I have been spending time on a simple idea that seems obvious once stated and is almost never actually used. Every claim rests on load-bearing assumptions — many of them implicit, never written down, doing their work in silence — and if even one of those assumptions is false, the claim cannot stand. That is what load-bearing means: an assumption whose failure brings the whole thing down. By definition, an argument can be no more secure than the shakiest assumption holding it up.
The trick is that extracting those assumptions is an acquired skill. The explicit ones are easy; anyone can list what a paper openly claims. The load-bearing ones are often the assumptions the author never noticed making — the things that had to be true for the argument to even get started, sitting so far underneath the visible claims that neither the author nor the reviewers nor the readers think to check them. Learning to surface those is most of the work. I've written AI GPTs to help me and while they are enormously helpful they still miss some assumptions because assumptions themselves are often layered and it is hard for anyone, man or AI, to see all the layers.
Here is a case study.
On June 16 a paper appeared in Culture and Religion, a peer-reviewed Routledge journal, by Nadim Rouhana, who holds a chair at the Fletcher School at Tufts. The title is "A State Founded by a Book": Zionism's Sacralized Politics and the Road to the Gaza Genocide. Here is the entire abstract, in the author's own words:
This paper examines how Zionism's sacralized politics – the framing and legitimation of Israel's policies toward Palestine and the Palestinians through appeal to religious texts – helped lay the groundwork for Israel's publicly supported and often eagerly enacted genocide in Gaza. It explores how sacralized politics became a key site of convergence between mainstream secular Zionism and national-religious Zionism, ultimately culminating in a shared genocidal policy. The paper first considers why secular Zionism increasingly harnessed and incorporated sacralized politics, particularly in relation to the systematic extension of the Zionist settler-colonial enterprise into the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, with its attendant land dispossession, massive and ongoing structural and direct violence, and systematic disregard for international law. It argues that choosing Palestine as the site for the Zionist project entrapped Zionism in sacralized politics to justify its settler colonial policies while at the same time conversing with significant Western currents and undercurrents. It then analyzes how mainstream secular and national-religious Zionism complemented one another in the violent project of overtaking Palestine and how this complementarity sanctioned the strategies that enabled Zionism's shift from a century-long eliminatory campaign with genocidal features, but short of genocide, to its actual implementation. The paper argues that the convergence of strategic goals and ideological visions between secular and religious Zionism helps explain the widespread support – and, at times, open enthusiasm – within Israeli society for the live-streamed genocide. While the primary focus is on intra-Zionist dynamics, the paper also briefly addresses the interaction with additional enabling factors: official Western complicity, the vast power asymmetry between Israel and the Palestinians, and the persistence of Palestinian resistance to elimination.
Before reading on, the exercise is worth trying yourself: what does this argument need to be true? Not "is it persuasive," but "what has to hold up for the conclusion to follow." Find those, and you have found where the paper can be broken.
A particularly fragile kind of support
Most arguments rest on several load-bearing assumptions standing side by side, each holding up a different part of the structure — like the columns under a building's pediment. Each one is individually fatal; that is what makes it load-bearing rather than decorative. Pull any column and the roof comes down.
A causal chain is a different kind of column. Much of Rouhana's thesis is not a set of independent supports but a sequence: sacralized politics drew secular and religious Zionism together, the convergence produced a shared genocidal policy, the policy culminated in genocide, and the same convergence explains the public's enthusiasm for it. That is one load-bearing column like the others — but it is built from segments stacked one atop the next, and every segment is load-bearing for the segment above it. Remove a block from the middle and everything resting on it falls; the conclusion at the top had nothing under it but that block.
This makes the causal chain the most fragile kind of load-bearing structure, and the reason is worth stating precisely. Its failure is no more total than any column's — all load-bearing failures are total. What the chain offers is more places to start the failure. A plain column gives a critic one target. A chain of six claims gives him six, each independently sufficient to drop the whole column, and through it the building. The author gains explanatory richness with every link he adds and pays for it in exposure: each link is one more thing that has to hold, and not one of them is allowed to fail. A thesis shaped as "the road to the genocide" is a column pre-segmented into exactly the independent targets its author needed all to survive. You do not refute it whole. You find the one block that will not bear weight.
So let me walk the segments. For each, here is an alternative at least as plausible as the paper's — and in some cases simply true.
"Zionism is religious"
The paper's foundation is that Israeli policy runs on religious legitimation — it appeals to sacred texts, sacralized politics, a state "founded by a book." Most Israelis are secular. They are not voting, fighting, or supporting the war because of biblical land promises; their Zionism rests on peoplehood and the ordinary conviction that a people repeatedly targeted for destruction needs one place where it can defend itself. Even the Likud is mostly not a religious party — its base is secular and traditional Mizrahi and Russian-immigrant voters whose nationalism has nothing to do with sacralized politics. The genuinely religious parties sit in the coalition as junior partners, not as its engine.
If Israeli Zionism is primarily a secular project of collective survival rather than a sacralized one, then "sacralized politics" is not the site where everything converges. It is a feature of one wing, and the paper's central mechanism is gone. The column fails at its lowest block.
