Part 5 of The Jewish Question: The Question Has a New Name

On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism to be a form of racism.

It wasn't the only UN resolution passed that day. 

The General Assembly also passed Resolution 3376, establishing the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. 

One resolution declared Jewish national identity illegitimate. The other created the permanent United Nations apparatus that would, from that day forward, operate the framework whose demands the first resolution had articulated.

Resolution 3376 was operationalizing a resolution passed the previous year. In November 1974, the General Assembly had passed Resolution 3236, which defined what it called the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. The 1975 resolution established the permanent committee to advance those rights. The 1974 resolution detailed those rights.

That resolution reaffirms "the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine, including the right to self-determination without external interference" and "the right to national independence and sovereignty." It reaffirms "the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return." It "emphasizes that full respect for and the realization of these inalienable rights of the Palestinian people are indispensable for the solution of the question of Palestine." It "recognizes that the Palestinian people is a principal party in the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East." It "further recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to regain its rights by all means in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations."

Each of these provisions, examined objectively, requires the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

Self-determination "without external interference" applied to a contested territory where two peoples claim sovereignty means Palestinian self-determination without consulting what the existing Jewish inhabitants currently living on the land have to say. National independence and sovereignty, asserted as an inalienable right of the Palestinian people, are articulated without any corresponding mention of Israeli national independence and sovereignty. The right of return, treated as inalienable, requires Israel to absorb the descendants of 1948 refugees in numbers that would end Jewish demographic majority within the state. Recognition of the Palestinians as a principal party in any settlement institutionalizes the Palestinian veto on any agreement that does not satisfy these demands. The right to 'regain rights by all means' — language careful enough to avoid explicit authorization of violence, but ambiguous enough to be read by the PLO as legitimating armed struggle — was articulated by states whose territory was not affected by the means.

Note what isn't in that resolution: any mention of "1967 lines" or "The West Bank and Gaza." It was not a resolution to make a Palestinian state side by side with Israel - it was a resolution to replace Israel. In this resolution, Israeli Jews have no rights - and Israel as a country does not have any rights either, no mater that it is a member of the UN and this goes against everything the UN Charter stands for.

This 1974 resolution is a modern restatement of the Jewish Question. Every demand is on Israel. And its title? 

"Question of Palestine."

The dual passage of November 10, 1975 was the institutional consolidation of this framework. Resolution 3379 declared Jewish national identity illegitimate. Resolution 3376 established the permanent committee to advance the Palestinian rights that 3236 had defined. Both resolutions were operationalizing the same structural project. The same coalition of Arab, Soviet-bloc, and non-aligned states passed both. The complementarity of the two moves was institutionally explicit. The entire purpose of The Question of Palestine was to operationalize the "Zionism is Racism" resolution. 

It was never about Palestinians. It was always about Jews. 

The UN's own timeline

There is one piece of confirming evidence you can see for yourself, today.

 The United Nations maintains an official website called The Question of Palestine, with a section titled "Historical Timeline." The timeline begins in 1885 with the coining of the word "Zionism" by Nathan Birnbaum. It continues with the publication of Der Judenstaat in 1896, the First Zionist Congress in 1897, and Chaim Weizmann's visit to Palestine in 1907. 

The UN's own institutional account of how the Question of Palestine came into being begins with the Jewish answer to the Jewish Question.

The Question of Palestine, on the UN's own institutional account, did not begin with Palestinian national consciousness, the British Mandate, the 1947 partition, or the 1948 war. It began with Zionism. The framework names what it is responding to. It is responding to the Jewish structural exit from the European Jewish Question. The Question of Palestine is the international system's institutional response to the Jewish refusal to be absorbed into European modernity on the framework's terms, using the language of "rights" and "principles" to destroy Jewish self determination - which would have saved untold millions had Israel been born ten years earlier.  

Read this way, the rest of the UN's institutional architecture around Israel is shown to be something other than what it claims to be. The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the Division for Palestinian Rights in the UN Secretariat, the annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (held on November 29, the anniversary of the 1947 partition vote, chosen specifically because it commemorates what the framework treats as the moment of original Palestinian dispossession), UNRWA's institutional perpetuation across generations and creation of a new definition of "refugee" just for Palestinians, the annual cycle of General Assembly resolutions reaffirming the inalienable rights articulated in 3236 — all of this is the institutional architecture of a framework whose load-bearing concern is not the welfare of Palestinians but the existence of the Jewish state that the Jewish exit from Europe produced. 

The November 29 commemoration is not the only annual UN ritual tied to the Israeli historical trajectory. The institution also holds an annual event on May 15. The UN does not call it "Nakba Day." It calls it the "Anniversary of the Nakba" — the anniversary of the catastrophe.

What is the specific catastrophic event the UN is marking the anniversary of? It cannot be the date Palestinian Arabs left their homes - some 250,000 had already left beforehand. It doesn't seem to be a commemoration of the attack on the new state of Israel by combined Arab armies that started May 15; perhaps their eventual loss is the catastrophe (and in fact the original use of the word was exactly for that reason) but the date would not be the date of the start of the aggression.

The only anniversary that makes sense is this: even though Israel declared the state on May 14 ahead of the Friday evening Sabbath, the Arabs did not consider that legally significant. What they do consider important is the day that the British Mandate ended — and Jewish sovereignty began on parts of Palestine. That was the stroke of midnight the morning of May 15.

