christian Zionists. Each side demands outrage from the other—while offering none of their own.

Consider this open letter from several dozen former leaders of major Jewish establishment groups, including a former national chair of the Anti-Defamation League, who recently warned that:

a range of actors are using a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech and the press.

They called on Jewish leaders and institutions

to resist the exploitation of Jewish fears and publicly join with other organizations that are battling to preserve the guardrails of democracy.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of many who signed. As you know, I am an avid defender of our democracy and the rule of law. This entire body of work is dedicated to those principles.

But their framing is revealing. By a “range of actors” they mean the Trump Administration. While Jews are facing an epidemic of antisemitism on a scale we haven’t seen since the 1930s, many Jews on the political left feel that we are being “exploited” instead of defended! This is self loathing and dangerous. And our enemies are thrilled. And it’s tearing us apart.

Consider a Jewish friend who recently posted on facebook:

It surprises me to see smart, well-educated Jews buy into this idea that Trump and his supporters are trying to silence free thinking and free speech in the name of preventing antisemitism. Isn’t this the same guy who rallied neo-Nazis to attack the Capitol? … I think their goal is simply to divide and silence the opposition. Today it’s trans teens and immigrants. Tomorrow it will be the Jews.

We have become so blinded by partisanship that many of us are unwilling to accept that Trump’s policies might actually be designed to protect Jews on campus because they are convinced they are smokescreens for fascism. In this moment, the actions (not the man) should be judged by their impact, not political identity.

How many of us have read comments like this from progressive jews:

Watching a genocide unfold seems very important. I am not a callous enough person to see toddlers with their heads blown off and dead children lying in the streets to think it’s not important to talk about. I’m truly shocked after the Holocaust that so many are willing to turn a blind eye. Many Jews do not support the slaughter of Palestinians, yet in Trump’s world this is antisemitism.

These aren’t fringe voices. These are our friends, colleagues, family members. And they truly believe that condemning Hamas is a distraction from a genocide that isn’t happening.

This is a war for existence. A war between light and darkness, freedom and barbarism. And yet, tragically, too many Jews—especially in the diaspora—are still blind to this reality. Even worse, many are directing their anger not at the enemy, but at fellow Jews. At Netanyahu. At the government. They rage at Jewish strength, while remaining silent about jihadist evil.

This is what happens when moral confusion becomes a badge of honor. When “nuance” becomes a license to excuse open genocidal threats against us. When being a “good Jew” means distrusting anyone on the political right who supports Israel—because they don’t do so through a progressive lens.

The propaganda has worked.

The most insidious expression of this phenomena is the political asymmetry in how antisemitism is addressed. When it comes from the far right, the left are quick to condemn it, but when it’s cloaked in the language of “decolonization,” “liberation,” or “anti-imperialism,” it’s excused, ignored—or even rewarded. As Bari Weiss observes in her 2019 book “How to Fight Antisemitism”:

Antisemitism has the uncanny ability to be politically convenient… It shifts shape to serve the ideological needs of the moment.

The result? Jewish students harassed on campus. Entire academic departments refuse to acknowledge antisemitic incidents cloaked in anti-Zionist rhetoric. Major media outlets portray Jewish self-defense as oppression, and terrorism as resistance.

This is not a coincidence. It’s the logical outcome of a political system that thrives on tribalism. The American duopoly doesn’t want Jews unified. It wants us fractured—screaming at each other instead of standing together.

So what do we do?

We stop playing defense. We stop apologizing. We stop performing ideological gymnastics to preserve our virtue signaling. And we remember: we are one people.

Jewish unity doesn’t mean agreeing on everything. It means agreeing on something fundamental: that antisemitism in all its forms, from the right, the left, the pulpit, or the quad—is a threat to us all. That we will not excuse it, ignore it, or hide from it because it’s politically inconvenient. It means being brave enough to call out those within our own community who have confused their politics for their identity. And yes - Antizionism today is antisemitism. Full stop.

The path to Jewish unity starts when we say: enough! Enough moral relativism. Enough silence when the mobs chant “globalize the intifada.” Enough pretending that campus antisemitism is protected “Free Speech.” Enough excusing genocidal rhetoric because it’s wrapped in intersectional language. Enough downplaying the threat of white nationalism. Enough blaming other Jews for the hatred aimed at all of us. And most crucially in this moment—enough blaming other jews who support the Trump administration’s actions to confront antisemitism forcefully and justly because it purports to align with your fear that it will lead to fascism. Our self interest, our survival must come before partisanship!

Consider the New York Times "hit piece on the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther entitled “The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement.” Rather than investigate the pro-Hamas activism erupting on campuses, the article framed the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther—a coordinated strategy to push back against this wave—as a dystopian overreach. This isn’t journalism. It’s ideological gaslighting. And it’s exactly how fear turns moral clarity into moral confusion.

We don’t have to agree with every political view of the Heritage Foundation. But if they chose to stand with Jewish students while others cower—we should be grateful, not ashamed.

And it’s not only the progressive Jews in the left that need to speak up. Imagine for a moment had Kamala Harris won the Presidency and she had:

• Signed a truce with the Houthis 48 hours after they struck Ben Gurion Airport

• Prioritized arms deals with Saudi Arabia while Israeli hostages were still underground

• Criticized Israel’s humanitarian policy while hinting at conditional military aid

• Cut an economic deal with Qatar, Hamas’s main backer, just months after October 7

Conservative Jews would be calling it betrayal! But because it’s Trump, too many remain silent—or worse, offer tortured rationalizations in the name of “strategy” or conclude Harris would have been worse. Their fear is not of antisemitism, but of empowering the progressive left. And so they tolerate what they never would from the other side.

This is what fear does: it makes principles conditional on who holds power. It replaces moral clarity with tribal loyalty. It makes defending Jews secondary to scoring political points—or avoiding them.

We’re Losing the Propaganda War.

For eight decades, Islamists and their backers have waged an ideological campaign—not just against Israel, but against the Jewish people as a whole. They’ve infiltrated the soft tissue of Western society: the schools, the universities, the human rights organizations, the social justice movements. They have framed the conflict not as a tragic clash of peoples, but as a simple moral binary: Palestinians as the oppressed, Jews as the oppressors. And the West—especially its younger generation—has believed the lie.

The Muslim Brotherhood and its enablers in Iran and Qatar have been playing the long game. Over the past 80 years, under both democratic and republican administrations, they have infiltrated America and strategically, methodically poisoned millions of impressionable minds who have now been indoctrinated.

• Education: In K–12 classrooms and elite universities, curricula steeped in critical theory have recast the Jewish story as one of privilege and power. Zionism is no longer a liberation movement of the indigenous Jews but a white colonial project.

• Social Media: Algorithms reward outrage, not context. The image of a grieving child spreads faster than the nuance of asymmetric warfare. TikTok and Instagram have become the new battlefield, where fact is no match for feeling.

• NGOs and Human Rights Orgs: Institutions once dedicated to universal justice now act as ideological actors. Groups like Amnesty International use the language of apartheid and settler-colonialism to delegitimize the only Jewish state—while saying little of actual apartheid regimes.

• Intersectional Movements: Intersectionality and identity politics tell Jews that they must choose between their identity and their solidarity. Unless they renounce Israel, they are excluded from coalitions they helped build.

And here is the bitter truth: it has worked. Our story is being erased. Our trauma is being dismissed. Our indigeneity is being denied.

Recent polling indicates a notable shift in attitudes among Americans under 35 regarding Israel and antisemitism.

Antisemitic Attitudes Among Young Adults

A global survey by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in early 2025 found that 46% of adults worldwide hold antisemitic beliefs. Notably, individuals under 35 exhibited higher levels of antisemitic sentiments compared to older age groups. The ADL attributes this trend partly to the influence of social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, which can amplify antisemitic content.

Views on Israel and the Israel-Hamas Conflict

A Pew Research Center survey from April 2024 revealed that only 24% of Americans under 30 have a favorable view of the Israeli government, a significant decline from previous years. In contrast, 60% of this age group view the Palestinian people positively. Additionally, 46% of adults under 30 consider Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7 attack as unacceptable, with 32% deeming it completely unacceptable.

Further, a Gallup poll from February 2025 indicated that 56% of Americans aged 18–34 hold an unfavorable view of Israel, compared to 41% of the general population. This marks a significant increase in unfavorable opinions among younger adults.

Support for Hamas Among Young Americans

A Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll conducted in March 2025 found that among Americans aged 18–24 who expressed an opinion on the Israel-Hamas conflict, 48% supported Hamas, while 52% supported Israel. This represents a substantial shift from the previous year, where 72% of the same age group supported Israel.

We thought merit would protect us. That our decency, our moral record, our historical trauma would shield us from defamation. But we misjudged the power of narrative. We were complacent and allowed ourselves to be divided—by politics, by ideology, by fear and by ignorance.

If we are to survive this century not just physically but spiritually and intellectually, we must reclaim the moral clarity of our story—together. This isn’t about right or left, religious or secular, hawk or dove. It’s about truth. And it’s about survival.

We must build—not just institutions, but a movement: unapologetically Jewish, proudly Zionist, morally grounded, and strategically smart. One that speaks in the language of this generation while carrying the wisdom of the past.

The way out is not submission to either political extreme. It is building a durable, principled Jewish center—one that rejects fear-based politics and reclaims moral clarity.

That means:

• Condemning antisemitism—whether it comes from MAGA rallies or DEI offices;

• Defending Israel’s existence unequivocally;

• Refusing coalitions that demand Jews compromise their identity for inclusion And embracing coalition that defend our right to Jewish Sovereignty regardless of political affiliation;

• And speaking out when others want us to stay quiet.

We must recognize that we do not stand alone in this fight—and we cannot afford to. Across the political and religious spectrum, there are courageous voices willing to speak out against antisemitism and defend the Jewish people, often at great personal cost. Regardless of which side of the political aisle you lean, we need to stand shoulder to shoulder in moral clarity with anyone willing to act with vigor against our enemies. From Muslim reformers who challenge antisemitism within their own communities, to secular human rights advocates who refuse to erase Jewish history, to political leaders willing to risk backlash for telling the truth—we must welcome all who are willing to stand with us. If we are to win the battle for truth, we must build alliances grounded in shared values, not identical identities.

Unity does not require uniformity—it requires courage, gratitude, and a clear understanding of who our real enemies are.

The Reality We Can No Longer Rationalize: The Truth about Radical Islam

Through millennia, the Jewish people have survived exile, pogroms and genocide. Sadly, we are at that moment again. Never again must mean never again!

If you’ve read this far, you likely feel it too: the weight of this moment. The heartbreak. The urgency. The fear that we may be too fractured to respond. The fear that our enemies know it.

How do you make peace with an enemy that doesn’t want peace?

You start by acknowledging an irrefutable historical reality. This has never been about a two-state solution. It’s always been about the existence of a Jewish state.

Haviv Rettig Gur has offered a profound analysis of Iran’s animosity toward Israel. He is a credible source of truth in understanding the complexities of the Middle East. He does a credible job of explaining the theological underpinnings of Iran’s hostility. He argues that Iran’s regime perceives the existence of a sovereign Jewish state as a direct affront to the Islamic concept of divine supremacy. In this view, the Jewish people’s return to their ancestral homeland and the Arab defeat at the hands of the jews in ‘48 and their subsequent establishment of a thriving nation, challenges the narrative that Jews are meant to live in subjugation under Islamic rule. This theological perspective fuels Iran’s ideological commitment to opposing Israel’s existence. This underpins the genocidal doctrines underlying our enemies and why it’s self-evident that Hamas doesn’t want peace. That the Palestinian Authority doesn’t want peace. That Hezbollah doesn’t want peace. That the Houthis don’t want peace. Radical Islam is not seeking peace with Israel. They are not seeking a Palestinian state. They are seeking the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the jewish people in their quest for Islam to rule the world. We cannot educate that out of them. We cannot bribe it out of them with economic incentives.

That’s not bigotry or “islamaphobia”, it’s history and it’s an acknowledgement of the nature of radical Islam. I want to be clear in distinguishing “Islamism” from mainstream peaceful people of Muslim faith. I stand in solidarity with Muslims who are themselves targets of jihadist ideology. Brigitte Gabriel is a staunch ally in this fight. Here she is on a panel discussing Benghazi.

Yes, it’s an ugly truth. Yes, it’s hard. But the history of the Arab/Israeli conflict has demonstrated rather unequivocally that our enemies do not want peace.

We must speak with a unified voice that Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and their allies aren’t fighting over land. It’s a religious, Islamist, Jihadist war to annihilate the Jews, destroy Israel and establish an Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East and eventually across the world. Consider the history of the State of Israel and the “peace process” that we’ve endured:

• In 1947, the UN proposed a two-state solution—Jews accepted it, the Arab world rejected it and launched a full-scale invasion the moment Israel declared independence in an effort to annihilate the Jewish people.

• Golda Meir famously captured the futility of appeasing Arab rejectionism with this quote about Israel’s pre-1967 borders:

Why do people, good people, some Israeli’s was well, tell us if you had only gone back to the 1967 borders after the war. Then I always ask a foolish question, but I haven’t heard one single wise answer. If the ‘67 borders were so holy, why was there a war in ‘67? All these territories were in the hands of Arab countries. If Hussein hadn’t gone to war in '67, when he shouldn’t have, when Eshkol asked him not to go to war, the West Bank would have been in his hands. If Assad hadn’t gone to war, the Golan Heights would have been Syrian. If Nasser (Egypt) hadn’t gone to war in ‘67, the Sinai Desert and the Gaza Strip were in his hands.

