Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, December 03, 2025

Academics ignore their own ethical standards when it comes to Israeli Arabs

Academics in social sciences have long championed the principle that individuals and communities should be allowed to define their own identities. This is a cornerstone of modern sociological ethics.

In some cases, there are even legal standards.

In 1997, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget established clear federal standards for collecting data on race and ethnicity. These standards apply to all federally-funded research and state unequivocally:

"Respect for individual dignity should guide the processes and methods for collecting data on race and ethnicity; ideally, respondent self-identification should be facilitated to the greatest extent possible."

The standards continue: "Self-reporting or self-identification using two separate questions is the preferred method for collecting data on race and ethnicity."

These aren't aspirational goals. They're mandatory for federal research and have been adopted as policy by major academic journals. The Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), following Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) standards, requires that researchers:

"Authors should explain whether race and ethnicity were self-identified by study participants or identified by others, providing justification if self-identification was not used."

The rationale is clear. As PLOS Global Public Health notes: "Observer classification has potential harms such as misclassification, stigmatization, and perpetuating structural racism."

Yet in academic research, there is a glaring exception to this rule: Arab citizens of Israel. In this case, academics have systematically violated their own principles.

An analysis of academic literature published in Taylor & Francis journals reveals a striking disconnect between how Arab citizens of Israel identify themselves and how academics choose to label them. Here is the breakdown of the uses of these phrases in academic papers since 2019 from my own keyword searches (1,354 results, some might be duplicates from papers using different terms in the same paper.)

Palestinian terminology ("Palestinian citizens of Israel"/"Palestinians in Israel"): 40.8%
Arab identity terminology ("Israeli Arabs"/"Arabs in Israel"): 39.2%
Israeli citizenship terminology ("Arab Citizens of Israel"/"Arab Israelis"): 18.0%
Religious terminology ("Israeli Muslims"/"Muslim Israelis"): 1.9%

But this is way out of whack with how Arab Israelis define themselves!

While there are differences in research, most show roughly what this Tel Aviv University Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation report said in June as how Arabs in Israel see themselves.

Arab identity: 36.2%
Israeli citizenship: 30.3%
Religious affiliation: 21.4%
Palestinian identity: 9.7%

The numbers are damning. Academics use Palestinian identity terminology at 4.2 times the rate at which the actual population self-identifies that way. Meanwhile, Israeli citizenship identity—the second-most common form of self-identification at 30.3%—is significantly underrepresented in academic literature at only 18.0%.

I've seen numbers from 3% to 15% for Arab Israelis identifying as Palestinians but no matter which statistic you choose, describing them as "Palestinians" is inaccurate and a blatant violation of social science standards.

Even more egregiously, religious identity, which 21.4% of Arab Israelis say is their primary identity component, receives only 1.9% representation in academic terminology. This is an eleven-fold underrepresentation of how more than one-fifth of the population sees themselves.

The irony here is rich. These are the same academics who would be horrified at misgendering someone or using racial terminology that a community rejects. They are the first to say that imposing external identity categories on people is a form of epistemic violence.

Progressive academics have spent decades rightfully criticizing how marginalized communities have been labeled by outsiders rather than being allowed to define themselves. They've fought against colonial impositions of identity, against medicalization of non-conforming identities, against bureaucratic categorizations that erase people's self-understanding.

But when it comes to Arab citizens of Israel, all these principles evaporate.

Why? Because the Palestinian national identity narrative serves a particular political agenda, and that agenda takes precedence over the community's actual self-understanding.

This isn't just about word choice. It reflects a deeper academic malpractice: the construction of a Palestinian national consciousness narrative within Israel that doesn't reflect the lived reality of the majority of the population being studied.

Only 9.7% of Arab Israelis say Palestinian identity is the most important component of their personal identity. Yet 40.8% of academic articles impose this identity on the entire population. This is not description - it's prescription. It's not research - it's activism masquerading as scholarship.

The data reveals something even more troubling: academics are not just slightly misaligned with the population they study. They are systematically constructing a narrative that inverts the actual priorities of that population. Israeli citizenship, which ranks second in self-identification, is deliberately minimized in academic discourse. Palestinian identity, which ranks dead last, is elevated to be the dominant frame.

This analysis reveals a fundamental crisis in academic integrity. Scholars who have built careers on respecting self-identification, who police language usage in every other context, who understand that naming is power—these same scholars are systematically imposing an identity framework on a population that has explicitly rejected it.

The evidence is clear. The numbers don't lie. Academics are using "Palestinian" to describe Arab citizens of Israel at 4.2 times the rate those citizens use it to describe themselves.

This is not research. This is ideological construction masquerading as social science.

And it's a violation of the field's own ethical standards.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

We last saw Kuwait's Al Rai newspaper columnist Sultan Ibrahim Al-Khalaf last summer when he denied the Holocaust.

Now he claims the American Jews reacted to Zohran Mamdani's election as mayor of New York City by launching a campaign of Islamophobia, "mocking Muslims and attacking Islam by spreading fabricated information about it, aimed at spreading hatred and incitement against Muslims.

But, he says, this sparked a very positive backlash:

But this campaign against Muslims had a positive side, as it was met with a counter-campaign against Jewish Zionist propaganda, especially on social media, the popular incubator of American public opinion, which exposed much of the Jewish culture established by Jewish rabbis, which is hostile to non-Jews, Muslims and Christians, considering them as non-human creatures created to serve the Jews.

Al-Rai is the most popular newspaper in Kuwait.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

12/02 Links Pt2: Ireland should venerate Chaim Herzog; FM Sa’ar to Irish ambassador: ‘You cannot deceive the world’; UK police used fake evidence to justify ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Let Anti-Semites Dig Themselves Out of Trouble

Chaim Herzog was also the father of current Israeli President Isaac Herzog. During the Gaza war, anti-Israel activists spurred on a campaign to get the Dublin city council to rename the park. The undisguised hatefulness of the petition inspired disgust even from Ireland’s prime minister. Amid the Jewish community’s uproar, a social media campaign to quash the name change from Irish Jewish activist Rachel Moiselle took off. Israel weighed in. Dublin backed off, pulling the petition at least for now.

It was a victory for the Jewish community’s determination to make its voice heard even amid the atmosphere of anti-Semitic intimidation prevailing in Ireland.

In other words, this was decidedly not what anti-Jewish activists wanted, in contrast to Aladwan’s case. Yet the reaction was the same. “The optics will appear to show these senior Irish politicians carrying out the instructions of the Israeli lobby, and it’s very hard to argue with a view when we see the actual result,” one council member said, according to JTA. Another added: “This was a full court press by the Zionist lobby, and they think they will win it. They will not win this.” A third: “I’m further convinced that whatever phone calls was made to our CEO and to other officials probably emanated from Israeli intelligence attached to the Israeli Defense Force.”

