Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, February 21, 2026

02/21 Links: Emerging Sunni coalition is a strategic threat to Israel; Huckabee calmly, brilliantly confronts Carlson’s barrage of anti-Israel, anti-Christian lies; Jeremy Bowen’s bias is visible from space

From Ian:

Far Left protest planned against Buchenwald Memorial on Liberation Day

A planned far-left protest against the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial on the anniversary of its liberation has sparked outrage across Germany, with officials denouncing the move as an affront to the memory of Holocaust victims.

According to a report in the German Bild, citing Switzerland's Neue Zürcher Zeitung, radical organizations are calling for demonstrations on April 11, the day the camp was liberated in 1945. The groups accuse the memorial's management of "spreading Israeli propaganda" and of not being "hostile enough toward Israel."

The protest is being organized under the slogan "Keffiyehs in Buchenwald." Among those involved are the student wing of Germany's Left Party (Die Linke), the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East and the German Communist Party (DKP).

In statements published by the organizers, the Buchenwald memorial site is accused of promoting "historical revisionism and genocide denial" and of serving as a vehicle for advancing an alleged "Israeli narrative."

The controversy follows an incident last year in which a woman seeking to stage a protest at the site while wearing a keffiyeh, a scarf widely associated with Palestinian nationalism, was denied entry. A German court later upheld the decision. The protest organizers claim the memorial's management is effectively criminalizing pro-Palestinian activists.

According to the report, one of the leading activists behind the campaign belongs to a communist organization that previously expressed public support for the October 7 massacre carried out by Hamas. In a statement issued after the attack, the group described it as a "legitimate uprising by all means necessary."

The remarks triggered widespread public anger in Germany, particularly given Buchenwald's central place in the country's culture of remembrance. Tens of thousands of Jews were murdered at the camp during the Holocaust, making it one of the most significant symbols of Nazi atrocities.

Felix Klein, the German government's commissioner for combating antisemitism, sharply condemned the initiative, calling it "a new low in the reversal of roles between victim and perpetrator." He described the planned demonstration as "a frontal assault on the dignity of commemoration and on the memory of the victims of the Holocaust."

Daniel Finkelstein: Britain is still our country as well – and we will not be driven out

I understand those people who wish to make aliyah. I respect that decision and understand the emotional pull. But as a move to enhance family safety? I don’t think so.

Until the last five years I might have answered “America” if considering a safe refuge for Jews. But now? I note only that the worst antisemitic abuse I receive originates in that country. And that every extreme trend is worse and more violent there. It seems like a society constantly on the edge.

And nowhere else in Europe is it tempting, either. Or the Middle East. Or Africa for that matter. Jews are a small minority in almost every country we live in and that is inevitably perilous. But I don’t think we are finished here unless someone has a better idea, and I don’t think someone does have a better idea.

But I do have a more positive reason for believing in the future for Jews in Britain. It has become harder for Jews everywhere, we all feel less safe, but a sense of proportion is required. This remains one of the greatest times to be alive as a Jew, and Britain is one of the greatest places.

When I read the story of both sets of my grandparents before they were engulfed by the disasters of the 1930s and 1940s, I could see the warning signs. Absolutely I could. The growth of open antisemitism, the slow rise of violence, the breakdown of taboos. All the things we worry about now did indeed precede the catastrophe.

Yet the difference in extent is as striking as the similarly in nature. The extent of violence and hatred was of an entirely different scale. And Germany, in particular, was a much more unstable country. British democracy and rule of law certainly has its challenges but remains, by comparison, vastly stronger.

When I wrote recently in The Times about my experience of antisemitic abuse I was flooded with kind messages from readers. We certainly have enemies but we also have many allies. There are millions of decent people in Britain who realise that their own safety and liberty is bound up in ours.

Besides, over hundreds of years we have built our own culture and community in this country. It’s not something to give up lightly. I don’t think complacency is warranted. Sadly, it is not warranted at all. But a little defiance is. This is certainly still the place for me.

Jeremy Bowen’s bias is visible from space

It will be of little surprise that Bowen has consistently misrepresented, downplayed or even tried to excuse, Hamas’s use of Palestinian civilians as human shields. Against Israel, Hamas has little choice but ‘to leverage the things that they can leverage in terms of trying to get an edge’, Bowen said in a 2023 podcast episode. In 2014, he claimed to have seen ‘no evidence during my week in Gaza of Israel’s accusation that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields’. This is despite extensively documented evidence to the contrary, showing that Hamas launches rockets from civilian areas and commandeers civilian infrastructure for military ends, including hospitals and schools.

In fact, you can find examples of Bowen’s bias as far back as 2009, when the BBC Trust found him in breach of impartiality guidelines for a 2007 BBC News article on the 40th anniversary of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War.

According to monitoring by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), Bowen has spent decades perfecting a narrative of Israeli aggression while airbrushing the extent of the threats Israel faces. He has repeatedly platformed voices that dehumanise Israelis while failing to challenge the anti-Semitic ideology that drives Hamas. That isn’t journalism: it’s a curated perspective that treats Jewish security concerns with a shrug of indifference.

The BBC is the most popular news source in the UK, reaching a staggering 94 per cent of adults. When its most senior editors trade in skewed narratives, they shape political discourse, social attitudes and the temperature of national debate. And the price of this is borne by British Jews.

Since 7 October 2023, the UK has endured record levels of anti-Semitic incidents. This has included a lethal terror attack and several foiled terror plots. When coverage of serious conflicts consistently falls short, it exacerbates real-world harms for a minority community already under pressure. The BBC’s tendency to amplify unverified Hamas claims – such as wrongly blaming the infamous al-Ahli hospital blast on Israel without evidence, or quoting Hamas casualty figures without qualification – has fuelled hostility towards Jewish communities.

Perhaps most breathtaking is the arrogance with which Bowen continues to showcase his bias with total impunity. The BBC’s internal accountability mechanisms are essentially a closed loop. The broadcaster is, quite literally, marking its own homework. Apologies and corrections are only issued long after the damage has been done and without significant consequences for repeated breaches.

This brings us to the government’s BBC Charter Review, which is exploring the BBC’s governance, public obligations and funding before a new 10-year charter is granted. The way the BBC works now, where senior figures like Bowen are immune to external scrutiny, is a betrayal of public trust. We need a fundamental reset of the BBC’s culture, including tying the renewal of the charter to demonstrable improvements in impartiality and accuracy.

We ought to remember that the BBC belongs to the public – not to the egos of its editors and correspondents.

02/20 Links Pt2: Reduced to one word – Jew; The Man Setting Fire to the GOP; Israelis called occupiers and ‘human fragments’ on BBC; A pro-Israel bookshelf

From Ian:

Alex Hearn: Reduced to one word – Jew

Comedian. Radio host. Actor. Presenter. Jew.

Only the last one mattered to Thomas Abdullah Bourne. He erased the individual identity and achievements of Matt Lucas until all he saw was a Jew. And Bourne decided that a Jew needed to be publicly humiliated.

There are no exceptions for racists. In the Soviet era, even leading Jewish communists were executed on charges of Zionism after show trials.

Bourne proudly uploaded his video of a Jewish man being harassed for no other reason than his Jewishness. After the backlash, he deleted it along with his account, but the damage was done. Targeting a popular public figure in this way had shown the hateful face of antizionism to the public.

