Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, April 30, 2026

Arabic media accused Jews of genocide before the word existed

Part 1: They Called It Genocide Before the Word Existed

On June 26, 1936, the Jaffa-based Arabic newspaper Falastin published a cartoon titled "Danse Macabre." It showed Chaim Weizmann and Ze'ev Jabotinsky — the moderate Zionist statesman and the Revisionist firebrand, ideological opposites conscripted together for propaganda purposes — dancing gleefully with Death over a field of Arab skulls, all to establish the Jewish National Home in Palestine.

Looking at the cartoon, one would think that the Jews massacred Arabs at the gleeful behest of their leaders.

The Arab Revolt had begun roughly ten weeks earlier, on April 15, 1936, when Arab gunmen ambushed vehicles on the Tulkarm-Nablus road and killed two Jews. The following day, Jewish assailants linked to the Irgun murdered two Arab laborers near Petah Tikva in reprisal.

Those are the only two documented deaths of Arabs by Jews between the beginning of the revolt and the date of this cartoon. In fact, the number of Arabs killed by Jewish forces between World War I and 1936 is extremely low — less than one a year, far fewer than the numbers of Jews massacred by Arabs in riots to that point. Nearly all the Arabs who died were killed by British troops suppressing the revolt, not by any Jewish militia. The Haganah's formal policy in this period was havlagah, restraint, and the Irgun's broader reprisal campaign came later, in 1937–39.

In June 1936, this picture portrayed far more skulls than Arabs killed by Jews during the year.

This is an accusation of genocide by Jews before the term was even coined.

The standard contemporary defense of anti-Zionist discourse holds that it targets a political movement rather than a people — that criticizing Zionism is categorically distinct from antisemitism and should not be conflated with it. The Falastin cartoon suite from the summer of 1936 shows that they made no distinction between Jews and Zionists, using Jewish stereotypes in their "anti-Zionist" caricatures.

For example, "Jewish money speaks" with a Jew bribing a British official.

Or John Bull, symbolizing England, having married two wives - a chaste, peaceful Arab and an aggressive cigarette smoking Jewish woman showing her legs.

In one, a Queen Esther uses her sex appeal to convince the (British) King Ahasuerus to add to her long list of attacking Arabs while Mordecai (Weizmann) adds his two cents.

Jews controlling the British was a mainstay theme.

Even though Falastin was an Arabic paper, the cartoons seemed to be aimed at - and perhaps created by - the British diplomats in Palestine. See below.

The editors of Falastin were not distinguishing between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. They were running them as a single editorial project, with the genocide accusation as the headline act and the Protocols-era tropes — world control, financial manipulation, sexual corruption of gentile power — as the supporting evidence.

The Protocols, in fact, is what made the genocide accusation possible. If a shadowy secret group of Jews were controlling the world for their enrichment when they were in Europe, then when they come out in the open in Israel it is expected that their actions will continue to reflect their desire to control the region, but more openly, with utter disregard for human lives,

Part 2: A Note on What the Research Turned Up

The post above focuses on the Falastin "Danse Macabre" cartoon and the casualty record it distorted. But researching it produced a set of observations that seem significant enough to share separately. . Consider this a work in progress.

The cartoons were aimed at British readers, not Arab ones.

Falastin was an Arabic-language newspaper. Its readership was Arab. Yet this series of front-page cartoons — running from late June through mid-August 1936 — carried English captions alongside the Arabic, written in fluent idiomatic English, with Punch-style dialogue and titles like "Danse Macabre," "Another Sharp Weapon," and "A Well Deserved Honour." These are British editorial cartooning conventions, not Arabic ones. "Danse Macabre" as a title carries zero cultural resonance in Islamic tradition; it is a specifically Western European reference, invoking the medieval totentanz and the Allied WWI atrocity cartoon tradition. An Arab editor titling a cartoon for Arab readers would not reach for that phrase. Someone addressing British readers would reach for it instinctively.

British Mandate officials — administrators, political officers, military intelligence personnel — read Arabic as a professional requirement. Falastin knew they were reading it. The English captions weren't a translation service for Arab readers; they were a signal to British readers already consuming the Arabic: we know you're here, and we want to make sure you don't miss the point. The cartoon suite was aimed at the Mandate administration, using their own cultural vocabulary to tell them: your Zionist proteges are mass murderers.

The visual style points to a British contributor.

The cartoon style itself — the John Bull figure in the "Man of Two Wives" cartoon, the dinner-party composition of "Another Sharp Weapon," the slave-driver-with-whip layout of "On the Way to Palestine," the formal caricature of named British officials in "A Well Deserved Honour" — is the visual grammar of British political cartooning, specifically the Punch tradition of the 1880s-1920s. An Arab cartoonist working in the Arabic visual tradition would not compose images this way. The Esther cartoon in particular required someone who knew the book of Esther closely enough to map its specific post-Haman dialogue onto a contemporary political scene — and who expected readers to catch the reference. That is the work of someone with a British classical education.

The cartoons ran for roughly six weeks and then seemingly stopped, apparently abruptly — at least partly because Falastin was suspended by Mandate authorities during the revolt. When publication resumed, the format did not continue. This is the profile of a guest contributor with a specific agenda and a finite engagement, not a house style. Someone came, produced the series, and either left Palestine or ceased contributing.

I have not been able to identify this person. There are no visible signatures on the cartoons, though the print quality of the surviving scans makes it difficult to be certain. If any reader with access to Colonial Office or Mandate administration archives, or with knowledge of British press history in Palestine in 1936, recognizes either the style or the circumstantial profile — a British Arabist with cartooning skills, classical education, Arabic fluency, and access to Falastin's editors — I would very much like to hear from them.

The tropes traveled through British diplomatic culture.

The cartoon suite deploys what are recognizably Protocols-era antisemitic tropes: Jewish financial control of governments, Jewish women manipulating gentile rulers, Jewish world domination through hidden mechanisms. These are Russian in origin — the Protocols were fabricated by the Tsarist Okhrana in the late 19th century — but they reached the Arab world through multiple vectors, of which direct Russian-to-Arab transmission is only one.

The British diplomatic and intelligence world of the early 20th century was saturated with conspiratorial antisemitism. The first English-language edition of the Protocols was published in 1920 by Eyre and Spottiswoode, the King's printer, with a preface by a former British intelligence officer — an establishment imprimatur, not a fringe publication. The British Arabist network in Palestine was exactly the milieu where that framework would have been most actively operationalized, because it gave officials a coherent explanation for the policy they already resented: Jewish influence over Balfour, over Lloyd George, over the Colonial Office, wasn't merely inconvenient — it was the Protocols machinery producing its predicted output. High Commissioner Chancellor wrote privately to his son in 1930 that he considered the Balfour Declaration "unjust to the Arabs and detrimental to the interests of the British," and his diary recorded that British civil servants in Palestine were so resentful of Jewish press criticism that they would resign en masse if they could afford to.

Those same officials were in daily contact with the Arab political and press elite — newspaper editors, lawyers, landowners, political leaders — who were educated, cosmopolitan, and looking for frameworks to understand what was happening to Palestine. The Protocols offered a complete explanatory system. British Arabists who already thought in those terms would have transmitted the framework through professional and social contact, long before formal Arabic Protocols translations were widely circulating.