Should it matter to the Jewish community that pro-Palestinian Dubliners are angry about this result and claiming that it confirms the truth of popular anti-Semitic conspiracy theories?

This is a question American Jews were asking themselves during the uproar over remarks made by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: If Roberts was forced to resign, would that make it look like there really was a “venomous coalition” of “globalists” pulling the strings and setting their own rules?

Taken together, the three preceding examples give us the answer. The first and second cases tell us that anti-Semites will respond to any successful assertion of Jewish rights and dignity in identical ways, raising the specter of a powerful Jewish puppeteering cabal. The third case shows us that those inclined to scapegoat Jews or to paint them as disloyal will do so as a first, not as a last, line of defense. And no one who complained of Jewish influence will change their mind when the person under fire—in this case Roberts—suffers no professional consequences.

Anti-Semitism is a matryoshka doll of conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theories are famously resistant to facts that would otherwise undermine their animating assumptions. Jews should stand up for themselves because it’s the right thing to do. Conspiracy theorists deserve no veto power. It is not the Jewish community’s obligation to save anti-Semites from the consequences of their own actions.

Stephen Daisley: Ireland should venerate Chaim Herzog

Ireland is a case study in the futility of trying to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism. Discussions about Israel aren’t marked by criticism of the contemptible Netanyahu government nor philosophical dispute with the moral claims of Zionism. It’s unhinged fixation, righteous fury, and an invincible credulity towards even the most dubious accusations, provided the finger is being pointed Zionwards. Some of the discourse wouldn’t be out of place at Friday prayers in Tehran.

It’s wild. They’ve thrown off every yoke of state Catholicism except the keen interest in perfidis Judaeis. Israel is the ultimate malefactor of the Irish imagination, the bogeyman of Dublin politics and Dublin media, and a national myth posits the republic as a modern-day David taking on Goliath, when most Israelis would struggle to locate Ireland on a map and the rest think it’s still part of Britain. Mind you, the tendency of its activists and ideologues to declare themselves ‘Paddystinians’ makes sense. Palestine is the only occupation the Irish left shows an interest in anymore.

The thing is, though, there are about three Jews in all of Ireland. (Okay, two to three thousand.) It’s like being obsessed with the scourge of ninjas, dedicating your life to documenting the crimes of ninjas, convinced that ninjas control the world, organising boycotts of ninja-owned businesses, but you live in Sweden and there are no ninja-owned shops and not enough ninjas to fill a Volvo hatchback, let alone form a local chapter of the international ninja conspiracy.

Should Britain stage an intervention? Take Ireland out for a pint and subtly work anti-Semitism into the conversation? We’re not making any accusations, mate; we’re just wondering if everything’s okay at home. Wife all right? Kids doing well at school? You still handing out those Protocols of the Elders of Zion pamphlets down Grafton Street every Saturday? You know, maybe it’s time to move on because the Jews don’t actually run the world, the Mossad isn’t monitoring you, there’s no genocide in Gaza, and I’m almost certain the profits from Medjool dates don’t go directly to AIPAC.

Oh, and drop the Chaim Herzog thing. People are starting to talk. The fella was an Irish Jew who made history. A park is the least we can do.

JPost Editorial: The Jerusalem Post marks 93 years as a link to Israel and the Jewish world

Ninety-three years after its first issue, The Jerusalem Post is still, at heart, a letter from home for Jews and friends of Israel across the world.

What began in 1932 as The Palestine Post, a modest English-language paper printed in a small Jerusalem office, has grown into something far larger than its founders could have imagined: a global conversation, a daily heartbeat of the Jewish world.

In its early years, the paper served a small community of diplomats, journalists, and new immigrants who needed reliable news in English from Mandatory Palestine.

It reported on the struggles of a people seeking self-determination and on the painful battles that marked Israel’s birth. For those who arrived from London, New York, Johannesburg, or Melbourne, unfolding the paper was a way of understanding their new home.

After 1948, The Palestine Post became The Jerusalem Post, reflecting the transformation of the Yishuv into the sovereign State of Israel. That change of name signaled that the paper saw itself as an institution bound up with the story of the Jewish state.

Today, most of our readers are not in Israel at all. They are Jews and friends of Israel in Los Angeles and London, Paris and Panama, Johannesburg, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and small communities where there is no longer a robust local Jewish press.

For them, The Jerusalem Post has become not only an Israeli newspaper in English but a kind of global town square, a place where the arguments, anxieties, hopes, and achievements of the Jewish people are reported, debated, and preserved.

12/02 Links Pt1: Hamas is Failing to Rebuild Its Iron Rule; A Response to Ben Rhodes' New York Times Piece on Gaza; Islamic Socialism Takes on the West

From Ian:

Hamas is Failing to Rebuild Its Iron Rule

Why Hamas Can’t Rebuild Its Rule
Frozen funding, escalating extortion, and growing public scorn have pushed the group into a self-defeating spiral
Gaza watchers generally hold that the more time goes by, the more Hamas will be able to retrench and reestablish control in the western half of the Strip, from which Israel withdrew in October. They see a “Tale of Two Gazas,” in which an authoritarian Hamas statelet, west of the so-called yellow line that now divides the Strip, achieves dominance on par with the iron grip that communist East Germany had on its citizens during the Cold War.

This widespread view has frightened foreign governments who are being asked to contribute troops to an International Stabilization Force (ISF) for the territory. Their reluctance to commit soldiers may eventually strengthen calls within Israel to abrogate the October 10 ceasefire and try to finish off Hamas without a multilateral framework. But is the fear well-founded?

The armed group is indeed applying new levels of violence and intimidation in a bid for authority. In just the first days and weeks following the ceasefire, it murdered at least 80 alleged “collaborators” in ISIS-style public executions. It is premature, however, to view Hamas’s retrenchment as a foregone conclusion.

To establish a viable new regime, Hamas needs to achieve what Hezbollah did after the 2006 Second Lebanon War — namely, a massive commitment of assistance from a foreign patron to rebuild its destroyed territory. But the equivalent monies aren’t coming. As a result, Hamas must employ ever-increasing levels of brutality against its own civilians in order to extract funds. The heavy-handed measures it has taken are enraging civilians, most of whom already blame the armed group for triggering the destruction of their territory by launching the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that sparked the war.

The consequence, for Hamas, is a vicious cycle in which the more aggressively it tries to reassert its authority, the more it isolates itself from the population and even some of its own recruits.

Like what you’re reading? Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This predicament crystallized for Hamas on October 20, when White House advisor Jared Kushner told reporters that while the U.S. and its allies will be raising money for Gaza’s rehabilitation, “no reconstruction funds will be going into areas that Hamas controls.” Longtime Hamas supporters Qatar and Turkey, which the U.S. considers key players in post-war planning, appear to have fallen in line with Kushner’s position for now.