Matt Lucas wasn’t alone. Last week, a Holocaust survivor and other visitors were called “child killers” and harassed by people in Madrid’s Reina Sofía museum because they were visibly Jewish. Instead of receiving assistance, a senior official instructed staff to remove them, saying others were “disturbed” by their presence. The Reina Sofía is considered one of the world’s leading cultural institutions.

Across the west in 2026 Jews are being excluded from museums, harassed on public transport and confronted on the street. And now, incredibly, antizionists could be coming to your home.

In cities including Brighton, Bristol, London and Sheffield, people are going door to door checking whether residents accept their “truth” about Israel – like racist Jehovah’s witnesses. They want people to sign pledges boycotting the world’s only Jewish state. The door-knockers compile lists of those who don’t pass their purity test. What will they do with this information?

Footage from Sheffield appears to show one door-knocker physically attacking a woman who confronted him. When an ideology becomes part of your identity, criticism feels like a personal attack. The door-knockers in Brighton were filmed having a rally by Sky News, with one speaker revealing what appears to be the campaigners’ ultimate goal: to harm Israel “until it shrivels and dies”.

This is the aim of antizionism – the destruction of Israel and the Jews who live there. Some hide behind the fantasy that Israel would be replaced by another democracy, but the Middle East isn’t known for democracy, particularly when it comes to Palestinian leaders. We know what would happen to half the world's Jews in this scenario. October 7, 2023 showed us, when Hamas attempted to implement it.

NGO Monitor: A Growing Threat in Sweden: Samidoun’s Network and Terror Affiliations

Samidoun, a terror-linked and terror-supporting NGO, is active and expanding its presence in Sweden, raising the spectre of incitement, public unrest, and violence.

Designated as a terrorist entity by Israel in 2021, by Germany in 2023, and jointly by the US and Canada in 2024, Samidoun is closely linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – an EU-designated terrorist organization. Samidoun also promotes other EU-designated groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah and openly advocates for Palestinians’ “natural right to armed resistance,” underscoring the NGO’s ideological commitment to violence.

Terror Designations
In February 2021, Israel designated the NGO, identifying it as “play[ing] a leading and significant role in the PFLP’s anti-Israel propaganda efforts, fundraising, and recruiting activists,” and serving as a “front for the PFLP abroad.”
In 2020, Germany expelled Samidoun head Khaled Barakat, and imposed a four-year entry ban; his appeal was rejected, citing PFLP links and “support for a terrorist organization.” As a result of the ban, Barakat was denied entry into the EU in 2022.
In November 2023, Germany banned Samidoun for violating its Basic Law (Article 9(2)) and its Associations Act; namely, it “impairs and endangers the peaceful coexistence of Germans and foreigners,” “advocates and calls for the use of violence as a means of enforcing political interests,” and “supports associations that initiate, advocate and threaten attacks against people or property.”
In October 2024, the US and Canada issued joint statements listing Samidoun as a terrorist entity. The US described it as a “sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization” and designated Samidoun head Khaled Barakat, “a member of the PFLP’s leadership” who played a “critical role[] in external fundraising for the PFLP.”
The Dutch Parliament passed a resolution in the same month calling on the government to designate Samidoun as a terror organization.

Samidoun’s Operational Presence in Sweden
Samidoun maintains chapters in Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö, which organize and participate in demonstrations and protests across Sweden, including events in Stockholm (Sergels Torg), Gothenburg (Brunnsparken, Centralstation, Gazaplatsen, Gustaf Adolfs Torg), Eskilstuna (Smortorget, Cityhustorget), Ostersund (Badhusparkens scen), and Vasteras (Stora Torget, Sigmatorget).

Support for Terrorist Organizations and Violence
On November 23, 2025, Samidoun Gothenburg co-organized a demonstration in “support of the resistance,” using promotional materials that featured members of terrorist organizations, including Hamas and the PFLP. The demonstration was followed by a joint event commemorating Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, the Muslim Brotherhood figure who is the namesake of Hamas’s military wing. The gathering honored “the legacy of his resistance.”

Promotional image for the November 23, 2025, Samidoun Gothenburg demonstration
On October 12, 2025, following the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, a Samidoun Gothenburg member gave a speech at a demonstration, stating, “The united armed resistance, led by the al-Qassam Brigades [Hamas’ military wing] and backed by a determined people, has stood strong through all this and forced the occupation to an agreement. The ceasefire is a statement of strength for the Palestinian resistance, and it is worth rejoicing over!”
On July 6, 2025, as Iran launched daily ballistic missile attacks on Israeli cities, a Samidoun Gothenburg member gave a speech at a demonstration stating, “I feel hope as the rockets fall over Tel Aviv.” He concluded his speech by calling out, “Death to Israel! Death to the USA! Glory to the martyrs! Long live the resistance! Long live Palestine!”
On November 29, 2024, a Samidoun Gothenburg member participated in a “cultural evening for Palestine” arranged by the cultural association Solens Port, claiming “PFLP, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the organizations that are building the armed resistance are not terrorists, they are our comrades, they are our heroes.”

PEN America gets captured: organization accepts Palestine as a member and rejects Israel; Jewish chief executive resigns after accusations of being a “Zionist” and not signing on to Israel’s “genocide”

Every day, it seems, another group gets ideologically captured, valorizing Palestine (or Hamas) and demonizing Israel. This is dispiriting for Jews, but the latest such capture—of the free-expression literary group PEN America—is especially depressing.

The decline of PEN American was first evidenced to me when, in 2015, it decided to give a “freedom of expression” award to the magazine Charlie Hebdo, many of whose writers (and a few others) were killed in an attack by al-Qaeda, presumably for making fun of Islam and Muhammad. The award was formally called the “PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award”, and was to be conferred with other awards at a literary gala banquet.

But six PEN members refused to be “table hosts” at the banquet, and then 139 other members (now 242) signed a letter taking issue with the award. Why? Because although Charlie Hebdo is well known to be an “equal opportunity offender,” whose metier is mocking everyone, including politicians and religions, those PEN members said that it was a no-no to mock Islam because its adherents were “already marginalized, embattled, and victimized.”

South Africa pulls out of Venice Biennale after minister pans artist’s focus on Gaza

South Africa will not participate in this year’s Venice Biennale following a dispute between its culture ministry and the artist it had selected, whose planned installation focused on Gaza.

Gabrielle Goliath, a South African artist selected to represent the country at the international culture exhibition, had planned to showcase a performance piece titled “Elegy” that would include a memorial for the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2023.

Goliath’s selection to represent South Africa at the biennale by Art Periodic, a nonprofit that was running the pavilion on behalf of the country, quickly drew the scorn of Gayton McKenzie, the South African culture minister, who called her work “highly divisive.”

While South Africa has long been among the most vocal critics of Israel, and diplomatic ties between the countries have frayed over the course of the war in Gaza, McKenzie has stood out for his staunch support of the Jewish state.

In January, McKenzie terminated the agreement with Art Periodic, writing in a letter that he would instead feature art in Venice that gave “a positive message” about South Africa, according to the New York Times.

