Action on Armed Violence: Another NGO that is trusted by the UN but uses a faulty methodology consistently against Israel

Action on Armed Violence presents itself as an independent, non-partisan research organization, and the world treats it accordingly. Its Explosive Violence Monitoring Project has run for over a decade, its annual figures are cited by wire services and human-rights groups, and its data now feeds the United Nations: the Secretary-General's May 2026 report on the protection of civilians draws on AOAV's monitor, and the 2025 edition opens with a Guterres quotation calling on states to act on its findings. That standing is the reason the monitor's flaws matter. A partisan pamphlet that overstated civilian harm would persuade no one; a trusted, UN-cited, self-described neutral dataset that does the same thing launders the overstatement into the official record.

AOAV's stated methodology is structurally flawed in a way that inflates civilian counts. Worse, it suspends its own rules in the cases where applying them would have produced a figure unfavorable to the narrative the reports advance. 

Here's the methodology: AOAV records casualties from explosive weapons "as reported in English-language media," logging incidents that caused at least one casualty within a 24-hour period. Two rules govern how casualties are classified. The first, stated in the methodology: "All casualties are assumed to be civilians unless otherwise stated." A casualty becomes an armed actor only when a news report explicitly identifies the dead or wounded as a soldier, militant, or armed security official. The second concerns attribution: responsibility is assigned to whoever the news report names. The project then totals these media-derived entries and publishes them under the word "civilian," flat and unqualified, across fifty-odd pages of findings, country profiles, and recommendations. The qualifier that would make the count honest — that "civilian" means "not reported as armed," not "confirmed noncombatant" — sits in a single methodology paragraph the headline reader never reaches.

One of AOAV's headline 2023 incidents shows both rules failing at once. AOAV's third-worst explosive incident of 2023 is listed as "Israeli air strike on an evacuation convoy fleeing north Gaza, 13 October," 270 civilian casualties were attributed to Israel. The footnote sources it to a Sky News article, whose headline reads: "Women and children among 70 killed in Israeli airstrike on fleeing Gaza convoy, Hamas says." The attribution to Hamas is in the title. The body went further: Sky News reported the blast was "blamed on" Israel, quoted an IDF spokesperson saying he was "not aware of any IDF strikes at this time at that location," and stated that "it was not immediately clear who the target was, or whether insurgents were among the passengers." The Associated Press wire carried the same qualification verbatim. The reporting did what responsible reporting does with an unverifiable battlefield claim — it named the source, recorded the denial, and flagged that fighters might be among the dead.

AOAV erased all three caveats. The Hamas claim became a fact of an Israeli airstrike; the denial vanished; the possibility of combatants among the passengers dissolved into a flat count of 270 civilians. And the Israeli account was not a one-line "no comment." Within two days, IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus argued publicly that the strike "appears to have been a false flag operation carried out by Hamas," asked who would benefit from images of dead evacuees and answered "only one organization: Hamas," and said Israel "did not try to strike anybody, any civilians in that area." The surrounding facts fit that reading at least as well as the alternative: Israel had ordered the evacuation and designated the route, Hamas had told Gazans to defy the order and was reported blocking the southern roads, and Hamas held the clearer motive to manufacture atrocity footage from a convoy of fleeing civilians. There was no evidence of an actual airstrike beyond Hamas's assertion of one. The cause remains formally unresolved; reference works still list the attack type as airstrike or possible IED. AOAV recorded it as settled Israeli strike of 270 civilian casualties, third-worst in the world that year. The media's attribution — "Hamas says" — is the qualifier that made the claim publishable, and AOAV's method strips precisely that qualifier, converting "a party to the war alleges" into "AOAV records."

The civilian-by-default rule produces an even stranger result across Gaza as a whole. In the 2024 monitor, AOAV records 23,432 civilian casualties in Gaza against 612 armed actors — a civilian share of 97.5%, with combatants making up 2.5% of the total and roughly 3% of the dead. If that isn't insane enough, the military casualties it recorded were apparently all IDF soldiers! In other words, Hamas never admits any of its terrorists were killed until years later, Israel admits its soldiers are killed within hours of the incident, so AOAV thinks virtually the only militants killed in Gaza are Israeli. QEDumb. 

The same selection problem corrupts AOAV's most quotable Gaza statistic. The 2024 monitor reports that Israel's recorded aerial attacks in Gaza caused, on average, "8 civilians harmed per recorded Israeli air strike, and 5 killed," and the 2023 edition builds a comparable per-airstrike figure. Read the methodology and the number dissolves. An incident enters the dataset only if "at least one casualty from an explosive weapon" was reported; a strike that hit an empty structure, or killed only fighters the media did not count, or fell where no English-language reporter was watching, never appears. The denominator is therefore not "Israeli air strikes" but "Israeli air strikes that produced reported casualties," and AOAV divides the casualties by that pre-filtered set to announce a casualty rate. The strikes that would pull the average down were excluded before the division.