• This statement exposed the core hypocrisy of Arab rhetoric after the Six-Day War. The call to return to the 1967 borders was framed as a demand for justice—but Meir pointed out that Arab states tried to destroy Israel even when it had no “occupied territories.” In other words, their grievance wasn’t about borders—it was about Israel’s existence. This quote underscores the enduring truth: when your enemy attacks you before you have any so-called provocation, the issue isn’t what you’re doing—it’s who you are.

• After the 1967 war, Israel offered land for peace; the Arab League responded with the infamous “Three No’s”: no peace, no recognition, no negotiations—followed by years of border raids and terrorism.

• In 1993, the Oslo Accords created mutual recognition, but were followed not by peace but by the First Intifada, a wave of suicide bombings, bus attacks, and open incitement from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Arafat publicly shook hands with Rabin but privately described the deal as a temporary tactical maneuver—and terrorism increased.

• In 2000, Israel offered a Palestinian state with 95% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and a capital in East Jerusalem—Arafat walked away without a counteroffer, and within weeks, the Second Intifada erupted, claiming thousands of lives in a brutal campaign of suicide bombings and shootings.

• In 2005, under the vision of Shimon Peres, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza—dismantling every settlement, synagogue, and military post and left Gazan’s with civilian infrastructure and businesses to give Palestinians a chance at self-governance. Instead, the Gazan’s elected Hamas who then violently seized control, murdered Fatah rivals, and transformed Gaza into a terror camp. The lie of disengagement has been utterly destroyed. It did not bring peace. It brought death, terror tunnels, missiles, and massacre. We paid for it with blood.

• In 2008, Prime Minister Olmert offered a state with land swaps and shared control of Jerusalem—Abbas walked away.

• In 2020, the Trump peace plan was rejected without discussion, with Palestinian leaders declaring it “dead on arrival” and refusing even to negotiate.

Each time, Israel said yes or tried to negotiate by offering land for peace and (another) Palestinian State; Palestinian leaders said no—and followed with violence. This isn’t conjecture. You can’t make peace with those who reject coexistence and respond to compromise with terror.

Shimon Peres, Israel’s former Prime Minister, once said:

You don’t make peace with your friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.

This is a lesson that rings true in theory—and one we hoped would hold in practice. But what we miscalculated, where we were naive and what became clear 18 years after Israel withdrew from Gaza, is that we must accept an uncomfortable truth: we can’t make peace with an enemy that doesn’t want peace.

Some have argued that the Western left—particularly in the U.S. and Europe—has long embraced a strategy of “peace at all costs” when it comes to Israel, often prioritizing moral signaling over strategic clarity. As Susie Linfield documents in The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hanna Arendt to Noam Chomsky, this shift has led many intellectuals and activists to abandon support for Israel’s right to defend itself, in favor of ideological purity that often aligns with anti-Zionist rhetoric.

The “peace at all costs” approach has repeatedly failed—not because peace is unworthy, but because it has been pursued without regard to whether both sides truly want it.

I recently read an article entitled: “The Real Nakba Was Jewish Naiveté. The fantasy of an Israeli-Palestinian peace process is a comforting lie we told ourselves. We believed in a future they never wanted.”

While it’s its intellectually stimulating to challenge the idea that the failure of historical peace efforts somehow vindicates the approach of the political right, it raises a question: If peace is possible with Arab Israelis— why not with Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank?

It’s a powerful point that points us toward the real issue: the problem isn’t ethnicity or even religion- but like in Nazi Germany - it’s ideology and governance.

Arab citizens of Israel live within a civic structure that allows for participation, opportunity, and coexistence. But their story starts long before modern integration efforts—it begins in 1948, when many Arabs chose to stay in the land that became Israel, even as Arab leaders urged them to flee, promising they would return once the invading armies had “cleansed” the land. Those who stayed made a different choice—one rooted not in ideology, but in a willingness to live alongside Jews. Their children and grandchildren have not been taught for 80 years to glorify martyrdom. They are not told from birth that Jews are demons and that stabbing a grandmother is the path to eternal honor. Tragically, Palestinians in Gaza and Judea & Samaria (“the West Bank”) are raised on the exact opposite. Not because of who they are, but because of who leads them, educates them, and funds their curriculum. That’s not a people being prepared for peace—it’s a people being weaponized.

What we’ve seen from Israel over the last eight decades (including under Netanyahu) hasn’t been true resolve — it’s been hesitation, calibration, and endless short-term management of a long-term problem. And it has a cost—both in Israeli blood and in our moral clarity.

We must look to history when executing a strategy to defeat extreme ideology. Examine how the West defeated Nazism and imperial Japan during WWII. It wasn’t with deterrence or temporary ceasefires. It was with total military defeat, followed by ideological dismantling, civic reconstruction, and cultural reform. Those societies weren’t just stopped—they were transformed but only after a brutal world war that cost more than 80 million lives including more than 50 million civilians. To be clear, I am not equating the current moment with the Holocaust, but I am pointing to parallels in propaganda, appeasement, and moral blindness that history teaches us to heed.

We haven’t done that in Gaza or Judea & Samaria (the “West Bank”). We haven’t even come close. We keep fighting the fire without draining the fuel. Had Europe acted faster Hitler could have been defeated long before the tipping point that allowed Hitler to cause the deaths of nearly 80 million people. We are at the precipice of another world war. We must find the resolve to act before this regional war consumes the world.

The Path Forward.

Which brings us to the heart of the issue: what do we do now? What’s the path forward? I think this is where we as a people need to stop yelling past each other and ask a more basic question: what does it mean to win? If “winning” just means surviving the next war, then maybe our current strategy is fine. But if winning means building a future where our children aren’t living on the edge of annihilation, then we need a very different playbook.

Here are my thoughts:

1. Military clarity. Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRGC—they must be dismantled completely. Not contained. Not deterred. Defeated. Victory means never allowing a Jihadi genocidal regime to rise again in Gaza. As Jews we must offer a vision for after the war, but we must also ensure we survive to reach it.

2. Moral clarity. One of the most pernicious effects of the mythology that zionism is colonialism is to dehumanize Israelis and Jews, who are reduced to “colonialists” against whom Hamas’ slaughter is legitimized as “resistance”. It has created an intellectual and social context in which it has become shockingly widespread for left intellectuals, activists and movements to not only express their belief that Israel should not exist but to express unrestrained admiration for the actions of Hamas. This must end. We must stop apologizing for surviving. We must confront the lie that we are occupiers and explain—without hesitation—why Zionism is liberation, not colonialism but the most successful de-colonialization in history. And we must stop conflating causation with correlation. Yes, it’s true, the “Palestinian” people are suffering but it is a self inflicted wound not caused by Israel but by their leaders who have consistently rejected peace.

3. Institutional clarity. We must support any efforts, including by the Trump Administration, to (a) Defund UNRWAand dismantle their schools that teach hate; (b) Sanction the funders of terror; (c) Discredit and defund the NGOsthat support terrorists in the name of social justice; (d) we must dismantle the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States and add them to the terror watch list; and (e) we must dismantle and defund university departments that serve as ideological incubators for Islamism.

4. Educational clarity. Reform Jewish education to tell the truth about Jewish indigeneity, Zionism, and our moral cause. Prepare our children not to plead for belonging, but to lead with vision.

5. Strategic clarity. Just as Churchill saw what Chamberlain wouldn’t, we must act before the next October 7. Because waiting only empowers the enemy—and weakens us.

The "western world" must wake up to the fact that we've allowed islamism to grow to a dangerous tipping point. They are a far larger group of people than the combined German/Nazis and Japanese Imperialists and they have already infiltrated western society and fight with unconventional methods.

We need to find the strength to fight—unrestrained, unapologetic, untied. For too long, our warriors have fought with one arm behind their back—chained by global opinion, moral confusion, and internal betrayal. That must end. There is no room left for restraint when the cost is Israeli lives.

And we need to find our imagination—not to fantasize about peace with terrorists, but to prepare for the day after victory. To build a civic structure where our children no longer inherit this war. To reconstruct where we have had to destroy. And to teach the world again that Jewish power is not just about might—but about meaning.

The left and the right must stop fighting each other and start fighting the real enemy—together.

We’re stuck in an American-style culture war while people are literally fighting for their lives. We need to reject the false binary that strength belongs to the Right and compassion to the Left. Zionism demands both. It demands that we protect ourselves and know what we’re protecting. That we fight Radical Islam with everything we’ve got—not just with weapons, but with a clear, unapologetic moral voice. That we stop playing defense in the court of global opinion. That we stop apologizing for our survival.

And yes, we need to rebuild. Not just Gaza, if and when that’s even possible—but ourselves. Our education systems. Our sense of purpose. Our connection to each other across oceans and ideologies.

Too many Jews today are confused, ashamed, or disengaged. We need to speak to them—not with guilt, but with clarity, courage, and invitation.

So no, I don’t think this is just about venting frustration or blaming others. I think it’s about naming what hasn’t worked and daring to imagine something stronger, deeper, and more unified.

Let us be clear-eyed about what we face—and unwavering in what we fight for.

Let us be Jews before we are partisans.

Let us be builders as well as defenders.

Let us tell our children that we rose to meet this moment—not because we agreed on everything, but because we refused to let anything come between us.

That is how we win.

Together.

The history of the Jewish people is complex, layered, and often painful. But our connection to our ancestral homeland is unambiguous. Israel is our ancestral homeland and the duration of occupation by conquering armies does not legitimize their presence as “indigenous” peoples. I’m not disputing that the history is complicated, it is, but complexity does not (and should not) create moral ambiguity. Nuance does not erase truth. And correlation is not causation.

The suffering of Palestinians is real, but it is not the inevitable result of Jewish self-determination, it is the direct consequence of 100 years of Arab leadership and islamist ideologies that have chosen the destruction of the State of Israel over peace. And sadly, it’s had a profound and devastating effect on the psyche of Israeli Citizens. Founded as a socialist dream, Israeli politics and society have, over time, moved further right. As a result of Israeli’s learned experiences with Palestinian rejections of overtures of peace resulting in decades of aggressions, as of 2022, 62 percent of the population identifying as on the political right. October 7th has only reinforced that trend and as a result, the prospects of peace have dimmed.

This is not a symmetrical conflict. It is a struggle between the Jewish people both in Israel and in the diaspora and those who seek to erase us. A fight not just against the Jewish state, but against Jewish identity, continuity, and survival.

Understanding our history makes our claim stronger, not weaker. And it deepens our obligation not just to defend Israel, but to defend ourselves. Acknowledging the full story doesn’t weaken our case it strengthens our obligation to tell it.

I spend too many waking hours struggle to understand why we are once again being vilified. But at this point, that is besides the point. It’s real, it’s persistent and it’s crawled out the shadows and exploded on the world stage since Hamas crossed the boarder in a genocidal rampage through southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

The rising tide of anti-Zionist propaganda is leaving Jews isolated, divided, and confused.

The “Pro-Palestine” Propaganda War

This is not new. We’ve faced persecution, expulsion and existential threats for well over two thousand years.

In “On Blood Libels” Anthony Julius discusses blood libels in great detail. He observes that:

The blood libel is not just an attack on Jews, it is an attack on Judaism. It does not just assert, “This is what Jews do.” It asserts, “This is what Judaism demands.”

The latest virulent strain of antisemitism, disguises itself as human rights activism and “social justice" and it has been amplified to unprecedented levels as a result of the “greatest propaganda machine in history”. This is how criticism of Israel has become the new lingua franca (bridge language) of antisemitism. And it’s being parroted by biased “journalism” in mainstream media outlets world wide from the BBC to CNN, the AP and MSNBC. Thanks to billions of dollars from Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood it has infected our children in classrooms from elementary schools to our nation’s most “elite” universities. It has spilled into our streets at hate filled protests around the world. Synagogues are being desecrated and burned, visibly jewish people are being assaulted and killed in the streets, Jewish children are being physically assaulted on the way to jewish schools and on college campuses, Jewish cemeteries and holocaust museums are being desecrated and the violence is escalating in the name of "Palestine”, in the past few weeks, two Israeli embassy staffers were assassinated outside a jewish event and a holocaust survivor was burned to death at a peaceful protest in Boulder and the perpetrators of these hate crimes are being celebrated.

As Natan Sharansky said so well in helping to define the 3Ds of modern anti-semitism:

Whereas classical anti-Semitism is aimed at the Jewish people or the Jewish religion, “new anti-Semitism” is aimed at the Jewish state. Since this anti-Semitism can hide behind the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel, it is more difficult to expose. Making the task even harder is that this hatred is advanced in the name of values most of us would consider unimpeachable, such as human rights.

He warned us 20 years ago about the constant and growing stream of anti-Semitic propaganda from the Arab and Muslim world which he published in a 150-page report on “Anti- Semitism in the Contemporary Middle East.”