02/20 Links Pt1: Media’s Belated Truth-Telling on Gaza; Why Israel Does Not Want America’s Military Aid Money Anymore; Inside Al Jazeera’s Style Guide; Guterres and the gutless United Nations

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Media’s Belated Truth-Telling on Gaza

From the Now It Can Be Told files come a couple more revelations about Gaza worthy of attention.

The BBC reports what has been true for over two years: Hamas is bleeding Gazans dry while violently cracking down on, as one Gazan described it, “people with opinions.”

The BBC has recently been embroiled in numerous ethics scandals around its reporting on the conflict. This report is an indication of what it might have looked like had the Beeb reported honestly and ethically for a single day during the war.

“At markets across Gaza,” BBC reports, “stallholders describe regular police patrols—and a renewed iron grip on official fees and taxes.” The market sellers can’t really afford what Hamas is demanding. “Should I pay them, or feed my children?” one asks.

As the piece explains, “food and some other basic goods are flowing into Gaza more freely. The few key traders with a license to bring them in from Israel say Hamas have reimposed strict control over taxing the imports. One trader, who agreed to share details anonymously, told us force was used against those who refused to pay.”

Same old story—Israel is letting in goods and food, and Hamas is taking it out of the mouths and pocketbooks of Gazan civilians and disappearing those who put up any resistance. The preceding sentence has never not been true since Hamas took control of the enclave close to two decades ago. If you want Gazans to be able to eat and earn a livelihood, you’ve got to remove Hamas. Because its policies are the same whether it’s peacetime or wartime: there is no such thing, in fact, as peacetime Hamas.

Interestingly, one trader told the BBC “that traders used a code-word for Hamas when discussing tax payments, so that Israel wouldn’t learn that money was being siphoned off to the group.”

Even Hamas’s victims have been helping the terror group cover up its crimes. What that means is simple: Hamas has, all along, been siphoning off a much larger share of goods and food and money than anyone claimed. If anything, the Israelis understated the extent of the problem.

In fact, it’s going to be difficult for anyone on the outside to get the full picture: “Hamas now has a database of all the traders who import goods into the Gaza Strip,” activist Mohammed Diab told the Beeb. “The trader pays in cash, not through bank transfers, so that the flow of funds cannot be traced. It is gradually restoring the system that was in place in the past, but away from the spotlight so it can’t be monitored.”

The longer it takes to disarm Hamas, the longer Palestinians will be immiserated and oppressed. It’s really that simple. And there’s nothing Israel can do to change that unless the world asks it to go in and disarm Hamas itself.

Inside Al Jazeera’s Style Guide, Which Forbids Reporters From Calling ISIS a ‘Terrorist’ Organization

Al Jazeera prohibits its staff from referring to al Qaeda, ISIS, and Boko Haram as "terrorist," "Islamist," or "extremist" groups, instead requiring reporters to use "neutral terms" like "fighters" and "armed groups," according to a copy of the outlet’s style guide obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The guide was labeled "2023-2024 Edition" but appears to have been updated to reference more recent events like President Donald Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America (the outlet tells reporters to use the former). The guide’s treatment of terrorist organizations is one example of how the Qatari state media outlet, which did not respond to a request for comment, presents radical Islam to the world.

"There is nothing stylish or factual about this unholy text, which has a higher spin rate than any Major League power pitcher," said one media insider who has seen the document. "It simply confirms what many right-thinking people have always known: Al Jazeera exists only to parrot narratives that have been carefully crafted by the Hamas propaganda machine."

Below is a compilation of exact quotes from the guide followed by examples of its rules being used in Al Jazeera articles.

TERRORISM/TERRORISTS
We do not use these terms unless attributed.

ISRAEL
It is the state of Israel, not the Jewish state. However, we can refer to the Jewish state when the subject is the religious composition of Israel. Do not use Jewish state as a synonym for Israel. Do not use ‘Jerusalem’ as a synonym for the government of Israel, as one might use ‘Washington’ to imply the U.S. government. With regard to whether we use pro-Israel or pro-Israeli government…care needs to be taken to use the longer but more accurate phrase: ‘pro-Israeli government’. Israeli peace activists will tell you they are ‘pro-Israel’, but ‘anti-Israeli government’. When Israeli politicians address the public, make an effort to find out who they are addressing and report it as is.

EAST JERUSALEM
The term ‘occupied’ should be used wherever it’s necessary.

"Israel to advance plans for 9,000 units in occupied East Jerusalem," Dec. 17, 2025: "Israeli authorities are expected to advance plans to build 9,000 new housing units in an illegal settlement on the site of the abandoned Qalandiya airport in occupied East Jerusalem, in another attempt to cut off Palestinian lands from each other and block any possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state ever emerging."

WEST JERUSALEM
Do not say ‘occupied’. And never refer to it as the capital of Israel.

"Netanyahu finally announces October 7 inquiry: Why are Israelis furious?" Dec. 20, 2025: "The ministerial team tasked with determining the scope of the inquiry is to meet in West Jerusalem on Monday, coincidentally the same day that Netanyahu is scheduled to give testimony in his long-running corruption trial in Tel Aviv."

INCURSION
This is the word we use when Israeli settlers, politicians, religious figures or nationalist groups go into Al Aqsa Mosque compound. Don’t call it a ‘visit’.

"UN says Israel is stoking ‘ethnic cleansing’ fears in Gaza, West Bank," Feb. 19, 2026: "In Jerusalem, Ramadan has brought further restrictions at Al-Aqsa Mosque. The mosque’s imam, Sheikh Akrama Sabri, said Israeli authorities are ‘imposing a reality by force’ by limiting worshippers while allowing extremist Jewish incursions into the compound."

ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS
Should be called illegal on first reference. Settlements are residential areas built by Israelis in the occupied territories. They are illegal under international law: this is the UN Security Council’s position - although Israel rejects this. All settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are considered illegal under international law. There are no ‘legal’ settlements.

"Israeli minister approves gun licences for 18 illegal West Bank settlements," Jan. 22, 2026: "Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has approved the issuance of gun licences to Israelis in 18 additional illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, as the right-wing government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushes to expand illegal outposts that undermine prospects for a two-state solution."

ISRAELI ARMY
Do not call it Israeli Defence Forces or IDF. Also avoid ‘security forces’.

"Israeli army sniper in Chile accused of Gaza war crimes could face justice," Feb. 18, 2026: "A Chilean court is considering a criminal complaint against a former Israeli army sniper who served in Gaza during Israel’s more than two-year-long genocide on the coastal enclave and the Palestinian people."

ISRAEL MILITARY DEATHS
We take a robust approach to censorship of our reporting by the Israeli military. Each case should be considered individually, but our first instinct should be to report the facts. The deaths in combat of Israeli soldiers are of high news value. If we are confident of the facts we should report them, even if the Israeli Army has asked us to wait for its permission. The Israeli Army says it routinely asks us to delay reporting deaths so it can first inform victims’ relatives. This is not a good enough reason for us to withhold news from our audience – provided we do not name the victim. This policy may provoke a reaction from the Israeli side. If it does, we will reassess it.

Josh Hammer: The Saudi Mask Slips

What the heck is going on here—and most important, what does it all mean for the United States and our very real interests in the Middle East?