John Spencer: A Response to Ben Rhodes' New York Times Piece on Gaza

The New York Times Dec. 1 opinion piece, "This Is the Story of How the Democrats Blew It on Gaza," by Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under President Obama, is appalling for anyone who cares about the truth. This feature-length essay repeats misinformation, inserts falsehoods, and advances a moral narrative that bears no resemblance to the laws of war or the realities of modern conflict. If these arguments are taken seriously inside Washington, they threaten not only Israel's security but America's.

An explicit condition of the rules-based order since 1945 is that sovereign nations may defend themselves after an armed attack. It is the most basic tenet of the UN Charter. Israel did not choose this war. It was launched against Israel on Oct. 7 when Hamas killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 250. Any democratic state, including the U.S., would have responded with immediate and overwhelming military force to achieve their goals as quickly as possible. That is the standard the author refuses to apply to Israel.

Only the uninformed or the deeply biased believe Israel intentionally targets civilians. These accusations are false, and to pretend the facts are ambiguous is not analysis. It is distortion. The argument that President Biden gave Israel unconditional support is also false. The administration held up key arms shipments. Israeli soldiers were forced to adapt operations in real time because of delayed or restricted U.S. support.

The laws of war do not judge outcomes alone. They judge intent, precautions, proportionality, distinction, and military necessity. Israel has taken more measures to reduce civilian harm than any military in history and often put its own soldiers at greater risk to protect civilians.

The author also invokes the biggest lie of this war, the claim that Israel is committing genocide. There is no genocide in Gaza. Israel has no intent to destroy in whole or in part the civilian population of Gaza. It sought to destroy Hamas as a military and political organization while doing more to feed, house, vaccinate, provide medical care, and prevent harm to the civilian population than any nation in history.

Wanting to destroy your enemy is not genocide. It is war. War is not illegal, and in some cases it is necessary. Every nation, including the U.S., has faced the moral dilemma of civilian deaths in a legitimate war of self-defense. Nations must prioritize their own citizens and their own survival. That is a foundation of the laws of armed conflict. Supporting an ally in a lawful war of self-defense is not a betrayal of our values. It is an expression of them.

Islamic Socialism Takes on the West

When New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met President Trump at the White House in November, the cordial encounter between the self-described Muslim socialist and the former president puzzled many observers. How should Americans understand Mamdani’s blend of Islamic identity and Democratic Socialist activism? Is he, as Congresswoman Elise Stefanik claimed, a “jihadist,” or as Trump suggested, “rational”?

The answer lies in understanding a century-old ideological tradition that melds Islamic theology with socialist revolutionary theory in ways that produce unpredictable and often dangerous outcomes. This fusion operates according to a logic articulated by neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who argued for destroying the liberal democratic order by creating a “new sensibility”—one that would demolish existing social structures to create something unprecedented, unpredictable, and radically different from Western civilization’s foundations.

Islamic socialism is not merely an intellectual curiosity. It represents a systematic challenge to Western democratic values, one that emerged from the Bolshevik Revolution and continues to shape American politics today.

The Origins: Soviet Islamic Communism
Islamic socialism was born in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, when Vladimir Lenin successfully courted Muslim constituents of the Russian empire. Though their alliance may have been a marriage of convenience, both groups saw symmetry between their ideologies. For socialists, philosophy ruled, and the end goal was societal transformation. Muslims saw their faith similarly—as a comprehensive system for remaking society.

The Marxist dialectic promised that contradictions between Islam and socialism would resolve themselves over time through social discourse. Opposing ideas would clash, then synthesize into something new and unpredictable. This was not a bug but a feature of the ideology.

Two foundational theorists exemplified this synthesis: Azerbaijani Misaid Sultan Galiev and Muslim reformist Nariman Narimanov, both Shia Muslims. Narimanov depicted Lenin as a prophet and defender of the oppressed. In Soviet propaganda posters, the Muslim revolutionary communist appeared as an Orientalist hero wielding a sword and straddling a horse, combining spiritual and communist themes under slogans like “Gather in love! Under the light of the Red star!”

This Soviet Islamic communism became foundational for Third World Marxism and postcolonial thought, including the theoretical framework behind the Palestinian cause. Years before Frantz Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth, Soviet Muslim socialists were theorizing about the psychology of the oppressed and the necessity of revolutionary violence.

Thanks to you, Elder of Ziyon site continues to help Israel and the Jewish people.

This year has been particularly eventful. Besides the normal analysis, scoops and cartoons, I've been working on a unique initiative that is meant to attack antisemitism at its intellectual roots - the philosophies that either promote or tolerate antisemitism to begin with. The idea is so audacious that I am almost embarrassed to talk about it, but the point is to create an ethical system - and indeed, an entire secular philosophy - based on Jewish thinking but meant for everyone. I am calling it Derechology and I've been writing about it, but I am also working hard on a book to reach an audience beyond my blog.

I also created a Substack where the best EoZ and Derechology articles are being posted. I already have about a thousand followers there.

My X account continues to grow, with over 127,000 followers.

The best roundup of Israel-related news on the Internet can be found in the daily linkdumps. An my columnists continue to contribute wonderfully.

All of this takes lots of time and money. Columnists need to be paid, domain names and hosting space need to be paid for, research materials and computer hardware and subscriptions and cloud storage need to be purchased.

Please help keep EoZ the best place to see original Israel-related news and opinion.

You can donate via PayPal. Or you can send us an Amazon gift card (elder@elderofziyon.com.) Or you can ask your synagogue or organization to sponsor EoZ for a lecture or as a scholar in residence. You can also become a paid subscriber to the Substack.

Thanks again for your support!

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Antisemitic and activist anti-Zionist language is used in THOUSANDS of academic papers

Academic papers have exploded in their use of antisemitic tropes and anti-Zionist activism language in recent years.

See for yourself:

The number of papers that accuse Israel of "Jewish supremacism" - an antisemitic trope straight out of the "Elders of Zion" and Nazi playbook" - went from 5 in 2005 to 455 last year - a 90 fold increase.

The Palestinian phrase "Talmudic Rituals," to make Jewish prayer seem sinister, has become mainstreamed in academia, from 2 in 2005 to being used 118 times in papers last year.

No other ethnic or religious group on earth has seen anything remotely like this.

Phrases popularized by BDS and other anti-Zionists that are nowhere close to neutral academic language - like referring to the Israeli army as "Israeli Occupation Forces" or referring to Gaza as an "open air prison" or even refusing to refer to Israel by name and replacing it with "Zionist regime" have similarly skyrocketed in recent years.

Altogether, the phrases listed here have gone from 40 in 2005 to 1,933 in 2024. The total, including this partial year, is over 8,000 papers using phrases that no serious academic should ever use except in scare quotes.