It’s not just a war for Israel’s legitimacy, it’s an antisemitic war that threatens the ability for jews - regardless of political leaning - to live in peace and security in America and around the world. This is what “globalize the intifada” means.

While a lot of antisemitic propaganda we see is often obviously biased, unfortunately, much of it is far more nefarious and has been used by our enemies to “indoctrinate” generation after generation. This information presents as rational, reasonable commentary that vilifies Israel. It has been “sane washed” into seemingly fact-based dispassionate “scholarly” journals chronicling our crimes against the Palestinian people. These writings are dangerous. With the advent of ChatGPT, you can unpack the misinformation and uncover these biased and lopsided narratives that have captivated tens if not hundreds of millions of people. Take for example the Carnegie Institute’s publication, written after the October 7th attacks, entitled: “The Many Civil and Human Rights Challenges Facing Israel’s Palestinian Citizens” written by an author with an agenda, Layla Gantus. Gantus’s article is a masterclass in selective omission and ideological framing. While it references real social and economic challenges faced by Arab-Israelis, which are real, it manipulates the context to paint Israel as an apartheid-like oppressor, without acknowledging the country’s complex balancing act between civil rights and national security—especially with an enemy that has refused a nation-state and peace with Israel every single time it’s been offered over the last 100 years. The piece downplays or ignores the scale of the October 7 attacks, fails to consider legitimate Israeli concerns over incitement and terror support, and frames lawful security responses as persecution. It describes Israel’s efforts to define itself as a Jewish state—while granting full citizenship to minorities—as inherently discriminatory. Most tellingly, it never once holds Palestinian leadership or extremist actors accountable for perpetuating conflict. This is not scholarship; it is advocacy dressed in institutional language. And it’s precisely this type of masked bias that has made anti-Zionist propaganda so powerful and so difficult for well-meaning observers to detect—unless they know what to look for. Here is ChatGPT’s analysis of the bias presented in this article:

Layla Gantus’s article is not a neutral policy critique but an ideologically slanted opinion piece that exaggerates discrimination against Arab-Israelis while ignoring Israel’s legitimate security concerns. It omits critical context—such as Arab political representation, integration successes, and the role of incitement—while conflating societal racism with state policy. By presenting one-sided narratives under the veneer of scholarship, it advances an activist agenda that distorts rather than clarifies the truth.

Or this white paper by the Middle East Research and Information Project innocuously entitled: “Palestine and Israel—A Primer” by Joel Beinin and Lisa Hajjar. Despite its academic tone, this publication is deeply biased co-authored by a co-founder of Jewish Voice for Peace (which is neither jewish nor advocates for peace1). Here is ChatGPT’s analysis of the bias presented in this article:

Though presented as an educational overview, this “primer” is a heavily biased document that frames Zionism as a colonial project and erases Jewish historical ties to the land of Israel. It systematically omits key context—such as Arab rejectionism, Palestinian terrorism, and Israel’s repeated peace offers—while portraying Palestinians as purely passive victims. By structuring the conflict as a one-sided narrative of Israeli aggression and Palestinian innocence, it indoctrinates readers into a delegitimizing worldview that masquerades as academic neutrality.

We have to be diligent and suspect of everything we read. Please take the time to fact check and seek out the truth.

Another insidious tactic that antisemites use is they intentionally redefine terms used in international law to fit their narratives. Words have meaning, but not to the antisemite. Words like Zionism, Genocide, Apartheid, Colonialism even antisemitism itself have all been redefined to vilify Israel. Be wary of the shape shifting virus of antisemitism.

Words have Meaning.

Let’s now go deeper, focusing on precise, historically grounded definitions of each term—typically drawn from legal, academic, or institutional sources—and then compare them to the ways antisemites or anti-Zionists have redefined them specifically to vilify Israel. The goal is to expose the deliberate manipulation of language.

1. Zionism

Historical Definition (from Jewish and academic sources):

“Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, which holds that Jews, like all other peoples, have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, the Land of Israel.”

— World Zionist Organization, 1897; consistent with modern international norms of self-determination.

Redefined Anti-Israel Usage:

Zionism is redefined as a racist, settler-colonial, and exclusionary ideology, asserting that the Jewish return to Israel represents European imperialism and ethnic supremacy rather than indigenous return.

Strategic Purpose of Redefinition:

By calling Zionism racism or colonialism, anti-Zionists seek to invalidate Israel’s legitimacy entirely, rather than critique policies. This demonizes all Jews who support Israel, turning nationalism into a slur.

2. Antisemitism

Historical Definition (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA):

“A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Includes: denying Jewish self-determination, holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions.

Redefined Anti-Israel Usage:

Antisemitism is redefined narrowly as only violence or discrimination against Jews as individuals or religious adherents—excluding anti-Zionism, rejection of Jewish statehood, or even calls for Israel’s destruction.

Strategic Purpose of Redefinition:

By decoupling anti-Zionism from antisemitism, activists grant themselves permission to demonize Jewish identity expressed politically, while claiming to oppose bigotry. It creates a false moral distinction.

3. Genocide

Historical Definition (UN Convention on Genocide):

“Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as: killing members, causing serious harm, deliberately inflicting life conditions calculated to bring about destruction.”

Redefined Anti-Israel Usage:

Israel’s military operations—even when targeting terrorists and providing humanitarian warnings/aid—are labeled “genocide.” Civilian casualties in asymmetric warfare are treated as proof of intent to exterminate.

Strategic Purpose of Redefinition:

This redefinition falsely equates war with genocide, ignoring actual genocides (e.g., Rwanda, Yazidis, Holocaust). It allows Israel to be demonized as Nazi-like, stripping it of the moral right to self-defense.

4. Colonialism

Historical Definition (UN and academic):

“The practice of acquiring political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.”

— United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (1960)

Colonizers are: foreign powers with no indigenous ties, extracting resources from the colonized land.

Redefined Anti-Israel Usage:

Jews—who have maintained a 3,000-year connection to the Land of Israel—are labeled European settler-colonialists displacing “indigenous Palestinians,” ignoring Mizrahi Jews, historical sovereignty, and Arab conquests.

Strategic Purpose of Redefinition:

This inversion turns indigenous Jews into invaders and colonial aggressors, erasing Jewish history to fit a global Leftist anti-imperialist narrative, and justifying resistance by any means.

It’s also ironic considering the fact that it’s the Arabs that are the actual colonizers. The consequences of the history of Arab-Islamic colonialism are obvious: There are more than 1.8 billion Muslims. There are 22 Arabs states which comprise the Arab League, representing roughly 430,000,000 Arab citizens, and Arabic is one of the most common languages in the world. Today, in addition to the 22 Arab nations there are 57 Islamic countries. Over 1.8 billion people are Muslims, constituting around a quarter of the entire global population. Arabic was spread across the world through Arab colonialism in the same way that English was spread across the world by English colonialism. Contrasted with about 15 million Jews worldwide, 6 million Jews in Israel, and only a few million people who speak Hebrew, this means there are about 120 Muslims per one Jew. Clearly, the Arabs were some of the greatest colonialists in human history.

5. Apartheid

Historical Definition (International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, 1973):

“Inhumane acts… committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group over another and systematically oppressing them.”

Key Elements: Racial classification, legalized segregation, denial of voting rights, and systemic denial of services.

Redefined Anti-Israel Usage:

Israel is labeled an apartheid state because it treats citizens and non-citizens (e.g., Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza) differently, ignoring the fact that Arab citizens of Israel have voting rights, serve in parliament, and attend universities.

Strategic Purpose of Redefinition:

Redefining apartheid to mean any legal or military distinction, regardless of race or citizenship, allows activists to equate Israel with South Africa, a known pariah, to rally global condemnation and BDS.

These redefinitions are not innocent academic exercises—they are rhetorical weapons. They are designed to delegitimize, demonize, and ultimately destroy Israel not through tanks and bombs, but through words. When lies become normalized through repetition, even truth starts sounding radical.

It is incumbent on each and every one of us to combat the massive disinformation campaign being waged against us. We must tell our side of the story. Because if we don’t tell our story clearly, courageously, and consistently our enemies will rewrite it for us. And this isn’t hyperbole. Our enemies have waged a propaganda war for thousands of years and, sadly, we have to face the reality that they are winning. Our story is being erased and rewritten in real time. And what’s being erased isn’t just Israel’s “side” of the story, but our story. Our history. Our right to exist as a people.

What is also troubling is that Hamas’ murderous rampage has divided us and it has created a crisis of Jewish disunity. It’s causing moral confusion and, as a result, Zionism is being called into question.

What is Zionism?

Many of Zionism’s detractors look around at whatever the current Israeli government is doing and see their actions as a reflection of Zionism itself. They believe that to be a Zionists, you must align with the Netanyahu regime. Yet, I am a Zionist, and I abhor the current Israeli government. How can that be?

To answer that question, we must start by aligning on the definition of Zionism? As defined above:

“Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, which holds that Jews, like all other peoples, have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, the Land of Israel.”

Zionism is a four-thousand-year-old ideology that turned into a movement in the late 1800s. Zionism stands for the right of the Jewish people to exercise self-determination in their historic homeland, the land of Israel.

That’s it. Full stop. It’s the reason there’s a Jewish refuge in this world and the reason so many want it gone. Since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, it has repeatedly served as a refuge for Jewish communities facing existential threats, persecution, or displacement around the world.2

But, we must be clear that “Zionism” and current Israeli policy are not the same. The Zionist ideology might inform current Israeli policy – in much the same way the values written in American’s declaration of Independence informs American policy – but the ideology does not dictate the policy of the Israeli government.

My goal in publishing this is to help us work together to align and recapture our story.

WHAT THIS GUIDE IS

It’s a tool for countering the lies with truth, the slogans with context, and the moral relativism with historical clarity. It breaks down the most common accusations against Israel genocide, apartheid, colonialism and gives you the language to push back without apology.

WHO IT’S FOR

• Jews who feel alone, confused, or gaslit in today’s discourse

• Students confronting peer pressure and institutional hostility

• Parents, professionals, rabbis, and friends trying to explain why Israel matters and why we must defend it

• Anyone who still believes that our people’s story didn’t start in 1948 and doesn’t end in hashtags

HOW TO USE IT

Each section presents a falsehood (A “blood libel”) and walks you through how to counter it. Not just with facts, but with the confidence that comes from knowing our history and embracing our responsibility. I’ve included “Author’s Notes” throughout the chapters along with footnotes and commentary I’ve called “Beyond the Talking Points” with links for anyone that wants to dig deeper.

Please use it at the Shabbat table. In classrooms. On campus. On social media. In your own mind when doubt creeps in. Send it to your friends. Post it on social media. Please help it go viral. We need to help our Jewish and non-Jewish friends and families to defeat this pernicious propaganda.

Because the truth is complex but not unclear.

Because Jewish unity depends on a common narrative rooted in moral clarity.

Because we can’t continue to allow our enemies to invert morality and conflate causation with correlation.

And because no one is coming to tell our story for us.

We have to do it together.

A PROLOGUE

☮️Peace, Love & Hate

We must all recognize that antisemitism is unlike any other form of hatred throughout history. No matter where the Jews have been - Europe, the Middle East, North Africa - they’ve always faced hatred. Antisemitism has been around for thousands of years, but it really kicked into high gear with the rise of Christianity and Islam. Discrimination against Jews often turns real ugly, real fast. It can escalate into false accusations, mass expulsions, violent mobs, murders, and even genocide. Everything and its opposite is a reason for hating Jews:

• In communist countries, Jews were hated for being capitalists, but in capitalist nations, they were accused of being communists.

• When Jews lived in ghettos, they were called "clannish," but when they assimilated, they were accused of infiltrating and corrupting the dominant culture.

• Jews are “too white” to count as an oppressed minority, but not “white enough” to mollify white supremacists.

Basically, no matter what, someone somewhere comes up with a reason to hate Jews.

Antisemitism is old and many thoughtful people have tried to explain it. The most common reasons are: Jews are rich, powerful and influential given their numbers. Jews claim to be the Chosen People. Jews killed Jesus. Jews are outsiders and different from everyone else. Jews are an inferior race. Jews are easy scapegoats.

And while some of these reasons may describe a particular antisemite’s motivation, none of them really explain antisemitism, especially since antisemitism happens at times and in places where these reasons don’t make a whole lot of sense.

For example, Jews living in Russia’s Pale of Settlement were poor and weak, but they were still hated.

The Jews of 19th century Germany renounced their status as a “chosen people,” but they were still hated.

Even when the Jews assimilated and did their best to shed their Jewish identity - you guessed it - they were still hated.

So, no matter where you look in history, antisemitism is always there, and with the explanations always changing and evolving, it’s hard not to think they’re really just… excuses.

If you're a Washington Post subscriber this is an interesting piece entitled "Why do people hate jews and judaism"

Hate: Why do they Hate Us?

Why do you suppose, as a people, jews have been forever persecuted. It's a puzzling question that is worth exploring.

On November 2nd, 2023 the Stanford Classical Liberalism Initiative interviewed Alan Dershowitz. It's worth the time to listen. As always, when it comes to Alan Dershowitz, you can count on moral clarity when it comes to Antisemitism.

I want to highlight two answers he gave in discussing the "woke progress" movement. Both arguments are valid and both were novel arguments that I had not yet heard.