First, the much-desired goal of Riyadh joining Abu Dhabi and Manama in the Abraham Accords circle of peace with Jerusalem is, at least for the time being, totally unachievable. A friend of mine who had been involved in the first Trump administration’s Abraham Accords diplomacy efforts once told me that, by the end of the first Trump term, a deal to bring Riyadh into the accords was “on the five-yard line.” This same official believed that, if Trump had been re-elected for a second term beginning in January 2021, Saudi Arabia would have joined the accords within a few months. Now, five years later, the notion of Israel normalizing relations with the state custodian of Islam’s holy sites is, sadly, a pipe dream.

Second, it seems that Riyadh’s recent shift in posturing is motivated less by a sincere ideological cottoning to Islamism—the Brotherhood remains officially banned throughout the kingdom, for example—and motivated more by MBS’s unseemly personal petulance and immaturity. It’s worth remembering that MBS, a nepo baby if there ever were one, has behaved like a spoiled child before. He initiated a high-profile mass arrest of prominent Saudi elites at the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton in November 2017. In October 2018, Islamist “journalist” Jamal Khashoggi was butchered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul; a CIA report the following month concluded that MBS had ordered the hit. Whatever one might say (and I have nothing nice to say about Khashoggi), these incidents were unnecessarily provocative—perhaps even gratuitous.

It seems that MBS is now up to his old tricks. By all accounts, MBS has come to loathe Mohamed bin Zayed, rule of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE. I’ve heard speculation that MBS now harbors an even deeper hatred of MBZ, and by extension the entire UAE, than he held for Qatar and its ruling House of Thani during the 2017-2021 GCC crisis. Given that the UAE under MBZ has been perhaps the most moderate of all the oil-rich Sunni Gulf states in its general approach to Islam and the most publicly embracing of Israel of all the Abraham Accords’ Arab signees, there is no clear reason why MBS has adopted such a hostile posture—given his years of anti-Islamist crackdowns and purges—other than pure pettiness and jealousy.

It’s juvenile—blatantly, insanely, and disgustingly so. But as Riyadh cozies up to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s strongman Islamist regime in Ankara, Ahmed al-Sharaa’s al Qaeda-lite regime in Damascus, and sides against Israel and the UAE on Somaliland’s push for national autonomy, MBS’s spoiled outbursts nonetheless have real consequences for the region.

pic.twitter.com/EwpF9q046R
Unbelievably evil: The notorious Hamas propaganda agent in Australia's parliament supported banning Israeli Jews who fought Hamas from entering Australia, but wants to welcome ISIS jihadists who enslaved non-Muslim girls and committed genocide against…
— Liza Rosen (@LizaRosen0000) February 19, 2026

Islamists firebombed a synagogue in Melbourne.

ABC News calls the firebombed synagogue a “mosque”pic.twitter.com/wxQfDRJmWA
— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) February 20, 2026

The New York Times ran a remarkable front-page story this week about Dr. David Hasan, a Palestinian American neurosurgeon from Durham, North Carolina, who has built a growing network of free schools in Gaza called Academies of Hope. Nine thousand children — war orphans and displaced youngsters — are now attending classes in tent campuses across southern Gaza, receiving hot meals, medical care, and something extraordinary: a curriculum purged of antisemitism and hate.

Dr. Hasan deserves enormous praise. He went to Gaza on medical missions when most of the world was arguing about the conflict from the comfort of their living rooms. He watched a ten-year-old girl take charge of her younger siblings after their parents were killed. And rather than turn away, he built something. He raised money — largely from Jewish donors — hired teachers over WhatsApp, coordinated with Israeli authorities, and replaced lessons glorifying killers with lessons about tolerance, coexistence, and conflict resolution. A math problem that once compared the number of "martyrs" in the first and second intifadas now asks about soccer match attendance. A reading that praised Dalal Mughrabi — who led the 1978 coastal road massacre that killed 38 Israelis, 13 of them children — has been replaced with a reading about a pioneering Palestinian educator. An Islamic studies lesson about Jews trying to kill the Prophet has been replaced with one about the Prophet's expressions of respect for Jews.

The children love it. "No drones or bombs," one 12-year-old told the Times. "The best thing is sitting at a desk and seeing the teacher and the board, and holding a pencil again."

This raises an obvious question: why is this so rare?

The Palestinian Authority's curriculum — the one taught in both the West Bank and Gaza — has been criticized for decades by Israel, the United States, and the European Union for inculcating hatred and antisemitism. That criticism has been thoroughly documented and is not seriously disputed. Yet in all that time, with billions of dollars in international aid flowing to Palestinian educational institutions, no one — not the PA, not UNRWA, not Qatar, not the EU — has made systematic hate-removal a condition or even a priority. Dr. Hasan, a private individual with no background in humanitarian work, did it anyway, and the PA's education ministry reportedly threatened him for doing so without permission.

Think about that: the official custodians of Palestinian education threatened a man for teaching children not to hate.

Which brings us to the social media reaction. Some Gazans have questioned whether Dr. Hasan is "overly aligned with Israel" — because he works with Israeli donors, coordinates with Israeli authorities, and has stripped anti-Jewish content from the curriculum. Others, described as embittered by Hamas, have pushed back and said teaching tolerance is better than teaching children to sacrifice themselves.

Notice what the objectors are actually objecting to. It isn't the food. It isn't the medical care. It isn't the fact that children are learning to read and write again. The complaint is that Jewish people are funding the schools and that hatred of Jews has been removed from the lessons. In other words: the mere participation of Jews in a humanitarian project is treated as a form of contamination. The removal of antisemitism from a classroom is treated as ideological subversion.

This tells you something important about the cultural environment in which these children are being raised — an environment so saturated with the premise that Jews are the enemy that any Jewish generosity is automatically suspect. It also tells you something about what "peace building" is actually up against. Dr. Hasan isn't just building tent classrooms; he's fighting an entire ecosystem of dehumanization that has been deliberately cultivated and institutionally maintained for decades.

That is precisely why what he is doing matters so much — and why the question of its rarity should be answered honestly. It is rare because powerful institutions — the PA, Hamas, the UN, and their international funders — have not wanted it. The hate in the curriculum was not an accident or an oversight. It was a policy. Dr. Hasan's schools prove that it was never a necessity.

Most of all, this is a damning indictment of UNRWA. A man managed to build a network of schools in months, with thousands of students and vetted teachers, that don't teach hate. UNRWA has spent decades arguing that such a thing is impossible in Gaza and that the lessons of hate they teach - which violate UN standards - are necessary (or they deny it.)

Dr. David Hasan's schools prove that all the excuses that justify antisemitism in Gaza are nonsense.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

A newer kind of philosophical antisemitism comes from Egypt

I have been arguing for nearly a year now that the common denominator of antisemitism - left, right, Arab, Christian or whatever - comes from Jews not fitting inside the paradigms of each group's philosophies. Jews, or Judaism, or Israel are particularistic when philosophies demand universalism, victims who became victors which makes binary frameworks break, or simply a people who survived when other philosophies predicted they cannot last. Philosophers prize cohesiveness in their theories, and Jews often prove the thinking is incoherent. Rather than update their frameworks to explain Jews, philosophies would rather get rid of the Jews to keep their frameworks intact.

