Wednesday, April 22, 2026

How to debunk the "Netanyahu controls Trump" theory - and every other conspiracy theory

I have been working on a better way to counter antisemitic and anti-Israel conspiracy theories. The standard approach is to attack them with facts: here is the evidence that contradicts your claim, here is the source you misread, here is what actually happened. The problem is that facts don't work against a well-constructed conspiracy theory. They can't, almost by design. Any fact that contradicts the theory gets absorbed as further proof of the cover-up; any source that disputes it becomes a compromised source. The theory is sealed against falsification, which means arguing facts inside it is arguing on its terms.

I've been using a different approach. Instead of attacking the content of a conspiratorial claim, attack its structure. Every such theory rests on hidden assumptions — conditions that must be true for the claim to hold. If you can expose those assumptions and show that they are structurally impossible, the claim collapses regardless of what the evidence says, because the architecture required to support it cannot exist. The conspiracy theorist cannot brush this away with "that source is compromised" or "that's what they want you to think." You are not arguing about evidence; you are arguing about the conditions under which the evidence could ever mean what they say it means.

I have been applying this framework to antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric for some time, and it consistently produces a more decisive result than factual rebuttal. So I decided to test it on a theory that has been circulating with particular confidence since the U.S.-Iran conflict escalated: that Benjamin Netanyahu is controlling Donald Trump, directing American Iran policy from Jerusalem while Washington's institutions provide the scenery.

This theory has many variants, but they share a common core. Trump, who demonstrably ignores advisors, overrides generals, dismisses intelligence assessments he dislikes, and has made a public identity out of being unbossed — this same Trump is somehow a puppet for a foreign prime minister. The assertion is made with great confidence by people who would immediately recognize its absurdity if the foreign leader in question were anyone other than a Jewish Israeli. One version from George Galloway says that Trump is afraid of Israel assassinating him and also of Israel exposing some damning Epstein dirt on him because Epstein was Jewish and therefore Jews, Israel, hand-waving, presto!

Let's examine what the claim actually requires in all cases. If we can show that the entire theory is impossible, there is need to debunk whether Israel has secret Epstein files they use as blackmail.

For a foreign government to direct U.S. policy, it must override all of the internal processes designed specifically to prevent that from happening. The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the NSA, the FBI's counterintelligence division, the NSC staff, the Joint Chiefs, and Congress's own oversight apparatus all exist, in part, to detect and resist exactly this: foreign penetration of American decision-making. Congressional committees — including members with no particular affection for Israel — hold classified briefings, demand justifications, and possess the power to expose, defund, or block policy they believe serves a foreign principal rather than American interests.

The Netanyahu-control thesis requires every one of these layers to fail, simultaneously and silently, on a decision for the US to go to war against its own interests. That's not a theory of foreign influence; it's a theory of total institutional collapse. And institutional collapse of that scale tends to leave evidence — leaks, resignations, whistleblowers, congressional revolts. We have seen none of that. What we have seen instead is the ordinary friction of alliance management: public disagreements between Washington and Jerusalem, U.S. diplomatic tracks Netanyahu has opposed, and operational constraints Israel has publicly resented - like stopping attacking Hezbollah targets.

The claim's proponents might respond that the institutions have been captured, that the oversight bodies are themselves compromised. This is a meta-conspiracy theory. But even if that somehow happened, there are dissenters within the government — very public anti-war advocates on both the Right and the Left — who at the very least would be leaking to the media about this incredible control Israel has.

In short, it is as close to impossible as can be imagined.

Now, to be sure, the US and Israel are aligned on many policies. They are both dead-set against Iranian nuclear weapons. That was the official position of Obama and Biden as well. Correlation does not mean causation, and certainly not causation from the weaker player to the stronger one.

Netanyahu does influence U.S. policy — more than most foreign leaders, and the reasons are structural: a deep alliance with genuine intelligence integration, significant domestic political salience in American electoral dynamics, Israel's earned respect on its own intelligence and deep knowledge of the Middle East, and a shared strategic file on Iran where Israeli assessments carry real weight. Israel has often shaped the terms of debate, provided intelligence framing that affected American perceptions, and timed his public interventions to exploit windows of receptivity. All of that is worth analyzing seriously. Israel's desire to influence American policy is not nefarious — it is consistent with what every foreign country does. Even enemies of the US like Russia, China and Iran itself use indirect methods like social media to try to influence the world's biggest superpower. There is nothing different about Israel.

What matters analytically is what happens when you shift from a factual rebuttal to a structural one. In a factual argument, every disproof becomes further proof, the burden of proof falls entirely on the debunker, and there is no limit to the supplementary fantasies available to shore up the original claim. In a structural argument, the burden returns to the theorist — and the questions become concrete and unanswerable. If your theory is true, exactly how does it work? Walk us through the mechanism. Show your working knowledge of how military commands, intelligence agencies, oversight committees, and newsrooms actually function. Because organizations are not moody teenagers who reverse course on a whim; they have processes, procedures, legal constraints, and institutional cultures that resist change even when ordered from above. They generate paper trails: meeting minutes, legal findings, inspector general reports, congressional notifications, classified cables that get read by hundreds of people. Changing the operational culture of the NSA or CIA takes years and meets fierce internal resistance — the agencies have their own lawyers, their own inspector generals, their own career officers who did not get where they are by becoming instruments of a foreign government. The theory has to survive water cooler gossip, internal Slack channels, agency attorneys pushing back on tasking, whistleblower statutes, and a press corps that has broken far more tightly held secrets than this one. Controlling one person in secret is difficult but imaginable. Controlling thousands of intelligence officers, congressional staffers, generals, and journalists — simultaneously, without a single credible leak — is not a hypothesis. It is a demand that we believe institutions work in a way that no institution in the history of democratic governance has ever actually worked.