He starts by explaining why it's so hard to resolve this complex problem when addressing the "woke progressives". He says:

The new McCarthyism is more dangerous than the old McCarthyism. The old McCarthyism was clearly wrong it was going after the wrong people for the wrong things, but the new Mccarthyites, the new wokes, they favor women's rights, so do we, they favor gay rights, so do we, they favor transgender rights, so do we, they favor climate control, so do we, they favor reasonable gun control, they favor a decent Supreme Court, they're on our side, they just are taking it to a point where tolerance has disappeared, due process has disappeared, free speech has disappeared. Remember that the "hard left" never supported free speech, it was always free speech for me but not for thee, go back to the Frankfurt school and the people there, they never tolerated anything like that, and so now the intolerant hard left is taking over, but the reason they're so hard to defeat is because they're on the right side of so many issues whereas the hard right is not on the right side and so they are much easier targets

It's such a smart observation. It's why it's so insidious and so hard to combat.

In discussing the "woke" progressive movement and their "anti-colonialist" framing of Israel and why they hate us, said:

One of the causes that woke has, is that they are totally against meritocracy.“ Why does he say that? He continues. “Who have been one of the biggest beneficiaries of meritocracy of the world.... the jews. Jews were without privilege, without any opportunities. They made it in America on the basis of meritocracy. Israel became a scientific superpower and a military superpower. So Jews in Israel stand for meritocracy. Stand for the ability to rise up. And that's exactly what the woke people don't like. So Jews fit that paradigm in so many different ways, colonialist, meritocracy, rejection of identity politics. Afterall Israel is one of the most diverse countries in the world, it has a significant black population, a very significant brown population, the majority of Israelis are not European by background, they're from North African and Arab countries by background. So meritocracy, that's the bane of the woke progressive movement

So could it be that?

But "wokeism" and "anticolonialism" are recent phenomena and antisemitism has existed for Millenia. So there must be more?

Perhaps it's what the late, great, Rabbi Sacks said 13 years ago... Maybe it's just "sibling rivalry" between religious "brothers”

Peace: How do we prioritize peace with an enemy that doesn’t want peace?

Since this chapter is entitled “Shalom”, let’s end with some inspiring thoughts from an asperational leader and a man who sought Peace.

Shimon Perez's last book was an autobiography entitled "No Room for Small Dreams: Courage, Imagination, and the Making of Modern Israel." It’s a fantastic book. He finished writing it only weeks before his passing in 2016. May his memory be a blessing! I highly recommend reading it.

I think given everything going on in Israel and in the world today, this is a poignant reminder that peace must be the end game. We can disagree about the means to that end, but it must be the end!

As Shimon says many times throughout his book and again below, peace must come through strength! Am Yisrael Chai!

I want to introduce you to the book, by quoting the book's final chapter. No spoiler alert necessary.

In discussing the Oslo Accords, Shimon said:

“It is worth remembering that every subsequent Israeli government, even those that have not chosen peace as a priority, eventually adopted our framework, acknowledging that the only way to put an end to the vicious cycle of violence and terrorism is through peace. Through two states, not one. And yet there continues to be great skepticism about peace not only whether it's possible, but whether it's even desirable.

To the first question, I believe that peace is not only possible, but inevitable. The optimism I feel is a function not just of my identity but of history. History after all is a powerful antidote to a cynical view of the world. How many times has it surprised us. How many times has it led us to realities that far exceeded our dreams. Who would have dreamed after World War II, that just three years later, France, Germany, and Italy would join together in peaceful alliance. How many times did I hear experts telling us that lasting peace with Egypt and Jordan was simply impossible. How many times did the pessimists shake their head at the idea that among the Palestinians there would ever rise a broad constituency against terror. We have seen the impossible made real again and again.

There was a time when the Arab League subscribed to the Khartoum formula known as the “three Nos”. Never make peace with Israel. Never recognize Israel. Never negotiate with Israel. Most of the people I worked with most of my life, would never have imagined a time when the Arab League would publish an initiative that refutes them all. [Note: Google the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative].

Never would they have believed that Arab leaders would speak out in favor of peace and against terror not just abroad but at home or that Palestinians would recognize Israel within its 1967 borders. And yet peace stubbornly, doggedly finds a way.

Without consideration of the doubts of the experts, I believe in the inevitability of peace because I understand the necessity of peace. Necessity is perhaps the most powerful concept of all it is what drove the Pioneers to settle the land. It is what pushed them to think creatively to turn salted dirt into fertile ground and transform a fallow desert into a community that could bear fruit. It was necessity that sent Ben Gurion on a mission to build the IDF to protect us at a time of our greatest vulnerability from the certainty of impending war. It was necessity that called upon Israeli leadership to build the impossible in Dimona [Negev Nuclear Research Center] and to risk everything in Entebbe. And likewise, it will be the necessity of peace that brings it finally and fully to fruition. The cost of hostility is simply too high. I believe with all my being in the virtue of Zionism and in the historic decision made by Ben Gurion to accept the UN resolution for a partitioned Palestine. Even then Ben Gurion understood that in order to retain the Jewish character of our state, we had to uphold our values and that our values are fundamentally democratic. Jews are taught that we are all born in the image of God. To believe this fundamental tenet, a Jewish state must embrace democracy which demands full equality between the Jews and non-Jews. Democracy after all is not only the right of every citizen to be equal, but also the equal right of every citizen to be different.

The future of the Zionist project depends on our embrace of the two-state solution. The danger if Israel abandons this goal is that the Palestinians will eventually accept a one-state solution. Because of demographics, this will leave us with a choice stay Jewish or stay democratic. But it really isn't a choice at all. To lose our Jewish majority is to lose our Jewish character. To give up on democracy, is to abandon our Jewish values. We must hold on to our values. We didn't give up our values even when we were facing furnaces and gas chambers. We lived as Jews and died as Jews and rose again as a free Jewish people. We didn't survive merely to be a passing shadow in history but as a new genesis a nation intent on Tikkun Olam. On making the world a right.

In 1996, I established the Peres Center for peace and innovation because of my belief in people and their ability to bring positive change and in recognition that peace cannot solely be made by governments, it must be made between people, between Jews and Arabs. I have worked over the past 20 years to build those bonds, through peace education business partnerships agriculture and health care. But a permanent solution will require the reasoned wisdom of governments. Ours and our neighbors. It will require leaders who understand that Israel is strong enough to make peace and that making peace from a position of strength is imperative.

To wait is to guarantee that the agreement will be worse than any we have ever considered. Israel will be negotiating, for the very first time, from a position of weakness. In a reality where immediate peace is the only way to save Zionism, the Palestinian negotiators will hold all the cards. The question then, is not whether we will achieve peace, but when and at what cost knowing that the longer we wait the higher it grows. This is why I see grave danger in giving in to skepticism at a time when we should be redoubling our efforts in history. There is no reverse gear. As I know far too well, achieving peace is not easy but there is no alternative but to return to the table. The yesterday between us and the Palestinians is full of sadness. I believe that the Israel and Palestine of tomorrow can offer our children a new ray of hope. The advancement of peace will complete the march of Israel toward the fulfillment of its founding vision. An exemplary and thriving country living in peace and security in its homeland and among its neighbors. It has been more than 20 years since I stood on a stage in Oslo and alongside Rabin and Arafat accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. Much has changed since then, but my core message remains unaltered: Countries can no longer afford to divide the world into friend and foe. Our foes are now universal poverty and famine, radicalization and terror, these know no borders and threaten all nations and so we must act swiftly to build the bonds of peace to tear down walls built with bitterness and animosity so that we can together confront the challenges and seize the opportunities of a new era. Optimism and naivete are not one and the same. That I am optimistic does not mean I expect a peace of love. I expect simply a peace of necessity. I do not envision a perfect peace, but I believe we can find a peace that allows us to live side-by-side without the threat of violence.

In the years to come, we must remember that peace negotiations will never begin with a happy end. They will begin instead from an obscure complicated situation, colored with memories of pain and violence and they will take time.

So let us rededicate ourselves to that effort and save the happy end for the ending. I believe with all my heart in the vision of the prophets, the vision of peace for the country. I love so much and what I know to be true is that a majority of people on both sides of the divide are eager for peace. Especially the young generation. They are the ones who transform the impossible into the unlikely. The ones whose creativity and passion will turn the unlikely into reality. Whether the leaders catch up to the young or the young become the leaders, we are inevitably walking in the same direction. The road will be littered with obstacles, but it remains the only one worth traveling."

I shared my observations in a chapter I wrote in Fairness Matters entitled: “Trump and the Battle for Jewish Unity. How Fear of Authoritarianism on the Left, and Fear of Progressivism on the Right Are Fracturing Jewish Unity in the US when we need it most”

October the 7th changed me. Until I read this article, I wasn't fully in touch with the actual source of my true sadness... but this summed it up... my idealism has been shattered! I want to conclude by sharing this article published by the Free Press entitled “Once, I Was a Peace Advocate. Now, I Have No Idealism Left” and this excerpt:

.... over the years, I noticed a disturbing trend:

With all the atrocities in the world, why did my social justice warrior friends hate Israel so disproportionately?

Why did it feel like intersectionality excluded Jews?

Why did the left—who supposedly stood up for human rights—put child-murdering Hamas terrorists on a pedestal?

At first, I thought it must be miseducation.

'Ah, they think Palestinians are the indigenous people. I’ll show that Jewish history, and the archaeology to prove it, dates back millennia.'

'Ah, they think we’re white colonizers. I’ll show how many Jews are people of color, including those who are Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ethiopian.'

'Ah, they’ll get it once I show them that there are fifty Muslim countries, and only one Jewish state.'

I agreed that the settlements were unlawful, that Gaza was a humanitarian crisis, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyuahu was a dictator. I assumed—if I cared enough, if I mourned for the Palestinian dead, if I put nuance above all else—our neighbors and their allies would give us the same decency.

How wrong I was. This past week, as over 1,300 Jews were slaughtered, the most murderous attack on Jews since the Holocaust, I saw the true face of Palestinians and their allies. All around the world, they celebrate. They gloat. They mock our tears. They do not protest against Hamas. They embrace pure evil.

And so, to the terrorists I now say:

When you killed my family, I forgave you. When you killed my people, I forgave you. But when you killed my idealism, I had no forgiveness left."

Am Yisrael Chai!

Footnotes:

2

Since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, it has repeatedly served as a refuge for Jewish communities facing existential threats, persecution, or displacement around the world. Below is a list of key mass immigrations (known as Aliyot) where entire Jewish populations or large segments fled to Israel for safety:

Holocaust Survivors (Late 1940s – Early 1950s)

• From: Displaced persons camps across Europe, including Poland, Germany, Romania, Hungary, and Austria.

• Cause: Surviving the Holocaust with no homes or communities to return to; widespread post-war antisemitism.

• Operation: Mass immigration under Israel’s Law of Return and “Aliyah Bet” (illegal immigration under British Mandate before 1948).

Middle Eastern and North African Jews (1948–1970s)

• From: Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran.

• Cause: Retaliatory violence, expulsion, or persecution following Israel’s establishment and rising Arab nationalism.

• Operations:

  • Operation Magic Carpet (1949–1950): ~49,000 Yemenite Jews airlifted.

  • Operation Ezra and Nehemiah (1950–1951): ~120,000 Iraqi Jews.

  • Ongoing emigration from Morocco, Egypt, and Libya throughout the 1950s–60s.

• Total: Over 850,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim lands came to Israel during this period.

Soviet Jewry (1970s–1990s)

• From: USSR (Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania, etc.)

• Cause: State-sponsored antisemitism, religious oppression, and refusal to allow emigration (“refuseniks”).

• Peak Period: After the fall of the Soviet Union (~1989–1991), over 1 million Soviet Jews emigrated to Israel.

Ethiopian Jews (1980s–1990s, 2000s–2020s)

• From: Ethiopia (Beta Israel community).

• Cause: Famine, civil war, and religious persecution.

• Operations:

  • Operation Moses (1984): ~8,000 Jews airlifted.

  • Operation Solomon (1991): ~14,500 Jews evacuated in 36 hours.

  • Additional groups arrived in subsequent waves, including Operation Dove’s Wings (2013).

• Total: Over 100,000 Ethiopian Jews have immigrated to Israel.

Argentinian Jews (Early 2000s)

• From: Argentina.

• Cause: Economic collapse, political instability, and rising antisemitism during the 2001 financial crisis.

• Result: Several thousand Jews made aliyah, though this was smaller than other waves.

French Jews (2010s–Present)

• From: France.

• Cause: Rising antisemitism, including the 2012 Toulouse school shooting and the 2015 Hypercacher attack in Paris.

• Peak Year: In 2015, over 7,800 French Jews made aliyah—the largest from any Western country in a single year.

• Trend: Over 40,000 French Jews have moved to Israel since 2000.

Ukrainian and Russian Jews (2022–Present)

• From: Ukraine and Russia.

• Cause: Russian invasion of Ukraine; antisemitism and political instability in both countries.

• Estimates: As of 2024, over 75,000 Jews from Ukraine and Russia have made aliyah since the war began.

Jewish Refugees from Turkey, Venezuela, and South Africa (Ongoing)

• From: Various smaller but significant emigrations due to economic collapse (Venezuela), political instability (Turkey), and rising violence/antisemitism (South Africa).

