Sunday, May 10, 2026

Part 4 of The Jewish Question: The Question Was Outsourced, Not Dissolved

International recognition of Israel in 1948 is often presented in retrospect as the world's moral response to the Holocaust. The reality was more complex. The Western European democracies that had produced the Jewish Question over the nineteenth century supported Israel's creation partly because the alternative was absorbing the Jewish survivors into their own societies, partly because the recent catastrophe demanded some form of moral recognition, and partly because the geopolitics of the moment made support advantageous. None of these motives constituted a revision of the framework that had generated the Question. The framework had been suspended by moral overhang and parked by operational expediency. It had not been dissolved.

The honeymoon was real

For roughly two decades after 1948, Western Europe and North America treated Israel as a state that had earned its place. The recognition was rapid. Diplomatic relations were established. Israel joined international bodies — the UN in 1949, UNESCO in 1949, the IMF and World Bank, the international sporting federations. Trade and cultural exchange developed. The Suez crisis of 1956 saw Britain and France in active military cooperation with Israel against Egypt. West Germany's reparations agreement of 1952 was negotiated and signed despite significant Israeli domestic opposition, because Konrad Adenauer's government understood reparations as a structural obligation that postwar Germany owed. French military cooperation with Israel through the late 1950s and early 1960s was substantial; France was Israel's primary arms supplier and contributed to the development of Israel's nuclear program.

The Eichmann trial of 1961 is a useful exhibit. Israel had captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, transported him to Israel, and tried him in a Jerusalem courtroom for crimes against the Jewish people. Eichmann was the Nazi bureaucrat who had organized the logistics of the Holocaust. His trial in Israel raised legal and political questions: Was Israel the appropriate venue? Did Israel have jurisdiction over crimes committed before the state existed? Should the trial have been held under international rather than Israeli auspices?

The Western reception of the trial was, on the whole, accepting. European and American newspapers treated Israel as the appropriate venue precisely because the equation Israel-equals-the-Jews was operating in its positive register. The Jewish state was the proper place to try the Nazi who had organized the murder of the Jews. The reasoning was emotional more than legal, but it was the reasoning that the Western press accepted, and it was the reasoning that confirmed the underlying equation. Supporting Israel was supporting the Jews. The trial was the world's reckoning, conducted in the venue the world had created for the survivors of what was being reckoned with.

This was the honeymoon at its clearest. The Israel-equals-the-Jews equation was operating openly, in positive register, in the most prestigious Western institutions.

What Europe was actually doing

Even during the honeymoon, the framework’s assumption that Jews must be managed was operative beneath the surface. Two patterns ran continuously across the post-1948 period — in diplomatic recognition and in commercial accommodation of Arab demands. Each pattern was visible to anyone choosing to look. None of them was characterized by Western governments as anomalous.

The first pattern was the treatment of Jerusalem. The 1947 partition plan had designated Jerusalem and a surrounding area, including Bethlehem, as a corpus separatum under international administration. After the 1948 war, Israel controlled West Jerusalem and Jordan controlled East Jerusalem and the rest of the proposed international zone, including Bethlehem. Western countries refused to recognize West Jerusalem as Israel's capital. They kept their embassies in Tel Aviv. They invoked the corpus separatum framework as the reason: Jerusalem was supposed to be an international city, and Israeli sovereignty over West Jerusalem could not be acknowledged.

The same framework should have applied symmetrically to the Jordanian-held portion of the proposed "international city." But it didn't.

Jordan formally annexed East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1950. The annexation was recognized de jure by only a handful of states, but Western governments tacitly accepted Jordanian administration of East Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and the rest of the West Bank for ordinary diplomatic purposes. They did not insist that Bethlehem should be internationalized. They did not invoke the corpus separatum as a reason to withhold recognition of Jordanian sovereignty over the southern boundary of what the same framework had defined as international territory.

The corpus separatum was a framework the international community kept alive as a tool against Israeli sovereignty over West Jerusalem and allowed to die quietly everywhere else it would have applied. It was not really a position about Jerusalem's status. It was a position about Israel's claim to Jerusalem. The same logic that refused to acknowledge Israel's capital silently accepted Jordan's claim to the rest of the area the same logic had defined as international territory. By 1967, Western embassies were still in Tel Aviv on the principle that Jerusalem was an international city, while Jordanian rule over Bethlehem had been accepted in practice for nearly two decades.

Similarly, even though the armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan included full access to the holy places of each religion, Jordan did not allow Jews - from any nation - to the parts of Jerusalem under its control. In 1959, a Canadian parliamentary delegation visited east Jerusalem but Jordan banned their one Jewish member, Leon Crestohl, from entering. This blatant antisemitism was not protested by any European government - and not even Canada filed a complaint to protest its own lawmaker being banned for being Jewish.

The second pattern was the treatment of the Arab boycott.

The Arab boycott was not against Israel as a state. It was against Jews. By 1956, Saudi Arabia and other Arab League members were sending letters to firms in Western countries demanding to know whether the firm had Jewish employees, Jewish board members, Jewish managers, or Jewish workers anywhere in its operations. A November 1955 letter to a Dutch firm asked: "Do you have any Jewish employees in your company. if yes how many and what are the positions held by them. Are there any Jews in your Board of Directors as members? Is any of your managers or branch managers a Jew, if yes please give name of the department headed by such a man." A Saudi Arabian directive of January 1952 asked an American firm directly: "what faith your firm is belong, to Jewish or Christian?"

The boycott's anti-Jewish character continued operating openly through the 1970s. By 1975, Western banks including Morgan Guaranty Trust and Chase Manhattan were participating in Arab-state syndicated loans that excluded Jewish-owned investment houses on the explicit demand of Arab clients. Time magazine reported the practice as routine. The United States ultimately enacted anti-boycott legislation in 1977 — the Export Administration Amendments Act and the Tax Reform Act, but Western European countries did not follow suit. European firms continued complying with Arab anti-Jewish demands as a normal feature of doing business, and European governments treated this as a private commercial matter rather than as discrimination requiring legal remedy.

The third pattern emerged when Palestinian terrorism began affecting European soil. In September 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked four airliners in coordinated attacks, eventually concentrating hostages at Dawson's Field in Jordan. The hijackers separated Jewish passengers from the rest, holding them longer and singling them out by passport markings. Germany, Switzerland, and Britain released Palestinian terrorists from their prisons in exchange for the hostages. The United States and Israel refused. The released terrorists, including the hijacker Leila Khaled, returned to PFLP operations.

The pattern that began with Dawson's Field continued. After the Munich Olympics massacre of 1972, in which Palestinian terrorists murdered eleven Israeli athletes on German soil, West Germany released the three surviving attackers within weeks. The release was secured through a Lufthansa hijacking that the families of the murdered athletes have argued for decades was staged with German government complicity to get the attackers off German territory without trial. The released attackers were welcomed as heroes in Libya. Switzerland made a secret bilateral agreement with the PLO in the early 1970s, in which the Swiss foreign minister contacted Yasser Arafat through a junior parliamentarian, agreed to support Palestinian statehood diplomatically, agreed to abandon the investigation into the 1970 Swissair bombing that had killed forty-seven people, and agreed to push for diplomatic recognition of the PLO — in return for which the PLO would stop attacking Swiss targets. The agreement was never publicly disclosed at the time. It came to light only in 2016 through a journalist's investigation of Swiss archives.