The theory doesn't only fail because the facts are against it, though they are. It fails because the conditions required for it to be true are structurally impossible — and no amount of selectively curated evidence and can build a house on a foundation that cannot bear the weight.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

04/21 Links Pt2: Israel at 78: Commitment, Solidarity, and Determination; Why the Progressive Hatred of Yitzhak Rabin Matters; DOJ says SPLC funneled $3M+ to extremists groups like the KKK

From Ian:

Israel at 78: Commitment, Solidarity, and Determination

Each year before Independence Day, the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics releases a report. This year's figures show that Israel's population grew by 150,000 and that 91% of Israelis say they are satisfied or very satisfied with their lives. But the numbers say nothing about the kind of year the country actually experienced.

It has now been well over two years since Oct. 7, 2023, a day that shattered assumptions and exposed vulnerabilities we still struggle to comprehend. Since then, Israel has been at war - first in Gaza, then in Lebanon, and now twice with Iran. It has been a year of sirens and safe rooms, of long stints of reserve duty. But that is only half the story.

Israel fought on multiple fronts, dealing devastating blows to Hamas, Hizbullah, and Iran - actions that will take those enemies years to recover from. It secured the release of the remaining hostages. And it once again demonstrated a capacity for resilience and mobilization that surprised even itself. Oct. 7 was a catastrophe. But Oct. 8 was the moment when Jews responded forcefully and decisively.

78 years ago, Israel emerged from the shadow of the Holocaust, weak and vulnerable. Today, it is a strong, independent state with a tremendous ability to defend itself. We need to be careful not to lose sight of how far we have come.

One expression of national resilience can be seen in the area adjacent to Gaza. On the eve of Oct. 7, 62,000 people lived there. Today, the number is higher. Most of those who were evacuated have returned, and new families are moving in. Hamas tried to empty those communities. Instead, they grew. This is a reminder of a deep current in Israeli society - one of commitment, solidarity, and determination.

Why, as a Progressive Jew, I Firmly Identify as a Zionist

I am a progressive Jew. I believe in human rights, equality, and justice. I also identify firmly as a Zionist. It is because I believe in human rights, take justice seriously, and because I take Jewish history seriously, that I place myself unapologetically in the Zionist camp.

Zionism means the belief that the Jewish people are a nation, and that like other nations they have the right to self-determination in their ancestral land. Self-determination is a core collective human right, one routinely recognized for other peoples. If I begin from a commitment to human rights, I cannot treat Jewish self-determination as the one exception, because denying a fundamental right to the Jewish people while recognizing it to all others is, in fact, discrimination.

Anti-Zionism is often presented as though it were merely moral outrage at Israeli policy. It is not. Anti-Zionism begins where criticism of policy ends. It means either denying that Jews are a people or accepting that they are a people while denying them the same right of collective self-determination routinely granted to others.

As a proud second-generation Mexican Jew, I learned very early that identity is shaped not only by what one feels inwardly, but by what the surrounding world insists on seeing. I also grew up with the persistent reminder that, for many (perhaps for most), I was somehow not fully Mexican. I was treated, subtly or openly, as if I were foreign, conditional, not quite of the place.

That experience is difficult for many American Jews to fully grasp, especially those who came of age in periods and places of greater security and acceptance. But outside the American frame, you learn that emancipation is real but fragile, belonging is real but conditional, and acceptance can narrow overnight.

The 20th century taught Jews that statelessness, dependency, and the goodwill of others are not a sufficient answer to Jewish history. It also taught that universalism is a noble language, but it has often failed Jews precisely when they most needed concrete protection. This explains why so many Jews, especially those whose families came from the Middle East, North Africa, or Eastern Europe, experience Zionism as the political form of collective survival.

To me, being progressive means applying moral principles consistently, not selectively. If self-determination is a right, then it is a right for Jews too.

Seth Mandel: Why the Progressive Hatred of Yitzhak Rabin Matters

Noura Erekat, the well-known opponent of Jewish indigenous rights, called the peace process an “arrangement of permanent subjugation” of the Palestinians and backed AOC’s decision not to promote coexistence between Arabs and Jews.

An International Crisis Group activist wrote in 972Mag that “Palestine advocates are setting the record straight about one of the conflict’s most harmful myths: that the Oslo Accords — and by association, Yitzhak Rabin — were a force for peace.”

One was tempted to sympathize with the spokesman for APN’s Israeli sister organization who asked: “Are you really going to boycott us and all our work with Palestinians to support human rights and an end to the conflict, just because Rabin wasn’t a flawless [idol] after 5 decades of conflict?”

Well, yes. They really are going to boycott you. It certainly doesn’t matter to AOC and the anti-Zionists around her that APN worked “with Palestinians to support human rights and an end to the conflict” because the progressive anti-Zionist movement doesn’t support either of those things. Human rights? The Tentifada crowd openly worships Hamas, which exists to deprive Palestinians (and non-Palestinians) of human rights. End the conflict? What on earth would give someone the impression that a movement chanting in support of Iran’s occupation forces, which are keeping several countries mired in civil war, wants an end to the conflict?

A Marxist author for Jacobin praised AOC’s snub of the Rabin event by cheering that this all happened because “AOC took her cues from Palestinians instead of pro-Israel voices.”

It’s hard to argue with that. Pro-Israel voices want coexistence. Those voices have been systematically excised from the political left. There is no progressive peace camp, and there hasn’t been one for years.

Edward Luce thinks there’s a big difference between Yitzhak Rabin and Bibi Netanyahu. The progressive anti-Israel caucus thinks the problem is that people think there’s a difference between Yitzhak Rabin and Bibi Netanyahu. To them, both men are equally guilty of the one unforgivable sin: believing the Jewish state ought to exist.

04/21 Links Pt1: Israel’s enemies are Britain’s, too; Trump extends Iran ceasefire indefinitely; The Death of a French Soldier in Lebanon

From Ian:

Israel’s enemies are Britain’s, too

Israel is the West’s front line in the Middle East. Whenever it’s hit, jihadi plots in Europe spike. If Israel falls, the vacuum won’t be filled by states that care about social justice or international law. It will be filled by the very forces that hate our way of life and want to destroy it.

Beyond ideology, the practical reality of British and European security is inextricably linked to Israeli survival. While our politicians posture, our security services are quietly relying on a partnership that keeps British citizens safe. This cooperation involves a vital exchange of high-end intelligence and defensive technology, including Israeli signals intelligence (the interception and analysis of electronic signals, from communications to radar) and other human assets – all which help thwart terror attacks on European soil. Be it drone technology or missile defence, Israeli innovation is woven into the fabric of Western military readiness. When Westminster downgrades this relationship because the optics get difficult, the UK degrades its own defences as a consequence.

I don’t argue this as a detached onlooker, but as someone who sees this collision from both sides. I was born and raised in Israel, but Britain has been my home for 17 years. My children are British. When I work to combat anti-Semitism here, it isn’t just out of tribal loyalty; it is also because the hatred being directed at Jews and the Jewish state is a precursor to a wider assault on the West. I have seen the front line first-hand, and I can tell you, it is moving closer to home.

And yet, British politicians are either totally unable or unwilling to contend with this reality. Westminster seems paralysed by a fear of domestic Islamic voting blocs and a loud, radicalised middle class. We have raised a generation of ‘anti-imperialist’ activists who view their own country as a racist, illegitimate entity that they would refuse to fight for. For members of this young, comfortable class, Israel is the ultimate villain because it represents everything they have been taught to loathe: national pride, borders and a willingness to fight for their own survival.

This weakness is mirrored in our crumbling hard power. Britain’s armed forces are at their smallest since the Napoleonic era. In the absence of the ability to deter threats, we seek instead to placate. We lecture Israel on ‘restraint’ because we no longer have the stomach for the reality of defence. British politicians parrot that ‘Israel has a right to exist’ while at the same time pursuing policies that directly threaten that existence. This has emboldened a growing anti-Zionist chorus in public life, including MPs, Green Party candidates and university lecturers who have moved beyond legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and settler violence to denying Israel’s very right to nationhood. By tolerating this rhetoric, we are legitimising an ideology that views the entire Western order as something to be torn down.

As Israel celebrates 78 years of defiance, Britain needs to make a choice: we can continue to indulge the ‘anti-colonial’ fantasies of our radicalised youth, as well as the Islamist sectarianism that undermines our national security, or we can recognise Israel for what it is: an essential security asset. It is time to stop treating our allies like enemies and our enemies like partners. The survival of the West may well depend on it.

The Gulf Learns What It's Like to Be Israel

Forty days of war following the U.S. and Israel's joint campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran are reshaping the Middle East and its alliances. Countries across the Gulf region now see what it has been like to live in Israel in recent decades, as rockets, missiles and drones have struck civilian population centers.

For decades, Israelis endured attacks on their cities from Iran and its proxies. Much of the world treated those attacks as background noise, or something to rationalize or applaud. In the recent conflict, Israel absorbed wave after wave of Iranian ballistic missile fire. Beersheba, Haifa, Jerusalem, Nahariya, Arad and Tel Aviv all took hits. At the same time, outrage barely registers across the U.S. and Europe over Iran's targeting of civilians and infrastructure, both in Israel and across the region.

Unlike in Israel, homes and offices in parts of the Gulf lack hardened bomb shelters, leaving civilians more exposed. The same holds true for Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman. None of these states are parties to the conflict. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps struck vital infrastructure, including oil facilities and desalination plants. The expectation of safety across many of these nations, once taken for granted, no longer holds. Countries that once viewed Israel's security challenges from a distance now confront them directly.

When Israel comes under fire, the international reaction arrives late - diluted by equivocation - or not at all. This time, the missiles have not fallen on Israel alone. Yet where is the outrage? Where are the emergency sessions? Where is the Arab League? Where is the Organization of Islamic Cooperation? The UN Security Council cannot pass a resolution brought by Bahrain and other Gulf states calling for condemnation and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

This moment tests whether targeting civilians is truly unacceptable or only unacceptable when it is convenient to say so. If attacks of this scale, across this many countries, fail to produce clarity, then the language of international norms becomes performance. Silence is not neutrality. It is acquiescence. When aggression meets no consequence, it expands.

Iran War Sent Shock Waves through Asia

The impact of the war in Iran has hit Asia harder and faster than expected. The Asia-Pacific region relies more heavily on Middle Eastern energy imports than almost anywhere else in the world. Even before the war started on Feb. 28, Asia's energy capacity was falling short of demand. In interviews, farmers in Vietnam, laborers in India, innkeepers in Sri Lanka, drivers in the Philippines, and executives in Hong Kong and Singapore all sounded worried.

Carriers flying through the Middle East, where 24 million migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia are employed, suspended trips to Dubai and other Gulf hubs right away. With jet fuel nearly doubling in price and with its availability threatened, airlines are slashing many more routes indefinitely. Qantas, Air New Zealand, Lion Air of Indonesia, VietJet, AirAsia, Air India, Cathay Pacific and Batik Air of Malaysia are cutting service.

Copper and nickel production rely on natural gas and sulfur, a fossil fuel byproduct. Both are in short supply, forcing several Indonesian nickel processors to reduce output. Polyester and nylon are also derived from petroleum. In the sewing hubs of Bangladesh, severe disruptions to production and shipment schedules have become common. Prices have soared for helium, a gas byproduct used for semiconductors, and some Asian chipmakers are slowing production.

Without enough petrochemicals to make plastic packaging, fewer Korean beauty products are heading to stores. A lack of fertilizer is threatening rice crops in Vietnam. Cattle farmers in Australia are warning of a meat shortage because of idled slaughterhouses and truckers.

Twenty-five years ago I first wrote an essay called "Proud to be a Zionist." I return to it every Yom Ha'atzmaut, updating it for the year that passed. This year I want to step back from the news cycle and say something more fundamental — something that explains not just why I am proud to be a Zionist today, but why Zionism is, at its core, one of the most morally serious ideas in the modern world.

It begins with memory. Jewish memory, specifically, is unlike anyone else's.

Most people live in a relatively short now — the span of their own experience, maybe their parents', maybe a grandparent's stories fading at the edges. The world before they were born is abstract, academic, other people's business. But Jews do not experience history that way. We carry it. The destruction of the First Temple is not an event in a textbook; it is a fast we keep in the summer, a corner of our homes left unfinished, a broken glass at a wedding. The exile in Babylon lives in our Psalms. The dazzling intellectual flowering of the Talmudists — men reasoning through every dimension of human obligation across centuries and continents — is still the living framework through which observant Jews think. The Crusades, the expulsions, the Inquisition, the pogroms: these are not medieval curiosities but family stories, preserved in liturgy, in communal trauma, in the specific geography of where our ancestors ended up after each wave of violence pushed them somewhere new.

And then the modern world confirmed everything the long memory had taught. The Holocaust was not a rupture in history. It was the culmination of a pattern that any Jew paying attention could have recognized, and that many did recognize — including Theodor Herzl, who watched the Dreyfus Affair and understood, decades before the gas chambers, that Jewish powerlessness was an existential problem, not merely a social inconvenience.

Our long memory also carries the lesson of what dependence on others costs. "Put not your trust in princes" is not paranoia — it is the condensed wisdom of three thousand years of experience with princes. We have lived among peoples who were genuinely hospitable, and we are grateful. But the same memory that preserves the hospitality also preserves the pattern: that goodwill is not a guarantee, that conditions change, and that Jews, when the politics of a given moment required a scapegoat, were reliably available.

We did not reason our way to this understanding. We bled our way to it.

This is why Zionism is a profoundly moral idea, grounded in real knowledge of the world. It arose from a people that understood — from within living memory, not from books — what persecution looked like, what displacement felt like, what it meant to be at the mercy of governments that had decided Jews were a problem to be managed or eliminated. And it proposed a solution that the same memory validated: the Jews needed their own land, their own army, their own capacity to act in their own defense rather than to petition, negotiate, or mourn.

Israel is not a new chapter in Jewish history. It is a continuous one — another entry in the long record, as the Temples and the Exile and the Talmud are entries, each shaped by the ones that came before. The miracles that have preserved us from extinction across the millennia are the same kind of miracle that has preserved a small, isolated state against enemies who have never stopped trying to destroy it. We recognize the pattern because we have seen it before.

And what do we see today? Jews being physically attacked in New York, London, Paris, and Melbourne. Jewish institutions maintained behind security that no other community treats as routine. On university campuses, organized campaigns of exclusion and intimidation against Jewish students. The language has been updated — "Zionist" has replaced older slurs, "colonialism" has replaced older charges — but the structure of the hatred is recognizable to anyone who knows what European Jews were reporting in the 1930s, when the dangers of Nazism were apparent and the world was composing careful statements of concern. The Holocaust happened without Hitler worrying about world opinion. We remember.

Golda Meir said it plainly: if we have to choose between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we'll choose the second option, thank you. The contemporary progressive consensus — in which victimhood is righteousness, in which absorbing violence without response reads as moral virtue — is precisely inverted from what Jewish history teaches. We tried the path of suffering and hoping for sympathy. We know what it produced. "Never again" is not just a slogan.

Israel means it. It does not sit at the table of nations hoping to be treated with generosity. It acts on the understanding, purchased over centuries, that the only reliable guarantor of Jewish survival is Jewish power exercised with Jewish responsibility. There is nothing more moral than a people that knows, from its own memory, exactly what defenselessness costs — and refuses to be defenseless again.

The word "Zionist" is currently used as a slur, including by people who claim to be moderates. This tells us something about them, and nothing about us. Zionism means that Jewish lives are worth defending. It means that the lessons of history have been acted upon rather than merely commemorated. It means that Israel — messy, magnificent, maddening Israel, the same Israel that feels like home when I visit — is the living proof that the Jewish story did not end with any of the many catastrophes that were supposed to end it.

Our memory is long enough to know what we almost lost. It is also long enough to recognize what we have.

The word "Zionist" is a compliment. It has always been. And to the non-Jews who see clearly what is at stake and stand with us anyway — you are practicing something genuinely righteous, and we see you.

Am Yisrael Chai.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Springer Nature has published a second edition of Islamophobia and Psychiatry, billing it as an expert clinical resource for physicians, counselors, and social workers. Chapter 24, authored by Samah Jabr (George Washington University School of Medicine), Sarah Mohr (Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley), and Elizabeth Berger (Alkaram Institute, Chicago), is titled "Islamophobia, Genocide, and Mental Health: A Palestinian Perspective on Collective Trauma."

A reader opening a psychiatry textbook expecting clinical analysis will find something rather different: a political manifesto that treats its most contested claims as established baselines, then builds a mental health framework on top of them.

The authors say at the outset:

[T]he state of Israel has from its outset regarded the Palestinian people as a group—as Muslim people—with an overall aim of assigning to them a disenfranchised and disempowered position relative to Jewish people. This political position is known by its supporters as well as by its opponents as Zionism.

They are saying that this is how Zionists define themselves - as having a primary aim of Jewish superiority over Palestinians. The fact that no Zionist actually thinks this way isn't important. It's only a paper in a respected journal, why bother checking facts?

The chapter's fundamental thesis is that Palestinian mental health suffers because Israel inflicts deliberate, genocidal harm. Every psychiatric symptom, every dimension of Palestinian psychological distress, traces back to Israeli policy. This is not presented as a hypothesis to be tested — it is declared as the premise from which clinical analysis proceeds.

There is a simple empirical test for this thesis: see if Palestinians outside the territories also have mental health issues that cannot be attributed to Israel.

There are in fact plenty of studies about that. Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan — far from Israeli military operations, outside Israeli jurisdiction, living under the governance of Arab host states — suffer severe and well-documented mental health crises. In Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Médecins Sans Frontières found that depression affects nearly one-third of patients, with others presenting with anxiety (22%), psychosis (14%), and bipolar disorders (10%). A Royal College of Psychiatrists essay examining Palestinian refugees in Jordan's Baqa'a camp — the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world, home to 104,000 people — found that all 16 medical professionals interviewed acknowledged high prevalence of mental illness in the refugee population, with estimates ranging from 20 to 50%, and some participants placing it as high as 75%. The drivers identified were poverty, overcrowding, stigma, gender-based violence, and the grinding hopelessness of camp life without prospect of legal integration into Jordanian society. Israel does not appear in the causal chain, because Israel is not present in Jordan.

Do the authors care about the source of mental health problems for all Palestinians, or just the ones that they can claim are suffering from "apartheid"? We have the answer.

The chapter's inventory of claims accepted as clinical fact is worth laying out directly, because the academic packaging obscures how unargued they are.

The authors declare "the genocidal conduct of Israel" as their working premise, citing Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese's March 2024 report as the evidentiary foundation. Albanese is a political appointee of the UN Human Rights Council — the same body that has never once condemned Hamas — and her document is advocacy, not peer-reviewed research. From there, Israel's "overall epistemic of Western European colonialism, racism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism" is offered as description rather than contested theory. Zionism, they write, induced Jewish communities "to form a kind of fifth column within the Middle East." The Holocaust "lent surface credibility to the Zionist political position" — six million murdered Jews are reframed as useful propaganda for Jewish nationalism.

On territorial ambitions, the authors assert that Israel's 2018 Nation-State Law reflects "political ambitions of Israel for sovereignty over the whole of former Mandatory Palestine." Israel's 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza — evacuating every settlement and soldier from territory the authors claim Israel seeks to hold forever — goes unmentioned. So is the withdrawal from Area A to give Palestinians, for the first time in their history, self-rule. Seems strange for the rapacious ever-expanding state they describe.

On apartheid, the chapter describes "the massive Israeli apartheid system which denied basic human rights to Palestinians." Arab citizens of Israel vote, serve in the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court, and practice medicine in Israeli hospitals. The comparison to South African apartheid is asserted; it is not argued.

The Islamophobia claim is the most structurally bizarre. The authors declare that "Islamophobia is both a weaponized major export of the state of Israel and a plank in the larger longstanding defense of the dehumanization and violence which typically characterize dominating oppressive systems." Israel — nine million people, a country smaller than New Jersey — is the primary global engine of anti-Muslim prejudice. The mechanism by which it exports this prejudice to Hindu nationalists in India, Serbian paramilitaries in the 1990s, or the architects of the Spanish Inquisition is never explained, because no such mechanism exists. Islamophobia long predates Israel and flourishes in regions with zero Israeli cultural footprint.

Then there is the pre-Israel history, where the revisionism becomes almost comedic. The authors describe Israel as having "rejected the previous model of religious and ethnic pluralism which had operated there for centuries." Yes, Israel defining itself as a Jewish state that gives equal rights to non-Jews is a Jewish supremacist state, while the Ottoman Empire - whose sultan was also the caliph, and which used separate legal systems for Muslims and Jews and Christians, was the model of pluralism.

Springer Nature's imprint on this chapter tells every clinician, librarian, and medical student who encounters it that what they're reading is science. The damage from that signal is harder to undo than anything in the text itself.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

04/20 Links Pt2: From grief to action: Ensuring the sacrifices of Israel’s fallen are not in vain; Full 60 Minutes interview with Rachel Goldberg-Polin; Boy George defends Eurovision participation

From Ian: JPost Editorial: From grief to action: Ensuring the sacrifices of Israel’s fallen are not in vain

Memory is a deeply entrenched concept within Israeli society.

Remembrance Day for the Fallen of Israel’s Wars and Victims of Terrorism, which will be marked nationwide on Monday evening, is filled with promises that the fallen will not be forgotten.

Over the past year, 170 soldiers have been killed across multiple fronts, including 15 soldiers and reservists killed in southern Lebanon since fighting resumed on March 2. Fifty-four disabled veterans have died from complications linked to wounds sustained during their service.

Behind these numbers are 7,165 bereaved relatives who have grieved and mourned for their fallen father, mother, son, daughter, or sibling.

The annual transition from the somber ceremonies to the joy of Israel’s Independence Day celebrations serves as a reminder of a difficult question we as Israelis must ask ourselves every year: What can we do to ensure that the sacrifices made by our soldiers were not in vain?

On Sunday morning, Israelis gathered outside the homes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other government ministers for an impromptu ceremony honoring our fallen heroes.

After observing a minute of silence, the gatherings turned into a public demand: A call for a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding October 7. A direct message from the Israeli public

Their message was direct and unambiguous: “The blood of our loved ones cries out from the ground and demands truthful answers.”

This demand, rooted in grief, is sustained by a real fear among society that, without accountability by the political and military echelon, the failures of the past will continue to manifest themselves in the blood of Israelis being shed.

The question facing Israel is not only how to respond to the current threats, but whether it can alter the trajectory that keeps producing them.

Israelis have shown unprecedented levels of resilience since October 7, 2023. When Hamas invaded southern Israel and the IDF was nowhere to be found, citizens mobilized. When entire neighborhoods, towns, and kibbutzim were destroyed, their residents came back to rebuild them from the ruins. In the North and South alike, Israelis have accepted life under daily fire.

This resilience cannot be taken for granted.

‘To cover our ears to one cry is to silence them all,’ Kaploun says at concentration camp site in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Yehuda Kaploun, a rabbi and U.S. State Department special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, spoke at the annual Donja Gradina commemoration hosted in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the site of the Jasenovac concentration camp.

The Croatian regime killed between 77,000 and 99,000 people at Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“To cover our ears to one cry is to silence them all,” Kaploun said at the ceremony. “Whether it is denying the Holocaust, any genocide or any atrocity, any attempt to rewrite the historical record is an insult to the victims at Jasenovac and an insult to any victim of the atrocities.”

That is why U.S. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio “have been clear: there can be no compromise with evil, and there can be no compromising the truth,” Kaploun said. “From standing with Jewish communities to fighting today’s axis of evil, we have made clear that hatred has no place in a civilized society.”

“As antisemitism surges globally, we have no choice but to remember,” he added. “Together, we must educate about the past, and learn from the past, to protect the living.  We must commit to fighting hatred wherever and whenever we see it, and we must build a better world for us all.”

Emir Suljagić, head of the Srebrenica Memorial Center, stated that he was “deeply moved” by Kaploun’s speech.

“Mr. Kaploun showed rare integrity and honesty in confronting contemporary genocide denial alongside Holocaust denial and antisemitism. He did not shy away from condemning all forms of historical revisionism and genocide denial,” Suljagić said. “That he said all of this in Jasenovac—a place that is hallowed ground for Jews—only underscores the weight of his words. His willingness to reach across historical and religious divides is a testament to his character and openness.”

04/20 Links Pt1: Ruthie Blum: Trump cards; PA Has Paid Convicted Terrorists Released in Gaza Deal; England’s Jews are being terrorised, and the left is silent

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Trump cards

This clash of narratives would be less troubling if it were merely rhetorical. But it goes to the heart of how the Islamic Republic wages war and, crucially, how it and the rest of the jihadist world try to avoid losing one.

Militarily, the imbalance is obvious. The United States possesses overwhelming superiority in every realm other than that of double-speak and propaganda-spreading.

Tehran’s advantage, like that of its proxies, has always existed in the ability to manipulate perception, to blur lines between perpetrator and victim and to exploit the West’s chronic susceptibility to wishful thinking. It understands that battles are not fought solely with planes and tanks, but by way of story lines that seep into public consciousness. It’s an arena in which jihadists are champions. One need look no further than the halls of Harvard.

While aware of this phenomenon, Trump doesn’t grasp the depths of Islamist religious ideology, which is far harder to confront than armies and navies. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that nobody, least of all Trump, likes being played for a fool. So, Iran is pushing its luck and not merely through bluster. Indeed, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired on two Indian ships in the Strait of Hormuz on April 18.

This is despite the fast-approaching end to the two-week ceasefire. The deadline for Tehran to agree to U.S. conditions for a deal is April 22.

Though Trump’s been vague about whether he means to extend the truce, he’s not likely to be flexible at this point.

During a joint press conference on April 16 with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth issued a warning to Tehran, referring to the U.S. blockade as the “polite way this can go.”

Addressing the Islamic Republic, he said, “You like to say publicly ... that you control the Strait of Hormuz. But you don’t have a navy or real domain awareness. You can’t control anything. To be clear: Threatening to shoot missiles and drones at commercial ships that are lawfully transiting international waters—that is not control. That’s piracy. That’s terrorism.”

He continued, “The United States Navy controls the traffic going in and out of the strait, because we have real assets and real capabilities. ... The math is clear. We’re using 10% of the world’s most powerful navy, and you have 0% of your navy. That’s real control, and we have a long track record of dealing with pirates and terrorists. But there is an alternative. As our negotiators have said, you, Iran, can choose a prosperous future, a golden bridge. And we hope that you do for the people of Iran. ... But if Iran chooses poorly, then they will have a blockade and bombs dropping on infrastructure, power and energy.”

Well, the IRGC certainly hasn’t been opting for the outcome desired by Washington, Jerusalem or the Iranian people. Trump, therefore, must stick to his literal and figurative guns.

After all, the last thing he would want is for the United States to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Palestinian Authority Has Paid Convicted Terrorists Released as Part of Gaza Ceasefire Deal, State Department Tells Congress

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has paid salaries to convicted terrorists Israel released from its prisons as part of its October 2025 ceasefire agreement with Hamas, the State Department formally determined in a non-public report to Congress obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The State Department's mandatory report—compiled between August 2025 and January 2026—marks the first U.S. government determination that the PA has "provided payments to convicted terrorists released from Israeli prisons in October 2025 under President Trump's 20-point peace plan."

The notice to Congress confirms a similar conclusion the State Department made in January, when it noted that, even though PA president Mahmoud Abbas claimed in 2025 that he had scrapped the so-called pay-to-slay program, his government had still doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to terrorists and their families. As the Free Beacon reported in February, the PA transitioned last year to concealing those payments from Western governments by funneling them through a newly established welfare authority. The most recent State Department report confirms that a portion of those funds has gone to the terrorists released in October.

The State Department report comes about six months after the beginning of President Donald Trump's Gaza ceasefire, which included a commitment from Abbas that the PA would undertake a series of reforms, including ending pay-to-slay. The notice to Congress demonstrates that he and his government have not followed through in any meaningful way.

The PA appears to have gone further since the end of the period covered in the State Department report. Abbas's Fatah party "announced that terrorists who have been imprisoned for more than 20 years will be granted leadership positions," according to the Palestinian Media Watch research group. Fatah Revolutionary Council member Tayseer Nasrallah said in a televised interview in March that these terrorists will serve as members in the upcoming Eighth Fatah Conference, the forum at which the PA sets government policy.

The State Department report includes other examples of the PA violating the terms of its agreements with the United States. The PA "incited and glorified violence, including on social media and media outlets," and "supported terrorism via educational materials and summer camps" that teach children jihadist ideologies, the notice states.

Khaled Abu Toameh: For the Leadership in Iran, Gaza and Beirut, What Is the Only Important Outcome?

[The US president's negotiations and ceasefires] are viewed by Tehran, Gaza and Beirut as infidels trying to tell Muslims what to do. For them, such a situation is unimaginable, unacceptable, and cannot be allowed to stand.

To Iran's current leaders, whoever they are, if Trump carries out his threat to bomb the country's bridges and power plants on Wednesday, so be it. In the view of Iran's theocratic regime, none of that is of any importance so long as it survives, in any form, to be able to continue waging jihad (holy war) against its people, its neighbors and the West.

A piece of paper signed with infidels at the point of a gun is, in their eyes, nothing more than a Western fantasy.

They see anything short of the total destruction of their entire power base as a total victory.