Here is the data:

80% of these inflammatory, biased and antisemitic phrases have been in the past five years.

It is no wonder that recent polls have found that people who have the most education are the most antisemitic - an inversion from decades past.

It you don't think that academic "anti-Zionism" is correlated with antisemitism, you ae living in a dream world. This chart proves that they go hand in hand.

Peer review has failed. Editorial standards have collapsed. An entire academic discipline now functions as an unapologetic propaganda mill - and its output is already shaping policy, media, and the training data of the next generation of AIs.

The more you dig into academic papers, the more rot you find.

(These were compiled by Grok AI using Google Scholar searches.)

The Institute for the Study of Amtizionism is enjoying these articles. Check them out on X: @InstituteCSA

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

New poll shows antisemitism in America is increasing across the ideological and educational lines

The Manhattan Institute released a poll yesterday that described, in detail, the thinking of today's Republicans and their different categories.

However, they also sampled a (smaller) number of Democrats, and the survey asked a number of questions about Jews.

The responses show that antisemitism in America is independent of political or educational boundaries.

There were five questions that mentioned Jews. The first one asked about whether their parties should accept people with openly antisemitic opinions, and one of the responses was "I am such a person." I've never seen a poll where people were asked straight out if they are antisemites.

The results? 11% total said they held antisemitic beliefs. 10% did not graduate college, 13% did. 16% were Democrat, 11% Republican. 12% voted for Trump, 11% for Harris.

The next question asked whether people agreed that "The Holocaust of Jews in Nazi Germany was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe." 19% total said this was probably or definitely true. 18% were not graduates, 24% were. 22% Democrat, 24% Republican.

12% felt Jews have received too much support and favorable treatment. 11% non-graduate, 12% graduate; but in this case the Democratic support was 9% while Republican was 25%.

To the question of whether "Jews are collectively responsible for the killing of Jesus Christ," 32% strongly or mostly agreed. Non-graduate 33%, graduate 32%. Democrat 33%, Republican 48%.

29% of the total believe that most or all Jewish Americans are more loyal to a foreign country than the US. The breakdown here was 30% non-graduates and 27% graduates, 26% Democrats and 30% Republicans.

Other conspiracy theories were also fairly even divided among Democrats and Republicans. 9/11, autism link to vaccines and the moon landing being faked were believed by a roughly similar number of Democrats and Republicans, college educated and not.

The takeaways:

1.Antisemitism is not a partisan problem.
It lives in Democratic and Republican voters. It’s visible among the educated and the uneducated. It cuts through all tribes - because it’s not about party. It’s about grievance and conspiracism.

2. Antisemitism is generational.
Younger respondents are far more likely to hold antisemitic beliefs, across every question. That’s not ideology. That’s algorithmic influence, social media immersion, and a collapse of moral structure.

3. Partisanship itself may correlate with antisemitism.
The most consistently non-antisemitic group in the poll? Independents. Those without tribal affiliation were markedly less likely to endorse antisemitic views. This suggests that ideological rigidity may amplify moral blindness.

4. Higher education is no protection.
College-educated respondents were often as likely or more likely to hold antisemitic or conspiratorial beliefs than those who never attended. That’s a damning indictment of our institutions - not just their failure to protect Jews, but their failure to teach how to think.

This poll doesn’t just show individual antisemitism. It reveals a national vulnerability — to grievance, to conspiracy, to dehumanization. This is a moral immune system failure.

And for Jews, it’s not just concerning — it’s existential. Because a society saturated in grievance and divorced from truth doesn’t need Nazis. It just needs narrative. And antisemitism always finds a role to play.

This is a warning. Not just about the Right or the Left, but about America, and whether it will remain a place that Jews remain safe.

Based on the generational split in these questions, it looks like things will only get worse.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

12/01 Links Pt2: When journalism becomes the engine of antisemitism; Tuvia Tenenbom: Oscar-Winning ‘No Other Land’ EXPOSED; Joseph Cohen: Islamism Forced Me to Flee Britain

From Ian:

When journalism becomes the engine of antisemitism

Italy is uniquely afflicted. It is the only Western country where a national labor union called a general strike for Palestine. It is the only one where leaders of the far-left Rifondazione Comunista accuse the media of supporting “genocide.” Public spaces are now saturated with Hamas flags and chants that recast Zionism as colonialism, erasing its true meaning as the national rebirth of the only indigenous people who never abandoned Jerusalem.

The attack on La Stampa rightly provokes outrage. But outrage alone is not enough.

According to research by demographer Sergio Della Pergola presented at a major antisemitism conference hosted by CNEL and the Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane, La Stampa emerged as the Italian newspaper most consistently engaged in anti-Israel propaganda between Oct. 7 and Sept. 19, 2025.

Prominent voices such as Vito Mancuso, Anna Foa, Ilan Pappé and Rula Jebreal shaped a steady narrative of demonization. Despite its historic reputation for moderation, La Stampa has portrayed Israel as violent, punitive and malevolent, while Hamas’s savagery faded into the background of a simplified story of victimhood framed as genocide, apartheid and war crimes.

Della Pergola documented how the historical and political context vanished almost entirely. The Oct. 7, 2023, massacre was swiftly detached from Hamas’s declared goal of destroying Israel and from its systematic use of human shields. Headlines such as “Israel blocks even births,” “Israel tightens the noose,” and repeated claims that massacring civilians is a “standard practice” of the Israeli army became routine.

Editor Andrea Malaguti defended his newsroom with fierce conviction, asserting professional integrity. But professionalism cannot survive when truth is sacrificed to ideology. What happened at La Stampa should serve as a warning to every journalist who believes that a single, morally flattened version of reality can sustain itself without consequences.

Even Mahatma Gandhi, whom the editor cited in self-defense, means nothing to vandals driven by hatred. What must concern us is the collapse of knowledge that has turned young people into instruments of violence, hollowed out their understanding of reality, and produced a moral degeneration fed by ignorance.

Journalism must return to its duty of truth. Not to plant Palestinian flags across Europe. Not to indulge fashionable guilt toward the “Third World,” revolutionary romanticism, jihadist apologetics or antisemitic reflexes. These forces now shape not only the attackers in the streets, but—tragically—the readers formed by years of informational distortion.

The lesson of La Stampa is not only about an attack on a newspaper. It is about the corrosion of conscience that made such an attack imaginable.

Harvard Hires Divinity School Graduate Who Assaulted Israeli Classmate

The Harvard University student who faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate during an anti-Israel "die-in" protest, Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, has a new job: He is a teaching fellow at… Harvard.

Tettey-Tamaklo, who was removed from his position as a proctor overseeing freshmen in the wake of the incident, began work as a "Graduate Teaching Fellow" at Harvard in August, according to his LinkedIn profile. He says he works to "advise faculty on curriculum design."

Tettey-Tamaklo was the subject of intense scrutiny after he was caught on camera accosting a first-year Israeli business school student at an October 2023 "die-in" protest held outside of Harvard Business School. He was slapped with a misdemeanor assault and battery charge last May and ordered by a Suffolk County judge to take an anger management class and perform 80 hours of community service roughly a year later.

As that legal process played out, the Trump administration demanded Harvard expel Tettey-Tamaklo over the assault. Instead, Harvard hired him. Throughout the ordeal, the school never disciplined Tettey-Tamaklo or his compadre, Ibrahim Bharmal, and refused to cooperate with prosecutors in the case.

Teaching fellows at Harvard are typically paid a minimum salary that ranges from $3,400 to $11,040, according to Harvard's graduate student union. They assist with courses, leading "sections," grading exams, and offering office hours. The positions are generally awarded to Harvard-enrolled graduate students, meaning Tettey-Tamaklo may be pursuing a Ph.D. Tettey-Tamaklo graduated with a master's degree from the divinity school in May, just weeks after he agreed to the pretrial diversion program in his assault case.

It's unclear in which school Tettey-Tamaklo is serving as a teaching fellow; his LinkedIn profile only says the job is a "full-time" and "on-site" position at Harvard. It's also unclear if he's pursuing a Ph.D. at the divinity school.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Why Qatar Should Have No Role in Gaza

The meeting underscores Qatar's apparent eagerness to play a central role in post-war Gaza. As a long-time supporter and funder of the Muslim Brotherhood organization, the Qatari regime's main goal seems to be ensuring that Hamas remains in power in the Gaza Strip. Hamas describes itself as "one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine."

One does not need to be an "expert" to understand that Qatar, despite its attempt to present itself as a neutral mediator between Israel and Hamas over the past two years, continues to be affiliated with the extremist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Unfortunately, this ideology considers non-Muslims (and Israel) as Enemy No. 1.

In his October 19 column in the Qatari government daily Al-Sharq, Ahmad al-Muhammadi, an imam and preacher in Qatar's Waqf Ministry, explained that the enmity between the Muslims and the Jews and Christians is existential and deeply rooted, and presented Islam as the truth and Christianity and Judaism as falsehood and heresy.

He went on to call on Muslims to beware of slogans of tolerance that are aimed at uprooting belief in Islam, and asserted that Islam is "a religion that neither compromises nor reconciles."

"Qatari Shura Council member Essa Al-Nassr said that October 7 was the beginning of the end of the Zionist state, presenting this as a divine promise mentioned in the Quran. He added that there can be no peace with the Jews, because their faith condones 'deception, the violation of agreements and lies' and they are 'slayers of the prophets.'" — MEMRI, September 15, 2025.

Researcher and political analyst Eitan Fischberger recently uncovered a series of posts in which Majed al-Ansari, advisor to the Qatari prime minister and spokesman for Qatar's Foreign Ministry, openly praised suicide bombings and called for Tel Aviv to burn.

In a recent speech, the Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, said that the five Hamas members Israel killed in an airstrike in Doha last September were "our brothers."

Qatari Education Minister Lowlah al-Khater has called Israel and the West an "ugly, racist, and vile civilization" She described Israel and its Western backers as a "mixture of ugliness, entrenched racism, and vile materialistic civilization."

12/01 Links Pt1: Israel Is Where Theory Stops and Reality Begins; The NYT's Claims Fighting Hezbollah Is Israeli ‘Imperialism’; Pardoning Netanyahu is wrong – and exactly what Israel needs right now

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Israel Is Where Theory Stops and Reality Begins

One can grant the claim that there is no theological imperative for Christians to support Israel at all, but that is not the same as saying that there is a theological imperative to be hostile to Jewish Israelis.

As the theologian Brian G. Mattson asks, “what has Israel to do with a modern Christian heresy? Has the state of Israel ever embraced or promoted or associated itself with Christian Zionism, other than to accept enthusiastic support wherever it can be found, particularly when in short supply? The modern Jewish state no doubt has its own notions of its origins, essence, and purpose … and they are unlikely to have been cribbed from modern evangelical Christian sensibilities, making it strange to hold Israel responsible for ideas held by some of its American supporters.”

Again, the theological discussion looks interesting from the outside. But the discussion the rest of us can more easily weigh in on is the political one, and here is the political reality. The Christian population of Israel is still growing, some years even as a percentage of the total population, and that is not the norm in the rest of the region. But this time of year, the issue tends to focus on one place more than others: Bethlehem.

The answer to why the Christian population is struggling in this historical Christian city is the same, however, regarding the question of Christian struggles in the Palestinian territories. The Christian population of Gaza has plummeted since Hamas’s 2007 takeover. The community’s population in Bethlehem has deteriorated since the Palestinian Authority took control of the city in 1994.

Hamas’s activities both in Gaza and in places like Bethlehem (Hamas exists in the West Bank, as well) have made the Christian population unsafe and also forced into a second-class citizenship status. As Eness Elias notes, it has become increasingly difficult for Christians to buy land in places under Palestinian control. Elias also recounts a story in which “Sanaa Razi Nashash from Beit Jala described how she went to the police to file a complaint against a Muslim man who assaulted her—only to find the assailant wearing a police uniform.”

Chasing Christians out while preventing them from buying property is a pretty airtight strategy to ensure the population only goes one way: down. And it’s the prevailing policy in places under Palestinian governance. Others report that the Palestinian Authority “is erasing” Christians from education curricula as Muslim students become the majority in previously Christian schools.

Walk around Israel and instantly understand that is the opposite of the case for Christians governed by the Jewish state. Ideological and theological debates over Zionism (of any flavor) are beside the point here, because it is where theory ends and reality reigns.

Seth Mandel: There’s No Such Thing As a Time-Bound Path to a Palestinian State

Pope Leo made his much-anticipated trip to Lebanon, and of course coming that close to Israel makes questions about the peace process unavoidable. Leo got the question from the press before his plane was halfway to Beirut. His response was unremarkable.

“We all know that at this time Israel still does not accept that solution, but we see it as the only solution,” the pope said, adding that “we are also friends with Israel and we are seeking to be a mediating voice between the two parties that might help them close in on a solution with justice for everyone.”

That formulation has become routine: As soon as Israel pushes the “Palestinian State Poof” button Bibi Netanyahu apparently keeps on his desk, there will be a fully functioning state living in peace and security alongside the State of Israel. There are no prerequisites for the Palestinians as far as the world is concerned.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s version of this demand reportedly includes a shot clock: Israel must initiate a “time-bound path” to such a denouement.

This is the sort of demand that sounds reasonable—“time-bound” evokes calendars and deadlines and commitments. But in fact there is no such thing as a time-bound path to a Palestinian state. The reason there is a peace process is because there are actions that must be taken, building blocks put in position and in the right order. If a construction crew agrees to a time-bound path to a new apartment building but doesn’t get all the walls finished by the deadline, does the building receive its certificate of occupancy anyway? This new State of Palestine sounds uninsurable.