The UN's selection of May 15 as the anniversary of the nakba shows that to the UN,  the first day of a UN member state's existence is catastrophic. 

The two commemorations are paired. November 29 marks the authorization of Jewish statehood as Palestinian dispossession. May 15 marks the start of operative Jewish sovereignty as Palestinian catastrophe. The UN's institutional rituals around Israel frame its entire existence as wholly negative. 

The UN would never admit that directly. But its official commemorations show that the UN — not Palestinians, but the UN itself — considers Israel's existence to be a problem that must be solved.

This is the Jewish Question transposed to the 21st century.

Counterfactual

There is a simple exercise that exposes what the Question of Palestine is actually about. Imagine the 1948 war had gone the other way. The Arab armies that invaded the new state of Israel — Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq — had won. Israel does not exist. What would have happened to the Palestinian cause?

The territory of the British Mandate would have been divided among the victors. Egypt taking Gaza and the Negev. Jordan taking the West Bank and the coastal areas. Syria taking the Galilee. The Arab population of the former mandate would have become citizens of one of these three states, just like Jordan gave citizenship to the West Bank Arabs in the areas it annexed.

Would there be a Question of Palestine? Would there be a permanent UN agenda item on the fate of the formerly-Mandate Arabs? Would there be a Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Egyptian-Jordanian-Syrian Arabs of the former Mandate? Would there be a UN Division for the Rights of those Arabs? Would there be an UNRWA for the people displaced by the war? Would Western university campuses host protests on behalf of the Arabs of Gaza-as-part-of-Egypt and the West Bank-as-part-of-Jordan? Would Palestinians-as-a-distinct-people exist as a category in international discourse at all?

The answer is obviously no. None of this institutional architecture would exist. The Arabs of the former Mandate would have been absorbed into Arab states under the usual conditions, and the international system would have had no reason to construct a distinct category for them. The world would not be talking about Palestinians today.

The Question of Palestine is not generated by Palestinian statelessness. It is not generated by Palestinian national aspirations. It is generated by opposition to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. It is the Jewish Question resurrected.

What the Arab states actually did with Palestinians

Are there any other fourth and fifth generation refugees on Earth besides Palestinians?

No, because the Refugee Convention definition of refugees does not allow automatic refugee status to descendants. Only UNRWA's does. The UN framework, pushed by the Arab nations, is that Palestinians should remain stateless and miserable, living in camps, as eternal pressure on Israel. Arab leaders admitted this numerous times. The Arab League passed resolutions barring Palestinians from becoming citizens in any Arab state. 

Egypt expelled any Palestinians in its territory to Gaza. Lebanon didn't allow any Palestinians to own land or to work in many jobs. Jordan killed thousands of Palestinians in eleven days in 1970. Kuwait expelled 400,000 Palestinians two decades later. Syria killed thousands in Yarmouk during its civil war. 

There have been no UN resolutions condemning these events. There have been no campus protests against how badly Palestinians have been treated by their own brethren. 

The rejection of statehood

The instrumental character of the Palestinian cause is further demonstrated by what Palestinians themselves have done with offers of statehood. They rejected the 1937 Peel Commission's proposed partition giving them a Palestinian Arab state. They rejected the 1947 UN partition plan.  They rejected the 2000 Camp David proposal offering Palestinian statehood on roughly 92 percent of the West Bank with land swaps, shared Jerusalem, and refugee compensation. They rejected the 2001 Taba framework addressing  the issues left open at Camp David. They ignored the 2008 Olmert offer proposing Palestinian statehood on roughly 94 percent of the West Bank with land swaps for the remainder, a capital in East Jerusalem, internationalized holy basin, and Israeli acceptance of a small symbolic refugee return. 

Each rejection was followed not by counter-proposal but by violence. The Second Intifada followed the Camp David and Taba rejections. The Gaza disengagement of 2005, in which Israel unilaterally withdrew all settlements and military presence, was followed by rocket attacks, the Hamas takeover of 2007, and three wars before October 7, 2023.

The Question of Palestine was never about the welfare or rights of Palestinians. It was solely about denying rights to Jews. 

BDS: the polite rebrand in compressed time

The most visible contemporary manifestation of anti-Zionism is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, launched in 2005 with the public framing that its target is Israel and its policies, not Jews. BDS positions itself as a civil-society human rights campaign modeled on the South African anti-apartheid movement, deploying the contemporary international system's most respectable vocabulary.

The framing falls apart on two facts.

The first is that BDS itself acknowledges its lineage when pressed. Omar Barghouti, the movement's founder, stated in 2011 that the 2005 BDS Call "was not the beginning" of the movement but "a culmination of decades of Palestinian boycott initiatives." He continued: "for more than a century Palestinians have used boycotts." Riham Barghouti, another founder, confirmed in 2023 that BDS "builds off a long history of Arab boycott and Palestinian boycott." The lineage they acknowledge begins with the Fifth Palestine Arab Congress of 1922, which formally called for the boycott of Jewish businesses in Mandatory Palestine, twenty-six years before Israel existed. The Arab League formalized the boycott in 1945, three years before Israel existed, targeting what the League called "products of Palestinian Jews." The target was Jews. The State of Israel was not yet available as a substitute.