These were not isolated decisions. They were a sustained operational pattern. European governments accepted Arab anti-Jewish hostility as a structural feature of the regional and international environment that European policy had to accommodate. When the hostility was directed at Jews who were not in Europe — Israeli Jews, Jewish firms operating internationally, Jewish hostages on hijacked airliners — European governments treated the hostility as someone else's problem to manage. When the hostility produced operational consequences inside Europe — terrorism on European soil, hijacked European airliners, Arab oil pressure on European economies — European governments responded not by confronting the underlying anti-Jewish character of what they were facing but by accommodating the demands the hostility produced.

This is the key point. Europe did not stop operating the framework after 1948. Europe outsourced it. The Jews of Europe had been removed by the Holocaust and by emigration; the framework's load-bearing assumption — that something about Jewish presence requires management — could now be operated against Israeli Jews, against Jewish firms, against Jews on European airliners, without disrupting European domestic political life. As long as the framework's hostility was directed at Jews elsewhere, Europe could appear to have moved beyond the Question while continuing to operate it.

When the hostility began producing consequences inside Europe, the framework simply expanded its scope to absorb the new conditions. European banks complied with anti-Jewish boycott demands. European governments released Palestinian terrorists in exchange for European hostages. European intelligence services cooperated covertly with Israeli counter-terrorism through a secret network of eighteen countries codenamed Kilowatt — but the cooperation was kept secret precisely because it could not be reconciled with the public diplomatic positions European governments were taking. The covert cooperation acknowledged what the public position denied: that Palestinian terrorism was a serious threat that required coordinated response. The public position served the framework's other requirement: that Arab demands had to be accommodated and that the underlying anti-Jewish character of those demands could not be confronted.

This is how the Question survived 1948. Europe had not dissolved the framework. Europe had outsourced it. As long as the irritant was at a distance, the framework could be operated quietly. When the irritant returned to European soil, the framework expanded to accommodate it. The structural assumption — that there is something about Jewish presence in any form that requires management by surrounding societies — was operative throughout. The vocabulary changed across the post-1948 period. The structure did not.

Reactivation: the public face

The Six-Day War of June 1967 changed the operational situation. Israel won decisively against three Arab armies that had massed on its borders threatening its destruction. It captured the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai. The military situation was unambiguous. Israel had been attacked and had won.

The political situation was already shifting. The Arab world's response to the 1967 defeat was not acceptance of the new military reality. It was the famous "three nos" of the Khartoum Conference of August 1967: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. The Arab states recommitted to the structural position that Israel should not exist, even after losing decisively the war they had begun.

What had changed was that Israel now controlled territory whose populations could be characterized as colonial subjects. The framework had access to a new respectable register: the language of decolonization, native to the post-1960 international system in which dozens of newly independent states formed an emerging majority. The conflict could be reframed as a stateless indigenous people resisting a settler-colonial state, articulated in the vocabulary of national liberation and self-determination.

The October 1973 war forced the framework's reactivation into public visibility. Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur. Israel sustained heavy initial losses, recovered, and pushed both armies back to lines favorable to a negotiated settlement. The military outcome was, again, unambiguous in Israel's favor. But the political outcome was the opposite of what the military situation suggested. The Arab oil-producing states imposed an embargo on countries supporting Israel. The price of oil quadrupled within months. European economies faced immediate disruption.

European public positions on Israel transformed in months, not years. By 1974, the European Community countries had shifted to positions critical of Israel and supportive of the Arab cause. France led the way. West Germany followed. The smaller European states followed Germany. The change was not gradual recognition of new evidence about the Middle East. The European governments shifting their public positions on Israel were the same European governments whose intelligence services were quietly cooperating with Israeli counter-terrorism in the Kilowatt network. The Europeans who were now publicly critical of Israel were the Europeans whose banks had been complying with Arab anti-Jewish boycott demands for two decades. The shift in respectable European political discourse was happening simultaneously with explicit anti-Jewish discrimination in European finance and with covert cooperation in counter-terrorism that could not be publicly acknowledged.

The framework's load-bearing assumption was always available. Oil and terrorism made deploying it operationally necessary. The Europeans were not encountering new evidence about the conflict. They were responding to operational pressure from a coalition whose anti-Jewish character was visible in their own institutions' transactions and their own counter-terrorism dilemmas.

The elevation of Palestinian nationalism

The most visible institutional moment of the transition was the United Nations General Assembly's invitation to Yasser Arafat to address it in November 1974. Arafat was the chairman of the PLO. Two years before he addressed the General Assembly, his organization had been classified by Western governments as a terrorist organization. He addressed the General Assembly with a holster on his hip and was given a standing ovation.

What is worth noticing is what this elevation actually was. Palestinian nationalism, as a centrally important international cause, was not visible before 1967. The Palestinian Arabs of the British Mandate had rejected the 1947 partition that would have given them a state, fought for and lost the 1948 war, and watched their cause absorbed into pan-Arab nationalism for nearly two decades. Between 1948 and 1967, the West Bank was annexed by Jordan and Gaza was occupied by Egypt; neither country supported the formation of a Palestinian state on the territories under its control. Palestinian Arab national aspirations during those nineteen years were treated by Arab governments and the international system as a regional refugee issue, not as a discrete national cause comparable to the post-colonial independence movements then receiving international attention.

There are many stateless or partially stateless peoples whose national consciousness is older, whose population is larger, whose case for recognition is stronger by any neutral measure. The Kurds number roughly 30 to 40 million across four countries, have a longer continuous national identity, have suffered chemical weapons attacks and forced relocations, and have no permanent UN agenda item, no committee on inalienable rights, no dedicated UN refugee agency, no annual day of solidarity. The Tibetans, the Uyghurs, the Western Saharans, the Tamils, the Baluch, the Rohingya — none has anything resembling the institutional architecture that began consolidating around the Palestinian cause in the mid-1970s.

The elevation of Palestinian nationalism from regional question to international centerpiece happened in roughly seven years. There is no rational explanation for this on the merits of the Palestinian case relative to comparable cases. The actual mechanism was terrorism plus oil. Palestinian groups had been attacking civilian targets across Europe and at international events since 1968. The Arab oil-producing states had used the embargo to demonstrate that European economies could be disrupted at will. The international system produced the elevation that the operational pressure required. Arafat's transformation from terrorist to statesman was the visible mechanism. Within twenty-four months, the same person whose organization had murdered Israeli Olympic athletes was addressing the General Assembly to a standing ovation.

This is the failure-of-solutions pattern the first essay trained the reader to recognize, operating in compressed time. The previous respectable vocabulary — Israel as a normal state with diplomatic standing, Arab opposition as a regional matter requiring eventual settlement — became inconvenient when oil prices spiked and terrorism became unavoidable. A new respectable vocabulary was selected. Within that new vocabulary, the load-bearing conclusion shifted from "Israel is a normal state" to "Israel is a colonial implant whose presence is the obstacle to indigenous Palestinian self-determination." The Palestinian cause was elevated to the centrality the new vocabulary required, on a timescale that admits no other explanation than the operational mechanism that produced it.