At the same time, the fact that we’re even having this conversation is the fruit of a genuine diplomatic success: the Trump administration’s triumph in getting the United Nations Security Council to vote to endorse his plan for the end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza. Some of Netanyahu’s coalition partners didn’t like that the resolution on the plan mentioned a path toward a Palestinian state. But they should take the win: France and the United Kingdom voted to essentially annul their own previous recognition of a Palestinian state by signing on to a document that made clear no such state exists.

No, Gaza Is Not the Worst or Deadliest War by Any Measure

True Statistic: Gaza has a Comparatively Low Civilian-Combatant Ratio
Based on available data, the civilian to combatant ratio in Gaza is roughly 1.8 to 1 (and probably even lower), using Hamas’ claim of 70,000 total fatalities and an estimated 25,000 combatants killed. This ratio is far lower than in recent Western-led urban battles. In Mosul, an estimated 10,000 civilians were killed compared to about 2,000 to 3,000 ISIS fighters, a ratio of 3 to 1 at the low end. Broader operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced ratios in the range of 3 to 1 up to 5 to 1. The Gaza ratio therefore contradicts accusations of genocide or indiscriminate targeting.

Critics who cannot accept this reality have attempted to manipulate both sides of the ratio to fabricate a higher figure. On the denominator, they undercount combatants by relying only on the number of fighters the IDF can literally identify by first and last name and match to a pre-war roster. By this absurd standard, any combatant the IDF could not fully identify in the midst of battle, combatants remaining in tunnels or beneath rubble, or any individual recruited by Hamas after the war began, is automatically labeled a civilian. This is how the false claim of “83% civilians killed” is manufactured.

On the numerator, these same critics assert, without evidence, that total fatalities are undercounted by some 40%. They never explain how this is possible when Gazans could and did report thousands of deaths without needing to present bodies, and given the compensation incentives to do so. Two years into the conflict, the notion that thirty thousand or more deaths remain unreported by their families has no evidentiary basis.

Taken together, the credible data leaves Gaza’s civilian combatant ratio well under 2 to 1, low for high-intensity urban warfare. And tellingly, when this metric contradicts their genocide narrative, the same critics who inflated every other statistic suddenly work to discredit it, proving that accurate numbers were never the point; the manipulation exists solely to promote an anti-Israel agenda.

Conclusion
When the facts invalidate the claims, the predictable response is to move the goalposts. After portraying Gaza as an unprecedented, genocidal conflict, critics suddenly dismiss all comparative evidence, insisting that previous catastrophic wars are too terrible to cite as data points. The impulse to portray Israel as uniquely criminal, rather than any commitment to truth, drives this constant reframing. It exposes the ideological goal driving the narrative: to cast Israel as uniquely criminal, even when the evidence shows otherwise. In the end, tragedy does not prove genocide, and facts still matter, even to those determined to ignore them.

The Washington Post reports about the Christian exodus from the Middle East. For Bethlehem it says:

Another place that is visibly losing its Christians is Bethlehem, the Palestinian town in the occupied West Bank where Christians believe Jesus was born. Israeli military restrictions and resulting economic hardship have helped drive a recent exodus, residents say, but the drain has been underway for years. The Christian share of the population has dropped from 85 percent before Israel was founded in 1948 to about 10 percent in 2017, according to a more recent Palestinian census.

The WaPo is linking the Christian exodus to Israel's founding. But that is not really the proper linkage: it is linked to Muslim control of the city.

Let's look at the Christian and Muslim population of Bethlehem at four key dates: 1948, when it was annexed by Jordan; 1967, when it was conquered by Israel; 1995, when control of nearly all of Bethlehem was given to the Palestinian Authority, and today.

Year	Total Population (Estimate)	Christian Population (Estimate)	Muslim Population (Estimate)
1948	~8,500	~6,800 – 7,200	~1,300 – 1,700
1967	14,439	6,231	8,208
1997	~22,300	~9,800 – 11,150	~11,150 – 12,500
Today (2022/2024 Estimates)	~35,000	~3,500 – 4,200	~30,800 – 31,500

The only time in the past 77 years that the Christian population of Bethlehem increased was under Jewish rule.

Jordan flooded Bethlehem with Palestinian Muslim refugees after 1948, changing the demographic balance significantly. But besides the huge change in percentage of Christians in Bethlehem during that time, there was also an exodus of some 10% of the Christin population under Jordanian rule.

When Israel took over the city, the Christian population increased by between 57-79%.

When the Palestinian Authority took control, it plummeted by some 62%.

It is Muslim rule that forces Christians out of Bethlehem, not Israel. Just like throughout the rest of the Middle East.

The media doesn't report it well, but the Muslim gangs in Bethlehem do persecute the Christians. Christians are also treated like second class citizens in the PA.

The Christian leaders who remain in Bethlehem are generally of the most antisemitic denominations, combined with their huge fear of the Muslim majority, that makes them blame Israel for the exodus to the media who happily accept that narrative.

We will be seeing lots of stories in coming weeks blaming Israel for Christian flight. But the numbers don't lie - if Israel's policies forced Christians to leave, they would be forcing Muslims to leave as well, yet Muslims are increasing dramatically.

Christians are fleeing Bethlehem for the exact same reasons they are fleeing the entire region - because of Muslims and increased Muslim fundamentalism, not because of Jews,.

In my last post I started realizing that academic Israel discourse is based on the "coherence theory" of truth, not the alternatives like that used by science - the "correspondence theory."

Briefly, the coherence theory says that a statement is true if it is consistent with a larger system of beliefs. The correspondence theory says that a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to, or accurately reflects, a fact or state of affairs in the objective world.

Hard sciences use the correspondence theory. A survey of scientific academic papers show that they use language like "data collected from," "quantitative analysis," "survey results," "statistical significance," "measured," "null hypothesis" or "empirical." Fields like economics which are not quite as predictive as hard science also uses correspondence theory language. An extremely high percentage of scientific papers use one or more of these terms in their abstracts.

Social science likes to pretend that it is like a hard science, but at least in the Israel context, this language is almost entirely absent in the sample of abstracts I had AI analyze. Instead it uses phrases like "must acknowledge," "irrefutable," "undeniable," "only path," "systematic," "structural," "urgent," or "the real reason," language that tries to paper over the lack of hard facts with assertions.

In the case of academic analysis of Israel, this is because there is already an established belief system: that Israel is malign by definition. Anything that is consistent with that belief is accepted as strengthening the belief system itself; anything that contradicts that belief is dismissed or re-interpreted to fit the belief.