• Trend: A few thousand from each country over the past two decades.

---

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Pro-Zionist:

How do you define genocide?

(Pause here to allow them to attempt a distorted or an emotional definition)

Pro-Zionist:

While deaths are a tragic consequence of the war that Hamas started on October 7th, the magnitude of casualties does not define “Genocide.” According to the UN Genocide Convention, genocide is

acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

The key word in that definition is “intent”.

Can you point to any Israeli statement or policy that expresses an intent to eradicate the Palestinian people as a group?

Anti-Zionist:

Well, look at the number of casualties and the disproportionate response by the Israeli government. That proves genocide.

Pro-Zionist:

So you believe casualties in a war, especially a war triggered by a terror attack involving mass murder and sexual violence against civilians, are proof of genocide — even when the attacking party, Hamas, hides behind civilians, uses hospitals as shields, and has openly called for the destruction of Israel?

Let’s look at the facts:

• Israel has repeatedly warned civilians to evacuate combat zones via leaflets, phone calls, and text messages.

• Israel provides humanitarian aid, allows fuel and medicine into Gaza, and even treats Palestinians in Israeli hospitals.

• The Palestinian population has grown fivefold since 1948. Since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, the population has continued to rise – in fact the population of Gaza has risen since October 7th.

• Genocides — like those in Rwanda, the Holocaust, or Darfur — involve mass graves, systematic extermination, and an explicit ideology of racial destruction. None of that is true in this case.

If Israel wanted to commit genocide, do you really think Gaza would still have millions of people living there after multiple wars? Would the population of Gaza have grown since the start of the war? And how can you explain the fact that the Arab-Israeli population has grown from 150,000 in 1948 to over 2 million today which comprise over 21% of the population?

This isn’t genocide. It’s a defensive war against a genocidal terrorist regime — Hamas — that openly states it wants to annihilate Jews.

And now we know that Hamas itself has admitted to inflating casualty numbers to manipulate world opinion.

Let’s also not forget: Hamas could end this war tomorrow.

They could release the hostages. They could disarm and surrender.

They choose not to. Why? Because Hamas’s goal isn’t peace — it’s martyrdom, optics, and the total destruction of Israel.

Genocide means mass extermination with intent.

What’s happening here is a defensive war against a genocidal terrorist regime that uses its own people as human shields while targeting Israeli civilians.

Anti-Zionist rhetoric depends on these kinds of simplistic cause-effect assumptions, often stripped of any historical depth or strategic nuance. They don’t analyze the causal roots of Palestinian corruption, Arab rejectionism, or jihadist theology — because doing so would make Israel’s actions look like what they are: reactive, not aggressive.

Anti-Zionists rely upon the conflation of causation and correlation. Correlation: Palestinians die during conflicts. False Causation: Israel wants to kill civilians. Reality: Civilians die because Hamas embeds itself in civilian areas, and wars happen because of terrorism — not because Israel seeks their destruction. So Hamas is the CAUSE of the civilian casualties.

BEYOND THE TALKING POINTS:

After each Q&A, I intend to try to provide additional context and background on each subject to help inform the reader.

Genocide.

The genocide convention contains nineteen articles. Of these, the first nine are of a substantive character, and the remaining ten are procedural in nature. The Preamble is of a general and historical nature.

Article I carries into the Convention the concept, unanimously affirmed by the General Assembly in its 1946 resolution, that genocide is a crime under international law. In this article the Parties undertake to prevent and to punish the crime.

Article II specifies that any of the following five acts, if accompanied by the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, constitutes the crime of genocide:

1. Killing members of the group;

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

As published by James E Webb, the then Secretary of State of the United States on June 9, 1949 in discussing the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,¹ adopted unanimously by the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris on December 9, 1948, with the recommendation that it be submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent to ratification. The United States officially signed the Convention on December 11, 1948. In his submission, Webb wrote:

This article, then, requires that there should be a specific intent to destroy a racial, religious, national or ethnical group as such in whole or in part. With respect to this article the United States representative on the Legal Committee said:

I am not aware that anyone contends that the crime of genocide and the crime of homocide are one and the same thing. If an individual is murdered by another individual, or indeed by a government official of a State, a crime of homicide has been committed and a civilized community will punish it as such. Such an act of homocide would not in itself be an international crime. To repeat the opening language of the Resolution of the General Assembly of December 1946, ‘genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups’. This remains the principle on which we are proceeding.

While the US signed the treaty in 1949, due to political resistance in the Senate—especially concerns about national sovereignty and possible domestic implications—the U.S. delayed ratification for decades. One of the Convention's strongest advocates, Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin, delivered over 3,000 speeches advocating the Convention in Congress from 1968–1986. The U.S. Senate finally ratified the Genocide Convention on February 19, 1986 voting 83–11 to grant advice and consent, with a series of eight provisos (2 reservations, 3 understandings, and 1 declaration) intended to limit its domestic legal consequences.

It’s important to understand those provisos as they highlight the importance of the strictness of the definition. Here are the reservations and understandings, the U.S. Senate attached to its advice and consent for ratifying the Genocide Convention (Treaty Doc. 81–15) on February 19, 1986 :

Reservations

1. Article IX – ICJ jurisdiction by specific consent

   That with reference to Article IX of the Convention, before any dispute to which the United States is a party may be submitted to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice under this article, the specific consent of the United States is required in each case.

2. U.S. Constitutional limits

   That nothing in the Convention requires or authorizes legislation or other action by the United States of America prohibited by the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the United States.

Understandings

1. Specific intent clarification (Article II)

   That the term ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such’ appearing in Article II means the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such by the acts specified in Article II.

2. Armed conflict & intent

   That acts in the course of armed conflicts committed without the specific intent required by Article II are not sufficient to constitute genocide as defined by this Convention. [Emphasis added]

3. International penal tribunal participation (Article VI)

   That with regard to the reference to an international penal tribunal in Article VI of the Convention, the United States declares that it reserves the right to effect its participation in any such tribunal only by a treaty entered into specifically for that purpose with the advice and consent of the Senate.

Taken together, these provisions ensured that while the Senate granted consent, the U.S. maintained control over Court jurisdiction, safeguarded constitutional boundaries, and clarified key legal interpretations (e.g., intent and tribunal participation).

Take note of the second “Understanding”. It reinforces the UN Convention meanwhile, our enemies continue to attempt to redefine the word “Genocide” falsely equating deaths in a war with genocide all the while ignoring actual genocides (e.g., Rwanda, Yazidis, Holocaust). This strategy allows Israel to be demonized as Nazi-like, stripping it of the moral right to self-defense. They conflate Israel’s military operations—even when targeting terrorists and providing humanitarian warnings/aid— with “genocide.” They falsely use civilian casualties in asymmetric warfare are treated as proof of intent to exterminate.

The Cause of Palestinian Suffering. Causation vs. Correlation.

As this is our first Blood Libel, I want to take the time to say that I know that there are many people who are heartbroken over the suffering of the Palestinian people. I feel their pain.

To be clear, I published www.bloodlibels.com in the hopes that I can find a way to engage with everyone regardless of political leanings - left leaning progressives and right-wing MAGA advocates - peaceniks and warriors alike. I know that this will fall on deaf ears of the truly jew hating antisemite - but there are many among us that are not antisemitic but find themselves in a moral quandary… unable to see the evils of radical Islam - unable to differentiate between causation and correlation in the century long conflict over the jewish homeland.

Those that can’t seem to grapple with the harsh reality that while it is true that there is a correlation between the suffering of the Palestinian people and the actions of the state of Israel, Israel is not the cause of their suffering!

The cause is the fact that the de-facto “elected” leaders governing Palestinian people are not seeking their liberation, they are seeking the elimination of the state of Israel and the expulsion of all jews from the “river to the sea”. They seem to harbor a naive belief that the Palestinian people would live a peaceful coexistence with the jews in Israel.

But too many on the political left “enable” Palestinian bad behavior. They excuse a century of terror and rejection of peace. They refuse to empathize with the life of a citizen of Israel, surrounded by genocidal enemies that have been trying to annihilate the state of Israel. They ignore the psychological effects of tens of thousands of rockets raining down on Israel for decades. Of the 1st and 2nd Intifada. Of suicide bombings. The mere fact that anyone in Israel still trusts in a two-state solution or that they have anyone in the Palestinian leadership that is interested in peaceful coexistence is beyond my comprehension. Moreover, they refuse to acknowledge what has happened in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait when Arab nations tried to live in peace with their “Palestinian” brothers in the past, only to end up with chaos and civil wars due to Palestinian terrorist organizations.1

As we embark on this journey together, I want to share an amazing article and podcast that I feel do an amazing job of framing the situation in very human terms but with credible historical context.

The article is entitled “Ecstasy and Amnesia in the Gaza Strip. Three catastrophes, all marked by euphoria at the start and denial at the end, have shaped the Palestinian predicament. Has the fourth arrived, and is the same dynamic playing out?” by Shany Mor. Shany is a lecturer in political thought at Reichman University and a frequent writer on politics, foreign policy, and Israel.

In his article he surmises that:

… the Palestinian predicament is the direct or indirect outcome of three Arab-Israeli wars, each about a generation apart. These are the wars that started in 1947, 1967, and 2000. Each war was a complex event with vast, unforeseen, and contested consequences for a host of actors, but the consequences for the Palestinian people were uniquely catastrophic: the first brought displacement, the second brought occupation, the third brought fragmentation. 

These three wars are so different from each other—in their duration, in the belligerents involved, in the global context surrounding and shaping them—that it’s hard at first to think of them as a set, as a group deserving some kind of collective analytical treatment to the exclusion of other major events. But it is actually the extreme differences among them that serves to highlight the unique features they share—the unique features, that is, that are the source of the Palestinian predicament.

It's one of the best and most nuanced discussions I've read about the conflict.  It's worth noting that Shany predicted in February of 2023 that another conflict would erupt that would impact this conflict that began as a civil war more than 100 years ago. It was entitled: “The next Intifada is about to begin. Israel's luck will soon run out”

I also want to share this podcast where Daniel Gordis interviews Shany.  

It's well worth listening to.   I will share two excerpts here. The first is Shany's discussion of what makes the Palestinian predicament different than other "Liberation" movements in history and in discussing why he's frustrated that there is no minority that criticizes the failed military operations of the Arab world against Israel and the decision to reject peace.  He says that he thinks:

".... this goes to the heart of what the Palestinian cause is. We want to believe that the Palestinian cause is a cause of national liberation. And we know what causes of national liberation look like, and we know the dilemmas that they face, and we know how they usually deal with them. A national liberation movement, often at the moment of truth, has to give up on bits of territory it would really want, symbolic sites that it cares about, a version of history that means a lot to it....  New states, depending on how they emerged in a global system, often have huge limitations on their security and foreign policy, particularly if they were on the losing side of a global conflict. And they have to deal with publics who often have very big and unrealistic demands. In all cases, whether we're talking about Armenians or Greeks or Bulgarians or Algerians or Poles or Lithuanians or Tunisians or even Israelis for that matter, or Irish... in all cases when push comes to shove, sometimes through a great deal of violence, sometimes through internal civil violence, they ultimately prefer liberation, even on unsatisfactory terms, rather than rejecting it outright. That is a normal disposition when your cause is about liberation.  When your cause is the elimination of another people rather than the liberation of yourself, then any such compromise isn't worth it because you haven't actually achieved anything.  And the fundamental ethos of the Palestinian cause in its moderate and radical version, in its secular and its religious version, in its Marxist and hyper nationalist version, in all of its various manifestations the fundamental commitment, the fundamental intellectual and theological commitment of this cause is that the establishment of a sovereign Jewish presence in this region is a cosmic crime that must be undone. Must be prevented or undone. And that makes compromise impossible."

The second, is Shany's discussion of the Abraham Accords and the narrative around why the Arab world wanted to normalize with Israel.

"As an aside, when those normalization agreements first started being signed in 2020 with Bahrain and the UAE. So, you encountered this critical voice in the Arab world, which was still a tiny minority, this sort of critical, moderate voice that was essentially saying something to the effect of we, the Arabs, are tired of bearing the burden of the Palestinians pointless and losing war against Israel. And I'm paraphrasing, but that was basically the argument. And it wasn't a very big popular view, it was of a distinctly small minority. And something about that view really annoyed me because I think it's very ahistorical. I do not think it is the case that the Arabs have been forced to pay a price for the Palestinians' pointless struggle against Israel. If there's a more accurate and historical way of saying it, it would actually be that the Palestinians have been forced to pay a huge price for the Arabs enormous cosmic, pointless struggle against Israel, not the other way around."

Enjoy Shany's perspective.  It does provide an interesting perspective on the 100+ year history of this conflict.

The Morality of the War in Gaza

As we explore these issues, I find that sometimes we can find interesting commentary online.

