06/01 Links Pt1: Gazology: How Gaza Became The West's Moral Obsession; IDF doctor killed, 7 hurt by Hezbollah drone attack; Israel commemorates victims of 1941 Baghdad Farhud pogrom

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: What Iran Is Really Asking of Trump

So Trump’s strategy is to keep talking and use the embargo as leverage to get a better deal. Iran’s strategy isn’t a secret either. It’s to allow Trump to think he’s close to a deal in order to for him to force Israel to stop beating up Iranian forces in Lebanon.

Each side thinks it’s playing the other, while the soldiers still dying are mostly Israelis.

Of course, the antiwar crowd has an answer at the ready: Israel can stop its pursuit of Hezbollah in Lebanon! Except, the reason Israel is in Lebanon is because Israel not being in Lebanon doesn’t prevent Israelis from being killed by Hezbollah.

On a simpler level, here’s what just happened: Iran announced that a specific part of the war—namely, Hezbollah in Lebanon—was of utmost importance to it. In response, Trump conceded that part of the war as a down payment on renewed negotiations, without getting anything in return.

Why would Iran think it’s doing anything other than winning at the moment?

There is another aspect to this refreshing bit of honesty from the Iranians. They have admitted that Hezbollah is Iran and Iran is Hezbollah. Of course, we knew this. But it’s better to have Iran openly admit it in a way that makes it impossible for its numerous American supporters to pretend otherwise.

Thus, we have three powers in Lebanon: Israel, Lebanon, and Iran. Only two of those are arguing for a permanent right to control the country: Lebanon and Iran. So which of those two has a stronger case to control Lebanon?

It’s not a trick question. Iran is confirming, yet again, that the Western narrative of this conflict is the correct one. Iran is an occupying power in Lebanon and elsewhere, and the deaths in Lebanon are indeed Iran’s responsibility.

It is also confirming something else. Any belief that Iran can be merely contained while leaving its threats intact is shortsighted in the extreme. The entire region was blown open by October 7, which was the work of one of Iran’s militias, Hamas. The fact that Iran is asking to preserve the ability to have its proxies repeat the conflagration is proof that the choice before Trump is war now, in which the U.S. has a distinct advantage, or war later, when the enemy has rearmed. The president should choose wisely.

JPost Editorial: Forcing the IDF to leave Lebanon is a betrayal of Israel's citizens

Trading Israeli lives for a few more days of quiet
Accepting another extension under these conditions would mean trading Israeli lives for a few more days of quiet, which is not truly quiet at all.

The collapse of the ceasefire extension was inevitable. Israel cannot maintain a truce with an organization whose purpose remains its destruction. The IDF’s recent maneuvers, including the capture of strategic high ground such as Beaufort Castle, reflect a clear military need to dismantle Hezbollah’s infrastructure in a lasting way.

Those hard-won gains must not be bargained away for another fragile agreement that Hezbollah will violate as soon as it suits its interests.

The airstrikes in Dahiyeh must be relentless and unrestricted. That is where decisions are made, where precision weapons are stored, and where Hezbollah’s Iranian-backed leadership feels most secure.

Israel does not need an extension of a failed policy. It needs the restoration of real deterrence. That deterrence will not come through gradual de-escalation, American-brokered road maps, or futile negotiations with Iran. It can only come through the systematic destruction of Hezbollah’s will and capacity to fight.

The time for begging for permission to defend Israel is over. The government must resist international pressure to preserve the ghost of a ceasefire and give the IDF the mandate to finish the job. Anything less would be a betrayal of the citizens still huddled in shelters, waiting for a government that values their lives more than its standing in Washington.

The ceasefire is dead. Israel should stop pretending otherwise before more Israelis pay the price for this diplomatic fiction.

France bans Israel from defense exhibition, limits Israeli companies to showing defensive weapons

The French government barred Israel's official participation in the June EUROSATORY defense exhibition, according to a Monday statement by the Israeli Defense Ministry, with its French counterpart saying that Israel was limited to defensive platforms.

The Israeli government and the ministry will be unable to participate in the exhibition or establish a national pavilion. Israeli defense firms would be prevented from displaying offensive weapon systems.

The French Defense Ministry said that exhibits would be limited to air defense and anti-missile defense equipment, and that Israeli exhibitors would be able to display their wares if they complied with that framework.

"The French decision encompasses: a ban on government representatives attending the exhibition; a ban on opening an Israeli national pavilion; and a restriction limiting Israeli defense industries to displaying air defense products only, with offensive systems explicitly excluded," said a statement by the Israel Ministry of Defense.

"This policy is applied selectively and discriminatorily relative to other participating nations - in direct violation of the established norms governing international defense exhibition," it added.

Participating companies confirm their attendance months in advance and despite the ban on the Israeli government and offensive weapons, many Israeli companies are expected to have their own smaller private desks to present their systems. Defense & Tech by The Jerusalem Post understands that among the Israeli companies still planning to attend with their original lineups including Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Dozens of Israeli companies acquired by the American defense conglomerate Ondas will also participate at the expo.

According to the French ministry, EuroSatory organizers have been informed of the decision and are expected to enforce the restrictions.

The Israeli Defense Ministry decried the restrictions at one of the world’s largest defense industry exhibitions as a selectively applied and discriminatory policy, “in direct violation of the established norms governing international defense exhibition,' said the ministry.”

"This is a disgraceful decision, one that reeks of political and commercial calculation, and regrettably, it comes as no surprise. It fits a deeply troubling pattern in French conduct in recent years - a pattern that has consistently placed France on the wrong side of history,” said the ministry. “France, which prides itself on the values of liberty and democracy, is acting in direct contradiction to the principles it claims to uphold. It is hiding behind a pretense of political justification to exclude Israeli offensive defense systems from an international forum - systems that have proven far superior to their French counterparts, and that have demonstrated exceptional precision and effectiveness against terrorist organizations and regimes threatening not only Israel, but regional and global stability at large.”

Paris' desire to undermine Jerusalem as a competitor
Eurosatory, one of the world’s largest defense exhibitions, takes place on the outskirts of Paris every two years.

During the last Eurosatory in 2024, France prevented the attendance of dozens of Israeli defense companies. At the time, the French Defense Ministry said that “the conditions are no longer right to host Israeli companies at the Paris show, given that the French president is calling for the cessation of IDF operations in Rafah.” The move was overturned by the Paris Commercial Court, which found that the order would lead to discrimination, but many Israeli companies decided not to attend the show.

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Hezbollah-aligned group holds a demonstration in Beirut. No one shows up.

On Sunday, Hezbollah-aligned groups called on Lebanese Shiites to held a rally on Martyr's Square in Beirut calling for the fall of the Lebanese government.

Practically no one attended.

Keep in mind that most Shiites in Lebanon are now displaced from their homes in the south, and tens of thousands of them were within walking distance of this rally.  These Shiites, Hezbollah's power base,  roundly refused to support Hezbollah.

Hezbollah itself didn't directly call for this rally. It will typically direct aligned groups to try out stunts like this as trial balloons to see if the anti-government message would resonate, without risking its own reputation. The group that officially called for this rally, "The Resistant People of Lebanon" is obviously just a new Hezbollah front, as the Hezbollah flags at the demonstration show. 

Before 2024, Lebanese media and most citizens refused to denounce Hezbollah out of fear. Now it is publicly regarded as a threat to Lebanon itself, prioritizing what Iran wants over the wellbeing of the Lebanese people. 

Even among the Shiites.

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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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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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