The second is that BDS does not boycott Arab-owned Israeli businesses - only Jewish-owned ones. The same Israeli legal jurisdiction, the same Israeli taxes, the same Israeli civic obligations — but the boycott operates only against the Jewish-owned firms. The criterion the movement claims (opposition to Israeli policy) cannot account for this. The criterion that does account for it is the criterion the framework has been operating since 1922: opposition to Jewish economic activity, in whatever surface vocabulary the era allows. 

It is Marx's argument about the Jewish Question revised for the 21st century.

Criticism seeks improvement. Anti-Zionism seeks elimination. BDS, like every form of polite antisemitism this series has examined, is the second.

The Jewish Question applied to philo-semites

The framework's scope is not limited to Jews. Recall that the antisemites who claimed they were not antisemites — the Tageblatt writers quoted by the Pall Mall Gazette in 1881 — threatened Prince Bismarck with becoming a target of the Question if he continued to defend Jews. "The Jewish question will exist even against him." The polite tier of the framework, the tier that distinguished itself from the brutalities of Jew-baiting, was the tier that issued this threat. The genteel antisemitic threats underlying  the Jewish question extends to defenders of the Jews. It treats those who support Jews as themselves candidates for the framework's operation.

We see this happening today. If a non-Jew defends Israel, they immediately get treated like Jews: social media threats, digging into their past, doxxing their families. These threats get noticed by the general population of people who might be sympathetic to Jews. 

The framework does not need to actually destroy defenders of Israel or Jews. It needs only to make defense costly enough that most potential defenders calculate that the cost is too high. Bismarck, threatened by the Tageblatt, was the German Chancellor with substantial political capital; the threat was real but he had resources to absorb it. Yet almost none of the academics with tenure considerations, nor the journalists with career considerations, nor the politicians with constituency considerations, nor the corporate executives with consumer considerations, have Bismarck's resources. They often calculate that defending Israel or defending Jews is not worth the threats, the social cost, or the professional damage. Each withdraws into silence or into more moderate-sounding language that does not expose them to the framework's enforcement. The Jewish Question framework wins without ever having to actually punish a defender, because the threat itself is sufficient to clear the field.

This is the framework's most efficient operation. The cumulative effect of many individual calculations is a public sphere in which defenders of Jews and of Israel are rare, defenders who do speak are marginalized, and the polite tier's framework operates without serious public opposition. The mechanism is unchanged from 1881. 

The framework's enforcement is the threat. The threat comes not from the Jew baiters or the pogromists, but from the people who claim that they are not antisemitic in the slightest. They just point out that the mob might want to go after the offenders. They might claim to abhor violence but they are happy to leverage it to solve the Jewish problem. 

The diminishment program continues

The Jewish Question  framework's various pillars all converge, on examination, on the same underlying demand. The right of return, fully implemented, ends Jewish demographic majority. The settler-colonial framing, taken seriously, requires the dismantling of the "colonial" society. The binational state proposal, by definition, ends Jewish sovereignty. The "from the river to the sea" formulation, on its plain meaning, requires that there not be a Jewish state between the river and the sea. The UN commemorating May 15 as the "anniversary of the Nakba" shows that the problem needing solution is the Jewish state's very existence. The pillars differ in respectability and in the speed at which they require Israel to dissolve. They agree on the destination. 

The international community insists that Jews must diminish themselves and stop insisting on the right to self determination in order to be accepted. It is the Jewish Question all over again. 

And just like some Jews accepted the framework then, some Jews accept it now.

Reform Judaism tried to drop Jewish peoplehood and become Germans of the Mosaic confession. The Bund tried to drop Jewish religion in favor of secular socialist Yiddish culture. The Mendelssohn family did drop everything across five generations, and ended with the family bank liquidated and the Lutheran descendants reclassified as Jews under the Nuremberg Laws. Nothing they did was ever enough, because the excuses for treating Jews differently were never the real reasons. 

The contemporary framework is performing the same operation at the state level. It is asking Israel to drop demographic majority, drop Jerusalem, drop the Jewish character of the state, in exchange for acceptance. And like some Jews in Europe did then, some Jews today accept the terms dictated by polite antisemites who claim they of course are against the Holocaust and don't support October 7, but if only Israel would give up on being so darn Jewish, then we would really have peace. 

This is the logic of the Jewish Voice for Peace and J-Street Jews, and their analogies in Europe and Australia. They accept the lie that somehow the Jews are the reason  for antisemitism, and Jews merely need to adjust their self-image to give up on some of their rights and then they would be respected and loved.

It didn't work then and it wouldn't work now. 

The historical record predicts what would happen if the diminishments were performed. The framework would absorb each one and demand the next, because the framework's load-bearing assumption is not satisfied by any specific diminishment. It is satisfied only by the cessation of the Jewish object the framework has selected.

The imaginary line

The Jewish Question existed because educated nineteenth-century Europeans needed a way to articulate the structural assumption that Jewish presence required management without sounding like the mob. The Question was, from its origin, a liberal response to the extremes of antisemitism — a way of saying we are not them, we are the responsible ones, we engage seriously with a serious problem. The line between Jew-baiting and the Jewish Question was the line educated Europeans drew so they could occupy a moral position superior to the mob while sharing the mob's load-bearing assumption.