It excluded a huge number of airstrikes. AOAV's 2023 dataset logs a few hundred air-launched incidents in Gaza; the Israeli military, by contrast, said it had struck over 11,000 targets in Gaza by 1 November 2023 and more than 22,000 by mid-December, with independent reporting putting the four-month total near 29,000 targets, roughly 228 a day. Whatever the precise count of distinct air operations, it dwarfs the few hundred AOAV recorded by orders of magnitude. The "civilians per air strike" figure does not describe Israeli targeting; it describes the handful of strikes that left a reportable civilian trail, which is the only kind the method can see. A monitor that counts only the strikes that killed civilians and then reports how many civilians strikes kill has not measured lethality. It has measured its own selection rule.

The absurdity reaches its peak with Lebanon, where the method collides with a fact pattern it cannot survive. AOAV's single worst explosive incidents of 2024 were the September pager operation and the next day's walkie-talkie operation. The explosives were concealed inside pagers and radios that Hezbollah itself had purchased and distributed to its members; the only people physically carrying them were Hezbollah personnel. Hezbollah acknowledged that hundreds of its fighters carried the devices, and a Hezbollah official said the operation took 1,500 fighters out of action through injury. Hezbollah's own leadership has long rejected the premise that there is any line between its political and military sides; as leader Naim Qassem put it, "we don't have a military wing and a political wing... one Hezbollah." A weapon that by physical design could only injure members of the organization, in an operation the organization says wounded 1,500 of its fighters, produced in AOAV's ledger a 97% civilian casualty rate. The monitor even concedes, in its own text, that "armed actors are likely included among these casualties." Here the method does not merely risk error. Its output is contradicted by the admitted facts of the event it is describing, including the facts AOAV itself records.

If the story ended with a flawed method honestly applied, AOAV could fairly answer that open-source monitoring is imperfect and its limitations are disclosed. The defense collapses on the evidence that the method is not applied when it would point away from blaming Israel.  The proof is an absence: the al-Ahli hospital explosion of 17 October 2023.

Al-Ahli was the most heavily reported explosive event of the early war. Within hours, Gaza's Ministry of Health announced 471 killed and blamed an Israeli airstrike, and the figure led news bulletins worldwide. Two findings then emerged from exactly the English-language sources AOAV scans. On the toll: the Anglican diocese that runs the hospital estimated around 200 dead, the director of al-Shifa Hospital put it near 250, and US intelligence assessed 100 to 300, likely at the low end. On the cause: US, British, Canadian, and French intelligence, along with Human Rights Watch, concluded the explosion came from a misfired Palestinian rocket that struck the courtyard rather than an Israeli strike on the building.

Now apply AOAV's own rules and watch the contradiction close around the report. AOAV publishes a table of the ten worst explosive incidents of 2023, ranked by civilian casualties; the smallest entry on it is a Pakistani suicide bombing at 193. Al-Ahli is not on the table. It is not anywhere else in the report either: across the entire document, the single most-reported explosive event of the early Gaza war goes unmentioned. There are only two ways AOAV could have reached that result, and each indicts a different rule.

If AOAV applied its standard practice — take the casualty figure reported in the first 24 hours, assume all civilian, attribute to the named party — then al-Ahli enters as 471 killed and 314 injured, attributed to Israel. That is 785 casualties, the single deadliest incident of 2023 by AOAV's stated criteria. 

If instead AOAV declined the day-one figure because it was disputed and the misfire finding undercut the attribution — exercising judgment its 24-hour rule does not provide for — then it accepted a corrected toll of roughly 100 to 300 dead and several hundred injured. Even at the floor of that range, killed-plus-injured clears the 193 threshold several times over. It still belongs in the top ten. There is no version of AOAV's methodology under which al-Ahli is correctly absent. Recorded by the rules, it tops the table. Corrected against the rules, it still ranks. Omitted entirely, it reveals a choice.

That choice is the whole case. To leave al-Ahli out, AOAV had to do the one thing it tells the world it does not do: look past the day-one wire copy, weigh the later corrections, and decide the incident did not belong. An event missing from a top-ten ranking might be an editorial judgment about where a line falls. An event missing from the entire report — when AOAV names, profiles, and tallies every other major Gaza incident of 2023, and builds its headline Gaza total from them — is not a line-drawing problem. It is a removal. The capacity to follow up and verify plainly exists; the report's own caveats about Gaza undercounting show AOAV reading the sources closely. That capacity was exercised on the one 2023 Gaza incident almost everyone agrees a Palestinian faction caused and that pointed away from Israel, and it was switched off for the convoy strike Israel denied, for the thousands of unlabeled Gaza dead booked as civilians, and for the Hezbollah fighters counted as bystanders to their own pagers. The verification machinery runs in exactly one direction.