I have written elsewhere about how Christian missionary antisemitism traveled from Western missionaries to Arab Christians and then into broader Arab political culture. The Falastin cartoon suite suggests a parallel and contemporaneous transmission: Russian conspiratorial antisemitism traveling through British diplomatic culture into the Arab press, producing in a single Jaffa newspaper in the summer of 1936 the synthesis that would eventually harden into the ideological infrastructure of modern anti-Zionism.

The genocide accusation in the "Danse Macabre" cartoon was not an indigenous Arab response to Zionist violence. The kill count was two. It was, in all likelihood, a British antisemite's cartoon, drawn in the British atrocity-propaganda tradition, deploying a Russian conspiracy framework, published in an Arab paper for a British audience — and in the process handing the Arab nationalist movement a fully formed ideological weapon it has been using ever since.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

04/29 Links Pt2: Israel's Legitimacy Isn't Debatable under International Law; How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Feed the Jews to the Mob; Spain’s Jewish Question

From Ian:

America’s Real ‘Special Relationship’ When the Pageantry Is Stripped Away

King Charles came to Washington this week to renew an old claim: that Britain remains America’s closest friend, joined by history, language, culture, and long alliance. There is truth in that. The ties are real. Yet the visit also exposed a tension no amount of ceremony could quite conceal. Beneath the pageantry, the handshakes, and the polished invocations of shared destiny, the old “special relationship” seemed less like a settled fact than a British hope. For today, America’s most “special” ally is surely Israel. Who says so? Britain’s own ambassador to the United States, caught in a leaked recording only weeks before the king arrived.

The royal visit was intended to mark 250 years of American independence, an anniversary born from rupture, and was tasked with displaying friendship between two nations whose elected leaders plainly have little warmth for one another.

For decades, the phrase “special relationship” has been used as a kind of Anglo-American incense, waved over every disagreement until the room smelled less of conflict. US President Donald Trump has battered British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for months, leaving the relationship between Washington and London looking bruised, transactional, even contemptuous. The royal visit was supposed to place something older and grander above that. And it nearly worked.

But Britain’s ambassador to Washington, Christian Turner, said the quiet part aloud.

The Financial Times obtained a leaked recording of Turner speaking to British students, in which he called the phrase “special relationship” nostalgic and backward-looking. But there was, he said, one country that could probably claim such a relationship with the United States: Israel. The Foreign Office insisted his remarks were informal and did not represent official policy, but the damage was done.

Turner’s point was awkward because it was true. The United States still values Britain. The historic and cultural ties remain deep. But a special relationship requires more than shared history and flags in matching colors. It requires instinctive trust in moments of danger. Under Starmer, that trust has more than frayed — it is in shreds.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Feed the Jews to the Mob

The leadership of the Democratic Party has decided to feed Israel to its left. This is no longer a matter of speculation or of reading tea leaves in polling data. Every plausible aspirant to the 2028 presidential nomination, Khanna, Van Hollen, Newsom, Pritzker, Booker, Gallego, Warnock, Emanuel, has moved, is moving, or is preparing to move toward some version of the anti-Israel position, whether by calling for an end to military aid, by denouncing AIPAC, by using the word genocide, or by maintaining the tactical silence that, in the current environment, functions as a form of the same concession.

Rahm Emanuel, a man who spent his career as the embodiment of pro-Israel Democratic centrism, now argues that the Israelis should pay for the Iron Dome themselves. The New York Times is chasing Hasan Piker. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist and child of the Third Worldism whose views on Israel require no explanation, sits in the mayor’s office in the largest city in the country, and the establishment figures who initially tried to hold him at arm’s length, from Schumer, to Jeffries, Gillibrand, have been drawn, with the aid of Obama, one by one, into the gravitational pull of the Third Worldist hatefest.

The establishment’s reasoning is basic strategic calculation: the left will not relent on Israel; a civil war inside the party over the Jewish state would destroy the coalition; therefore, the rational move is to concede this issue, preserve party unity, and proceed with the moderate agenda on everything else: affordability, climate, migration, AI, etc. Feed this one thing to the beast, and the beast will be satisfied. It is an intelligent calculation, a genius one, really, but it is also a catastrophic one, because it rests on a complete misapprehension of what is being conceded and to whom.

The first error is the assumption that anti-Zionism is a position, a policy preference, a discrete item on a list of demands that can be granted in exchange for quiet on the remaining items. No, no, no. This is a major category error. Anti-Zionism is not a position. It is a worldview, and a worldview does not function the way individual policy preferences do. A policy preference can be traded: you give me this, I give you that, and we both go home. A worldview is the structure within which all positions are generated, the logic that determines which sentences can be spoken and which cannot, and when you concede the worldview, you have not bought peace on the other questions. You have conceded the very logic by which all the other questions will be decided.

Anti-Zionism is the keystone of the decolonial mentalité, the foundation of Third Worldist resentment, the case study around which the entire system of colonizer and colonized, settler and indigene, white and nonwhite, oppressor and oppressed, achieves its most concentrated political force. It is where the theoretical rubber meets the real road, where the theory meets an actual state, an actual conflict, an actual set of policy levers, and becomes, in the world of its grandfather, world. Conceding it does not quiet the theory. It does not quiet anything but validates the movement, and the movement then proceeds to apply itself, with the momentum of a successful campaign of destruction, to the next question and the next, and the next, and the next. Nothing will be spared. NY Times facing backlash for calling Hasan Piker "progressive in a MAGA body" : r/popculturechat The Democrats’ new Charlie Kirk

The second error is that the liberal establishment treats the decolonial left as though it were a moral movement; a coalition of idealists whose passion on this one subject must be accommodated because the passion is about something real and the moral claim has traction. This is the view from the outside, from the surface, and it is wrong. What is at work inside the American left on the Israel question is not, or not primarily, some moral awakening. It is an inter-elite ruthless competition for institutional position, and anti-Zionism is the instrument through which that war of position is being waged.

Spain’s Jewish Question

On March 10, 2026, Spain’s Council of Ministers officially terminated the appointment of its ambassador to Israel, Ana María Salomón Pérez, formalizing a diplomatic standoff that had been building for months. Pérez had first been recalled for consultations on Sep. 9, 2025, hours after Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar accused the Sánchez government of antisemitism, and had never returned. The permanent recall is the culmination of a steady deterioration since Oct. 7, 2023, during which Sánchez recognized Palestinian statehood, imposed a military embargo, and banned weapons-carrying vessels headed to Israel from Spanish ports. The most recent trigger was Spain’s vocal opposition to the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, leading Israel to expel Spain from the Civil-Military Coordination Center in Kiryat Gat, which oversees the cease-fire in the Gaza Strip. Sánchez has only doubled down. At a recent rally in Andalucia, where his party is trailing, he said he would push for the European Union to break its commercial ties with Israel: “A government that violates international law or the principles of the EU cannot be its partner.”

Sánchez’s anti-Israel posture is not just foreign policy. Rather, its calculation is mostly domestic. As corruption scandals engulf his party, Sánchez’s approval rating has cratered to 25.7%, with 69.6% disapproval. The anti-Israel turn plays well at home regardless: Since November 2023, Spanish sympathy toward Palestinians has grown by 16.5 points, nearly 57% of Spaniards consider what is happening in Gaza a genocide, and a Pew poll found 75% have unfavorable views of Israel.