But there is another response that can be made in response to those pesky Jews: create a cohesive philosophy whose entire purpose is to demonize Jews.

This is what Abdul Wahab al-Messiri has done.

The brilliant Hussein Aboubakr Mansour traces the ideology of al-Messiri as described in his eight volume Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, and what emerges is not crude prejudice but a fully systematized metaphysical indictment. Messiri did not stumble into antisemitism. He built it.

Critical Theory provides a particularly fertile environment for this dynamic, not because it is inherently antisemitic but because of its structure. Its central move is unmasking. It claims surface appearances conceal hidden domination and institutions encode power. The moral hero exposes the concealed logic beneath the visible order. Once this becomes the default intellectual posture, anomalies do not falsify the framework; they intensify the search for deeper concealment.

If applied to Jews, this sounds a lot like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, doesn't it?

Messiri takes the crude antisemitism of 19th century Eastern Europe and makes it compatible with the most trendy philosophical theories. Drawing on Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental reason, and Heideggerian and existential critiques of modernity, he relocates the source of Western domination from abstract rationality to Judaism itself. The hidden structure that Critical Theory sought to expose becomes Jewish metaphysics. Zionism becomes the distilled expression of modernity’s will to dominate. The Jewish narrative of chosenness is recast as the original civilizational pathology from which Western imperialism, capitalism, liberalism and even Nazism supposedly flow.

This is not medieval demonology in religious language. It is medieval demonology translated into the vocabulary of twentieth-century critical philosophy.

The result is a philosophy in which antisemitism is not an emotional reflex but the organizing principle. Jews do not merely fail to fit the paradigm. They explain why the paradigm is necessary. They occupy the structural position of hidden power more elegantly than any other candidate, precisely because antisemitic tradition has prepared that slot for a thousand years. Critical Theory’s emphasis on concealed domination and antisemitism’s emphasis on clandestine Jewish influence converge with remarkable ease.

Before reading this article, I had thought that this encyclopedia was just an encyclopedia. It is often reviewed and referenced in Arabic news media and op-eds. I didn't realize there was an entire philosophical framework behind it.

Messiri’s influence matters. His encyclopedia is widely cited in Arab intellectual circles and has shaped this generation of educated discourse. He provides a coherent architecture in which hostility to Israel and Judaism is not simply political but metaphysical. In his system, opposing Zionism is an act of universal emancipation. Violence becomes resistance against the Logos of domination. The Palestinian cause becomes a transcendent symbol around which history itself is morally organized.

So far, I see little evidence that Messiri's philosophy has been accepted in Western universities. It is still relatively new. When he is studied it is usually in Middle Eastern Studied departments. But the fact that it is coherent means there is little in the way of "progressive" scholars to start adopting it - it is a socially acceptable philosophy to justify Jew hatred, and something like that will not remain isolated for long.

When that happens, the antisemitic Right might be in the forefront of its mainstreaming, since it is already close to their conspiracy theories about Jews.

I began my philosophical project in order to dismantle antisemitism by identifying the broken assumptions that generate it. What Mansour’s essay reveals is a different challenge. There exists an intellectual tradition in which antisemitism is not a byproduct of philosophical incoherence but its deliberate center. Instead of eliminating Jews to preserve a theory, Messiri reconstructed theory to eliminate Jews conceptually. He did not defend a fragile paradigm against anomaly. He designed a paradigm in which the anomaly becomes the ultimate explanation.

If antisemitism can arise from philosophical systems that cannot tolerate Jewish particularity, it can also arise from systems that define Jewish particularity as the concealed engine of evil. The first problem is rigidity. The second is design. Both demand response, but they are not the same adversary.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

02/19 Links Pt2: Tucker Carlson's detention claim shattered by viral video; Bari Weiss’ Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture canceled; Why I acquired the whiteprint of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria

From Ian:

Noah Rothman: The Revolt of the Revolting

Review of 'The Revolutionists' by Jason Burke
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez was jubilant upon his return to London in 1971. When the Venezuelan national’s parents had last seen their son, he and his brother had just secured positions to study at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University—the front from which so much Soviet-sponsored radicalism and militancy was cultivated, refined, and exported. But that had been years earlier. On arrival, Ramírez was chided by a family friend for failing to tell his worried family where he’d been, but the reason for his prolonged absence was simple. “I’ve been in the Middle East,” he confessed, “learning how to kill Jews.”

That certainly explained the low profile. Ramírez embarked on that project under an assumed name, “Carlos,” to which the appellation “the Jackal” would soon be indelibly appended. Although he was perhaps the most famous revolutionary left-wing terrorist and assassin of his generation, Carlos actually had serious competition for the title. He would, however, make an outsize contribution to the bloodshed that bathed the decade to follow.

Although they talked a good game about proletarian solidarity and compassionate self-sacrifice, the violence that the Jackal and his terrorist allies dispensed was more often an outgrowth of narcissistic self-reverence that masqueraded as altruism. The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, by the British author and journalist Jason Burke, tells Carlos’s story and those of many others like him.

Burke’s rich narrative distills a violent decade to its intellectual concentrate. He chronicles the international Marxist left’s turn from socialist ardor toward nationalism and Islamism. It was a transformation that occurred in tandem with Israel’s progression from a fledgling state into a regional power. The Communist East and its fellow travelers turned on Israel as it evolved from an incipient socialist experiment into a Western-oriented capitalist democracy—one that had had the temerity twice to defeat the coalition of Arab nations in whose success Moscow had ill-advisedly invested substantial sums. The international left’s bitterness did not die when the Warsaw Pact pivoted late in the Cold War from confrontation to accommodation with the West, leading the global Marxist vanguard to throw their chips in with the Islamist radicals still in the fight.

It’s only proper, then, that Burke’s story begins not with the rash of civilian-aircraft hijackings that closed out the turbulent 1960s and set the stage for the violence to come, but in 1948, with the Jewish state’s founding. The birth of Israel was accompanied by the rise of a particular radicalism in the region influenced by “Marxist ideology,” one of the earliest expressions of which was George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, founded in 1967.

Seth Mandel: The Problem With ‘Epstein Class’

Back in 2017, during the heady days of the Trump-Russia “collusion” accusations, the release of the Steele Dossier supercharged the story. A former British spy had been very clearly duped by the Russians into putting together a file of colorful and compromising tales about Trump. The main effect this had was to turn the American political discourse into a conspiracist circus.

And when that happens, it’s only a matter of time before the sleuthing public finds a way to make it about the Jews.

Sure enough, in April 2017 Politico ran one of the wackiest articles about Jews to appear in a mainstream publication in years. Under the headline “The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin,” the article intimated that Chabad-Lubavitch institutions were the link between Trump and Putin’s oligarchs. The piece never establishes this, of course, because it’s nonsense. But it conjured a false picture that many people, eager to get Trump on collusion, bought into.

It is an iron rule that conspiracy theories find their ways to Jews if left to fester in the public’s imagination. So while the dossier’s intent had nothing to do with Jews, the irresponsible collation of rumors inevitably ended up there.

So it is with the Jeffrey Epstein files. Led by the bipartisan duo of Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, Congress forced open the files relating to the well-connected financier who was convicted of sex offenses. Epstein has been the subject of endless but groundless speculation by conspiracy theorists that he was working for Israel.

