Links - 14th August 2026 (2 - Palestine/Middle East Peace)

IDF specifies terror affiliations of 12 Gazan soccer players killed in Israeli strikes; one was a FIFA ref - "The Israeli military provided details Wednesday on 12 soccer players killed in the Gaza Strip during the war between Israel and Hamas who it said have been identified as terror operatives, slamming their international portrayal as innocent athletes. Seven of the 12, including one who was a FIFA referee, have been acknowledged as members by Gaza terror groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.  “Following an intelligence investigation, it is now possible to reveal the terrorists’ organizational affiliation and their roles, despite the fact that in many cases they were presented to the world solely as soccer players, without any mention of their affiliation with terror organizations,” the military said.  Some of the information was based on open sources, but all of those listed were identified by the IDF as members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.  They were named by the military as:
Mohammed Barakat  Barakat, nicknamed “the Legend of Khan Younis” for his soccer prowess, was a terrorist in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, the IDF said...
Mahmoud Kamal Mohammed Ali Al-Rifi  Al-Rifi was the captain of the Al-Jalaa soccer club in Gaza and a company commander in Hamas’s aerial array.
Mohammed Mansour Mansour played for a soccer club in Nuseirat and coached the club’s youth division. He was a deputy commander of Hamas’s Nuseirat Battalion, who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. Hamas’s military wing identified him as a member in March.
Ahmed Mohammed Hassan Abu al-Atta  Al-Atta was a soccer player and a platoon commander in Islamic Jihad. Atta, who played for Al-Ahli Gaza, was recently identified by the terror group as the deputy commander of the Gaza City Brigade’s rocket unit.
Abdullah Riyad Abdullah Khattab  Khattab was a player for Gaza’s al-Ribat soccer team and Ittihad Shabab Deir al-Balah, and a member of Islamic Jihad’s anti-tank missile array. Islamic Jihad identified him as a commander in June.
Mohammed Sami Mohammed Khattab  Khattab, a FIFA international referee, was a member of Islamic Jihad in central Gaza. The IDF said Khattab refereed matches in the West Asian Championships and other international games. The Islamic Jihad also identified him as a platoon commander in the terror group.
Ali Mahmoud Ahmed al-Kurd  Al-Kurd was a soccer player and coach for two teams in Rafah, as well as a platoon commander in Islamic Jihad in the Strip’s southernmost city. Islamic Jihad identified him as a member in May.
Mohammed Imad Atta Hassouna  Hassouna was the captain of the Al-Shabab al-Zawaida soccer team and a Hamas terrorist who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. Hassouna was identified by Hamas as a member of its military wing last week.
Tarek Ziad Hussein al-Hour  Al-Hour was a midfield soccer player who played for several teams in the Gaza Strip, according to the IDF, and was a member of Hamas’s military wing.
Mohammed Ziad Hussein al-Hour  Al-Hour was a beach soccer player and platoon commander in Hamas’s military wing in Nuseirat. The IDF said al-Hour competed on the Palestinian national team in the 2013 West Asian Beach Soccer Championship.
Mahmoud Osama al-Jazzar  Al-Jazzar was a goalkeeper for two soccer teams in Rafah, and an Islamic Jihad operative. Islamic Jihad identified al-Jazzar last week as a deputy commander of an elite unit in Rafah.
Mohammed Nidal Mohammed al-Hawajri  The IDF said al-Hawajri was a soccer player but did not say what teams he played for, and was a commander in Hamas’s military wing in Nuseirat."

Meme - "The zionist billionaire fears the friendly socialist"
Anonymous @YourAnonNews: "Mamdani just unlocked the rarest political achievement, actually scaring a final boss."
objkshn: "Wow. He's declaring Mamdani and Mamdani-policies to be what it will take to protect a city from Blackrock, a vulture predatory private equity firm that doesn't invest in community but bleeds them dry. He just elevated Mamdani to God-like status with this admission."
The General: "BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says he may abandon investing in New York City because Zohran Mamdani is a threat to his business"
There's no evidence he's a "Zionist". This is a good reminder that terrorist supporters just use "Zionist" as a dog whistle for Jew, and left wingers who are normally super keen on "exposing" "dog whistles" to claim their opponents are saying something they're not love the biggest dog whistle in the world. Also left wingers hate investment and want to destroy the economy

Islamist thugs are firebombing politicians into compliance is the US and UK - "a senior American politician made a highly disturbing admission.  Washington Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services committee, revealed that he had voted in favour of cutting American military aid to Israel because of the violence and intimidation he and his family were facing. Mr Smith said: “My family and I have had our home vandalised, a fire has been set in my driveway, my neighbours’ lives have been disrupted by demonstrations in the middle of the night, town halls meant to be forums for dialogue have been shut down, and a staff member has been physically assaulted.”...   In February 2024, Mike Freer, the Conservative MP for Finchley and Golders Green, announced he would not stand again after his constituency office was firebombed.  It was, he said, “the final straw” after more than a decade of threats tied directly to his support for Israel and his work challenging anti-Semitism. “Because I have such strong views on the Middle East, and I’m pro-Israel, this has led me to become a target,” he said at the time.  What links Mr Smith’s Washington and Mr Freer’s Finchley is not a shared position on the Middle East – it is the methods being used against those who believe that the West should continue its support for the region’s only democracy in its fight against jihadism. The lesson these campaigns of political violence teach is explicit: back away from support for Israel and for the Jewish community, or your family pays the price. The experiences of Mr Smith and Mr Freer represent direct evidence of the growth of extreme Left-wing terrorism and intimidation. It is debate replaced by threats, the ballot box replaced by firebombs.  We cannot blame this simply on Iranian proxies operating on foreign soil, or on the destructive division deliberately driven by China’s TikTok. We must accept that citizens of our country believe that it is permissible to commit violence and bullying in service of their hatred for the Jewish State. We should also be in no doubt that this intimidation extends beyond our political representatives. Since October 7, this culture of intimidation has been felt across society by the Jewish community.  It has been experienced in the education system, in arts institutions and the workplace. It has left many British Jews feeling isolated, displaced and in fear."
Damn right wing violence! This shows why it's so important to crack down on Islamophobia and jail Islamophobes

The inconvenient truth about Gaza’s ability to govern - "First, there never was a sovereign, independent Gaza in recorded history. Ottoman Turkey, for instance, ruled Gaza for four centuries. No effort was made to establish a state. Later, Egypt governed Gaza for 19 years. Again, there was no move towards Palestinian independence. To the contrary, Cairo imposed harsh military rule.  Ironically, the first country to offer Gaza the opportunity to chart its own destiny was Israel. Yes, Israel. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew every last soldier and settler. It also left behind scores of greenhouses intended to help kick-start Gaza’s economy. Within days, however, those greenhouses were looted and destroyed. Second, over the strong objections of Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, the United States pressed for Hamas to participate in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. That legitimised a terrorist group which, predictably, took full advantage of the opportunity. Within a year, Hamas had violently seized total control of Gaza, killing or expelling Palestinian Authority officials. No election has been held in the ensuing two decades. Third, while some in the West romanticise, if not fetishise, Hamas as an “anti-colonial liberation” group, the truth is quite different. It is an outgrowth of the extremist, transnational Muslim Brotherhood, whose stated objective is to replace existing nation-states in the Middle East with a Sharia-based caliphate, while extending the reach of political Islam to the four corners of the world. At its core, it is virulently anti-Semitic, misogynistic, homophobic, authoritarian, and intolerant of “infidels”. The murderous Iranian regime has been its principal supplier of weapons and funding.  Fourth, when Israel gained control of Gaza in the 1967 war of self-defence, by all accounts, the strip’s population was under 400,000. When Israel withdrew unilaterally in 2005, the population had more than tripled to 1.3 million. Thirty-eight years of Israeli control clearly did not prevent rapid population growth. Fifth, in the past two decades, Gaza has been the recipient of billions of dollars from governments and nongovernmental organisations earmarked to develop its economy and address humanitarian and social needs. Instead, the funds were largely syphoned off to build a vast terrorist infrastructure, including a tunnel system reported to exceed the length of London’s Underground. In other words, instead of seeking to emulate Dubai or Singapore, Hamas’s leaders opted to weaponise Gaza as a launching pad for Israel’s destruction. Meanwhile, some of those same leaders managed to become billionaires in the process, with homes in hospitable Qatar.  Sixth, pro-Hamas voices frequently refer to Gaza as an “open-air prison”. That choice of words resonates with Hamas’s ideological sympathisers, but fails to note Israel’s withdrawal in 2005 and its long-standing interest in a peaceful and prosperous neighbour. It also conveniently ignores that Gaza has two borders, not one. The other is with Egypt, an Arab and Muslim-majority nation. Why is so little attention paid to Cairo’s opposition to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, its sealed border with Gaza, and its refusal to offer help to Gazans in need, either before or after October 7, 2023? Seventh, what happened on October 7, 2023 cannot simply be forgotten, dismissed, or minimised. It was the deadliest single day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. In proportional terms, it would have been the equivalent of more than 8,000 British women, men, and children slaughtered in 24 hours, plus more than 1,750 people, including the elderly and babies, kidnapped. What would the British government’s response have been?  No, this was not an initiative from Gaza to advance a two-state solution, send a message of coexistence, or launch an interfaith, intercultural dialogue. It was a genocidal effort to kill as many people as possible simply because they lived in Israel and were presumed to be Jews.  Eighth, the immense challenge any Israeli government would have faced was how to cripple Hamas, rescue the hostages, ensure this could never happen again, and minimise harm to civilians. Not easy tasks when the enemy deliberately weaponises civilians by placing them in harm’s way, stores weapons and command centres in schools, mosques, and hospitals, cynically manipulates media images, and cares not a whit for notions of international humanitarian law, proportionality, de-escalation, Red Cross access to the hostages, and the like.  Ninth, in the fog of any war, innocent people are tragically killed and wounded. That is unspeakably heartbreaking. But one side, Hamas, cannot launch a war of aggression and then thunder to the world about its consequences. Despite all the freewheeling accusations launched against Israel, few armies in history have ever gone to its lengths to grapple with the moral dilemmas of war, even as its foes have no such scruples. Apropos, exactly how many humanitarian corridors were created by Allied nations to provide aid to German or Japanese civilians during the Second World War? None. Finally, the long-term goal must be to de-radicalise Gaza. Not an easy, overnight job, but a vital one. Is the American-created Gaza Peace Board, established in 2025, up to the challenge? Only time will tell.  Radicalism and rejectionism run deep throughout the coastal strip. And they are abetted, wittingly or unwittingly, by an extensive network of governments, United Nations officials, and nongovernmental organisations. Unless and until that changes, the prospects for peace and stability are, alas, dim."
The narrative is important. The truth is not