One could frame Sánchez’s anti-Israel posture as part of a broader European left turn catering to Muslim voters, as expressed in parties such as France’s La France Insoumise and their equivalents in Belgium and the United Kingdom. I find this explanation reductionist. More importantly, it doesn’t apply to Spain. Unlike France and the United Kingdom, where Muslim voters number in the millions, only an estimated 800,000 Muslims have the right to vote in Spain, about 2% of the electorate. Muslim migration to Spain is a relatively recent phenomenon, accelerating in the late 1990s and early 2000s, compared to France’s and the United Kingdom’s postwar guest-worker programs that brought migrants half a century earlier. Spain itself was an exporter of labor through most of the second half of the 20th century. As a result, over half of Spain’s Muslim population does not yet have citizenship. Sánchez did recently regularize half a million immigrants—but they cannot vote yet, and most come from Latin America, not Muslim-majority countries.

There is simply no need to invoke Muslim electoral pressure to explain anti-Israel sentiment in Spain, because Sánchez’s position is rooted in something older and more specifically Spanish: a particular brand of antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Israeli sentiment with its own deep history.

After the Civil War and during Francisco Franco’s 40-year rule, Spain’s history was insulated from the rest of Europe. Although Franco was more aligned with the Nazis, Spain did not suffer or participate directly in World War II. Ironically, the country served as a conduit both for Jews escaping Nazism and for Nazis escaping prosecution afterward. This is also a reason Spain, unlike Austria or Germany, never faced the pressure of dealing publicly or institutionally with its inherent antisemitism.

Spain was the last country in Western Europe (aside from Vatican City) to formally recognize Israel, doing so only in 1986 as a condition of joining the European Economic Community—after decades during which Franco promoted a mythical Jewish-Masonic conspiracy as a foundational threat to Spain. As with many of Franco’s legacies, the country was quick to turn the page; there was no historic accountability for four decades of institutionalized instrumentalization of antisemitism. Those unexamined attitudes have proven durable: The ADL’s Global 100 survey places Spain as the Western European country with the highest level of antisemitic attitudes, at 26%—ahead of Belgium (24%), France (17%), Germany (12%), and the United Kingdom (10%).

Swiss National Council votes against recognizing Palestinian state

Switzerland's National Council voted 116-66 against recognizing Palestine as a state, with 11 abstentions, on Tuesday.

The proposal was put forward by the Geneva Canton, which requested that Switzerland recognize the state of Palestine and “make every possible effort to establish a just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine, notably inspired by the Geneva Initiative.”

The Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council, which considered the proposal, said that while it "condemns the massacres taking place in the Middle East," a majority concluded that conditions are not yet in place to recognize a Palestinian state.

It cited international law, which requires three main conditions to be met before recognizing a state: a permanent population, a defined territory, and an independent and functioning government.

The committee found the third condition to be lacking, as there is no functioning organization to govern Palestine.

The Palestinian Authority does not exercise unified and effective state authority over the entire territory
“Recognizing Palestine in the current situation would send a problematic signal,” said Erich Vontobel of the Swiss People’s Party, Zurich. “Gaza remains under Hamas control. Hamas opposes peace, openly seeks Israel’s destruction, and is classified by Switzerland as a terrorist organization.

“Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority does not exercise unified and effective state authority over the entire territory.”

Furthermore, the majority of the committee also believes recognition now would “run counter to Swiss neutrality and jeopardize Switzerland’s role as mediator in seeking peace.”

It therefore concluded that it is currently too early for Switzerland to recognize Palestine, but that this does not call into question support for a two-state system in the longer term.

04/29 Links Pt1: Two Jews stabbed in Golders Green; These blood libels are endangering Jews; Navy begins intercepting Gaza flotilla; Iran’s Hormuz toll plan falters as Gulf nations side with US

From Ian:

The Golders Green attack was sickeningly predictable

It was only last month that four ambulances, operated by the Jewish Hatzola charity, were set ablaze in Golders Green. One of the more slyly heartbreaking details to emerge from the horror in Golders Green this morning is that Hatzola volunteers treated the stabbing victims at the scene. One of their surviving ambulances spirited one of the bloodied men to hospital. You could not find a grimmer metaphor for the threat to life and limb that is now faced by Britain’s tiny, embattled Jewish community.

It is now impossible to ignore. Back in 2024, were it not for a successful operation by undercover officers from Greater Manchester Police, British Jews would have suffered a massacre on the scale of Bondi Beach. In February this year, two foreign-born ISIS fanatics were locked up for plotting to gun down Jews in Manchester. Porous borders, homegrown Islamic extremism, and leftist useful idiocy have put a target on Jews’ backs.

While the Labour government has offered little more than a tepid bath of thoughts and prayers, the leaders of the ‘anti-racist’ left have basically told Jews to relax. Last week, Green Party leader Zack Polanski, having been asked about the spate of anti-Semitic attacks, said ‘there’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s a perception of unsafety or whether it’s actual unsafety’. Meanwhile, Green local-election candidates continue to be outed as pond-scum Jew haters, calling the recent firebombings ‘false flags’ and openly saying things like, ‘it takes serious effort not to be a tiny bit anti-Semitic’.

How long are Jews supposed to put up with this? Long before October 7, and the carnivals of anti-Semitism posing as ‘pro-Palestine’ demos, they suffered a level of menace no other community would be expected to tolerate. Long before Hamas’s butchers and rapists ploughed into Israel, and Islamists and leftists took to our city centres to celebrate, British Jews made up 0.5 per cent of the population and a quarter of the victims of religious hate crimes. They sent their kids to schools behind high fences, with security guards and routine police patrols. Their elders were suckerpunched in the streets. Their cemeteries were routinely desecrated.

Now the sewers have well and truly burst. This is a national emergency. It requires action, not mere words. If we do not stand with British Jews now, then we can no longer claim to be a civilised nation. Certainly, we cannot claim to be surprised when the next attack rolls around.

Brendan O'Neill: These blood libels are endangering Jews

Truth is not the intention here – demonisation is. You can tell this from the frenzied podcast Jones made to accompany his batshit article. Reading and writing about the ‘indescribably horrific’ crime of Israeli dog-rape was like ‘opening a door to the darkest recesses of Hell’, he says. ‘You will rightly ask yourself’, he says to listeners waiting with lolling tongues for yet further confirmation of Israel’s wickedness, ‘how any human being could possibly imagine these crimes, let alone actually perpetrate them’.

This isn’t journalism. It’s certainly not anti-imperialism. It is nothing I would recognise as ‘progressive’ commentary. It is a medieval morality play, where the mob is invited to marvel and gag over the fathomless depravity of the Jewish State. It is of a piece with Jones’s religious mania over Israel, a nation he says is ‘uniquely murderous’ and in the grip of a ‘genocidal mania’. As for its ‘cheerleaders’, who have succumbed to ‘depravity’, he hopes they will be ‘haunted by the souls of the slaughtered Palestinians… until the end of time’. These are the ramblings of a mind rendered unstable by obsessive, one-eyed loathing for Israel.

The dog-rape tale leaves no doubt – ancient blood libels are being rehashed in the phoney langage of ‘criticism of Israel’. The Jewish people were once accused of lusting after the blood of Christian children – now the Jewish State is accused of intentionally murdering Palestinian children. The Jews were once said to be the secret puppetmasters of politics – now the Jewish nation is said to have the mighty West eating from the palm of its hand. Jews were once branded as agents of Satan, doing his diabolical work on Earth – now they are said to deploy dogs in their genocidal crimes and in the process are ‘opening a door to the darkest recesses of Hell’. Are we seriously expected to believe it is wholly coincidental that all the dangerous shit that was once said about Jews is now said about the Jewish State? Yeah, I’m not buying it. To me, it feels like medieval calumnies are being reanimated on the altar of a deranged loathing for the world’s only Jewish nation.