The Times of London provided a perfect example of the type of conspiracy mongering enabled by the mass release of the Epstein files. “Was Epstein a Mossad agent? New files deepen mystery over Israel links,” the headline promised. Several paragraphs into the story we get this: “An FBI report from the Los Angeles field office written in October 2020 said the bureau’s source had become ‘convinced that Epstein was a co-opted Mossad agent.’”

So now the reader has imbibed this rumor along with terms like “FBI report” and descriptions of certain messages as Department of Justice documents. Which they are—technically. But the “source” is a Holocaust denier and all-around disgraced kook—the report protects his identity, but it is not a secret. Still, the Times gets to play games by painting them as official documents coming from the feds.

Nicole Lampert: The pro-Gaza luvvies are engaged in their nastiest purity spiral yet

Towards the end of China’s Cultural Revolution, those who had dared to indulge in wrongthink were forced to wear signs around their necks detailing their alleged crimes and dragged into public stadiums. They were tortured and some of them were even the victims of ritualistic cannibalism.

Though not as extreme as the gruesomely violent aspects of the Cultural Revolution, some of the intolerance that characterised that movement can now be found in response to Israel. This week, 80 actors and directors, including Javier Bardem (a keffiyeh-clad poppinjay), Tilda Swinton, Brian Cox and Mike Leigh, denounced the Berlin Film Festival in Variety magazine because its organisers dared to say that not everyone has to express an opinion on Gaza.

They are furious that the Berlinale’s mild-mannered German jury president, Wim Wenders, voiced his belief that filmmakers should stay out of politics. “We have to do the work of people and not the work of politicians,” he said when asked repeatedly about Gaza. In 2026, this counts as bravery.

But the furore was immediate, with Indian novelist Arundhati Roy storming out of the festival, which was due to present a 1989 film she wrote. She described Wenders’ comments as “unconscionable”.

Then came the letter, which had the frankly breathtaking audacity to compare the Berlinale’s stance with that of Germany in the 1930s, because the previous year it had tried to stem the anti-Semitic impulses of too many righteously insane filmmakers who wanted to denounce the Israeli state for daring to defend itself.

What is more, the letter did not just have the usual lie that the war in Gaza is a “genocide”, but the kind of claim that only people who spend too much time in the land of make-believe could come up with – that Palestinians had been “evaporated” by the IDF.

These puffed-up self-righteous celebrities, who have forgotten we only want to see them crying on film and wearing nice clothes on the red carpet, are becoming dangerous with their anti-Zionist conspiracies.

While we may not be quite at cannibalism in this new attempted cultural revolution, in which everyone should bow down to the victimhood of the Palestinians, I fear we are getting ever closer.

02/19 Links Pt1: Trump announces $10 billion U.S. investment in Gaza, 10-day timeline for Iran; Hamas Debunks the ‘Genocide’ Narrative; The Lancet’s dubious Gaza casualty figures

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Hamas Debunks the ‘Genocide’ Narrative

Hamas has wrapped up its latest revision of casualty data in the Gaza war, and it makes clear why Israel’s critics have been flailing since the end of the war.

The list has enough information to cite 68,800 deaths. Hamas has lost 25,000 fighters, which leaves 44,000 war deaths to account for. Included in that 44,000 are about 10,000 natural deaths. The remaining 34,000 would include civilians killed by Israel and those killed by Hamas and associated militant groups—either by execution, rocket misfires, turf wars, and the like.

The result is that even when using Hamas’s numbers, Israel’s civilian-to-combatant death rate is close to 1:1, an unheard-of accomplishment in an urban war setting, let alone one in which much of the territory has been turned into Hamas human shields. Given that Hamas started the war, refused to surrender, and fired at Israel from civilian homes, the terrible tragedy of Gazan lives lost is laid at Hamas’s feet.

It feels pretty silly at this point to even consider the “genocide” accusation, but this is another opportunity to note that Hamas goaded its defenders out on that limb and then personally cut it off under their feet. While plenty of bad-faith actors have been accusing Israel of genocide since the war started, and are therefore immune to facts, I’m sure there are a number of decent folks who fell into the “genocide” trap because they followed a trend in the name of “human rights.” I do not envy the humiliation they are experiencing now, but neither do I find such people particularly sympathetic. They ought to feel bad about what they’ve said and done, and I hope they do.

The reason people were willing to believe it is twofold. First, it is the quintessential example of the Big Lie. Hitler’s belief was that the bigness of the lie not only lends it credibility but serves as an emotional, rather than rational, appeal. As we watch Israeli companies flood Gaza with sweets and drinks for Ramadan, we cannot maintain any rational, conscious interpretation other than Israel won a defensive war while protecting civilians to an extent never seen before. But those who shape their beliefs based on subconscious appeals to emotion? Who knows what contradictions they can maintain.

The other reason is, yes, anti-Semitism. The public’s willingness to believe the worst about Jews is not new, and it’s not an accident. Those who have participated in the “genocide” Big Lie have not made an honest mistake. A mistake, perhaps—but not an honest one.

Colonel Mike Kelly: Debunking the Gaza Genocide Myth Overview
Dr Mike Kelly AM examines why a finding of genocide against Israel by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is highly unlikely under international law.

Drawing extensively on the 1948 Genocide Convention and relevant ICJ jurisprudence, he argues that genocide requires proof of a specific intent to destroy a protected group in whole or in part, and that this must be the only reasonable inference from the evidence.

Kelly analyses the ICJ’s current proceedings, prior genocide cases, and the Convention’s drafting history to demonstrate the high legal threshold required.

He contrasts the definition of genocide with the realities of urban warfare, reviewing casualty claims, humanitarian aid flows, medical operations, IDF precautions in attack, and internal investigative mechanisms.

He further critiques reliance on unverified casualty data and partisan UN reports, arguing that they fail to establish the specific intent required under the Convention.

The article concludes that, whatever criticisms may be made of particular incidents or conduct in the war, the legal standard for genocide has not been met, and that expanding the Convention beyond its original scope would require a formal international renegotiation of its terms. Download PDF Trump announces $10 billion U.S. investment in Gaza, 10-day timeline for Iran

President Donald Trump used the occasion of the first meeting of the Board of Peace in Washington on Thursday to announce significant monetary and troop commitments from the U.S. and other countries to stabilize Gaza, as well as lay out a timeline for military action against Iran.

“I want to let you know that the United States is going to make a contribution of $10 billion to the Board of Peace,” Trump said at the United States Institute of Peace, where several foreign leaders gathered for the meeting.

The president also named, for the first time, which countries have agreed to make additional financial contributions to the reconstruction of Gaza: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and Kuwait “have all contributed more than $7 billion toward the relief package,” Trump said.

The meeting comes as the administration works to address several issues in the Middle East, including rising tensions with Iran. The U.S. has amassed a large collection of military assets in the region in preparation for a potential strike, as the two sides attempt to negotiate a nuclear deal.

Trump said in his remarks, “Now we may have to take it a step further or we may not. Maybe we are going to make a deal [with Iran]. You are going to be finding out over the next probably 10 days.” Last June, Trump said he would decide whether to take action against Iran within two weeks, and carried out strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities two days later.

Trump also called on Iran to “join” the board “on a path that will complete what we’re doing.”