In one of the clearest moral explanations of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, author and thinker Coleman Hughes challenges the simplistic genocide narrative in his 2024 interview with Joe Rogan. When Rogan argues:

"I'm saying that when you're killing 30,000 innocent civilians in response to something that killed 1,200 innocent civilians and you're continuing to bomb an area into oblivion which is what it looks like when you're looking at Gaza there's many people that have made the argument that that is at least the steps of genocide or a form of genocide that you're you're destroying thousands and thousands of people's homes and and killing them

Coleman responds with complete moral clarity:

What’s unique about this war, unlike every other war that I could think of, is you have an army in Hamas that has perfected the art of embedding itself and meshing itself with civilians so that you cannot hit them without hitting the people around them. Other armies have done this, but none have perfected it to the extent that Hamas has. No army that I know of in military history has had 15 years to build 300 miles of tunnel underneath a city that they don’t use to shelter the civilians, but they use to shelter themselves so that they can operate right under a kindergarten, right under a mosque. So this is a challenge no army has faced. And so that’s what makes this war different. And yes, I agree with all of the absolute tragedy and suffering of the Palestinian people. But what creates that is the way Hamas fights. And either we can say one of two things. We can either say, well, Israel doesn’t have a clean shot, and so they have to let Hamas get away with it because it’s too much to bear. But then we are essentially creating a situation where terrorists have found the perfect solution — which is that you can cross the border, go house to house slaughtering your enemies, and then hide behind your own people, and they can do nothing about it. It’s a perfect strategy. Can we live in a world where we allow that to be an acceptable strategy? I don’t think so.And it’s very ugly to watch. It’s heartbreaking. And I completely understand why people don’t think the way I think when they see the videos — I completely get it. But I don’t think we can actually live in a world where that’s allowed to be a strategy.

If you want to watch the entire video here is a link (jump to 1:46:10 and listen through 2:13:00), in the meantime, here is a clip.

Coleman Hughes doesn’t deny the horror of war. He affirms it — while insisting we be honest about cause and effect. Israel’s war may be controversial, but it is not genocidal. It is a tragic and morally complex defensive war — against a terror group that uses civilians as pawns in a propaganda campaign.

We will discuss this more in “Blood Libel #10 | The IDF Commits War Crimes”

Footnotes:

Israel is an apartheid state, just like South Africa was.

Pro-Zionist:

Can you explain what “apartheid” means, and how it applies to a country where Arab citizens vote, serve in the parliament, and sit on the Supreme Court and protests its government freely?

(Let them attempt to define apartheid as systemic discrimination.)

Apartheid, as defined under international law, is “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another.”

So let’s ask:

• Do Arab citizens of Israel have the right to vote? Yes.

• Do they serve in the Knesset, judiciary, medical field, military, and police? Yes.

• Do they have freedom of speech, religion, and assembly? Yes.

This isn’t apartheid — it’s a multiethnic democracy with legal protections for minorities and a long tradition of internal dissent and activism.

In fact, Israelis — Jews and Arabs alike — regularly protest their own government’s policies, including on issues like West Bank settlements, judicial reform, and the treatment of Palestinians.

So if your claim is that Israel is an apartheid state, the facts just don’t back it up.

(At this point, they may try to refute the claims… to which there is no credible refutation, or they will attempt to clarify they aren’t talking about the state of Israel but instead they are talking about Judea & Samaria or the so-called “West Bank”.)

Ah — so you’re not talking about the State of Israel. You’re talking about a territory with a disputed status under international law, governed in part by the Palestinian Authority, and subject to Oslo security arrangements that both sides agreed to.

Are there restrictions in the West Bank? Yes — but they are based on security, not race.

And much of the West Bank is governed by Palestinian leadership, not Israel.

If you want to discuss the challenges of a prolonged conflict, that’s fair.

But calling it “apartheid” slanders the only democracy in the region, and it erases the real suffering of South Africans who endured true apartheid — where they had no vote, no freedom, no access to power, and no representation.

BEYOND THE TALKING POINTS:

I would encourage you to really dig in and learn more about the facts behind what led to the “Occupation” of the “Disputed Territory” of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”).

The Six-Day War in 1967: A War for Survival

Few lies have done more to distort public understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than the claim that Israel’s so-called “occupation” began with a war of colonial conquest in 1967. This falsehood has become a cornerstone of the modern blood libel against the Jewish state—a libel that erases the true context of the Six-Day War and flips the moral landscape upside down.

Before the War: No Palestinian State, No “Occupation”

In 1967, Israel was a small, embattled democracy bordered by hostile regimes. The Gaza Strip was not “Palestinian land”—it was under Egyptian military occupation. The “West Bank”, including East Jerusalem, was annexed by Jordan, which had barred Jews from accessing holy sites like the Western Wall and destroyed 58 synagogues. These territories were not earmarked for a Palestinian state. For nearly 20 years, the Arab world controlled both Gaza and the West Bank and chose not to create one.

The notion of a sovereign “Palestine” did not exist. No Arab regime called for one. No Palestinian leader governed one. And yet, the very Arab nations that had denied Palestinians their own state were preparing for war—not to liberate Palestine, but to destroy Israel.

The Lead-Up: A Coordinated Attempt to Annihilate Israel

In May 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser escalated tensions by demanding the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula. He then blockaded the Straits of Tiran, cutting off Israel’s maritime access to Asia and oil—a move universally recognized as an act of war.

Nasser massed over 100,000 Egyptian troops near Israel’s southern border and declared:

“Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.”

— Gamal Abdel Nasser, May 26, 1967

Syria, meanwhile, stepped up attacks from the Golan Heights. Jordan signed a military pact with Egypt and opened its borders to Iraqi troops. Arab media boomed with genocidal threats. The world watched in silence as Israel faced the prospect of a second Holocaust.

The War: Preemptive, Defensive, and Existential

In Israel and the West it is called the Six Day War. In the Arab world, it is known as the June War, or simply as "the Setback." Never has a conflict so short, unforeseen and largely unwanted by both sides so transformed the world. The Yom Kippur War, the war in Lebanon, the Camp David accords, the controversy over Jerusalem and Jewish settlements in West Bank, the intifadas and the rise of Palestinian terror: all are part of the outcome of those six days of intense Arab-Israeli fighting in the summer of 1967.1

On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a preemptive strike against Egypt’s air force, crippling it within hours. Despite Israeli warnings to stay out, Jordanian forces began shelling Jerusalem and advancing into Israeli territory. In response, Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank. On the northern front, Israel neutralized Syrian artillery by taking the Golan Heights. By June 10, the war was over—and Israel had tripled its size in six days.

But these territorial gains were not the result of imperial ambition. They were the result of a desperate war for survival. Israel captured land from regimes that had used it to wage war—land that had never belonged to a Palestinian government because no such government had ever existed.

The Aftermath: Israel Offers Peace, the Arab World Rejects It

Immediately after the war, Israel made it clear: it did not seek permanent control over these territories. It offered to return land in exchange for peace.

One of the most enduring lies in the campaign to delegitimize Israel is the claim that UN Security Council Resolution 242 requires Israel to withdraw from all land captured in 1967—and that its continued presence in the West Bank is therefore illegal. This is a deliberate distortion of the resolution’s language and intent.

Passed after the Six-Day War, Resolution 242 calls for Israel to withdraw from “territories occupied”—not “allterritories,” and not “the territories.” That omission was intentional. The British ambassador who drafted the resolution, Lord Caradon, confirmed:

“We didn’t say ‘all the territories’ because we didn’t want to say it.”

The resolution ties withdrawal to peace. It affirms Israel’s right to secure and recognized boundaries, not a return to the vulnerable 1949 armistice lines. Yet after the war, Israel’s offer to negotiate peace was met with the Arab League’s answer which came in September 1967 at Khartoum with the infamous “3 Nos”:

“No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.”

The truth is simple: Israel is not in violation of 242. The Arab world rejected peace, and Palestinian statehood was never denied by Israel—it was denied by Arab leaders who preferred eternal conflict over coexistence. Resolution 242 is not a weapon against Israel. It’s a roadmap to peace—one the other side still refuses to follow.

Regardless of the foregoing, in a gesture of restraint, Israel did not annex Gaza or the West Bank. It allowed the Islamic Waqf to retain authority over the Temple Mount, and in East Jerusalem, Arab residents were offered Israeli citizenship. The occupation that followed was not a product of Zionist expansionism. It was a product of Arab rejectionism.

The Blood Libel Today: Turning Self-Defense Into Sin

And yet today, activists, academics, and journalists accuse Israel of having “occupied Palestine” since 1967—as if there had been a Palestinian state to occupy. They claim Israel “ethnically cleansed” Palestinians, though no mass expulsion occurred. They scream “colonialism,” ignoring that Jews are indigenous to the land and that Egypt and Jordan—not Britain or France—had been the occupying powers before 1967.

This inversion of truth is not simply ignorant—it is malicious. It casts Israel’s fight for survival as a war of aggression. It erases the decades of Arab denialism and failed leadership. And it turns the victim of genocidal threats into the villain.

What We Must Remember

• In 1967, Israel acted in self-defense, not conquest.

• There was no Palestinian state to occupy—because the Arab world refused to create one.

• After the war, Israel offered peace, and it was rejected.

If the world had accepted Israel’s peace offer in 1967, there could have been a Palestinian state for the past 57 years. Instead, there has been only war, lies, and blood libels.

Judea & Samaria the so called “West Bank”

The “West Bank” refers to the west bank of the Jordan River. It is also called by its biblical and geographic names of Judea and Samaria, or beyond the ‘Green Line’ that marked the boundary prior to 1967.

For Israel its significance is both religious and strategic. Often referred to as ‘the cradle of Jewish civilisation’, it is where the majority of biblical stories took place. It is also important strategically. Topographically, the mountain ridge overlooks Israel’s coastal plane. It also provides an element of strategic depth, without the West Bank Israel would be just 9 miles wide at its narrowest point.

Israeli settlements were first built in 1967 and gradually expanded across the West Bank with significant blocs east and south of Jerusalem. The population of the West Bank is estimated at just under 3 million, made up of around 500,000 Jews and 2.5 million Palestinians.

To gain a fulsome understanding of the current situation in Judea and Samaria, you need to study the Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 (Oslo I) and 1995 (Oslo II) were intended to act as the basis of a road map to a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The Oslo Accords had the potential to mark a significant turning point in Israeli-Palestinian relations. For the first time, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) mutually recognized each other, with the stated aim of negotiating a final peace settlement.

These “accords” were mutually agreed upon by both Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as part of a transitional framework toward a negotiated two-state solution.

While Oslo offered hope for a two-state solution, the peace process was severely undermined by waves of Palestinian terrorism, including suicide bombings, shootings, and other attacks during the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s. Hamas and other rejectionist groups opposed to Oslo launched attacks designed to derail negotiations, and Israel responded with targeted operations. This cycle of violence, including the Second Intifada (2000–2005)—which erupted after failed final status talks at Camp David under President Bill Clinton in 2000—further hardened attitudes on both sides and led to a breakdown of trust .

Here is Former U.S. President Bill Clinton shares inside details on Yasser Arafat’s failure to accept an Israeli peace deal that would have granted Palestinians nearly the entire West Bank and a capital in East Jerusalem. Clinton reflects on Israel’s right to self-defense in the face of continued violence from Hamas. Highlighting Israel’s ancient historical ties to Judea and Samaria, Clinton rejects claims against Israel’s legitimacy. He critiques Hamas’s intentions, arguing that its primary goal isn’t Palestinian statehood but rather the destruction of Israel – a stance that endangers Palestinians too. Clinton also addresses Middle Eastern geopolitics, warning of a growing alliance between Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. He urges world leaders to recognize the complexity of the conflict and support lasting peace based on truth and security. Subscribe for in-depth insights on the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and regional stability.

As part of Oslo II, Israel & the PLO agreed to divide the “West Bank” into three administrative zones:

• Area A (about 18% of the West Bank) was placed under full Palestinian civil and security control,

• Area B (about 22%) under Palestinian civil control with shared Israeli-Palestinian security oversight, and

• Area C (about 60%) remained under full Israeli civil and security control.

  This arrangement was intended to be temporary, with further redeployments based on future negotiations.

The Settlements

With respect to the Israeli settlements that are purported to be a violation of international law, it is important to note that the settlements — including all government-authorized settlements and “unauthorized outposts”—are located in Area C, which the Oslo framework placed under Israeli control during the interim period. No Israeli settlements exist in Areas A or B, which are administered by the Palestinian Authority (PA) . Despite criticism of Israeli settlement expansion in Area C, it is important to note that Oslo did not prohibit such activity in that zone during the interim period. Final borders and sovereignty were left unresolved and were to be determined in future negotiations. Today, the legacy of Oslo remains hotly contested: some view it as a failed peace plan, others as a missed opportunity subverted by extremists and political intransigence on both sides.

This is a very poignant article by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity” republished in the Future of Jewish substack entitled: “Everything you know about Israeli settlements is wrong. Few seem to know about the Palestinian Authority's vast illegal settlement program in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) and the strategy behind it.” Please take the time to read it.

As I highlighted at the outset, there is so much propaganda disguised as scholarly work. This article is a perfect example, it’s entitled “The Illusion of Oslo” by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace which was published 3 weeks prior to October 7th by Nur Arafeh As ChatGPT concludes:

This is not a neutral analysis but rather a polemic from a pro-Palestinian perspective. It selectively presents facts, omits key historical context, attributes malicious intent to Israel, and idealizes Palestinian steadfastness. That doesn’t mean every claim is false—but the article is ideologically driven and should be read critically alongside more balanced sources.

