Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, December 29, 2025

The circular argument that became mainstream: Israel is defined as racist, therefore Israel must be racist

In June, Stanford University Press released a book edited by Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin titled "Race and the Question of Palestine."

The very title of the book all but announces its conclusion that Israel is racist. The Introduction confirms this impression, not by carefully arguing its case, but by building the conclusion into its premises and then presenting the result as discovery rather than assumption.

From the opening pages, the editors insist that race is not merely one analytic lens among many that might be used to understand the conflict, but the essential framework for interpreting Zionism, Israel, and Palestinian experience. Other explanatory models – citizenship law, nationalism, security doctrine, regional war, even ethnicity itself – are treated not as competing hypotheses to be weighed, but as evasions that obscure the truth.

Once this framing is in place, the logic becomes self-sealing. If Zionism is defined as settler colonialism, and settler colonialism is defined as inherently racial, then Israel must be a racial state. The conclusion is embedded in the premise.

This is where the circularity becomes impossible to ignore. The Introduction does not begin by asking whether race best explains Israeli policies, institutions, and conflicts. It begins by asserting that race does explain them, and then rereads every legal distinction, border regime, and security practice as confirmation of that claim. Evidence no longer tests the theory; the theory filters the evidence. That is coherence masquerading as correspondence – an internally consistent story that never seriously risks being wrong.

The most revealing moment comes when the editors turn their attention to human rights organizations that do not foreground race. B’Tselem, for example, is criticized not because its factual claims are false, but because it frames Israeli domination primarily in terms of ethnicity and citizenship rather than race.

See the circularity here:

Speaking of race in the context of Palestine, readers may ask why use “race” instead of “ethnicity,” “people,” or “nation,” and what analytical and explanatory work “race” does that “ethnicity” or “nationality” does not. ...[T]heir use alone without race analysis, I suggest, not only fails to capture the work of race, racialization, and racism as constitutive of colonial projects, but also conceals it. The apartheid reports, mentioned above, provide an example—one of many—of such concealment through their failure to recognize settler colonialism and race as the defining features of Israeli apartheid or to account for Zionism as the racial ideology that drives Israeli-Zionist colonization.

The circularity is explicit. If race is defined as the only valid explanatory category, then any analysis that does not center race is, by definition, accused of concealment. If you do not begin with race, you cannot arrive at race as the conclusion. The framework does not merely privilege a lens; it morally disqualifies alternatives.

This same structure governs the Introduction’s core claims:

The colonization of Palestine—like other imperial, colonial, and settler-colonial projects—cannot be understood outside the grammar of race. Concepts such as ethnicity and nationality do not capture the history or the political work of race as a project of colonial distinction that rationalizes dispossession and domination....

But if Zionism is understood as a movement of an indigenous people returning to its ancestral homeland – which it is – the argument collapses. That possibility is never seriously entertained, because the framing makes it impermissible from the outset. Alternative explanations are not rebutted; they are ruled out in advance.

A strong theory clarifies what it can and cannot explain. It specifies the conditions under which it might fail. It does not declare rival models ethically suspect simply for existing.

We have discussed many times that Israeli law maps far more cleanly onto distinctions between citizenship and non-citizenship than onto any racial hierarchy between Jews and Arabs. Arab citizens of Israel live on both sides of the Green Line and possess the same civil rights as Jewish citizens there. Arab Israelis and Druze serve at the highest levels of government, the judiciary, medicine, industry and the military. They aren't tokens. Their existence should be fatal to the claim that Israel operates as a racial regime in the sense implied by the book. Instead, they are ignored, leaving the reader unaware that such counterevidence even exists. The framework does not invite comparison; it forecloses it.

None of this is happening on the margins of activism or social media. This is a flagship academic press lending its imprimatur to an argument that relies on premise smuggling rather than demonstration. Stanford University Press is not Jadaliyya, a political blog, or an NGO position paper. It occupies a role that signals to readers, students, and journalists that what follows has passed serious scholarly scrutiny. When a press of this stature publishes a text that substitutes moral intensity and theoretical coherence for falsifiability and causal testing, it sends a signal far beyond this one book.

Once you see the circularity of the argument, you cannot unsee it. The fact that this passed through one of America’s most prestigious academic presses should trouble us far more than the argument itself.

What is at stake here is larger than a single book or a single conflict. When prestigious academic institutions normalize circular reasoning, moralized framing, and premise smuggling, they teach students and readers that conclusions matter more than truth-seeking, and that theory is a substitute for evidence rather than a tool for understanding reality. Once that lesson is absorbed, the damage is not confined to Middle East studies. It spreads outward, hollowing out the intellectual norms that make serious disagreement, genuine pluralism, and honest scholarship possible at all.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Somaliland is the anti-Palestine

There was an unintentionally revealing tweet from the "State of Palestine" about Israel's recognition of Somaliland:

Why would "Palestine" even care whether Israel recognizes Somaliland?

Maybe because Somaliland is everything "Palestine" can never be.

Michael Rubin writes in the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune:

In 1960, Somaliland won its independence from Britain. Five days later, however, Somaliland’s government chose to unify with the former Italian colony to form what would become Somalia.

It was not a happy marriage, and the former British protectorate split from Somalia in 1991.

Somaliland’s three decades of isolation, in hindsight, may have been a blessing. The international community dumped billions of dollars of aid into Mogadishu, but Somaliland received next to none and had to raise its own budget from customs revenue and taxation. As a result, Somaliland built capacity and a tax base. It is home to major investments—multibillion-dollar communications and mobile money companies, one of the continent’s largest Coca Cola bottling plants, hotels, resorts, and transportation companies. Its deep-water Berbera port now competes with Djibouti and Mombasa. Most businesses that the international community labels as Somali are actually owned by Somalilanders.