Set the two 2023 incidents side by side and the pattern is unmistakable. The blast that pointed away from Israel — disputed attribution, a toll its own sourcing showed was inflated — was dropped from the ranking despite belonging at or near the top of it. The blast that pointed at Israel — a Hamas claim the IDF denied, with no evidence of a strike beyond the accusation — was elevated to settled fact and placed third. A monitor genuinely indifferent to which side a headline blamed could not sort two events so cleanly along that line.

This is why AOAV's standing is the heart of the problem rather than a footnote to it. The organization's authority rests entirely on the claim that it neutrally records what the media reports. The convoy entry shows it discarding the media's own caveats when they protect Israel. The Gaza and Lebanon totals show the civilian-by-default rule manufacturing combatant-free wars out of conflicts against armed organizations. And al-Ahli shows that the rule can be suspended at will, exercised precisely when suspension serves the narrative. Each example points the same way, and the cumulative weight is hard to read as accident. An organization with this method, applied this selectively, is not producing a flawed measurement of civilian harm. It is producing an argument, and dressing it as data — then handing it to the United Nations, which cites it as the considered judgment of an independent observer.

In short, the only consistency that AOAV shows in its methodology in the Middle East is whatever makes Israel look as bad as possible. 

(h/t Irene)

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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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05/31 Links: Rachel's Life in Pieces; Einat Wilf: What the Arab World Knew All Along & How Israel Lost the Information War; Netanyahu hails capture of Lebanon’s Beaufort Castle

From Ian:

Rachel's Life in Pieces

REVIEW: 'When We See You Again' by Rachel Goldberg-Polin
"Once upon a time, I was meandering down the road of life with my husband, Jon. It was a regular and beige life, and it worked. It was a warm beige. We felt, and were, blessed and lucky. Normal.

"Suddenly, one day, while walking along our way, a metaphorical 18-wheeler semitruck hit us from behind and broke every bone in our bodies. All 412 of our combined bones were fractured, our spirits were mangled, and our hearts were stolen. Our life was stolen.

"That day was October 7th, 2023."

So begins the soul-searing memoir by Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the Chicago-born American-Israeli whose globe-trotting efforts to free her son Hersh from Hamas captivity ended when he was murdered in a tunnel in Gaza 330 days after his kidnapping.

When We See You Again is a book no parent should ever have to write but every American should read. That every Israeli will read it I take as given, considering the prominence of Hersh in the country's national consciousness and the fact that posters pleading for his release still cling stubbornly to street signs across the world's only Jewish state.

The book is an attempt by a bereaved mother, beloved by the millions of people across the globe who read and watched her and her husband's efforts on behalf of their only son, to capture Hersh's personality beyond the headlines and psychologically work through her unimaginable grief. "Since my heart is shattered into tiny pieces," she writes, "it is easier to share than when it was one mighty, solid, and strong heart. So please take a shard. Be careful, they are sharp." Its brilliance lies in the author's weaving of unending loss and boundless frustration alongside attempts to find measures of comfort through Jewish teachings (by profession, she is an educator). Additionally wise is her avoidance of distracting the reader with partisan politics. No political figure in America or Israel is mentioned by name and she does not take a side on the debate that roiled the global Jewish community as to whether imprisoned terrorists should be freed in exchange for civilian hostages.

The reader is reminded of Hamas's brutality, often absent from daily headlines about Middle East negotiations and by those who would seek a Palestinian state. Describing how Israeli authorities found the bodies of Hersh and his fellow murdered captives, she unsparingly and clinically notes, "They were all skeletal, filthy (the coroner estimated they had not bathed in months), bearing scars of torture, and riddled with close-range bullet wounds. Hersh had six. And his hair was covered in gunpowder." She details how Chaim Peri, an 80-year-old peace activist, was kidnapped and murdered after 100 days of captivity. While Goldberg-Polin doesn't dwell on every horrific detail, it's worth reminding readers that on the 7th, Hamas also killed Holocaust survivors, burned Jews alive in their homes, sexually abused both living and dead victims, and livestreamed the murder of grandmothers on Facebook. Forty-six Americans had their lives snuffed out that day.

Jake Wallis Simons: The anti-Zionism mob is showing its true insidious colours

On the surface, the anti-Zionist cover story is quite convincing. They simply long for the evil state of Israel to be replaced by a single, democratic country with equal rights for all. The Zionist project was a historic mistake and should be humanely dismantled. Pretty reasonable, no?

Not so fast. For one thing, if you’re going to start dismantling every country with a history of injustice, best of luck to America, Australia, Canada, Turkey, Pakistan and India, all the Latin American states founded through Spanish and Portuguese conquest, all the European states built through centuries of feudal warfare and empire, and much of Africa and the Middle East.

Secondly, any practical thoughts on that single state for Jews and Palestinian Arabs? Here’s a clue: think October 7 and multiply it. So what’s the solution? Send the Jews back to the countries from which they most recently fled, like Poland, Russia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and Libya? What about the racists in those countries who persist in their demands that the Jews go “back to Israel”?