Anti-Zionism, as portrayed in mainstream media and operative in the UN, is the same construction. It exists because the international community needs a way to articulate the structural assumption that Jewish sovereignty requires management without sounding like Hamas, Hezbollah  or Hitler. The respectable form of anti-Zionism is a liberal response to the extremes of contemporary antisemitism — a way of saying we are not them, we condemn the brutalities, we engage seriously with a serious question of human rights and decolonization. The line between calling for Israel's destruction and demanding Israel transform into a non-Jewish state is the line educated Westerners draw so they can occupy a moral position superior to those who chant "Globalize the Intifada" while sharing the same underlying framework. Now, as then, the respective Questions are antisemitism that pretends to be liberal and enlightened, not like the crude people who call for violence. 

In both cases, the line is imaginary. The demand that Israel drop the Jewish part of its state, never demanded of Muslim or Christian states, is just an extension of the antisemitic but polite 19th century demands that Jews give up Judaism, Jewish institutional life, or the laws that held them together for 3,000 years in order to not be attacked as Jews. The argument then was that Jews caused antisemitism by being too Jewish. Today the argument is that Israel causes antisemitism by refusing to commit national suicide. Either way, the polite version and the crude version have the same goal: elimination of a critical component of Jewish existence, whether it is religious, cultural, economic or national. 

The UN, by its own institutional account, dates the Question of Palestine to 1885. The first event on its timeline is the coining of the word "Zionism." The framework documents its own lineage on its own institutional website. The Question of Palestine is the international system's institutional attempt to negate the only successful Jewish answer to the Jewish Question. The framework knows what it is. It says so on its own pages.

Believe it. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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05/12 Links Pt2: The Gulf Countries Are Building a Middle East that Iran Cannot Tolerate; France arrests Tunisian for terror plot on Jews; Israel advances to Eurovision final

From Ian:

Dr. Yuval Steinitz: Technological Superiority Led to Israeli Victory in Iran War

Dr. Yuval Steinitz, chairman of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, told a Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs briefing on Monday that "40,000 rockets and missiles were launched at Israel from Lebanon and Gaza alone. Iron Dome intercepted the overwhelming majority of them with a success rate close to 99%."

Without Iron Dome, Israel's major cities would have faced massive civilian casualties, economic paralysis, and severe disruption to daily life and military operations. "There is no parallel technology in the world," Steinitz said, describing Iron Dome as the only system capable of intercepting short- and medium-range rockets, mortar shells, and artillery fire at this scale.

Steinitz described the phases of Israel's Iran campaign, beginning with the elimination of senior Iranian military leadership. Nearly 40 top commanders from the Revolutionary Guards and the regular Iranian army were killed "in less than 10 seconds." "The speed was critical. If it had taken 10 minutes instead of 10 seconds, commanders would have escaped to bunkers and the achievement would have been impossible."

The second phase focused on achieving air superiority over Iran within 36 hours, allowing the Israeli Air Force to operate freely against nuclear and missile infrastructure while defending Israel against ballistic missile attacks.

"For the first time in history, two countries fought each other directly from distances of 1,000 to 3,000 km....The main factor was scientific and technological superiority," he said, noting that while Iran rapidly adapted and improved its systems during the war, "we ran even faster, and the end result is very clear....I don't know a better example of a crystal-clear victory in the modern world than the war between Israel and Iran....The regime was dramatically weakened."

Regarding the impact of strikes against Iran's nuclear program, Steinitz said: "We destroyed most of the enrichment sites and almost all of the weaponization infrastructure." While Iran still possesses enriched uranium stockpiles and the scientific knowledge to enrich further, key components of the nuclear weapons program were severely damaged, including testing facilities, conversion infrastructure, and personnel involved in weaponization.

In his assessment, before the war Iran could have reached a nuclear weapon within months. "Now, it will take them between two to four years to rebuild everything and produce a real nuclear weapon."

Jason Greenblatt: The Gulf Countries Are Building a Middle East that Iran Cannot Tolerate

For decades, Iran's leadership has opposed the direction much of the Gulf has taken politically, economically and diplomatically. Today, that opposition is increasingly being expressed through direct attacks on the states' infrastructure and way of life. Since Feb. 28, the Iranian regime has launched 549 ballistic missiles, 29 cruise missiles and 2,260 drones at the UAE.

The Iranian regime presents its model as the only legitimate form of Islamic governance. Yet, Gulf states have demonstrated that economic growth, global engagement, and religious life can develop together without the same degree of state control.

The UAE also made a decision to establish formal relations with Israel, altering a long-standing regional dynamic and showing that countries in the Middle East can pursue different paths, grounded in national interest and the pursuit of long-term stability and prosperity. It also introduced a precedent that runs directly against Iran's effort to organize the region around confrontation and war.

Iran's conflict with the Gulf extends beyond military confrontation. The UAE stands in direct opposition to Iran's broader ambitions. A country that represents economic openness, stability and independent decision-making challenges the narrative that the Iranian regime promotes about how the Middle East must function. What Iran is trying to damage has not broken under sustained attack, and I do not believe it ever will.

Trump says stopping Iran's nuclear program outweighs Americans' economic pain

US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Americans’ financial struggles are not a factor in his decision-making as he seeks to negotiate an end to the Iran war, saying that preventing Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is his top priority.

Asked by a reporter to what extent Americans’ financial situations were motivating him to strike a deal, Trump said: “Not even a little bit.”

"The only thing that matters, when I’m talking about Iran, they can’t have a nuclear weapon," Trump said before departing the White House for a trip to China. "I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That's the only thing that motivates me."

Trump's remarks are likely to draw scrutiny from critics who argue the administration should balance geopolitical objectives with the economic impact on Americans, particularly as cost-of-living concerns remain a top issue for voters ahead of the November midterm elections.

Asked to elaborate on the president's comments, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said that Trump's "ultimate responsibility is the safety and security of Americans. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, and if action wasn’t taken, they’d have one, which threatens all Americans."

Trump is under growing pressure from fellow Republicans who fear economic pain caused by the war could spark a backlash against the party and cost it control of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate in November.

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05/12 Links Pt1: Two-Year Investigation Concludes Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence; Melanie Phillips: ‘Zack Polanski is an enemy of Jews’; Kristof’s grotesque journalistic malpractice

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The End of Our Illusions

We try to avoid imagining that our ideological opponents are morally inferior. But it can be just as dangerous to convince ourselves that our declared antagonists want the same things we want and hold to values that approximate our own.

That is part of the reason for the pained reaction to Nick Kristof’s opinion column yesterday, in which he claimed (without evidence, obviously) that Israel has instituted a state policy of militaristized bestiality.

Today, a meticulous, harrowing report was released on Hamas’s systematic rape and sexual violence toward Israelis on and after October 7. The commission that undertook this investigation “has examined over 10,000 photographs and videos of the attack totaling more than 1,800 hours of visual analysis.”

We want to believe that Nick Kristof and all the people who defended and shared his article are just like us—believers in honesty, men and women of integrity, a community of truth-seekers with a baseline sense of human decency. We want to believe this in part because of that very sense of human decency.

But we are making a massive error. Kristof’s named sources not only provided no evidence for his lurid bestiality fantasies but themselves were also people with massive credibility deficits.

Conversely, the documentation of sexual violence by Palestinians who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023—the total number of infiltrators was several thousand that day—took years, even though we all watched videos of Palestinians dragging the unclothed bodies of Israeli women through the streets of Gaza, and even though Hamas documented many of their crimes, and even though Hamas members admitted to raping women that day. All of that is what is known as evidence—apologies to Kristof and his readers for using such technical, obscure SAT words—and evidence needs to be compiled, examined, analyzed, and used as the jumping-off point for additional investigation.

That is what Israeli officials did, and that is what those who support the Jewish state’s existence did, and what they called for others to do, because that is what is done when the goal is to obtain the truth. To the anti-Zionist collective, the truth is to be avoided like the plague, and therefore what is rewarded is not evidence but creativity and imagination.

And that is what was on display in the New York Times. We want Kristof and his defenders to be like us. But they are not like us—and they punish us for our good faith.

Israel Is the Weapon By Abe Greenwald

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There’s increasing overlap between the left and right dupes on all these issues. The point is that anti-Semites merely used Israel to turn them into their anti-Jewish foot soldiers. They’ve been recruited to dehumanize Jews online, disrupt Jewish events, and attack Jews around the world. Not Israel—Jews.

Because the aim of the information war is not merely to turn public opinion against Israel—although it’s certainly done that. The idea is to alchemize anti-Zionism into kinetic Jew-hatred in the real world, to instigate a war against the Jews of the Diaspora parallel to the one that Hamas launched against the Jews of Israel.

Many American Jews say that Israel should do a better job fighting the information war—without understanding that war was declared against them. Israel has done an astounding job of fighting its war. We are the ones who’ve been under attack from anti-Israel propaganda this whole time.

We still are, and it’s getting ever worse. No longer do the propagandists bother to sprinkle meager crumbs of credibility over their work. There’s no incentive for them to cover their tracks and every incentive to prevaricate. Photographs of the Gaza famine that never happened earn Pulitzer Prizes. The New York Times now publishes horror stories about Israel that are not only impossible to verify but impossible period—literally impossible. When Nicolas Kristof writes a story about IDF-trained rape-dogs, he’s sending the mob after all of us—including those liberal American Jews who then denounce Israel. What they don’t realize is that accusing Jews of committing impossible crimes is the oldest, most primitive category of anti-Semitic propaganda. It takes us out of the realm of the human, no matter where we are on this planet.

It would be hard for a famous journalist simply to assert that Jews, as a people, have dark powers that defy the laws of nature. But when Israel is your weapon, you never hold your fire.

Honest Reporting: Why They Deny The Crimes of October 7

When Jewish Suffering Becomes Inconvenient
For many people invested in a worldview in which Israel represents absolute evil and Palestinians represent absolute victimhood, acknowledging the sexual crimes of October 7 creates tension. Jewish women cannot be permitted to exist as victims because their reality complicates the narrative. Israeli suffering becomes ideologically intolerable. And so it must be doubted, obscured, minimized, or erased altogether. This is why so much October 7 denialism focuses specifically on the sexual crimes.