Nowhere has Somaliland demonstrated its capacity and accountability more than with elections. Somaliland, unlike Somalia, has held more than eight elections since 1991. One was decided by less than 100 votes of more than one million cast. Each change of power has been peaceful. Somaliland elections are among the world’s most secure, with voter registration certified with biometric iris scans.

What a contrast with "Palestine"!

The PA started not long after Somaliland declared independence, and has had the benefit of billions of dollars in aid from the West as well as from Arab countries. All it has to show for this is a kleptocracy, one of the most corrupt governments on Earth, a dictatorship where one person controls the executive, legislative and judicial branches as well as the organization (the PLO) that the PA officially reports to, and a permanent split with Hamas.

The Palestinian government could not survive a week without international aid. Somaliland has been stable for 33 years without such aid.

Somaliland compares far more with the Zionist government in making from 1922-1948 where diaspora Jews helped financially but it was mostly built with dedication and sweat from the Jews who lived there, creating institutions that were ready as soon as the British left.

International aid cannot help a people who have little interest in self-governance to begin with. The Palestinian national cause, from the start, was always primarily anti-Israel and independence was only a means to help destroy Israel rather than an end in itself.

The world should reward people who actually care about themselves and their future, not those whose entire purpose is to destroy another state.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

An op-ed in Misr Al Balad by Dr. Khaled Fawaz starts off with sympathy for Adolf Hitler's hate for Jews:

Hitler's childhood. He grew up in a humble family, suffering from his father's cruelty, while deeply loving his mother. Her death, particularly at the hands of a Jewish doctor due to medical negligence, profoundly affected him, instilling in him a deep-seated hatred for Jews from a young age.

Before becoming the Nazi leader, Hitler was an artist who painted and sold his works to make ends meet. At that time, Jews controlled the German economy, buying his paintings cheaply and then reselling them at exorbitant prices, which fueled his resentment and bitterness towards them. With Germany's defeat in World War I and the imposition of harsh reparations by the Allies, the economic situation worsened, and Hitler believed that Jews were responsible for this collapse and for spreading moral corruption and decadence within German society.

Poor Hitler! (The doctor story and the reselling paintings story are complete fiction.)

Then Fawaz compared Gazans to Jews in Polish concentration camps::

Later, with the occupation of Poland, Hitler deported Jews to isolated camps and imposed extremely meager food rations, forcing some to dig tunnels to escape and survive—a scene strikingly similar to what is happening today in Gaza.....Thus, it can be said that what Hitler did in the past in terms of persecution and discrimination is being repeated today in another form by Israel...

Then comes Holocaust denial:

Some studies indicate that the number of victims did not reach six million, as Israeli propaganda claims, but was much lower, according to some French historians such as Urry and Jarde Jardin.

Arabs are fed a constant stream of pure antisemitism, every day, and human rights groups don't give a damn.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

12/28 Links: The Global War on the Jews; All eyes on Florida as Trump, Netanyahu face Gaza ceasefire test; How Western ‘charity’ bought Hamas’s rockets; Starmer welcomes ‘extremist’ to Britain

From Ian:

The Global War on the Jews

Jews everywhere are confronting a period of danger and moral testing. Antisemitism no longer hides at the margins. It organizes, radicalizes, and kills. The global surge in antisemitism does not arise organically. States and terrorist organizations deliberately export violence, incitement, and ideology far beyond Israel's borders. The same actors who target Israel actively work to destabilize Jewish life worldwide. What begins in Israel never ends there.

During Israel's campaign against Hamas, calls for a "ceasefire" from anti-Israel activists exposed their true intent. They demanded that Israel should halt its defense. Hamas and its allies, it seemed, could continue attacking Israeli civilians without consequence. That same moral inversion now fuels violence across the Diaspora. Selective outrage and the erasure of Jewish vulnerability have moved from protest rhetoric to physical attack.

Since the truce between Israel and Hamas took effect in early October, violence against Jews worldwide has intensified. When the world delegitimizes Jewish self-defense, Jewish life everywhere becomes more vulnerable.

In Israel, a deeper clarity is evident. Israeli society understands that security cannot be subcontracted, that moral clarity cannot be outsourced, and that Jewish continuity demands courage. The festival of Hanukkah rejects the idea that Jews must justify their existence on terms set by others. Israel embodies that refusal.

Only in Israel do Judaism, Christianity, and Islam coexist freely and openly under the protection of law. That reality stands in sharp contrast to the regions controlled by the forces whose narratives dominate much of today's international discourse.

College Middle Eastern studies departments are broken — shut them down to end campus radicalism

Shut down the Middle Eastern studies departments in our universities. I was a student in one of these programs, and I say it plainly: shut them down.

A majority are corrupted and compromised. Through these departments, dozens of American college students have at best been indoctrinated to despise this country and whitewash the crimes of terrorists, and at worst pushed toward genuine radicalization and extremist plots.

These programs have been the soft underbelly through which universities quietly accept foreign money and, with it, foreign influence that dictates curriculum, hiring, admissions, scholarships and more. They serve as conduits that funnel cash into extracurricular groups, adding an extra layer of protection and plausible deniability while financing the encampments and harassment campaigns that have erupted on campus in recent years.

Anti-Israel protesters demonstrate outside Columbia University on Sept. 3, in New York City. (Yuki Iwamura/AP)

This influence has been seeping into our institutions for more than two decades, but it has become brazen precisely because there have been few, if any, consequences. As someone who has had a front‑row seat to the jihadification of American academia, this is where much of it begins. Shut it down.

The rot is no longer theoretical. It has names, funding streams and institutional addresses. At Columbia University, Mahmood Mamdani, father of New York City’s mayor-elect, has been criticized for presenting Israel as a purely colonial project while downplaying the terrorism of groups such as Hamas, shaping how students in African and Middle Eastern studies understand the region.