So, as we saw in the last post, when Israel’s president said that all of Gaza bears responsibility for the environment that enabled October 7, that quote is taken as proof of genocidal thinking - while in the very same speech he said clearly that civilians are not to be harmed. The latter statement is ignored, because it does not cohere with the prior belief.

We saw the same with Netanyahu’s references to Amalek — even though he explicitly quoted the commandment to remember, it is assumed that he meant annihilate - because the coherence framework allows only one possible interpretation.

That's why academics can claim that Israel is still committing "genocide" even after the war is over. Empirical facts are not important against the narrative - the stability of the coherent belief systems.

This is not simply a disagreement about facts. It is a disagreement about how truth itself is determined.

Coherence theory is often presented as a legitimate alternative theory of truth. But it isn’t merely different — it is epistemologically broken. The reason is simple: Coherence theory is not falsifiable.

In correspondence-based reasoning, if evidence contradicts a claim, the claim must change. In coherence-based reasoning, if evidence contradicts a claim, it is interpreted as misleading, irrelevant, or morally compromised.

This sounds very familiar to those of us who have analyzed antisemitism - because this is the exact mental structure of conspiracy thinking.

Once a field abandons falsifiability - the ability to test a claim against reality and risk being proven wrong - it becomes epistemologically indistinguishable from conspiracy theory.

In a conspiracy model, contradictory facts are reinterpreted as evidence of the cover-up. In a coherence-driven academic model, contradictory facts are reinterpreted as irrelevant, misleading, or morally suspect.

A conspiracy theorist says, “The lack of evidence proves how deep the conspiracy goes.”

A coherence theorist says, “The contradictory facts are irrelevant because they don’t align with what we know about colonial power structures.”

These are functionally identical.

This is not about Israel alone. It affects broader academic domains like identity studies, post-colonial studies, critical race theory, and much of gender theory. When a model becomes too elegant - when it explains everything, and can survive any contradiction - that is when it stops being scholarship and becomes dogma.

Falsifiability is the immune system of truth. If a claim can never be wrong, then it is not science, nor history, nor scholarship. It is theology without God.

People who operate within coherence-based frameworks are often sincere, intelligent, and genuinely unaware of the epistemic trap they are in. Their entire thinking process is wrong but this is how they are trained, how their fields operate. If the underlying theory of truth is wrong, then entire disciplines built upon it are on unstable foundations. Confronting that feels existential to them, so resistance is natural.

But this confrontation is necessary. Unless we return to falsifiability, to the kind of truth that can be tested, challenged, and corrected, we are training generations of students to confuse ideological coherence with actual reality. And life changing political and policy decisions are being made based on frameworks that cannot be wrong because they cannot be tested.

That should concern all of us.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The respected academic journal Analyse & Kritik just published a paper by Abed Azzam called "‘Blot Out the Memory of Amalek from Under Heaven’: The Gaza Genocide and the Political Theological Legacy of the Biblical Amalek." Here is its abstract:

The biblical command ‘Blot out the memory of Amalek’ surfaced heavily in Israel after October 7, 2023. UN institutions, international and Israeli human rights NGOs and scholars of genocide studies classified the wide use of the Amalek rhetoric across Israeli politics and the military as a clear incitement to genocide. It is acknowledged that such scientific and legal subordination of the present Israeli Amalek rhetoric to the concept of genocide is indispensably important for the Palestinian just cause. However, this paper further singles out this rhetoric to examine it through the analytical lens of political theology. Thus, it first highlights the political-theological carriage of the biblical narrations of Amalek. Second, it situates Amalek as an archetype of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the enemy. Third, the paper traces a genealogy of the Zionist construction of the Palestinian as an Amalekite enemy. Finally, it concludes by showing how this political-theological genealogy culminates in the erasure of the Palestinian from the memory of Western ‘civilization.’

Because I am familiar with the topic, I was quickly able to see that the article was based on false assumptions. I identified two:

One that Israeli leaders invoked Amalek in the sense of destroying every Palestinian man, woman and child when they were in fact invoking the other Amalek commandment of "remembering Amalek" - that is the verse Netanyahu quoted and consistently used the language of "remember."

The other was that Israeli leaders were referring to Palestinians as Amalek or saying all Palestinians are legitimate targets, and they clearly said the opposite - that Hamas was the target. In fact this paper barely mentions Hamas and while it mentions the date of October 7, 2023 several times, not once does it say what happened that day.

If any load-bearing assumption behind the paper is false, then the paper is itself wrong. And these aren't the only false assumptions: the paper assumes "genocide" as a fact, that the "Amalek rhetoric" was widespread in Israel, that there is a traceable "genealogy" from the Torah to early Zionists to the Gaza war of "Amalek" rhetoric, that modern Israeli leaders using "Amalek" rhetoric reflect a coherent theological‑political ideology rather than as a rhetorical device.

Again, if any of these are provably wrong, the entire paper is wrong. Which it is.

But this post is not meant to be merely a debunking of the paper. It is a story of how anti-Israel rhetoric has become so mainstreamed that even intelligent people can no longer tell the difference between truth and the lies I just listed.

Analyse & Kritik is a peer reviewed journal. A Jewish day school student would know the difference between the two Amalek commandments. Anyone can look up the text of the speeches of Israeli leaders to see what they actually said. Why couldn't the peer reviewers?

The answer, I believe, is that today's academia no longer has a reasonable definition of "truth." There are a number of theories of what truth means, and the one that they use (at least for Israel) appears to be the "coherence theory," which holds that a belief is true if it is consistent with a larger system of beliefs. This paper, and many others I have examined, are coherent - yet they are riddled with falsehoods that aren't just mistakes but that invalidate the entire paper. The reviewers are looking at whether the argument is consistent, but they are assuming that the facts are accurate.

The anti-Israel narrative has become so widespread that it is now considered the only coherent explanation for anything Israel does. This is why the academics and NGOs are so resistant to correction when their facts are proven wrong - they cannot wrap their heads around any coherent alternative to "Israel is evil." That is the only fact they are willing to accept, and any actual facts that contradict it are considered aberrant, not disproof.

The frightening part is that AIs, unless carefully trained, tend to do the same thing. I tried to train a GPT to surface hidden, load-bearing assumptions and tested it with this article. It found some surface-level assumptions but did not detect the deeper ones. It assumed that Azzam's Biblical quotes were all referring to the same commandment. It said that it was wrong to generalize individual politicians to the entire Israeli leadership, but gave examples of genocidal sounding quotes that were themselves taken out of context - because it was trained on the ICJ case and UN documents that did not mention how they misquoted the speeches. Only when I told them the facts did they go to source materials and find out I was right.

Academics don't know how to search for truth anymore, and AIs are being trained to think the same way.