What the international system now had

The 1975 General Assembly resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism was the institutional moment when the framework's reassertion became official. The resolution was passed by a coalition of Arab, Soviet-bloc, and non-aligned states. It was opposed by the United States, Israel, and most Western European democracies. It would be revoked sixteen years later, in 1991, when geopolitical conditions had again shifted. But the 1975 resolution marked the moment when the international institutional vocabulary had completed its transition. The framework had moved from procedural concern about Israeli policy to declarative judgment about Israeli legitimacy.

The Treitschke-style escalation that closed the first essay had its post-Holocaust analogue in compressed institutional form. In 1879, a respected German academic had moved from procedural inquiry about Jewish citizenship to declarative judgment that the Jews were Germany's misfortune. In 1975, the General Assembly moved from procedural concern about Israeli policy to declarative judgment that Zionism was a form of racism. The vocabulary differed. The structural escalation was identical.

By 1975, the framework had what it needed. A respectable contemporary vocabulary that the post-decolonization world found native. A non-state actor who could be elevated to international statesman regardless of his organization's methods. Operational pressure (oil) sufficient to make European cooperation reliable. Terrorism sufficient to keep that pressure constantly visible. An asymmetric framework of "solutions" that always required Israeli concessions and never required reciprocal concessions from those who refused to recognize Israel. And a base of explicit anti-Jewish hostility — the Arab boycott, openly targeting Jews wherever they worked or invested — that the Western world had been politely declining to look at for two decades.

What the international system would do with this architecture in the decades that followed — how it would consolidate the institutional infrastructure, how it would produce the contemporary "Question of Palestine" with its permanent agenda items and dedicated agencies and inalienable-rights committees, how the architecture would operate against the Jewish state down to the present moment, and how its operation today reveals the same structural pattern that produced the original Jewish Question — is the subject of the next essay in this series.

The honeymoon was over. The framework had returned to operation. It had simply found new vocabulary in which to articulate what it had been articulating, in successively respectable registers, since 1789.

And soon enough, the Question would take on a formal form that few have recognized as a direct line from the 19th century to the 21st.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Part 3: From Diminishment to Disaster

In 1896, a Viennese journalist named Theodor Herzl published a short pamphlet titled Der Judenstaat — The Jewish State. He opened it with this sentence: "This pamphlet will open a general discussion on the Jewish Question."

He was operating inside the European framework grammatically. The Question was the inherited vocabulary, and Herzl used it. But he was about to invert its diagnosis. "I merely wanted to indicate clearly," he wrote, "how futile had been past attempts — most of them well intentioned — to solve the Jewish Question."

The diminishment program

As we have seen, the non-Jews who posed the "Jewish Question" often had solutions: Jews should assimilate, or convert, or not act as a community. In short, they must diminish who they are as Jews.

Unfortunately, many Jews accepted the problem definition.

Most of the major nineteenth-century Jewish movements that engaged with the Question made the same mistake the framework's perpetrators made: they took the surface vocabulary literally. Instead of realizing that the Question itself was a socially acceptable cover for antipathy towards Jews, they believed that the framework's stated terms specified the actual problem. They believed that the framework would honor the diminishment of the Jews its stated terms called for — if only they weren't religious, if only they were better assimilated, if only they stopped doing Jewish things. Diminish the Jewishness of Jews, and the Jewish Question would be solved.

Reform Judaism took the civic-political register at face value. Reform emerged in early-nineteenth-century Germany in the immediate post-emancipation environment, building on the Haskalah movement of Moses Mendelssohn and his circle in the 1770s. The various German states had begun extending civic equality to Jews in stages from the late eighteenth century onward, but the emancipation came with an implicit demand: Jews were entitled to civic rights as individuals, but their continued existence as a distinct corporate community with distinct practices was understood as the obstacle to full belonging. The framework's civic register, articulated most clearly by Clermont-Tonnerre in 1789, was operating across the German lands. Everything to Jews as individuals; nothing to Jews as a nation.

Reform's founding generation accepted this diagnosis and proposed the program for fulfilling it. The Hamburg Temple, founded in 1818, introduced the organ, mixed-gender seating, vernacular German prayer alongside Hebrew, sermons in German, and choirs trained in Western musical conventions. Subsequent German Reform congregations went further. Some moved their main weekly service to Sunday, reasoning that Saturday observance was an unnecessary marker of difference. Liturgy was purified of references to return to Zion, since such references implied that Jews were not actually at home in Germany — a position incompatible with the civic premise of emancipation. Abraham Geiger framed the program as the rational response to the question of how Jews could fully participate in modern German society. He felt Jewish religious life had accumulated practices appropriate to medieval ghetto conditions but inappropriate to modern citizenship. The essential core of Judaism — ethical monotheism — could be preserved, but the surrounding practices that marked Jews as a distinct people had to be remodeled. Judaism was a religion, not a nation. Jews were Germans of the Mosaic confession.

The Jewish Question framework did not honor the trade. By 1879, when Wilhelm Marr was coining "antisemitism" to give an old position a scientific veneer, and Heinrich von Treitschke was writing in the Preußische Jahrbücher that the Jews were Germany's misfortune, German Reform had been operating for sixty years. The Germanization of Reform Jews was as complete as possible. Some had gone further and converted entirely to Lutheranism.

None of it was sufficient.

The framework had moved on. Religious practice was no longer the operative criterion. The new criterion was racial inheritance, which could not be reformed away. The diminishment had been performed and the framework had simply selected new criteria for refusing acceptance.

The Mendelssohn family is the compressed family-genealogy version of the pattern. Moses Mendelssohn died in 1786 as a strictly observant Jew who had argued for emancipation in the language his Christian neighbors would understand. His son Abraham converted to Lutheranism and added the name Bartholdy precisely to bury the Jewish surname; he wanted his family eventually to drop "Mendelssohn" altogether. Abraham's son Felix was baptized as a child, lived as a believing Christian, composed sacred music in Christian liturgical traditions. The diminishment was complete across three generations. Yet by 1850, Wagner was publishing his attack on Mendelssohn's music as inescapably Jewish despite Felix's Christianity. By 1933, the Nazi regime had reclassified the Lutheran descendants as Jews under the Nuremberg Laws, banned Felix's music, torn down his statue in Leipzig, and liquidated the family bank. The diminishment had been performed across five generations. The framework had simply moved on each time and selected new criteria for refusing acceptance.

The Bund, founded in the Russian Pale in 1897, took the socialist-economic register at face value. Operating in a different surrounding political order, where the framework was articulating itself through Marxist-economic vocabulary rather than through the German civic-Protestant register, the Bund proposed a different diminishment. Drop religion as a public matter (their term Veltlekhkeit — secularism — treated religion as a private question). Embrace secular socialist Yiddish culture. Build Jewish trade unions, Yiddish schools, Yiddish theaters and newspapers, Jewish community councils. Demand national-cultural autonomy within the multi-national socialist states the future would deliver. Their term doikayt — "hereness" — meant Jews belonged where they lived, not in a separate state.