At Oberlin College, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, a former Iranian diplomat, has faced allegations that he helped cover up the Iran regime’s mass executions in the 1980s and has spoken of Hamas "resistance" in ways that minimize its terrorism.

And at Princeton University, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, another former Iran regime official, has been accused of echoing the talking points of Tehran while appearing to legitimize Hamas and Hezbollah in public remarks, all under the banner of Middle East security studies.

When the person shaping course offerings, speakers and graduate funding openly aligns with a brutal authoritarian regime, why should anyone be surprised when students emerge hostile to Israel, sympathetic to designated terror groups and convinced America is the villain of the story?

The money behind this intellectual capture is staggering. Saudi Arabia has poured tens of millions into specific Middle East and Islamic studies hubs, from the King Fahd Center in Arkansas to Alwaleed-bin-Talal–branded programs at Harvard and Georgetown that fund chairs, research and student programming focused on Islam and the Middle East.

According to a 2022 report by the National Association of Scholars, a higher education think tank, Qatar has become one of the largest foreign donors to U.S. higher education since 2001, with several billion dollars routed through branch campuses and partnerships that shape what is taught about the Middle East on both Doha and U.S. soil.

This is not philanthropy in the abstract; it is targeted influence over who gets hired, what gets researched, and which narratives about Israel, Jews and the West are elevated or suppressed.

Book Review: “Be A Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide”

A delightful lithograph hangs in the Berkeley Jewish Art Museum, a block west of the University of California’s rattled flagship campus. It shows its creator, originally a Soviet underground artist, Eugene Abeshous, dressed as a Fiddler on the Roof extra, disembarking at Eretz Yisrael. The work is called Jonah and the Whale in Haifa Port because instead of a cruise liner, its protagonist exits the gaping mouth of a sea monster. Abeshous tells the story that was once on the front pages of American newspapers, but is now nearly forgotten—that of Soviet Jews leaving the belly of the beast.

In her recently released Be A Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide, historian of Soviet Jewry Izabella Tabarovsky used the struggle of the Soviet Jews in the 1970s and 80s as an inspiration for the young Americans facing antisemitism on college campuses. Tabarovsky put the half-century-old experiences of my and her parents’ generation side-by-side with the conflicts defining the lives of our children. Even if we are “separated by decades, borders, and ideologies,” she showed how the mindset of refuseniks can—and does—inspire the students today.

Refuseniks were the Soviet Jewish dissidents who were denied permission to make aliya. My maternal uncle, for instance, applied for his exit visa in 1980, lost his scientist job, had many unfortunate encounters with the sadistic Soviet bureaucracy, and was finally granted passage in 1987, after he made it on the Ronald Reagan list of 100 refuseniks.

My uncle was perhaps luckier than most, but this was a fairly typical refusenik fate. Yet when Tabarovsky tells American students to be refuseniks, she highlights another meaning of the word—the one who refuses to surrender to the forces of evil. Her book teaches how to dive into Jewish history to find the inner strength to resist.

In one key respect, Soviet antisemitism was similar to the contemporary American antisemitism—it sells itself as antizionism. In fact—and this is something Tabarovsky discussed in her Legal Insurrection lecture—our antizionism was invented by the Soviets; it was a product of the virtual freakout over the 1967 defeat of its Arab clients. The Antizionist tropes animating the vocabulary of American college professors are traceable to Brezhnev-era Soviet propaganda.

Antizionism, Tabarovsky shows, was something that Soviet Jews, like their contemporary American counterparts, experienced on a personal level—the hysteria whipped up in the media and echoed in local Communist meetings made Jewish existence unsafe. But the defiant Zionists inverted fear and responded with pride. For instance, when his bosses brought out Nathan Sharansky for a Soviet humiliation ritual before his entire institute and started drilling him about his Jewish ideological leanings, Sharansky responded by giving a brief lecture on modern Israeli history—and found an “intrigued” audience in his co-workers, many of whom, I’m sure, found it liberating to hear Soviet propaganda exposed.

For years, the Iranian regime has insisted that it is not antisemitic, only “anti-Zionist.” This distinction is repeated endlessly in diplomatic forums, academic exchanges, and media appearances. Even their infamous Holocaust cartoon contests are framed as exposing Western hypocrisy towards censorship and not antisemitism. According to Tehran, hostility is directed solely at a political ideology, not at Jews as a people or a religion.

That claim collapses under even minimal scrutiny.

A recent peer-reviewed article published by a journal affiliated with Al-Mustafa International University provides a clear and well-documented example of how the Iranian state sponsors antisemitism under the guise of religious scholarship.

This is not an isolated incident. It is part of a structured, state-linked academic ecosystem that systematically produces and legitimizes anti-Jewish ideology.

In Fall 2023, the Quarterly Journal of Quranic Knowledge Studies, hosted by Al-Mustafa International University (MIU), published an article titled, “Characteristics of Jews in the Quran and Strategies for Confronting Zionism and Global Arrogance with an Emphasis on the Quranic Thoughts of Imam Khamenei.”

The article does several things that, taken together, remove any plausible claim of neutrality. It categorizes Jews as a collective possessing alleged negative traits like deceit, arrogance, covenant-breaking, hostility, and moral corruption. It treats these traits not as historical polemics or contested interpretations, but as enduring characteristics with modern relevance. It explicitly links these religious stereotypes to contemporary political conflict. It advocates “confrontation” strategies that include ideological warfare, mobilization, and military preparation, citing Quran 8:60. And It grounds its interpretive authority in the writings and speeches of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Its antisemitism and dehumanization of Jews is explicit:

Some inhabitants of this world, though outwardly human, are deemed worse than the vilest of creatures, as articulated in the Quran: “… They are like cattle; rather they are more astray. It is they who are the heedless”1 (Quran 7:179). This study aims to investigate the characteristics and behaviors of Jews as portrayed in the Quran, while formulating strategies for confrontation based on the Quranic verses...