Uri Kurlianchik on X - "I wonder what the Middle East would have been like if Israel was as brutal as Turkey was in the 20th century? Israel would have been 99% Jewish with clear borders. No occupation, no intifadas, no Palestinians. Just one brief atrocity that only historians would speak about."
Anna Mae on X - "I think the historians would make an exception for Israel."

How would a doctor know who fired the bullet? - "Numerous reports came out a few years ago from doctors claiming that ‘IDF assassins’ were targeting innocent children in Gaza, which was accompanied by an image of a bullet imbedded in a child’s skull. Brutal and sick... the doctors wouldn’t have been at the scene - they would have been at the hospital when they were told what happened.  Why would they tell the world that this was the work of ‘IDF assassins’ when they couldn’t have possibly known if it was true, and why would so many news outlets run these stories with no fact checking?  And why would  so many of us buy it hook, line, and sinker? Maybe it’s because we want to.  Meanwhile, here is a photo of Hamas shooting their own citizens in the head ‘assassin style’. There are probably real cases of war crimes committed by IDF soldiers, which should be dealt with, but to believe that the IDF targets and assassinates innocent children, especially when it’s coming from people who think that strangling the life out of a seven month old baby is a legitimate form of ‘resistance’, shows some serious moral confusion.  If we actually care about the children in Gaza we should look at the cause of their suffering so we can help rather than using their suffering with the sole purpose of blaming everything on Israel."

Rawan Osman روان عثمان on X - "You can’t make this up.  Zionist Tracker posts faces on X, one at a time, over a dripping red handprint. Gal Gadot. Mayim Bialik. Helen Mirren. Gwyneth Paltrow. Jerry Seinfeld. Leonardo DiCaprio. An Israeli actor accused, without evidence, of things no article substantiates. And now, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  The hand isn’t decoration but a direct lift from a specific photograph. October 12, 2000, Ramallah: two Israeli reservists, Vadim Norzhich and Yosef Avrahami, took a wrong turn and were seized by Palestinian police, then killed by a mob that broke into the station.   A man named Aziz Salha walked to the window afterward and held up his hands, covered in their blood, to the crowd below. They cheered. An Italian news crew filmed it. That image — a killer displaying his victim’s blood as a trophy, to applause — became one of the defining photographs of the Second Intifada. That is the symbol this account chose to brand every post with.  What does the visual grammar of a lynching, repurposed as a content template, invite? Post the face, post the hand, let the crowd do the rest.  And now AOC is in the crowd’s sights. This is a woman who tried to block a $735 million missile sale to Israel. Who told the Senate to choose between upholding the law and “cowering to Netanyahu.” Who pledged publicly to vote no on any Israel funding at all, defensive systems included. Her file, by the movement’s own logic, should read: ally.  Her crime was a single vote against an amendment that could never have passed (422 to 6) because the amendment also cut a missile defense system, and she said so out loud. That’s the whole indictment.  So what does this tell us. She isn’t hateful enough. And she was never anything but disposable. That’s the tell. The moment anyone in this camp declines to hate on command and obey blindly, the hand comes up, and it’s suddenly their face on the poster.  @trackzionist  @AOC  #zionism #israel"
Henshi on X - "If @AOC is a Zionist then you guys are all in trouble 😜"

No Room at the Inn: BDS Hotels in Europe That Won’t Accept Israelis or Jews
So much for people's existence not being political and discrimination based on national origin being bad. People's existence is only political when it pushes the left wing agenda
It's Islamophobic to expect all Muslims to condemn Islamist terrorism, but if Jews and/or Israelis don't condemn Israel, it's good for them to not receive service

Meme - "LEFTIST AMERICAN WOMAN WHO HAD "FUCK ICE" IN HER SOCIAL MEDIA BIOS, FOUND BEATEN TO BY HER ASYLUM SEEKER BOYFRIEND"
"Jamey Carney
1.1K friends . 4.5K posts
New Yorker in Ireland
Free Palestine
Fk Ice"

Dr. Maalouf ‏ on X - "This is Jamey Carney, a 43-year-old woman from New York who became involved in the pro-Palestinian movement and decided to move to Ireland.  There she met her partner, Ahmad Al-Saqar, a Palestinian refugee from Jordan, and converted to Islam. She frequently posted on social media about their trips together.  It didn’t last long. She was brutally beaten to death by him. Her disfigured body was found by her 13-year-old daughter. The suspect has been on the run since Tuesday.  Western leftist pro-Palestinian women and those willing to convert to Islam need to wake the fuck up. Or they could end up like this."

Kosher on X - "Mohamed Sabry Soliman. He burnt an 82 year old female Holocaust survivor to death. “Justice for Palestine” at University of Colorado, Boulder just publicly declared support for him calling it an “act of resistance” This is the Pro-Palestine movement. They are the lowest of the low."
"Resistance" means murdering Jews everywhere in the world

Roz Rothstein on X - "A disabled elderly Jewish woman walked into a Vodafone store in Melbourne seeking help with a device. She left in tears on the street. The employee became agitated, shouted "Free Palestine" at her repeatedly, called her a "dirty Zionist," told her "Jews are disgusting," and filmed her without consent while she stood trapped at the counter, unable to leave without her device."
Ken Benneth on X - "So yelling at elderly disabled Jewish woman "Jews are disgusting" is a legitimate criticism of Netanyahu policies, while questioning real statistics on Muslim attitude on raping white girls and murdering Jews is Islamophobia. Got it."

Matthew Kolken on X - "For the first time in my life I have concerns about being a Jewish American, and it is the left that concerns me."
Fugitive Caesar on X - "Congratulations for your success as an Immigration Lawyer! You successfully imported tens of millions of people who hate you. This is your life's work."
Kaveman Reprobate on X - "They never seem to grasp the story of the Golem, and it's their story!"

StopAntisemitism on X - "Boston (Lexington), MA: William Diamond Middle School Principal Johnny Cole sent an email apologizing to Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, and Lebanese students who were offended by a mandatory Holocaust lesson. Since when is teaching historical fact something that requires an apology?  And why is a school principal validating outrage over Holocaust education instead of defending it?"
Jonathan Eric Lewis on X - "This is going to be the newest front in the war against Jewish peoplehood in the United States and I'm not entirely sure legacy Jewish organizations are ready for it.  What we have here is the emergence of what I have previously called "neo-negationism," an ideological movement that doesn't seek to outright deny the Holocaust, but to marginalize it in western discourse.  The ultimate goal, of course, is to replace the Holocaust with the "Nakba" as the epitome of human evil, so as to position Jews not as the primary victims of the 20th-century, but as its perpetrators"
Clearly, there's no link between anti-Semitism and "anti-Zionism", and only bigots opt out of Pride so we need to make it compulsory, and it's right wingers and conservatives who are against accurate history being taught

Rabbi forced to condemn Israel before booking French holiday villa - "A rabbi from London was refused a holiday rental in France after the owners demanded that he condemn Israel before being allowed to stay at the property.  Rabbi Yoni Birnbaum was told he could only stay if he confirmed that he was “a member of a progressive, liberal Jewish movement”.  He was asked to “condemn the violent actions of the Israeli army” or his family’s holiday booking in eastern France would be cancelled. Mr Birnbaum, 45, labelled the request a “purity test” and said it reflected rising anti-Semitism around the world... The owners rejected his complaint and cancelled the booking. In their response, they did not apologise, insisting they did not discriminate on the basis of religion or ethnicity.  “We would indeed ask the same of someone whose email address starts with Imam,” they wrote. “Just as we sometimes check on Facebook, for example, and if we see that someone glorifies the far-Right or far-Left, he or she will not be admitted.”... Mr Birnbaum said the incident fitted a historical pattern in which Jews had repeatedly been forced to prove their acceptability to society. He noted that Jews in medieval Europe were often pressured to prove their religious purity through conversion, while the Nazis imposed racial tests... Mr Birnbaum said the incident reflected a wider climate in which anti-Semitism had been allowed to “fester” in parts of society.  He added: “I look visibly Jewish, I walk around with a kippah on, people can see that I’m Jewish, and I often experience this type of low-level anti-Semitism, people shouting things from cars at me.  “But this was of a different level, because this to me spoke of a deep entrenched problem in society, which is where Jews have once again got to pass a purity test, as the Nazis had a racial purity test, which is basically how pure are you vis-a-vis the Israel-Palestine conflict.”"
Weird. We're told it's Islamophobic to demand that Muslims condemn Islamist terrorism

Meme - Smug Soyjak: "Not everyone that criticizes Israel is antisemitic."
Normal person: "Oh, so what do you think about Jews?"
Confused Soyjak:
Angry Soyjak: "FUCK THOSE TALMUDIC BABY PENIS SUCKING BLOOD DRINKERS!!!"