Sexual violence carries a specific moral weight in contemporary society. To acknowledge that Hamas terrorists and their collaborators committed widespread and systematic acts of rape, mutilation, and sexual torture would require many activists to confront a reality: that individuals and movements they have celebrated, romanticized, excused, or sanitized committed acts of extraordinary brutality.

We should also recognize the profoundly anti-Jewish nature of this phenomenon. Jews are uniquely subjected to suspicion toward their suffering in ways that have become normalized across political and cultural life. The distrust of Jewish testimony has become so deeply embedded that many people no longer even recognize it as prejudice.

The Crime Continued Through Erasure
The tragedy is not only the crimes themselves, but what their denial reveals about the world Jews inhabit. After the Holocaust, many believed humanity had learned something: that there existed a moral obligation to listen to victims, document atrocities honestly, and ensure genocidal violence could never again be erased through propaganda and denial. Yet within hours of October 7, that promise began collapsing in real time.

The lesson of Holocaust denial should have taught us that evidence alone is never enough against ideologically motivated hatred. There will never be enough footage, enough testimony, enough witnesses, enough forensic evidence, or enough reports for those who have already decided that Jewish suffering does not count.

That is the real connection between Holocaust denial and the denial of October 7. Both ultimately rest upon the same underlying premise: that Jews are uniquely unworthy of belief, uniquely suspect in their suffering, and uniquely undeserving of moral sympathy.

Ultimately, when these crimes are denied, minimized, relativized, or erased, the victims are violated a second time. The murdered are stripped not only of their lives, but of the truth of what was done to them. The raped are stripped not only of bodily autonomy, but of the dignity of having their suffering acknowledged. Denial is never neutral. It is the continuation of the crime through erasure.

That is why speaking clearly about October 7, including the systematic sexual crimes perpetrated against women and girls, matters so profoundly. We cannot bring back those who were murdered. We cannot undo the horrors inflicted upon the victims. But we can refuse to abandon them to silence, distortion, and denial. We can bear witness. We can speak plainly. And we can ensure that those who suffered are not erased by a world that too often finds Jewish suffering uniquely difficult to acknowledge.

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The Covenant Under Pressure - Excerpts from Part 8 of my new book

This is an excerpt from Part 8 of my new book, Reclaiming the Covenant. you can buy the print version now on Amazon..)

The covenant has survived 250 years. It has survived a civil war that killed 620,000 Americans, a Great Depression, two world wars, the assassination of presidents, the betrayals of Watergate, and the trauma of September 11. In each case the threat came, the covenant held, and the republic continued. This record is genuinely remarkable and should not be minimized.

Survival is not the same as health. A body can survive repeated illness while accumulating damage that makes the next illness more dangerous. The covenant’s current threats are not external — no foreign adversary can destroy it, though many would like to — they are internal, and they are particularly insidious because they operate in the covenant’s own language. The republic is not being attacked by people who hate America. It is being eroded by people who are certain they love it.

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Part 4 established the covenant’s dignity foundation — the floor, grounded in the Declaration and operationalized in the Fifth, Fourteenth, and Eighth Amendments, from which every right derives and against which every political act must be measured. The question that floor poses is not: does this help my side? It is: does this treat every person as a being with inherent dignity the covenant requires me to respect? Five distinct threats are currently answering that question wrongly, and they are doing so from multiple directions simultaneously.

The first two were developed at length in Part 5. Faux patriotism — tribal loyalty dressed in covenant language — defines membership by identity rather than covenant acceptance, failing Washington’s Newport test immediately and denying dignity to every American it categorizes as insufficiently authentic. Its mirror image — the use of legitimate grievances to declare the covenant itself fraudulent — is self-defeating for the reason we identified: every powerful argument for justice in American history has derived its authority from holding the covenant to its own terms, not from rejecting them. Both are covenant-exit positions. Both produce the same outcome: Americans who feel no obligation to Americans they have categorized as opponents.

Single-issue tunnel vision is the most widespread and the least recognized as a covenant problem. It takes one genuine covenant failure — racism is the most prominent current example, though the structure applies to any single axis — and makes it the interpretive lens through which every institution, every historical figure, every policy question must be evaluated. The problem is that a single-axis lens cannot hold multiple values in tension simultaneously — the equality principle coexisting with the free speech guarantee, with reserved powers, with property protections — and the genuine tensions among them can only be navigated through mature reasoning. Single-issue tunnel vision substitutes predetermined conclusions for that reasoning. It is, in the precise sense Part 4 established, a failure of corrigibility: the refusal to remain open to being wrong.

The fourth threat is covenant language capture — the systematic redefinition of the covenant’s vocabulary to serve factional interests. Part 4 developed the rights taxonomy in full: the distinction between genuine rights (constitutive commitments the covenant cannot revoke without ceasing to be itself), entitlements (real policy commitments above the rights floor, restructurable through legitimate argument), and faux rights (policy preferences dressed in covenantal language). The inflation of “rights” to include contested policy goods does two things simultaneously: it acquires the moral force of covenantal language for positions that have not earned it, and it strips the term of the precision that protects genuine rights. Rights inflation forecloses the democratic argument the covenant’s framework requires, because you cannot argue democratically against what has been declared a right. That foreclosure is the attack — conducted almost always by people who believe they are defending the covenant rather than eroding it. The same dynamic applies when “freedom,” “equality,” “democracy,” and “patriotism” are redefined to mean agreement with my tribe’s positions rather than the covenant’s terms.