This is not metaphorical, historical, or narrowly theological. It is contemporary, collective, and explicitly applied. This is Nazi-level antisemitism being produced and disseminated in Iranian universities today.

Al-Mustafa International University operates under the direct oversight of the Supreme Leader’s office, receives state funding, and has been sanctioned by the United States and Canada for its role in exporting Iran’s ideological agenda abroad.

More importantly, the article’s bibliography reveals that this worldview is not unique to MIU. Many of the cited works that similarly associate Jews—not Zionists—with inherent moral corruption originate from Iranian public universities overseen by the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology; from state-approved academic journals in Quranic and Islamic studies; from dissertations produced at government-funded institutions; and from publications authored or endorsed by Khamenei himself.

In other words, the article is embedded in a network of state-linked scholarship that repeatedly returns to the same themes: Jewish moral degeneracy, Jewish hostility, Jewish conspiratorial power, and the necessity of confrontation.

That is not anti-Zionism. That is antisemitism with footnotes.

There are very few Western scholars who study official, state-sponsored Iranian academic antisemitism. But this is not a small matter.

MIU’s explicit mission is international. It trains clerics, scholars, and educators from over 100 countries. Graduates go on to staff mosques, cultural centers, and academic institutions across the globe. When Western universities host Iranian academics without scrutiny, when journals cite Iranian Quranic scholarship as neutral, when governments engage in “academic dialogue” without examining content, they become unwitting participants in this mainstreaming of antisemitism.

Note that this paper, and several that were cited in it, were written in English, not Farsi. The intended audience is Western.

The Iranian regime’s claim that it opposes Zionism but not Jews is not merely false. It is a strategic lie designed to shield its official antisemitism from accountability.

When a state-funded university publishes peer-reviewed articles that portray Jews as inherently immoral and advocate confrontation grounded in religious obligation, the correct term is not “anti-Zionism.” It is state-sponsored antisemitism.

And, as in Nazi Germany, the universities are not an obstacle to this ideology, but its vanguard.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

My head is spinning from this op-ed in Jordan's Ammon News by Fares Al-Habashneh.

As far as conspiracy theories go, this one is a doozy.

He links Jews to the Mafia, the Mafia to the purchase of Manhattan Island in 1626, Harlem's Cotton Club, the global drug trade and finally Israel.

The global mafia originated in Sicily and migrated to America after the maritime and geographical discoveries of the 17th and 18th centuries.

American Jews forged an early alliance with the mafia from the European continent, and it was in Manhattan specifically that the American mafia was founded and launched.

American imperialism inherited everything from Britain, from the genocidal campaigns against Native Americans to the world of Jewish-owned banks and stock exchanges, and it also inherited the world of the mafia and drugs. In New York, white settlers forced the original inhabitants to sell Manhattan for $20.

This is the biggest and dirtiest deal in the history of capitalism and international organized crime. From that moment, the mafia, through its alliances in American business and financial centers, began to control the economy, trade, decision-making centers, and the stock market.

See? It is all so obvious!

After referring to a couple of obscure books and films the article winds up where it has to:

One of the central objectives of the Israeli project in the Middle East is to flood neighboring countries with drugs and transform them into markets for promotion and consumption, creating drug-related chaos

Habashneh has written quite a lot for Jordanian media outlets.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

12/27 Links: Anti-Zionism is Anti-Jewish, Anti-West, Anti-America and Anti-Joy; Australian Jews no longer feel safe to live freely and openly; Italian police charge nine with funding Hamas; What does Israel stand to gain from recognizing Somaliland?

From Ian:

Anti-Zionism is Anti-Jewish, Anti-West, Anti-America and Anti-Joy

So far, we’ve been telling the world that antisemitism and antizionism are bad for the Jews and for Israel, but with Israel becoming a pariah state, much of the world has shrugged and said: who cares?

With our backs against the wall, we have no choice but to aim high. To win the long game, we must raise the stakes and start focusing on what is good and bad for the world. Antizionism may be a singular sin and a uniquely evil expression of Jew-hatred that targets Jews as Zionists, but it’s a lot worse than that.

It’s also anti-West, anti-America, anti-truth, anti-justice, anti-joy and anti-world. Antizionism, just like anti-Judaism and antisemitism, is a movement against the common good. It has become a hater’s paradise where all haters and liars are welcome. We must invest more resources in making that case.

If antizionism is bad for the world, the corollary, as I argued recently, is also true: Zionism is great for the world. As Joshua Hoffman writes on his Substack: “The West is losing something essential that Israelis do best. While many people in the West feel embarrassed by their own countries, Israelis carry deep-seated pride rooted in history, responsibility, and a clear-eyed understanding of reality.”

Just as antizionism is rooted in Jew-hatred, Zionism is rooted in Judaism. The two are inseparable. If there is joy in Judaism, there is joy in Zionism. If there is courage in Zionism, there is courage in Judaism. By keeping these two pillars of Jewish identity tightly bonded, we can craft a winning and unapologetic Jewish message for the next century: Zionism and Judaism are great for the world.

In short, to have any chance of combatting the global evil of antizionism, we must put our best two feet forward: Jewish and Zionist.

We owe it to those decimated Jewish souls I saw in “Nuremberg.”

Palestinians must renounce culture of deception for real peace with Israel

Yet here, too, the familiar pattern emerges. This is not ideological transformation but tactical adaptation. Not abandonment of doctrine, but message management.

The phased approach has not vanished; it has simply adopted a modern suit. As fears of sanctions grow and as renewed threats loom – including the possibility of a future US administration designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization – rhetoric softens and declarations become more measured.

This does not indicate a change in essence. Political Islam, across its various branches, operates in stages: first “da’wah” – social, educational, and religious influence through nonviolent means – and only later confrontation. Those who fail to recognize this risk mistaking conciliatory statements for ideological surrender.

Israeli experience teaches that actions, not words, must be examined. Arafat spoke of peace while preparing for war. Abbas speaks of civic integration, yet has not truly disavowed the ideological foundations from which he emerged.

Formal disengagement from a Shura body or institution does not erase ideology; it is a technical adjustment designed to reassure, obscure, and delay confrontation.

The problem is not only political but also cultural – a culture in which deception is not an exception but a tool. One message is crafted for Western audiences, another for internal consumption. Peace is treated not as an objective, but as an instrument.

The Oslo Accords taught Israel a painful lesson: peace is not secured through documents alone. It is measured through sincerity, education, and genuine shifts in worldview.

As long as the Palestinian political spectrum, in its various forms, remains committed to the phased doctrine, every conciliatory declaration must be approached with skepticism.

Italian police charge nine with funding Hamas

Seven people were arrested in Italy on suspicion of raising some $8 million for the Gaza-ruling terrorist group of Hamas, police said on Saturday.

International arrest warrants were issued in connection with the case for two additional individuals located outside the country, AFP reported.

Mohammad Hannoun, president of the Palestinian Association in Italy, was among those arrested, local media reported, according to AFP.

The nine suspects are charged with financing “associations based in Gaza, the Palestinian territories, or Israel, owned, controlled or linked to Hamas,” under the guise of “humanitarian purposes for the Palestinian people,” the report continued.

More than 71% of the $8 million was directed to financing Hamas or entities affiliated with the Islamist dictatorship, the Italian police was cited as saying.

Some of the money went to “family members implicated in terrorist attacks,” the statement further read.

Italy’s ruling party, Brothers of Italy, spearheaded by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, said on X that the left should “humbly apologize” given the arrests.

The Italian government has denounced “for a long time” local associations with ties to terrorism, “but the left attacked us along with its media circus,” the party tweeted in Italian following the police’s statement.

12/26 Links Pt2: When “One Religion” Becomes “Zionism”; From Tehran to Turning Point USA: The political utility of Jew-hatred; What is Ireland's Problem With Israel?; Top 10 Worst U.N. Moments of 2025

From Ian:

When “One Religion” Becomes “Zionism”

I was listening to The Interview, the New York Times podcast hosted by David Marchese, featuring Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian writer and activist. It was rebroadcast on The Daily’s Saturday edition. The conversation itself was interesting; I recommend it in order to understand what is seen today by Palestinians as a moderate view, one that supports peace. But there was one moment- very specific- that genuinely stopped me cold. And it came from the interviewer.

At that point in the interview, the guest, Raja Shehadeh, made an extreme claim- not about Israel as a state, and not about Zionism as a political movement, but about religion.

“Palestine has always been a place for three religions… and now one religion is trying to dominate and say it’s the only one that is going to be allowed.”

This was not a slip of the tongue. It was a clear statement. One religion. Dominating the others. Deciding who will be “allowed.”

Historically, only two political frameworks in the Eretz Yisrael/Palestine provided full freedom of religion- equal protection for Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike. The first was the British Mandate. Whatever its colonial flaws, it explicitly enshrined equal religious rights. Before that, under Muslim rule, Jews paid special taxes for being Jewish, as did Christians (jizya, poll tax), and both often paid to access holy sites.

The second polity is the State of Israel, where freedom of religion is protected by law, Arabic is an official language, and religious practice is legally safeguarded. One can- and should- report on extremist groups and Jewish far-right violence, trying to destory this legal and political framework. But those are not the law of the land.

And yet, when Shehadeh framed his argument in explicitly religious terms- about Jews as Jews- the interviewer probably panicked. Marchese immediately intervened. Not to challenge the premise, or bring facts to the discussuin, but rather to reframe it to the political code he finds appropriate :

“Well, you know, what you’re describing is Zionism.”

This was not a neutral clarification. It was a substitution. A sweeping religious accusation was hurridly converted into a political one.

In doing so, Marchese performed two moves at once. First, he corrected his interviewee- implicitly telling him that the “problem” is not Jews but Zionists. Second, he smuggled in a definition of Zionism that bears little resemblance to reality, implying that Zionism is about religious domination.

From Tehran to Turning Point USA: The political utility of Jew-hatred

The threat picture: Iran amplifying far-right antisemitism through social-media operations, Qatar cultivating conservative influencers through access and economic incentives, Russia weaponizing deceptively edited content, and China bankrolling radical antisemitic campus networks. Different vectors, same target. This is antisemitism’s operational advantage: Its utility transcends ideology. A Nazi and a Marxist, a theocrat and an atheist, a grifter and a communist operative can all deploy identical conspiracy theories while advancing separate strategic objectives.

This is how institutional defenses fail—not through the initial breach but through immune system collapse. When calling out Holocaust denial makes you the target rather than the threat actor, then you’ve already lost. When boundary enforcement becomes boundary violation, there are no boundaries. The attack chain from “perfidious Jews” to “death penalty” to “Cookie Monster” ovens to mass-casualty events isn’t theoretical. We have the historical case studies. The progression is consistent and accelerating.

When this hatred achieves mainstream acceptance (amplified by podcasters with millions of followers, weaponized by hostile state actors, defended as “free speech”) and produces attacks like Bondi Beach, you’re not observing normal political friction. You’re watching the mechanics of how democracies fail to protect their most vulnerable citizens.

The threat requires decisive action. Platforms must enforce existing terms of service against coordinated inauthentic behavior. Law enforcement must treat incitement to genocide as the criminal act it is, not protected speech.

Both conservative and progressive institutions must choose between coalition maintenance and moral clarity. Right-wing leaders must decide whether platforming Holocaust deniers is an acceptable price for audience growth. Left-wing activists must confront how foreign adversaries have weaponized their movements to advance antisemitic agendas. Americans with platforms across the political spectrum must understand that silence functions as operational support.