"Choosing Palestine made the sacralization inevitable"
The abstract makes a stronger claim than "Zionism used religious language." It says choosing Palestine entrapped Zionism in sacralized politics — that the location itself made religious justification structurally necessary, an inescapable consequence of where the project was sited. This is the boldest assumption in the paper, because it asserts inevitability rather than influence. A claim of necessity has to clear a far higher bar than a claim of mere correlation: it must show not that religion was used, but that nothing else could have done the work.
It cannot clear that bar, and the historical record runs the other way. When Herzl put British East Africa to the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903 as a refuge from the pogroms, the delegates who fought hardest to keep Zionism bound to Palestine were the secular Russian Zionists led by Ussishkin and Weizmann; the religious Mizrachi faction under Rabbi Reines was the bloc willing to consider the Uganda plan, because their concern was the physical survival of the Jewish people and their faith left them untroubled about a temporary refuge elsewhere. At the one moment the movement actually voted on whether Palestine was negotiable, the seculars were the immovable ones and the religious contingent was flexible. The sacralization-entrapment story has the roles exactly reversed, and Rouhana is wrong on one of his most basic assertions.
And notice the form of the claim. "Choosing Palestine inevitably entrapped Zionism" is a counterfactual about a road never taken — it asserts that an alternative secular path would have failed, while no such path can be run to check. An assumption that no observation could disconfirm cannot serve as a legitimate load-bearing one; it is doing rhetorical work in the costume of historical necessity, the kind of block that looks solid until you ask what would have to be true for it to fail.
"The war is ideology in action"
The abstract treats the Gaza war as the expression of a long ideological project — the moment a century-long "eliminatory campaign" finally tips into genocide because the ideology was always headed there. The war started on October 7, 2023, with the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The plainer explanation fits the timeline: a country attacked, its citizens slaughtered and dragged into Gaza, responding with the aim of ensuring it cannot happen again.
That explanation accounts for the same facts without any of Rouhana's apparatus. You do not need sacralized politics, ideological convergence, or a century-long teleology to explain why a nation goes to war after that; you need a calendar. If the war is a response to an attack rather than the climax of an ideology, the entire causal story about why it happened is explaining something that was driven by something else.
Worse is the assumption Rouhana needs in order to reach his reading: that the religious-Zionist ideologues almost welcomed October 7 as the long-awaited pretext to fulfill a genocidal aspiration. That requires Jewish malice as the starting premise rather than a finding, and it explains nothing — least of all the inconvenient fact that Israel had already left Gaza. In 2005 Israel unilaterally uprooted all twenty-one of its settlements there and withdrew every soldier and civilian, over fierce objection from its own settler movement and with majority public support. A century-long eliminatory campaign converging toward genocide does not voluntarily demolish its own communities and hand the land to its enemy. The eliminatory-teleology block does not merely lack support; the central episode of recent Gaza history points the opposite way.
"It is a genocide"
This is the block the title hands you as settled. "Genocide" is a legal term whose hardest element is specific intent to destroy a group as such, not a strong word for a great deal of killing. The paper never argues this element is met. It opens with the genocide as fact and spends its energy explaining the ideological roots of an event it has assumed into existence.
Set the assumption next to Israel's actual conduct. A state intending to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza does not coordinate with humanitarian organizations to move food and medicine in, run a vaccination campaign against polio across the territory, or warn civilians out of areas before striking them. Those actions are what the absence of genocidal intent looks like. You can argue about whether the war was waged proportionately or competently, but the specific claim the paper needs — intent to destroy the group as such — is contradicted by the conduct it is supposed to describe.
If there is no genocide, there is no road to the genocide, and a paper titled "the road to the Gaza genocide" has no destination.
"Nations go to war because of ideology and public mood"
Underneath the visible claims sits a deeper assumption the paper never states and probably never noticed making: a theory of how a country decides to fight a war. Rouhana's drivers are ideology and public enthusiasm — sacralized politics shaping the national mood, the mood enabling the policy. That is how the abstract models a state going to war, as a feeling that becomes a campaign.
Real states do not work that way, and Israel in particular does not. A war cabinet weighs the imperative to bring hostages home and stop the rockets, the army's own legal review of every target, the munitions actually in the warehouse and the ones Washington is willing to resupply, the international pressure mounting by the week, and the strategic question of how to dismantle Hamas's military capacity so that October 7 cannot recur. These determine when Israel strikes, where, with what, and when it stops. A government does not consult the public's theological temperature; it consults its lawyers, its generals, its arms inventory, and its allies.
This assumption is the one most easily missed, because it hides in what the paper leaves out. Two distinct claims are buried here: that ideology is a primary driver of state policy at all, and that it outweighs the strategic constraints pulling against it. The first could be granted in the abstract — ideology is one input among many — and the argument would still fail on the second, because a primary input is not a dominant one. By treating ideology and public mood as the engine, Rouhana builds a model in which the entire apparatus of the decision can be left out without loss, and the left-out factors are the ones that explain the war's actual shape with no reference to sacralized politics. The charge is not that he ignored Israel's strategic situation; it is that his model is built so that excluding it changes nothing. How many governments on earth place ideology ahead of security and strategy in deciding whether to go to war? Iran, perhaps. The model that fits a revolutionary theocracy has been quietly fitted to a parliamentary democracy with a supreme court reviewing its targeting.