Be careful. Ensure you research everything you read.

Thomas Pueyo also does a good job of describing the situation in the so called “West Bank”. Lots of challenging subjects to explore. In “The Problem of West Bank Settlements” Thomas points out:

I mentioned before why Israel is settling the West Bank. It’s all about security. But Palestinians don’t give much of it. It’s not just the past: the pogroms before independence, the three Arab attacks on Israel, the two Intifadas…When Israel did give Palestinians more independence, like in Gaza or by withdrawing from parts of the West Bank in the Oslo Accords, it’s been systematically followed by increased violence, like Hamas’s takeover in Gaza and the 2nd Intifada, much more aggressive than the 1st one. So Israelis did try to give authority to Palestinians.

It’s complicated and unfortunately it has helped our enemies create the narrative that “Israel” is a colonizer and an apartheid state. But the “West Bank” is not technically Israel in large part because of the Oslo Accords which were meant to bring peace. Peace, however, is a two-way street!

According to Wikipedia (at least as of this writing):

The West Bank is a landlocked territory near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the Levant region of Western Asia that forms the main bulk of the Palestinian territories. It is bordered by Jordan and the Dead Sea to the east and by Israel (see Green Line) to the south, west, and north. It has been under an Israeli military occupation since the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. Since the Oslo II Accord was signed in 1995, its area has been split into 165 Palestinian enclaves under total or partial civil administration by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), and a contiguous area containing 230 Israeli settlements into which Israeli law is "pipelined". Israel administers the West Bank – sans East Jerusalem – as the Judea and Samaria Area division.

So yes… the West Bank is complicated. But it’s not Gaza and it’s not Israel.

The promise of the two-state solution may be fading away… but it is entirely unreasonable to blame Israel! Israel has offered land for peace many times and its enemies simply aren’t interested in peace. Once again Anti-Zionists conflate causation and correlation.

But let’s talk about the settlements as an impediment to peace.

Critics often claim that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are the central obstacle to peace. But this claim deserves serious scrutiny—especially when considered alongside the conflicting positions held by many of Israel’s loudest opponents.

On the one hand, we are told to believe that the chant “From the river to the sea” is not a call for the eradication of Israel (a lie), but rather a vision for peaceful coexistence in a single democratic state. If that were true — if the aim were truly one binational state where Jews and Arabs live side by side—then why is Jewish presence in the West Bank treated as a crime? Why would Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria be any more controversial than Arab ones in Tel Aviv or Haifa?

If the vision is coexistence, settlements should not be the problem. The answer is it wouldn’t be. So the only conclusion must be that they don’t want to live side by side with their jewish neighbors.

So let’s look at the rhetoric around settlements in a two-state solution.

Israel has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to trade land for peace, including dismantling settlements.

In 1979, Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt—over 80% of the land it had captured in the defensive 6 day war in 1967—in order to achieve peace with Egypt.

In 2000 and 2008, Israel offered the Palestinians nearly all of the West Bank and a capital in East Jerusalem. Each time, Israel said yes. Each time, the Palestinian leadership said no.

And specifically with respect to settlements, in 2005, Israel forcibly evacuated every Israeli from Gaza—over 8,000 citizens forcibly uprooted from their homes by the IDF. In return, Israel didn’t get peace. It got suicide bombers and rockets. Hamas seized control, turned Gaza into a terror base, and launched thousands of attacks on Israeli civilians.

So if Israel has a track record of trading land for peace and from withdrawing from territory—sometimes at great internal cost—then blaming settlements for the absence of peace rings hollow.

The reality is this: peace hasn’t been rejected because of where Jews live in the West Bank—it’s been rejected because of where Jews live, period.

When you understand the full context you’ll understand what the slogan “From the river to the sea Palestine will be Free” really means. When you hear Palestinian’s chant this in Arabic, it’s chillingly clear. They say:

“Min al-nahr ila al-bahr, Filastin ‘Arabiyya”. (من النهر إلى البحر ستكون فلسطين عربية)

This translates to:

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.”

This is not a call to end occupation. It is a call to erase Israel entirely. It means no place for Jewish sovereignty between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In that worldview, Tel Aviv is a settlement. Haifa is occupation. The problem is not the presence of Jews in Area C (which per the terms of the Oslo Accords is controlled by Israel — it’s the presence of Jews at all from the river to the sea.

So when is it fair to ask: how long can a nation keep offering peace when its outstretched hand is met—time and again—with violence, rejection, and betrayal?

This isn’t just a political calculus. It’s a human one.

Imagine growing up in a society where every generation is told: “We tried. We offered. We left. And they still came to kill us.” Imagine what that does to the national psyche—to the young people watching rockets rain down from land Israel gave away, to the parents teaching their children to hope for peace while preparing for war.

Hope becomes harder to hold when every concession is answered with bloodshed. Trust becomes a luxury. And yet, remarkably, many Israelis still say they would support a two-state solution—if only there were a real partner for peace.

If protests around the world were truly about peace, they wouldn’t glorify Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran while chanting slogans that deny Israel’s existence. They would call for the liberation of Gaza from Hamas’s tyranny. They would acknowledge that coexistence requires compromise from both sides. And they would recognize that the real obstacle to peace is not Israeli settlements—it’s the ongoing war against Israel’s right to exist.

The “Occupation” & International Law.

Beyond Israeli’s civil rights (explored in Blood Libel #4), let’s try to explore a more comprehensive understanding of the legal claims to the legitimacy of Israel’s sovereignty over the so called “occupied territories” — one that explores Israel’s legal rights while also recognizing the broader moral and diplomatic argument in support of the legitimacy of Israel’s claims to those lands.

Judea & Samaria (“The West Bank”) and the Gaza Strip were never sovereign Palestinian territory. Prior to 1948 they were parts of the British Mandate, illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt from 1948–1967, then captured by Israel in a defensive war. Because no legitimate sovereign existed at the time, and because Egypt and Jordan both later renounced their claims, the territories were effectively “terra nullius” — lands without a lawful owner.

Israel, as the only state to inherit Mandate-era rights, and the only state to offer peace in return for land (as it did successfully with Egypt), has the most legitimate claim to sovereignty over these areas. The UN, which never held legal title to the land, cannot transfer it to a non-sovereign actor like the Palestinian Authority, nor can it unilaterally create a Palestinian state without Israel’s consent. In fact:

1. Israel’s claim is legally superior, based on defensive acquisition and historical rights.

2. There is no displaced sovereign to return the land to.

3. Any Palestinian state must arise through bilateral negotiation — not UN fiat.

LEGAL BRIEF: The West Bank and Gaza as Terra Nullius and Israel’s Sovereign Claim

I. Definition and Legal Principle of Terra Nullius

1. Terra nullius is a Latin term meaning “land belonging to no one.”

2. Under international law, territory without a recognized sovereign can be legally acquired by another state through effective occupation, especially if gained during a defensive war.

3. While post-WWII norms prohibit acquisition of territory by aggression, defensive acquisition of unclaimed or unlawfully held land is not prohibited.

II. The West Bank Was Terra Nullius in 1967

1. Ottoman Empire to British Mandate (pre-1948):

• The Ottoman Empire relinquished sovereignty after WWI.

• The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (1922) gave Britain administrative control, not sovereignty, with the express purpose of establishing a Jewish national home.

2. Jordan’s Occupation (1948–1967):

• Jordan illegally occupied and annexed the West Bank during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

• This annexation was recognized only by the UK and Pakistan.

• The Arab League and most of the world rejected Jordan’s claim, and no international body recognized the West Bank as Jordanian sovereign territory.

3. No Prior Palestinian Sovereignty:

• No Palestinian state has ever existed.

• Palestinians did not hold sovereignty over the West Bank at any time in history.

Conclusion:

At the time Israel captured the West Bank in a defensive war in 1967, it was not the territory of any recognized sovereign. Therefore, under the principle of terra nullius, Israel’s claim is legally superior.

III. Gaza Was Terra Nullius in 1967

1. British Mandate and Egyptian Occupation:

• Like the West Bank, Gaza was part of the British Mandate until 1948.

• Egypt occupied Gaza after the 1948 war but never annexed it.

• Egypt itself said it held Gaza “in trust for the Palestinian people” and did not claim sovereignty.

2. Israel Captures Gaza in 1967 Defensive War:

• Egypt initiated hostilities in 1967.

• Israel captured Gaza lawfully in self-defense.

3. Egypt Abandoned Claim to Gaza in 1979:

• In the Camp David Accords and Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, Egypt explicitly refused to reclaim Gaza.

• Egypt made no claim of sovereignty and withdrew permanently.

Conclusion:

Gaza, like the West Bank, was not under the sovereignty of any state in 1967 and was formally relinquished by its last administrator. It qualifies as terra nullius under modern legal theory.

IV. Israel’s Legal Right to Sovereignty Over the West Bank and Gaza

1. Historical Right via Mandate:

• The Mandate for Palestine (1922) recognized the right of the Jewish people to “close settlement on the land” (Article 6).

• These rights were preserved by Article 80 of the UN Charter, which prohibits the UN from revoking Mandate-era rights absent a trusteeship agreement (which never occurred).

2. Defensive War Doctrine:

• Under international law, while conquest is illegal in aggressive war, territorial acquisition is not necessarily illegal when resulting from self-defense — especially when there is no prior lawful sovereign.

3. Effective Control and Legal Administration:

• Israel has exercised continuous, effective control over the West Bank since 1967.

• Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but maintains border security, which does not constitute sovereignty.

• No other state has a superior legal claim to either territory.

V. The UN Has No Legal Authority to Transfer Sovereignty

1. UN General Assembly Resolutions Are Non-Binding:

• Resolution 181 (Partition Plan) was rejected by the Arabs and had no binding legal effect.

• The UNGA has no authority to create states or award territory.

2. UN Security Council Resolutions Acknowledge Disputed Status:

• Resolution 242 (1967) calls for “withdrawal from territories” — not all — and links withdrawal to secure and recognized boundaries.

• This implies Israel has a negotiated claim, not an obligation to cede all captured territory.

3. No Trusteeship Was Established:

• Under Chapter XII of the UN Charter, the only mechanism for transferring Mandate land would have been a Trusteeship Agreement.

• None was ever signed.

• Therefore, Article 80 remains in force, preserving the Jewish legal claim.

Conclusion:

The UN has no legal authority to override the legal status of territory held under the Mandate or gained in self-defense from non-sovereign occupiers.

The West Bank and Gaza Strip were terra nullius when Israel captured them in a defensive war from illegitimate or non-sovereign occupiers. As the sole inheritor of Mandate-era rights, and as the only nation with effective legal, military, and administrative control, Israel’s claim is the most legally sound under modern international law.

The UN has no lawful authority to transfer these territories to another entity, including the Palestinian Authority or a future Palestinian state.

Formal vs. Full Citizenship – Understanding the Jewish Democratic Model

Some critics claim that because Israel self-identifies as a Jewish state, it cannot also be a liberal democracy. But this assumes a false binary. Many democratic nations (such as Ireland, Greece, or Finland) tie national identity to ethnicity, language, or religion, while still upholding civil rights for all citizens. Israel is no different in this regard—it is both Jewish and democratic, and while not perfect, it does provide legal equality and individual rights to all of its citizens, including its Arab minority.

As Professor Raphael Cohen-Almagor argues in his piece, “Israeli Palestinians: Between Formal and Full Citizenship,

Arab citizens of Israel enjoy formal citizenship: they vote, serve in parliament, access courts, express their views freely, and participate in nearly every sector of society. This is not apartheid.

Cohen-Almagor himself rejects the apartheid label as inaccurate and inflammatory. He writes:

While Israeli Palestinians do not always receive equal treatment and they de facto at times are discriminated against, Israeli Palestinians do not live under anything that resembles South African apartheid.

Instead, he calls for greater efforts to close the gap between formal citizenship (legal equality) and full citizenship(social and economic equity). This is a valid aspiration—and it mirrors the ongoing challenges of every liberal democracy.

It’s a sad fact that discrimination and inherent biases exist in all democrat societies, including within the United States, which has long struggled with disparities in education, housing, policing, and economic access for minorities. It’s human nature after all. But Israel exists in a unique situation amongst first world nations given that it is surrounded by Arab populations and Islamist regimes that have persecuted a 100 year war against the existence of a Jewish State.

To equate those internal disparities with apartheid is a distortion—one that falsely compares Israel’s flawed but pluralistic democracy with a brutal, race-based system of domination that systematically excluded Black South Africans from all political rights.

The idea of a “Jewish democracy” is not inherently contradictory. Just as France can be a French republic while protecting Algerian Muslims or African immigrants, so too can Israel be a homeland for the Jewish people while safeguarding the rights of its non-Jewish citizens. It is worth noting that even Cohen-Almagor acknowledges the legitimacy of this arrangement:

While there is the need for a home for the Jewish people… Israel should retain its democratic character.

Israel, like every democracy, can always do better in ensuring equity for all its citizens. But imperfect democracy is not apartheid. Israel’s commitment to civil rights—especially for its minorities in a region dominated by authoritarian regimes—sets it apart, not beneath, other nations. And using the language of apartheid to delegitimize Israel doesn’t help Palestinian citizens—it erases the real moral complexity of building a democratic state amidst decades of regional war and existential threat.