That is why all three regimes – the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon – need to be totally dismantled if there is to be any real, permanent change of conduct in the Middle East.

The message should by now be clear: Iran's regime, Hamas and Hezbollah have no intention of laying down their arms, no interest in compromise, and no respect for Trump and his policies. In fact, they are telling Trump: Your initiatives and efforts are irrelevant.

The intractability of their leaders also aligns with their long-term ideological objective of sustaining a permanent conflict with Israel and the West.

Even if the Iranian regime is no longer able to continue funding, arming, and guiding its proxies, all will remain committed to armed struggle until "victory."

"Victory," in their terms, means first the destruction of Israel ("the Little Satan"), then taking over their oil-rich neighbors, and eventually the destruction of Europe and the United States ("the Great Satan").

So long as the Iranian regime – or Hamas or Hezbollah -- is able to survive, there will be no disarmament, no moderation, and no peace.

The repeated refusals by Iran's regime, Hamas and Hezbollah expose the failure of any policy built on engagement, incentives, or accommodation.

These terror entities do not interpret diplomatic overtures, off-ramps and ceasefires as goodwill. They view them instead as weakness.

They are right. It is, indeed, the West's fault that it allows itself to be exploited. The West not only gives these leaders time to rearm and rebuild, but worse, it grants them legitimacy and power bases throughout Europe and the United States. No one in the West even asks them to concede anything of substance.

Until there is a better understanding by the West of what jihad actually is -- and the uncompromising determination behind it -- every negotiation, threat and ceasefire will only lead to more terrorism and the next war.

Part 2 of my book Reclaiming the Covenant: The Blueprint and the Builders (excerpt)

Here is the beginning of Part 2 of my upcoming book ion America at 250, Reclaiming the Covenant.

The full chapters are being published on my Substack for paid subscribers, and if you are are a subscriber through this blog, PayPal, Patreon or Ko-Fi, email me and I will give you a gift subscription on Substack so you can read the whole book as it comes out.

The Blueprint and the Builders

In the summer of 1776, the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams — three of the five who had drafted the Declaration — to a committee to design a seal for the new United States. Adams reached for classical antiquity: Hercules choosing between Virtue and Sloth. Franklin and Jefferson both reached for the Exodus. Franklin's handwritten proposal described Moses standing on the shore, hand extended over the Red Sea, Pharaoh in his chariot overwhelmed by the returning waters, rays from a pillar of fire in the clouds reaching Moses "to express that he acts by Command of the Deity," with the motto "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God." Jefferson's written submission was essentially Franklin's design with light edits; in committee discussion he also proposed the Israelites in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. The committee adopted Franklin's Moses design for one side of the seal, with Jefferson drafting the August 20 report. Congress tabled it. Only the motto "E Pluribus Unum" — originally Du Simitière's — survived to the final 1782 seal.

The Exodus story encodes a specific answer to the hardest problem in political founding: how do you bind a diverse collection of people together in a way they cannot simply think their way out of? Blood ties do it, but they exclude by definition. Conquest does it, but it generates permanent resentment. Rational argument does it temporarily, until someone finds a better argument. The covenant at Sinai did something different — it made obligation constitutive of identity. The people who accepted it became something they had not been before. You could not exit the covenant without ceasing to be what the covenant had made you, which is a fundamentally different relationship to obligation than any contract or philosophical argument can create. Israel’s greatest king, David, was descended from Ruth, a Moabite who accepted the covenant — membership defined by acceptance, not ancestry, from the beginning.

But Sinai immediately posed the question the founders would later face in Philadelphia: how much uniformity does a covenant require, and how much difference can it tolerate? The twelve tribes that accepted the covenant at Sinai were culturally different. They had distinct territories, distinct economies, distinct characters — the tribe of Judah was not the tribe of Dan, and the tribe of Levi, scattered among the others as a priestly caste with no territorial holding, was different from both. What they shared was the covenant’s common floor: a body of law that applied to all, common national obligations (defense, the Temple service, the pilgrimage festivals), and the dual membership principle — a member of the tribe of Judah was simultaneously of Judah and of Israel, and neither membership cancelled the other.

Above that floor, the tribes governed themselves. The Torah legislated the common minimum; the silence above it belonged to the constituent parts. The leaders of Manasseh petitioned Moses for an inheritance rule that would protect tribal territory when daughters inherited land — and got it, a tribal policy modification within the national covenant’s framework. Centuries later, the Talmud records that marriage customs in Judah and Galilee differed in legally consequential ways, both fully within halacha, neither overriding it. A seafaring tribe and a ranching tribe developed different commercial norms for the same reason Delaware and Texas have different corporate and oil law: the national covenant sets the floor, and the silence above it belongs to the people whose lives actually posed the problems. The word the founders would later use for this structure derives from the Latin foedus — covenant. When they called their system “federal,” they were using, whether they knew it or not, the vocabulary of the model they were recovering.

This is the balance the covenant must maintain: enough unity to hold together, enough pluralism to stay legitimate. It is harder to maintain than it sounds, because the pressures run in both directions simultaneously. The covenant can fail by imposing too much uniformity — absorbing the constituent parts into a single mandatory identity, which destroys the pluralism that makes membership voluntary and meaningful. It can equally fail by tolerating too much fragmentation — allowing the shared floor to erode, the dual-membership principle to dissolve, the common obligations to go unmet. Both failures are real. The Hebrew political tradition experienced both.

The Hebrew legal tradition’s influence on the founders was not merely inspirational — it was jurisprudential.

John Selden (1584–1654) was simultaneously the greatest Hebraist of his century and the most important constitutional lawyer of his generation. He argued against the Crown in the Ship Money cases, helped draft the Petition of Right, and first articulated parliamentary sovereignty in terms English constitutional law still uses. He also spent decades producing the most systematic treatment of Hebrew law available in the European scholarly tradition — De Jure Naturali et Gentium Juxta Disciplinam Ebraeorum — arguing that the Noahide laws, the Hebrew legal tradition’s account of what any person owes to any other person prior to any particular covenant, constituted the foundation of universal natural law. What you owe to strangers — the floor of obligation that exists before any specific agreement, any citizenship, any tribal membership — had a Hebrew jurisprudential source, and Selden translated it into the vocabulary of English constitutional argument.