We should all be very, very scared.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

11/30 Links: UNSC Resolution 2803 and the ‘Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict’; Yom HaPlitim: How one day honors a million displaced Jews; The BBC’s staggering hypocrisy on anti-Semitism

From Ian:

Alan Baker: UNSC Resolution 2803 and the ‘Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict’

United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 (2025), adopted on Nov. 17, 2025, represents a serious attempt to restructure governance, security and reconstruction mechanisms in the Gaza Strip.

Presented alongside, and built upon, President Donald J. Trump’s “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” of Sept. 29, 2025, the resolution endorses a multilayered framework involving an unprecedented Board of Peace (BoP), an International Stabilization Force (ISF) and a transitional technocratic Palestinian administrative structure.

1. The resolution’s legal character and Chapter VII elements
Although Resolution 2803 does not invoke Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, its wording adopts components associated with Chapter VII determinations. The operative clause stating that the situation in Gaza “threatens regional peace and security” reflects the terminology of Article 39, signaling that the Security Council perceives a threat to international peace.

However, by refraining from expressly stating that the resolution was adopted under Chapter VII, the council avoids establishing binding enforcement measures. Key operative verbs—such as endorses and calls on—further demonstrate that the resolution’s obligations are largely recommendatory rather than mandatory.

Legally, this carefully calibrated language creates a gray zone:
It strengthens the political authority of the plan.
It provides Security Council endorsement of it.
Yet it withholds the coercive weight of Chapter VII.

This ambiguity allows states to claim U.N. legitimacy for participation, while simultaneously preventing the council and the U.N. from assuming direct responsibility for implementation or oversight.

2. Endorsement of the Comprehensive Plan: Scope and limitations
The council “endorses” the Comprehensive Plan rather than “adopting” it. This distinction is essential. Endorsement acknowledges the plan’s existence and supports its aims, but:
It does not transform the plan into a U.N. instrument.
It does not give the U.N. operational control over implementation.

The Comprehensive Plan is thus validated politically but not incorporated legally into the UN’s institutional architecture. The United States, in some form of loose coordination with Qatar, Egypt and Turkey remains the principal diplomatic driver.

This distinction directly affects:
the legal authority of the Board of Peace
the status and obligations of U.N. agencies operating in Gaza
the status of future political negotiations

The Board of Peace: A novel international governance mechanism
The resolution welcomes the establishment of the Board of Peace, assigning it “international legal personality”—a term commonly associated with international organizations but undefined within the resolution itself.

Questions arise:
Is the BoP envisioned as an independent international organization?
What treaties or instruments grant it legal personality?
What “relevant international legal principles” govern its operations?

The BoP is empowered to oversee:
a transitional civil administration in Gaza
reconstruction and economic initiatives
coordination of humanitarian aid
establishment of operational entities (including bodies with their own international legal personality)

Importantly, the BoP is not a U.N. body, nor does it operate under U.N. authority or financing. Its legitimacy stems solely from the political endorsement of the Security Council and the states participating in its creation.

Gazans' Stark Choice: Either Hamas or Reconstruction

It will be many years before the great majority of Gaza residents are living in anything more than makeshift or temporary housing. The future of Gaza hinges entirely on the willingness of the world to take an active role in reconstruction. But for that to happen, Hamas has to step out of the way by disarming and ceding any role in governing Gaza.

Allowing Hamas to continue as a fighting force means that its war with Israel will resume, and with it will come another round of death and destruction. Understandably, the Gulf governments that are expected to foot the bill for reconstruction costs don't want to see their investment go up in flames.

Allowing Hamas a significant role in governance also risks undermining the reconstruction effort. In its years in power, Hamas never showed any particular interest in the welfare of the Gazans under its rule, leaving basic services like education and health to the care of others; it had even less of an interest in economic development. Hamas would almost certainly use the civilian institutions of reconstruction as a cover to rearm.

Gaza thus faces a stark choice of an armed Hamas preparing for the next round of war with Israel, or reconstruction and a functioning economy. Given how desperate the situation is, you would think the gun option would be a non-starter for Gazans. But it seems that Gazans want to have both, according to a recent poll.

A demilitarized Gaza means, in effect, raising the white flag and acknowledging that the most audacious and sustained act of "armed resistance" in Palestinian history was a failure. Yet however steadfast Palestinians may want to be in the fight with Israel, living in a tent amid rubble, with minimal access to basic services and no means to support a family, is not a long-term option.

Yom HaPlitim: How one day honors a million displaced Jews

Yom HaPlitim, meaning “Day of the Refugees,” is the Israeli national day honoring the 850,000+ Jewish refugees who were expelled from or forced to flee Arab and Muslim majority countries and Iran from the 1940s to the 1970s. In Israeli law, the day is officially called “The Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Countries and Iran,” and is sometimes referred to as Yom HaPlitim (“Day of the Refugee”) or Yom HaGirush (“Day of the Expulsion”). The first official Yom HaPlitim was commemorated on Nov. 30, 2014, after the Knesset resolution adopting the day was adopted in June of that year.

Nov. 30 was chosen particularly because the day before marks the anniversary of the UN Partition Plan vote on Nov. 29, 1947, a day that also sparked violence and persecution against Jewish communities in many Arab countries.

Why did Jewish refugees flee Arab countries and Iran?
Before 1948, around 850,000–900,000 Jews lived across the Arab world and Iran, in places like Iraq, Egypt, Yemen and Aden, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Iran. After the partition vote and especially after Israel’s establishment, many of these communities faced anti-Jewish riots and pogroms, mass arrests, and laws stripping Jews of citizenship, jobs, and property. Within a generation, most of these ancient communities had been emptied; today, only a small fraction of the Jews who once lived across the region remain.

Yom HaPlitim was created to acknowledge the trauma, loss, and displacement of Jews in Arab and Muslim countries; preserve the history of ancient Jewish communities, many thousands of years old, which were declining and then destroyed in the mid-20th century; to promote awareness of confiscated and revoked property; and to correct the historical gap in which Jewish refugees from Arab lands received very little recognition and delegitimization of their Middle Eastern identities. By the 1970s, over 95% of Jews from Arab countries had left, many never allowed to return. In some cases, entire communities were moved in dramatic rescue operations, like Operation Magic Carpet (airlifting Yemenite Jews to Israel) and Operation Ezra and Nehemiah (airlifting Iraqi Jews).

Some advocates frame Yom HaPlitim as a way to highlight a “second” refugee population alongside Palestinian refugees. Others caution against using one community’s trauma to negate another’s. At its best, Yom HaPlitim is about adding a missing chapter to the story of the 20th century, not erasing or minimizing anyone else’s suffering.

Today is Jewish Refugees Day. We remember 850,000 Jews forced out of Arab states and Iran in the 20th century. Communities 2,500 years old were destroyed.

At the United Nations, I asked Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, and the others: “Where are your Jews?”

Still waiting for an answer. pic.twitter.com/s6gsyuZvGP
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) November 30, 2025