“If they [Iran] join us, that will be great. If they don’t join us, that will be great too, but it will be a very different path,” the president said. “They cannot continue to threaten the stability of the entire region, and they must make a deal. Or if that doesn’t happen, I maybe can understand if it doesn’t happen, but bad things will happen.”

On February 16, an Israeli airstrike killed Hezbollah operative Ahmad Hussein Termos in the southern Lebanese town of Tallousa. Termos was trying to rebuild Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon after Israel destroyed it.

Unlike most assassinations, the IDF gave Termos a warning.

Lebanese journalist Radwan Mortada tells the amazing story of what happened, even as he tries to twist it as Israeli evil and a terrorist's "heroism."

When reality is harsher than fiction.

Yesterday, in the town of Tallouseh, the martyr Ahmad Termos (62) was on a family visit. He was sitting with his wife in her brother's house. The sound of a drone overhead, then another. He had barely stepped inside to sit when his phone rang.

Ahmad answered.

The voice on the line was cold and clear:
"Is this Ahmad Termos?"
"Yes", he replied.
"This is the Israeli army, Ahmad. You either die with those around you… or alone."

Without hesitation, he answered: "Alone."

He hung up. His face changed. His brother-in-law, Salim, looked at him and asked, "What happened, Ahmad?"
Calmly and decisively, he said: "The Israelis. Get up and leave. They say either you die with me… or I die alone."

He did not beg. He did not shout. He asked them to leave, to survive, to let him face his fate alone. They refused at first, insisting they would not leave him, that they would die with him. He steadied them, then convinced them to go.

For a moment, he forgot he wasn't in his own home. Then he realized it. He did not want death to come in a house that was not his. He chose to take death away from them. He asked them to stay while he left. He said goodbye. He got into his car, started the engine, drove away from the house, then parked.

Seconds passed. The drone fired two missiles.

The car burned. Ahmad's body was torn apart. He burned… but his story remains. He is one of the heroes of our time.

Take away the rhetoric, and the story is clear: Israel wanted to eliminate one of the key people breaking the ceasefire agreement, and went through great pains to ensure that no civilians would be hurt.

Calling Termos a hero for choosing not to let his family die and his brother-in-law's house be destroyed is a very low bar for heroism.

Apparently, this happens often. Mortada adds:

Before Ahmad, another young man was driving with his wife beside him. He received the same call. He stopped the car. He helped his wife out. He moved her away. Then he drove on alone, toward the missile.

These are scenes that repeat themselves in the South [of Lebanon].

It never occurs to these Hezbollah groupies that if the terror group would have followed the ceasefire agreement and dismantled its military infrastructure in southern Lebanon, even their own terrorists wouldn't be killed today.

One commenter realized that the story was not quite the story if sadistic psychological torture of innocent Lebanese as it was written:

Your statement contradicts the claim that the occupation army targets civilians. May God have mercy on the martyrs and accept them, but be careful when phrasing news so that you do not serve their enemy.

In fact, this is a story of heroism - Israeli heroism in saving innocent Lebanese lives while eliminating those who are trying to murder Jews. No amount of flowery language around how "heroic" Hezbollah terrorists are takes that away.

(h/t Ali)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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Part 4 of a series on the 2026 Palestinian draft constitution

The 2026 Palestinian draft constitution contains a clause that most Western observers will read past without a second thought. Article 4, under "General Provisions," states: "The principles of Islamic Sharia are a primary source for legislation."

That sounds moderate and pluralistic. It doesn't say "the primary source," just "a primary source." Many constitutions name religion as a source among others. The phrase suggests balance — Sharia alongside secular law, democratic norms, international obligations.

But that is not how the Palestinian Authority has ever interpreted the identical language in its 2003 Basic Law. And one of the men who drafted this constitution has said so explicitly.

In 2020, Mahmoud al-Habbash, the Chief Justice of the Palestinian Authority's Sharia Court, addressed the question directly. Although the PA had signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), he stated:

The Palestinian Constitution expressly states that Islamic Sharia is the primary source of legislation and that everything must be in harmony therewith. There is also a decision by the Constitutional Court whereby international agreements prevail over local laws, provided these are consistent with the Palestinian religious and cultural legacy.

The State of Palestine may not be an Islamic state, but none of its laws may contradict Islamic religious law.

This was not the opinion of an outside critic or a religious hardliner operating at the margins. Al-Habbash is the most senior Sharia judicial official in the Palestinian Authority. He is also member number six on the committee that drafted the 2026 constitution.

The man who articulated the operative doctrine — that Sharia functions not as a source but as a supreme veto over all other legal obligations — is one of the document's authors. The constitution is not ambiguous on this point. It is telling you exactly what it means through the person who helped write it.

The gap between Palestinian signature and Palestinian implementation is not speculation. It is a documented pattern spanning more than a decade.

In April 2014, the State of Palestine acceded to seven of the nine core UN human rights treaties — notably, without entering a single reservation. This was widely praised. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called it a "significant step." International human rights organizations celebrated Palestine as the only state in the Middle East and North Africa to sign CEDAW (for women's rights) without carve-outs.

The seven treaties were: CEDAW, the ICCPR (civil and political rights), the ICESCR (economic and social rights), CAT (convention against torture), CERD (racial discrimination), the CRC (rights of the child), and the CRPD (rights of persons with disabilities). All were signed "without reservations."

Under Palestinian law, a treaty gains binding domestic legal force only when published in the Official Gazette. Only CRC and CERD were published and are actual law under the Palestinian Authority. The rest of the treaties were signed, but never implemented in law.

The pattern requires no elaborate interpretation. The two treaties published are the two with the least direct conflict with Sharia. The five treaties that remain legal dead letters are precisely the five that most directly challenge Sharia-grounded practices: the prohibition on torture and cruel punishment, equal rights for women in marriage and inheritance, freedom of religion including the right to change one's faith, and equal civil and political rights regardless of sex.

The 2026 constitution enshrines this hierarchy as supreme law.

Article 82(2) establishes the legal order explicitly: ratified treaties sit above domestic legislation but below the constitution. Sharia, as Article 4, sits within the constitution itself. Therefore Sharia permanently outranks every international treaty obligation the PA has ever signed or will sign.

Article 16, the constitution's gesture toward international law more broadly, says only that the state "respects international law and the UN Charter." The language of "respects" has no legal force. It doesn't say that the state "is bound by," or "incorporates," or "applies." This is diplomatic language dressed as a legal commitment. It gives international law no enforceable domestic status whatsoever.

The PA's own Supreme Constitutional Court closed any remaining gaps in 2017 with two rulings that built a second layer of filtration. Decision No. 5 held that international conventions must be actively incorporated into national law to have any domestic force — effectively giving the PA permanent discretion over which obligations to activate. Signing treaties by itself is legally meaningless. Decision No. 4 held that implementation of conventions depends on consistency with "the national, religious, and cultural identity of the Palestinian people" — a formulation that is, in practice, a Sharia filter with additional steps.

The architecture is complete. Treaties sit below the constitution. Customary international law is something the state merely "respects." The courts have reserved a religious identity veto over whatever survives. And the man who articulated the doctrine governing all of this helped draft the document.