Locke read Selden carefully; the reading notebooks document it. Jefferson and Madison read Locke. The chain from Hebrew jurisprudence to the Declaration’s “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” runs through Selden’s legal scholarship, not just through the founders’ biblical literacy. The dignity floor that the American covenant will not breach — the claim that every person possesses inherent worth that no majority can revoke — has a genealogy that is simultaneously theological and jurisprudential, and Selden is the point where those two strands fuse into constitutional argument.

The Puritan founders understood the covenantal structure directly, a century and a half before Philadelphia. John Winthrop, aboard the Arbella in 1630, described the Massachusetts Bay Colony in entirely covenantal terms: “We are entered into covenant with Him for this work.” He closed his sermon by quoting Moses’s last speech to Israel before they entered the Promised Land — Deuteronomy 30: “I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse; therefore choose life.” The surrounding verses make the passage’s significance explicit: the covenant, Moses says, is not in heaven and not across the sea — it is in your mouth and in your heart, to do it. The covenant does not require superhuman effort or ongoing divine enforcement. It requires acceptance, and then action, and then acceptance again. Winthrop chose this passage deliberately: the structure works through what you become when you accept it, not through what punishes you if you don’t.

The Liberty Bell encodes the same logic in metal. The Pennsylvania Assembly chose its inscription in 1751, twenty-five years before independence: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” — Leviticus 25:10, the Jubilee passage, mandating the periodic restoration of freedom as a structural legal obligation. Exodus tells you how a people is freed; Leviticus tells you how a free people maintains its freedom. The inscription is a constitutional provision, not a sentiment: liberty requires institutional maintenance, it erodes without active renewal, and the law’s job is to restore it when circumstances have undermined it. The founders who chose that verse were reading the legislative books of Hebrew scripture, not just the liberation narrative.

The Hebrew model that Franklin and Jefferson reached for was not, then, a story of success. It was a story of a structural problem brilliantly solved and then, slowly, disastrously mismanaged.

....

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Some Academia Wake Up to the Antisemitism They Were Trained to Avoid

H-Judaic, the main scholarly network for Jewish studies, just announced the inaugural meeting of a new Scholarly Network for the Study of Muslim Antisemitism, convening May 4 on Zoom and led by FIU professor Iqbal Akhtar. The framing is careful — "the intersection of antisemitism and Islamic contexts," an agenda built around "research mapping" and "identifying gaps." Read past the academic register, though, and something remarkable is happening: a mainstream scholarly network is forming around a subject the academy has spent decades pretending did not exist as a distinct category worth studying.

This is part of a larger shift. Andrew Pessin's Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism launched in late 2025 with a seven-webinar lecture series, a roster that has grown past 180 scholars, and a multi-volume foundational book project now soliciting contributions. Pessin's diagnosis is blunt — antizionism is "the dominant ideology in the academy," and serious scholarship on it has been corrupted to the point that the standards themselves need to be rebuilt. ICSA's explicit model is that antizionism has its own history, internal logic, tactics, and archive, and that these need to be mapped with the same rigor that historians of antisemitism have applied to other variants. The Movement Against Antizionism, Stop Antizionism, and a growing number of faculty resilience groups are pulling in the same direction.

What makes the Scholarly Network for the Study of Muslim Antisemitism interesting is the piece of the puzzle it addresses. Surveys by the ADL and others have consistently shown that antisemitic attitudes in Muslim-majority countries run at extraordinary levels — often two to four times higher than in Western populations — and the diaspora communities carry measurable portions of that freight with them. Everyone in the field knows this. Almost nobody in the field will say it on the record, because the topic sits directly on top of the third rail of Western academic life: anything that could be framed as Islamophobia ends careers, and the taxonomy of acceptable bigotries has long placed Muslims in the protected column and Jews in the privileged one. The result has been a strange silence in which French authorities have scrubbed the Muslim identity of attackers from public descriptions of antisemitic assaults, and Arab antisemitism has been a hate that scholars cannot bring themselves to name even as they catalogue every other variant.

The silence is not only political cowardice; it is methodologically disastrous. Antisemitism is a shape-shifter, and its different hosts produce different pathologies. Christian supersessionism, Enlightenment racial theory, Soviet anti-cosmopolitanism, Black Hebrew Israelite replacement theology, Nation of Islam conspiracism, and the theologically grounded Jew-hatred embedded in significant strands of Islamic tradition each have their own origin, internal grammar, and relationship to Zionism as both provocation and response. Treating them as a single undifferentiated "rising antisemitism" produces analysis that cannot predict anything and interventions that cannot work. You cannot counter a theological claim with a civil rights framework, and you cannot counter a conspiracy theory with sensitivity training. The field has been systematically blurring these categories for so long that treating Muslim antisemitism as its own object of study is, in 2026, a minor scholarly revolution.

The detail that makes this particular initiative unusual is that Akhtar is Muslim. He founded Miami Interfaith after October 7 to build Jewish-Muslim dialogue in South Florida, hosts the Interfaiths podcast with frequent Jewish guests, and studied Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern topics as an undergraduate. A Jewish scholar announcing a network for the study of Muslim antisemitism would be dismissed in much of the academy as a polemicist before the Zoom link went out. A Muslim scholar announcing the same network, from inside a Muslim Studies center, creates space that did not exist the week before.

Whether the network produces serious scholarship or whether it gets captured and defanged by the surrounding disciplinary pressures is an open question. But the fact that these institutions are being founded at all — and that they are being founded simultaneously, across the Jewish/non-Jewish divide and across the antisemitism/antizionism distinction — suggests that a tipping point has been reached, even if it is only among a minority of scholars who have integrity.

As someone who has been writing about Muslim antisemitism for years, this is gratifying.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)