That Francesca Albanese is spreading the dog-rape story takes the blood-libel crisis to a whole new level. This is a UN official. These are dangerous times. There was a stabbing in Golders Green just today. History tells us that blood libels beget violence. Burnings and pogroms followed the medieval myths about Jews being child-killers and well-poisoners. In the past year, we’ve seen Jews in England be violently attacked and stabbed by people calling them baby-killers. How long before the knife is wielded by monsters calling them rapist dogs, too?

Seth Mandel: Anti-Jewish Anarchy in London

This is merely Iranian opportunism, however. The UK’s longstanding problem with anti-Semitism was waiting to be exploited. The cell seems to be having no trouble finding all these single-use recruits. At their best, the police are simply not up to the task of policing. At their worst—as happened in Birmingham last year—they have essentially colluded with the anti-Semites and fabricated anti-Jewish talking points.

Which is to say that the atmosphere of Jew-hunting in London and Manchester is the fault of those who govern London and Manchester. The ruling Labour Party has demonized the Jewish state and stood with its hands in its pockets as the natural results of that vilification—violence against Jewish Britons—commenced and increased. The Green Party has managed to come back from the electoral fringe by repositioning itself solely as a refuge for the “Gaza left,” a riotously anti-Semitic group of political lowlifes gaining ground in local and municipal elections at an alarming clip thanks to its focus on Jew-baiting.

Iran didn’t make Jew-hatred popular in London and Manchester; it took advantage of it, making it even deadlier. Such anti-Semitism has been on broad display since October 7, and the government of Keir Starmer and David Lammy did nothing but throw occasional fuel on the fire.

Speaking of which: Today’s attacks come while King Charles III is visiting the U.S. The king gave a rousing speech to Congress yesterday and his visit was carefully crafted to buck up the transatlantic alliance. And while the Crown’s diplomatic competence was reassuring to watch, it also highlighted the fact that the United Kingdom has no real head of government. Starmer is prime minister, but he is an unpopular fool with no gravitas and no talent for governing and spectacularly poor judgment. The term “lame duck” does insufficient justice to the contempt Sir Keir’s peers have for him, a contempt Starmer has earned.

The longer Starmer stays in office, the more London and its environs descend into anarchic Jew-purging. His mere presence at 10 Downing is a disgrace, but his exit would be only the beginning of a long process to fix what’s broken.

As for right now: Protect the Jews of Britain, for God’s sake, or enable them to protect themselves.

Seth Mandel: An Apology Would Be Nice, But It Isn’t Enough

When Australian authorities announced they would restrict the routes that pro-Palestinian marches were allowed to follow two months ago, it was because of the impending visit of Israel’s head of state. When UK officials suggested today that they support heavily restricting pro-Palestinian marches, it was because they don’t know how to get “anti-Zionists” to stop constantly trying to murder Jews.

The explanations were slightly different, but the underlying problem was exactly the same: not one of these so-called protests is free of foaming-at-the-mouth pogromniks. Their slogans unambiguously call for violence against Jews anywhere in the world, and violence against Jews almost inevitably follows.

In America, where even anti-Semitic lunatics have free-speech rights, the institutions of democracy—universities, political bodies, etc.—had a responsibility to counter the Hamasniks’ bad speech with good speech. Instead, they ceded the field to Beijing-backed terrorism supporters. Joe Biden said the demonstrators “have a point.” University administrators invited lawlessness, and their faculties went on teaching anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

The result was that commencement ceremonies had to be canceled or live student speeches had to be removed from the programs, restrictions that will continue at many of this year’s ceremonies. That is, school administrators reached the same conclusion that institutional authorities reached in Britain and in Australia: Every single time so-called anti-Zionist activists are given the floor, they will whip up anti-Jewish bloodlust.

Jonathan Hall, a UK government adviser on anti-Semitism policy, reportedly told Times Radio today after the stabbings in Golders Green: “It pains me to say this, but I think we may have reached a point where we need to have a moratorium on the sorts of marches that have been happening. It’s clearly impossible at the moment for any of these pro-Palestine marches not to incubate within them some sort of anti-Semitic or demonizing language.”

Peter Beinart argues that the Left's antizionism is different from the Right's. It isn't.

Peter Beinart's latest piece in the New York Times makes the argument that right-wing anti-Zionism is genuinely antisemitic because it roots Israel's behavior in Jewish identity, while left-wing anti-Zionism is morally serious because it roots Israel's behavior in systems — colonialism, nationalism, and power. Tucker Carlson blames Israel's crimes on its Jewishness; progressives analyze structures. Therefore, Beinart suggests, the two are categorically different, and the progressive arguments are serious and fact-based.

The argument is superficially appealing, but it confuses vocabulary with logic. Both versions of anti-Zionism, right and left, turn out to depend on the same underlying premise: that Jews cannot be trusted to tell the truth — a conclusion the piece will earn, not assert.

The left's central accusations against Israel are claims about intent, not descriptions of behavior. Genocide requires the intent to destroy a people. Apartheid requires the intent to permanently dominate. Colonialism requires the intent to displace and replace. If your evidence for those accusations is based on reading minds, it is not evidence — unless there is no other credible explanation.

There is one, and it is more credible. The left's explanation — deliberate targeting, racial domination, eliminationist expansionism — requires attributing to Israel a set of intentions that Israel explicitly denies and that the historical and strategic evidence does not support. Israel's explanation fits the facts better: Israel is a Jewish state built by a people who internalized two thousand years of antisemitism as lived experience rather than historical abstraction, whose founding principle of Never Again functions as an operational imperative rather than an empty slogan, and whose moral framework derives from three thousand years of Jewish ethical thinking that the West itself largely inherited — and that the left applies selectively, inverting it against its source.

That last point matters more than it usually gets credit for. Israel is not a state indifferent to civilian casualties. It is a state whose entire military and legal culture is organized around minimizing them, because that is what its moral tradition demands. The IDF's doctrine of purity of arms, the military advocate general's office, the post-operation investigations, the evacuation warnings that forfeit tactical surprise — these are the institutional expression of a moral seriousness that runs through Jewish law on the conduct of war. And they are precisely why Hamas uses human shields. That strategy only works because Hamas correctly calculates that Israel will accept higher costs to its own soldiers rather than kill civilians indiscriminately. An army with genocidal intent does not generate that calculation in its enemies; it generates the opposite one.

What the left consistently refuses to recognize is that Israel is not choosing between war and peace. It is choosing between two moral costs: accept civilian casualties in Gaza while fighting an enemy that has made those casualties structurally unavoidable, or allow that enemy to terrorize Israeli civilians forever and with impunity. That is a genuine moral dilemma, the kind that three thousand years of Jewish ethical tradition was actually developed to navigate. The left's framework collapses it into a morality play with only one moral agent — Israel — and one set of lives that count. The moral cost of allowing Hamas to terrorize Israeli civilians indefinitely simply does not register as a cost. That omission is not an oversight; it is the premise.