Bruce Fenton | Facebook - "Is antisemitism increasing? Absolutely.  Without question.  100% yes it is.  Is this because people suddenly randomly decided to hate Jewish people around 2024?  No.   Antisemitism is rising is because
1) the majority of the USA and the world feel that Israel is committing war crimes and
2) both Israeli and Jewish leaders continually work to conflate the State of Israel with the religion of Judaism
Against and again we are told that criticism of Israel the country is antisemitic and equated to criticism of Jewish people.  Personally I don’t prefer to conflate the evil actions of Israeli politicians with an entire religion.  But the overwhelming majority of both Israeli people and Jewish people DO conflate the two.   The official spokespeople and most prominent leaders make a mission of conflating the two.  So either Israel and Jewish people are one in the same - in which case antisemitism is because of the actions of Israel (I don’t prefer this option) OR the actions of politicians in Israel do NOT reflect the religion - in which case Jewish people have not often or loudly enough condemned Israel and those who seek to conflate it with their religion."
Terrorism supporters once again claiming that the reason "anti Zionists" are anti semites is Jews claiming criticising Israel is antisemitic (which they don't claim, but that's another story). By this "logic", "Islamophobia" is the fault of Muslims and left wingers

Mazelit Airaksinen 🎗🇺🇸 🇮🇱 on X - "My freshman year at Barnard College — I was placed in the “Social Justice House” dorm with 3 pro-Palestine activists.   My roommate was co-president of SJP at Columbia.   Down the hall, the president of Barnard JVP was living.   Guess what happened when they found out I wouldn’t sign their petition against Israel?   I was 18.   I couldn’t even locate Israel on a map, yet I was attacked, harassed and eventually stalked for refusing to condemn it — a country I barely had heard of before.   This is the spark that led to my conversion. Read my story, and if you do, I’d love to know what you think 💕 "

Links - 12th August 2026 (1 - Palestine/Middle East Peace [including Ro Khanna Stunt])

Ro Khanna on X - "Israeli settlers, brandishing American made M4s, detained me & other Americans on my trip to Palestine. When the IDF arrived, they sided with the settlers & continued our detention. They made a huge mistake. You will be hearing more soon."
AG on X - "I am very critical of settler violence and think Israel needs to do far more to punish it. But that’s not what this is about.   So what appears to have happened here was an intentional political stunt by someone who has built his entire career on stunts.  @RoKhanna  had his Palestinian guides take him into a restricted area that is closed off to civilians without requesting access or coordinating with anyone.  Local security (which Khanna intentionally misrepresents as random settlers) then stopped them. IDF arrived and spent time evaluating the situation. Then Israeli police showed up, determined what had happened, and let them go on their way.   No one was hurt or attacked. No one was threatened. Khanna knew going to a restricted area would get a response and he got exactly what he wanted.   I will note that if a random group goes onto a military restricted area in the U.S., they would also be detained and questioned.   Israel is to blame for letting Khanna plan out this stunt, but that’s exactly what it was. And it was predictably coordinated with the press as he had a NYT photographer with him and waited until they released a story days later to even post about it.   Khanna wants to run for president on this nonsense because he has nothing to offer Americans."

Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر on X - "US Rep. Ro Khanna is a charlatan and dishonest. His tour was halted on the bus because they entered a closed military zone (CMZ) which is prohibited (due to safety) to civilians. Police were called in to discuss the problem with the tour organizer who had repeatedly attempted to enter the CMZ in the past as well. The bus has to wait until the arrival of the officers to the scene, which is what caused the delay. It was not a "detainment" and no one was arrested. Police stated they have already reviewed the body cam footage of police at the scene confirming this account. The tour participants were also briefed and then continued on their way. Much like Rahm Emanuel, this is another example of a propagandist (who behaves as if he is paid by America's enemies) intentionally orchestrating a scene to provoke attention and whine about Israel.   Ro Khanna you are truly pathetic."
Left wingers claim Americans are arrogant for going overseas and expecting special treatment. But if you push the left wing agenda you need to get special treatment and if you don't, it's an outrage

Max 📟 on X - "Let me get this straight: Ro Khanna was taking a lot of heat at home because he was propping up a Nazi-sympathizing rapist (Graham Platner).  So in order to take the heat off of the fact that he had propped up a Nazi rapist, he flew to Israel to fabricate a diplomatic incident with an ally on behalf of a different group of Nazi-sympathizing rapists (Arab-Islamic supremacists).  And all of this could have been avoided if he had simply coordinated his visit with Israeli authorities instead of having a tour guide sneak him into a military-protected zone.  Do I have that right?"

Zvika Klein צביקה קליין on X - "Rep. Ro Khanna was blocked on a road near Khirbet Zanuta on Wednesday. That happened, a NYT photographer saw it, and if the armed men who did it broke the law, prosecute them. Now the rest of the story.  The IDF says its troops and police dispersed the civilians and let his vehicles drive on. His own aide says the group was released when officers arrived. Yet the tweet claims the IDF "sided with the settlers and continued our detention." Both cannot be true.  The "M4 machine guns": the M4 is a carbine, and it is precisely the rifle the IDF issues to civilian rapid-response squads in the area. Nobody, including Khanna, has established whether these were "hoodlums" or local security members reacting to an unidentified convoy that no one knew was coming.  Because no one did know. Israeli security officials confirm the congressman never coordinated the visit, which is why he had no protection. He toured Area C with programming run exclusively by Palestinian hosts, by his own description, to get an "unfiltered" view. Unfiltered also means unverified.  And the timing tells its own story. Incident Wednesday. Tweet Saturday, minutes behind a New York Times article, from a politician who told Reuters this trip made him "more resolved" to run for president in 2028, and who declared anyone unwilling to use the words genocide and apartheid "morally compromised" before he ever got in the van.  An hour on a blocked road is not Israel's finest moment, and settler violence, including Saturday's attack on a CNN crew near Sinjil where four suspects were arrested, deserves condemnation and prosecution. But a presidential launch video dressed up as a human rights report deserves scrutiny too.  Congressman, our studio in Jerusalem is open. Come tell the full story, on the record, with the IDF statement on the table."

Yael Bar tur on X - "This is the best thing that could have happened to Ro Khanna. A bunch of assholes harassed him, true, but then you know what happened?  The police and IDF were called, and broke it up. So really the Israeli authorities protected him from a violent minority group, which of course Israel is the only country in which this problem exists.   Anyway, enjoy telling your heroic tale to the guy who thinks 9/11 was awesome."

Albert Aaron | Facebook - "I received a lot of questions about the Ro Khanna incident and I want to provide an update with additional information that came out today. People also asked me for sources so I will try to be more deliberate with my sourcing for this one. Based on everything I reviewed, here’s what happened:
1. According to Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli Embassy reached out to Ro Khanna when they learned that he was going to Israel in order to coordinate a trip. Khanna ignored Israel’s request (Source: Face the Nation). He instead coordinated the trip without Israel’s knowledge and with a left-leaning organization named “Breaking the Silence” (Source: Jerusalem Post). The group advocates for an effective displacement of Jews in Judea and Samaria. Now, what specifically happened on the ground.
2. While in Area C, Ro Khanna entered a Closed Military Zone (CMZ). NBC confirmed this and Khanna’s trip organizer from Breaking the Silence did not dispute this fact to the Jerusalem Post. According to the Israeli government, which controls Area C, “when an area is formally declared a closed military zone, Israeli military orders generally prohibit entry or presence without permission from the military commander…. A foreign visitor (including an American or European citizen) who enters a CMZ without permission can potentially be removed, detained for questioning, fined, or face other legal consequences depending on circumstances.” So according to this, Ro Khanna acted contrary to Israeli military regulations governing closed military zones and against diplomatic norms of a U.S. congressman.
3. It was at that point, that local civilian guards saw a bus in a CMZ area, and took matters into their own hands by stopping the bus and calling up the IDF. Israeli officials criticized this intervention by local civilians, with Prime Minister Netanyahu referring to them as “vigilantes.” Jerusalem Post also cited Israeli officials who said that initial stop by the local guards was a “failure on the Israeli side,” implying that the initial stop by local civilians was outside of their jurisdiction. Nevertheless, these local guards immediately called the IDF according to numerous sources, including Ro Khanna’s own account. The IDF arrived promptly within 20 minutes.
4. When the IDF arrived, they began to investigate. According to the Jerusalem Post report, at this point, the people on Khanna’s bus also called the Israeli police to resolve the dispute. The precise division of authority between the two agencies at this point was not publicly explained. The New York Times added this: “Mr. Khanna assumed the soldiers were there to help him pass. Instead, the soldiers smoked cigarettes, chatted with the men.” Khanna adds, “I felt powerless in that situation, which is not an easy thing, as I have a lot of privilege in life.” I could not decipher if it was the female soldiers smoking cigarettes, their conversation with the men, or both that made Khanna feel “powerless,” based on the New York Times reporting. [Yes, I’m kidding.]
5. About an hour later from the start of the incident, Israel’s police arrived. “Israel Police told NBC News that it responded to a report that a group was blocking a route inside a ‘closed military zone’ [CMZ] that’s technically controlled by the Israel Defense Forces.” [it should be noted that for this particular incident, it appears that the IDF controls the military zone, while the Israeli police controls the traffic and detention matters.]
6. The police also added that they reviewed camera footage and added this about the group leader, likely a reference to Breaking the Silence activist. “A review of body-worn camera footage confirms that the group leader was explicitly warned by officers, as this was not his first time violating the Closed Military Zone order,” police said. “He was issued a final warning that any future violations would result in immediate arrest.” (Source: NBC) About an hour and some minutes later, local police cleared the area, and Khanna continued on his way. These are the facts. That is exactly how it went down on Wednesday. With sources. But what happened after that is important too.
7. Ro Khanna sat on the story for several days and coordinated with major networks in the United States to provide an incomplete picture of what happened. He did not disclose, for instance, that he himself was acting outside of military laws by being inside a CMZ. Khanna also described the incident to networks as him being held at gunpoint. While militarily personnel were armed because that is the nature of military personnel in closed military zones, there is absolutely no evidence that firearms were ever pointed at anyone or that anyone was threatened with anything gun-related.
8. In my view, these deliberate material omissions and egregious overstatements by Khanna were designed to paint him as a victim of something (I’m not sure what exactly) instead of stating the facts about exactly what happened. For instance, Khanna specifically didn’t report to any of the networks in his initial media blitz that he was in a restricted area controlled by Israel pulling a stunt against Israel. Aside for NBC, none of the networks disclosed that important fact. Khanna also fundraised off of this media blitz.
9. Another piece of information to have emerged from this story is that Khanna went on the trip with his new aide, a democratic socialist Cameron Kasky (in the photograph below). Kasky is a Columbia University dropout who had entered New York’s congressional race to replace Jerry Nadler (my district in NYC) and dropped out fairly quickly because he was a terrible candidate. His primary message was effectively that he has a deep hatred for Israel. For instance, he likened Israelis fighting in the Gaza war to mass shooters on high school campuses, and blamed the United States for both. Here is how he framed it: “What do the mass shooting at my high school in Parkland and the mass killings of children and adults in Gaza have in common? America is responsible.”
10. Most importantly, as I mentioned yesterday and as was repeated by the ambassador today, the trip’s timeline and intent are strange. The trip occurred shortly after Graham Platner’s campaign collapsed as a result of credible rape allegations. Ro Khanna was one of Platner’s most important supporters and campaigned with him in June, shortly before Platner won his primary. It is also peculiar that Khanna chose the Middle East, and not the United States, as the setting from which to announce his candidacy. Why are democratic socialists and left-leaning candidates so focused on what Israelis are doing in the Middle East and not on their own constituents in the United States?
So that’s what happened."