They must know all this, just as they must know that “Death to the IDF” would mean a second Holocaust. Regardless, celebrities like Gary Lineker and Juliet Stevenson craft the anti-Israel narrative, while progressive Jews like Miriam Margolyes and Zack Polanski provide the alibi. “Respect” is awarded. Then the shock troops go in.

Here’s another flavour of the idiocy of the scene. Molly Crabapple, an anti-Zionist writer, recently published a book about Bundism. This was an Eastern European Jewish socialist movement of the 20th century which opposed the Zionist dream of returning to the land of Israel. Instead, Bundism promoted “doikayt”, a Yiddish word meaning “hereness”, insisting that Jews should fight for dignity where they already lived. According to The Economist, this could inspire modern Jews who “want to celebrate their heritage without tying themselves to Israel”.

Thanks for that. Here’s the problem: the Bundists were slaughtered in the Holocaust. This, then, is a vignette with a warning. To prevent the rhyming of history, we need immunity to spin. Insidious ideas must be given their true names, regardless of the nomenclature shrilly demanded by their proponents.

British Museum evacuated after ‘suspicious device’ found days after Jewish event postponed

The British Museum was evacuated on Saturday after staff discovered a suspicious device in a visitor toilet and received what it described as “malicious communications”, just days after the institution faced criticism for postponing a Jewish Culture Month lecture on ancient Israel over security concerns.

Police were called to the museum at around 2.50pm and between 12,000 and 16,000 visitors were evacuated as a precaution.

The Metropolitan Police later confirmed that the package was found to be non-suspicious and that there was no ongoing threat. The museum reopened shortly before 4pm.

In a statement, the museum said: “Earlier today, the British Museum was evacuated as a precaution after a suspicious device was discovered in a visitor toilet. At the same time, the museum received malicious communications, which were treated seriously and reported to the relevant authorities.

“As this remains a police matter, we will not be providing further comment on the nature of the communications received.”

The incident comes less than a week after the museum postponed a lecture on the kingdoms of ancient Israel and Judah, which had been scheduled as part of Jewish Culture Month.

The lecture, due to be delivered by Paul Collins, Keeper of the Department of the Middle East, was postponed after concerns that activists planned to disrupt the event. Museum officials said intelligence suggested a significant proportion of those registered to attend intended to prevent the lecture from proceeding.

The decision sparked widespread criticism, with politicians, historians and public figures accusing the museum of capitulating to threats of disruption.

David Collier: Antisemitism and Ignorance on Display at Cambridge Market Square

Last week someone showed me a photograph of a pro-Palestine stall in Cambridge Market Square. What I saw was not angry students or hardened activists, but four elderly women – probably in their seventies – who had chosen to spend their day urging strangers to boycott Israel.

The image stayed with me – and I decided that I wanted a closer look at what was actually taking place. So yesterday I went up to Cambridge to listen to what they were saying. Selling a Fictional Palestine

When I arrived, the stall was slightly larger than the one I had seen in the photograph, with perhaps six people gathered around it. The women from the original image were there, now accompanied by a couple of younger men. For a while I simply stood nearby, looked through the maps and leaflets laid out on the table, and listened to the conversations taking place with members of the public who had stopped to engage.

At one point, one of the Cambridge Palestine Solidarity Campaign activists was speaking to three young people, probably in their early twenties. The discussion turned to the word “Palestine” – and it quickly became clear that none of those involved had any real grounding in the history they were attempting to discuss.

For much of the last two millennia, “Palestine” was primarily a geographic term used by successive imperial and colonial powers in reference to the Holy Land. It was not part of the traditional identity of the local Arab population. Yet the subject has become so politically charged that many pro-Palestinian campaigners now tie themselves in ahistorical knots trying to pretend otherwise.

Which was exactly what I encountered.

After the group moved on, and noticing my interest in the stall, one of the women approached me. I deliberately chose not to challenge her or present myself as informed. I wanted to test the depth of her knowledge, so rather than appearing as an adversary, I presented myself as someone open to being educated.

We spoke for around twenty minutes, and almost everything she told me was either misleading, historically confused, or simply false.

Here are a few examples:
Invading armies
I was told that while the Arab armies did invade in 1948, they only entered the areas allocated to the proposed Arab state and did not enter the Jewish enclave. This is simply false. Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian and Lebanese armies all entered areas allocated to the Jewish state. Jordanian forces also captured the Jewish areas within the international zone around Jerusalem and ethnically cleansed them of their Jewish population. At one stage, the Egyptian army was just twenty miles from Tel Aviv.

The woman was not merely mistaken. She was dramatically rewriting the nature, ambition and scope of the invasion.