The fifth threat is practiced by people who understand perfectly well that it is wrong and do it anyway: the systematic exploitation of majority power to entrench dominance against the covenant’s explicit design. The constitutional grounding for majority restraint is not ambiguous — the Bill of Rights constrains majorities, the Senate equalizes state representation, the amendment supermajority requirement prevents passionate simple majorities from foreclosing future consensus, judicial review and the presidential veto check legislative dominance. Madison in Federalist No. 10 was explicit: the founders did not trust majorities. The entire architecture is designed to force consensus rather than permit domination.

Gerrymandering is one example. There are plenty of others — pressuring lawmakers to vote with their party and against their consciences in order to get legislation passed turns Congress into a collection of robots instead of thinkers and representatives. When the value of staying in power overrides moral values, the system is in danger. All of this is technically legal, but Jefferson and Madison would have recognized it immediately as the thing they were most afraid of.

Running beneath all five threats is the distinction Part 4 named and Part 5 illustrated through the civil rights movement: the difference between positions that disagree within the framework and positions that attack the framework itself. The test is always procedural. Any political philosophy that pursues its goals through argument, accepts democratic outcomes including losses, maintains the dignity of opponents, and remains open to being wrong is a legitimate participant in the covenant’s framework — however radical its substantive positions. What the framework cannot accommodate is the methodology that rejects these conditions: that claims the right to override democratic outcomes, suppress opposing argument, dehumanize opponents, or treat the covenant’s mechanisms as obstacles to destroy when they produce unwelcome results. The content of the ideology is irrelevant to this judgment. A revolutionary vanguard that suppresses dissent to achieve economic justice and an authoritarian movement that bypasses elections to restore cultural order are committing the same structural violation, from opposite directions, for opposite reasons. Citizens who have internalized this distinction can do what the current environment makes nearly impossible: take seriously the difference between opponents whose positions they find dangerously wrong and opponents whose conduct attacks the preconditions for having the argument at all.

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Understanding the threats is the easier part. The harder question is why the covenant is losing ground to them now, in ways it has not before — why national pride is collapsing, why the sense of shared American identity is fracturing, and where the fracture lines actually run.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

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Pennsylvania judge leaves the Democratic Party over antisemitism. Here's a sample platform for a sane, moral third party.

It is refreshing to see someone with principles.

From WESA (Pittsburgh):

Pennsylvania state Supreme Court Justice David Wecht, who was reelected to a second 10-year term as a Democrat last fall, says he has left the party, in which he says “hateful anti-Jewish invective and actions are minimized, ignored, and even coddled.”

“Acquiescence to Jew-hatred is now disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party,” said Wecht in a statement distributed from a state court system email account Monday afternoon.

“I can no longer abide” the tide of rising antisemitism, he said. “So, I won’t. I am no longer registered within any political party.”

America's political system needs a third party that condemns the extremes of both major parties and makes its stand on issues based on morality rather than partisanship. and power.

What would such a party's platform look like? Glad you asked! This is the kind of thing I've been thinking about. 

The Covenantal Party: A Platform

A society survives not through laws and incentives alone, but through morally trustworthy relationships between citizens, institutions, and truth itself. That is the center of gravity of this platform.

Rights protect individuals. Obligations sustain civilization.

Citizens owe duties — to family, to community, to truth, to future generations, to institutions, and to the nation itself. A political movement that speaks only of rights while ignoring obligations has already conceded the ground on which free societies stand. The deepest unit of civilization is the relationship, not the individual and not the state — and a platform that ignores that has misread what it is trying to protect.

Human dignity is non-negotiable.

Anti-dehumanization norms, criminal justice reform oriented toward rehabilitation where possible, strong disability protections, anti-corruption laws, and ethical AI governance all follow from the same root: people are not reducible to demographics or economic units. The party rejects cruelty as entertainment, ideological purges, mob humiliation culture, and any system that strips individuals of their irreducible worth. Dignity is not a progressive talking point or a conservative tradition — it is the precondition for everything else.

Truth and moral transparency are civilizational commitments.

Institutions collapse when they lose moral credibility, and the process of losing it is usually invisible until it isn't. The platform makes transparency a defining issue: radical government transparency, independent institutional audits, anti-propaganda standards, strong whistleblower protections, mandatory disclosure of political funding sources, and public reasoning requirements for major administrative decisions.

That transparency mandate extends fully into the technology sector. Social media platforms, search engines, and content recommendation systems exercise extraordinary influence over what citizens see, believe, and feel — and they exercise it invisibly. Algorithm disclosure requirements, public audits of content amplification systems, and anti-manipulation regulations apply across all major platforms, not just AI systems. Users have a right to know how their information environment is being shaped, and platforms that profit from manipulating attention bear a corresponding obligation to account for how they do it. Institutional opacity is a civilization-level threat whether the institution is a government agency or a technology company.

Fair elections require fair maps.

Gerrymandering is legalized political corruption — the manipulation of district boundaries to predetermine election outcomes regardless of voter preference. The platform supports algorithm-defined redistricting, drawing district lines through transparent, auditable computational processes optimized for compactness, contiguity, and equal population — with no partisan data as input. Independent oversight commissions verify the output. The legitimacy of representative democracy depends on voters choosing their representatives, not representatives choosing their voters.