Hen Mazzig on X - "According to a source for the New York Post, Ro Khanna was invited to meet freed hostages and survivors of October 7th.  Khanna's team didn't even bother to respond.  His team was also offered an opportunity to meet with Druze civilians in the Golan Heights and a briefing on how aid is currently getting into Gaza. They didn't take it.  Now, if Ro Khanna genuinely believes that aid is not properly getting into Gaza, why not go to the briefing? If he thinks Israel is lying, wouldn't that be the perfect time to get proof?  But he didn't go, because those aren't his intentions. He didn't want to meet with victims of Hamas or those trying to get as much aid into Gaza as they can because they contradict his narrative.  And the narrative is all that matters."

MacKenzie Scott sends millions to nonprofit that supports anti-Israel and pro-Muslim groups | Fortune - "According to a Dec. 9 blog post written by Scott, her philanthropic organization Yield Giving donated to Solidaire Network, which says it “nurtures relationships between social movements and members to create regenerative systems rooted in love and justice.” This means in practice that the network has funded organizations including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), the US Palestinian Community Network, and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), according to tax filings and press releases from the Solidaire Network...  SJP and AMP—two organizations receiving funding from Solidaire Network—face investigations in both the House and Senate for allegedly coordinating with terror group Hamas to start anti-Israel protests in the U.S...  U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) in September also asked the FBI to investigate what he calls the “virulently antisemitic” PYM, after its leader Aisha Nizar called on supporters to disrupt the U.S. F-35 fighter jet supply chain."

The Archbishop of Canterbury is blind to the true enemies of Middle East Christians - "Which country offers the strongest legal protections and lowest risk of persecution for Christians in the Middle East? Where do believers enjoy the greatest safety and the richest opportunities to flourish? The answer, of course, is Israel.  According to a US State Department report on international religious freedom, this is because “the country’s laws and Supreme Court rulings protect the freedoms of conscience, faith, religion, and worship, regardless of an individual’s religious affiliation”, and it “criminalises actions that damage or desecrate religious sites or restrict access to worshippers”.  Anybody following the new Archbishop of Canterbury’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land last week, however, would be encouraged to think rather less favourably of the Jewish state. Unlike Justin Welby, who in 2017 met leaders from both sides (yet was hardly free from Israelophobia himself), her schedule seemed to be rammed with set-pieces designed to cast a cloud over Jerusalem... At the end of her pilgrimage, Mullally got political, releasing an open letter to Anglicans calling for an end to the “occupation” and a “viable two-state solution”, with Jerusalem as a “shared capital”. Strangely, she did not mention that Ramallah had previously rejected this precise offer, such as when Ehud Olmert tabled it in 2008. As a professional nurse rather than foreign policy expert, perhaps she had no idea. Provocatively, the Archbishop’s letter also spoke of the “indigenous Christian Palestinian presence in the Holy Land”. Indigenous? Now that’s a weapon of a word. Without denying Arab history, delve deep enough into Christian indigeneity and you will end up finding Jews, who lived in Israel for a millennia before the birth of Christ, the Jewish prophet... much of Mullally’s campaigning focused on the Arab Christians living on the West Bank, who experience markedly less freedom than their brethren in Israel. But their plight cannot solely be blamed on the Israelis. Partly – the Archbishop was apparently not aware of this detail – it is due to the repressive nature of the Palestinian regime in Ramallah, which is saturated in corruption, Islamism and brutality. Israel does not qualify for the 2026 World Watch List, one of the best-known indexes of persecution against Christians globally, published annually by the charity Open Doors. This is backed up by other groups, such as the Pew Research Center.  Open Doors does, however, highlight the persecution faced by Christians in the Palestinian Territories, which were ranked at 62 on its 2025 World Watch List... Most Christians on the West Bank, Open Doors adds, feel they are “squeezed out” of their country, with some fleeing abroad. “We are considered foreigners, seen as people that come from the crusaders, we’re seen as infidels,” one testified... Of course, as Open Doors rightly reports, the “political situation with the State of Israel” does have an effect on civilians, with checkpoints – a security necessity, from Israel’s point of view – making life “extremely difficult” for all Palestinians. Then there is worrying intimidation on the fringes by gangs of contemptible Jewish extremists on the West Bank and in parts of Jerusalem, who have been emboldened by certain deplorable government ministers.  Certainly, Israel must do more to clamp down on this vandalism and harassment. But there are criminals and bigots in every society, and democracy provides no bulwark against the incompetence of elected governments.  Moreover, notwithstanding this darkness, settlers do not tend to target Palestinian Christians for their faith, unlike in Nigeria and Pakistan, where Christians are subjected to spectacular massacres, or Somalia, where converts are butchered.  While reporting in Sri Lanka in 2019, I saw with my own eyes – and smelled – the gruesome results of true Christian persecution, when jihadis killed 269 people in attacks on churches and hotels in what came to be known as the Easter Bombings. To say that such horrors dwarf settler bullying would be to understate the point greatly. As Jesus Himself put it: “You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”  There is no dispute. By far the greatest threat to Christians around the world is Islamist extremism. Other factors include the communist oppression seen in North Korea, the dictatorial paranoia seen in Eritrea, the religious nationalism of India and the clan oppression in parts of East Africa; but jihadism eclipses them all. The Jewish state, by contrast, a wonderful place for Christians... Instead, she shone a spotlight on the failings of a natural ally while essentially ignoring the true enemies of the Church. It’s an approach that is sure to win plaudits on the Left, but by implying that Israel is a malevolent force, she is falling victim to trendy bigotry. In short, she made herself part of the problem."

moses hess on X - "“I don't know what his intentions were,” he threw a fire bomb at jews"
Kathryn Paisner on X - "The speed with which we went from, “Don’t stop talking about Charlottesville,” to, “There are good people on both sides of antisemitic terrorist attacks,” is really breathtaking."
From Melat Kiros, a Democratic candidate. Time to demonise the "far right" and Republicans for anti-Semitism. Of course she blames 911 on US foreign policy too

Aristonkle on X - "I’ve stated this before but I want to ensure that every single person that sees this talking point out in the wild is armed with the correct response.   When leftists like this person or Hasan Piker say that excursions in the Middle East resulted in 9/11, be sure to bring up the fact that the chief motivation for Bin Laden was the fact that he considered coalition forces that were *invited* to KSA were “illegal crusaders” on holy land and that the West needed to be punished for this.   Those same coalition forces pushed out Saddam’s armored corps from their brief invasion of KSA when they attacked the Saudi city of Khafji and  saved Saudi Arabia as a state by doing so.   It was, and is, an entirely schizophrenic argument."

Hen Mazzig on X - "I’m all for representation of Palestinians, but Prada posting a video to their 33M+ followers of their new “Palestinian ambassador” Saint Levant wearing a necklace shaped like the entire land with Israel erased, that’s a message.  If an Israeli, or any Jew, wore a pendant that included Gaza, the outrage would be instant. But erasing Israel, “from the river to the sea,” gets a luxury campaign."

