Monday, December 01, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
The biblical command ‘Blot out the memory of Amalek’ surfaced heavily in Israel after October 7, 2023. UN institutions, international and Israeli human rights NGOs and scholars of genocide studies classified the wide use of the Amalek rhetoric across Israeli politics and the military as a clear incitement to genocide. It is acknowledged that such scientific and legal subordination of the present Israeli Amalek rhetoric to the concept of genocide is indispensably important for the Palestinian just cause. However, this paper further singles out this rhetoric to examine it through the analytical lens of political theology. Thus, it first highlights the political-theological carriage of the biblical narrations of Amalek. Second, it situates Amalek as an archetype of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the enemy. Third, the paper traces a genealogy of the Zionist construction of the Palestinian as an Amalekite enemy. Finally, it concludes by showing how this political-theological genealogy culminates in the erasure of the Palestinian from the memory of Western ‘civilization.’
Because I am familiar with the topic, I was quickly able to see that the article was based on false assumptions. I identified two:
One that Israeli leaders invoked Amalek in the sense of destroying every Palestinian man, woman and child when they were in fact invoking the other Amalek commandment of "remembering Amalek" - that is the verse Netanyahu quoted and consistently used the language of "remember."
The other was that Israeli leaders were referring to Palestinians as Amalek or saying all Palestinians are legitimate targets, and they clearly said the opposite - that Hamas was the target. In fact this paper barely mentions Hamas and while it mentions the date of October 7, 2023 several times, not once does it say what happened that day.
If any load-bearing assumption behind the paper is false, then the paper is itself wrong. And these aren't the only false assumptions: the paper assumes "genocide" as a fact, that the "Amalek rhetoric" was widespread in Israel, that there is a traceable "genealogy" from the Torah to early Zionists to the Gaza war of "Amalek" rhetoric, that modern Israeli leaders using "Amalek" rhetoric reflect a coherent theological‑political ideology rather than as a rhetorical device.
Again, if any of these are provably wrong, the entire paper is wrong. Which it is.
But this post is not meant to be merely a debunking of the paper. It is a story of how anti-Israel rhetoric has become so mainstreamed that even intelligent people can no longer tell the difference between truth and the lies I just listed.
Analyse & Kritik is a peer reviewed journal. A Jewish day school student would know the difference between the two Amalek commandments. Anyone can look up the text of the speeches of Israeli leaders to see what they actually said. Why couldn't the peer reviewers?
The answer, I believe, is that today's academia no longer has a reasonable definition of "truth." There are a number of theories of what truth means, and the one that they use (at least for Israel) appears to be the "coherence theory," which holds that a belief is true if it is consistent with a larger system of beliefs. This paper, and many others I have examined, are coherent - yet they are riddled with falsehoods that aren't just mistakes but that invalidate the entire paper. The reviewers are looking at whether the argument is consistent, but they are assuming that the facts are accurate.
The anti-Israel narrative has become so widespread that it is now considered the only coherent explanation for anything Israel does. This is why the academics and NGOs are so resistant to correction when their facts are proven wrong - they cannot wrap their heads around any coherent alternative to "Israel is evil." That is the only fact they are willing to accept, and any actual facts that contradict it are considered aberrant, not disproof.
The frightening part is that AIs, unless carefully trained, tend to do the same thing. I tried to train a GPT to surface hidden, load-bearing assumptions and tested it with this article. It found some surface-level assumptions but did not detect the deeper ones. It assumed that Azzam's Biblical quotes were all referring to the same commandment. It said that it was wrong to generalize individual politicians to the entire Israeli leadership, but gave examples of genocidal sounding quotes that were themselves taken out of context - because it was trained on the ICJ case and UN documents that did not mention how they misquoted the speeches. Only when I told them the facts did they go to source materials and find out I was right.
Academics don't know how to search for truth anymore, and AIs are being trained to think the same way.
We should all be very, very scared.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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