"Israeli society enthusiastically supports genocide"
The abstract needs the public, not just the government. Its claim is that ideological convergence explains the "widespread support – and, at times, open enthusiasm – within Israeli society for the live-streamed genocide." This rests on a relabeling that does the entire job in a single phrase, and the relabeling is libelous.
Of course Israelis broadly supported a war against Hamas after October 7. But Rouhana claims they supported a genocide, which works only if the war and the genocide are the same object, and they are not. Strip the relabeling and the polling shows something the paper cannot use: support for destroying the military force that murdered and abducted their neighbors, declining support for the war's continuation as it dragged on, and no measurable public appetite for destroying the Palestinian people as such. There is literally no support for the assertion that Israelis as a whole support genocide.
There is a second assumption underneath the first: that public enthusiasm is causally significant — that the mood enabled the policy rather than forming around decisions leaders had already made. The abstract needs the public to be a cause, not a chorus. Whether opinion drove the cabinet or merely followed it is an empirical question the paper does not engage, and the conventional direction of causation in wartime runs the other way: governments decide, then publics rally. If the enthusiasm is a consequence of the war rather than a cause of it, it explains nothing about why the war happened, and this block carries no load at all.
"We cannot believe what Israelis say"
There is one more assumption, the one that licenses all the rest. To build this argument, Rouhana cannot take Israel's stated war aims at face value — destroy Hamas's military capacity, return the hostages, end the threat from Gaza. Those aims are strategic and defensive, and they fit the secular-survival reading rather than the sacralized-genocidal one. So they are set aside, and a different set of goals supplied in their place: the ones the ideology predicts.
That move requires a particular and rarely-defended assumption — that Israeli statements are not evidence of Israeli intent but a screen to be seen through, and that the analyst holds the interpretive key to the real meaning behind the words. Distinguishing stated aims from actual ones is a legitimate tool; political scientists use it constantly, and governments do sometimes lie about why they fight. The problem is what Rouhana does with the license once he claims it. Every official denial becomes confirmation, every humanitarian measure becomes a cover story, every stated defensive aim becomes the mask over the genocidal one. The theory is built so that nothing Israel says or does can count against it, because saying and doing the opposite is simply what a sophisticated génocidaire would do. This is a conspiracy theory and wishful thinking mind-reading dressed up as analysis.
A framework that cannot be contradicted by its subject's words or its subject's deeds is interpreting a text it wrote in advance, not analyzing evidence. And it rests on a claim about the author's own access to hidden meaning that he never has to justify, because his readers grant it before they open the paper.
The circularity underneath
In each case the contested thing is a premise the paper starts from, not a finding it reaches. The genocide is assumed, the ideology is offered to explain it, and then the depth of the ideological roots is treated as confirmation that the genocide was real. The conclusion props up the premise that produced it; the load-bearing claim is holding itself up.
This is the genre's signature. A legal or moral conclusion walks in dressed as a historical premise, and once it is inside the argument, no one asks it to show its papers again.
Why nobody checks
Pulling these threads required no archive, no Hebrew, no special expertise, and no position on the war. It required reading the abstract as a structure instead of a story — asking what must be true for the conclusion to follow, then asking which of those things the author shows rather than assumes.
The hardest assumptions to surface are the ones that never appear as sentences. A tool can catch the claims a paper makes; it struggles with the claims a paper relies on without making — that nations decide by ideology rather than strategy, that a subject's own words are a screen. Those live below the visible argument, in the choice of what to model and what to omit, and you find them by asking why the obvious explanation is missing.
The procedure works on essentially any paper in this literature, and it is almost never run, because the people reviewing and citing and assigning these papers already share the premises. When everyone in the room agrees that Gaza is a genocide and Zionism is settler colonialism, no one in the room is positioned to see that those are the load-bearing assumptions rather than the results. A field that agrees on its starting points stops seeing them as starting points.
There is a structural accomplice, too: Culture and Religion is a religion-studies journal, and its reviewers are equipped to assess whether sacralized politics is characterized coherently, not to test a genocide classification imported from international law or a model of military decision-making imported from security studies. The contested claims cross the disciplinary border and shed their burden of proof on the way, arriving as settled background in a field with no standing to challenge them.
So the journal is real, the peer review happened, and the author has the title and the chair. None of that is evidence the argument is sound. It is evidence that the argument was built and approved by people who start with assumptions that are not supported.
A thesis shaped as a causal chain hands its critics the one gift a careful argument never should: a row of independent blocks, every one of them load-bearing, not one of them allowed to fail. The secular character of Israeli Zionism, the inevitability that supposedly trapped it in scripture, the date the war began, a single shipment of vaccines, the war cabinet's actual deliberations, Israel's own stated aims taken at their word — any one of them is enough, and the column was only ever as sound as its weakest block.
This paper does not just have one collapsed column, but nearly all of them.
Friday, July 03, 2026
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