Dr. Maalouf ‏ on X - "Can anyone help me understand this? Because I genuinely don’t get it. LGBT people are imprisoned, tortured, and killed in ‘Palestine.’ So how come they are the biggest supporters of Palestine?"
Larry Sanger on X - "There are three reasons.  First, woke progressives (“intersectional activists”) constantly thirst for confirmation of their moral superiority, which they typically get by defending whoever (they're told) is victimized, and by signaling their superiority both to the victimizers and to all who do not signal hard enough. Virtue signaling is socially powerful and explains a lot of what wokesters say and do.  The second reason is that there is only one victimizer that matters: Western civilization (and its defenders). So, if a group—like Muslims, trans people, illegal aliens, etc.—is plausibly victimized by the West, they become the victims. Then they are helped, their causes promoted, and any harm that comes to them becomes the cause du jour.  The third reason is that the only victims that matter are those that, by being defended, can help destroy Western civilization, or whatever parts of it stand in the way of a socialist, egalitarian (“woke”) utopia. Muslims can weaken Western civilization by increasing crime (including rape gangs), creating ghettos, and threatening terrorism and Sharia Law. Think several European cities with large unassimilated Muslim populations. The trans movement can be used as a blunt weapon to indoctrinate children into the joys of LGBTQ and as a way to divide Christian denominations. Illegal aliens can be used to defend violent gangs, drive up housing costs, and generally increase alienation in society. Thus we have sanctuary cities.  Conservatives notice what's going on, complain about it, and thereby can be identified with the "victimizers." They do unforgiveable things like opposing the spread of Islam, say that trans women aren't women, and complain about needless, avoidable violence by known illegal immigrant criminals.  So the left then secures its wonderful tasty moral superiority by defending the "victims" against the complaints of conservatives.  As to LGBT people (or women) victimized by Muslims in Muslim societies, leftists haven't been told this, so they don't believe they are. Or, if they can't avoid the facts, they believe this is a legitimate cultural difference. Not only are the moral relativists, their commitment to moral relativism becomes central to their moral self-concept when they reflect that their purpose is to defend victims as “historically marginalized groups” and to fight the historical oppressors. Any suggestion that it's a serious problem is the bigoted and offensive imposition of the great oppressor, Western civilization, which is the source of all the worst problems in the world. Any violence and other crime on the side of the victims is thus recast (in the twisted progressive mind) as legitimate acts of war, essentially; for the progressive to acknowledge a problem would be treasonous. This is why the hatred of Israelis became so pronounced after October 7.  I have no doubt that some LGBT progressives are uncomfortable with their “strange bedfellows,” but allies are allies. In fact, the self-disinterested ability to accept them as allies in the bigger fight is surely another source of that tasty sense of moral superiority."

Leslie Kajomovitz on X - "The United Nations International School is technically a private institution, with annual tuition of about $50,000. In practice, however, it receives at least $21 million in taxpayer-funded tuition payments each year through the United Nations.  It is outrageous that taxpayer money is being used to fund a school where public records show students have been allowed to use Nazi-inspired cartoons and antisemitic imagery and compare Israel to Nazi Germany.  Nearly 30% of its student body (about 415 students) are children of UN staff. As part of their employment benefits, The UN pays for for their children's private school tuition.  This does not include the children of ambassadors and diplomatic staff, whose tuition amounts to an additional $7 million annually.  These figures apply only to UNIS in New York. Not all UN staff children attend this school. Across the entire UN system, taxpayer-funded private school tuition for UN staff children exceeds $200 million per year.  @USAmbUN  @michaelgwaltz  @HillelNeuer  @UNWatch  @dannydanon  @IsraelinUN  @gidonsaar"
Clearly when the UN condemns Israel it cannot be lying and this is also proof anti-Zionism isn't anti-Semitism

Andy Burnham just gave away what kind of PM he'll be - and it stinks - "The idea that Andy Burnham will bring change is laughable. He has just made perfectly clear that the obsession with Israel is to remain the priority of his unelected incoming Labour Government. Burnham’s contrived video criticising Keir Starmer for the Labour Party’s position in the Israel-Hamas war is our best indication yet of the type of Prime Minister we are about to get.  In the space of three minutes, Burnham confirmed that he will cynically stop at nothing to exploit the tragic events of the Middle East to win back far-Left Labour voters from the Green Party. The stench of desperation is strong. It matters not to Burnham that Israel - a strategic ally of the UK - has been at war with a terror group banned in our own country. Or that its refusal to release hundreds of Israeli hostages was the sole reason for the war’s continuation.  The reality is that the anti-Israel crowd cannot be appeased. No amount of anti-Israel measures will sate their desire to denigrate the world’s only Jewish state. I recall all too well how the Labour Government’s recognition of a Palestinian state – hitherto the holy grail of anti-Israel obsessives - was immediately met with demands for ever more punitive steps directed at Israel... The very fabric of Britain is being torn apart by those that have given succour to the anti-Israel hate mobs. It has fuelled sectarian politics with so called ‘Independents’ elected to Parliament and even local councils exclusively on the cause of Gaza. It can also be directly linked to the record levels of anti-Jewish racism which have brought international shame on our country.  Brits will be wondering today why the first act of the incoming Prime Minister has been to appease the crazies by jumping on their hateful bandwagon. They will question why Israel is a bigger priority than the cost of living, ending illegal immigration or fixing the broken NHS. They would be right to fear that things are only going to get worse. Even before walking into 10 Downing Street, Burnham has chosen to pick a fight with our most important ally, the United States... The UK is today regarded as a basket case. Once revered as a nation, we have become a source of ridicule. The student style gesture politics of successive Labour prime ministers amounts to little more than a race to the bottom."
The left wing wishlist is endless, after all

American Antizionism

American Antizionism

A year after the Six Day War, the French scholar Leon Poliakov published the penultimate volume of his magnum opus, a millennia-spanning four-part history of antisemitism.  He concluded Volume 3, From Voltaire to Wagner, with the declaration, “Historians are not prophets, and I will refrain, finally, from making any prognosis. Only the future will show if, and to what degree, a hatred of the Jews, justified theologically until the French Revolution and ‘racially’ until the Hitlerite holocaust, will have a third incarnation under a new ‘anti-Zionist’ guise.”

Poliakov did not refrain for long, perhaps because the future showed itself more quickly than he had anticipated. Before turning to the final volume, which carried the history of antisemitism through the rise of Nazism, he rendered his prognosis on the Jewish question of his own day. “[T]he devil painted on the wall has swapped his name from ‘Jewish conspiracy’ to ‘Zionist conspiracy,’” Poliakov wrote in a 1969 monograph. The title of that book, De l’antisionisme à l’antisemitisme, telegraphed the argument. “Under the pretext of a critical attitude toward the Jewish state and its supporters, an ancient passion inspired by hatred continues to make its way.” A meticulous historian, Poliakov then added a nuance that current debates over antizionism routinely ignore: “However, it does so in different ways, depending on the region and the regime.”

Two years after Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Flood” (we must confront the name for reasons that I will explain below), it is less the horrors perpetrated on October 7 than the traumas of October 8 that have forced an American Jewish reckoning. What does it mean that, of all places, America’s campuses and cities were the most likely to meet Jews in their grief with rationalizations, exhilaration, silence, abandonment, and shunning? Jews in the United States are now discovering how antizionism makes its way here in this region. The experience has caught them intellectually, emotionally, and politically unprepared. I am neither a pastor nor a politician, so I cannot offer much on the latter two. But to those hoping to gain some intellectual footing, I can offer my perspective as a sociologist who has written on social movement activism, a historian who has studied antizionism in the USSR, and a professor who has been navigating academic antizionism in the US since the 1990s. These shape how I understand what American antizionism is, how educational failures enabled it to gain a foothold, how it has become more dangerous (at least for now) than race-based antisemitism, and how Jewish Americans might begin to blaze a path forward. 

An American Mass Movement in Action

Unlike antizionism’s Soviet and Iranian variants, no national authority in the United States leads the charge. Rather, coordinated by activist networks, American antizionism has been advancing through petty regimes, to borrow Poliakov’s term—the scholarly association, the student union, the publishing house, the school board, the grocery co-op, the city council, and now perhaps even the mayor’s office. Efforts to institutionalize antizionism via divestment resolutions and boycott policies manifest sporadically at the local level rather than via a unified national policy. This devolution to local government and civil society might be the crucial adaptation in the Americanization of antizionism. It has allowed a new reality to take root without much notice: A mass movement premised on denying and undoing political rights that Jews have already secured now expresses itself through (some) governmental institutions in the United States. 

This is new for the vast majority of American Jews, certainly for those born here after World War II. It is not a coincidence that the first book devoted to the critical analysis of antizionism—Poliakov’s—did not emerge from the United States, but from Europe. There, “Jewish questions” have long served as an organizing principle of political debate. Here, on the other hand, the notion of a mass political movement challenging Jewish claims to equality was assumed to be a relic of the past. It was also assumed to follow a specific model: that of Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, the Ku Klux Klan, and the like, i.e, a challenge to individual Jewish civic rights in the US based on religious and racial claims. Nothing in recent American experience prepared Jews for a young and energetic mass movement committed—not for racial reasons but ostensibly for reasons of social justice—to the notion that the principles of equal rights and self-determination of peoples enshrined in the UN Charter should no longer apply to Jews. Had the movement confined itself to critique of Israeli policy, even scathing critique, Jews might have better retained their footing. But the mobilization of antizionism framed itself in the language of opposition to “Zionism” writ large. It is not merely the exercise of Israeli state power that a growing portion of the American public has deemed problematic, but Jews’ claim to have a national right to self-determination in the first place.