This framing also resolves what the left's framework struggles to explain structurally. Israel is not a colonial project in any meaningful sense; it is the return of a people to their ancestral homeland, a homeland they never ceased to inhabit, mourn, or orient their prayers toward. It extends full citizenship to Arab Israelis, seats them on its Supreme Court, and elects them to its parliament, while maintaining Jewish survival as a founding priority — a priority that is entirely coherent given the history. And it allows thousands of trucks of aid into Gaza even while fighting there, because feeding civilians in a war zone is consistent with its own moral position. That last fact is almost never processed seriously by the left, because it is flatly inconsistent with the assumption of Israeli immorality that anchors their framework.

Which is where the epicycles begin. Arab judges on Israel's Supreme Court? Tokenism. LGBTQ rights? Pinkwashing — a deliberate propaganda strategy to distract from "apartheid." Evacuation warnings before strikes? Public relations. Aid convoys into Gaza? Cover for genocide. Nothing counts against the theory; everything gets absorbed into it, reclassified as deception, filed under further evidence that the malice runs deeper than it appears.

The pro-Israel explanation is consistent with the facts as they present themselves. The left's explanation is coherent only by reclassifying every inconvenient fact as performance. One framework has to keep adding mind-reading and assumptions of deception to survive contact with reality. The other doesn't. Which means there is no structural difference between the progressive position and a conspiracy theory.

I've written before about the difference between correspondence and coherence theories of truth, and how conspiracy theories are epistemologically indistinguishable from the coherence model. In a correspondence framework, claims are tested against reality, and evidence can falsify them. In a coherence framework, claims are judged by how well they fit the narrative, and contradictions are reinterpreted until the system stays intact. Conspiracy theories survive exactly this way: counterevidence doesn't weaken the theory, it proves how deep the conspiracy goes.

The contemporary left critique of Israel has adopted that structure. Israel isn't liberal — it's pretending to be. Its institutions aren't genuine — they're performative. Its justifications aren't honest — they're propaganda. The particular content of the accusation varies, but the underlying move is the same: nothing Israel or its supporters say or demonstrate can be taken at face value, because the deception is total. Which is exactly how antisemites have looked at Jews for centuries — deceptive, cunning, conspiratorial, pursuing a hidden agenda of power over non-Jews.

Beinart argues that the left avoids essentializing Jews because it speaks the language of systems rather than identity. But the left's systemic framework only remains coherent if it assumes, as a standing premise, that Jewish institutions are uniquely deceptive — that their visible behavior is systematically misleading and their explanations are not to be accepted at face value the way Hamas's claims are. Without that premise, the coherent narrative collapses, because counterevidence would have to be taken seriously and the theory would have to update.

Which brings us back to Tucker Carlson, whose theories Beinart correctly identifies as antisemitic conspiracy thinking. Carlson speaks openly about Jewish civilizational threat and hidden manipulation. The mechanism is recognizable: start with a fixed conclusion, interpret all evidence through that lens, reclassify contradiction as proof of how cunning the deception is.

Strip away the vocabulary, and the left's framework runs on the same engine. The right says Jews are dangerous because they intend to control the world; the left says Israel is dangerous because of its predetermined intentions to dominate its Arab neighbors and population. Both use the same logic and the same assumptions of Jewish evil. Only one of them is honest enough to say "Jews."

Beinart wants to draw a moral boundary, and there is one — only it falls in a different place than he draws it. The dividing line runs between those willing to test their claims against reality and those who build arguments that reality is not permitted to challenge. Cross that line and it no longer matters how sophisticated your language is or how carefully you avoid biological essentialism.

Beinart writes that "combating the anti-Israel right's conflation of Israel and Jewishness is made harder by pro-Israel American Jewish organizations that have conflated those two things as well." Yet Beinart's own argument depends on antisemitic tropes no less than Carlson's does — the assumption of Israeli Jewish intent to dominate and destroy, which is the complete opposite of how Jews and Israel understand themselves and their history. His framework requires that premise to function.

Whether he sees it or not, he is in the same epistemic territory as Tucker Carlson.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

A new report from the UK-based advocacy group Freedom in the Arts, "The New Boycott Crisis," documents that the UK arts sector has developed interlocking mechanisms that exclude Jewish artists systematically — and these methods work precisely because they never name what they're doing.

The report, based on surveys and interviews with 194 artists, venue leaders, agents and promoters, identifies antisemitism as "the dominant form of identity-based exclusion documented across the data, operating at every level from overt to institutional, frequently unrecognised by the very frameworks designed to prevent discrimination." That last clause is the key one.

The first mechanism is the reversal of where pressure originates. The conventional picture of a boycott crisis is external: protesters outside the door, audiences threatening to stay home. What the data shows is the opposite. "There was no audience backlash. The pressure came from staff." Across venue after venue, the force driving cancellations came from inside — overwhelmingly far-Left staff complaints, internal networks, and advisory bodies — while audiences remained largely indifferent or actively wanted the work. The sector is responding not to its public but to a small number of internal ideological enforcers.

Which leads to the second mechanism: the weaponization of safety language. Once a staff member frames a political objection as a welfare concern — "I don't feel safe with this performer booked" — the word "safeguarding" does for institutional antisemitism what "anti-Zionism" does at street level: it launders a discriminatory outcome into an ostensibly neutral concern. Jewish identity itself becomes a "reputational risk." Jewish-themed art becomes "too sensitive." A klezmer band gets its gig cancelled not because anyone articulated a problem with the music, but because Jewish identity and an Israeli singer had been absorbed into the venue's ambient danger calculus. Strange Brew in Bristol later acknowledged in its apology that the band "was likely only subjected to this level of scrutiny… because they are a Jewish band performing with an Israeli singer." That's the mechanism caught on paper — which almost never happens. The internal Israel-haters claim that they would be endangered if the Jewish artists performs, even though there is no evidence that this would in fact happen. But safety must be taken seriously by every institution. They game the system.

Most cases produce no paper trail. That's the third mechanism — what the report calls the silent boycott. "Opportunities dry up. Invitations stop coming. Communications go unanswered. Projects stall indefinitely." Jewish artists describe this pattern post-October 7: their loss of gigs came not from anything they said or did, it simply happened, undocumented and unchallengeable. The mechanism is engineered for impunity: if an artist receives a termination letter, she can consult a lawyer; an artist who receives silence can challenge nothing. Agents, knowing this, advise concealment — steer clear of certain festivals, make the Jewish identity less visible, don't put the artist forward where rejection is anticipated. Self-censorship becomes a professional service delivered under duress, converting institutional discrimination into career advice. the result is that overtly Jewish art or lectures have virtually disappeared because the entire art infrastructure has no way (and seemingly little desire) to fight the invisible boycott.

The EDI and "values" frameworks that were supposed to prevent discrimination become, in this environment, the mechanisms that enable it. A political demand framed as a diversity concern gains access to formal institutional complaint machinery. "Values-led" organizations reserve the right to refuse bookings on grounds they define, with the definition expanding under pressure until Jewish association itself falls outside the ethical boundary. The report documents a Bristol arts venue whose CEO described, as institutional achievements: signing a pledge not to stock Israeli products — under the banner of institutional values. The circular logic completes itself: the framework designed to protect diverse voices now ejects anyone who questions the framework.

The report documents a consistent pattern through the case studies: when organizations held their ground and followed well-defined procedures protecting their artists and art, the predicted catastrophe failed to materialize. Example after example of book festivals, music events and theatres that held their ground and calmly explained that they are following their own procedures and support artistic expression usually held the events without serious incident.