Footnotes:

The 2005 Gaza withdrawal wasn’t about peace — Sharon did it to kill the two-state solution.

Pro-Zionist:

That’s an interesting theory. Can you explain how unilaterally evacuating 8,000 Jews, dismantling settlements, and giving up land was meant to prevent a Palestinian state?

(Let them struggle to rationalize the contradiction.)

Pro-Zionist:

A perfect example of how historical revisionism wrapped in cynicism gets mistaken for insight. The claim that Ariel Sharon pulled out of Gaza in 2005 to prevent a two-state solution is flat-out wrong, both historically and logically.

The truth is:

• Ariel Sharon wasn’t a dove — he was a hawkish general. But by 2003–2004, he had accepted that Israel could not govern millions of Palestinians indefinitely.

• The Gaza Disengagement Plan was a bold and painful move — not to avoid a Palestinian state, but to create conditions for one by ending direct Israeli control over Gaza.

• Sharon removed every last soldier and settler, even exhumed Jewish graves — taking enormous political and personal risk.

If the goal was to kill the two-state solution, why give Palestinians territory without demanding anything in return?

Why do it unilaterally, knowing it would anger his base?

What actually happened:

• Hamas seized Gaza in 2007, violently overthrowing the Palestinian Authority.

• Since then, Gaza has been turned into a launchpad for terror, not a model for statehood.

• This proved to most Israelis that giving up land unilaterally would not bring peace — it would bring rockets.

So no — Sharon didn’t pull out of Gaza to block a two-state solution.

He did it to test whether Palestinians could build something peaceful if given the chance.

They failed the test. And now people blame Israel for locking the door after someone set the house on fire.

Anti-Zionist:

That may be so but he turned Gaza into an open-air prison. It’s basically a concentration camp.

Pro-Zionist:

It’s absurd to compare life in Gaza to life in a concentration camp! Life for Jews in Nazi concentration camps meant systematic starvation, forced labor, torture, and industrialized extermination, with over six million murdered simply for being Jewish.

In contrast, Palestinians in Gaza live under self-rule by Hamas, receive international aid, have access to markets, schools, and hospitals, and their population has grown steadily for decades — making any comparison both historically false and morally obscene.

Let’s be clear:

• Gaza receives millions in humanitarian aid, including fuel, food, and medicine — even from Israel. Essential products have always been allowed to pass through.

• Israel has no soldiers or civilians in Gaza. Hamas themselves have publicly affirmed that there is no “occupation” of Gaza.

• Gaza has luxury malls, beaches, and apartment towers — while Hamas leaders live in Qatar.

• The Population of Gaza in 2005 was 1.4 million and has grown to over 2.4 million growing 65% in less than 20 years, despite claims that Israel is committing genocide.

This isn’t a concentration camp. It’s a self-governed territory under the rule of a terrorist group that uses its people as shields and its aid to build terror tunnels.

So since Gaza is governed by Hamas, not Israel if you’re implying that Hamas has imprisoned its own people - On that we can agree!

Anti-Zionist:

But Israel controls the borders and airspace.

Pro-Zionist:

Egypt also borders Gaza — and it enforces an even more stringent blockade. Why do you never mention Egypt? Why doesn’t Egypt open its borders to the Palestinian’s?

Even a simple google search will confirm that the blockade only began after Hamas violently took control of Gaza and started executing an intifada against Israeli civilians. It was a necessary security measure!1 Since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups have launched twenty-five thousand (25,000) rockets and carried out numerous terror attacks against Israel.2 These attacks have led to thousands of Israeli casualties, widespread trauma, and significant property damage. Israel’s Iron Dome defense system has intercepted many of these rockets, mitigating potential harm. But that doesn’t excuse the actions of the people of Gaza.

They don’t seek peaceful coexistence.

Anti-Zionist:

What Israel is doing is worse than what the Nazis did.

Pro-Zionist:

Did the Nazis ever warn Jews to evacuate before sending them to gas chambers? Did they feed, clothe, employ and medically treat the people they were exterminating?

(Let that land.)

Pro-Zionist:

Comparing Israel to the Nazis isn’t criticism — it’s historical desecration. It minimizes the Holocaust and demonizes Jews by turning them into Nazis.

Here’s what the Nazis did:

• Systematically murdered 6 million Jews in death camps.

• Turned human beings into ash in industrial ovens.

Here’s what Israel is doing:

• Fighting a genocidal terror group that butchered civilians in their homes.

• Warning civilians to evacuate before airstrikes.

• Delivering aid to enemy territory even during war.

You don’t want justice when you compare Jews to Nazis. You want to strip Jews of their humanity. That’s antisemitism in its most vile form.

BEYOND THE TALKING POINTS

Gaza Disengagement

In August 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew every soldier and civilian from the Gaza Strip, dismantling 21 settlements and forcibly evacuating over 9,000 Jewish residents as part of then–Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “Disengagement Plan.” No peace agreement was in place. The move was designed to reduce friction, test the possibility of Palestinian self-rule, and send a message that Israel was willing to make painful concessions even in the absence of a partner for peace.

But any hope for peace was quickly extinguished. In January 2006, Hamas—an internationally designated terrorist group committed to Israel’s destruction—won Palestinian elections. By June 2006, Hamas had kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and ramped up rocket fire into Israeli towns. A year later, in June 2007, Hamas launched a bloody coup against the Palestinian Authority, seizing full control of Gaza. From that point on, Gaza became a militarized enclave governed by a jihadist organization with Iranian backing.

As a result, since 2005, Gaza has not been “occupied” by Israel. In fact, the bogus claim that Gaza is “occupied” has even been refuted by Hamas itself.

For decades, the notion that Israel is an occupier has been the rallying cry of the Palestinian people, seemingly an almost a greater raison d'etre for them than an actual pursuit of self-determination, as evidenced by the consistent rejection of every peace offer presented to the Palestinians and the unyielding rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel. While renouncing the language of occupation with respect to Gaza may be perceived as a concession to Israel, al-Zahar is actually demonstrating the strength of his government and boldness in the face of detractors in Gaza who are desperate for an excuse to continue to fight Israel.

The accusation that Gaza is an “open-air prison” is not a neutral description — it is a propaganda phrase. And like most propaganda, it conceals more than it reveals. It implies that the suffering of Gazans is a deliberate Israeli policy of collective punishment rather than the tragic result of a complex, century-long conflict rooted in rejectionism, terrorism, and failed leadership.

At the time of the withdrawal, while Israel retained control over Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters—a common practice for sovereign nations bordering hostile territories—this was not used to restrict the movement of civilian goods. The border crossing at Rafah with Egypt was placed under Palestinian Authority control, monitored by European Union observers in coordination with Israel, per the U.S.-brokered Agreement on Movement and Access. Far from occupying Gaza, Israel physically left, with international praise and guarded optimism.

Only after this violent takeover did Israel and Egypt impose blockades on Gaza, aimed at curbing the flow of weapons and materials used to attack civilians. This sequence is often inverted in anti-Israel narratives, which falsely suggest that Israel’s control over borders and utilities was part of a preexisting siege. In reality, the restrictions were a direct response to Hamas’s aggression, not a continuation of occupation.

Despite this clear timeline, some legal scholars and UN agencies began describing Gaza as “still occupied,” arguing that Israel’s security measures constituted “effective control.” This interpretation is widely disputed. The U.S. State Department, many Western legal experts, and even the Israeli Supreme Court have rejected the idea that a state can be considered an occupier without a permanent military presence on the ground.

This distortion—that Israel withdrew only to keep Gaza under siege—has become one of the most persistent modern blood libels. It ignores the risks Israel took to give Palestinians an opportunity for self-governance and erases the sequence of violence that followed. It allows Hamas to escape accountability while casting Israel as a perpetual aggressor, no matter how many times it disengages. The truth is more complex—but far more morally clear.

This is a war zone.

And yet, despite that reality, Israel continued to provide electricity, water, medical aid, and allowed thousands of Gazans to cross for work or medical treatment — even as Hamas dug terror tunnels and stockpiled weapons. Even now, amidst the current war, Israel allows humanitarian aid into Gaza daily. Would a jailer feed and power a prison run by militants actively trying to kill its citizens?

The Egyptian border with Gaza is also closed most of the time — not because of Israel, but because Egypt doesn’t want Hamas terrorists destabilizing Sinai. Are Egyptian policies also a sign of apartheid? Or are they, too, responding to the real threat Hamas poses?

To call Gaza an open-air prison is to invert cause and effect. It implies Israel imposed these restrictions arbitrarily, rather than reactively — in direct response to Hamas’s takeover and terrorist campaigns.

Let’s put it plainly: There was no blockade before Hamas took over. The blockade is not the cause of Hamas’s behavior — it’s the result.

Why It Matters

The “open-air prison” libel is used to suggest moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel — or worse, to depict Israel as the oppressor and Hamas as the victim. It erases the choices Hamas has made: to choose rockets over roads, martyrdom over medicine, tunnels over textbooks.

It also ignores a basic moral truth: A democracy under siege is not obligated to arm its attackers.

The Truth the “Open-Air Prison” Lie Hides

• Israel left Gaza. Hamas filled the vacuum.

• Gaza is blockaded because Hamas declared war, not the other way around.

• The restrictions are targeted at a hostile regime, not civilians.

• Egypt, not just Israel, enforces border controls.

• There is no genocide, no racial domination — only a tragic conflict fueled by jihadist ideology.

If Hamas surrendered tomorrow, released the hostages, and disarmed— what would happen?

The blockade would end. Gaza would rebuild. Aid would flow. Peace could begin.

But if Israel stopped defending itself, what would happen?

Another October 7th. Another slaughter. And eventually, no Israel at all.

That’s the moral difference. That’s the truth behind the lie.

Gaza Disengagement Shifted Israeli Politics

Here is a short companion breakdown of how the disengagement shifted Israeli political thinking across the spectrum? That’s a key piece of context for understanding how Gaza radicalized Israeli voters — not the other way around.

Before the Disengagement:

• Many Israelis believed in the Oslo vision: that land-for-peace was viable.

• The left and center pushed for a two-state solution, assuming that if Israel ended “occupation,” peace would follow.

• Even Ariel Sharon — a right-wing figure — shocked the world by embracing unilateral withdrawal in Gaza, framing it as a step toward strengthening Israel’s democracy and international legitimacy.

What Israel Did:

• Evacuated all 21 settlements in Gaza.

• Removed over 8,000 Jewish residents, often by force — many of whom were never properly resettled.

• Dismantled synagogues, military outposts, and infrastructure, even leaving greenhouses to help jumpstart Gaza’s economy.

• Left Gaza entirely — no soldiers, no civilians, no claim to sovereignty.

What Happened Next:

• In 2006, Hamas won elections in Gaza.

• In 2007, Hamas violently overthrew the Palestinian Authority, threw political opponents off rooftops, and began using Gaza as a base for terrorism.

• Thousands of rockets and missiles have been launched into Israeli towns since then.

• Hamas has diverted international aid to build terror tunnels, not schools or hospitals.

How It Changed Israeli Views:

• Many Israelis — especially in the center and left — realized that withdrawing from land does not guarantee peace.

• The political left lost credibility. Voters who once believed in peace through negotiation shifted rightward, not out of ideology, but out of disillusionment and self-preservation.

• Even centrist leaders like Tzipi Livni and Yair Lapid began adopting more cautious or hawkish positions on security.

• Today, Israeli politics are shaped not by racism or expansionism, but by the lived trauma of the Gaza experiment.

Bottom Line:

Israel tried unilateral withdrawal.

It got rockets, not reconciliation.

That’s not a justification for occupation — it’s a sobering lesson about who its partners are.

So when critics say “Israel moved to the right,” what they ignore is:

The Palestinian leadership moved to violence — and Israeli voters followed reality.

Again, conflating causation and correlation. Israeli politics have shifted because of real threats, repeated terror attacks, intifadas, and wars — not out of hatred but out of a defensive survival instinct. The far left collapsed not because of bigotry, but because their peace offers were met with violence and rejection.

The Gaza Trap.

As we explore the “truth” we must be able to face some uncomfortable truths ourselves. This article, entitled “The Gaza Trap”, is one of those articles that is a tough read. Tomas Pueyo presents one of the most thoughtful discussion of the "Palestinian Narrative" that I've read. There are some scary statistics contained in the article that terrify me including verification of my concern that the residents of Gaza have been radicalized to a point that peace is unlikely to ever be possible.

But, no matter how upset you are - and as you can tell from my opinions - I'm beside myself with grief and righteous indignation for what's going on in Israel and around the world. I'm scared for my children and for your children and for the free world! I am unmoved in my feeling that Radical Islam is dangerous and immoral and is a threat to free society.

In the end, if we are going to find a way through this challenging moment in history, we must find our humanity. We must find a way to understand each other in order to heal. Anyone calling for the destruction of the state of Israel is immoral and has barbaric ambitions and antisemitic beliefs. Just as I would only want to be judged as a human for how I comport myself that is how I expect us to treat others. So for anyone that seeks peace and human understanding... it's important to study this issue in all its complexity and from all sides so that reasonable people can come to a compromise that will lead to peace.

Footnotes: