07/31 Links Pt2: After 25 years, the Sbarro bombing and its aftermath still matter; Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and the serpent: Why their lies work

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: After 25 years, the Sbarro bombing and its aftermath still matter

For the rest of the world, including most Jews, Aug. 9 is just another day on the calendar. It doesn’t have the resonance of 9/11 or Oct. 7. Unlike those dates that remain inextricably linked to horrifying terrorist attacks, what happened on Aug. 9, 2001 has faded into memory for most Jews.

Some remember the Palestinian Arab suicide bombing at the Sbarro pizzeria at the corner of King George Street and the Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, which took the lives of 16 people, including eight children and a pregnant woman, and wounded another 130 persons. It was one among many such atrocities committed by the Palestinians during the terrorist war of attrition waged by the Palestinians from 2001 to 2005, known as the Second Intifada. And even that terrible struggle, which took the lives of more than 1,000 Israelis and many more Palestinians, has been overshadowed by the unspeakable crimes committed on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ordeal of the war against Iran and its terrorist proxies ever since.

Other than the families of the murdered and injured, that day isn’t likely circled on many calendars.

A date to remember
So, perhaps it’s understandable that it might fade from our consciousness.

Indeed, many such dates fade from the collective memory of nations because of the passage of time. Dec. 7 was once a turning point in the lives of Americans, who could tell you where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, dragging the United States into the Second World War. But those who have such memories of the events 85 years ago are now few and far between.

Increasingly, the same is true for Nov. 22, which was once indelibly linked to the trauma of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but which now has little resonance for any but the conspiracy-theory buffs among the overwhelming majority of Americans who were not alive then.

But we should remember Aug. 9—and not just because this year is the 25th anniversary of that horrible incident. It stands as a reminder of the folly and hubris of those who dabble in the Middle East peace process. That is something that President Donald Trump ought to keep in mind when he issues broadly optimistic statements about peace in the Mideast.

Trump’s Board of Peace, which is responsible for the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the post-Oct. 7 war, has announced a new plan for implementing the disarmament of Hamas and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the region. Israel’s moves would be contingent on the terrorists laying down their weapons and the president’s threats to Hamas if they don’t comply sound tough. But Trump’s breezy optimism about Hamas surrendering its armaments seems reminiscent of such predictions about the end of Palestinian terrorism the world has heard many times in the past, not least in the years before Aug. 9, 2001.

The Sbarro bombing was a shocking indicator of the barbarism of Israel’s erstwhile peace partners.

Nearly eight years earlier, most Israelis and the Jewish world had rejoiced in the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords on the White House Lawn by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat under the optimistic patronage of President Bill Clinton. Only a year before the bombing, Israel’s then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak had journeyed to Camp David, where he and Clinton had followed up on Oslo by offering Arafat an independent state in Gaza, a share of Jerusalem, and almost all of Judea and Samaria. Arafat rejected the offer. By way of further response, he launched the wave of terror attacks that literally and figuratively blew up the peace process. Instead of trading land for peace, it exchanged land for terror.

Jonathan Tobin: Decoding the settler violence narrative for Americans

Debunking a false narrative
The truth about settler violence contradicts not merely the assertion of the CIS and those regurgitating it in America, like Stephens. Though the Times columnist and others have mocked Netanyahu’s claims that the problem is confined to approximately 150 “juvenile delinquents,” once you take a deep dive into the statistics about settler violence, you realize that he might not be entirely wrong about that claim.

As JNS has reported, the assertion that Jews living in Judea and Samaria have been regularly engaging in a crime rampage is based on reports that classify a great many things that no objective observer would call “Jewish terror.” A Kohelet Policy Forum report on the subject by Israeli legal scholars Eugene Kontorovich and Avraham Shalev details the facts that many of the alleged acts of settler violence consist mainly of Jews doing things like visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem or creating infrastructure in their communities.

More important is the fact that many of these alleged instances of Jewish terrorism represent incidents in which Jews have defended themselves against acts of Arab terror. They also include times when the IDF has conducted counter-terror operations.

The narrative about settler violence also ignores the context of life in the territories. Arab violence and terrorism aimed at Jews is a daily occurrence. It is so common that only the most violent incidents involving deaths at the hands of Palestinian terrorists are reported, even in the Israeli press. The hundreds of thousands of Jews living in communities in the heart of their ancient homeland face constant harassment and violence. Rock-throwing at vehicles—something that American prosecutors would have no qualm about classifying as attempted murder since it is done with the express intent to harm the occupants of the car—is a constant threat. As anyone who has taken the trouble to visit these “settlements” knows, Jewish towns and villages, as well as farms, must be guarded around the clock to protect their inhabitants.

The number of acts of Arab violence in the territories far outnumbers even most of the exaggerated claims of settler crimes.

That’s not to say that a tiny minority of the Jewish population of these communities has never crossed the line from active defense to acts of retaliation. And when they do, they are often arrested by Israeli intelligence units and subject to the full force of the law. But such incidents are a small percentage of overall actions that the United Nations or others call settler “violence.”

So, to argue as Stephens does, that Netanyahu is lying and that a nation that can order its forces to perform amazing acts of derring-do when fighting Iran, Hezbollah or Hamas could, if it wished, put a quick end to a major crime problem is not merely missing the point of what is actually happening in Judea and Samaria. It’s a false claim whose purpose is to bolster the idea that Netanyahu’s government is hopelessly compromised by the presence of parties, like those led by ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. The assertion is that these controversial parties and leaders that support the Jews of Judea and Samaria have prevented the prime minister from doing his duty to uphold the law.

There are reasonable, even strong, arguments to make that someone like Ben-Gvir, who does and says things that are irresponsible and undermine Israel’s reputation, is a liability to Netanyahu. In private, the prime minister probably thinks that himself. Netanyahu would almost certainly prefer some of the center-left parties as coalition partners for Likud and will likely try to get them to join him if he gets the chance to form another government after the Oct. 27 election. But except for the national unity government that existed for a time after Oct. 7, they have refused to join Netanyahu due to personal feuds. That has ensured that Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and the ultra-Orthodox parties are the Likud’s only available partners.

Seen from this perspective, the entire discussion becomes easily understandable as a tactic to persuade people not to vote for Netanyahu or his allies.

Plenty of legitimate reasons exist for Israelis not to want Netanyahu to continue in office, including his lengthy tenure as prime minister and the fact that Oct. 7 happened on his watch. Yet it should be remembered that his most likely would-be successors were just as guilty as Netanyahu of subscribing to the “conceptzia” idea that Hamas could be bought off from attacking Israel as it did that Black Shabbat. That goes double for everyone in the military and intelligence establishment that sold Israelis this false doctrine. Indeed, the entire point of the CIS initiative is to replicate the pre-Oct. 7 situation in Gaza in Judea and Samaria, with the same tragic results its most likely consequence.

And that’s a reminder to those citing the CIS letter that blind faith in military and intelligence officials—many of whom, like Vilnai, have political motives—is almost always a mistake.

Coercing Israel
Once you strip away the skewed statistics, emotive rhetoric and virtue-signaling about disassociating from Jews who are “bad” settlers, the talk of settler violence is revealed as a political tactic aimed at toppling Netanyahu. The main reason why the Israeli opposition and its allies in the United States talk about the subject is to paint the Jewish population of the territories as a bunch of violent thugs, and in doing so, convince the electorate that they should be sacrificed in some chimerical “land for peace” agreement.

Yet since the Israeli left knows very well that the Israeli public will never vote for such a thing, they must resort, as they have for decades, to pleas for Washington to pressure Jerusalem to adopt policies the voters have rejected, as well as to efforts to delegitimize the prime minister and his allies.

Those whom American supporters of Israel look to as champions of their cause, like Stephens, should not have fallen for this tactic since it does as much harm to Israel’s reputation as it does to the government. That he and others like him have done so speaks volumes about their hostility to Netanyahu and Trump. Stephens’ readers deserved better from him.

Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and the serpent: Why their lies work

A biblical strategy
"Your eyes will be opened,” said the Serpent to an undecided Eve in the very first time this tactic was used.

The same tool that Carlson and Owens use today.

"Did God really say you shall not eat from any tree of the garden?"

The same build-up that the Serpent used before any claim is made, the same that Carlson and Owens use now. A redirect of attention. Not telling Eve what to conclude explicitly, but certainly implicitly.

Then comes suggesting something is being hidden from Eve.

And finally, the feeling that you see something others don't. It's framed by the Serpent, and now by the woke-right as joining an unseen tier, being a part of the people who see behind the curtain that everyone else is staring at.

The content of what's revealed almost doesn't even matter.

What's seductive is the exclusivity of the seeing. Once you believe you're one of the few who's noticed something hidden, the claim defends itself, because doubting it would mean giving up the very thing that made you feel exceptional in the first place. Owens, Fuentes, antisemites across Twitter/X even use that term to describe themselves. “Noticers.”

These lies are compelling for the same reason they always have been.

What makes this worth writing about, for me, isn't the tactics themselves, however. It's that I've fallen for them. Not in some abstract, theoretical "everyone's susceptible" way. Specifically.

There have been moments where a claim, made by conspiracy theorists, about 9/11, Kennedy’s assassination, or the moon landing, or even the claims made by Carlson, Owens, or Fuentes themselves, landed on me not because I'd examined it, but because it was framed in a way that made the examining feel unnecessary. Where "obviously" did the work that evidence should have done, where I felt the rush of waking up to something instead of the slower, less flattering work of actually verifying it.

Most of life, most of reality takes time to understand, and you actually shouldn't have it all easily comprehensible in an instant.

Maybe the Israel-Palestine conflict can't be fully understood from a 30-second TikTok clip; maybe it does actually take time.

That's the uncomfortable part of taking this seriously. It's easy to nod along to a breakdown of manipulation tactics when you're picturing the people who fell for them.

It is way harder to sit with the fact that skepticism isn't a personality trait you either have or don't; it's a discipline you fail at, repeatedly, usually in the exact moments you feel most certain you're finally seeing clearly.

Aristotle once said that “the mark of an educated mind” is the ability to “entertain a thought without accepting it.”

I quite like that. In an age where we're flooded with every idea imaginable, regardless of how shaky, I think it's more important than ever to be able to hear something, feel its pull, and still ask whether it's actually true.

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07/23 Links Pt1: Americans Keep Buying the Same Used Car from Iran; Trump: US-Saudi nuclear deal contingent on Abraham Accords acceptance

From Ian:

Due to blogger's wobbly, yesterday's (22nd) links are in the comments here.

Iran Must Never Have a Nuclear Weapon

For months, the Commander-in-Chief has repeated a clear endstate: Iran will never possess a nuclear weapon. That objective is the only outcome consistent with American security, Israeli survival, and the prevention of nuclear-armed theocratic blackmail of the global energy system.

Iran's nuclear program is not a technical problem that can be solved by bombing centrifuges or stockpiles. It is a political-military program driven by a regime whose founding ideology and operational doctrine treat the acquisition of nuclear weapons as a means to destroy Israel and, ultimately, confront the U.S. As long as that leadership remains, the program can be reconstituted.

The June 2025 U.S.-Israeli strikes and the far larger February 2026 campaign severely damaged Natanz, Fordow, and related sites. Yet, the regime's scientific cadre, its archival blueprints, and its procurement networks survived. With residual scientists, data, and institutional knowledge intact, Iran can drastically shrink the timeline to a nuclear weapon in the near future despite recent setbacks.

"Managing" or "monitoring" the regime over time is a strategic illusion. It places the burden of eternal vigilance on future administrations that may lack the will, the congressional majorities, or the public support to act when Iran next sprints for the bomb. We have already watched this movie with North Korea. The difference is that a nuclear North Korea can be contained; a nuclear Iran cannot.

The permanent elimination of the regime's nuclear weapons ambition is achievable only by removing the regime that harbors it. Unconditional surrender of the Axis powers in 1945 is the relevant historical precedent. Germany and Japan were not "managed." Their regimes were destroyed, their ideologies discredited, and their war-making capacity permanently dismantled.

Leaving the Iranian regime in power after we have already killed its Supreme Leader and degraded its military is not prudence; it is strategic incoherence. Continuing to pursue diplomatic settlements with a proven non-compliant actor simply defers the day of reckoning.

Americans Keep Buying the Same Used Car from Iran

In Washington, negotiations are viewed as a pathway to an agreement. In Tehran, negotiations are viewed as another means of waging conflict. For Americans, an agreement represents the finish line. For the Iranian regime, it is, at most, an interim waypoint. Americans seek a resolution; Iranians seek an advantage.

For more than four decades, every time the U.S. has sought progress, the same Iranian "hardliners" have suddenly emerged as obstacles that must be appeased. Another small concession. Another limited sanctions waiver. Another symbolic gesture. Only then, perhaps, can the talks continue. From the Iranian perspective, this is the negotiating strategy.

There is little sense of defeat in Tehran. The regime's internal narrative is one of resilience. From the regime's perspective, the mere fact that the world's leading superpower continues to seek its consent constitutes a psychological and strategic victory in its own right. The U.S. increasingly appears to be responding to a tempo set by Tehran. Instead of rewriting the rules of the game, it seeks to negotiate more favorable terms within the existing framework.

In nearly every negotiating cycle, Americans convince themselves that an agreement is just around the corner, while Iranian leaders conclude that a little more patience will improve their bargaining position even further. Perhaps the question in Washington should no longer be, "What new proposal should we put forward?" Instead, policymakers should ask, "Why do we continue to assume that the other side views negotiations as serving the same purpose that we do?"

An operational alternative does exist. The U.S. possesses ample military capabilities to place overwhelming pressure on the Iranian regime. Rather than pursuing a costly ground invasion, Washington could impose a sustained maritime blockade.

Such an approach, however, would require strategic patience, political endurance, and a willingness to absorb retaliatory costs - qualities that successive American administrations have lacked. Consequently, the U.S. will most likely pursue yet another negotiated agreement.

Netanyahu’s insistence offers a clear hint of what lies ahead

“Call us when you’re serious,” U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in the early 1990s.

Under the current Republican administration, with the current Likud prime minister, Washington is still answering the phone. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump are speaking, although no longer every day.

Something has been amiss in relations between the White House and the Prime Minister’s Office since the war with Iran became more complicated. The president’s inner circle is smaller and more closed than in previous administrations, and gaining access to it has become increasingly difficult. The Americans are making it clear to the Israelis that they are running the war and that everything is fine, thank you very much. But it is evident to everyone that Israel is moving into the back seat.

As a seasoned politician, Netanyahu presumably knows how to recognize deliberate distancing. One example came when Vice President JD Vance said, “Israel’s standing in America is not good, and I don’t think anyone can dispute that.” Last week, Vance had already made clear that he occupied the “sensible center,” between those who see Israel as a problem and those who see it as an asset. That is interesting, but the president’s silence is even more so.

And then there is Saudi Arabia. This week, Trump granted the kingdom the civilian nuclear program it had long sought, contrary to Israel’s position and without the broader package deal Israel had wanted. Former President Joe Biden held up a similar move in an effort to link that incentive to the Abraham Accords. His successor went ahead without tying the two together. Lindsey Graham must surely be turning in his grave.

This is already the second time that has happened. After all, lifting the sanctions on Syria also eliminated the possibility of securing a peace agreement with Israel. And all this is unfolding while the departure of Wing of Zion, Israel’s official aircraft for the prime minister and president, is delayed again and again.

The situation also has implications for the election.

I once heard a campaign strategist say that as far as Israelis are concerned, everything happening in the Middle East is foreign news until missiles begin landing here.

Mossad says it foiled Iranian plot to infiltrate Israel, attack senior officials

Working with foreign intelligence services, Israel foiled an Iranian plot to send operatives into Israel to harm senior Israeli officials, the Mossad intelligence agency said in a statement on Thursday.

The effort, led by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry, involved turning to criminal organizations, who would in turn recruit people inside Israel or who could enter Israel for gathering intelligence on a target, then carrying out an attack.

Two criminals living in Iran under the protection of the Intelligence Ministry — Baba Mahuzadeh Haji Jafan, also known as “Babak”; and Mehmet Nadim Ya’it, also known as “Nadim” — recruited Turut Ozkor, a criminal living in France who went by the nickname “Philip.”

The handlers of Babak and Nadim in the Iranian Intelligence Ministry are named by the Mossad as Asadollah Behzad Oskhari, Vahid Matzoumi, Mohammad-Hossein Zoghi and Hamid Qasemi.

Oskhari was killed in Israel’s 12-day bombing campaign against Iran in 2025 and was a key figure in plots to attack Jewish and Israeli targets worldwide, said the Mossad.

Philip was tasked with recruiting a cell of foreign nationals who would enter Israel, it added.

He traveled to Iran on several occasions to meet handlers and be paid, according to the statement.

Philip was expelled by France, while Babak and Nadim remain in Iran.

“Despite the attempt to avoid an Iranian fingerprint, the proxy method repeatedly demonstrates the carelessness of the operatives on the ground, leading to the exposure of their handlers in Iran,” said the Mossad.

The Mossad worked with Shin Bet and foreign intelligence agencies to uncover the network, the statement added.

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07/20 Links Pt2: Ireland’s hypocritical anti-Israel law is a win for Hamas — and a challenge to Trump; Rare burnt First Temple-era beams unearthed in Jerusalem after 2,600 years

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: Ireland’s hypocritical anti-Israel law is a win for Hamas — and a challenge to Trump

In 1977, Congress prohibited US companies from participating in boycotts of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations.

Decades later the Trade Promotion Authority law, passed during the Obama administration, specifically condemned “state-sponsored unsanctioned foreign boycotts of Israel.”

That’s exactly what Ireland’s law is.

US laws ban American companies from complying in any way with an impermissibly discriminatory boycott like Ireland’s.

That puts American companies operating there in a legal bind.

Moreover, the law requires the Treasury Department to maintain a “current list of countries which require or may require participation in or cooperation with an international boycott.”

American companies doing business in countries listed as boycotters face tax and other penalties if they abide by their requirements.

Until now, Treasury’s list was made up solely of Arab states like Syria and Iraq — and it’s gotten steadily shorter, as more Arab countries have made peace with Israel and started normal trading relationships.

Now Treasury must promptly add Ireland to its official list of boycotting countries: If Dublin wants to act like Damascus, it must be treated as such.

Irish legislators seek to pressure Israel to completely withdraw from Judea and Samaria, and to dismantle all Jewish communities there.

But Israel did exactly that with Gaza in the 2005 Disengagement — and Hamas turned it into a terror base.

Ireland claims its move upholds international law, but its hypocrisy is glaring.

It has imposed no similar rules on goods from other disputed territories — or on China, despite Beijing’s massive and ongoing human rights abuses.

Ireland isn’t about to shutter its movie theaters showing “The Odyssey,” even though parts of it were filmed in Western Sahara, which the United Nations regards as occupied territory.

Its ban applies only to Jewish towns.

President Donald Trump’s first administration clearly stated its opposition to Ireland’s law — heck, even the Biden administration warned Dublin of “consequences” if it moved forward.

But animosity to Israel runs so deep in Ireland — the only criticism the law got from opponents was that it doesn’t go far enough — that its legislators decided passing a symbolic Israel-bashing bill is more important than good relations with Washington.

Perhaps they think America is bluffing?

Regardless, imposing trade restrictions on a US ally as it fights alongside us in a hot war is deeply disrespectful.

But Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham is reportedly considering a similar measure — so Trump must nip this trend in the bud.

The United States must make it crystal clear that no matter which countries choose to impose sanctions on an ally, they will face the consequences of US law.

Ireland's Antizionism

In the sports world, opposition to Israel has grown significantly in the past few weeks and months. Nowhere has this been truer than in the ongoing campaign to cancel the upcoming Ireland-Israel football match scheduled for October. Left-wing politicians and the establishment media took the lead in advocating for a complete cancellation of the game, even if it would hurt Irish football in the long run. The media ran with the story every day, all with the same ideological bent.

When the game was moved from Dublin to a yet to be determined neutral venue, the very same people who complained about Israeli football players and fans visiting Ireland’s largest city argued that moving the game deprived them of the right to protest the Israeli team in person. The country’s largest trade union has even called on the national broadcaster not to air the game. This demonstrates that these activist groups were not interested so much in the outcome as in the process, for it allowed them to keep the issue alive in public discourse, with the establishment media eagerly amplifying the most extreme antizionist voices.

This gets to the heart of antizionism, for it doesn’t purport to offer constructive solutions to deeply entrenched problems, so much as to provide an ongoing justification for a constant campaign of vilification directed against Israel and the majority of the world’s Jews who support its right to exist in peace and security. Quite a few of those who agitated against the game being played in Dublin, who have been silent on the Islamic Republic’s massacre of their own people, couched their opposition as being borne of out of a commitment to being “anti-genocide.”

This implies that Israel’s war against Hamas was a deliberate act of genocide rather than the result of having to fight a war in a densely populated area, in which the enemy deliberately used civilian infrastructure to wage battle. This is a key component of antizionist discourse, which has employed “genocide” as a rhetorical weapon and as a libel. Nothing exemplifies the degree to which antizionism has taken over the Irish public sphere quite like the degree to which sundry politicians and journalists have used this term as a factual representation of what has occurred in Gaza over the last three years, with little regard to international jurisprudence. Those Irish antizionists who employ the term “genocide” do so not to highlight civilian suffering in Gaza — which is indeed very real — but to whip up hatred against Israel’s very existence and to downplay the Holocaust’s place in western collective memory. This is especially alarming, considering the lack of historical knowledge about the Holocaust among many in Ireland, particularly young people.

Antizionism, once institutionalized, limits the spaces in which Jews, if they identify with Israel in any manner, can freely operate. One recent incident which showcases the depth to which antizionist thinking has taken root in Ireland is the cancellation of a Dublin fundraiser for Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross. The Dublin National Concert Hall, which was meant to host the event, which was to include the performance of a play about October 7, decided to cancel the event following an antizionist campaign by local activists who accused MDA of being “complicit in genocide.” Significantly, no other venue has stepped up to offer to host the event.

While it is certainly true that antizionism has infiltrated the public sphere in numerous western democracies, there simply is no equivalent to the degree to which it has taken root in Ireland and in the Irish media, which focuses disproportionately on Israel in its news coverage. This is not meant to be a slight on everyday Irish people, many of whom have expressed alarm at the speed at which antizionism has become normalized in myriad aspects of Irish society. Rather, it should be seen as a warning sign for all those interested in promoting pluralism and tolerance and the viability of a peaceful, long-term settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most of all, it is a reminder that antizionism remains a distinct manifestation of Jew hatred, one that continues to threaten both the viability of Diaspora Jewish communities and the classical liberal underpinnings of western democracy.

David Collier: How an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory Became a Community Note on X

The risk of long-term reputational damage needed to be addressed. I went back to the site where the graffiti had been drawn. Several days had passed, and I had no idea what I would find. The graffiti itself had gone, but two freshly painted patches on the pavement were immediately visible. Someone had covered it over. It was a relief. I may have been fighting a nonsensical conspiracy claim, but the approved Community Note had given the allegation the appearance of official endorsement.

I posted footage of the covered-up graffiti on X and requested a review of the Community Note. Thankfully, that was enough for the note to lose its approved status. It wasn’t, however, enough to stop the abuse or silence the conspiracy theorists.

There was one more thing I could do to close this case completely.

The FOI Request That Closes the Case
If park staff had painted over the graffiti, there should be a record of it. Because Trent Park is managed by Enfield Council, that record would be obtainable under the Freedom of Information Act.

On Saturday 27 June, attaching the photographs in my possession, I submitted the request.

I have now received the response.

As the brilliant fictional detective Adrian Monk would say at this point in the investigation: “Here’s what happened.”

On 24 June at 19:08, just over two hours before members of my family walked through the park, a concerned citizen sent an email to Councillor Alessandro Georgiou, the Conservative councillor of Cockfosters ward and leader of Enfield Council. The email is explicit in its detail, mentioning both the swastika and the Star of David.

To his credit, at 22:42 that night, Cllr Georgiou sent a response, thanking the sender, and copying in an official council account, asking for the graffiti to be cleared “ASAP.”

At 10:35 on 25 June, Lisa Smart, Head of Urban Green Spaces at Enfield Council, responded that the council aims to remove offensive graffiti within 24 hours and that she would instruct officers to deal with it.

I was also provided with timestamped images, showing that the council workers had arrived to deal with the graffiti within that 24-hour window, at just after 8:00 on the morning of 26 June.

The timestamps show the graffiti thirty-five hours after my photograph had been taken. Both the swastika and the crossed-out Star of David remain clearly visible, along with the stain in the centre of the pavement. So much for the claim that the markings had simply been drawn in water. According to the council’s account, the combination of the heat and the way the graffiti had embedded itself into the surface meant officers eventually had to paint over it, as the photographs show:

By 11:44 on 26 June, the graffiti had been covered over.

The following day, I returned to the site and filmed the footage I posted on X.

Case closed.

The Bigger Lesson
The disturbing aspect of this story is that a system intended to combat misinformation elevated a conspiracy theory into an apparently authoritative statement with real-world consequences.

The burden was then reversed. Those making the accusation produced no evidence. The Jewish target had to spend weeks obtaining official records simply to restore the presumption of innocence.

This time, documentary evidence happened to exist. Had the graffiti been removed some other way, the Community Note would likely still be there today, giving permanent credibility to a baseless accusation.

Systems that determine “truth” are vulnerable to organised falsehoods, popular prejudice and institutional bias. When the subject is Jews or Israel – where hostile narratives already circulate widely – that vulnerability becomes especially dangerous.

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07/13 Links Pt2: Human rights groups ‘tolerating terrorism against Israel’; The people who know nothing know everything; "He's a Lying Liar." Haviv SLAMS Ro Khanna's Political Stunt in Israel

From Ian:

Human rights groups ‘tolerating terrorism against Israel’

Human rights groups are tolerating terrorism against Israel, the UK’s independent reviewer of terror legislation has said.

Jonathan Hall KC said Left-wing activists regarded violence towards supporters of Israel as a “kind of exemption” because their brains had been “scrambled by Gaza”.

He said that many civil liberty NGOs had abandoned their “traditional” focus on “domestic issues” and instead become “sucked in” to an obsession with the Palestinian struggle.

Speaking at an event at Parliament, he said that some human rights groups had “lost this really precious neutrality and ability to be consistent” on the subject of Israel.

Mr Hall said: “I’ll be able to tell you from my own experience, I barely have any engagement with these sorts of groups. You’d think that Amnesty UK would be right in the forefront of saying: ‘There is an amendment to this legislation, what should we do?’ No, they’re involved in really defending one particular sort of protest.

“And I think that it’s an example of something that we’ve seen with the Palestine Action group response, where people on the whole get their brains scrambled by Gaza.

“So they tolerate behaviour, very violent behaviour, which they would say, if it was being done by the extreme Right or an Islamist group, ‘yes, of course that would amount to terrorism’. But they seem to regard it as a kind of exemption.”

Earlier this year, six Palestine Action activists were cleared of committing aggravated burglary after a break-in at the UK headquarters of an Israeli-owned arms company.

The six activists were found not guilty over allegations that they had used or threatened unlawful violence.

They had used an old prison van to ram-raid an Elbit Systems factory in Bristol in the early hours of Aug 6, 2024, and attacked police officers with sledgehammers, according to Avon and Somerset Police.

They “genuinely believed” their demonstration at the factory would help the Palestinian cause in Gaza, the court heard.

Mr Hall urged humanitarian groups to “pull themselves back from the brink and remember what they really are there to do”.

He said he had spoken to senior executives at British NGOs who are “worried about the direction of travel” but are being “pushed” in that direction by younger members of staff.

Lee Smith: The Culture of Loserdom

The United States saved Egypt from a humiliating defeat in 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered French, British, and Israeli forces to evacuate the Suez Canal, which they’d easily taken from Egyptian forces. But not even Nasser’s Soviet patrons could save him in 1967, when Israel destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground, seized Sinai, and remade the Middle East in six days. His successor Anwar Sadat lost the 1973 war when Ariel Sharon nearly encircled Cairo and only Henry Kissinger’s intervention stopped him.

And then Sadat turned it around, briefly. He won a Nobel prize for making peace with Israel, got back the Sinai—and then terrorists killed him for it. The country’s only other Nobel prize winner, novelist Naguib Mahfouz, was stabbed in the throat on a Cairo street for writing a book that Egyptian terrorists didn’t like. In other words, Egypt cannot abide winning. And thus, naturally, Egypt renewed the contracts of Hossam Hassan and his twin Ibrahim, thereby rewarding the coach responsible for one of the most spectacular chokes in sports history and consequently one of the most repulsive displays of sporting conduct.

People, nations, aren’t supposed to lose like Egypt does, by embracing loserdom as a collective gestalt deployed to blame others for the failures that are only their own. Perhaps the most crucial job of any parent, and coach, is to teach their children how to lose gracefully and what to learn from it so that they may reap victory in the future. Sports is part of that tuition—even the best teams lose sometimes. You can do everything right, execute every play perfectly, but the other side, the other athlete, is simply better. Or you were better, but the calls went against you, or the weather was bad, and that’s just the way it goes.

But if you wanted to breed psychopaths, if you wanted to build a mummy army fed on a strict diet of resentment, you’d tell them nothing is their fault because every outcome is controlled by a mysterious force: colonialism, or Zionism, or voodoo, etc. And then, when things went against them—and things always go against those whose minds and souls are cut to fit the jagged-edged pattern of paranoia—they’d erupt in fits of predictably maniacal rage.

It’s the instrumentalization of those pathological furies that drives the politics of the Middle East. For instance, because of Egypt’s will to lose, Washington pays Cairo $2 billion a year not to send the millions of young men who blame the Jews for everything, from Mossad dolphins to soccer defeats, to their death in another war with Israel. It’s the same throughout the Muslim Middle East, which is why from Iran to Gaza, the Palestinian cause—the global standard of loserdom—is celebrated like victory.

And now the third-world migrants who have overrun Europe’s shores have brought the same culture to the continent. After Morocco’s loss to France, for instance, North African immigrants surrounded an Amsterdam hotel believed to be hosting Israelis and shouted threats, holding them responsible for the loss. And here, in the United States? It’s not a good sign that the man elected to run America’s greatest city can’t tell winning from losing and gives evidence he thinks like the third-world mobs drenched in resentment, that Egypt was robbed.

The people who know nothing know everything

I knew the evening was in trouble when the hostess described the table as “a safe space for difficult conversations.”

Nothing good has ever followed such words.

A safe space for difficult conversations is usually a space in which everyone is free to express precisely the same opinion, provided they do so using slightly different therapeutic vocabulary. Disagreement is welcome in the way vegetarians are welcome at a barbecue: theoretically, warmly, and without any intention of accommodating them.

The dinner was being held in an immaculate apartment overlooking the city. The furniture was Scandinavian, the lighting was flattering, and the books had been arranged not alphabetically but morally. Edward Said sat beside Frantz Fanon. Judith Butler leaned against a large volume on decolonising architecture. There were several books about Israel, none by Israelis, historians, military analysts, Arabic speakers, Hebrew speakers, or anyone who had recently burdened themselves with the region’s chronology.

The apartment belonged to Oliver and Beatrice, who had invited 12 people for what they called “an evening of food, friendship and necessary conversation.”

I had been included, I later realised, as the necessary conversation; the one in need of “education.”

Beatrice greeted me at the door with the expression of a person welcoming a recently rehabilitated extremist.

“We’re so glad you came,” she said, touching my arm. “We were worried you might feel uncomfortable.”

“I’ve been to family weddings,” I replied. “I’ll survive.”

The other guests had already assembled around a huge island bench. They held champagne flutes and spoke in low, solemn tones about suffering in places they would never visit.

There was Julian, an international lawyer who specialised in commercial leases but had recently developed strong views on the laws of armed conflict. Nadia worked in branding and referred to herself as a storyteller. Marcus was a documentary producer whose documentaries had never been produced. Eleanor taught postcolonial literature and had perfected the academic art of converting adjectives into accusations. Simon was in finance and considered himself politically courageous because he had once criticised capitalism at Davos.

There was also Theo, a surgeon, who knew nothing about Israel but knew it with clinical confidence.

I was introduced around the room.

“This is our pro-Israel friend,” Beatrice announced.

When celebrity ignorance gets a stage

You can criticize Israeli settlement policy in Judea and Samaria. Plenty of Israelis do, loudly, in a free press, which is more than can be said for any of its neighbors. That is a real debate, and I welcome it.

But a nation that has voluntarily relinquished more territory than it currently holds is a strange poster child for expansionism. Name another country in history that won defensive wars and then handed the land back just for a signature on a peace treaty.

I’ll wait.

That’s the thing about Casablanca’s Oxford speech: It is the statement of a man who has never had to know anything, explaining to a room full of university students who the Jews really are. He got the biography of his subject wrong because he never learned it. He got the map wrong because he never looked at it. Although he does note that some of his closest friends are Jewish.

The danger isn’t that a rock singer holds uninformed opinions and mumbles through them to an audience who knows even less. Everyone is entitled to those. The danger is the machinery around him: the host who says “100% agree” without a beat, the comment sections calling it brave, the prestigious institutions handing Casablancas a lectern, the total absence of anyone in the room asking a single factual question.

When ignorance gets a stage, applause and an Oxford invitation, while the people it targets get stabbed on a London street, we are not having a policy debate. We are watching a line move.

So, I’ll say it again: Say something. You don’t need a position on settlements to notice that the facts here are wrong and that the target, once again, is the Jews.

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07/09 Links Pt2: Rahm Emanuel and the persistent delusion of failed policies; Jerusalem voted the seventh-best city in the world; Elie Wiesel’s hidden world of letters, loss and friendship

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Rahm Emanuel and the persistent delusion of failed policies

Say this for Rahm Emanuel. He may have about as much chance of being nominated for the presidency in 2028 by the Democratic Party as he does of being elected pope. But he knows how to retain the attention of the national media by manipulating contacts inside the Beltway.

That’s the only way to explain why someone who is not even being included in way-too-early polls about presidential preferences could get the kind of massive coverage he got for a speech given this week in Israel, when those far ahead of him in the contest struggle to be noticed.

On July 7, The Washington Post devoted three full articles to previewing Emanuel’s July 8 talk at Tel Aviv University. The Post, The New York Times, CNN and the rest of the corporate press then followed up with even more coverage of the speech after the fact. Those articles not only depicted it as deeply relevant to the current debate about the U.S.-Israel relationship going on in his party, but also to the reality on the ground in the Middle East.

A rerun of failed ideas
But what made this public relations coup even more remarkable is the fact that the much-ballyhooed address consisted of little more than a recycling of the conventional wisdom of his long-past political heyday. Emanuel’s speech was more or less a rerun of what passed for foreign-policy establishment canon in 1995 and 2015, put forward as a formula for peace in the second quarter of the 21st century.

Once you strip away Emanuel’s attempts to claim both the credibility and credentials to demand that Israelis discard everything their lying eyes and ears have been telling them about their nation’s struggle to survive a multifront war launched by Iran and its terrorist auxiliaries, all you’ve got is what we might term a piece of political nostalgia.

Emanuel calls his big idea the “23-state solution” because it is based on the notion that the Arab and Muslim world can cajole the Palestinian Arabs to make peace. But that’s just window dressing for what is the same two-state solution that his former bosses, Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, foolishly expended so much political capital trying to force into being. Contrary to liberal myth, that formula was thwarted not by Israeli intransigence but by the stubborn refusal of the Palestinians—enabled by much of the Muslim and Arab worlds, in addition to Western leftists—to countenance any future but one in which Israel is erased.

The context here is the fact that the former U.S. ambassador to Japan (2022-2025), mayor of Chicago (2011-2019), White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama (2009-2010), U.S. congressman from Illinois (2003-2009), investment banker (1999-2002) and senior adviser to Clinton (1993-1998) believes that his already impressive résumé ought to be rounded out by a stint as commander-in-chief. The man renowned as a serious policy wonk, albeit one with a predilection for profanity and a notorious temper, may have much to say about a lot of different topics. Yet when it comes to Israel—a subject he claims intimate knowledge of—Rahm is nothing but a blast from the discredited past.

That’s why the truly significant aspect of the speech and the massive coverage it generated isn’t what it says about the 2028 race, efforts to prevent the Democratic Party from becoming the anti-Israel party or even the one that is comfortable with antisemitism. Rather, it points toward the fact that while Israelis have absorbed the lessons of the last 33 years of history, including the Oslo Accords disaster, the Second Intifada, the fruits of the withdrawal from Gaza and the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023, supposedly smart people, including those like Emanuel who know a thing or two about Israel, have learned nothing.

Adam Louis-Klein: Rahm Emanuel’s shocking speech to fracture the bond between Israel and the diaspora

Emanuel does not share a fate with Israelis, and certainly not with the "Zionists" whose forced exodus from social networks, whose professional discrimination in the academy and elsewhere, he frames as a the natural consequence of Israel itself. He speaks from a thousand miles above, insulated from the antizionist abuse that is raging across the West.

His open attribution of collective guilt toward Jews – discriminatory in its very essence – is hardly surprising. It's increasingly treated as the common sense of liberal politics. “Netanyahu is harming Jews” is a common refrain, even though it lacks all logical sense. Netanyahu could be Hitler – as antizionists daily imagine him to be, as they mouth old Soviet slogans – yet targeting ordinary Jews as “genocidal” would still be unacceptable, and blame would lie with those who did so.

The casual rhetoric of blame reflect a deeper problem: the systematic concealment of antizionism, of Israel-hate, as something that could actually be the structural cause not only for changes in Israel's “reputation,” and not only for the violence against diaspora Jews, but for the crises in the Middle East themselves. Why, exactly, is Israel in a permanent state of war, which includes occupation and ongoing reciprocal violence? Why, exactly, does the question of whether the United States should be entangled in these wars come up in the first place? Violence against Israelis here is taken as natural and given.

While Emanuel claims to want Arab states to recognise Israel's right to exist, to integrate Israel into the region, he seems uninterested in the moral stakes of anyone seeking to annihilate a state in the first place. He seems oblivious to the social media accounts with millions of followers screaming with joy at the sight of Iranian missiles falling on Israeli civilians. Somehow none of that causes any moral outrage, since he has saved it all up for “Netanyahu” – the villain of his decadent fantasies.

The absence of any actual engagement with global antizionism is not merely a lacuna in the discourse: it is one that serves to reproduce that violence itself. By refusing to name the cause, and refusing to hold its principal actors accountable, ongoing wars are continually given justification, while blame is displaced onto Israel. This ongoing habit of evasion and non-accountability around antizionism – including refusing to say its name – causes harm to Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians alike.

Emanuel's politics does not seek peace; it seeks moral legitimacy and it exploits Israel as a tool to achieve it. His tone of superiority is not incidental. Like the old German Jews who looked down upon the traditional Eastern “Ostjuden” with contempt in the early 20th century, the liberal American Jew, insulated from antizionist abuse on the ground, now proclaims their civilisational superiority to the primitive Israeli.

I doubt that such a relationship is meant to lead to a memorandum of understanding.

Chief Rabbi urges Church of England to reject ‘genocide’ report ahead of Synod vote

The Chief Rabbi has urged the Church of England’s governing body to reject a controversial report accusing Israel of genocide, warning it threatens decades of Jewish-Christian relationship-building.

Sir Ephraim Mirvis spoke out before next week’s General Synod debate on whether the Church should formally engage with A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, also known as Kairos II, as part of its efforts to better understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The report, produced by Palestinian Christian organisation Kairos Palestine, describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a “genocidal war” and claims the Jewish state is a “colonial enterprise built on racism”. It also accuses Israel of apartheid and settler colonialism.

In a statement published on X following reporting by The Times, the Chief Rabbi said: “The content of Kairos II is deeply concerning, and I would hope the Synod will see it for what it is. While it is important to recognise the suffering of Palestinian Christians, this document does so in a way which can only harm the cause of peace.”

He added: “It presents a one-sided account of a complex conflict, downplays the historical experiences and legitimate concerns of Jewish people, and offers little more than political activism dressed up as theology.”

Mirvis continued: “It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood – using extreme rhetoric to challenge the very concept of a Jewish state, and to oppose existing peace agreements in the region.”

He warned that “at a time when Christian-Jewish relations require nuance, trust and a willingness to engage with complexity, Kairos II risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building.”

The Chief Rabbi concluded: “Meaningful progress begins when the dignity, aspirations and suffering of all peoples are acknowledged. Kairos II takes us further away from that goal, not closer to it.”

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The Load-Bearing Assumption: a deconstruction of an anti-Israel academic paper

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. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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To hyphenate or not to hyphenate - is the wrong question

Earlier this week on my Substack I promised a follow-up on whether to write “anti-Zionism” or “antizionism.” The follow-up grew into something much larger.)

In the 1870s Wilhelm Marr needed a better word. “Jew-hatred” — Judenhass — named the thing too plainly, carried the stink of the mob and the medieval church, and marked its holder as a relic. So he reached for a clinical substitute built from Greek and Latin, founded a League of Antisemites, and gave the world “anti-Semitism.” It was the same hatred masquerading as a legitimate, even scientific position. Many Europeans could now profess anti-Semitism the way they might profess a position on tariffs, as the considered conclusion of a serious person rather than the reflex of a bigot.

A century later the heirs of that hatred needed the same favor in reverse. While the term never took hold in English speaking countries as anything but prejudice, the Holocaust had made “anti-Semitism” toxic, a prejudice a respectable person could not own in public. So the hatred required a new address, a category that sounded like a stance rather than a sickness.

It found one in opposition to the Jewish state.

“Anti-Zionism” arrived already dressed for the part. It named a real object, Zionism, and opposition to an object reads as politics, the proper business of citizens. The maneuver was Marr’s maneuver run a second time: take the same animus and move it into whatever vocabulary the age treats as legitimate. Marr fled religion for science. His heirs fled the post-war horror of “anti-semitism” for the safety of “politics.”

The move succeeded by construction rather than accident.

In the first decades after 1948, irrational hatred of Israel was understood, by the ordinary person and by the chancelleries alike, as the old hatred wearing a flag. The American Council for Judaism opposed Zionism on principle and remained marginal, a curiosity rather than a movement. When Arab spokesmen insisted they bore no grudge against Jews and quarreled only with Zionists, the disclaimer was received as the propaganda everyone knew it to be — the Arab League boycott of those years targeted Jewish-owned firms worldwide, not only Israeli ones. The line between a legitimate critic and an eliminationist was visible to the naked eye, and almost no one mistook one for the other.

Moscow started erasing that line. During the mid-1960s negotiations over the international convention against racial discrimination, the US and Israel tried to include antisemitism as something to be condemned; the Soviet Union refused to allow that unless Zionism was condemned alongside it, along with Naziism and apartheid. In the end, the ICERD condemned neither to avoid the conflict, but the seed was planted to separate anti-Zionism from antisemitism. After 1967 Moscow intensified the campaign, recasting Israel as the moral heir of the persecutor it had so recently escaped. The rhetoric matured into United Nations Resolution 3379 in 1975, which declared Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination, and which the General Assembly passed on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The resolution was repealed in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed, but the association lived on. The equation migrated out of the Soviet bloc and into the academy and the human-rights NGO, where it shed its Cold War accent and acquired the idiom of decolonization. There the hatred completed its costume change: from a sickness one had to deny, to a politics one could defend, to a virtue one could parade.

That migration is the campaign whose half-success we now live inside. The modern anti-Zionist no longer denies the charge of hatred in the embarrassed tone of the 1950s Arab diplomat. He preempts it. Every article carries the disclaimer, every placard the mantra — “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” — repeated with a discipline that would impress any marketing department, and a growing share of the audience has come to believe it. The bolder ones complete the inversion the Soviets drafted and announce that Zionism is the true bigotry, that the Jews who insist on a state are the racists. The Big Lie method works. The line that once stood in plain view, between the man who criticizes Israel and the man who wants it gone, has been deliberately smudged until much of the public can no longer find it.

The question is, how do we restore that line?

There are three options. Each has a real advantage and a real cost, but they are not mutually exclusive.

The first is to call the hatred by its name and say plainly that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. The advantage is that it is true, and true at the root, because the thing that animates the obsessive hatred of the one Jewish state is the same thing that animated the obsessive hatred of the Jew next door for two thousand years. The cost is that the enemy has spent sixty years inoculating the public against exactly this sentence. He hears “that is antisemitic,” reaches for the prepared rebuttal, and the exchange collapses into a meta-argument about whether the accuser is weaponizing the term — which is itself the victory, since the oxygen meant to counter the hatred gets spent instead on the accusation.When a bigot denies his bigotry, the level of proof needed to refute him is quite high, and this ends up moving the argument into a distraction.

The second is to defend Zionism as the moral and legitimate thing it is, and to turn the enemy’s own word against him. This is my preference, because it concedes nothing. The whole force of “anti-Zionism” as a shelter depends on Zionism being a fair target, an ideology one may decently oppose; the moment Zionism is restored to what it is — the national liberation movement of an indigenous people returning home — opposition to it stands revealed as opposition to that people’s existence, which is the hatred under a thin coat. The cost is that the coat has been painted on for decades. “Zionist” has been so thoroughly poisoned that to defend Zionism is to fight uphill against a meaning the enemy has spent a half-century manufacturing. This battle is also hard. The battle cannot be abandoned, because to abandon it is to concede the enemy’s central premise that Zionism is the kind of thing a good person opposes.

Here my own definition of antisemitism does its sharpest work, because it locates Zionism where it belongs, inside Judaism rather than beside it. Zionism is an expression of Jewishness no less central than religion, culture, or descent — the longing for return is woven through the liturgy and the calendar millennia before it became a political program — and an attack on it is therefore an attack on an aspect of the Jewish whole. Most Jews today do not keep kosher, yet a campaign to ban shechita is recognized as antisemitic without difficulty, because the prevalence of a practice has never been the measure of whether hatred of it targets Jews. Zionism stands in the same relation to Jewish identity, and hostility to it is antisemitic on the same logic, whatever the proportion of Jews who happen to be Zionists or live in Israel.

The line falls between criticism that means to repair and criticism that means to wound. Honest critique aimed at improving the thing is legitimate for both — the agunah problem, the plight of the woman chained to a dead marriage, is a serious criticism of Jewish law made by people who love the law and want it mended, and criticism of an Israeli policy by people who want Israel to be better stands on exactly the same footing. Sharansky’s three Ds mark where repair ends and hatred begins: demonization, delegitimization, and the double standard. The agunah critic trips none of them. The campaign against the Jewish state trips all three.

The political costume fails the same test that exposes the welfare argument against shechita. When a European parliament bans Jewish ritual slaughter on grounds of animal welfare while leaving hunting untouched, the welfare concern is revealed as pretext by what it declines to prohibit; the principle is selectively applied to land precisely on the Jewish practice. That selectivity is Sharansky’s double standard in miniature, and anti-Zionism dressed as principled politics performs the identical sleight on a global scale. The professed concern for human rights, self-determination, and the rest finds its single uncompromising application in the one Jewish state, and the selectivity gives the game away. Any move that admits anti-Zionism as legitimate political expression is as disingenuous as crediting the hunting enthusiast with tender feelings for the welfare of animals.

The third way is to change the playing field. “Anti-Zionism” is now a loaded term because the haters have made Zionism a loaded term. This new fight intends to change the nomenclature to “antizionism,” closed and unhyphenated, as the scholars and activists now naming it have done, because the closed form makes it easier to show that what wears the mask of politics is hatred underneath. Anti-Zionism is indeed a hate movement but the haters who apply that term to themselves deny it; by calling it “antizionism” the haters cannot counter it because they don’t accept that term for themselves. The fighters against antizionism are able to create their own definition that can bring the stigma back to “anti-Zionism” since the words are pronounced the same.

This is where the lexical comparison to antisemitism is relevant. Using the older term “anti-Semitism” opened up accusers to the spurious charge that Arabs are Semites (or Jews are not Semites) and therefore they cannot be considered anti-Semites. It was an attempt to distract from the actual meaning of the word and unhyphenating it showed that it is its own word, unrelated to semitism. “Antizionism” does the same - it separates the word from Zionism itself and moves the argument away from endless discussions about the minutiae of the history of Zionism and into a new territory, where it is much more clearly a term of bigotry.

The cost of this move is that it implicitly concedes the pro-Zionism argument. Those who use “antizionism” are not defending Zionism, they are calling out a hate movement. Moreover, to name antizionism as its own distinct thing concedes, by the grammar of the move, that it might be something other than antisemitism — which may hand these modern antisemites a victory

This is why my own old instinct ran the other way. Years ago I coined “misoziony” — hate of Israel built from the Greek root for hatred — to point out that this is just as irrational as traditional antisemitism is. Misoziony is no more moral than racism or misogyny. The verdict is built in to its own body. The term never spread, for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it was right: my blog was too small to mint vocabulary, the prefix means nothing to an English ear, and no one was sure how to pronounce it. The lesson is not that coinage fails but that naming is hard for reasons orthogonal to truth, and that the word which already owns the public’s stigma will always start the race far ahead of the word that must build its own. (”Israelophobia” falls at the same hurdle and one more, because the dominant emotion is hatred and not fear, so the word mislabels the thing at its root.)

Set the three side by side and you see that they all have pluses and minuses. Calling it antisemitism is the truth-claim, but it bounces when the targets deny it. Shifting to “antizionism” is the tactical entry, but it implicitly concedes the war over the morality of Zionism when it stands alone. The defense of Zionism alone is the most comprehensive and least possible of the three, an impractical one in today’s environment.

But it isn’t a menu where you must pick one. Each strategy has its place, depending on the audience and the medium.

I will continue to use the term “anti-Zionism” because I defend Zionism as much as I denounce anti-Zionists as antisemites. I refuse to concede that battle.

Others, like the ICSA and Movement Against Antizionism, see antizionism as its own pathology disconnected from Zionism. They are not wrong: Antizionists use Zionism as a bogeyman to direct their hate of Jewish national rights, and since these groups’ tactics are to go on the offensive, “antizionism” works well for them. Defending Zionism, for them, is a distraction from their missions.

My only disagreement is that the term “antizionism” may also implicitly cede the other argument, that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. By studying it or fighting it as its own phenomenon, it can be seen as admitting that antizionism is unrelated to the world’s oldest hate, not merely a new flavor. If we can agree that antizionism is in fact a straight line descendant of the entire catalog of other antisemitisms, then we are on the same page. This is not a question of tactics - it would be a distraction for these organizations to expand their missions to fighting antisemitism, and there are plenty of others who (claim to) do that. I just want to make sure that the new antisemites who claim to only hate a political movement are still, in the end, recognized as antisemites, across the board, from all of us fighting the good fight, even if that is not where the argument is made.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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