The report's conclusion from these cases is direct: institutions that appease do not purchase peace but permanent vulnerability, while institutions that resist frequently discover the threat was largely phantom. The antisemitic pressure within the arts sector is, for now, a minority phenomenon that has learned to punch far above its weight — exploiting the sector's conflict-aversion, its "safety" language infrastructure, and the rational calculation of precarious freelancers that silence is cheaper than resistance. The open letters threaten, but in the end the protests either don't appear or remain small and peaceful. The audiences show up.

That asymmetry between perceived threat and actual threat is the most actionable finding in the report. Jewish artists are being excluded, Jewish culture is being suppressed, and careers are being ended — not because the sector's audiences demand it, but because a small number of internal actors have learned to operate mechanisms that produce discriminatory outcomes without ever requiring the institution to say the word "Jew."

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

04/28 Links Pt2: Three Years After October 7, Anti-Semitic Violence Is Still Rising; Oslo's Collapse - and the Cost Israel Kept Paying; Israel rebukes Norwegian Holocaust Center’s Nakba-Holocaust events

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Three Years After October 7, Anti-Semitic Violence Is Still Rising

Underlying our public debate about anti-Semitism is the belief that we’re dealing with a kind of punctuated equilibrium: periods of mostly stable levels of anti-Semitism followed by occasional bursts that give us a new normal.

But what if that’s wrong? What if there aren’t periods of stability anymore?

Post-October 7 anti-Semitism seemed primed to follow the usual pattern, in which certain metrics of anti-Semitism will improve after the surge and others will level off at the crest of the surge. So all the metrics are considered in light of the assumption that the surge will fade as the Hamas attacks get further in the rearview mirror.

But the surge is acting funny.

When Tel Aviv University released its annual report on worldwide anti-Semitism for the year 2025, the main headline was that more Jews had been killed in anti-Semitic incidents (20) than in any year in over three decades. It was no consolation to say that this was because there was a massacre in Australia that pushed the numbers so high and that such massacres are blessedly rare—after all, attempted anti-Jewish massacres continue to take place. If the recent attack on a Reform shul in Michigan had succeeded, God forbid, 2026 would far surpass 2025 on this metric just a few months into the year. To be Jewish in some parts of the world now is to feel more like a target than ever.

Delving into the report far beyond that headline statistic reveals why that feeling is so widely shared: Three years after October 7, violent anti-Semitism is still rising across parts of the West.

Oslo's Collapse - and the Cost Israel Kept Paying

As part of the Oslo Accords, Israel agreed to pursue peace and coexistence with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO promised to end terrorism and "armed struggle" against Israel, prevent incitement to violence, actively combat terrorism, and avoid unilateral actions. The core concept was mutual commitment: the PLO-PA would deliver peace and coexistence, while Israel would provide financial support.

The PLO and the PA never fulfilled their commitments. The PLO, dominated by Fatah, the party of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, never truly abandoned terror. Fatah leaders have repeatedly stressed this. The PA education system has been consistently criticized for radicalization, antisemitism, and the promotion of violence against Israel and Israelis. Instead of combating terror, the Palestinian leadership refers to the genocidal terrorists of Hamas, who planned and executed the October 7, 2023, massacre, as legitimate "Palestinian factions."

Incitement to violence, terror, and murder, as well as the glorification of terrorist murderers, led by the PA, remain commonplace. The PLO-PA also developed and implemented a multi-million dollar "Pay-for-Slay" terror reward policy. In the international arena, the PLO-PA repeatedly acted unilaterally, requesting that the UN recognize the "State of Palestine."

While the PLO-PA did not fulfill most Oslo commitments, Israel continued to collect and transfer taxes which accounted for 65-70% of the PA's total budget. By continuing to transfer these funds to the PA, Israel was bankrolling its own potential demise. In June 2025, Israel ceased transferring the taxes to the PLO-PA.

Since the PLO-PA has fundamentally breached every provision of the Oslo Accords, Israel is fully within its rights to refuse to continue transferring the funds. If the PLO-PA does not fulfill its commitments, there is no reason whatsoever why Israel should be expected to continue funding Palestinian terror, whether the physical murder of Jews or the diplomatic terror in international forums.

U.S. Politics Broke Bipartisan Support for Israel

In his essay on the "sorting" of American politics and its implications for Israel advocacy, Uriel Zehavi argues that Israel lost Democratic support not because of any one war or settlement announcement, but rather that Israel became trapped inside the broader "great sort" of American politics, the decades-long process by which nearly every politically salient issue gets absorbed into partisan identity. Once that happened, a bipartisan consensus on Israel became structurally unstable.

In an earlier era, both parties contained ideological diversity. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats created overlapping coalitions. But modern American politics no longer functions that way. Party identity now acts as a master category through which voters interpret almost every issue.

Once progressive activists increasingly coded Israel as aligned with nationalism, militarism, and American conservatism, many Democratic voters followed elite cues from their own ideological ecosystem. At the same time, evangelical Christians and conservatives embraced Israel even more strongly, making support for Israel increasingly identified with Republican identity. The result was a widening partisan gap that could not have been avoided regardless of Israeli policy choices.

Organizations built for a consensus era are trying to defend ground that no longer exists. Instead of one message aimed at a unified political center, Israel advocates may need entirely different arguments, messengers, and vocabularies for Republican and Democratic audiences.

Nevertheless, there remains overwhelming revulsion among mainstream Americans, including most Democrats, toward terrorism and overt antisemitism. After Oct. 7, many Americans were horrified not only by the massacre itself but by celebrations of the attacks on elite campuses and social media. The more that radical anti-Israel movements fuse themselves with excuses for terrorism, harassment of Jewish students, or conspiracy-laden rhetoric about Jews and power, the more they may repel most Americans who still distinguish between criticizing Israeli policy and celebrating mass murder.

04/28 Links Pt1: Qatar promised to 'look after' ICC prosecutor Khan if he pursued Netanyahu; UAE to withdraw from OPEC; Amer Hujirat, Defense Ministry civilian contractor, killed in Lebanon

From Ian:

Jason D. Greenblatt: The Revolutionary Guards Are Executing the Clerics' Vision

The New York Times published a detailed account last week of Iran's new leadership structure. It states that power has shifted to "an entrenched, hard-line military" and that "the broad influence of the clerics is waning." The implication is that this represents a radicalization of what came before. It does not.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the cleric who led Iran for 35 years, advanced Iran's nuclear program to the edge of weaponization, built the ballistic missile program, the drone program, and the network of proxies including Hizbullah, Hamas, the Houthis and the Shia militias in Iraq that threatened Israel, the Gulf states, and American forces across the region for decades.

He crushed the Green Movement in 2009. His regime executed protesters in the crackdown that followed the 2022 uprising. He directed the IRGC's Quds Force under Qassem Soleimani, whose operations killed and maimed American soldiers for years. The IRGC was not a force that the clerics restrained. It was the instrument through which the clerical vision was executed.

A claim repeated in media commentary and on Capitol Hill held that the U.S. was not already at war with Iran before the February strikes. That claim has always been a fiction. Iran had been waging war on the U.S. and its allies for decades, through terror proxies, attacks on American troops, and a nuclear program designed to hold the region hostage.

Pretending otherwise did not make Americans or our allies in the Gulf and Israel safer. It made the eventual reckoning easier to mischaracterize as aggression rather than a long-overdue response to a severe threat that had been growing for 45 years.