Family stability is infrastructure.

The party treats family stability as seriously as highway maintenance or grid reliability — because it is. Policies include pro-family tax reform, meaningful child tax credits, parental leave, housing affordability initiatives, marriage counseling incentives, and community-based childcare. Unlike some traditionalist movements, the framework avoids punitive moralism; it orients toward repair, aspiration, and reintegration rather than permanent exile. Strong families are not a culture-war decoration — they are the load-bearing structure of social cohesion.

Relationships are the foundation of the civic order.

Responsibility for other citizens begins at home and radiates outward — to neighbors, to community institutions, to the nation, to future generations. This platform centers relationships rather than transactions. The neighbor you check on during a storm, the community organization you give three hours a week to, the civic association that maintains the park, the volunteer fire department — these are not quaint remnants of an earlier era. They are the connective tissue without which no law, no policy, and no government program can substitute. Volunteerism and civic participation are not lifestyle choices; they are the active expression of what citizenship means. A platform serious about civilization will treat the cultivation of civic participation as a policy goal in its own right — supporting volunteer infrastructure, incentivizing community service, and measuring social capital alongside economic indicators.

Pluralism with principles.

A covenantal society is not a monoculture. It holds together diverse communities — religious and secular, traditional and progressive, urban and rural — under a shared framework of basic obligations rather than a shared set of cultural preferences. Any community that adheres to those basic principles — human dignity, rule of law, non-coercion of members, civic participation — has wide latitude to organize its own internal life according to its own values. Orthodox communities, secular humanist communities, religious minorities, immigrant communities maintaining distinct cultural identities: all of them belong within the covenant as long as they honor the floor that makes coexistence possible. The framework does not demand uniformity; it demands accountability to shared minimum standards. Pluralism without that floor is not tolerance — it is the gradual dissolution of the common ground on which all communities stand.

Markets are tools, not moral authorities.

The economic framework is market-friendly, anti-oligarchic, anti-extractive, and committed to the dignity of labor. Policies include regulated capitalism, vigorous anti-monopoly enforcement, worker ownership incentives, vocational education, industrial policy for strategic resilience, discouragement of predatory finance, and strong social safety nets tied to reintegration and contribution. The party rejects both libertarian hyper-individualism and centralized technocratic socialism — the economy should serve human dignity, and when it stops doing that, the framework for correcting it must already exist.

National cohesion without ethnonationalism.

The platform strongly emphasizes national preservation, sovereignty, and cultural continuity while rejecting racial nationalism, supremacism, and xenophobic politics. Policies include strong border enforcement, civic integration into constitutional and covenantal norms, controlled immigration, national service programs, and the construction of a shared civic identity. Obligations to citizens come first; strangers are still treated ethically. A nation is a covenant with its own people — that priority is not a moral failure, it is a moral structure.

Peace through strength.

Foreign policy is restrained realism: seek peace first, maintain overwhelming defensive capability, avoid humiliation politics in diplomacy, reject utopian interventionism, and refuse to appease violent actors. The platform is skeptical of ideological empire-building in both its neoconservative and progressive humanitarian forms. Deterrence works; naïveté kills.

Ethical technology and AI governance.

The same values driving the transparency agenda — dignity, accountability, corrigibility — apply directly to AI governance. The party advocates AI transparency standards, explainability requirements, human accountability for automated decisions, protections against algorithmic social fragmentation, digital privacy rights, and limits on surveillance capitalism. The technology sector does not get a separate moral framework just because its tools are new.

Education for moral formation and civic responsibility.

The platform rejects value-neutrality in education as the illusion it is. A democracy that produces technically skilled but morally unformed citizens has not educated its people — it has processed them. Policies include robust civics as a core graduation requirement at every level, ethical reasoning, media literacy, dialogue skills, history taught with genuine complexity, anti-fragility education, and vocational dignity.

Civics education in particular is treated as nation-building infrastructure. Students learn how government works, how to evaluate evidence and argument, how civic institutions depend on citizen participation, and what obligations come with the rights they inherit. The goal is not the production of any particular political viewpoint — it is the production of citizens capable of self-governance, which is something distinct from, and more demanding than, the ability to cast a ballot.

Environmental stewardship without apocalypticism.

Conservation, sustainable energy, long-term stewardship, anti-waste culture, and genuine ecological responsibility — all grounded in the obligation to future generations rather than in anti-human ideology. The platform rejects degrowth ideology and civilizational self-hatred alongside environmental recklessness. Stewardship means caring for something you intend to pass on — that is a conservative impulse, a progressive commitment, and a human obligation simultaneously.

What makes this different.

Unlike progressivism, this platform is less utopian, more obligation-centered, more institutionally skeptical, more committed to family and national cohesion, and less identity-essentialist. Unlike conservatism, it is less market-fundamentalist, more communitarian, more committed to robust social safety nets, and more explicitly moral-structural in its reasoning. Unlike libertarianism, it rejects radical atomized individualism as a social philosophy. Unlike populism, it is suspicious of demagoguery and moral simplification — which means it will never be the easiest platform to sell, but it may be the most honest one.

The platform in three words: Rights require responsibility. 

And civilization requires the willingness to say so.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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