How are we to make sense of the rise of such an antagonistic politics in the United States? Having been immersed for more than a decade in the study of Jewish American mass mobilization (specifically, their fight against Soviet antizionism), my understanding is shaped by a vibrant field of sociological scholarship on social movements. This leads me to see American antizionism as a politics that is defined more by its actions than by its arguments. And because I recognize it as an independent phenomenon in its own right, rather than just as a critique of something else, I spell it “antizionism” and not “anti-Zionism.”

These points demand clarification.

First, what defines antizionism better: its actions or its arguments? College-educated people are often guilty of a double standard, viewing working-class political movements as irrationally passionate, but their own political movements as staunchly principled. Because antizionist politics have taken root mainly among the intelligentsia—professors, university students, journalists, artists—many people assume that antizionism is therefore best understood as a reasoned intellectual position, more rational than emotional. This certainly serves the interests of antizionism’s proponents, but it is a fiction rooted in social class biases. Antizionism is like any other political movement. It is not reducible to its intellectual dimensions. In the real world, mass movements are always more than the manifestos proffered by their most articulate spokespeople.

To understand what antizionism is in practice, we should focus less on what its intellectuals say and more on what its activists do. For one, while there may be continuities between what elites express and what the masses enact, there are also always gaps. And it is in these gaps that the protestors seize control of their movement from the writers. But even more important, only through action does a social movement create a reality of its own out there in the world. Our ancestors had a way of saying this: Naaseh v’nishma, “We will do and we will understand.” Behavior comes first. Meanings emerge through the doing. Praxis. This is the social movement not on paper, but in real life.

Look at images from the “mostly peaceful” (i.e., sometimes violent) antizionist encampments that were shared on social media or broadcast on the nightly news. Keffiyeh- and medical-masked demonstrators pitch tents, wave flags, chant slogans, block walkways, storm libraries, and confront Jews. The protests are full of action, emotion, conflict, noise, and drama. The antizionist movement in the US has praxis in abundance. Indeed, the movement’s undeniable success at mass mobilization brings us to the second point: there is a reason it is more appropriate to write of the movement using the spelling “antizionism” in all lowercase without a hyphen.

Consider the alternative. To write of what we have seen since October 8, 2023 as “anti-Zionism” suggests all that is at stake is reasoned critique of the ideologies of Berl Katznelson, Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and other formative thinkers who laid the intellectual groundwork for the Jewish state. Such a narrow idealist approach obscures the antizionist movement’s praxis and conceals its scope. Antizionism is more than just a critique. It is bigger than just a set of ideas. One need not agree with it or support it to give it the credit it is due: Antizionism is a world-altering political phenomenon. Every Jew who has felt even the smallest bit affected by the changed political context in which they now live—be it choosing to tuck in a Magen David necklace, deciding not to mention one’s travel to Israel, second-guessing whether to apply to a certain university, or, alternatively, seeking out Jewish community for the first time—can attest to that fact.

Antizionism is also not the first political movement to present itself as an antithesis to an imagined Jewish villain. Decades ago, scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century race-based oppression of Jews recognized that this was true of the politics that they studied. This insight led them to revise how they spelled the name of these politics, from “anti-Semitism” to “antisemitism.” Through this change, they also avoided lending their support to any claims the self-professed “antis” made about “Semites” or “Semitism.” These were properly understood as a phantasmagoria conjured by the antisemite, a socially constructed Other to define oneself against.

Deleting a hyphen is a small move, but it makes a bold claim. Antisemitism has little to do with “Semites” and everything to do with antisemites. It is a phenomenon in its own right, propelled by its own dynamics. To understand it, one has to look at those who profess it rather than those whom they profess to be against. I make the shift here from “anti-Zionism” to “antizionism” for the same reasons.

The antizionism that actually exists out there on American streets is a phenomenon sui generis. It is a political mass movement defined not by abstract ideas but by lived praxis. There is a loose connection between what antizionist professors in the classrooms write and what antizionist students in the encampments do. But the behaviors create a lived antizionism that outstrips systematized ideologies formulated by intellectuals.

In other words, antizionism is what antizionism does. Defined by its practice rather than by any claims it makes about “Zionism,” American antizionism involves a now-familiar behavioral repertoire: encampments and other occupations of university spaces, boycotts of Israeli scholars and artists and also of select American Jewish groups including Hillel and the Anti-Defamation League, masked harassment of Jewish students, defacement and destruction of Jewish property, disruption of performances by Jewish musicians, and so forth. Like other movements, antizionism at the extreme finds expression in political violence: Jews and Israelis in the United States have fallen victim to antizionist physical assault, firebombing, and shooting. Although the violence has been committed specifically in the name of the movement’s professed ideals, it is better understood not as an agreed-upon tool in American antizionism’s strategic repertoire, but rather as an indication of antizionism’s success in constructing an enemy. Those in its ranks who are motivated to take up violence know whom to target.

Antizionist praxis in the US also involves rituals, symbols, and behaviors that build and sustain community. I’ll offer a few examples. Protesters do not simply shout “Free Palestine.” They often add a second “free.” Why? Because the spondee (“Frée, Frée”) followed by the dactyl (“Pálēstīne”) creates a rhythm more easily and mellifluously chanted by crowds. This formulation has become so ritualized within antizionist movement culture that the gunman who murdered Israeli embassy staffers Sarah Lynn Milgrim, z”l, and Yaron Lischinsky, z”l, at the Capital Jewish Museum in May 2025 shouted “Free, Free Palestine,” with the doubled “Free,” as he was being arrested, even though he was alone and even though one “free” would have sufficed to communicate the motive for the attack. He was signaling that his actions were part of a larger antizionist movement.

Boycotting Israel is another example of a behavior that adherents use to demonstrate affiliation with the movement. When someone associates their name with a boycott effort by signing a public petition, for example, they realize antizionism in a behavioral sense. This is also true when they follow through on their commitment, as when a professor refuses to write a letter of recommendation for a student seeking to study abroad in Israel, or when a member of a film festival committee votes to reject a submission because it comes from Tel Aviv. But I would argue that the public declaration of joining a boycott campaign accomplishes something different, and arguably bigger, than the private act of boycotting. Its very visibility makes it a form of collective action. By speaking out in favor of boycotting, antizionists build community, define an Other, and affirm their shared values of excluding and marginalizing that Other.

Of course, those who advocate for a boycott would be loath to speak of the practice in this way. People like to think the best of themselves. Also, acknowledging the thirst to ostracize could make it harder to recruit supporters, particularly in communities that profess inclusion and belonging as core values. Instead, pro-boycott discourse combines moralistic language with statements emphasizing a strategic goal. Boycotts are typically framed as a means to achieve various Israel-Palestine-related outcomes. But as sociologist Robert Merton famously taught, regardless of whether social behaviors fulfill their officially declared “manifest” purposes, they usually also serve some “latent” functions that their practitioners may not be aware of—or are aware of but may not wish to examine too closely. And so it is no great stretch for the sociologically minded to recognize that the antizionist practice of boycott holds far richer and more complex meanings beyond placing pressure on Israel.

The discipline of anthropology holds other keys to deciphering deeper meanings of the practice of boycott. The discipline starts from the premise that the meanings embedded in human behavior are always layered and multidimensional. Boycott campaigns are no exception. And because boycotts, by their nature, center on a refusal to interact, anthropological studies of how and why people police boundaries between Self and Other, between good and bad, become especially helpful. I see the boycotts as a perfect example of what Mary Douglas highlights in her classic “analysis of the concept of pollution and taboo”—the human penchant for dividing the world into opposing categories of purity and defilement. Antizionists establish themselves as a moral community by defining “Zionism” as a polluted category and then practicing rituals of distancing and exclusion. This is the latent meaning encoded in the act of signing one’s name to a boycott campaign or holding a referendum on an institutional boycott. These are behaviors by which antizionists construct themselves as a moral community in contradistinction to a polluting Other. (A polluting Other that, we need not add, just happens to be Jewish.)

I recognize the irony of looking to anthropology to make sense of antizionist praxis, considering that the American Anthropological Association has played an important role in the normalization of antizionism in American academia. Future historians of antizionism will undoubtedly debate whether those leading the successful boycott campaign in the AAA failed to recognize that they were participating in a ritualized Othering, or whether they understood this only too well and used their expertise to more effectively isolate Israelis and Jews. Regardless, the failings of a scholarly association do not negate the insights of a discipline or the window that anthropology gives us onto the nature of antizionism as it exists in the US today.

As I write this, a fragile ceasefire has taken shape in Gaza. Fighting in Lebanon has subsided. The Iranian front is quiet. Let us hope this augurs better days to come. But if American Jews imagine that all this will halt the momentum of antizionism here at home, they misunderstand the dynamics of social movement mobilization. Movements make themselves sustainable by creating a subculture and by building community. In these regards, 2024 was a watershed year for the antizionist movement in the United States. American Jews have hardly begun to recognize this, much less come to terms with it.

Rhetorics of Violence

Like their counterparts in Israel, American Jews were caught by surprise on October 7, 2023. They had experienced horror upon seeing the images of slaughter that launched the Al Aqsa Flood. They expected that horror to be shared. In most cases, it was. But American Jews also discovered to their dismay that antizionists in the United States immediately brought the language of deluge into their own communities as a way of symbolically participating in the assault. Just as Hamas was “flooding” Israel, antizionists organized and promoted protests by describing them as attempts to “flood” campuses and streets. For those hoping for a denunciation of the attacks, this was worse than silence. Identity of language asserted identity of purpose, collapsing the distance between the Al-Nukhba Force and antizionist demonstrators an ocean away.