The clerics built this. The IRGC executed it. They are not in tension. They are in partnership. The only thing that has changed is that sustained military pressure has left them with fewer options than they have ever had.

Walter Russell Mead: It's Way Too Early to Declare U.S. Defeat in Iran

The establishment consensus is that President Trump's war with Iran is a disaster. Time will tell, but it would be a mistake to assume that Mr. Trump is desperately looking for the exits.

Viewed from the Oval Office, the war may seem less costly than critics charge, and the likelihood of a favorable outcome may appear significantly greater than a horrified foreign-policy establishment can bring itself to believe.

True, the war has gone on longer than originally hoped and is taking a toll on the president's popularity. But he may feel less trapped than critics think he should.

In the Gulf, American naval forces have, without taking casualties, consolidated a crushing blockade of Iran that Tehran seems unable to counter.

And support in the Gulf for a decisive effort against Iran is stronger now than at the outbreak of hostilities.

For now, the president can afford to wait and see how mounting pressure affects the Iranian side.

U.S. Cannot Accept Iran Retaining Control of Hormuz, Rubio Says

Asked about the main roadblock to an agreement with the Iranian government, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News on Monday: "The country's run by radical Shia clerics; that's a pretty big impediment....People talk about moderates and hardliners. They're all hardliners in Iran. But there are hardliners who understand they have to run a country and an economy, and there are hardliners that are completely motivated by theology....Unfortunately, the hardliners with an apocalyptic vision of the future have the ultimate power in that country."

"If what they mean by opening the straits [of Hormuz] is, 'Yes, the straits are open as long as you coordinate with Iran, get our permission or we'll blow you up, and you pay us,' that's not opening the straits. Those are international waterways. They cannot normalize, nor can we tolerate them trying to normalize, a system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway and how much you have to pay them to use it."

"The nuclear question is the reason why we're in this in the first place....They seek to dominate the region. And imagine that with a nuclear weapon. Look what they've done with the straits - great example. The straits is basically the equivalent of an economic nuclear weapon that they're trying to use against the world, and they're bragging about it. They're putting up billboards in Tehran bragging about how they can hold 20% of the world's energy hostage. Imagine if those same people had access to a nuclear weapon. They would hold the whole region hostage."

"I think they're serious about figuring out how can they buy themselves more time. We can't let them get away with it....They're very experienced negotiators, and we have to ensure that any deal that is made, any agreement that is made, is one that definitively prevents them from sprinting towards a nuclear weapon at any point."

If Ireland and Spain are so "moral" by boycotting Eurovision, why don't they quit EVERY entity that Israel is a member of?

Ireland, Spain, and Slovenia are boycotting Eurovision because Israel is a participant. They believe that Israel is guilty of the most heinous crimes and their participation amounts to normalizing genocide.

But if that's the case, why stop at a meaningless song contest? They should - no, they must - boycott every organization in which Israel holds membership.

Israel competes in FIBA EuroBasket. So do Ireland and Spain. Israel plays in the Davis Cup alongside other European nations. Israel competes at the Chess Olympiad, where Israeli players regularly contend for top honors. Israel participates in the Olympics under the IOC, which — like the EBU — has considered the question and kept Israel in.

Then there is UEFA. Both Ireland and Spain are members. So is Israel. If they find it morally repugnant to share a stage with Israel at a singing competition, all the more so to share a pitch with Israeli clubs and national teams. By that standard, every Champions League broadcast, every Nations League fixture, every World Cup qualifying match involving a UEFA member is equally complicit. The should do the moral thing and quit UEFA. Otherwise, by their logic, they are baby killers.

But why stop at sports? Political organizations are, by the boycotters' own logic, far more directly implicated in Israel's supposed crimes. Ireland and Spain claim Israel deliberately targets hospitals — yet both remain members of the WHO, which has not expelled Israel and continues to treat it as a normal member state. The International Monetary Fund might do some important work, but nothing is more important than making a statement in support of "Palestine." Boycott the World Bank!

And then there is the UN itself. Israel has been a member for over 75 years. How can Spain and Ireland and Slovenia sit in the same General Assembly while there is a Zionist in the room? Don't they have any morals whatsoever? If they are principled then they must conclude that remaining in the UN is the equivalent as murdering babies and using their blood for matzah.

Oh, sorry, I jumped the gun on their planned accusations against Israel in 2028.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Projection: Why Arab Extremists Think Jewish Prayer Is Conquest

A group of Haredi tourists in Marrakesh found themselves running short on time before mincha and did what observant Jews have done in sports stadiums, airports, and trade shows the world over: they found the most inconspicuous corner available, gathered a minyan, and prayed quietly for ten minutes against a wall at Bab Doukkala.

The reaction from Moroccan social media, amplified enthusiastically by Algerian media, was immediate and unhinged. Social media users demanded to know whether the Jews wanted to "rule" them. Activists insisted the tourists were attempting to establish a new Western Wall. A former actor turned Islamist called for the wall itself to be demolished and rebuilt to cleanse it of Jewish prayer. A group of Moroccan youth gathered to perform a ritual purification of the site. Graffiti appeared: "Bab Doukkala is for Moroccans and not for the Jews." Israeli flags were burned at protests that stretched into a second day.

A dozen men praying for ten minutes produced days of protests, flag-burning and outraged articles for nearly a week now.

The question worth asking is why — not as a matter of condemning individual Moroccans or Muslims, but as a matter of understanding what mental framework makes this reaction feel coherent to those who hold it.

The answer is psychological projection.

Judaism and Islam have fundamentally different relationships to religious expansion. Islam carries a missionary imperative; conversion is actively sought and celebrated. Judaism actively discourages converts, requiring potential proselytes to be turned away multiple times before acceptance. One of these traditions has historically treated the physical presence of its religion in public space as a marker of territorial and civilizational advance. The other has not. The call to prayer broadcast over loudspeakers into mixed neighborhoods, the mass prayers staged in Times Square or Trafalgar Square — these are not simply acts of private devotion made public by logistical necessity. When religious display is deliberately chosen for the most iconic and contested spaces available, and amplified to reach populations who did not seek it out, the message exceeds devotion. It is a statement of presence, of belonging, of claim. There is no other explanation for why any of those settings would be chosen over a mosque — or a park, for that matter, where the public is not inconvenienced.

This is not a claim about Islamic prayer as such. A Muslim praying in a corner because he cannot reach a mosque in time is doing exactly what those Haredi tourists did at Bab Doukkala. The question of intent is settled by the choices made: where, how loudly, toward whom, and at whose inconvenience.

The extremists reacting to Marrakesh have absorbed the framework in which public religious display means territorial claim, because that is the framework their own political tradition has operated within. When they see Jews praying in public, they reach for the only interpretation available to them: the Jews are doing what we would be doing. They are marking territory, they are asserting ownership, they must be stopped before the claim hardens.

The absurdity of this is arithmetically obvious. Seven million Jews cannot dominate half a billion Arabs through the strategic deployment of mincha. Israel's interest in Morocco extends exactly as far as it does with every other Arab state: normal relations, trade, coexistence. The Greater Israel fantasy that Arab political culture attributes to Zionism is not a reading of Israeli behavior — it is a mirror held up to Arab political culture's own ambitions and projected outward.