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Second-Order Antisemitism - Fixing a Gap in My Definition

In 2021, I created a definition of antisemitism that I believe is both comprehensive and
precise — and short enough to fit in a tweet:

Antisemitism is
hostility toward,
denigration of,
malicious lies about, or
discrimination against

Jews

as individuals,
as a people,
as a religion,
as an ethnic group,
or as a nation (i.e, Israel.)

As I discussed in my last article, this defines its object first. Jews are not just a faith community. They are simultaneously a people, an ethnicity, a civilization, and a nation,
with Israel as the contemporary expression of that last dimension. Any attack on any of
those dimensions is antisemitism. The definition is exhaustive by construction: anything
not covered by it is, by definition, not antisemitism. No “context,” no “mights,” no
“mays” required. without defining what Jews are, you arrive at a mess of a definition of antisemitism.

Over the years, my definition has held up well. It has been quoted in at least one
scholarly book on the topic and has been taught in an Ivy League school.

I recently realized, however, that there is a class of antisemitism it does not cover.

In November 2025, a man approached actress Helen Mirren and her husband Taylor
Hackford on the streets of London, filmed the encounter, and published it. He had done
his research. He was not targeting Mirren because she had played Golda Meir — he was targeting her for a 2023 interview in which she said Israel should exist because of the Holocaust and opposed cultural boycotts of Israeli artists. “An evil Zionist bitch,” he
told her as he backed away. Then, turning to Hackford: “fuck you and all.” The
Metropolitan Police, when the video resurfaced this week, described it as “antisemitic
verbal abuse.”

The police said what is obvious - attacking a non-Jew because of their support of Jews is antisemitic. But none of the definitions, including my own, would have included this
incident as antisemitism.

The missing category might be called second-order antisemitism: hostility toward, or
attacks on, non-Jews specifically because of their association with, defense of, or
solidarity with Jews.

This is not a minor edge case. It is a recognizable and recurring phenomenon. Arab
Zionists get attacked as if they were Jews. Non-Jewish attendees at Jewish events get
targeted. Allies who publicly defend Israel face the same harassment campaigns directed
at Jewish advocates.

Even though this could be termed second-order antisemitism: it is actually more severe
in some ways than direct attacks on Jews. If someone hates Jews enough to attack those
who merely defend them, the hatred of Jews themselves is beyond question. Second-
order antisemitism is a revealed preference — it shows that the hostility is not a reaction
to anything Jews have done or are, but a hatred of Jewish existence and Jewish solidarity as such. The non-Jewish defender becomes a target precisely because their support is
voluntary. They chose the Jews. The antisemite cannot tolerate that choice.

The logic is the classic a fortiori argument if they attack those who stand with Jews, all
the more so do they attack Jews.

There is even a third-order variant worth naming. Ritchie Torres, the congressman from
the Bronx, has been one of the most consistent and vocal defenders of Israel and the
Jewish community in the United States Congress. The attacks on him are not merely
second-order antisemitism.

Torres is, by every marker of progressive identity politics, supposed to be on the
attackers’ side. He is Black. He is gay. He represents a minority-majority district. His
support for Israel is experienced by the haters not just as defending Jews but as a
betrayal of his assigned political identity — a violation of the intersectional framework
that requires members of oppressed groups to stand against Israel. The rage directed at
him is compounded: attacked for defending Jews, and attacked again for refusing to be
the ally the haters assumed they owned.

This is antisemitism operating through the machinery of identity politics. The
assumption that Black, gay, or minority voices belong to the anti-Israel coalition — and
the fury when they don’t — reveals that the coalition’s anti-Zionism is not a political
position derived from principle. It is a tribal demand. Torres’s existence as a defender of
Jews is, to them, a category violation. The intensity of the response reveals the
assumption underneath.

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So I need to slightly adjust my definition of antisemitism to be as complete as possible.

I added “and those who defend Jews” in the center column. If even the British police
recognize that as antisemitism, everyone does. A definition that does not cover that case
is not a good enough definition of antisemitism.

When the hatred extends beyond Jews to everyone who refuses to abandon them, what
you are seeing is not a political grievance that got out of hand. It is a hatred of the Jewish
covenant itself — of the idea that anyone, Jewish or not, might choose to stand with the
Jewish people.

That is antisemitism in its most elemental form.

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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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05/30 Links: Mamdani just offered NY's Jews a 234-year-old bargain; Ireland Can't Stop Thinking About Israel; Hezbollah targets Israeli home front with series of rocket, drone attacks

From Ian:

Hen Mazzig: Giant

I went into Giant braced for a hit job, and I was wrong about that. Mark Rosenblatt does not put Roald Dahl in the dock and read out the charges against him. He gives him wit, a beautiful house in the country, a fiancée who adores him, and a new children’s book about to ship... And then he lets Dahl talk. John Lithgow plays him as charming, the kind of man you would want at your table. By the end you understand that the charm and prestige were doing the work the whole time. It was how the cruelty traveled.