Flood language also enabled antizionists to intimidate American Jews without making the threat explicit. This is part of a broader phenomenon in which would-be tormentors transform elements of murders past into symbols that evoke trauma in the present. Racists wave nooses at Black Americans to evoke lynchings. Antisemites make hissing sounds at Jews to evoke gas chambers. By adopting “flood” language and images of Hamas paragliders even as the victims in Israel were still being tallied, antizionists in the US found a way of supporting the Hamas attacks overseas while simultaneously inflicting emotional pain on Jews here at home. Since October 7, flood language has continued to play a subtle but important role in the expansion and evolution of the Al-Aqsa Flood as a globalized antizionist campaign seeding violence against Jews on every continent.

In the US, as tens of thousands responded affirmatively and “flooded” college campuses, the language of deluge gave way to similarly evocative calls for “intifada.” It is doubtful that most of those adopting the movement’s rhetoric understood the range of meanings of the words activists were inserting into the mobilization. This polysemy proved an asset to the antizionist cause, enabling it to popularize a coded yet plausibly deniable rhetoric of violence. That such rhetoric found fertile ground in universities, where humanities and social sciences faculty typically demand sensitivity to the nuances of language, is one of the more disheartening aspects of the embrace of antizionism within the academy. It is not clear whether this stems from students’ and professors’ readiness to tolerate a coded language of violence or an inability to recognize it. Either way, whether due to moral failure, intellectual failure, or some combination, the result does not reflect well on the American academy.

American Jews, sensing the implications all too well, found themselves flummoxed. How could so many people, and especially young, educated, high-minded Americans, respond so enthusiastically to these calls to “flood” the streets and “globalize the intifada”? Hadn’t Jewish groups invested millions over many decades trying to teach America’s youth that good people shouldn’t join crowds engaging in hostile rhetoric or behavior toward Jews or, for that matter, treating any group as a villainous Other? American Jews had been true believers in the idea that teaching the horrors of the European past could help build a more tolerant American future. Had Holocaust education let them down? 

The Problem with a Sample of One

Until his death at the age of 95, Northwestern University professor Howard Becker was one of America’s most original sociologists. Almost thirty years ago, he wrote a delightful book about sociological research methods, Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While Doing It. It remains in print today. I give it to graduate students, and I assign it in my undergraduate sociological methods seminar. Unlike most social science methods texts, Becker’s says little about t-tests and statistical significance. Instead, it delivers on its promise and teaches readers how to think.

Becker opens his discussion of sampling by explaining that “every scientific enterprise tries to find out something that will apply to everything of a certain kind by studying a few examples” from which we hope to generalize. But this is often problematic because “the part may not represent the whole as we would like to think it does.” In trying to understand why, he zeroes in on implicit biases that encourage people to limit their investigations to canonical cases while ignoring the rest. Telling the story of his choice to conduct research on medical education at the University of Kansas, Becker related that colleagues could not understand why in the world he did not focus on the Ivies. They thought, he said, that “perhaps we didn’t know any better.” He also told of American Sociological Association president Everett Hughes’s criticism of research into sexual deviance that examined prostitution while ignoring the celibacy of priests and nuns. Why assume that deviation from the norm is found only on the bell curve’s right tail? The distribution also has a tail to the left.

When we impose arbitrary constraints on the samples we choose to consider, we guarantee that we will fail to comprehend the full breadth of the phenomena we want to make sense of. As Becker explains, “Our general ideas always reflect the selection of cases from the universe of cases that might have been considered.” Our knowledge cannot incorporate data from cases we never bother to look at. How is our understanding of the world compromised as a result?

Becker’s book helps us to see one major reason why American antizionism has been tolerated and allowed to flourish. For the vast majority of Americans, including Jewish Americans, what they have learned about the Othering of Jews relies on a sample of one. For half a century, students in American middle schools and high schools have been given a single example of mass anti-Jewish politics over and over, to the exclusion of all else: Nazi-style race-based antisemitism. The decades-long oppression of Soviet Jews in the name of antizionism, to cite another example, is not taught. In American civics curricula and thus in American general knowledge, it might as well not exist.

What is the result? Americans do not have a conceptual language for thinking about the Othering of Jews in all its many flavors. Everything gets forced into the language of “antisemitism,” with its Nazi and racist referents. This has allowed both antizionists and the Jews who fight back against them to avoid engaging with the realities of their own situation. Among the protestors in the Palestine encampments, good-hearted people were prepared to participate in language and behaviors that threatened Jews, and to do so without moral qualms, because they understood their politics as “not antisemitic,” by definition. Why?  Because they had been taught that antisemitism is the politics of right-wing racists, and the encampments expressed the politics of progressive anti-racists.

For their part, American Jews frightened or appalled by the protests rushed to label them “antisemitic,” as if this gave them a stronger grasp on the phenomenon. They would have done better to simply note that in these instances Americans were ostracizing Jews in the name of and in the tradition of antizionism—a mode of antagonistic politics rooted in Jews’ Soviet and Middle Eastern experiences, and justified in language originating in Marxist, anti-Western-imperialist, and Islamist ideologies. Had the long and problematic history of antizionism been given even a fraction of the time devoted to Nazi antisemitism in our curricula, museum exhibitions, and Oscar-winning films, Americans would not be limited to a sample of one on which to base their understandings of how political movements define Jews as an enemy. But for motivations we can only ponder, they were given just one historical case to reason with. As a result, public conversation has been shunted down the dead end of debating whether antizionism “is” or “is not” antisemitism. It is not. In the Soviet context for certain, and arguably in the American context today, antizionism is worse.

How is antizionism worse? The Soviet persecutions speak for themselves. The Kremlin declared that its policy toward Jews was rooted in antizionism, not antisemitism. We take it at its word. The American case requires some explanation.

First, consider the likelihood of exposure to day-to-day experiences of marginalization. American antizionism finds its social base in the same educated, urbanized professional class that most Jewish Americans inhabit. Jews are more likely to personally encounter antizionism in their workplaces, schools, and communities than they are to encounter racist antisemitism, whose adherents are mainly drawn from demographics that Jews interact with less regularly.

Second, thanks to the educational system’s sample of one, Jewish Americans know as little about the history of antizionism as do their non-Jewish peers. Ignorant of even the most rudimentary facts about the long twentieth-century tradition of antizionist persecutions, marginalization, and violence, young Jewish Americans possess for antizionism neither the historical awareness, nor the intellectual defenses, nor the visceral repulsion that they have for racist antisemitism. This has allowed antizionists to enjoy some measure of success in recruiting Jewish American support. Obviously, for the movement, the ability to place Jews front and center is a strategic asset, and one that American antizionism enjoys, but American antisemitism does not. 

Third, because antizionism comes with a seal of approval from its scholarly supporters, it enjoys a legitimacy that Jewish Americans’ educated peers are reluctant to bestow upon racist antisemitism. (This partly explains the mantra, “I am not antisemitic, I am only antizionist,” as well as why the reverse is not heard: “I am not antizionist, I am only antisemitic.” Class bias is operating here. Among professionals, politics that appear intellectually unserious tend to be stigmatized.) Intellectual legitimacy is an especially important resource as antizionist activists seek to make their movement sustainable. It is a crucial piece of efforts to incorporate antizionism into teacher training and school curricula, shaping how future generations understand their world and the role of Jews in it.

Fourth, because of its particular combination of characteristics—an intellectually justified, socially acceptable Othering of Jews whose social base is in the professional class—antizionism easily makes the leap from individuals’ personal politics to systemic discrimination in the sectors of the American economy where antizionists (and Jews) typically work, shop, and play. One can reasonably speak of institutionalized antizionism in the academy, the non-profit sector, and the arts world. One cannot say the same of antisemitism from the racist right, at least not at the moment.

Only regarding the issue of physical violence can one make a case that racist antisemitism at present constitutes a greater immediate threat to Jewish American well-being than antizionism. Antisemites are better armed, have better paramilitary organization, and are more organized into antigovernmental revolutionary cells. This does not mean that antisemites have a monopoly on violence targeting American Jews, however. The antizionist attacks of Spring 2025 that killed one in Colorado and two in Washington, DC, should disabuse any who comfort themselves with that illusion.

All of this can change. America’s political situation is at its most volatile since the late 1960s. Racist antisemitism is making headway among some factions of the MAGA right. It is possible that such antisemitism will one day supplant antizionism as the primary driver of efforts to roll back Jewish political participation and equality. But at least for now, antizionism’s grip on that role appears secure.

Cognitive Liberation

American Jews are caught in a trap partly of their own making. But I see a few ways out. The paths all begin in the same way, with Jews learning to recognize and name the power dynamics that have rendered them vulnerable in the first place. Cognitive liberation is the prerequisite to any effective response to the degradations of antizionism.

Most importantly, Jews should stop indulging the definitional debate, “Is antizionism antisemitism?”  When it is forced upon them, let them simply respond, “Antisemitism is the Othering of Jews from the American right. Antizionism is the Othering of Jews from the American left. All the rest is commentary. Now go and fight both.” If pressed to elaborate, they can remind themselves and those they are addressing that antisemitism and antizionism were state policies of the twentieth century’s two most powerful totalitarian regimes, and that America’s declarations of victory over Nazism and Communism were premature. The legacies of Hitlerite antisemitism and Stalinist antizionism echo into the present day, influencing the thinking of many Americans who are often unaware of the pedigree of their ideas.

Ultimately, it is up to antisemites and antizionists to change their own minds by beginning to understand the history they are perpetuating. This is their work. It is not Jewish Americans’ job to do it for them. But it is important that Jewish Americans, for their own sake, be willing to state that antizionism is itself a form of oppression. One does not need to label it antisemitism to make that point. Were its history better known, the term “antizionism” would bear the stigma of the evils committed in its name. But who knows this history well besides émigrés who remember their treatment as Jews under the Soviet and Iranian regimes? For this reason, their voices are among the most important in the Jewish American community. Dialogue with the newest immigrants can help Jewish Americans take Poliakov’s dictum—that antizionism differs “depending on the region and the regime”—and use it to navigate their difficult situation.