Saner Moroccan voices saw through it. One Moroccan outlet asked the obvious question: Muslims pray in public spaces across the world — streets, airports, parks, the heart of European capitals — and this is treated as a natural expression of religious freedom. What changes when the people praying are Jews? The double standard, that outlet noted, does not reveal a principled defense of public order. It reveals whose religion is entitled to public space and whose presence in that space constitutes a provocation.

The answer the extremists gave, through days of protests and flag-burning and ritual wall-cleansing, was not really about Jews at all. It was about what they would mean if Jews thought the way they do.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

04/27 Links Pt2: Behind the scenes with Met Police hunting synagogue arsonists; “But Zionism!” Isn’t an Argument Anymore; Irish President’s Sister Joins Gaza Flotilla

From Ian:

Behind the scenes with Met Police hunting synagogue arsonists

A Jewish primary school is not the site of a typical crime scene.

But it is where the two industrious Metropolitan Police officers – Pc Zachary Stimson and Sgt Simon Vandepeer – are investigating a report of “hostile reconnaissance” on Friday afternoon, hours before the Sabbath.

They were called by the school’s security guard, who saw a young man pacing up and down in front of the school gates.

He appeared to be taking pictures and videos of the building on a quiet residential road in north London.

When confronted, the suspect had shouted: “I don’t give a f--- about Jews”, before fleeing, according to the guard.

The unsettling incident comes amid a backdrop of skyrocketing anti-Semitism including an arson attack that destroyed four Hatzola ambulances in north-west London.

On Friday, three men and a 17-year-old boy appeared at the Old Bailey, charged with criminal damage after allegedly attacking the vehicles. Police are investigating whether Iran is hiring locals to carry out the targeted attacks on their behalf.

Seconds after the confrontation, the two police officers and I charged down the North Circular towards the scene with sirens on and blue lights flashing.

Though a report like this would always be concerning, it is taken especially seriously in light of the recent anti-Semitism and a Jewish community living in fear. Jewish community living in fear.

The officers responding to this phone-in are part of a large, multi-pronged campaign called Operation Compertum, from the Latin comperire, meaning “to find out or discover”.

Launched a week ago, the aim of the initiative is threefold: arrest would-be arsonists, deter anyone tempted to commit a crime with a visible police presence and reassure the Jewish, and wider, community they are safe and that the state cares about their security.

So far, police have had enormous success arresting 25 people linked to the arson attacks and an additional 41 people for anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate crimes as well as interviewing a further six people under caution.

This unprecedented undertaking by the Metropolitan Police, counter-terror officials and British intelligence services came in response to the firebombing of four fully-stocked Hatzola ambulances costing around £1m in damages and striking fear into the heart of the British Jewish community.

A group calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia [HAYI], meaning Islamic Movement for the People of the Right Hand, claimed responsibility for the strike.

They used Telegram, an encrypted communications app, to distribute propaganda videos of the assaults on pro-Iran networks.

But sadly, Hatzola was only the beginning.

26th suspect arrested in connection with antisemitic attacks in London

Another suspect was arrested in the United Kingdom on Sunday in connection to the series of recent antisemitic attacks against Jewish-affiliated sites in London, according to the Metropolitan Police.

The 37-year-old man was detained near Barnstaple, Devon by officers from the Counter Terrorism Policing unit.

“He was arrested on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts and has been taken to a London police station for questioning,” according to the Met, which did not disclose the man’s name.

Since the setting ablaze of four ambulances belonging to the Hatzola Jewish group in Golders Green, London, on March 23, a total of 26 suspects have been apprehended by British authorities.

Eight people have been charged with arson-related offenses and one person has been convicted of arson, the Met Police said.

Last week, police arrested a 25-year-old man in nearby Stevenage and three others, a 26-year-old man and two women aged 50 and 59, near Birmingham. On April 21, police arrested a 39-year-old man in Ealing in connection with an “investigation following the discovery of jars of a non-hazardous substance in Kensington Gardens,” according to a police statement.

“But Zionism!” Isn’t an Argument Anymore

The sophisticated antizionist will say he is making a political argument about the character of the state. A binational arrangement. Consider what that actually means. Seven million Hebrew-speaking Jews give up majority status, give up the political sovereignty their grandparents built, give up the only country on Earth where Jewish life has demographic and military weight, and trust that a binational entity including Hamas voters and West Bank militants will treat them fairly. They are to return, voluntarily, to the Diaspora condition they left, with its known downside of periodic mass murder, the desire for which is enshrined in founding documents.

This is where the distinction between antizionism and antisemitism becomes, in practice, an academic curiosity. Bari Weiss wrote in How to Fight Anti-Semitism that it’s one thing to consider whether to have children before you get pregnant, but it’s another thing entirely to consider parenthood after your kid is born. Maybe the distinction between antizionism and antisemitism matters in a Jewish Studies seminar. For the Israeli seventeen-year-old in Haifa however, it’s meaningless. What the antizionists are demanding of her is that she dissolve the basic conditions of her existence. Whether your motive is classical Jew-hatred or high-minded political theory is immaterial to the demand itself.

It is also not racism, at least not in the Nazi sense. Nazi racial antisemitism offered Jews no escape: you are what you are biologically, and no renunciation could save you. Antizionism does offer an escape: Renounce your people’s sovereignty, disavow Zionism, adopt the vocabulary of your accusers, and you will be welcomed. This is the sophisticated antizionist’s position. In that structural sense, antizionism resembles not racial antisemitism but the old Christian antisemitism, which promised to receive Jews warmly if only they would convert.

That is why the honest word for it is not racism. A movement that seeks to erase a national and ethnic identity through propaganda, persecution, and sometimes violence is not a legitimate political position. It is a hate group. That broad political circles in the West now grant this hate group intellectual respectability is a problem of its own, and not different in kind from the fact that racial doctrines once enjoyed wide acceptance, or that Christian Jew-hatred was once the bedrock assumption of educated European life. Popularity has never been evidence of legitimacy.

What Israelis are
Israelis don’t owe anyone an argument for their existence. They don’t need to win the debate about whether Zionism was the right idea in 1897. They don’t need to persuade Ezra Klein or Hasan Piker or the student encampments that their country’s creation in 1948 was just. The debate is over, not because one side won, but because the thing itself came into being. They are a people. They speak a language. They live on a piece of land and have mortgages. That is what peoples do. The Greeks do it. The Poles do it. The Québécois do it. The arguments about whether they should are, at this point, a leisure activity for people who live elsewhere.

The core goal of Zionism, the one all its strands shared, was to make the Jewish people a nation like other nations: speaking its own language, exercising sovereignty in its own homeland. Different Zionisms added different ingredients. Some are incomplete. Some never will be. But the core was achieved. To be a Hebrew-speaking Jew in the Land of Israel is now as unremarkable as being a Frenchman in France. Zionism as an ideology has produced something that no longer needs ideology: a national, ethnic, and cultural identity with a life of its own.

For a long time, Jews have been expected to justify their existence to every new generation of critics, in every new language, using the vocabulary the critics themselves handed us. Zionism and the Israeli project, at its deepest level, is the project of not having to. Of simply being. Of the dignity of waking up somewhere, ordering a latte (“cafe-hafuch”) and croissant in Hebrew (OK, the Hebrew for croissant is croissant, a French word, but still), and speaking a language and raising a family and going to work. Antizionism is a demand that Jews return to the mode of being in which they have to justify all of that. Israelis, for the most part, are not interested. And they shouldn’t be.