The Bund worked hard at its program. The Yiddish secular culture they built was substantial — newspapers, theaters, literature, schools, mutual aid organizations across Russia and Poland. Bundists fought antisemitism as Jews and as socialists, in the streets when necessary, with substantial commitment and at substantial cost. They believed they had identified the operative problem. The framework's economic register had said Jewish religious particularism and retrograde social forms were the issue. They were performing the rational response.

The Question's terminal phase swept their world away. Polish and Russian Jewry — the Bund's constituency, the speakers of the Yiddish secular culture the Bund had built — were destroyed in the camps regardless of which language they had spoken or which culture they had constructed.

These Jews tried to answer the Jewish Question using the non-Jews' stated assumptions - that they weren't hateful, but Jews had to meet them halfway to become respectable. But the history of antisemitism shows that the excuses for hate are never the real reasons.

What Herzl saw

Theodor Herzl was a thoroughly assimilated Viennese journalist when he arrived in Paris in 1891 as the correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse. He was the product of three generations of Jewish engagement with the framework's diminishment programs. His grandparents had been part of the Hungarian-Jewish bourgeoisie that had begun the integration project. His parents were comfortable, secular, and German-cultured. He himself had attended a Vienna gymnasium, taken a doctorate in law, written plays, become a successful journalist. He was not a religious Jew. He was the kind of Jew the diminishment program was supposed to produce: indistinguishable from his Christian colleagues except in the technical fact of ancestry.

Then he covered the Dreyfus trial in 1894-1895.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a fully assimilated French Jewish army officer. His family had been French Jews for generations. He had performed every diminishment the framework had ever specified. He had attended elite military schools. He had risen on merit to the General Staff. He spoke unaccented French. He was a believing Catholic in cultural sympathy if not in confession. He had married a French Jewish woman from a similarly assimilated family. He had served the Republic that the framework's civic register had said was the proper home of emancipated Jews. He was, by every measure the diminishment program had ever endorsed, a successful French citizen of Jewish background.

He was convicted of treason on the basis of evidence the army knew was forged, in proceedings the army knew were fraudulent, and the public reaction was massive antisemitic mobilization that lasted for years. The cry "À mort les Juifs!" — "Death to the Jews!" — was heard in the streets of Paris. The country whose Revolution had granted Jews civic emancipation a century earlier, whose Reform-style assimilation program had been the model the diminishment had been performing across Europe, produced in 1894 the political crisis that revealed what the framework had been all along.

Herzl was watching from the press section. He saw what the diminishment program could not see from inside itself. The framework was not really about religious practice, civic identity, economic role, or any of the other surface terms claimed. The framework was about the Jews, in whatever form they took. Dreyfus had performed the maximum diminishment available short of conversion, and even some converts had not escaped the framework's reach. The framework would always find Jews. There was no diminishment that would produce acceptance because the framework was not asking for diminishment. It was asking for disappearance.

What Herzl proposed in Der Judenstaat was a different category of response. If the question "what do we do about our Jews?" could not be answered, the Jews can decide for themselves what to do independent of what the Questioners assumed. Jews would have to constitute themselves as a polity of their own, where their presence would not require management by any surrounding society. Sovereignty was not an ideological alternative to integration. It was the structural exit from a cognitive architecture that would and could not be reformed.

Herzl died in 1904, forty-four years before the state he proposed came into existence. By the time it did, the catastrophe his diagnosis had warned against had already happened. The Question's racial phase, meant to make antisemitism sound like logic and science, had produced industrial genocide.

The international community that recognized Israel in 1948 was operating in the rubble of what the framework had produced.

What 1948 actually was

The international recognition of Israel in 1947-48 has been retrospectively narrated, in much Western public memory, as the moral awakening of the international community to the case for Jewish national rights. The recognition is often presented as the world's response to the Holocaust — a recognition that what had been done to European Jews demanded the establishment of a Jewish state.

This narrative is partly true but substantially incomplete.

Displaced persons camps in the American, British, and French zones of occupied Germany held hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors. The Western countries were admitting displaced persons at enormous scale — Canada took in 157,000, Australia 170,000, the United States 400,000 between 1945 and 1952 — but Jewish DPs were systematically held to small percentages of these flows. Australia capped Jewish passengers at 25 percent per ship and limited Jewish admissions to 3,000 per year, lower than its prewar quota. Canada's postwar DP program kept the Jewish proportion deliberately small after a senior immigration official had answered, in 1945, that when it came to Jewish refugees, "none is too many." The American Displaced Persons Act of 1948 contained provisions deliberately structured to exclude most Jewish DPs and had to be amended in 1950 before significant Jewish admissions resumed. The British White Paper of 1939, restricting Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine, remained in force throughout the war and was being enforced after the war against survivors trying to reach the one place that wanted them.

The international recognition of Israel emerged from this situation. It was not, in its dominant operational motive, a moral awakening. It was the international community's acceptance that the Jewish Question — the post-catastrophe version, the survivors-of-Europe version — could not be solved within the Western world and that the only available solution was to relocate the Question outside of Europe altogether. The 1947 partition vote and the 1948 recognition completed an operation that the Holocaust had largely accomplished: the cessation of Jewish presence in Europe as Jewish presence.

Six million had been murdered. The remainder needed somewhere to go. The international system found it acceptable to provide a destination because the destination was not Europe.

The international system recognized Israel because Zionism appeared to solve the Question by exporting it. The system did not, however, revise the framework that had generated the Question. The European political order that had produced the Question, plus the rest of the world inheriting through institutions modeled on European political assumptions, recognized Israel and moved on.

The Question's load-bearing assumption — that Jewish presence as Jewish presence is the kind that requires management — was not dissolved. It was relocated. The framework had a new object available: Jewish sovereignty rather than Jewish presence. Whether the framework would reassert itself against the new object was a structural question to be answered by the international system's encounter with Jewish sovereignty. The encounter would take some time to unfold.

But from the very beginning, Israel was the Jew among nations.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

A Turkish news outlet called Ensonhaber has apparently solved the mystery of Turkey's stray dog crisis.

It's the Jews fault.

The argument, such as it is, runs like this. Turkey has a genuine and serious problem with feral dogs — attacks have reportedly killed dozens of people in recent years. The government passed legislation to address it, authorizing municipalities to shelter and eventually euthanize unclaimed strays. Animal welfare groups pushed back. Ensonhaber's theory is that those groups are fronts for a "dog food lobby," that the dog food lobby is controlled by Jewish families, and that Jewish-owned companies are therefore deliberately keeping Turkish streets dangerous to maximize their pet food revenues.

Come again?

The profit motive runs the other way!

Dog food is only bought by pet owners. Stray dogs are not a market for dog food, because who would buy it?

The actual dynamic, if commercial interests are involved at all, is much more mundane: pet food companies sometimes partner with or fund animal welfare organizations because those organizations promote pet adoption, which creates customers. That's not a conspiracy; it's marketing. And it has nothing to do with stray dogs, whose numbers represent a policy failure, not a revenue opportunity.

It gets more absurd. The article claims, "The best-selling brands in Türkiye, such as Royal Canin, Acana, and Orijen, belong to the Mars company. These companies are run by one of the wealthiest Jewish families in the United States."