The historical pattern is clear, and the contemporary threat indicators are impossible to ignore. Antisemitism has been repackaged as a multipurpose political and economic tool: profitable for podcasters, strategically valuable for hostile states and algorithmically optimized for maximum reach. What began as ancient hatred has evolved into modern infrastructure—and that infrastructure is producing body counts.

The question is whether American institutions, left and right, will respond to these threat indicators before the next attack, and the one after that, and the one after that.

‘Palestine 36’ is propaganda by subtraction

There’s a reason why “Palestine 36” avoids al-Husseini: His real record contradicts the film’s narrative. His worldview, which was defined by eliminationist antisemitism fused with religious absolutism, existed long before 1936 and did not end with the Arab Revolt.

During World War II, al-Husseini was a committed Nazi Party collaborator. He lived in a mansion provided by the Third Reich; met repeatedly with Nazi hierarchy; broadcast Arabic-language propaganda for Nazi radio, urging listeners to “kill the Jews wherever you find them”; blocked efforts to rescue Jewish children; and helped recruit Muslim SS divisions responsible for atrocities in the Balkans. Prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials after the end of World War II described him as a collaborator “of the highest order.”

This is not a figure who fits comfortably into a romantic narrative of anti-colonial resistance.

And that erasure is not accidental; it is political. Acknowledging al-Husseini forces recognition of the conflict’s true roots: an Arab nationalism in Mandatory Palestine shaped primarily by Islamist and European bigotry, and ideological rejection of any Jewish sovereignty, not by anti-colonial grievance. The Mufti didn’t oppose the partition of the land because of borders; he opposed granting Jews any civil or national rights whatsoever.

A film that acknowledged these truths would undercut the preferred narrative that the conflict began in 1948 or 1967, or that it is purely an anti-colonial dispute. It would reveal what has always been the case: Jews in Mandatory Palestine were not colonizers. Rather, they were a vulnerable minority facing organized campaigns to eliminate them or keep them permanently powerless and stateless.

Modern Palestinian leadership has never disavowed al-Husseini. His portrait hangs in official offices. Schoolbooks echo his rhetoric. Hamas praises him outright. The hatred ideology that he championed animated the pogroms of the 1920s and 1930s, just as surely as it animated the Hamas-led atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

This is why films like “Palestine 36” must erase him. Because restoring him to the story restores the truth—and the truth shatters too many cherished political narratives.

And here lies the film’s deeper deception: “Palestine 36” is not history. It is propaganda by subtraction—a film that invites viewers to mourn the colonized while concealing the internal purges, the anti-Jewish violence, the ideological extremism and the Nazi collaboration that shaped the entire conflict.

The war against Jewish self-determination did not begin with Israel’s declaration in 1948 or with the Arab Revolt of 1936. It began when leaders like al-Husseini chose hatred over coexistence, rejection over compromise and alliance with genocidal tyrants over peace with their Jewish neighbors.

12/26 Links Pt1: Two killed in terror attacks in northern Israel; Israel is first to recognize Somaliland; U.S. Involvement in Gaza Is a Strategic Opportunity

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Mike Waltz on Gaza, Iran, and Keeping the UN in Check

Mike Waltz is having an unusual experience as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a job that does not usually come with a honeymoon phase. Yet the former congressman and national security adviser took office in September and a mere two months later the Security Council gave the Trump administration a big win by passing a resolution affirming the president’s plan for postwar Gaza.

As a result, Waltz may be America’s first UN ambassador in some time to describe the atmosphere there, at least for now, as “pleasant.”

Waltz sees such support, he told me this week after wrapping up a weeklong trip to Israel and Jordan, as validation for the fact that “the president and his team are trying something very new and bold and innovative.”

Waltz visited the Keren Shalom crossing on the Egyptian border and the American civil-military coordination center in Kiryat Gat and sees Israel clearly holding up its end of the deal. Aid flow into Gaza has surged: The cease-fire plan called for Israel to allow 600 trucks of food and supplies in daily, and the day Waltz left had seen 900 aid trucks enter the enclave. “For the rest of the world that is saying the international community is not doing enough or that the Israeli government is getting in the way of basic lifesaving aid going in to the people that have suffered at the hands of Hamas, that’s just false,” Waltz says. “The data doesn’t back it up.”

There was almost a breakthrough on another front while Waltz was in Israel. Hamas recovered remains of what many hoped was the body of the last missing hostage, Ran Gvili, but it was a false alarm. Waltz did meet with Gvili’s parents and came away impressed with their son’s heroism and sacrifice. “The reason he was off duty that day is because he had a broken shoulder. And what did he do when he got the alert [that Hamas had invaded]? He threw his gear on his only good shoulder and ran towards the sounds of the guns, and over a dozen dead terrorists were found where he died.”

The search for Gvili’s body continues as all parties work toward further implementation of the Gaza plan, including, Waltz said, Egypt and Qatar. Waltz also mentioned that expanding the Abraham Accords remains an administration priority.

When calling for Israelis to be killed is deemed acceptable

For months my producers at Talk have been working with me to try to get answers out of Avon & Somerset Police about how the investigation is going, whether Pascal Robinson-Foster was ever arrested (he was not, but he was questioned) and we ran a graphic on the screen on many occasions, calculating the number of days the investigation was dragging on. On numerous occasions we asked chief constable Sarah Crew to be interviewed on Talk. She refused each time, and continues to do so.

And now we have the verdict from her and her CPS colleagues: despite televised evidence, despite months of investigation, despite 200 people being interviewed on a basis not fully clarified by Avon & Somerset Police, there is ‘insufficient evidence’ for Pascal Robinson-Foster to be prosecuted. He initially denied he was calling for the deaths of individual IDF soldiers, with evidence inconveniently turning up from a concert just weeks before Glastonbury when he had done just that. Robinson-Foster has repeated the call in other international concerts.

Free speech is a fundamental part of any free society. The free speech we enjoy in the United Kingdom is denied to citizens of most of the Arab world and it is certainly not encouraged by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. But Robinson-Foster’s call was not for the IDF to cease its activity. He was not taking issue with the IDF’s tactics, or even doing something such as calling them ‘murderers’ guilty of ‘genocide’. All of these sentiments are ones with which most Jewish News readers will disagree, but will not actively believe people should be arrested or charged for saying.

But now, as 2025 closes, we are told by both Avon & Somerset Police and the Crown Prosecution Service that in the United Kingdom it is absolutely fine to call for the death of the 169,500 active personnel in the conscript IDF army and its 465,000 reserve soldiers. Many antisemites will sleep more soundly at that.

Sir Keir Starmer lights his menorah candles, has Jewish leaders into Number 10 for a Chanukah reception and says he will do all he can to stop antisemitism. Perhaps he could start by having a word with the organisation he once led, the Crown Prosecution Service, reminding them what antisemitism actually is, if the Prime Minister himself in fact knows. It would be helpful if it didn’t take yet more years for our ruling class to work out basic facts. It may even save a few Jewish lives.

Yehuda Teitelbaum: You Don’t Care About "Palestine" Part 1

You don’t care about Palestine.

How do I know?

One Word. Sudan.

CNN has just published a detailed, months-long investigation documenting ethnically targeted mass killings carried out by Sudan’s army and its allied militias. The reporting describes civilians being executed, bodies dumped into canals, and mass graves concealed until satellite imagery revealed wrapped corpses surfacing as the water receded. Investigators traced responsibility back to senior levels of command.

The scale is absolutely staggering. More than 150,000 civilians are believed to have been killed. Nearly 12 million people have been displaced. Entire regions are facing famine. Non-Arab communities have been targeted at checkpoints, driven from their villages, and in some cases wiped out entirely. Women interviewed by investigators described watching their children executed. Weeks later, bodies were still being carried downstream by the canals. A UN investigator quoted by CNN described the campaign as a “targeted extermination of people.”

If concern for civilian life were really the driving force behind today’s activism, Sudan would be impossible to ignore. Yet there are no campus encampments demanding action, no mass ceasefire marches, no viral influencer monologues, and no celebrities posting flags or slogans.

The usual explanation is that Israel is different because the United States supports it militarily, and that protests are really about American complicity rather than the tragedy itself. I don’t buy it. If mass killing only matters when it can be blamed on your own country, that is a deeply self-centered way of engaging with human suffering.

These same voices regularly insist that silence is complicity and that there is always something one must do, even when the odds of success are low. That principle is suddenly abandoned when Sudan comes up.

No one genuinely believes that protesting Israel under a Trump administration is likely to change Israeli policy. People protest anyway because they believe public expression itself has moral value. That logic does not disappear because the victims are Sudanese, yet it is treated as if it does.

There is also a tendency to pretend that the United States is simply powerless in Sudan, which is not true. This is not an argument for American troops on the ground, and it is reasonable to oppose that idea. But the United States is the most powerful military and diplomatic actor on the planet. If it wanted to exert serious pressure, coordinate large-scale evacuations, isolate leadership, enforce consequences, or push negotiations using the full weight of its influence, it could. Even short of military action, there are many tools available.

The reality is not that nothing can be done. It is that no one wants to do anything. Sudan does not offer the emotional payoff or political symbolism that Israel does. It does not fit neatly into Western ideological narratives, and it does not allow people to perform virtue without cost.

Sudan has everything people claim to care about: ethnic cleansing, mass graves, famine, millions of refugees, and overwhelming evidence documented by satellite imagery, whistleblowers, and international investigators. Even CNN could not soften what it found.

And still, there is silence.

Arabs threatened to drive Jews into the sea - and now claim that "the sea" is a traumatic Nakba term FOR THEM!

Here is a recent academic paper abstract published in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies:

The sea symbolism and the Palestinians’ traumatic memories of departure, displacement and death

Wael J. Salam & Ghassan Aburqayeq

Received 10 Mar 2025, Accepted 11 Nov 2025, Published online: 15 Dec 2025

Cite this article https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2025.2602436

ABSTRACT
This article examines the sea as a literal and metaphorical emblem of Palestinian trauma and the imperative not to forget the individual and collective memories of flight and homelessness in the works of two Palestinian writers, Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish. As eyewitnesses to cataclysmic events, including the Nakba or the 1948 Catastrophe of the Palestinians’ expulsion, Kanafani and Darwish repeatedly represent the sea as a port of entry for European Jewish settlers of the Palestinian land and a port of deportation for Palestinians, rendering this symbolism a site of mourning, death, departure and identity formation. Kanafani and Darwish creatively respond to the occupation of their homeland by hammering home the bleak reality of settler colonialism. They associate the sea with the Palestinians’ ongoing trauma of expulsion and flight—a dissident memory that, while traumatic, preserves the Palestinian right to resist, exist, and return to their homeland.

The sea was indeed a motif in 1948 - but it was an Arab motif about throwing the Jews into the sea!

I've collected several contemporaneous articles about how the Arabs made that threat to the Jews as early as this AP dispatch from December 19, 1947:

An AP analysis from February 8, 1948, uses quotation marks for the phrase referring to Arab leaders in 1947:

This article from the News York Daily News in April 1948 quotes Fawzi al Kaukji directly making that threat:

A British memo from August 1948 from Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin:

It is quite untrue to suggest that we have let the Arabs down or failed in any obligations towards them. We did not urge them to intervene by force in Palestine, nor did we promise them support if they did so. They went in of their own accord, in most cases without telling us beforehand. Very small measure of military successes which they achieved shows that their forces, while capable perhaps of occupying friendly territory, were not prepared for and incapable of undertaking major military operations, which would have been necessary to achieve the announced object of the Arab states, namely to drive the Jews into the sea.

And this rhetoric didn't end in 1948 - here is an Egyptian propaganda poster from 1967 literally called "Throw the Jews Into the Sea:"

To Arabs before the 1967 war, the sea didn't symbolize defeat - it symbolized impending victory over the Jews.

I cannot see the full paper but based on the footnotes it is apparent that this issue isn't even addressed in the article.

This paper is an inversion of reality.

In fact, I cannot find a single academic article about the "drive the Jews into the sea" phrase that was used so often in 1948 and afterwards. I researched it here and here and Yisrael Medad did here.

Which brings up another problem in academia: there are hundreds of papers analyzing the most peripheral angles of the Palestinian experience but relatively few on Israel, and those few are concentrated in a very few Israel-centric journals while the anti-Israel papers are spread over dozens of journals on disparate topics. There is a feedback loop - there's no demand for papers describing Israelis charitably so none are written.

Once again, academia is being used for propaganda and erasing history, not real research.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

What happened at AmFest was widely described as a “civil war on the Right.” That description might capture the heat, but not the substance.

What actually played out was different moral frameworks colliding on the same stage, each assuming the others were playing the same game, when they are on different playing fields.

The clash between Ben Shapiro and Steve Bannon made this unusually clear.

Shapiro’s speech called out Tucker Carlson and other right-wing media personalities, but the substance of his speech was about duty. At the climax, he spoke about obligations - what people with microphones owe their audiences, and what audiences owe themselves. He spoke about truth, about principle over personal feeling, about responsibility for consequences, about evidence rather than insinuation, and about the obligation to offer real solutions rather than theatrical outrage. He ended where he began: with truth, insisting that victory built on anything else is hollow.

It was a striking moment because it sounded almost old-fashioned. Shapiro was not trying to define who belongs to a movement, as he was accused of. He was trying to define what makes political speech legitimate in the first place.

Bannon’s response came from a different universe. He did not engage Shapiro’s argument at all. Instead, he shifted the frame entirely. This was not, he said, about principles. It was about power, loyalty, and who represents MAGA and who does not. Shapiro, in this telling, was disqualified not because his claims were false, but because his allegiance was suspect. This makes him, in Bannon's words, a "cancer."

One side is asking, “Is this true, responsible, and principled?” The other is asking, “Are you with us or against us?”

Whatever one thinks of Shapiro, his argument fits squarely within the classic conservative tradition. That tradition has always been suspicious of mass passions and concentrated power, including power exercised by one’s own side. Edmund Burke warned that a representative who sacrifices judgment to popular opinion betrays his duty. Russell Kirk described conservatism not as a rigid ideology but as a way of seeing - one that requires discernment. William F. Buckley Jr. defined the conservative role as “Standing athwart history, yelling 'Stop'.”

That worldview assumes that thinking critically, demanding evidence, and resisting tribal pressure are virtues. Loyalty is not the highest good; judgment is.

Bannon and his allies, by contrast, are not articulating classic conservatism at all. They are advancing a newer far-Right vision centered on identity and power. In this framework, America is not simply a constitutional nation with a shared civic inheritance. It is a civilizational project with a defined Christian cultural and religious core. Politics becomes boundary enforcement. Dissent, even principled dissent, becomes a threat to be neutralized rather than an argument to be answered.

And Jews are not treated as full equals in a movement based on making America Christian. When Bannon said, "This is about power politics and what Charlie Kirk believed in to the core of his being—that America makes decisions for America, and Americans make decisions for America," he's implying that Shapiro is not qualified to be part of such decisions.

Here is the irony: despite the rhetoric, neither of these positions actually represents MAGA as practiced by Donald Trump.

Trump’s MAGA was never classic conservatism, but it was also never simple isolationism or civilizational purity. It is transactional. Trump cares about leverage, credibility, and outcomes. He opposes endless wars not because force is always wrong, but because wars without leverage, objectives, or exit conditions are bad deals. When he makes threats, he expects them to be believed.

That is why the reaction from many self-described MAGA supporters to the U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities was so revealing. The objections were framed in moral language - “we don’t want to start an endless war” - but they ignored the actual logic Trump had articulated for years. Iran’s nuclear program was central. Red lines were drawn. A deadline was announced. Credibility was explicitly on the line. Following through was not a deviation from MAGA logic; it was the logic.

And in fact, the feared escalation did not occur. Deterrence worked. Which only sharpened the question: if even successful enforcement is condemned as illegitimate, then what exactly is being conserved?

The major break between classic conservatism and the other two is that the former is skeptical of unbridled power and unlimited loyalty while MAGA and the Christian identity Right demand them.

This is why everyone now seems to be talking past everyone else. They are starting from entirely different assumptions about what politics is for. Classic conservatism asks whether speech is true and responsible. MAGA asks whether actions preserve leverage and credibility. The Christian-civilizational “America Only” Right asks whether an action serves identity preservation and internal cohesion.

They use the same slogans, but they are not answering the same questions.

The open question is not which side won a particular exchange. It is which of these moral frameworks will define the future of the Republican Party - and what happens to those whose framework loses. Movements built on loyalty abandon principles. Movements built on identity exclude those who don't fit. Movements built on power without constraint become autocratic. Yet those built on principles might not win elections in today's hyper-partisan environment.

The fracture is already there. The only question now is whether anyone is willing to name it honestly.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

When the PLO's founder said Palestine was "Southern Syria"

Captain Allen on X uncovered this gem from 1956:

Only eight years later, Shukairy would change his tune as the first head of the PLO:

This was of course the conference where the PLO issued its first charter - the one that said the borders of "Palestine" excluded the West Bank and Gaza.

Shukairy is in the light colored coat; the poster behind him separates "Palestine" from the other lands it was not claiming with the word "We Shall Return" in Arabic.