Finally, Jewish Americans must tackle the problem of the “sample of one.” This means reinventing Jewish education to present Nazi antisemitism not as the paradigmatic example of twentieth-century anti-Jewish oppression but as one of its two major variants—the one rooted in the culture of the political right. This will require developing supplementary school, day school, summer camp, and youth group curricula for all age levels about Soviet and Iranian antizionism. By devoting equal time to this subject, Jewish children and their parents, too, will more easily recognize that the Othering of Jews is just as much a tradition of the political left, and will be capable of specifying how and why.

Then, real education can begin. How do these historical experiences of anti-Jewish oppression overlap or diverge? How could anti-Nazi Communists and anti-Communist Nazis both find in Jews a common enemy? How did each society mobilize its reigning academic paradigms (scientific racism, Marxist anti-imperialism) to justify discriminatory practices against Jews? What are the legacies of each in American politics and American education today? And regardless of whether one self-identifies as progressive, liberal, moderate, or conservative, how can one recognize and fight against the anti-Jewish inheritance of one’s own political camp? 

Would it also be possible to write the study of Soviet antizionism into American public school curricula? Had such an education been a regular part of American high school education, college students might have been less likely to join the antizionist wave that engulfed campuses with the start of the Al-Aqsa Flood. Or perhaps not. But at least they would not have embraced antizionism out of ignorance. Those who joined the encampments would have done so with the understanding that their politics come with an uncomfortable history. Then they could make the moral choice to confront this history or to knowingly ignore it.

We are unlikely to witness the study of Soviet antizionism in American public schools, however. High school history curricula are already overpacked, and the Cold War itself is barely treated. Curricular reform of this sort is a tall order.

But American Jews do have the power to change Jewish education. They cannot undo their failure to prepare their children who faced hostility on campus in 2023 and 2024 and 2025. But they can start now to teach the class of 2030 about the long and unsavory history of antizionism so that they will understand more about it than any of their professors or classmates who practice it in dangerous ignorance.

 

 

 

 

 

A Salient Example of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s Canonical Islamic Jew-Hatred—Introduction, Text, and Commentary (4/X)

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A Salient Example of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s Canonical Islamic Jew-Hatred—Introduction, Text, and Commentary (4/X)

"Koran 2:143 and 2:144 recount another example of the Jews""angry subversion," as per el- Husseini, of the alleged divine revelation which mandated changing the direction of prayer (the "qibla") from Jerusalem to Mecca. Classical (Tafsir Ibn Kathir; Tafsir al-Jalalayn) and modern (Maariful Qur‘an) commentaries, substantiate el-Husseini‘s gloss...

El-Husseini claims that verses 4:51 and 4:52 provide yet more evidence of the Jews‘ attempts to confuse and dishearten Muslims, while simultaneously abetting Muhammad‘s enemies. As a result, they have been accursed by Allah, eternally. Here too, el-Husseini‘s gloss is validated by the interpretations of classical and modern exegetes...

Concluding his litany of Koranic quotations, appropriately, with Koran 5:82, el-Husseini insists this verse "quite unmistakably characterizes the position of Islam and Judaism." Once again, his assessment is upheld by a continuum of authoritative Koranic exegeses that span over a thousand years, till now. The classical Koranic commentaries on Koran 5:82 by Tabari, Zamakashari (d. 1143), Baydawi (d. 1316), and Ibn Kathir demonstrate a uniformity of opinion regarding the animus of the Jews toward the Muslims, which is repeatedly linked to the curse of Koran 2:61 (i.e., for killing prophets, and transgressing against the will of Allah, repeated at verses including 2:90-91, 3:112, 3:181, and 4:155)...

The modern gloss on Koran 5:82 in Maariful Qur‘an notes that the vast preponderance of Jews felt an unremitting malice toward the Muslims, and a lust for the "material pleasures of mortal life"—the rare exceptions to this rule, for example, Abdullah ibn Salam, became Muslims!...

El-Husseini‘s depiction of the nefarious attempt by Shas b. Qays to foment discord amongst the nascent Muslim "Ansar" tribes is confirmed by Ibn Ishaq‘s sira account...

The verbatim canonical hadith which chronicle Muhammad‘s alleged poisoning by a Khaybar Jewess, are reproduced below, confirming el-Husseini‘s paraphrase of these accounts. However, el-Husseini does incorrectly attribute to Abu Huraira the hadith reports of Aisha and Anas which recorded the long-term, purportedly terminal effects of Muhammad‘s poisoning...

Additional confirmation of el-Husseini‘s overall narrative regarding Muhammad‘s poisoning is provided by the sira accounts of Ibn Ishaq, and Ibn Sa‘d. Ibn Ishaq‘s report concludes that Muhammad ultimately died from this poisoning episode, and notes his death was considered an act of "martyrdom"...

Ibn Sa‘d (in his Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al- Kabir) focuses on the putative Jewish conspiracy behind Muhammad‘s poisoning, while insisting adamantly that the Khaybar Jewess perpetrator was put to death...

El-Husseini appositely concludes his compendious discourse on Islam‘s canonical Jew-hatred with a central motif from Muslim eschatology, as recorded in the hadith—how the destruction of the Jews is requisite for ushering in the messianic times. Here are the canonical hadith el- Husseini accurately renders:

Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah‘s Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."

Abu Huraira reported Allah‘s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: "The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews."

Finally, apropos of their longstanding Islamic relevance, Ibn Kathir‘s 14th century commentary on Koran 4:155-159, which discusses Isa‘s (the Muslim Jesus‘) role in defeating the Dajjal (the Muslim "anti-Christ"), and his Jewish minions, invokes these same apocalyptic canonical hadith of Jew annihilation.

Despite its minor errors, or deviations, Hajj Amin el-Husseini‘s proclamation demonstrates great fidelity to the canonical Islamic narrative regarding the Jews. Seminal Western academic studies of how the Jews are depicted in the sira, hadith, and Koran, independently validate el- Husseini‘s assessment of these canonical Muslim sources. Moreover, these analyses have long been available to the academic community.

For example, Hartwig Hirschfeld‘s detailed mid-1880s analysis of the sira accounts of Muhammad‘s interactions with the Jews includes this rather understated summary of the "mutual disappointment" that characterized their relationship, and the predictably disastrous results for the Jews:

The Jews, for their part, were singularly disappointed in their expectations. The way in which Muhammad understood revelation, his ignorance and his clumsiness in religious questions in no way encouraged them to greet him as their Messiah. He tried at first to win them over to his teachings by sweetness and persuasion; they replied by posing once again the questions that they had already asked him; his answers, filled with gross errors, provoked their laughter and mockery. From this, of course, resulted a deep hostility between Muhammad and the Jews, whose only crime was to pass a severe judgment on the enterprise of this Arab who styled himself "God‘s prophet" and to find his conduct ridiculous, his knowledge false, and his regulations thoughtless. This judgment, which was well founded, was nevertheless politically incorrect [une faute politique], and the consequences thereof inevitably would prove to be disastrous for a minority that lacked direction or cohesion.

Georges Vajda‘s 1937 essay "Juifs et Musulmans selon Le Hadit" ("Jews and Muslims according to the Hadith")—a magisterial seventy-page analysis, replete with 202 accompanying notes—remains the definitive study of Jews and their relations with Muhammad and the Muslims, as depicted in the hadith.

Vajda‘s meticulously documented research conclusions were not understated. He demonstrates how Muslim eschatology highlights the Jews supreme hostility toward Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjal—the Muslim equivalent of the Antichrist—and as per another tradition, the Dajjal is in fact Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions state that the Dajjal will be accompanied by seventy thousand Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjal is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered—everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree. Vajda also emphasizes how the notion of jihad "ransom" extends even into Islamic eschatology:

Not only are the Jews vanquished in the eschatological war, but they will serve as ransom for the Muslims in the fires of hell. The sins of certain Muslims will weigh on them like mountains, but on the day of resurrection, these sins will be lifted and laid upon the Jews.

And in the corporeal world, Vajda observes, "distrust must reign" in Muslims‘ relations with Jews, because,

the Jews . . . are rebels to the solicitations of Islam and keep their religious traditions in a way liable to lead Muslims into error. Even when Islam knowingly borrows from Judaism, these borrowings are presented as amendments of the corresponding Jewish customs, unless they expressly forge traditions that aim to efface the true origin of the rite in question, by transposing it either into Arab paganism or into "Israelite" or pre- Israelite antiquity . . . especially beware of asking them for information of a religious kind.

But it is the Jews‘ stubborn malevolence, Vajda adds, that is their defining worldly characteristic:

Jews are represented in the darkest colors [i.e., in the hadith]. Convinced by the clear testimony of their books that Muhammad was the true prophet, they refused to convert, out of envy, jealousy and national particularism, even out of private interest. They have falsified their sacred books and do not apply the laws of God; nevertheless, they pursued Muhammad with their raillery and their oaths, and harassed him with questions, an enterprise that turned to their own confusion and merely corroborated the authenticity of the supernatural science of the prophet. From words they moved to action: sorcery, poisoning, assassination held no scruples for them.

Vajda concludes that these archetypes, in turn, justify Muslim animus toward the Jews, and the admonition to at best "subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination," as dhimmis, treated "with contempt," under certain "humiliating arrangements.""