Liccy, his fiancée, catches the contradiction before anyone else in the room. You keep telling me the Jews in Israel are violent monsters, she says, and yet you tell me the Jews here are weak. She cannot make the two fit together. She is not meant to. The Jew who is too powerful and the Jew who is too cowardly are the same invented Jew, convicted in both directions at once. The charges against him have never needed to agree with one another.

Then there is Tom, Dahl’s British publisher, who is Jewish and wants no part of any of it. “I’m British!” he proclaims. This has nothing to do with me. Yes, I was rolling my eyes too. Later he exclaimed that when his people do something good he feels a flicker of pride, or maybe not pride, maybe just relief at not having to be ashamed for once. When they do something bad, he is ashamed. It is the diaspora bargain, the hope that enough distance from Israel will buy you a pass. It does not. Dahl turns on him anyway and calls him a house Jew. A house Jew? The man who worked hardest to be left out of it gets the ugliest name in the room.

Dahl saves a stranger argument for Jessie Stone, the executive his American publisher sent to manage him. His real quarrel, he tells her, is with Ashkenazi Jews like her. Europeans, with no claim to the Middle East, unlike the “Arab Jews and the Ethiopian Jews.” The flattery is a weapon. It makes some Jews native so the rest can be called foreign. I hear the identical argument now, usually from people who have never read a line of Dahl. The Israeli becomes the white colonizer and the Mizrahi the real thing, and none of it is meant to honor anyone. It is a way to decide which Jews are allowed to belong where they already live. Dahl got there in 1983. The sorting is a pose, and it does not survive the afternoon. By the end he stops pretending any of them are the real ones. He hates all of us.

The play is funniest right before it is at its worst. Stone presses Dahl on Israel fighting a defensive war and asks what Britain would do if its own cities were bombed. We would never be as barbaric as you are to the Palestinians, he says. She gives him two words back. Dresden. Nagasaki.

Later, cornered, he turns to his cook and asks whether she would ever visit Israel, whether she would boycott an Israeli avocado. Does the avocado know that it’s Israeli, she asks, and the house laughed. The laugh matters. The whole logic of the boycott comes apart the moment a real piece of fruit is in your hand.

What lifts Giant above a period piece is that Dahl wrote the ending himself, in life, and Rosenblatt understood that.

No, ambassador: Israel's anger with France is not 'staged,' it is earned

The ambassador defends France’s stance on Lebanon, but he ignores the rhetoric that accompanied it. To hear Macron accuse Israel of “spreading barbarism in the region” as it fought to stop Hezbollah’s relentless rocket fire was a breaking point. It felt less like a strategic critique and more like a defense of France’s historical raison d’être in Lebanon at the expense of Israeli lives. To use the word “barbarism” against the victims of October 7 while they fight an Iranian proxy is an inversion of reality that no “friend” should utter.

Then came the diplomatic sucker punch: the announcement of an upcoming, unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state. By moving toward recognition then, without a negotiated settlement or the release of our brothers and sisters still rotting in Hamas tunnels, France effectively rewarded the October 7 massacre. This move did not advance peace; it actively derailed the delicate negotiations to free our hostages by signaling to Hamas that it need only wait for the West to hand it a victory.

To add insult to injury, France then moved to boycott Israeli defense companies at major exhibitions. How can a nation claim to support our “right to self-defense” while simultaneously banning the very tools we need to exercise that right? A diplomatic double standard

Ambassador Journès, you claim there is a “double standard” being applied to France. On the contrary, we are simply applying the same standard to you that you apply to us. We see the consistency with which France treats Israeli security as a secondary concern to its own Mediterranean grandstanding.

I am not a fan of the current Israeli government. I protest its policies and worry for our democracy. But being a critic of my government does not make me suicidal for my country. Loving France does not mean I must accept its gaslighting.

We don’t need “smooth conversations,” Mr. Ambassador. We need an ally that doesn’t treat our survival as a bargaining chip for its own regional relevance.

Our anger isn’t “staged.” It is the natural response of a people that expected more from the patrie of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

Author Theo Baker says he feels more Jewish as a result of antisemitism at Stanford

Theo Baker describes himself as “an accidental journalist.” But at just 21, his writing has already sent shockwaves through the academic world.

As a freshman at Stanford University in 2022, he exposed then-President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s decades-long pattern of manipulated data and research in scientific papers he co-authored or supervised, ultimately leading to his resignation. Baker, the son of New York Times reporter Peter Baker and New Yorker columnist Susan Glasser, became the youngest recipient of the George Polk Award for his reporting on Tessier-Lavigne.

During his sophomore year, Baker published a much-discussed essay in The Atlantic called “The War at Stanford,” exploring campus culture following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel. He called college “a factory of unreason” and argued that anti-Israel demonstrations and rhetoric had created a pervasive climate of fear, accusing Stanford of failing to adequately condemn the attacks or protect Jewish students, all while training the next generation of tech and industry leaders.

Baker reflects on his turbulent college years in his new memoir and exposé, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, published earlier this month. The book lays bare an elite university corrupted by Silicon Valley’s pursuit of power, all while Stanford saw a historic rise of antisemitism.

Whether it was navigating the release of ChatGPT or grappling with the impact of the Oct. 7 attacks, Baker said every year of his experience at the elite Palo Alto, Calif., university presented a unique challenge. Weeks away from graduation, Baker spoke with Jewish Insider about his past four years on campus, the role that technology plays in rising antisemitism — and what the future might hold for universities.

Jewish Insider: You’ve described yourself as coming from a home with “just a tiny bit of cultural Judaism.” How has covering antisemitism changed your Jewish identity? What about your relationship with Israel?

Theo Baker: In fall 2022, I went home for Thanksgiving and said, “There’s so much antisemitism at Stanford.” I was shocked by that. It’s not something I really countered growing up. As soon as I arrived at Stanford — even in the first week — someone asked me, “why are all Jews so rich?”

By the end of that year — and this is before Oct. 7 —- someone in my dorm, a kid who was Jewish, talked about being Jewish for the first time and someone put a bunch of swastikas and an image of Hitler on his door later that day.

So Jewishness is an identity and not one I would have placed much investment in prior to coming to college. It was something that I knew about myself but was not particularly salient. Certainly, I, like many college students in the last few years, have been made to feel more Jewish just by the circumstances around us. It was certainly interesting to be here on campus as a reporter when the biggest story happening was something that also intersected with my own background.

I have not taken trips to Israel [in college] but I lived in Israel briefly when my dad was the Jerusalem correspondent for The New York Times. I’ve tried to center my reporting on the things I have expertise on. Stanford is 7,000 miles away from Israel. It’s so fascinating that it became such an important issue for people, and then disappeared seemingly so quickly from the public conversation.

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05/29 Links Pt2: The Joy of Hating Jews; The CliffsNotes Guide to Anti-Zionist Brainwashing; Mamdani endorses former Columbia encampment organizer for Congress

From Ian:

The Joy of Hating Jews

Nazi Germany understood this with terrifying sophistication. Some of the most disturbing footage from the period is disturbing precisely because people appear cheerful. Crowds smiled during boycotts of Jewish stores and later acts of public humiliation and degradation. Book burnings resembled university festivals. Torchlit parades became raucous public celebrations. Looting, gathering, and watching flames together transformed hatred into public theater in which ordinary people could participate.

Today’s digital culture has monetized these pleasures. Online platforms are engineered to maximize engagement by maximizing emotional reward. Antisemitism is extraordinarily well suited to such systems. Platforms amplify the thrill of forbidden knowledge, insider language, memes, and collective outrage while making them instantly accessible and endlessly repeatable. The digital dogpile—coordinated mass attack on a single Jewish target—is the mob made digital. Like the analogue mobs that preceded them, these too are often gleeful and public. But unlike earlier forms, participation no longer requires gathering in the street or much physical effort at all. The mob no longer needs to gather, it simply needs to log on.

Flooding Jewish journalists’ social media feeds with Holocaust jokes and “oven” memes; defacing synagogues, menorahs, or Jewish community centers with swastikas—often timed to holidays; filming antisemitic taunts of visibly Jewish people and posting them online for laughs; turning classic antisemitic tropes into viral “ironic” content or remix videos—none of these are coherent responses to a supposedly sophisticated international cabal controlling the world’s economy, politics, media, migration, and satellites. They are rituals of humiliation. The point is not resistance. The point is pleasure.

Revelation, belonging, and moral framing explain much of antisemitism’s appeal and durability. They are pleasures that can disguise themselves as insight, solidarity, and justice. Each has a cover story. Together, they remove the ordinary societal restraints on cruelty. Once hatred feels righteous and collective, Jewish suffering itself becomes the pleasure. The sadism—pleasure in Jewish pain, fear, and humiliation for its own sake—has no disguise. The suffering itself is the reward.

One of the most difficult realities confronting Jews about antisemitism is that their outrage is part of the reward structure. It is part of the fun.

Antisemitism is rarely content merely to express itself. It seeks reaction. The shock, anger, fear, and public anguish it provokes are psychologically and socially rewarding to the antisemite. It heightens the drama. This helps explain why even wildly implausible accusations persist despite their absurdity. The accusations are not simply designed to persuade—they are meant to scandalize, provoke, and energize. Their very absurdity is part of the thrill. Jews have been accused of using Christian children’s blood to make matzo, of controlling the weather, of harvesting organs from Palestinian children, of training and deploying dogs as instruments of sexual assault, of operating secret space lasers. The accusations need not be coherent. They need only be energetic. The more absurd the allegation, the more satisfying the reaction it provokes.

This creates a peculiar bind. Antisemitism cannot be ignored. History punishes indifference again and again. But public Jewish distress feeds the very reward system sustaining it. Condemnation does not deter, it deliver the pleasure the antisemite wants.

If Jews protest loudly, it will be cast as Jews having something to hide. If Jewish organizations demand collective condemnation, it will be cast as Jews having the power to suppress criticism. If Jews stay silent, it will be cast as indifference, arrogance, or worse—tacit agreement. Confront the accusation publicly and Jews feed the spectacle. Ignore it and normalization spreads. Explain it carefully and with nuance and lose ground faster. Complexity will always be outrun by emotional simplicity and the vocabulary of moral crusade. In short, Jews become unwilling performers in someone else’s theater. The antisemite wins either way.

This is part of the exhaustion Jewish communities experience in the wake of antisemitic waves that followed Oct. 7 and have not abated. It is not only fear. It is the demoralizing recognition that every available response is both necessary and compromised.

Antisemitism is not a burden its adherents bear—it is a pleasure they seek. Antisemitic narratives are not the cause of antisemitism—they are its cover stories. Spectacle is not a byproduct of antisemitism—it is often the product. Sadism is not a side effect—it is what revelation, belonging, and moral righteousness make possible. Jewish outrage is not a deterrent—it is a reward. And all of this is because, while the antisemite often claims to be outraged by Jews, history shows he is—far more often than not—thrilled by them.

Seth Mandel: The CliffsNotes Guide to Anti-Zionist Brainwashing

The story of Taryn Thomas’s recovery from the intellectual isolation of pro-Palestinian activism provides a handy guide for anyone interested. Her quotes in her Telegraph profile are perfect as a CliffsNotes-style outline of the anti-Zionist movement in the West:

“People I know, whether it was activists or people I look up to, were already posting their thoughts.” This is Thomas reflecting on her social circle at Stanford after the massacres of October 7 but before Israel’s ground incursion in response. She didn’t know much about the conflict, but those around her had talking points ready to go to defend Hamas and indict Israel as soon as the attack happened. This is key to anti-Zionist activism: It isn’t grassroots or organic; it is pre-packaged and distributed to an army of propagandists.

“I never really understood why, but we were told that in order for us to be free, Palestine has to be free.” Thomas, who is black, was introduced to the pro-Palestinian cause at Black Lives Matter events. This is classic anti-Zionist media strategy: Co-opt someone else’s oppression and tell them that they are the victim of the Jews. Immediately making it about someone other than the Palestinians also frees one from the burden of the Palestinian share of blame for the state of the conflict.

“It seemed like everyone was a lot more educated than me and very certain and sure of themselves that this is a genocide. The only safe position was the more radical one in the encampment.” Once inside the activist wing of the mission, one quickly finds that the lazy river flows only in one direction. If you float along, you drift into increasingly more extreme territory; it is staying in one place or exploring moderate positions that require effort.

Seth Mandel: Heed This Rabbi’s Words

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, gave a speech yesterday at a Reform Judaism conference that I predict will be studied, remembered, and referenced for the foreseeable future by his fellow rabbis.

The address should be watched, because Hirsch knows how to deliver a speech. And because often when there’s something you really need to hear, you need to literally hear it. The speech was a rousing call for Reform Judaism to wear its Zionism on its sleeve, to proudly embrace Jewish particularism, and to hold firmer than ever to its belief in Jewish peoplehood.

Because it is no surprise that I support Hirsch’s unapologetic love of Zion, I will comment on one specific aspect of the speech that I believe made it so profound. In organized American Jewry, just as in politics, an idea has taken hold: Because young people are wishy-washy on Zionism and Israel, institutions must either adapt to welcome their ideas or watch their membership crumble.

I won’t mince words: This is weaselly behavior. Which is why I’m not shocked to see it in politics, even as I find the self-debasement cringeworthy. But I have no patience at all for it in Judaism for one reason: Our clergy are our teachers.

Teaching, leadership, education—these are what saved Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple and the ensuing exile. We argue endlessly about what our rabbis say and do and mean, but it is largely thanks to this system that we have something to argue about at all.

So if young people are straying from Jewish peoplehood, is it our responsibility to join them? Or to teach them?

One of the repeated explanations one hears from liberal Jews is that so many young people have never known a not-right-wing Israeli government. In political circles, this can make Israel advocacy difficult for Democratic officials.

Hirsch also shares this sentiment. He has many disagreements with the current Israeli government, and he does not shy from saying so. But he does not use this as an excuse:

“Given the growing hostility to Israel, especially in our circles, liberal and progressive spaces, it is not enough for us to proclaim our Zionist bona fides every now and again, often expressed defensively, and with so many qualifications, stipulations, and modifications that our enthusiasm for Zionism is buried under an avalanche of provisos. It is not enough to issue occasional press releases, or tweets, that we are a Zionist movement. We are the leaders. We must lead.”

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