Um, no. The Mars family is not Jewish

Frank Mars founded the company in Minnesota in 1911; his son Forrest Mars Sr. built it into the global conglomerate it became. The family's background has been extensively documented over more than a century of corporate history. No credible source has ever identified them as Jewish, because they are not.

But when Jews are linked to a real problem, there is no reason for fact checking anymore. Jews are so self-evidently evil that the case is closed at that point.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

05/09 Links: The International Criminal Court Is In Bed With Our Enemies; How Hating Israel Became a Career Move; Israel built secret base in Iraqi desert to support Iran air campaign

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: The International Criminal Court Is In Bed With Our Enemies And It’s Time We Clean House

The only action that the ICC has taken so far is disciplinary proceedings against Khan himself. The most that can happen is that he loses his job. His accuser never turned to the Dutch police because she said his official immunity would protect him. However, under the ICC’s rules, the judges could waive that immunity if they wished. The Court’s refusal to allow a criminal investigation of Khan, even as the scope of the scandal expands, demonstrates the institution’s political nature.

At the same time, the Court seems fully intent on proceeding with the Netanyahu prosecution. Such serious prosecutorial misconduct could, at least in the United States, lead to the dismissal of even factually substantiated criminal charges. Here, the evidence does not even show that the alleged crime (purposeful starvation of civilians) even occurred, let alone was committed by the accused. As the dust settles in Gaza, the lack of mass starvation becomes ever more evident.

An American prosecutor would be loath to try a case with such manifest prosecutorial misconduct (notably, senior court officials knew about the allegations against Khan at the time the indictments were made but kept it quiet for six months, when it leaked to the press). But Netanyahu is not facing a jury of his peers, but rather a panel of international judges who likely share the Court’s institutional culture.

Qatar’s involvement shows the ICC to be even more dangerous than its critics thought. The rap against the tribunal has long been that it acts like a global independent counsel – an unaccountable prosecutor with no democratic restraints. But even worse, it now appears that hostile states can coopt it as a political weapon in an ongoing conflict.

This illustrates the need for the Trump administration to take decisive action against the organization. The sanctions the Treasury Department has imposed on individual court officers have inconvenienced them but appear to have done little to fundamentally weaken the organization or change its trajectory. A body politically motivated enough to maintain the Israel warrants in the wake of the growing Khan fiasco will certainly retaliate against Trump and his top officials once they are out of office.

The administration should impose institution-wide sanctions on the tribunal and vigorously enforce them. The ICC recently got some good news as Peter Magyar, Hungary’s prime minister-elect, vowed to rejoin after it had become the first EU country to quit. Magyar prioritized the issue because he is seeking EU funding, and Brussels ties its financial support to adhering to its foreign policy. America must adopt the same tough approach, insisting that countries receiving benefits quit the Court. For Europe, pushing countries to join the ICC is a matter of ideology. For America, pushing back should be seen as a question of national security.

How Hating Israel Became a Career Move

When a Western celebrity’s career stalls, the most reliable career-fixer available right now is loud, extreme hostility to Israel. The path back does not run through coexistence groups, or hostage families, or Israeli and Palestinian peace activists building shared institutions in Jaffa or Haifa. It runs through extremism. Death chants. Concentration camp comparisons broad enough to include everyone except the people who were actually being held in tunnels under Gaza.

This is why people who genuinely want peace get drowned out, and people who want destruction get profiled in Variety. The algorithm is not neutral. It rewards heat. The hotter the take, the bigger the bookings. Bobby Vylan admitted as much on Louis Theroux’s podcast. He told Theroux he would lead the chant again “tomorrow, twice on Sundays.”

Piers Morgan figured out the demand side of this market. He does not bring nuanced voices on his show because nuanced voices do not generate clips that travel. He books the loudest combatants he can find and harvests the engagement. Bob Vylan and Melissa Barrera have figured out the supply side. Different positions in the same marketplace, same business model.

Notice what this kind of activism costs the activist. Nothing. You do not have to fund a hospital. You do not have to learn Arabic or Hebrew. You do not have to sit with a bereaved family or visit a checkpoint or lose a single friend. You post. You wear the keffiyeh on the red carpet. You sign the open letter. The signaling is luxury-tier. The sacrifice is zero.

This is champagne activism. Same shape as champagne socialism. The people who perform it the loudest are the ones who pay nothing for it. Bob Vylan’s chant cost him a UTA contract and bought him an international audience. Kneecap’s visa fight cost them a US tour and bought them a feature film. Barrera’s Instagram posts cost her Scream 7 and bought her Broadway, a production company, and a sympathetic Variety profile. The math is in the bookings.

Real activism is expensive. It is slow. It does not photograph well. The Parents Circle families look at each other’s grief every week and have done for thirty years. Maoz Inon’s parents were murdered in their home on October 7. He has spent every month since standing on stages with his Palestinian friend Aziz Abu Sarah, whose brother was killed by Israeli soldiers, calling for a shared future. They got in a van together last year and drove across checkpoints for eight days to write a book almost nobody outside the peace community will read. That is what it actually costs to do this work. Variety has not profiled them.

We owe those people more attention than we are giving them. They are the ones doing the actual work. Lift them up. Book them. The career algorithm will not change on its own. The least we can do is stop feeding it.

Andrew Fox: “Rape is just part of war”: what happened when I spoke in Amsterdam

The critical point is that the sexual violence on 7 October was no ordinary “feature” of war. It was an orgy of sadism. It went far beyond anything that had occurred in this conflict before. So I responded by describing what I had seen. I made the point that I was not dehumanising Hamas. Hamas dehumanised itself on 7 October, and when Yoav Gallant described Hamas as Israel fighting human animals, he was absolutely correct.

The room then descended into a shouting match. One of the activists at the back was warned by security that he would be removed if he continued. He immediately tried to recast the warning as a threat of violence against him. The performance was instant: provocation first, victimhood second.

To his credit, the moderator did an excellent job of calming the room. Without him, the situation could easily have deteriorated further. Unfortunately, there was also a journalist from a newspaper hostile to our position in the room (he was not invited by the organisers, so draw your own conclusions about how he came to be there, and why). The article that followed was predictable. We were blamed. The activists were cast as victims. The same pattern repeated itself: disrupt, provoke, invert, accuse.

For me, the morning was a lesson. I am primarily a writer, but I have also given speeches. I am a qualified university lecturer and a Fellow of the Higher Education Authority. However, I have never previously experienced an incident in which pro-Palestinian activists turn up determined to create a scene.

What struck me most was not just the hostility: it was the epistemic closure. These people operate within a sealed universe of alternative facts. There is no argument to be had because there is no shared evidentiary standard. I know what I have seen with my own eyes in Gaza itself during the war. They, on the other hand, have absorbed two and a half years of propaganda via social media, activist networks, campus politics, and the Hamas narrative laundered through supposedly respectable institutions. Those two evidentiary bars are not the same.

That is the truly dangerous part. When two sides disagree about policy, there can still be debate. When two sides disagree about interpretation, there can still be debate. However, when one side insists on living in a manufactured reality, conversation becomes almost impossible.

That is what I saw in Amsterdam; neither serious engagement nor moral seriousness. Not even real anger, in the sense of an emotion tied to facts. What I saw was a political identity built from keffiyehs, flags, slogans, and inverted victimhood. It was a glimpse into how toxic this movement has become. Not because it advocates for Palestinians (there is nothing inherently wrong with advocating for Palestinians), but because so much of the Western pro-Palestinian movement has now fused with denial, propaganda, theatrical intimidation, and the moral laundering of Hamas.

That is the world we are dealing with, and after what I saw in Amsterdam this week, I am more convinced than ever that the fight is not only about Israel, Gaza, or international law. It is about reality itself.

05/08 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The anti-Zionist contagion; The ugly truth about the cult of Palestinianism; The success of the Greens is another kick in the teeth for Britain’s Jews

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The anti-Zionist contagion

British Jews are under increasingly aggressive siege from abuse, intimidation, discrimination, arson attacks on their institutions, street violence and terrorism that left two Jews dead in a synagogue on Yom Kippur.

The Golders Green stabbings last week provoked a huge outpouring of revulsion and concern. There was a fusillade of bromides about “no place for antisemitism in Britain” from the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and other Labour Party politicians.

The media suddenly started publishing accounts by deeply distressed British Jews about the state of fear in which they were being forced to live. Commentators produced outraged and horrified diatribes against a society that was forcing its Jews to consider emigrating.

Yet some of those voices had previously produced outraged and horrified diatribes against the State of Israel, recycling defamatory falsehoods about the behavior of the Israel Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip.

This discrepancy alone should have sounded a warning that, for all the public breast-beating, the real point was still being lost.

This is because attacks on Jews are still deemed to be in a separate category from attacks on Israel or Zionism. The assumption is that attacks on Jews are very bad indeed because they are against people, but attacks on Israel or Zionism are absolutely fine because they are merely against a country or an ideology.

The distinction is false, and itself helps fuel the hatred of both Israel and Jews.

The point was illustrated this week in Manhattan. At Park East Synagogue on New York City’s Upper East Side, where an event marketing Israeli real estate was taking place, hundreds of masked Islamists and their supporters chanted from behind a police barricade: “We don’t want two states. We want ’48!”

The mob, which flew a Hezbollah flag, was spearheaded by a branch of Al-Awda, which is linked to Samidoun, a U.S.-designated terror organization.

The police thankfully prevented a repeat of what happened last November at Park East, when anti-Israel demonstrators blocked people from entering and exiting the synagogue. That intimidation helped motivate city legislators to tell the police to establish a protest-free “buffer zone” around houses of worship.

The city’s Islamist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is ruthlessly exploiting the false distinction between attacking Israel and attacking Jews.

“There is no tolerance for hatred of Jewish New Yorkers,” he said about the Park East demonstration. Yet at the same time, he registered his opposition to the synagogue event that was promoting the sale of land “in occupied West Bank in settlements that are a violation of international law.”

Condemning Jew-hatred while simultaneously inciting it through incendiary distortions is the mind-twisting stock in trade of the anti-Israel left.

In Britain, Starmer’s government is now talking about banning the “hate marches” that have taken place almost every week since the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The belated realization is beginning to dawn that the chanting on these marches for the murder of Jews may help cause actual attacks on Jews.

Despite this, Starmer and many others are still failing to join the necessary dots. The rampant Jew-hatred that has so shocked them is the result of something that they won’t acknowledge.

Brendan O'Neill: The ugly truth about the cult of Palestinianism

That’s what this case has really revealed – the lethal narcissism of the keffiyeh classes. This is a class of people so drunk on moral vanity, so convinced of their own saintedness, that they seem to think anything is justified in the name of ‘the cause’. That cause being to advertise to the world their bloated vision of themselves as holy crusaders against the wickedest state in existence. Indeed, one of the activists told the jury, ‘with absolute certainty’, that breaking into the Elbit base ‘is the best thing I have ever done’. You sad bastard. ‘There is a good chance’, they said, that ‘innocent lives were saved’ as a result of ‘our actions that night’. This is a level of self-delusion that borders on the pathological. Lost in a cocoon of sanctimonious fantasy, they really believe that breaking a computer in Bristol will save a life in Gaza.

This is the modus operandi of Palestine Action – it executes dumb stunts not to impact world affairs but to assert the cultural supremacy of the credentialled haters of Israel here at home. It is moral hubris and class arrogance masquerading as ‘anti-war’. Sometimes it crosses the line into something darker, like when Palestine Action smashed up a Jewish-owned business in Stamford Hill in London. This feels ‘very, very scary now’, said local Jews amid the shattered glass of that woke mini-Kristallnacht. Who could have guessed that the bourgeois left’s division of the world into ‘the anointed’ who righteously hate the Jewish State, and ‘the demonic’ who support it, would prove so catastrophic for the liberty and dignity of Britain’s Jews? All of us. That’s who.

It feels like this has been a mask-slipping week for the cult of Palestinianism. More people can surely see the sectarian malice that lurks behind that veil of pacifism. A keffiyeh mob smashing a woman’s back. Rancid anti-Semites who call Jews ‘cockroaches’ stinking up the Green Party of England and Wales. Another gaggle of sanctimonious sea-farers setting off for Gaza, even though there’s no famine there, while in South Sudan nearly eight million face ‘acute hunger’. The stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green glossed over by supposed ‘anti-fascists’, who seem more interested in their own right to chant ‘Globalise the intifada’ than in Jews’ right to live in peace. Just think about that: mere days after violence against Jews, they were demanding the right to agitate for more violence against Jews.

Some of us have known for some time that Palestinianism is bigotry in a keffiyeh, the mask Jew hatred wears in the 21st century. We’ve seen this bourgeois army and its Islamist chums engage in the most vile demonisation of the world’s only Jewish nation, and of all who support it, which includes most of the world’s Jews. Are others now clocking this truth? No, anti-Zionism and the winds of hate it has unleashed are not going away. They are far too entrenched in the cultural establishment. But a reckoning might be brewing. Let us hope so.

Seth Mandel: Anti-Zionists Are Canceling R.F. Kuang for Writing the Word ‘Israel’

Writers are taught the value of clarity, so the novelist R.F. Kuang should already know precisely how to extricate herself and her fans from the awkward situation in which they find themselves.

Kuang, the author of the celebrated novel Yellowface and others, has a new book in the works. A page of it was leaked, and now Kuang faces a serious allegation: that she is giving credence to the idea that Israeli people exist.

Kuang’s novel, set for a September release, includes a page with an Israeli character, reports the Times of Israel: “The musician, a successful pianist whose performance ignites a near-religious fervor for a character in the story, is not named, and the text identifies him as ‘a dour-faced man who did not so much as crack a smile as we applauded.’”

Ah, so maybe he’s a bad Israeli! Kuang’s fans are taking this theory under consideration. Perhaps, it has been suggested online, Kuang is offering a sly critique of colonialists by suggesting that all Israelis are bad people. Obviously not Arab-Israelis. Just the you-know-whos.

But this, too, must be rejected. As the article notes, the negative portrayal of Jewish Israelis is still a woke infraction: “Casey McQuiston, the author of the 2019 romance novel ‘Red, White, and Royal Blue,’ initially included a scene where the U.S. president jokes that an ambassador ‘said something idiotic about Israel, and now I have to call Netanyahu and personally apologize.’ In 2021, McQuiston said they would remove the reference to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in future printings of the book.”

It is at times hard to believe these people are real. But there are enough of them for an author to bowdlerize her own book because it referenced an Israeli person engaged in the crime of existing.

Not everyone thinks Kuang deserves banishment from the cloud kingdom of BookTok. The piece quotes a Threads user who wrote: “The people canceling a preorder over [a] single mention of an Israeli pianist being booked at a concert hall in R.F. Kuang’s new book lack so much f–king nuance. There’s literally no mention of Zionism yet y’all can’t seem to differentiate.”

Now that you mention it, I have noticed a distinct lack of nuance when it comes to differentiating between Zionists and the “good Jews.” As protesters wave Hezbollah flags, yell “we support Hamas,” and call Jews at a synagogue “pedophiles,” I worry about the lack of nuance, too.

05/08 Links Pt1: Saudi Arabia’s War; Princelings of Persia; IDF kills Hamas terrorist linked to Mia Schem abduction; PA policeman one of three terrorists arrested

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Saudi Arabia’s War

It’s worth noting, for posterity, that the great under-covered theme in this war has been the influence exerted by the Saudis. That story has been under-covered because Western mass media tends toward herd behavior and relies on preconceived narratives. The prevailing narrative is that if any state exerts a controversial level of influence over American warmaking, that state must be Israel. It is the only country subject to this type of coverage.

And yet, the Saudis were urging Trump to launch the war and then loudly protested when Trump signaled that he was looking for an off-ramp. Israel wants to be able to continue its own missions in Lebanon, but it can deal with a U.S.-Iran cease-fire just fine as long as its own hands aren’t tied elsewhere. That’s not true of the Gulf Arab states, which have stuck their necks out to join a U.S. war alliance that includes the IDF.

The Saudis were not quiet about pushing Trump to finish off the Iranian regime. That makes them an immediate target if the regime gets back on its feet. The United Arab Emirates has left OPEC in order to boost American voters’ flagging patience with the war, which puts them on the outs with Riyadh and Tehran simultaneously. If the administration doesn’t have the attention span to stick it out and make sure these Arab states have the security they need after going out on a limb for the U.S., American credibility will fall even faster than gas prices rise.

Israel, however, can afford to be more deferential to Trump. The Israelis have worked to protect the UAE from Iranian retaliation, so it’s not as though they want the war to end here. But it isn’t the Israelis who have publicly tied Trump’s hands and forced him to make the U.S. military defend them or else be made to look a fool over false promises.

It’s tempting to end by merely emphasizing that those who have been claiming that Israel controls U.S. foreign policy, or that American soldiers are risking their lives “for Israel,” have now managed to make themselves look more clownish than ever. But there’s another takeaway here: The public should rethink the reporting and the prognostications made by anyone who has bought or sold the prepackaged narrative about Israeli manipulation. What else about the war have you been misled to believe by mainstream narratives or podcast-bro grifting? Now’s a good time for a reality check.

Princelings of Persia

I used to dismiss what I thought was an urban myth that, to help sell Tehran on the nuke deal, President Barack Obama granted thousands of Iranian spies a backdoor path to residence and ultimately citizenship in the United States. After all, visas and green cards are not like the letters of transit in Casablanca, where you fill in your name and hop on the plane to Lisbon. U.S. consular rules would block such individuals from getting here anyway. Yet in the years after the Iran deal (known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), this story got traction, even as Obama’s spokesmen naturally denied it.

But this year, this supposed myth was given new credibility with the arrest in Los Angeles of Shamim Mafi, an Iranian arms trafficker who came to California in 2013 and was given permanent residency under the Obama administration three years later. And it turns out Mafi is small potatoes compared to what a recent wave of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and deportations has exposed: that upper Iranian terrorist nobility has been prospering all over the United States.

“They have eyes and ears everywhere,” Iranian American author and human-rights activist Elham Yaghoubian told me about the regime. “It peaked under Obama.”

For a prime example, look first to the $2 million five-bedroom, five-bath modern gray-and-white clapboard house in suburban Los Angeles that has been causing firestorms all over Iranian social media. Its most recent occupants have posted a two-and-a-half-minute video online showing off the grand front, the sprawling interior, and the adjoining elm-shaded McMansions. The camera loiters over the kitchen and dining room surfaces laden with an acre of holiday goodies, a great room of flat-screen TVs and speakers blaring performances nearly drowned out by clapping, while breakfronts full of bric-a-brac reflect, through their glass backing, glimpses of the LA woman documenting the vastness of her lavish residence.

The hostess with the iPhone camera is not Britney Spears, but one Maryam Tahmasebi, sneering at the neighbors’ American flag in contrast to the Shia Imam Hussein banner flying on her own house. And those flat-screen TVs are lit up with screeching mullahs, with a clapping mob cheering them in response. She is the daughter-in-law of Masoumeh Ebtekar, the unhinged “Screaming Mary” spokesperson of the student group that occupied the U.S. Embassy for 444 days in 1979, now an ICE detainee.

The online haters are the outraged Persians around the globe who are fuming at the latest sign of corrupt aghazadeh, or “princeling decadence,” the effrontery of the Islamic Republic’s elite Gen Zers living it up overseas while Iranians go hungry and get shot dead by the thousand at home. The aghazadeh in question is Ebtekar’s son, Eissa Hashemi. Incredibly enough, this scion of two embassy hostage takers “entered the United States in 2014 in visas issued by the Obama administration,” according to a statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on April 11. Even more incredibly, according to the same statement, “in June 2016 – just months after the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] seized two U.S. Navy vessels and captured 10 American sailors – the Obama Administration granted all three Iranian nationals lawful permanent resident (LPR) status via the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program.” That would be the same time frame when Mafi, the arms trafficker in Woodland Hills, got her green card. Hashemi is in ICE detention as well, along with the couple’s son.

Americans of a certain age have to pause here to savor the thought of hostage taker Masoumeh, née Nilufar, Ebtekar (the hard-liner Water Lily renamed herself Sinless), watching her revolutionary family members being seized, cuffed, shackled, and hustled into custody for an uncertain but inevitably humiliating fate.

Though Hashemi was Iranian revolutionary aristocracy, he often pleaded to his haters—fellow Iranians—that he was not a fanatic and was not even born when his parents took the American hostages and his mother gloated over her desire to murder them. Not so with Hamideh Soleimani-Afshar, reportedly the niece of Qassem Soleimani, the deceased IRGC-Quds Force chief. Afshar had celebrated attacks on U.S. soldiers and military facilities, praised Iran’s supreme leader, called America the “Great Satan,” and voiced support for the IRGC, a designated terror organization, according to the New York Post, citing the State Department. She and her daughter, Sarinasadat Hosseiny, were detained by ICE, leaving behind a black Tesla—in which the Post glimpsed Hermès cushions, a Miss Dior bag, and a Sephora bag—in front of their home on Plainview Avenue in Tujunga, on the opposite side of the San Fernando Valley from Agoura Hills.

'We should never have let them in': Labor's 'complete failure' revealed after ISIS brides charged with slavery, terrorism offences

The Albanese government’s decision to allow the return of four ISIS brides and their nine children has been branded a “complete failure” after three of the women were arrested on arrival.

Two women were arrested after touching down at Melbourne Airport on Thursday evening, with a third arrested on arrival in Sydney.

The two Melbourne women, aged 53 and 31, have both since been charged with multiple slavery-related offences, while the 32-year-old Sydney woman has been charged with lesser terrorism-related offences.

The Albanese government has maintained that no assistance was provided to the cohort, but questions have been raised about why the individuals were granted passports and not subjected to temporary exclusion orders.

Shadow home affairs minister Jonathan Duniam said the seriousness of the charges showed why “we should never have let them in”.

“The fact that we are arresting people on their arrival means we shouldn't have allowed them to come to Australia,” he told Sky News.

“We're talking about terror-related offences here and under the Passport Act there is a power for the Foreign Minister to not issue passports to people on grounds of national security.

“I would argue that terror-related offences are a good enough reason not to give someone a passport.

“We're not talking about small misdemeanours… We're talking about some of the worst crimes here.”

The shadow home affairs minister said since they have arrived, the group were now Australia’s problem, with the cost of monitoring them estimated at $2 million per year, per person.

“For the government to allow this to happen is a complete failure of this government's commitment to our national security and protection of the people here," he said.

“We should never have let them in."

We the People - Part 7 of "Reclaiming the Covenant"

The founders were not naive about government. They had read Locke and Montesquieu, studied the Roman Republic, watched the British Parliament operate at close range, and understood the mechanics of institutional design better than any generation before them. The Constitution they produced is a masterwork of that understanding — separated powers, enumerated rights, layered sovereignties, a bill of rights added almost immediately because the first draft wasn’t cautious enough. They knew how to build governmental architecture.

What they were attempting in 1787 was something the formal architecture alone could not accomplish, and they knew it. The experiment was not merely in constitutional design. It was in whether a free people could constitute themselves as a society — hold themselves together, maintain justice, extend opportunity, honor their obligations to one another — without the binding agents that every previous civilization had relied upon, like blood, the Crown, or the Church. The founders explicitly rejected them all. What remained was a covenant and a bet: that people who had accepted common terms could treat each other as members of a common enterprise, even across distances and differences that made the bond invisible to ordinary human instinct.

The Constitution announces this in its first three words. “We the People.” The obligations the Preamble describes — a more perfect union, justice, domestic tranquility, the general welfare, the blessings of liberty — are assigned to the people collectively, and the government is the instrument they constructed to help honor them. The direction of authority in the American system runs from citizens outward to institutions, not downward from institutions to subjects. Every other government of the founders’ era ran the other direction. That reversal was the experiment.

Europe drew the opposite conclusion from the same Enlightenment premises. If reason could identify the conditions of human flourishing — and the philosophes were confident it could — then the rational state, staffed by educated administrators, was the appropriate mechanism for producing those conditions. The state would answer the social questions: how resources were distributed, what opportunities existed, and what obligations citizens owed one another. The citizens’ job was to participate in the state through their representatives, pay their taxes, and receive the protections and services the state provided. This was a coherent theory of how a modern society organizes itself, and it produced, over the following two centuries, the welfare states of Western Europe, whose citizens are by most measures well cared for.

America’s founders rejected that theory before it fully formed. “Of the people, by the people, for the people” was not poetry when Lincoln said it at Gettysburg — it was a job description, and it assigned the job to Americans, not to their government. The social questions were the people’s questions to answer: in their towns, their voluntary associations, their businesses, their daily choices about how to treat the people around them. Government could set the floor — the legal minimum below which no one could push another person — but the ceiling was built by citizens, and it was as high or as low as citizens chose to make it.

Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in America in 1831 to understand why this arrangement seemed to be working. He was thirty-one years old, a French aristocrat in a country that had recently guillotined its aristocracy, trying to comprehend a democratic republic that had already survived longer than the French Republic had managed. What he found surprised him enough that he wrote two volumes about it.

The surprise was not the Constitution or the courts or the federal structure, all of which he analyzed carefully. The surprise was what Americans did when they had a problem. In France, Tocqueville wrote, a man encountering a difficulty would look to the government; in England, to a lord; in America, to his neighbors. Americans formed associations — voluntary, spontaneous, self-organized — for everything: building roads, founding schools, running hospitals, debating public questions, organizing charity. The habit of solving problems collectively, without waiting for authority to act, was so pervasive that Tocqueville decided it was the secret of democratic self-government at scale. A people that governed its own daily life would prove capable of governing its political life; a people that waited for the state to solve every problem would lose the capacity for self-governance entirely.

The habit he observed was the covenant in daily practice. Every barn-raising, every volunteer fire company, every mutual aid society was an enactment of “We the People” at small scale — Americans treating other Americans as people they were in community with and therefore owed something to. The government had almost nothing to do with it. That was the point.

The question was whether the habit he observed was permanent or circumstantial. He was watching a country of perhaps thirteen million people, overwhelmingly concentrated along the Eastern Seaboard, sharing a common language, a broadly Protestant Christian culture, a recent revolutionary experience, and memories of the communities they or their parents had left in Europe. Mutual obligation came naturally in that context. The farmer down the road was one of you: you knew him, or knew his family, or knew someone who did. Obligation to a visible neighbor is something human beings are wired for. Every social instinct evolution gave us operates at small scale, among people we can see.

The founders were asking Americans to extend that instinct outward far beyond anything instinct naturally supports. And in 1787, they were asking it of a country that, whatever its other divisions, was composed almost entirely of white Christians. The covenant’s terms said membership was defined by acceptance rather than identity — but the actual membership was, for most of the republic’s first century, remarkably homogeneous, which made the horizontal obligations easier to feel even when the theory said they should extend further. The hard version of the experiment — the version that asks 330 million people, the most diverse nation in human history, to feel genuine obligation to strangers across a continent who share nothing with them but citizenship — is the version only now being run at full scale.

The founders bet that the covenant could carry that weight. The evidence is not yet in.

What the evidence does show is that the inner rings of the covenant are holding. AmeriCorps data from 2023 found that 75.7 million Americans — 28.3% of the population — formally volunteered through an organization, contributing nearly five billion hours of service worth $167 billion in economic value. That number had collapsed during the pandemic and rebounded to its largest recorded expansion in the survey’s history. More striking still: 54% of Americans — 137.5 million people — informally helped their neighbors in the same period, running errands, watching children, lending tools, doing the ten thousand small things that constitute a functioning community. Tocqueville’s Americans are still out there. The voluntary habit he identified nearly two centuries ago has not died. Americans are still, in large numbers, treating the people around them as people they owe something to.

The inner rings hold. The outer ring — obligation to Americans you will never meet, in places you have never been, whose lives look nothing like yours — is where the strain shows, and that strain is the subject of the next chapter. What matters here is that the foundation Tocqueville identified is intact, and that it supplies the answer to the question the experiment was always asking: can free people maintain a society without mandatory binding agents? At the level of neighbors and communities, the answer remains yes. The question is whether Americans can extend the same habit to the scale the experiment demands.

This is where the American Dream enters.