The practical consequences of Sharia supremacy over all legal obligations are not theoretical. They are visible in existing Palestinian law.

Under the personal status laws that govern Muslim Palestinians, inheritance follows Sharia rules: women receive half the share of male relatives. Polygamy is permitted for Muslim men. Marital rape is not a crime — the 1960 Penal Code that applies in the West Bank defines rape as applying only to a woman who is not the perpetrator's wife. The Family Protection Bill, which would have addressed domestic violence, was blocked on the grounds that it conflicted with Sharia. None of this has been amended.

Non-Muslim citizens exist within a legal framework whose primary source is explicitly not their faith. Article 37 guarantees freedom of religious practice for "followers of monotheistic religions" — but the legislation their rights depend on is shaped by Sharia. The constitution provides no mechanism by which this changes.

And for anyone who might leave Islam: the ICCPR — the treaty the PA signed and never published — guarantees the right to change one's religion. Under classical Sharia jurisprudence, apostasy is a capital offense. The PA has not published the ICCPR. It has not abolished the death penalty. The Second Optional Protocol committing it to do so was also never published.

The constitution's treatment of genocide crystallizes the entire problem in its starkest form.

Most states prohibit genocide as part of customary international humanitarian law that they automatically support in their constitutions. The Palestinian constitution only says that it "respects" international law, which is legally meaningless. So any prohibition of genocide must fit with Sharia law.

The word "genocide" does appear throughout the document, but only to accuse Israel. The preamble declares as constitutional fact that genocide is being committed against Palestinians. Article 24 mandates prosecution of the perpetrators. Article 69 states that genocide is a crime not subject to a statute of limitations. The constitution is constructed, from its preamble through its criminal law provisions, as a legal instrument for prosecuting genocide committed by others.

Nowhere in the document is there a legal path to prohibit Palestinians from performing genocide against Jews.

A constitution that weaponizes the accusation of genocide as its foundational premise — while blocking the legal mechanisms that would make the prohibition on genocide binding on itself — tells you that it understands international law as only applicable on others.

This is Part 4 of a series on the 2026 Palestinian draft constitution. Part 1 examined how the constitution makes peace illegal. Part 2 analyzed "pay for slay" under the constitution, Part 3 explored how it deals with armed groups.

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

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An interactive map of Hezbollah human shields

The Alma Research and Education Center has released an interactive map that shows, using open sources, many of the weapons found in civilian buildings in Lebanon by the IDF.

So for example, click on a spot in the map and you can find a video of weapons stored in a mosque.

The wooden crate contains 12 rounds of large caliber PGТ-AP2 Russian armor-piercing (AP) projectiles.

Those must be some explosive sermons given in those mosques.

Hamas' strategy of using human shields is well known and documented, but Hezbollah is ususally characterized more as a professional militia. Obviously, they are just as guilty of war crimes as Hamas is in endangering their own people.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

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02/18 Links Pt2: US likely to attack Iran, but Trump has not yet decided to do so; Jesse Jackson and the betrayal of the civil-rights movement; Eli Sharabi’s ‘Hostage’ memoir named Jewish book of the year

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Two Cases Demonstrate How Anti-Zionist Propaganda Undermines Liberal Democracy

The significance of the Palestine Action case, in fact, threatens to obscure the importance of the fight over the hostage posters. But the hostage posters arguably represent the problem at the root of all this activism.

The Palestine Action non-convictions were made possible by a campaign for what activists called “jury equity.” The defendants’ own lawyer argued that they should be treated like suffragettes, not criminals. But how does a society—in a democratic country, with a free press—come to embrace that idea widely enough to nullify the law? And to apply it only when the motivating factor is Jew-hatred?

To answer that, we only have to listen to the people who tear down hostage posters. In the case cited above, here’s how the defendant, Fiona Monro, explained her destructive actions:

“The board was clearly there to justify the genocide that was happening. A large laminated board with a photograph of a hostage was highly inflammatory to many people in that community clearly found it very upsetting to have that constantly thrust in our face daily.”

This is genuinely insane. The central claim of hers is that “a photograph of a hostage was highly inflammatory” and that people understandably “found it very upsetting.”

It is a picture of a Jewish person who was kidnapped during a pogrom and then murdered by his kidnappers.

You cannot get to the Palestine Action acquittals until your society produces enough people like Fiona Monro and those she claims to represent.

The people who tear down hostage posters represent a genuine threat to the functioning of a free society. They are an indication that the virus of anti-Semitism has metastasized to the point at which self-government becomes imperiled. As Britain is the first to belatedly realize.

NGO Monitor: Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Introduction
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor’s current and former Board Chairs appear on a 2013 list, published by Israel, of Hamas’ “main operatives and institutions” in Europe.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor appears in the European Union’s transparency register, a “database listing ‘interest representatives’ (organisations, associations, groups and self-employed individuals) who carry out activities to influence the EU policy and decision-making process.”

In their own words “youth-led independent, nonprofit organization that advocates for the human rights of all persons across Europe and the MENA region, particularly those who live under occupation, in the throes of war or political unrest and/ or have been displaced due to persecution or armed conflict.”

Funding
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor does not publish any financial date on its website, reflecting a complete lack of transparency and accountability.

According to its website, “Since the establishment of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, we have completely refused all offers of funding, sponsorship or support from government and faction bodies to protect our vision and narrative, to ensure an unbiased perspective and to resist external influences and pressures. We, however, rely on individual donations, project funding by independent international organizations, as well as crowdfunding campaigns, which are launched by our crowdfunding team several times a year.”

Euro-Med Monitor’s program “We are not Numbers,” which provides “training to developing storyteller–journalists in Palestine,” is fiscally sponsored by Nonviolence International.
Nonviolence International co-founder Jonathan Kuttab is also co-founder of Palestinian NGO Al-Haq. On October 22, 2021, the Israeli Ministry of Defense declared Al-Haq a “terror organization” because it is part of “a network of organizations” that operates “on behalf of the ‘Popular Front’.”

Ties to Terror
Ramy Abdu, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor Founder and Chairman
In November 2020, Israel Minister of Defense Benjamin Gantz signed an administrative seizure order against Ramy Abdu under Israel’s anti-terrorism law. The order was issued “in relation to his work with the [Israeli]-designated terrorist organization ‘IPalestine- International Platform of NGOs Working for Palestine…that belongs to and acts on behalf of…Hamas” Abdu served as a Board member.
The order was in effect until August 1, 2022.

Ramy Abdu appeared on a 2013 list, published by Israel, of Hamas’ “main operatives and institutions” in Europe. The institutions included The European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza (ECESG), European NGOs Empowerment Services (ENES), and the Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR).
A 2011 publication by Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center described Ramy Abdu as ECESG’s coordinator.

In 2013, Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR) and PALThink organized an event, “Hamas Movement within the International Context,” featuring Hamas leader Osama Hamdan. At the event, Ramy Abdu, then CEPR’s Palestine Office Manager in Gaza, sat next to Hamdan and was a keynote speaker.

Mazen Awni Issa Kahel (Mazen Kahel), Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor chair 2015–2019 Mazen Kahel appeared on a 2013 list, published by Israel, of Hamas’ “main operatives and institutions” in Europe. The institutions included The European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza (ECESG), European NGOs Empowerment Services (ENES), and the Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR).