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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Gaza was the two-state solution.

Figuratively, of course.

Gaza after Israel’s 2005 disengagement was not an “independent Palestinian state.” But Gaza was something enormously important: a real-world test of the basic theory behind the two-state solution.

Israel dismantled every one of its 21 settlements in Gaza, removed more than 8,000 Israelis from their homes, and withdrew its permanent military presence from inside the territory. Here was an opportunity for Palestinians to demonstrate what Palestinian self-government could become when Israelis were no longer living among them: Build institutions, build an economy, build political legitimacy, build infrastructure, build a future.

Build something Palestinians could point to and say: This is what we will do with independence.

Instead, Hamas took power in 2006 and, a year later, after fighting its Palestinian rival Fatah, Hamas violently seized Gaza and established its own government there.

And eventually came October 7th.

That does not mean Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza caused October 7th. Nor does it mean every conceivable Israeli withdrawal must produce the same result. It means something more uncomfortable: Territory is not enough.

For decades, the two-state solution has been marketed as though the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were fundamentally a real-estate dispute. Draw the correct border, remove enough settlements, give Palestinians enough land, provide sufficient economic assistance, put Israeli soldiers on one side and Palestinians on the other. Then peace will emerge.

October 7th exposed the weakness in that theory, because a two-state solution does not merely require two states; it requires two political societies capable of sustaining them.

The word “competency” will make people uncomfortable, but it should not. Competency does not mean intelligence. It does not mean ethnicity. It does not mean that one population is inherently superior to another. It means something much more practical: A competent state must be able to govern.

It needs functioning institutions. It needs a government capable of enforcing laws. It needs some monopoly over organized force (rather than competing militias answering to different political factions). It needs mechanisms for transferring power. It needs public institutions that survive individual leaders. It needs economic administration, courts, security forces and a political culture capable of making decisions that are painful but necessary.

Most importantly, if that state is supposed to exist beside another state with which it has spent generations at war, it needs a government capable of enforcing peace against its own extremists.

That last part matters enormously. Peace is not proven when moderates sign an agreement. Peace is proven when extremists try to destroy that agreement and the government stops them.

Israel has demonstrated this type of state capacity since 1948 — and in important ways even before independence.

Israel has featured governments of the Left, Right and Center. Prime ministers have lost elections. Coalitions have collapsed. Leaders have been prosecuted. Governments have made disastrous decisions and been publicly investigated for them. Israelis protest their government, replace their government, and bitterly disagree over what their government should do.

That is not evidence of perfection. It is evidence of a functioning state.

Palestinian politics has produced something very different. The Palestinian Authority has not held a presidential election since 2005 or a national legislative election since 2006. Mahmoud Abbas’ original four-year presidential mandate expired in 2009, yet he still rules to this day. Hamas, meanwhile, converted its 2006 “electoral victory” into exclusive rule over Gaza after its violent break with Fatah in 2007.

For nearly two decades, Palestinians have therefore lived under two rival Palestinian governments: Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in parts of the West Bank. That is not simply a democracy problem. It is a sovereignty problem. Who speaks for the Palestinians? Who controls the guns? Who has the authority to sign a permanent peace agreement? And, most importantly, who has the ability to enforce that agreement if another Palestinian faction rejects it?

These are not peripheral questions. They are the entire question. A Palestinian state created tomorrow would still have to answer the most basic question of statehood: Who is actually in charge?

This brings us to an even deeper problem with the two-state solution: Two states only produce peace if both states consider the creation of those states the end of the conflict.

That distinction is routinely ignored. If Israel believes a Palestinian state means the Palestinians receive sovereignty and the conflict is over, while a powerful Palestinian movement believes a Palestinian state is merely another stage in the struggle against Israel, the two sides are not agreeing to the same deal. One is agreeing to an end state; the other is agreeing to a new starting position.

And that is where the ideological difference between Zionism and much of Palestinianism becomes impossible to ignore.

Zionism is fundamentally an affirmative ideology. It answers one question: What do the Jewish People need? The answer is Jewish national self-determination in the Jewish ancestral homeland. Zionism does not require France to disappear. It does not require Jordan to disappear. It does not require Egypt to disappear. And it does not require Palestinians to disappear either. A Jewish state and a Palestinian state can therefore exist simultaneously within the logic of Zionism.

The existence of “Palestine” inherently negates Zionism. That is the contradiction few folks wants to confront. Palestinian politics has never fully resolved the contradiction between building “Palestine” and undoing Israel.

In 1947, the United Nations recommended partitioning the land into separate Jewish and Arab states. Palestinian Arab leadership rejected partition. The Arab Higher Committee subsequently reaffirmed its rejection of the plan.

That matters because there was no occupation of the West Bank by Israel in 1947. There were no Israeli settlements in the West Bank. There was no Israeli control of Gaza. Yet partition was still unacceptable.

Why?

Because the argument was not merely about where the Jewish state would be. It was about whether a Jewish state should exist at all.

More than seven decades later, Hamas’ own political documents still define “Palestine” as extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, rejects recognition of Israel, and describes the establishment of a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines as a possible formula of national consensus without surrendering its claim to all of the territory.

That is not a minor semantic distinction. It is the difference between two states and two stages. This is why Gaza matters so much.

Israelis were told for years that separation would make them safer. Get out of Gaza, remove the settlements, end the daily friction, give Palestinians greater control over their own lives, let them govern themselves.

Israel eventually did much of that. The result was not Singapore on the Mediterranean. It was Hamas. It is that territorial withdrawal without political transformation can simply move the battlefield. A border is only peaceful when the people controlling the other side have decided that what lies beyond that border is no longer theirs to conquer. Otherwise the border is merely a military line.

This is the mistake Western policymakers continue to make when they talk about two states as though statehood itself will manufacture moderation. Based on a massive sample size of history, it will not.

A Palestinian flag will not disarm Hamas. A Palestinian seat at the United Nations will not create independent courts. International recognition will not create democratic legitimacy. Foreign aid will not produce a monopoly on force. And drawing a border will not make a population accept that everything beyond that border belongs permanently to somebody else. Those things require political transformation.

This does not necessarily mean there can never be a Palestinian state. It means the sequence matters. The international community has spent decades asking: What must Israel give the Palestinians so that peace becomes possible? Perhaps the more important question is: What must Palestinian politics become so that Palestinian sovereignty becomes safe?

A viable Palestinian state requires far more than territory. It requires legitimate institutions, a unified government, a single security authority, the dismantling or absorption of independent armed groups, an education system that prepares children for coexistence rather than permanent conflict, leaders willing to tell their own population that millions of Israelis are not eventually going anywhere and, above all, an explicit understanding that Palestinian independence would settle the Palestinian claim against Israel rather than strengthen it.

That is the missing piece. You cannot impose borders around an unresolved ideology and call the conflict solved.

The international community remains addicted to the phrase “two-state solution” because it sounds reassuringly concrete: two peoples, two states, two flags, two governments, problem solved.

But conflicts are not ended by flags. They are ended when societies decide what they are willing to live without. Palestinians would have to accept something equally fundamental and, historically, much harder for their political movements to say without qualification: The Jewish state is permanent.

Not until the next war. Not until the next generation. Not until the demographic balance changes. Not until refugees and their descendants overturn its Jewish character. Not until another armed organization becomes powerful enough to challenge it.

Permanent.

That is what peace means.

And that is why October 7th should have fundamentally changed the way the world talks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Gaza demonstrated that removing Israelis from Palestinian territory does not automatically remove the Palestinian conflict with Israel. It demonstrated that self-government does not automatically produce responsible government. And it demonstrated that physical separation cannot substitute for ideological reconciliation.

The question is therefore not whether diplomats can draw two states on a map. They have been drawing those maps for generations. The question is whether Palestinian politics can produce a state whose purpose is to build “Palestine” rather than eventually dismantle Israel.

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This is a guest essay by Ben Koan, who writes the newsletter, “The Thousand-Year View.”

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In 2025, Peter Beinart, the Jewish-American columnist and opponent of Zionism, publicly apologized for speaking at Tel Aviv University, declaring that “I let my desire for that conversation override my solidarity with Palestinians, who in the face of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide have asked the world to boycott Israeli institutions that are complicit in their oppression.”

Beinart’s principle is that the most radical Palestinian activists should determine the nature and tactics of the Palestinian national movement. The role of Palestinian sympathizers — especially guilty-by-proxy Jews — is to shut up and listen.

On the contrary, since the Palestinians on their own have been unable to achieve their goals and Palestinian identity is itself a response to Zionism, Jews have a sacred obligation to give them unsolicited advice. After all, Zionists have a better track record of achieving sovereignty than Palestinian nationalists.

If David Ben-Gurion (Israel’s founding prime minister) had led the Palestine Liberation Organization, there would have been a Palestinian state decades ago. Moreover, Jews everywhere are now constantly told to “Free Palestine,” which indicates a personal responsibility for the Palestinians’ fate.

First, let’s take it as a given that, from the radical Palestinian perspective, the ideal scenario is the destruction of Israel, the expulsion (at minimum) of its Jews, and the reconquest of the entire Holy Land for Islam and the Arabs. The rub is that Arab attempts to vanquish Israel on the battlefield during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the 1967 Six-Day War, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War all ended in failure.

The Iranian project to build a “ring of fire” around Israel and defeat it via terrorist proxies is also in shambles. Hamas wreaked havoc in southern Israel for one day on October 7, 2023, but now Gaza is in ruins, Hezbollah has been decimated in Lebanon, and the Iranian regime itself, though still standing, has been weakened by successive Israeli and American strikes.

The radical Palestinian dream is unrealizable in practice. Over the long term, the trend is toward Israel’s regional integration instead.

In 1967, the Arab League formally adopted the “Three No’s" — no peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel. Since then, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Bahrain have all established ties with Israel; most Arab countries have ended their secondary boycott; and Saudi Arabia has endorsed the prospect of normalization.

Israel has also developed diplomatic relations with non-Arab Muslim countries from Europe to Africa, to the Caucasus and Central Asia. In 2026, for the first time in history, an Arab Muslim nation even fought with Israel against a common foe.

On the other hand, the Palestinians still have cards to play. Their cause has popular, often fanatical backing throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. Because of mass Muslim immigration, that fan club now also extends to the West. Even more significantly, as a result of anger over the war in Gaza and progressive Third Worldism, the Palestinians also have a large non-Arab, non-Muslim constituency.

In 2002, 16 percent of Americans sympathized more with the Palestinians and 51 percent with the Israelis. In 2026, 41 percent of Americans sympathize more with the Palestinians and 36 percent with the Israelis. A record 57 percent of U.S. adults now say they support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Large majorities in many countries have increasingly negative views of Israel. Popular sentiment has political consequences, as does the rise of Muslims as a significant Western voting bloc. European countries like France, the UK, and Spain (plus Canada and Australia) have symbolically, if meaninglessly, recognized Palestinian statehood.

An increasing number of Democrats are voting against aid and even arms sales to Israel, while refusing money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is becoming a litmus test for the Left. Even authoritarian Saudi Arabia pays attention to public opinion, and is predicating normalization with Israel on an “irreversible pathway” to Palestinian statehood.

But how will the Palestinians play their cards?

Islamists, settler-colonial theorists, and unabashed antisemites favor fighting Israel to the last Palestinian. Former Iranian president Ayatollah Akbar Rafsanjani put this camp’s true nature on display in 2001:

“If one day the Islamic world is reciprocally equipped with the weapons that Israel has, on that day the Arrogance’s strategy will reach a dead end, because the use of one atomic bomb in Israel leaves nothing left, but in the Islamic world, there will only be damage.”

Needless to say, nuking Tel Aviv would also annihilate Ramallah. Similarly, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar thought Israel might use nuclear weapons in response to October 7th, but proceeded with the attack anyway.

But what are Palestinian lives compared with the glory of the Islamic world?

The actual track record of anti-Zionist intransigence is one of escalating Palestinian loss. Their leadership rejected the 1922 Legislative Council proposal, which would have given them a representative body under British imperial authority; the 1937 Peel Commission, which would have given them approximately 80 percent of the Holy Land; the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, which would have given them approximately 43 percent; and even alternative proposals for a Palestinian state “from the River to the Sea” with Jewish autonomy.

Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) and Gaza — the current Arab-majority Palestinian territories — only fell under Israeli control because Jordan and Egypt, which previously controlled them, attacked Israel in 1967.

But let’s be fair to the Arabs. From their perspective, it was reasonable to wager, in turn, that the nascent Zionist enterprise would fail, that five Arab armies could annihilate fewer than a million Jews in the 1940s, and that Soviet backing would win them their revenge in the 1960s and 1970s.

History, however, proved wrong the prophecy of Arab League Secretary-General Azzam Pasha: that the defeat of Israel would be “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” Since the Arab defeats, Israel has grown in economic, military, geopolitical, and demographic stature. Only fanatical Iran and its terrorist proxies still have the appetite to wage open warfare on the Jewish state, while the Soviet Union has disappeared as a superpower benefactor.

At the same time, Israel’s very strength has helped shape an image of Palestinian “victimhood.” When the dominant framing was the “Arab–Israeli conflict,” Israel played the plucky David against the Goliath of hostile Arab states.

But since Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, along with their sizable Arab populations, the “Arab–Israeli conflict” gradually transformed into the “Israeli–Palestinian conflict.” Now Israel is seen as Goliath, and the Palestinians as David, even though, in reality, the Palestinians still claim the allegiance of vast Arab and Muslim populations. The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel on the battlefield, but they can help delegitimize it in the eyes of much of the world.

Or they could make an offer.

The Palestinians cannot rely on the fickle sympathy of their Western admirers to last forever. The war in Gaza is over, and other conflicts will inevitably grab the world’s attention, just as Gaza itself stole the spotlight from the war in Ukraine. Who, after all, speaks today of the Tibetan Freedom Concerts? Or remembers the Zapatistas?

Having achieved peak “victimhood” and temporarily captured Greta Thunberg’s attention, now is the perfect time for Palestinians to cash in their chips.

In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas a state covering Gaza and more than 94 percent of the West Bank, with territorial swaps making up the difference, and a capital in East Jerusalem. This followed previous Israeli offers of Palestinian statehood in 2000 and 2001.

In large part due to rampant Palestinian terror and rejectionism, the Israeli public has turned against the idea of territorial withdrawals in exchange for peace.

But the Palestinians also have more to offer than they did in previous decades. Palestinian buy-in could expand the Abraham Accords to include, per the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative, the entire Arab League and beyond, with transformative implications for Israel’s economy and security.

A resolution to the Palestinian issue would also delegitimize anti-Zionists in the West, who would be put in the absurd position of going against the wishes of the people they claim to represent. In contrast to Peter Beinart, a Palestinian leader should lead the charge by promising that a Palestinian state would not only oppose BDS, but actively broker ties between Israel and the Arab and Muslim worlds.

To assuage Israeli security fears and for its own survival, this pragmatic Palestinian state would need help to maintain order and avoid a terrorist takeover. Fortunately, a neighboring country has a proven track record of both crushing Palestinian militants and governing a Palestinian majority while maintaining peaceful ties with Israel: Jordan (i.e., historical Eastern Palestine).

The confederation of the West Bank and Gaza with Jordan (i.e., the reunification of the West Bank and East Bank) would provide plentiful land for refugee resettlement, fulfill the vision of Palestinian icon Yasser Arafat, and re-create the proven political structure that existed prior to 1967.

The contours of the grand bargain are as follows: Israel receives regional normalization and an internationally backed security arrangement in exchange for territorial withdrawal, following the precedent of Sinai under the Egypt–Israel peace treaty. (The involvement of a responsible state actor is to avoid the precedent of Gaza, which fell to Hamas after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal.)

The Palestinians receive political separation from Israel and additional land in exchange for renouncing irredentist claims and pledging fealty to King Abdullah II. And Jordan receives its own demographic and territorial expansion, including a Mediterranean outlet via Gaza, in exchange for helping to resolve the Palestinian issue.

Ample Gulf Arab funding could help underwrite the logistics and grease the wheels. After all, regional stability (and access to Israeli arms, technology, and capital) is in their own self-interest. Notably, Emirati-based Jordanian-Palestinian billionaire Hasan Ismaik and influential Saudi operative Ali Shihabi already endorse the idea of a Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine.

Jordan formally renounced its claims to the West Bank in 1988, recognizing the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Thus the re-engagement of Jordan would require petitioning by the Palestinians themselves. The 1948 Jericho Conference, during which Palestinian notables formally requested Jordanian annexation of the West Bank, provides historical precedent.

Trilateral negotiations between the Palestinians, Jordan, and Israel could then establish a pathway for an eventual Jordanian-Palestinian confederation. This pathway should include confidence-building measures to ensure that the new state does not descend into chaos or fall under Islamist control (though the existing presence of American bases in Jordan is a good backstop).

For example, Israel could gradually relinquish security control over the West Bank to joint Jordanian-Palestinian forces. At the same time, Jordan could begin providing West Bank Palestinians with citizenship and parliamentary representation, as was the case from 1950 to 1988, to legitimize its security role. Jewish settlements would be presented with the choice of either accepting Jordanian-Palestinian suzerainty or being dismantled.

As with earlier peace negotiations, this arrangement presupposes land swaps that allow Israel to keep contiguous settlement blocs while compensating the Palestinians with equivalent territory. Eventually, the Jordanian-Palestinian confederation would also assume responsibility for rebuilding the Gaza Strip and disempowering its former Hamas rulers. Significantly, Jordan has already outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, a ban that would extend to its Palestinian branch.

The Palestinians will not get all their desired land in this scenario, but they will get get all their desired land in any plausible scenario. They can comfort themselves with the knowledge that they have tried every violent, maximalist alternative, culminating in the futile massacre of October 7th, and have more than earned the right to cut their losses against a superior (and nuclear-armed) foe. Mexico is not getting California back, Germany is not getting East Prussia back, Serbia is not getting Kosovo back, and the Arabs are not getting all of Israel back.

Nor will the children of displaced Hindus be returning to Pakistan, displaced Greeks be returning to Turkey, displaced Jews be returning to the Arab world, or displaced Arabs be returning to Israel.

As recently as 2023, over 100,000 ethnic Armenians were expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh when Azerbaijan conquered the region. Yet Armenia has accepted its defeat, absorbed the refugees, and is discussing peace with Azerbaijan, which would also entail normalizing ties with Turkey.

The Palestinians, despite losing every war they have ever started, still have the chance to peacefully gain land they could never take by force of arms. Indeed, through a confederation with Jordan, they could claim more than 80 percent of the original British Mandate of Palestine, instead of just a micro-state in the West Bank and Gaza. The Tamils, Kurds, and Tibetans would thrill at the chance for sovereignty over even parts of their homelands.

Make your play, Palestine, while the world is still in love with you.

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There is a strange assumption many of us make about Jewish survival: We imagine that the greatest threat to Jewish identity is hardship.

Antisemitism. Persecution. Exile. Assimilation. War. Discrimination.

And certainly, Jewish history gives us plenty of reasons to think so.

But this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Eikev, presents a very different possibility. Perhaps the greatest spiritual danger does not arrive when everything is going wrong. Perhaps it arrives when everything is finally going right.

Eikev takes place near the end of the Torah, as Moses prepares the Israelites to enter the Land of Israel. The generation standing before him has spent decades wandering through the wilderness. They have lived with uncertainty, hunger, rebellion, miraculous rescue, and almost complete dependence on God.

Now that is about to change. They are going to have land, homes, food, crops, livestock, possessions, and security. And Moses is worried — not because he thinks the Jews will be unable to survive prosperity, but because he worries they will survive it so well that they will forget who they are. That may be one of the most important Jewish lessons for our own time.

Eikev contains some of the Torah’s most beautiful descriptions of the Land of Israel. Moses describes a land of wheat and barley, vines and figs, pomegranates, olive oil and dates. It is a land in which the Israelites will eat and be satisfied.

And then comes the warning: Once you have eaten your fill, built beautiful homes, increased your possessions, and accumulated silver and gold, be careful. Your heart may become arrogant. You may forget. And eventually you may tell yourself, “My power and the strength of my hand have made me this wealth.”

The Torah does not condemn success. It anticipates it. The problem is what success can do to our memory.

When we are struggling, dependence is obvious. We know what we lack. We know what we cannot control. We pray differently when we are frightened than when we are comfortable. But abundance creates an illusion. The successful person begins to believe that he created the entire chain of events that produced his success. I worked for this. I earned this. I built this. I deserve this.

The Torah responds with an extraordinarily precise formulation: Remember that God gives you the power to create wealth.

Notice what it does not say. It does not say that you did nothing. It does not tell us to deny ambition, discipline, intelligence, or effort. It asks us to remember where even those capacities came from. Your intelligence is yours, but you did not choose the brain you were born with. Your work ethic is yours, but you did not create every person who taught you discipline. Your business may be yours, but you did not invent the society, technology, infrastructure, customers, teachers, opportunities, and historical circumstances that made it possible.

Judaism asks us to hold two ideas simultaneously: Work as though your choices matter enormously, and remain humble enough to recognize that you are never the sole author of your success. That is a much harder theology than either helplessness or arrogance.

The very name Eikev contains another lesson. The word in the opening verse is usually understood as “because” or “as a result” — because the Israelites listen to the commandments, the covenant will continue. But eikev can also mean “heel” in Hebrew. The famous French rabbi and commentator Rashi famously connected the word to the commandments that people tend to treat lightly: the mitzvot (commandments) they figuratively “trample under their heels.”

There is something profound here about how Jewish identity actually works. Most people imagine that identity is shaped by enormous decisions. What do I believe? Am I religious? How Jewish am I? What are my politics? What do I think about Israel?

But a Jewish life is usually built much more quietly. It is whether you light candles on Friday night; whether you call your parents and grandparents; whether your children hear Jewish music in your home; whether there are Jewish books on your shelves; whether you know why Passover exists rather than merely attending a Seder, whether you learn a little Torah each week; whether you say a blessing before eating, whether you walk past the mezuzah without noticing it or allow it, occasionally, to remind you who you are; whether you consistently stay engaged with Israel.

Civilizations are built from grand ideas, but they survive through habits. The Jewish People did not survive for thousands of years because every Jew spent every morning contemplating Jewish theology. We survived because Jews baked certain foods, said certain words, remembered certain dates, taught certain stories, married into a people, mourned in certain ways, celebrated in certain ways, and performed thousands of seemingly small acts that quietly reinforced a gigantic idea: “I am part of something that began before me and must continue after me.”

Perhaps that is the deeper meaning of Eikev: Do not underestimate the things beneath your heel. The small things eventually determine the direction in which you walk.

Eikev also contains the biblical source for one of Judaism’s most revealing practices: Birkat Hamazon (grace after meals). “When you have eaten and are satisfied,” the Torah instructs, we should bless God.

The timing is fascinating. You might expect the Torah to tell us to pray when we are hungry. Instead, it specifically worries about us when we are full — because hunger naturally produces longing, and satisfaction produces forgetfulness. This is why gratitude in Judaism is not merely a feeling. It is a discipline.

Modern culture often tells us to practice gratitude because it will make us happier. Judaism goes further. Gratitude keeps us sane. It corrects our perception of reality. Without gratitude, every blessing slowly transforms into an entitlement. The extraordinary becomes ordinary.

The person who once prayed desperately for a spouse can eventually begin taking that spouse for granted. The person who dreamed of having children can eventually experience them mostly as an inconvenience. The immigrant who dreamed of freedom can raise children who barely understand why freedom matters. The entrepreneur who once begged for customers can become irritated that growth is not happening fast enough.

And a Jewish People who spent 2,000 years praying to return to Jerusalem can eventually produce Jews for whom Jewish sovereignty seems mundane.

Human beings are remarkably talented at normalizing miracles. Eikev tells us to fight that instinct, not through occasional inspiration, but through ritualized memory: Eat, become satisfied, then stop, remember, and bless.

This lesson has enormous implications for Jewish life today.

Many Jews become intensely Jewish when something terrible happens to Jews. An antisemitic attack occurs. Israel goes to war. A synagogue is threatened. A Jewish student is harassed. Suddenly Jews who rarely thought about their Jewishness feel something awaken inside them. There is nothing strange about that. Threat has always strengthened group identity, but it also creates a danger.

If the primary thing making us Jewish is the existence of people who hate Jews, then we have outsourced Jewish identity to our enemies. They decide when we feel Jewish. They decide when we gather. They decide when we care about Israel. They decide when we learn our history. They decide when Jewish peoplehood becomes important to us.

That cannot be enough.

A Judaism built only in response to antisemitism is “desert Judaism.” Eikev is trying to prepare us for “Promised Land Judaism” — a Judaism capable not merely of surviving danger but of surviving comfort. That means knowing what we are protecting, not merely who we are protecting it from.

Judaism must contain joy, study, food, music, prayer, family, debate, community, Israel, Hebrew, history, Shabbat, purpose, wonder, responsibility, and children who associate being Jewish not merely with people trying to kill their ancestors, but with a civilization they are grateful to inherit.

The ultimate Jewish victory is not simply that our enemies fail to destroy us. It is that we build Jewish lives worth continuing.

Eikev also returns to one of Israel’s greatest failures: the Golden Calf. Moses recalls ascending Mount Sinai, receiving the tablets, discovering the people’s betrayal and smashing the tablets — but the story does not end with destruction. God tells Moses to return. There will be another set. There is a subtle difference between the two.

The first tablets are described in Exodus as “the work of God.” After they are shattered, Moses is told to carve the second set himself. The words will still come from God. But this time Moses has to prepare the stone. There is an extraordinary lesson hidden inside that distinction: The first covenant arrives as a miracle, the repaired covenant requires human participation.

That is often how life works.

The first version of something can feel effortless: a friendship, a marriage, a community, a dream, a relationship with Judaism. Then something breaks, and we become obsessed with getting back what existed before. But perhaps the goal is not always restoration; sometimes the second tablets must be different from the first. Sometimes what comes after failure requires more work from us, and becomes more precious precisely because of that work.

Jewish history itself can almost be read this way: Temples were destroyed, communities were expelled, languages disappeared, entire centers of Jewish civilization were annihilated — and again and again, Jews carved new tablets. Yavneh, Babylon, Spain, Poland, Morocco, Baghdad, the modern West, Israel.

The forms changed. The covenant continued. Judaism does not teach us that nothing will break. It teaches us that brokenness does not get the final word.

Near the end of Eikev, Moses makes an interesting comparison between Egypt and Israel. Egyptian agriculture depended heavily on the Nile and irrigation. The Land of Israel, Moses explained, depends upon rain from heaven. On the surface, that sounds like an agricultural observation. Spiritually, it is much more.

Egypt represents predictability: The river is there, water can be controlled, and systems can be engineered. Israel requires looking upward — waiting, hoping, recognizing limits.

Modern people are naturally drawn toward Egypt in this sense. We want dashboards, forecasts, metrics, insurance, calendars, algorithms, and five-year plans. We want enough information to eliminate uncertainty. And these things are useful. Judaism is not opposed to planning.

But Eikev reminds us that no sufficiently sophisticated system can eliminate vulnerability from human life. You can exercise and still become sick. You can save money and still experience financial trouble. You can choose someone carefully and still have your heart broken. You can raise children lovingly and still be unable to determine who they become. You can build the strongest army in a region and still require vigilance tomorrow.

Eventually every human being discovers that there are things beyond his control. The question is whether that realization destroys us or humbles us. Faith is not the belief that everything will happen the way we want. Faith is the recognition that we were never promised complete control in the first place.

After recounting Israel’s mistakes, Moses asks one of the Torah’s great questions: “What does God ask of you?” The answer is surprisingly simple: to walk in God’s ways, to love, to serve, to observe. And only a few verses later, Moses gives this spiritual program an ethical consequence: God loves the stranger, and therefore we must love the stranger as well.

This matters because Jewish identity can become narcissistic if we are not careful. We can become so focused on preserving ourselves that we forget what Judaism is asking us to become. The Torah does not ask Jews merely to survive as Jews. It asks us to behave like Jews. There is a difference. Jewish survival is the prerequisite; Jewish purpose is the objective.

And Eikev offers some answers: Remember deliberately, practice gratitude especially when you feel entitled to gratitude least, pay attention to the small mitzvot, do not confuse achievement with self-creation, teach Jewish history before a crisis forces your children to ask about it, build Jewish homes that contain more celebration than fear, accept that some things remain beyond your control, turn failure into responsibility rather than despair, and never allow Jewish identity to become merely the scar tissue left behind by antisemitism.

The Jews standing before Moses had already learned how to survive the wilderness. The challenge now was harder: They had to learn how to live in the land. That may be Eikev’s most enduring lesson. Survival is not the final Jewish objective. The purpose of surviving is to build a Jewish life worth surviving for.

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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We were supposed to have learned this lesson in 1945.

When Nazi Germany collapsed, the world did not merely discover the horrors of the Holocaust. It supposedly learned something about the political machinery that had made the Holocaust possible in the first place.

Antisemitism was not simply an irrational hatred that happened to infect German society. It was useful. It was a political technology.

The Nazis understood that if you could convince enough people that Jews were responsible for their humiliation, their poverty, their wars, their cultural decline, their political instability, capitalism, communism, internationalism, and virtually every other source of anxiety, you could accomplish something extraordinarily valuable: You could take millions of people with different problems and give them the same enemy.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes Nazi propaganda as essential to constructing a German “national community” by identifying who did not belong. Jews were designated the principal enemy. Nazi propaganda subsequently portrayed Jews not merely as people Germans should dislike, but as a hidden force manipulating governments, provoking wars and conspiring behind the scenes.

That distinction matters.

The political usefulness of antisemitism has never depended primarily on getting everyone to hate individual Jews. It depends on teaching people to understand the world through Jews. Something is wrong with your country? The Jews. Your economy is struggling? The Jews. Your nation is at war? The Jews. Capitalism is exploiting you? The Jews. Communism threatens you? The Jews. Foreign governments are conspiring against you? The Jews.

The accusation changed according to the audience. The function remained remarkably consistent: Take complicated problems and give them a Jewish explanation. That is the genius — and horror — of antisemitism as a political instrument. And we made an enormous mistake if we believed that instrument was buried beneath the ruins of Berlin. It wasn’t. It evolved.

After the Holocaust, openly announcing that “the Jews” were responsible for the world’s problems became considerably less fashionable in respectable political circles. But the fundamental political temptation remained: There was still enormous power in telling people that a Jewish collective stood somewhere behind their suffering.

Increasingly, the word simply changed. The Jew became “the Zionist.” The international Jewish conspiracy became “the Zionist lobby.” The uniquely evil Jewish people became the uniquely “evil Jewish state.”

Israel ceases to be one country among many and becomes a kind of universal explanation; a symbol onto which unrelated grievances are projected, a villain that appears in political struggles thousands of miles from Jerusalem, regardless of whether Israel has anything meaningful to do with the problem being discussed. That is when history should make Jews nervous.

Consider what happened in Jordan this summer. In July, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it had launched ballistic missiles at Jordan. Then came an extraordinary message to the Jordanian people: “You know very well that not only do we not have any enmity with your country, but we also love you,” the IRGC said, describing Jordanians as people who understood Palestinian suffering especially well.

Think about the chutzpah (the audacity) of this: Iran had just fired ballistic missiles onto Jordanian territory, and its message to Jordanians was effectively: We are not your enemy.

The appeal to “Palestine” was not incidental. It was the mechanism. Iran understands the enormous emotional power of the Palestinian cause across the Arab world. It also understands that Jordan maintains relations with Israel and works closely with the United States.

So the Iranian regime is attempting to redraw the political map inside the Jordanian imagination. Do not blame the country firing missiles into Jordan. Blame Israelis and their American supporters. Understand your suffering through “Palestine.” See your government’s relationship with Israel as betrayal.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is doing what antisemitic political movements have done for generations: redirecting domestic anger toward an external Jewish enemy and using that enemy to fracture political alliances. The circumstances are completely different from Nazi Germany. The political technology is disturbingly familiar. And Iran is hardly alone.

Look at New York City. Zohran Mamdani won the mayoralty, in part, by aggressively campaigning against Israel. He carried an unusually intense anti-Zionist politics into a race for an office with almost no authority over Israeli policy, and with Israel playing virtually no part in day-to-day life in New York City.

He had supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for years. He repeatedly refused to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada.” He also made the prospective arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York a political issue.

Whatever one thinks of those positions, there is an obvious question: Why does the mayor of New York City need a foreign policy toward the Jewish state? Israel does not control New York rents. Israel does not determine subway service. Israel does not run New York schools. Israel does not collect New York garbage. A mayor cannot negotiate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet somehow the Jewish state became a recurring ideological test in a municipal election.

That phenomenon should interest us far beyond Mamdani himself — because politicians rarely spend enormous amounts of political capital on subjects they believe have no political value. Israel has become valuable not necessarily as policy, but as symbolism. It tells voters which tribe you belong to. It communicates who you believe is “oppressed” and who you believe is an “oppressor.” It signals whether you belong to the “establishment” or the “resistance,” the “colonizer” or the “colonized,” the “powerful” or the “powerless.”

And once Israel is transformed from an actual country into a symbol of everything a political movement despises, demonizing it becomes politically useful even when Israel has absolutely nothing to do with the office being sought.

The State of Michigan offers another example. Abdul El-Sayed has just won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate there, defeating the incumbent Haley Stevens in one of the United States’ most closely watched primaries. Israel became one of the race’s major dividing lines.

El-Sayed has not simply criticized Benjamin Netanyahu. He has described the Israeli government as “evil” like Hamas, called Israel a “rogue state,” accused it of apartheid and genocide, called for ending American military assistance and repeatedly resisted questions asking whether Israel has a right to exist. After winning the primary, he went even further, describing Israel as “bloodthirsty” and an “illegal apartheid regime.”

The warning sign is something larger: the transformation of the Jewish state into an almost metaphysical villain. Bloodthirsty. Evil. Apartheid. Genocidal. Rogue. A state whose very legitimacy becomes questionable.

And somehow this single country of roughly 10 million people occupies an extraordinary amount of space in political campaigns conducted thousands of miles away. That is not unprecedented. It is one of the oldest patterns in Jewish history.

The antisemite rarely begins by saying, “I simply hate Jews.” He gives you a political theory: The Jews control finance, the Jews control governments, the Jews are undermining the nation, the Jews are responsible for war, the Jews are disloyal, the Jews exploit workers, the Jews oppress people.

The content changes because antisemitism is extraordinarily adaptable. The Jew can be blamed simultaneously for capitalism and communism, nationalism and globalism, whiteness and foreignness, imperialism and revolutionary subversion.

Contradiction has never been a weakness of antisemitism. It is one of its greatest strengths. A conspiracy theory capable of explaining everything can survive almost anything.

Today the same strange flexibility increasingly attaches itself to Zionism. Israel can somehow be portrayed simultaneously as an American puppet and America’s master. It can be accused of controlling Western foreign policy while simultaneously surviving only because Western governments sustain it. It can be described as a colonial outpost of Europe even though roughly half of Israeli Jews descend from communities across the Middle East and North Africa.

And political movements thousands of miles away can incorporate opposition to Zionism into their identities regardless of whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has the slightest relationship to the problems their voters actually face. This is what should worry us: this obsession.

There is another danger here, and Jews should be intellectually honest enough to acknowledge it: The accusation of antisemitism can itself be abused. We are being told that if the speaker says “Zionist” instead of “Jew,” history no longer applies. That is absurd. Antisemitism has never required a particular vocabulary. It requires a function.

Who is being turned into the explanation for society’s problems?

Who is being portrayed as uniquely malevolent?

Who is imagined to possess extraordinary hidden power?

Who becomes the enemy around whom otherwise unrelated groups can unite?

Who is denied political rights that everyone else is assumed to possess?

And most importantly: Who benefits politically from making people believe it?

That last question may be the most important, because the most dangerous antisemitism has never merely been personal prejudice. It has been organized prejudice, useful prejudice, mobilized prejudice.

A politician discovers that attacking Jews (or Zionists, or Israel) wins applause. A regime discovers that blaming the Jewish state redirects anger away from itself. An activist discovers that “Zionism” can bind together groups with almost nothing else in common. And suddenly antisemitism has a constituency. That is how it becomes dangerous.

There is a tendency to study Nazi Germany as though it belonged to another universe: black-and-white photographs, strange uniforms, burning books, and speeches delivered in a language most of us do not understand. That makes history comfortable. It allows us to believe we would recognize the next version because it would look like the last one.

But history almost never returns wearing the same uniform. The slogans change, the political parties change, the ideologies change, the technologies change — and the scapegoat mechanism does not. Find the Jew. Turn him into an abstraction. Make him responsible for problems he did not create. Convince people that fighting him is synonymous with fighting injustice. Build a political identity around that fight. Then collect the votes, loyalty, power, and social cohesion that follow.

We thought the Holocaust had made this strategy politically radioactive forever. We were horribly mistaken. Antisemitism did not disappear after 1945. It learned how to speak the language of the age. And politicians, regimes, and movements are discovering all over again what their predecessors understood centuries ago: There are few political shortcuts more powerful than giving people a Jewish enemy.

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This is a guest essay by Steven Abraham, the rabbi at Beth El Synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Dara Horn is entirely aware of what she has done.

She has joked that her book titles make excellent beach reading because nobody will sit near you.

Five years ago, she gave us “People Love Dead Jews,” which was awkward enough. This new title — “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question” — is a provocation set in 40-point type on the cover of a mainstream trade hardcover.

The provocation is not merely a marketing stunt. It is a piece of theology. And the fact that the book will arrive in the middle of Elul (the final month of the Jewish civil year), days before we stand together for Selichot1, is a coincidence worth treating as something more than coincidence.

Start with the title. Horn has taken the bureaucratic euphemism the Nazis used for the murder of European Jewry and repurposed it as a lure. As she explained in an interview, the title is intended to catch the eye while also announcing, without irony, that she intends to propose an actual solution — not a 10-point public-policy program, but a different story about who Jews are and what antisemitism is.

This is not new to us. This is Purim.

It is the logic of a holiday in which we take the name of the man who wanted us dead and place it in the mouths of children holding noisemakers. Jewish survival has always involved seizing the vocabulary of the enemy and refusing to let it mean what he meant by it.

What Horn proposes, at least from what she has said publicly about the book, is a reframing. Antisemitism, she argues, is not most usefully understood as bias, bigotry, prejudice, or even conspiracy theory. Those categories flatter us into believing that antisemitism sits neatly on a shelf beside other hatreds and can therefore be addressed with the same tools: diversity seminars, museum visits, carefully worded statements and commemorative events.

Horn says antisemitism is a lie, and the lie never truly changes. Her formulation is worth quoting: “Jews are destroying what you value the most.” In other words, antisemites accuse Jews of destroying what antisemites value the most.

Whatever the surrounding civilization treasures, the Jews are accused of dissolving it. In a Christian world, we were killers of God. In a nationalist world, we were rootless cosmopolitans. In a capitalist society, Jews were accused of communist subversion; under communism, Jews were condemned as capitalist parasites. In a world that has decided colonialism is the master sin, Jews have become the ultimate colonizers.

The accusation is a mirror. It tells us almost nothing about Jews and almost everything about what the accuser worships.

Then Horn does something more daring than diagnosis: She insists that most people are not the enemy. Her framing is drawn from the Megillah (the traditional Jewish scroll read during holidays like Purim), and it may be the most rabbinically interesting move in the entire project.

Most people, she says, are not Haman (the villainous, Amalekite-descended prime minister in Megillat Esther who plotted the total annihilation of the Jewish People). Most people are Achashverosh, the volatile and easily manipulated Persian king whose decree to destroy the Jews was thwarted by Queen Esther and Mordechai, a miraculous turnaround celebrated every year on Purim.

They are not plotting genocide in a back room. They are distracted, credulous, comfortable, and easily influenced by whoever last had their ear. Haman is rare. Achashverosh is everywhere.

But Achashverosh is persuadable.

That is why Esther speaks. It is why Mordechai refuses to allow her the fantasy that silence will keep her safe. And it is why Dara Horn has written this book at all: not only for the convinced antisemite, who may be beyond persuasion, but for the friend who does not understand, the school principal who has never learned to recognize the lie, and the well-meaning neighbor who cannot comprehend why Jews refuse to disavow Israel as the price of social acceptance.

Anyone familiar with the archives of Jewish self-understanding will feel the ground shift here. We have spent generations describing antisemitism through the language of Amalek: an eternal, metaphysical enmity that cannot be reasoned with, only survived. There is a certain comfort in that framing. If hatred is eternal, we are relieved of the exhausting work of persuasion. We are also relieved of asking whether we have told our own story badly.

Horn takes that comfort away. She has watched a fatalism settle over Jewish communities — especially since October 7th — a quiet conviction that hatred is simply our lot. Her answer is essentially Mordechai’s answer to Esther: Do not imagine that your silence will save you.

The Megillah is famously the one book of Hebrew Bible in which God’s name does not appear. That absence is not a theological defect. It is the point. Deliverance in the story comes through human beings deciding to act.

The argument of Horn’s book “People Love Dead Jews” was that the world prefers its Jews murdered and memorialized. Dead Jews can be honored without making demands. They can be placed behind glass, engraved in stone and incorporated into speeches about tolerance. Living Jews are less convenient. They have loyalties, children, fears, political claims, and opinions of their own.

What I have come to believe, standing in a synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska, is that this preference is not exclusively a gentile problem. We have absorbed some of it ourselves. We have become extraordinarily good at commemoration and strangely reluctant to fund vitality.

Look honestly at where American Jewish money goes: Holocaust education centers, memorial plaques, security infrastructure (which we genuinely need and which I would never begrudge), and cemetery associations with endowments that may outlast the congregations that own them.

Then look at what we starve. The preschool that operates at a loss and is therefore always one board meeting away from closing. The Tuesday afternoon religious school whose teacher is paid something between a stipend and an insult. The camp scholarship fund that ran dry in March. The youth program without enough money for a professional advisor. The young family that would join the synagogue if dues and tuition were survivable.

We know how to bury Jews beautifully. We are less certain how to make being Jewish on a Tuesday afternoon in Nebraska feel like something other than an obligation to be endured.

Our tradition is not ambiguous about the dignity owed to the dead. Kevod ha-met is a sacred obligation, so serious that caring for a met mitzvah (an abandoned corpse with no one to arrange burial) overrides nearly every other communal responsibility. Cemeteries should be beautiful. The grass should be cut, the stones should stand straight, and the names should remain legible. We should perform that work with reverence because forgotten graves represent forgotten lives.

But a manicured cemetery is not Jewish continuity. Without the living, it is an archive.

The architecture of Jewish law bends toward life. Nearly every commandment yields to pikuach nefesh, the preservation of human life. The dead, the Talmud says with characteristic lack of sentimentality, are free from the commandments. They have finished their work.

We have not. A community that invests more imagination in those who have finished than in those who have not has quietly decided how its own story will end.

The future of Judaism has never been built in cemeteries. It has been built in classrooms, around campfires, at Shabbat tables, and during chaotic preschool drop-offs. It has been built by underpaid teachers, exhausted parents, patient tutors, and rabbis trying to convince a 13-year-old that the Torah portion in front of them belongs to them too.

Every cemetery exists because previous generations invested in the living. Every gravestone marks someone who was once a child learning Aleph-Bet. This is why Horn’s subtitle matters even more than her title. Her answer to the Jewish question is not death, revenge, or retreat. It is a love story for the living.

She wants Judaism understood as a 3,000-year-old anti-tyrannical movement, a civilization organized around the conviction that no human being is a god and no empire is permanent. That is a story worth telling the Achashverosh’s among our neighbors.

It is also a story that requires actual Jews who know it.

We cannot hand a child a heritage of moral defiance if the totality of her Jewish education consists of a Holocaust unit and a bar mitzvah tutor hired in the spring. We cannot complain that young Jews do not defend Judaism when we have not taught them what Judaism is. We cannot speak endlessly of continuity while treating preschool, religious school, camp and youth engagement as budgetary luxuries.

The greatest memorial we can build to previous generations is another generation.

Horn’s new book arrives during Elul, the season of cheshbon ha-nefesh, honest moral accounting. She has, in effect, handed the American Jewish community an examination of conscience in hardcover.

Read it. Argue with it. Then look at your Jewish community’s budget, which may be the most honest theological document any Jewish institution produces. Ask whether it was written by people who expect Jews to be here in 50 years.

Let the cemeteries be beautiful, but fund the preschool. Pay the Wednesday school teacher. Send the child to camp. Help the young family walk through the door.

The monument remembers who we were. The classroom determines whether anyone will remain to remember.

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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, a writer specializing in politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Everyone seems to have lost their minds.

The brain rot and rabid Israel-obsession to explain absolutely everything continues to excavate new layers of stupidity I didn’t know existed — like we have crossed some invisible threshold into a place I don’t know we’ll ever be able to come back from.

I used to think, “Wow, this is starting to sound like the conspiracies of the medieval period like that Jews poisoned wells or orchestrated the plague,” but that actually seems tame in comparison to what’s acceptable in mainstream discourse now.

The humble idea that, “Hey, I don’t actually know much about Ceuta, or history, or anything, so maybe I shouldn’t weigh in” appears to be dead and buried.

The idea that Israel is behind the migrant influx into Ceuta, is a conspiracy theory; a classic, anti-Jewish, predictably insane, mass hallucination for the terminally online. And the best “evidence” for it is a tweet from seven years ago. You’d think if this was such a top secret operation, they’d have picked a better communications strategy than Twitter. But it seems to be definitive proof for the likes of Jew-haters.

No, Israel did not orchestrate the arrival of tens of thousands of North African migrants into Spanish territory. How this benefits Israel or the U.S. isn’t even explained. Minor details though.

It’s quite remarkable how Israel is now behind virtually every event on earth, while continuing to execute what these same people call a “genocide” and a “greater Israel project.” Do Zionists ever sleep?

I’m not exactly an expert on Ceuta, but from what I can tell, the reality is far more mundane and, as usual, doesn’t make for explosive social media content. In June of this year, a Spanish court ruled that migrants could not be immediately sent back and, instead, could stay while their case was processed. In other words, migrants believed Spain’s increasingly permissive migration policies offered a realistic path to legal residence and potentially onward movement through Europe.

Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, then appeared to panic when the predictable outcome of his socialist policies materialised. Beyond normal diplomatic relations that every country engages in, Israel has really little to do with the situation in Ceuta. That should be pretty clear to anyone who hasn’t drunk the anti-Zionist Kool-Aid. Unfortunately many people, with very large platforms and political influence, are swimming the Kool-Aid.

I know it’s hard to see when you are inside the conspiracy theory, but this is how they work: You start with a predetermined conclusion, in this case, that Israel is behind every crisis on earth, then work backwards to force everything into that conclusion and, eventually, the more convinced you become that the conclusion must be true, the further you’re willing to stretch and contort the facts to preserve it.

History is full of large swaths of people gripped by the same belief that they had finally found the one common root of all evil, and that by confronting this one villain they could “liberate” humanity and usher in a utopia free from oppression. It has a bloody and devastating track record.

When millions of people go along with conspiracies that require wider and wider cognitive leaps to frame a familiar villain (yes, you don’t get out of this by replacing Jews with the Jewish state), well, that is the kind of mass psychosis that can hasten the breakdown of a civilisation. I still have people tell me with a straight face that “criticism of a country can never be antisemitic.” Really? Is tracing every event on earth back to Israel within minutes “criticism”?

The frustrating part about basketcase conspiracies of this magnitude is that there’s often a tiny kernel of truth, buried under layers (and layers and layers) of fantasy. For example, it’s not completely irrational to suggest that Morocco is using the border pressure as political leverage against Spain. In fact, during the 2021 Ceuta crisis, this happened during tensions between the two countries over Western Sahara. At what point the leap to “Israel is flooding Ceuta with migrants” is made, I’m not sure.

So of course the Left does what the Left does best: They pick up their trusty “white oppressor versus brown oppressed” blueprint and plonk it onto the latest breaking news. They did this with Israel and had wildly successful results calling Jews colonisers in their ancestral homeland for the past several years, so why not? Many of these same people are comparing Morocco to Palestine, as in, Moroccans are the “indigenous” reclaiming their land, and Ceuta is Spain’s “colonial outpost.” The reasoning goes that Spain should just “give back” Ceuta.

Putting aside that Portugal captured Ceuta in 1415, and that it has remained under Iberian rule ever since, these are the kinds of people who would never, in a million years, argue that Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, or Egypt should be made Christian again. Their efforts to “decolonise” only flow in one direction, and at the end of the day, they’re just exploiting the language of social justice in the service of a profoundly anti-Western worldview.

Then there’s the others, often the same people if we’re being totally honest, pushing the line that Israel engineered the crisis to “punish” Spain for challenging Israel.

So is this an anti-colonial liberation movement, or a Zionist plot to punish Spain? And if we’re going with the latter, are tens of thousands illegal border crossings now … bad? Because I thought diversity is our strength.

Maybe the prime minister of Spain and his fellow liberal acolytes across Europe should update their open borders stance. President Emmanuel Macron of France was among the European countries that moved quickly to reinforce border security following the crisis, which is a tad hypocritical. It reminds me of people who spend years loudly demanding the abolition of the police, only to be the first to beg the police to help when someone is ransacking their house. Slogans are easy, but reality has a habit of kicking them in the teeth.

We seem to be a profoundly ahistorical generation, which is quite an achievement given that we have more access to history than any generation before us. If we knew it just a little more, we’d recognise a very old pattern.

Throughout history, and particularly Europe, Jews repeatedly became the explanation for disasters that had nothing to do with them. They were accused of poisoning wells during the Black Death, causing crop failures, orchestrating economic collapses, revolutions, wars, pandemics, financial crises and, more recently, blamed for both communism and capitalism.

When societies become anxious, confused, or looking for simple explanations, conspiracy theories have a habit of converging on a familiar scapegoat.

During the 19th century, the conspiracy literature exploded, which catalogued that Jews secretly controlled banks, newspapers, governments and monarchies. The infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (first published in 1903 and linked to the Tsarist secret police) claimed to expose a secret Jewish plot to manipulate governments and orchestrate world events. Though it was thoroughly discredited and disproven, it provided the framework that almost every modern global conspiracy borrows from, even if they’ve never heard of the book.

The Nazis, who persuaded ordinary Germans that Jews were sinister through industrialised propaganda, inherited these existing myths and prejudice that had already been in circulation for centuries.

The ironic part is that today’s mobs believe these conspiracy theories by replacing “Jew” with “Zionist.”

But Soviet anti-Zionism already perfected this work around. After 1967, the Soviet Union realised it could attack Jews without mentioning Jews. They promoted anti-Zionism as imperialist, colonial, racist, fascist, and Nazi-like, a Cold War propaganda campaign. Soviet disinformation reframed the world’s only Jewish state as the source of global instability, and exported this narrative globally via universities, journalism, communist parties, third world liberation movements, and humanitarian organisations.

What we are seeing today is the very same psychological structure, and you don’t even need to swap out Jews for Zionists.

Importantly, this isn’t a phenomenon that is uniquely Left or Right, but happens across the spectrum. During times of societal instability, the fringes embrace such theories to make sense of the world. Then, over time, the two extremes converge and start to move in toward the centre, ultimately engulfing the rest of society in the same conspiracy theories.

The Far-Right myths generally draw on Nazi-style propaganda and include ideas such as the shady globalists, Rothschilds, Great Replacement theory, and Mossad behind everything. The Far-Left, however, typically draws on Soviet propaganda ideas, and include claims of Zionism being behind imperialism, white supremacy, Western politics, policing, capitalism, and so forth.

Historians have highlighted that every successful conspiracy theory expands over time, and pay attention to how the Israel-is-behind-everything mutates. It started with Israel influences America; then morphed into Israel controls America, and Europe; then Israel created ISIS; then Israel caused COVID; then Israel was behind the shooting of Charlie Kirk; Israel caused the heatwave in Europe; now it’s Israel was behind the migrant crisis in Ceuta.

And I promise, whatever makes headlines next, you can bet that within seconds, people with big names and an even bigger influence, will immediately insist that Israel did it.

Another thing to notice is that, like classic conspiracy logic goes, these theories are completely unfalsifiable. Because any evidence against it becomes evidence for it. If the theory contradicts itself, that’s what they want you to think.

I always remember my first real life encounter with someone I’d known for years who became gripped by this disease of the brain. She posited, rather confidently, that Israel controls the media and our social feeds. When I pointed out how the media was, in fact, disproportionately anti-Israel, she then pivoted to, “that’s because people are starting to wake up.”

Contradictions like this are rife in the “pro-Palestine” movement. The Holocaust didn’t happen, but Gaza is a Holocaust. October 7th was carried out by Israel, but also Israel deserved it. End the genocide, but also globalise the intifada. Israel is an ethnostate, but also “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free (of Jews).”

These contradictions can only coexist in the same movement because the movement in question is organised around one of the oldest conspiracies.

There’s nothing unique about Ceuta. It’s simply the latest event in a long line that exposes the same conspiracy, and how we’ve become infected with it at a societal level. The fact that the time between an event occurring and people blaming Israel has become almost instantaneous, tells us just how deep we are, and how, with each passing day, it becomes less likely we’ll ever find our way out.

A darkness has taken hold of Western civilisation, a similar darkness that swallowed up many before ours, including Tsarist Russia, Medieval Spain, Weimar Germany, and Iran before it fell to the Islamic Republic.

I can’t stop it, and I can’t slow it down. We can try, and we should. But ideas believed at this scale, and with the historical weight they carry, have dire consequences. Once enough people believe them, they develop a momentum all of their own.

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I understand you better than you might think.

I used to be one of you.

I was Jewish because I had been born Jewish, not because I had chosen it. Judaism was somewhere in the background of my life: a handful of holidays, family traditions, familiar foods, perhaps a vague sense of historical persecution. It was an identity I inherited, but not one I had examined closely enough to appreciate.

Israel felt distant too. It was a country I knew I was somehow expected to care about, but I did not fully understand why. I had absorbed the idea that Judaism was mostly a religion, Israel was mostly a political controversy, and Jewish identity was something that could be acknowledged without demanding very much of me.

I did not hate Judaism. I simply did not know it. And because I did not know it, I could not love it. That distinction matters.

Many Jews who feel indifferent toward Judaism have never seriously encountered Judaism. They have encountered a diluted version of it: Hebrew words they could not understand, rituals no one explained, services that felt repetitive, rules that appeared arbitrary, and a history presented largely as a catalogue of people trying to kill us.

They were told what Jews suffered, but not what Jews built. They were taught how Jews died, but not how Jews lived. They learned about antisemitism before they learned about Jewish civilization. They were taught to remember the Holocaust before they understood what was nearly destroyed.

It is difficult to love something when no one has shown you what is lovable about it. So this is not a letter of accusation. It is an invitation.

Before you decide that Judaism has nothing meaningful to offer you, learn what it is. Before you conclude that Israel has no place in your identity, understand what Israel means in Jewish history. Before you walk away from the Jewish story, make sure you have actually read it. Because Judaism is not merely an old religion practiced by a stubborn minority. It is one of the foundational civilizations of the human story.

You do not have to be religious to recognize the revolutionary power of Judaism. The Jewish contribution to civilization did not begin with famous Jewish scientists, doctors, writers, entrepreneurs, or Nobel Prize winners. It began thousands of years earlier, with ideas so deeply embedded in modern life that we often no longer recognize where they came from.

Judaism introduced a radically different understanding of human beings and their place in the world. In an age of emperors, tribal gods, and human sacrifice, the Torah (which literally means “instruction,” “teaching,” or “guidance”) declared that every human being was created in the image of God. Not merely the king. Not merely the priest. Not merely the warrior or the wealthy man. Every person.

That idea changed the moral architecture of civilization. If human beings possess inherent dignity, then power cannot be the only source of value. The strong do not have an unlimited right to dominate the weak. The stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the poor are not disposable. The ruler himself is subject to a law beyond his own desires.

Judaism insisted that might does not make right. That may sound obvious today, but it was not obvious in the ancient world, and it is still not obvious in much of the modern one.

Judaism gave humanity the concept of a weekly day of rest — not merely for elites, but for workers, servants, strangers and even animals. Shabbat was a declaration that people are not machines and life is not measured only by production. For one day each week, the laborer and the master stepped away from the economic hierarchy and remembered that human beings were created to live, not merely to work. Long before anyone spoke about work-life balance, Judaism built it into the structure of time.

Judaism transformed history from an endless cycle into a journey with moral purpose. It taught that the world is unfinished and that human beings have a responsibility to improve it. It rejected the fatalistic idea that injustice is simply the natural order of things. The prophets stood before kings and told them they were wrong. Nathan confronted David. Elijah confronted Ahab. Isaiah condemned corruption. Amos denounced those who grew rich while crushing the poor.

In Judaism, the most powerful man in the country could still be judged by a higher standard. This was a civilization in which moral courage meant speaking truth not only to one’s enemies, but to one’s own people.

Judaism made argument sacred. The Jewish tradition did not demand that every question be suppressed. It preserved disagreements. Rabbis debated one another across generations, and minority opinions were recorded even when they did not become law.

The Talmud is not a book of simple answers. It is a civilization thinking out loud. Judaism taught that intellectual struggle could itself be holy—that wrestling with God, morality, law and meaning was not evidence of disloyalty, but part of the Jewish vocation. The very name Israel comes from struggle. We are the people who wrestle.

Judaism elevated education into a communal obligation. Learning was not reserved for a small philosophical elite. Parents were expected to teach their children. Communities were expected to sustain schools. Literacy became central to Jewish survival because Judaism could not be inherited only through blood; it had to be studied, interpreted and renewed.

Our most sacred object is not a crown, a sword, or a monument. It is a book. Judaism gave the world a moral language that later flowed through Christianity and Islam and became inseparable from Western and global civilization: creation, covenant, law, human dignity, justice, repentance, forgiveness, responsibility, liberation, the sanctity of life, and the hope of redemption.

This does not mean Judaism was the only civilization to produce wisdom, morality, or compassion. It was not. No serious person needs to erase the achievements of other cultures in order to honor the Jewish contribution. But the opposite is also true: No serious account of the modern world can erase Judaism.

The world still lives inside ideas that Jews carried through exile, persecution, and dispersion for thousands of years.

Judaism is more than what it gave others. Yet even this argument can become a trap. We should not value Judaism only because of what it gave the world. Judaism is not important merely because Christianity borrowed from it, Western civilization absorbed parts of it, or modern activists use fragments of its moral vocabulary. Judaism does not need external validation to justify its existence.

It is ours.

It gave us a way to make time sacred. It gave us rituals for birth, maturity, marriage, grief, and death. It gave us a language for gratitude and a structure for community. It taught us to bless food before consuming it, to pause before acting, to remember before celebrating, and to take responsibility after failing.

It gave us Shabbat tables, wedding canopies, mourning prayers, melodies, stories, laws, arguments, jokes, and memories. It gave us a calendar that follows us wherever we go. It gave us the audacity to remain a people when history insisted that we disappear.

Judaism survived the destruction of kingdoms, the burning of its Temple, Roman exile, forced conversions, massacres, expulsions, ghettos, pogroms, and genocide. Empires that once ruled the known world vanished. The Jews remained — not because survival was easy, but because Jewish life was meaningful enough to preserve.

Generations of Jews carried books across borders. They whispered prayers under persecution. They taught children languages that hostile governments tried to ban. They rebuilt communities after being expelled from one country after another. They did not endure all of that so we could feel guilty. They endured because they believed they possessed something beautiful.

We often tell the Jewish story as though our ancestors were motivated only by fear: fear of assimilation, fear of enemies, fear of punishment, or fear of abandoning tradition. But fear alone cannot sustain a civilization for thousands of years.

There was also love. Love of Torah. Love of family. Love of learning. Love of Shabbat. Love of Jerusalem. Love of the Jewish people. Love of a future they would never personally see.

You are the future they believed in.

And then there is Israel. For many Jews, Judaism feels culturally acceptable until Israel enters the conversation. You can celebrate Hanukkah, quote Jewish comedians, enjoy bagels, and talk about Jewish trauma without causing much controversy. But say that you love Israel, and suddenly you are expected to defend every policy, every politician, and every action taken by a country of millions of people.

No other national identity is treated this way.

A person can love America without endorsing every American war. A person can love France without agreeing with every French president. A person can feel attached to India, Mexico, Armenia, Ireland, or Japan without first submitting a complete moral defense of its government. But Jewish love for Israel is often treated as presumptively suspicious.

Do not accept that standard. Israel is not merely a government. It is not a political party. It is not a prime minister, a coalition, or a collection of policies. Israel is the restored national home of the Jewish people in the land where Jewish civilization was born.

Jerusalem was the Jewish capital centuries before Christianity or Islam existed. Hebrew was the language of Jewish scripture, prayer, and national memory long before it became the daily language of a modern state. Jews prayed toward Jerusalem from every corner of exile. At weddings, we remembered Jerusalem. At Passover, we ended with the hope of returning to Jerusalem. During mourning, celebration, and prayer, the land of Israel remained present.

Zionism did not invent the Jewish connection to Israel. Zionism turned an ancient connection into a modern political movement. Israel is what happened when Jews decided that perpetual helplessness was not a moral obligation.

For centuries, Jews lived at the mercy of rulers who could tolerate them one year and expel them the next. Jewish security depended on the goodwill of governments, churches, monarchs, and neighbors. Sometimes that goodwill lasted for generations. Sometimes it disappeared overnight. The Holocaust did not create the Jewish need for sovereignty. It demonstrated the catastrophic cost of statelessness.

Israel gave Jews somewhere to go. It absorbed Holocaust survivors, Jews expelled or driven from Arab and Muslim countries, Ethiopian Jews, Soviet Jews, and communities facing persecution around the world. It revived Hebrew, built universities, created cities, developed agriculture, advanced medicine, and technology, and formed a democratic society in one of the most hostile regions on earth.

It is imperfect because it is real. Imaginary countries never make mistakes. Real countries do.

Loving Israel does not require shutting down your conscience. Israel itself is filled with disagreement. Israelis argue about war, peace, religion, courts, settlements, borders, budgets, and leadership with extraordinary intensity. Disagreement is not betrayal, but there is a difference between criticizing Israel because you care about what it becomes and treating Israel’s very existence as a moral stain.

There is a difference between disagreeing a government and opposing Jewish sovereignty. There is a difference between demanding that Israel improve and demanding that it disappear. A Jewish state should not be required to achieve perfection in order to deserve survival. No other state meets that standard.

You may not hate Israel. You may fear loving it. Some Jews distance themselves from Israel not because they have studied it carefully and reached a reasoned conclusion, but because loving Israel has become socially expensive.

Perhaps your friends disapprove. Perhaps your political community treats Zionism as a form of racism. Perhaps you worry that defending Israel will make you appear insensitive, tribal or reactionary.

So you qualify every sentence. You begin every statement about Jewish suffering with an apology. You condemn Israel before anyone has even asked what you believe. You present your Jewish identity in the least threatening form possible. You want to prove that you are one of the “good Jews.” I understand the temptation.

But a Jewish identity built around seeking permission from non-Jews will eventually become an identity defined by what other people are willing to tolerate. That is not liberation. Compassion that demands Jewish self-erasure is not compassion. Universalism that asks every group to preserve its identity except the Jews is not universalism. Justice that recognizes every people’s historical trauma except ours is not justice.

You are allowed to care about Jews without apologizing for it. You are allowed to love Israel without presenting a legal brief. You are allowed to belong to your own people.

Perhaps you still feel little connection to Judaism or Israel. That feeling is real, but it does not have to be final. Do not begin with obligation. Begin with curiosity.

Read Jewish history — not merely the history of antisemitism, but the history of Jewish ideas, kingdoms, communities, creativity and renewal.

Study the Torah as literature, law, philosophy, and national memory. Read the arguments of the rabbis. Learn why Jews pray toward Jerusalem. Understand what Shabbat was designed to do. Explore the diversity of Jewish communities from Morocco to Poland, Iraq to Ethiopia, Yemen to Spain.

Visit Israel — not as a political tour, but as an encounter with Jewish civilization alive in its own language and land.

Walk through Jerusalem and realize that the street signs are written in the language of the Bible. Sit in a café surrounded by Jews from families scattered across continents. Hear ancient prayers spoken in a modern country. Watch Jews argue with one another loudly, passionately, and freely.

You may discover that Israel is not the simplistic symbol you were taught to either worship or condemn. It is a living society. You may also discover that Judaism is not a burden from the past. It is a framework for the future.

I used to think Jewish identity was something I had received accidentally. Now I understand it as an inheritance of almost unimaginable depth. An inheritance does not become meaningful merely because it is old. It becomes meaningful when we open it, study it, use it and add something of our own.

You do not have to believe exactly what your grandparents believed. You do not have to practice Judaism exactly as they did. You do not have to agree with every rabbi, every Israeli, or every Jew — but you should know what you are rejecting before you reject it. You should know what your ancestors protected before you decide it has no value. You should know what Israel restored before you treat it as disposable.

I once stood outside that story. Then I learned enough to step inside. The door is still open.

My name is Joshua Hoffman, and I’m reaching out on behalf of Future of Jewish — a publication dedicated to helping people better understand, think critically about, and feel more connected to Judaism, Israel, and the Jewish world.

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This is a guest essay by Guy Goldstein, the grandson of Holocaust survivors.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Last week, the United Nations took the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel and filed it in the world’s records as endangered Palestinian heritage.

The danger it named was the Jews. The place is Sebastia, the hilltop city King Omri raised 3,000 years ago, and the threat entered on the record is an Israeli plan to protect the ruins. A Jewish king’s capital, filed as Palestinian, with the Jewish state named as the peril it must be saved from.

If it were the only case you could call it a blunder. It is not the only case. It is one entry on a long and growing list, and the list, taken whole, shows a pattern that ordinary politics cannot explain.

The move belongs to one faith above all, and it is older than any of the institutions now taking it up. Wherever the Islamic conquest reached it left the same signature: When it beat a people, it announced their end by raising a mosque on their holiest ruin.

The Dome of the Rock went up on the Temple Mount 13 centuries ago, on the exact stone where the Jewish Temple had stood, and it is still the first thing the eye finds over Jerusalem. Hagia Sophia, the greatest church in Christendom, became a mosque the week Constantinople fell. The cathedral of Córdoba became the Great Mosque, and the basilica of Damascus became the Umayyad mosque. A sultan in Delhi built a mosque out of the smashed columns of 27 Hindu and Jain temples and carved the boast into the gate himself, and named it Quwwat-ul-Islam, the Might of Islam.

It did not matter who the conquered were — Jews, Christians, Hindus — they would all be subjected to the same move on, and the conquerors documented their intent so there could be no mistaking it. Where the liberated hold power today they are clawing the record back. India has gone to its courts one temple at a time and won. The Jews have reclaimed several of their holy sites. Though Ironically, those liberated peoples are being branded “occupiers” and “expansionist” for doing so.

Where conflict with Islam persists, the deliberate erasure of the past continues, as was the case in Iraq and Syria when ISIS destroyed relics of ancient pre-Islamic civilization, and as continues today in Judea and Samaria.

Rachel’s Tomb sits a mile from Bethlehem, prayed at by Jews for thousands of years, and an Islamic trust began calling it the Bilal ibn Rabah Mosque in the 1990s. That same trust drove bulldozers into the ancient fill of the Temple Mount in 1999 to open a new mosque, and hauled out 6,000 tons of earth with no archaeologist allowed to watch. Volunteers have since sifted half a million pieces of the First and Second Temples out of the debris it dumped, and Israel’s own Supreme Court found the trust had broken the antiquities law 35 times over.

Hours after Joseph’s Tomb was handed to Palestinian control in October 2000, a mob burned it and painted the dome green. That same month a crowd in Jericho torched a synagogue floor that had held its mosaic for fourteen centuries.

This process continues today, in 2026. Now at Bethlehem, where three ancient reservoirs cut in the time of the Hasmoneans and Herod once carried water to the Second Temple. The Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank, has announced it is considering building a mosque on them. The same move, one more time.

And while the mosque is planned above, the history below is already going. An illegal quarry has ground two kilometers of that 2,000-year-old aqueduct into gravel, and the Israeli group that fought the quarry in court for fifteen years is called Regavim. Remember it.

The bricks are the old way, though, and the old way is slow. There is a faster one now, and it needs no mosque at all. Instead today you change what the record says a place is, and you do it in the rooms where the world keeps its records.

The United States, in the last month of the Obama Administration, lifted the veto that had shielded Israel for decades and let the United Nations Security Council pass Resolution 2334, which declares that every inch of Jewish presence beyond the 1967 line, the West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem alike, has no legal validity and is a flagrant violation of international law.

East Jerusalem is the Old City. The Old City is the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the Jewish Quarter. One clause turned the oldest ground of Jewish civilization, in the world’s highest legal record, into occupied land where the Jews are the trespassers.

This in turn became the backbone of the case the International Criminal Court opened against Israel, and of the World Court’s ruling in 2024 that the Jewish presence beyond the line is unlawful and must end. And a quieter clause told every government on earth to treat everything past that line as no part of Israel. Europe was listening, and it built a policy on those words.

Then there is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which has spent a decade rewriting the cultural record one vote at a time. It passed a resolution on Jerusalem in 2016 that named the Temple Mount only by its Muslim names and wrapped the Western Wall’s own plaza in quotation marks under a Muslim name, as though the Jewish name were the doubtful one.

The erasure was so plain that UNESCO’s own director general broke with her members to say it out loud, that the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount in Arabic) is also the Har HaBayit (Temple Mount in Hebrew) whose Western Wall is the holiest place in Judaism, and that to deny any faith’s tie to Jerusalem betrays the city.

Six years before, UNESCO had ruled that Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs, among the oldest living Jewish sites on earth, were mosques and Palestinian property. It made the old city of Hebron a Palestinian site in danger in 2017, and the danger was Israel.

It did all of this so relentlessly that the United States and Israel finally walked out of the organization. And this July it reached Sebastia, a hill whose mosque stands on a church, on an older church, on Herod’s city, on the Israelite capital, each layer laid to bury the one beneath.

Here is where the grievance becomes an indictment, because the same world that files these votes knows exactly what it is doing, and jails people for it everywhere else. When jihadists took pickaxes to the shrines of Timbuktu, the International Criminal Court tried a man for it and sent him to prison for nine years, the first person it ever jailed for the destruction of heritage alone. The Security Council passed a resolution calling the deliberate erasure of a people’s monuments a threat to international peace.

The phrase the courts and UNESCO use for it is “cultural cleansing,” and they mean it as a crime. So the world has the law. It simply declines to apply it when the heritage is Jewish and the erasers are useful. The same act that sends a man to a cell in the Hague when it is done in Mali earns a UN listing and a European grant when it is done in Judea.

Islam is not the only group repeating its most successful playbooks in Judea and Samaria. Sixty years after the Soviet Union created the school of Zionology to legitimize the hatred of Israel (anti-Zionism), the KGB’s most successful project is repeating the its best move and joining in the erasure.

This time Russia has built a state program to record heritage sites in digital form, run by its Academy of Sciences and by the Hermitage museum under orientalist Mikhail Piotrovsky, and blessed by Putin himself. Its name is the archive of the monuments of Africa and the Islamic world. It works by signing deals with governments; it has signed one with the Palestinian Authority, and the first Jewish sites reported for its cameras are Solomon’s Pools and Jericho, the town where the Bible says Joshua crossed into the land.

In the age of AI, this is one of the most dangerous threats facing Jewish history. Whoever builds the archive writes the label: the name of the place, the centuries it is permitted to have lived through, the people it is said to belong to, and who owns the file underneath. Slide a Second Temple reservoir and the oldest city in Jewish memory into an archive of the Islamic world, and the Jews become a footnote to their own ground.

You cannot rewrite the stone. You can rewrite the caption, and the caption is what becomes part of “reliable sources.”

As George Orwell said, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Were it only Islam and the remnants of the Soviet agitprop machine, that would be bad enough, but it is the European Union paying for Palestinian building across Area C, the sixty percent of the West Bank left in Israeli hands in the Oslo Accords, and it does it in the open, whole clusters of it with EU flags on the walls, put up without permits against the law and against the Oslo treaty.

Behind closed doors, its plans are even more nefarious. Its own confidential plan from 2022 writes the quiet part down: Fund the building, give Palestinians lawyers in Israeli courts, and monitor Israeli archaeological digs, which the EU calls a tool Israel uses to tighten its grip. Consider that same ground. A Palestinian quarry is grinding a Temple-era aqueduct into rubble, and the heritage crime Europe chose to watch for is Jews doing archaeology.

This May, the EU did the thing that gives it away: It sanctioned Regavim, the watchdog from the start of this story, the one that spent 15 years in court over the quarry eating the aqueduct. It froze the group’s assets and put its director under a travel ban, the same machinery the EU keeps for the world’s worst abusers of human rights. The stated crime was that Regavim lobbies to tear down illegal Palestinian building, including a school the EU had paid for.

Now set that against what the EU itself pays for. It has poured money into the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, which an Israeli court ruled is the farming arm of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group the EU’s own law calls a terrorist organization. Two of that group’s men, both drawing salaries from the EU-funded body, ran the cell that murdered Rina Shnerb, a 17-year-old Israeli girl, in 2019.

The Dutch government confirmed to its own parliament that its money had paid them, and nine European states went on funding the body after the ruling. It also funds B’Tselem, whose field researcher was caught on a hidden camera helping hand a Palestinian who wanted to sell land to Jews over to Palestinian Security Forces (who would punish them for the crime of selling land to a Jew).

The count of settler violence that Europe leaned on to justify sanctioning Israelis has been shown — by Regavim and by a second Israeli institute, as well as by the Israeli army’s own tally — to be inflated well past double the real figure (with some figures showing that it is inflated more than 10-fold). Nonetheless, Europe used that inflated count to build the file that sanctioned the group dedicated to exposing the pattern of investment from the European Union in the silent occupation of Judea and Samaria.

It is the same tell every time, whether the accuser sits in Brussels, at the UN, or in Moscow. The loudest voice charging the Jews with erasing and occupying and stealing is the hand on the eraser.

Jewish-Soviet writer Vasily Grossman said it plainest, a lifetime ago: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I will tell you what you are guilty of.”

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Everybody thinks wars determine the future.

Not true — babies do.

Armies win battles. Demography wins centuries.

Long after today’s round of fighting has ceased, after today’s diplomats have retired, after tomorrow’s ceasefire has collapsed, and this week’s headlines have been forgotten, the real story will still be unfolding quietly inside maternity wards. Generals might dominate the history books, but mothers write history just as much.

That may sound sentimental, yet it is anything but. Demography is among history’s least sentimental forces. Historians have long noted that demographic strength underpinned the rise of powers as diverse as 19th century America, post-war Israel, and modern China. Economists from Adam Smith onwards understood that labor, productivity, and population are inseparable.

It determines who fills classrooms, factories, laboratories, universities, tax rolls, and military barracks. It decides whether pension systems remain solvent, whether economies continue growing, whether armies can recruit, and whether nations possess the confidence to plan beyond the next election.

So it is remarkable that so much commentary on Israel remains fixated on missiles, negotiations, and diplomatic theater — while paying comparatively little attention to the one variable likely to shape the region long after every current politician is gone: Israel’s population. And, just as importantly, the Palestinian population.

Much of the developed world, in the West and in Asia, has discovered a revolutionary population policy. They have stopped having enough babies to maintain their populations. In many places people have stopped having families. For example, South Korea’s fertility rate has fallen below 0.8 births per woman. Italy, Spain, and Japan remain well below the replacement level of 2.1, forcing governments into permanent debates about pensions, immigration, and shrinking workforces.

Politicians obsess over economic growth while quietly running out of workers. Against this backdrop, Israel looks almost biologically rebellious.

The Jewish state’s total fertility rate remains around three children per woman, the highest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and roughly double the OECD average of about 1.5 children. It is one of the few developed countries still reproducing its population without relying primarily on immigration. That alone makes it anomalous.

Yet there is another anomaly that receives far less attention: The Palestinians are demographic outliers, too. Forget the laughable but unfunny “Great Genocide” blood libel. For decades, Palestinian fertility has been among the highest in the Middle East. While birth rates have fallen significantly, particularly in the Judea and Samaria, they remain robust by Western standards, with Gaza maintaining higher fertility than either Israel’s Arab citizens or many neighbouring societies.

This creates one of the Middle East’s great paradoxes. The conflict that dominates international attention is taking place between two societies which continue reproducing themselves while much of the developed world quietly forgets how.

For years, one prediction became almost conventional wisdom. Beginning in the 1980s and continuing well into the 2000s, diplomats, journalists, and prominent demographers repeatedly warned that Israel faced an inevitable “demographic time bomb.” The argument became conventional wisdom in policy circles.

One influential example was Professor Arnon Soffer of the University of Haifa. Israeli and international media frequently cited his warnings. His projections became enormously influential, even though many later required substantial revision as fertility and migration patterns changed. Israel, we were confidently informed, would eventually cease to have a Jewish majority because Arab population growth would overwhelm it, be it Palestinians or Arab Israelis.

It sounded inevitable. Expert graphs were produced. Journalists repeated them with their customary lack of rigor. Activists cited them. Then reality committed one of its recurring acts of discourtesy by refusing to cooperate.

Jewish fertility rose and Arab Israeli fertility declined. Birth rates in Judea and Samaria declined substantially. Large waves of Jewish immigration continued to reshape the population. Since October 7th, applications for aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) have risen sharply from Western countries as antisemitism surged, adding yet another reminder that migration responds to history as well as economics. Repeated revisions were required.

Demographic questions have not disappeared — far from it. Israel still faces profound internal demographic challenges involving secular Jews, religious communities, Arab citizens, immigration, labor-force participation and education.

The point is different: Demography is dynamic. People alter their behaviour as economic and political conditions change, cultural expectations evolve, and migration shifts. History stubbornly refuses to follow straight lines simply because a think tank projected one 20 years earlier.

Population alone also guarantees nothing. History is littered with large countries that remained poor and small countries that became rich. What matters is what societies do with the people they have. A growing young population can become an extraordinary economic asset or an extraordinary burden. That depends on institutions.

Israel has spent decades converting human capital into strategic capital: universities, research laboratories, high-tech companies, military wizardry, medical breakthroughs, and enough entrepreneurship to earn the moniker “start-up nation.” Israel spends around five to six percent of GDP on research and development, the highest proportion in the OECD, helping explain why a country of under 10 million people became one of the world’s leading innovation economies.

Population growth feeds an ecosystem capable of transforming people into productivity. The Palestinian story is more tragic. Palestinian fertility once exceeded six children per woman in many areas during the 1990s. It has since fallen markedly, although Gaza has continued to record significantly higher birth rates than most developed societies.

The Palestinians have one of the region’s youngest populations. This youth should be an enormous strategic advantage; young societies possess energy, adaptability and enormous productive potential. Yet young populations require jobs, investment, functioning institutions, stable governance, and educational opportunity. Without those, demographic strength risks becoming demographic frustration.

This is hardly unique to the Palestinians. The pattern has appeared repeatedly across parts of the Middle East and North Africa, where rapidly growing young populations collided with stagnant economies and dysfunctional political systems. Population provides possibility. Institutions determine whether that possibility becomes prosperity. This is where many Western activists foolishly undermine the very Palestinians they claim to champion.

Campaigns to isolate Israel economically are often presented as moral victories, but reality is messier. The Israeli and Palestinian economies remain deeply interconnected. Thousands of Palestinians have worked in Israeli businesses, industrial zones, construction projects, logistics networks, and agricultural enterprises. Complex supply chains rarely respect the simplistic slogans found on university placards. Israel collects tax revenue for the Palestinian Authority, which govern parts of the West Bank.

When activists demand economic disengagement, they imagine they are punishing Israel. Frequently, their main effect is to shrinking Palestinian employment.

Therapy teaches that anxious people often catastrophize today’s crisis while neglecting the deeper patterns quietly shaping tomorrow. Nations display similar cognitive distortions. Governments panic over today’s budget or cabinet reshuffle while neglecting the demographic currents reshaping the next half-century. Meanwhile, birth rates continue doing what they are doing without requiring holding a press conference.

Demographers, of course, possess one unfair advantage over political commentators: They are usually wrong much more slowly. While this is positive for Israel, it does not mean the Jewish state can relax. Its demographic diversity presents immense policy challenges. Each segment of Israeli society possesses different fertility patterns, educational outcomes, labor-force participation rates, and political priorities.

Population growth creates housing pressures, infrastructure demands, transport challenges, healthcare costs, and increased educational needs, not to mention challenges in getting enough people to meet military needs. Managing these successfully will determine whether demographic expansion becomes lasting national strength or merely administrative overload.

Demography is not, despite what the cliche says, destiny. Competence matters. Ultimately, demography is not really about statistics; it is about confidence. Demographers continue debating exactly why birth rates fall, but confidence clearly matters. People invest in children when they believe the future is worth inheriting.

That observation is not absolute. Every family makes deeply personal decisions influenced by economics, health, culture, and circumstance. Yet societies collectively reveal something profound through their willingness (or unwillingness) to imagine future generations. Israel remains unusual because it continues imagining one. The Palestinians do too. That fact alone distinguishes this conflict from many of the ageing societies that comment upon it from afar.

Perhaps that explains part of the fascination. Much of the West debates how to manage decline. Israelis and Palestinians are still debating how to manage growth. Those are very different problems.

Today’s youth will inherit whatever institutions today’s adults leave behind. The true strategic contest is not who just wins the next battle, but which societies transform their growing populations into educated, productive, and resilient citizens. Every nation eventually becomes what it reproduces.

Israel understands that. Hamas understands it too, but in the most destructive possible way. It has long spoken of demography as a weapon rather than as human flourishing. Israel seeks to turn children into scientists, engineers, and soldiers. Hamas has habitually turned children into propaganda, militants, or martyrs. That is about civilizational difference as much as demographics.

Meanwhile, much of the West — preoccupied with today’s outrage and tomorrow’s social-media storm — barely notices the deeper currents flowing beneath history.

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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The world desperately wants to believe that Hamas is willing to surrender its weapons.

U.S. President Donald Trump has announced that the United States-backed Board of Peace reached what he described as a historic agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas and the other armed factions in Gaza.

The announcement was immediately treated as a possible breakthrough: Hamas would give up its weapons, Israel would withdraw from Gaza, the Strip would be reconstructed, and the long nightmare might finally begin to end.

There is only one problem: The agreement does not actually require Hamas to disarm.

Read the document rather than the headlines. The word disarmament does not appear in the roadmap. Instead, it calls for Hamas’ weapons, tunnels, production facilities, and military infrastructure to be gradually “decommissioned and stored.”

The weapons are not necessarily destroyed. They cannot be transferred to Israel or any non-Palestinian party. Hamas and the other factions are permitted to participate in the process. Even the implementation schedule has not been written yet; the parties have another 14 days to negotiate it, and that deadline can be extended.

Weapons may remain legal under future Palestinian regulations. Existing police structures will absorb newly trained officers. Employees cannot be excluded merely because of their political affiliation. The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza will supposedly handle internal security, while the International Stabilization Force is explicitly prohibited from performing police work inside Palestinian society.

This does not sound like the surrender of Hamas. It is an elaborate promise that the terror group might someday participate in a Palestinian-controlled process for storing some of its weapons while Israel gradually abandons the territory from which it can enforce compliance.

Hamas has not agreed to cease being Hamas. It has agreed to discuss the conditions under which the world will pretend that it has.

The fundamental mistake behind the disarmament narrative is the belief that Hamas is an ordinary political organization that happens to possess a military wing.

It is not.

Hamas is a revolutionary Islamist movement in which religion, governance, education, charity, propaganda, policing, and terrorism have always reinforced one another. Its military infrastructure did not suddenly appear after Hamas entered politics. Its political and social infrastructure helped produce the military organization.

Hamas emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood network in Gaza. Long before it governed the territory openly, the movement built influence through mosques, schools, youth programs, religious institutions, and social services. These were not merely charitable activities taking place beside the revolutionary project. They were part of the mechanism through which the movement recruited supporters, established legitimacy, spread its ideology, and built a state within a society.

This is why describing Hamas as having a “political wing” and a “military wing” is so misleading. The distinction is useful to diplomats because it makes negotiations easier to imagine. It is less useful for understanding the organization itself.

The politician raises money. The preacher sanctifies the mission. The teacher passes the worldview to the next generation. The administrator distributes patronage. The police officer suppresses rivals. The propagandist turns defeat into martyrdom. The terrorist carries out the violence. They are different jobs inside the same enterprise.

Taking a rifle from one Hamas member while leaving the movement’s financial networks, educational institutions, command structure, loyal civil servants, ideological authority, and coercive power intact does not dismantle Hamas. It merely changes the form through which Hamas exercises control. A terror movement does not become peaceful because its weapons have been placed in a warehouse controlled by people it may still influence.

For decades, Western leaders have treated Hamas’ ideology as if it were an embarrassing collection of outdated slogans rather than an explanation of the movement’s behavior.

The original 1988 Hamas charter combined the theology of the Muslim Brotherhood with conspiracy theories and explicit antisemitism. It described the conflict not merely as a territorial dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, but as part of a religious struggle in which Jewish sovereignty itself was intolerable. The updated political document in 2017 removed some of the most openly antisemitic language and adopted the vocabulary of national liberation. Western observers rushed to present this as moderation.

But Hamas did not recognize Israel. It continued to claim all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It maintained the legitimacy of armed “resistance” and treated a Palestinian state within the 1967 lines not as a permanent settlement alongside Israel, but as a possible intermediate national consensus. The vocabulary changed. The objective did not.

October 7th should have ended the West’s habit of treating Hamas’ ideology as theatrical excess. Hamas did not merely attack a military position or attempt to improve its bargaining power. It launched a mass assault against Israeli communities, killed roughly 1,200 people, and took 251 hostages.

The attack was also intended as a message to Jews everywhere: Jewish sovereignty can be penetrated, Jewish security can be shattered, and the resulting violence can be transformed into a worldwide campaign against Israel’s legitimacy. Hamas understood that the physical battlefield was only one theater. The information war would begin almost immediately, with Israel placed on trial for responding to an attack that Hamas had initiated.

This does not mean every Palestinian supports Hamas, nor that every Muslim shares its ideology. It means that Hamas itself should be judged by its own doctrine, institutions, conduct, and declared objectives — not by the version of Hamas that foreign diplomats need it to become for their peace plans to work.

Hamas does not need to believe in the agreement to benefit from signing it. By accepting the general roadmap, Hamas changes the diplomatic conversation. Until now, the central demand was simple: Hamas must disarm. Now Hamas can claim that it has accepted disarmament in principle and that Israel is the party preventing peace.

Every Israeli objection can be described as obstruction. Every Israeli operation can be portrayed as a violation. Every demand for stronger verification can be called an attempt to sabotage the agreement. The burden of international pressure begins shifting from the terrorist organization that has retained its weapons to the Jewish state that does not trust it. That is not an accidental consequence. It is the strategy.

Even analysts sympathetic to increased pressure on Israel acknowledge that Hamas’ acceptance is likely a pragmatic move designed to keep the organization involved in Gaza’s future, delay actual decommissioning, and shift the appearance of intransigence toward Israel. Hamas has avoided the language of surrender, rejected the destruction of its weapons, and attached its obligations to Israeli withdrawal and other conditions. ement gives Hamas nearly everything it needs to begin the next phase of the struggle.

It gives Hamas time. It gives Hamas diplomatic legitimacy. It creates pressure for an Israeli withdrawal. It opens the door to “reconstruction” money (which Hamas has notoriously syphoned in years past). It leaves the weapons inside Palestinian hands. It places internal enforcement under a new Palestinian authority whose ability to withstand Hamas has not yet been demonstrated. It allows Hamas to present survival as compromise and compromise as victory.

Most importantly, it preserves ambiguity. Hamas can surrender obsolete weapons while concealing functional ones. It can classify operatives as ordinary civil servants. It can allow loyalists to enter supposedly neutral institutions. It can retain influence over clans, charities, unions, mosques, businesses, and local power brokers while insisting that its formal military organization has disappeared.

That is an inference from the agreement’s gaps, not proof that every one of these tactics will occur. But Israel is being asked to make irreversible territorial concessions before those risks have been eliminated. The standard cannot be whether Hamas has provided enough promises to satisfy international negotiators. It must be whether Hamas has lost the physical and institutional capacity to threaten Israel again.

Let’s recall that Israel withdrew its soldiers and Jewish communities from Gaza in 2005. The hope was that ending Israel’s permanent presence would reduce conflict and give Palestinians an opportunity to govern themselves.

Instead, Hamas eventually took control and transformed Gaza into the base of an increasingly sophisticated military threat. Civilian infrastructure was intertwined with the machinery of war. Tunnels expanded underground. Rockets were produced and imported. International aid flowed into a territory where the governing power openly rejected the legitimacy of the Jewish state.

Israel was repeatedly told that deterrence would hold. It was told that Hamas had become more pragmatic because it had to govern. It was told that economic incentives would moderate the movement. It was told that Hamas wanted stability. It was told that the organization understood the devastating consequences of starting a major war. Then came October 7th.

Israel’s skepticism is therefore not paranoia. It is experience. No responsible country would be expected to remove its military from territory bordering its own communities while an organization that recently invaded those communities retains weapons, personnel, tunnels, money, and political influence. Yet Israel is routinely asked to treat this standard of national self-preservation as evidence that it does not want peace.

The reverse is true: Israel wants a peace that does not require Jews to pretend that their enemies have changed before those enemies have actually changed.

The Board of Peace agreement can still be useful, but only if it is treated as a test of Hamas rather than proof of Hamas’ transformation. “Zero trust” cannot be a slogan. It must determine the sequence. Israel should not withdraw from an area because Hamas has promised to disarm there. Withdrawal should occur only after the previous phase has been completed, independently verified, and proven durable.

Weapons must be destroyed, not merely stored for possible future use. Tunnels must be permanently demolished, not placed under the nominal supervision of a committee that cannot safely inspect them. Manufacturing sites, supply chains, financing networks, and command systems must be dismantled. Former Hamas fighters cannot simply remove their uniforms and reappear as police officers, administrators, contractors, or unofficial enforcers.

Inspectors must have unrestricted access. Obstruction must automatically pause Israeli withdrawals and reconstruction funding. The new governing authority must demonstrate that it can arrest armed Hamas members, seize hidden weapons, suppress military parades, and operate without seeking permission from the organization it is supposedly replacing.

Reconstruction should proceed alongside verified demilitarization, not ahead of it. The people of Gaza deserve homes, schools, hospitals, and a functioning economy. They do not deserve another “reconstruction” cycle in which civilian recovery provides cover for Hamas to rebuild the infrastructure of the next war.

And Israel must retain the right to act when the enforcement system fails. An international force unwilling or unauthorized to confront Hamas cannot become the shield behind which Hamas regenerates. Anything less is not disarmament. It is subcontracted denial.

Hamas’ weapons matter because the ideology controlling them remains intact. The organization was not created because Gaza lacked enough development assistance. It was not radicalized because Israel failed to offer the correct diplomatic formula. Hamas arose from a movement that sees Jewish sovereignty as a religious, political, and civilizational offense. Its antisemitism is not an unfortunate public-relations problem attached to an otherwise negotiable agenda. It has helped define the agenda itself.

That does not mean ideas can be defeated only through military force. It means military force cannot safely be removed while the people committed to those ideas retain the capacity to implement them.

A genuinely post-Hamas Gaza would not merely contain fewer rifles. It would contain fewer institutions teaching that murdering Israelis is heroic. It would contain leaders who regard Palestinian prosperity as more important than destroying Jewish sovereignty. It would contain police officers prepared to confront terrorists rather than protect them. It would contain educators who teach children how to build lives instead of how to sacrifice them.

That transformation may take years. It cannot be manufactured by announcing that Hamas has agreed to a document.

Perhaps individual Hamas members are exhausted. Perhaps some commanders understand that the movement has reached the limits of what its military campaign can achieve. Perhaps regional pressure has forced its leaders to search for a way out. Those possibilities should be tested, but they should not be mistaken for evidence.

The Jewish People have paid too many times for the world’s determination to believe that those who openly threaten us do not really mean what they say. Israel was created in part so that Jewish survival would no longer depend on the optimism, promises, or protection of others.

Hamas may sign papers. It may change terminology. It may place weapons in storage, transfer responsibilities to friendly administrators, or disappear temporarily behind a new Palestinian institution. But Hamas has not disarmed until it can no longer rearm. It has not surrendered until it has surrendered control.

And peace has not arrived until an Israeli child living near Gaza can sleep safely — not because an international committee published another roadmap, but because the organization that invaded Israel has been permanently deprived of the means to do so again.

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This is a guest essay by Melissa Brodsky, a writer specializing in media literacy, modern antisemitism, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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It was the year 1945. The laundry permeated the air, heavy with bleach and steam and the exhaustion of machines running too hard for too long.

Two massive industrial washing machines dominated the room, churning and shaking the floorboards with enough noise to rattle your back teeth. A young woman stood behind the counter, pleasant and efficient, taking in uniforms and smiling at the officers who dropped them off.

The British soldiers who came through liked the joint. It had reasonable prices, reliable service, and friendly staff. If Yelp had been around, it would have scored a 10 out of 10.

None of them ever wondered why two washing machines needed to run 14 hours a day. And not one of them ever looked at the floor beneath their boots.

Twenty-five feet below those boots, a factory was running around the clock.

By 1945, the Haganah (a Jewish underground paramilitary organization founded in June 1920 in British Mandate Palestine) understood with absolute clarity what was coming. The British Mandate would end. When it did, five Arab armies would not wait to see what happened next. The question of Jewish survival in the land was going to be settled by force, and the Haganah intended to be ready.

Getting weapons was hard but manageable. Smuggling rifles, pistols, and Sten submachine guns through a British blockade required nerve and patience, and the Haganah had both. The Sten gun (a simple, cheap British submachine gun produced in enormous quantities during World War II) was available in surplus and relatively easy to acquire. The bullets were another matter entirely.

A bullet press is not a piece of equipment you can hide behind a curtain. The machines that stamp nine-millimeter cartridges are heavy, industrial, and loud, producing a distinctive metallic shrieking that carries through walls and across open ground. The smell of brass and gunpowder is immediate and unmistakable. And the British, who knew perfectly well that the Haganah was building up its arsenal, had informants across the British Mandate watching for exactly this kind of operation.

Yosef Avidar, the Haganah officer tasked with solving the ammunition shortage, had actually purchased bullet presses in Poland back in 1938. They made it as far as Beirut before the situation in Europe made moving them further impossible. They sat in storage in Lebanon for years, waiting.

When Avidar finally got them moving again, he faced the same problem he always faced: Running industrial bullet presses in a territory controlled by an occupying army with a network of informants and a habit of surprise inspections required a cover so complete that a British officer could stand directly above the operation and see nothing but a pleasant agricultural community going about its daily business.

In 1945, a group of young pioneers, most of them teenagers recruited from the Hatzofim (scouts) youth movement, settled on a bare patch of land on Kibbutz Hill in Rehovot, directly adjacent to a British military camp. They put up buildings. They planted crops. They built a dining hall and living quarters and gave every appearance of doing exactly what hundreds of other groups of Jewish pioneers were doing across British Mandate Palestine: establishing a new agricultural community from scratch.

It was all a stage set.

Working in absolute secrecy over 22 days, the group excavated a chamber eight meters (26 feet) beneath the ground. The walls and ceiling were poured concrete, nearly two feet thick, designed to muffle sound and withstand weight. The finished space was roughly the size of a tennis court, 250 square meters (2,690 square feet) of underground factory, lit by electric light, ventilated through a shaft disguised as the chimney of the bakery operating directly above it.

The machinery went in through an opening concealed beneath a 10-ton industrial baking oven, mounted on a pivot so it could swing out to allow access to the shaft below and swing back to cover it completely. The entrance the workers used daily was hidden beneath one of the industrial washing machines in the laundry above, which swung out on heavy hinges to reveal a metal ladder descending into the earth.

When the machine swung back, the entrance disappeared.

Then came the problem of electricity. Running 30 bullet presses around the clock consumes an enormous amount of power. A sudden spike in electricity consumption at an agricultural kibbutz would raise questions immediately. So the Haganah tapped directly into the British military’s own power supply. The British Army was unknowingly powering the bullet factory being built to fight them.

They built the laundry because they needed the noise. Industrial washing machines running at full capacity produce enough mechanical roar to mask the shrieking of bullet presses below. They offered the service commercially, at rates low enough to attract customers, and built a clientele that gave them an ironclad excuse to run the machines from morning to night.

Bullet casings are made of copper. Importing large quantities of copper into British Mandate Palestine would attract exactly the kind of attention the operation could not afford. British customs officials asked why they needed so much of it. The Haganah told them it was for manufacturing lipstick containers. To make the story airtight, they backed it up with gifts of lipstick to British officers’ wives. The British officers’ wives were delighted. The copper kept coming.

The 45 workers lived on the kibbutz above and descended into the factory in rotating shifts. Each shift lasted roughly 10 hours. Down in the bunker, under artificial light, in the heat and the noise and the smell of brass and machine oil, they stamped nine-millimeter bullets at a rate of up to 40,000 a day.

Each bullet was marked with the letters EA — E for Eretz (as in Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel) and A for Ayalon (the name of the factory, the Ayalon Institute) — a small, invisible declaration of identity pressed into every cartridge that came off the line.

The work left marks. Underground workers got pale. The kibbutz was supposed to be populated by sunburned, weather-beaten agricultural pioneers. Workers also emerged from their shifts smelling of machine oil and gunpowder.

To explain the smell, carpentry and metal workshops were built around the laundry above, giving anyone who noticed the scent a plausible explanation. To explain the pallor, the operation’s director appealed to the Haganah’s chief doctor, Dr. Yosef Kot, who came down into the bunker personally.

The workers suffered chronic headaches, eye problems, general weakness from 10-hour shifts underground with no sunlight or fresh air. The doctor’s prescription was a quartz lamp. They hauled it down into the bunker. After their shifts, the workers stripped down and stood under it, treating their medical symptoms and maintaining the tan that their actual working conditions made impossible. When they emerged above ground, they looked appropriately weathered.

The kibbutz kept uninvited visitors away through a separate scheme. The gate always had a notice posted. Today it might be foot and mouth disease. Tomorrow, a bird plague. The next day, an infant illness requiring quarantine. Nobody came to check, not even family. Workers had to turn their own relatives away at the gate, cutting visits short, refusing to explain why. The families understood they should not ask.

When the finished bullets needed to leave the compound, they went out in milk cans with false bottoms and later in hidden compartments of fuel trucks, a particularly audacious choice given that they were stashing gunpowder-filled ammunition inside vehicles designed to carry flammable liquid. The cans looked like dairy deliveries. They were carrying the ammunition that would determine whether a Jewish state survived its first weeks of existence.

In February 1948, the Jewish underground blew up a section of British railway. The British, furious and suspicious, launched a sweep of the surrounding area that brought soldiers directly to Kibbutz Hill.

The workers had minutes of warning. They descended into the factory, shut down the machines, and climbed back out. Then, in a move of extraordinary improvisation, they organized themselves into a medical relief team and went to assist casualties from the railway explosion. When British soldiers arrived at the kibbutz gates, they found a community apparently engaged entirely in humanitarian work.

The inspection found nothing. The machines went back on the next day.

By the time the British Mandate ended in May 1948 and the State of Israel declared independence, the Ayalon Institute had produced more than 2.25 million nine-millimeter cartridges. When five Arab armies invaded simultaneously in the hours after independence was declared, those bullets were already distributed and waiting.

It has been said, by the people who were there, that the ammunition from the Ayalon Institute was the only supply that was never in shortage during the 1948 war. Every other category of weapon and equipment ran low at some point during those desperate first weeks. The bullets from the factory beneath the laundry did not.

Yehudit Adler, a 19-year-old worker at the Ayalon Institute, put it simply when asked about those years: “It was not frightening. It’s very difficult for me to reconstruct the feeling because we were so dedicated and we wanted it to succeed. And we knew the dangers, of course. One little lapse and the British would hang us.”

The operation shut down in June 1948, once the immediate threat to central Israel had passed and the British had departed. The machines were moved to other locations, and the bunker went quiet.

After independence, the 45 workers did not go their separate ways. They had spent three years living as a community above a secret, sustaining each other through isolation, illness, and the daily weight of knowing what failure would cost. When the war ended and the factory closed, they decided to do what they had always said they were doing: They founded a real kibbutz.

Kibbutz Ma’agan Micha’el opened in 1949 on the Mediterranean coast near Zikhron Ya’akov, 93 kilometers (58 miles) north of the Ayalon Institute. The community they had pretended to be finally actually became.

Their secret, kept so completely that not a single word leaked during three years of operation, stayed kept for another 25 years after that. The public did not learn about the underground factory until 1973. Twenty-five years of silence, maintained by 45 people who had decided that some things were worth protecting long after the danger had passed.

After the State of Israel was established, Yehudit Adler changed her name. She became Yehudit Ayalon, taking the name of the factory as her own, carrying it forward into the rest of her life the way she had carried everything else about that place: without fanfare, without explanation, and without apology.

In 1987, after a restoration project, the site opened as a museum. Visitors today can stand in the laundry above, watch the washing machine swing out on its pivot, and descend the same metal ladder those 45 teenagers climbed every day for three years. The bullet presses are still there. The UV lamp is still there. The concrete walls, two feet thick, built in 22 days, are still there. The factory that saved a country is still exactly where they left it.

There is a version of this story that frames it as a caper, a clever trick pulled off by resourceful underdogs, and that framing is not wrong. The fake quarantine signs, the lipstick cover story, the sunlamp tans, the British officers dropping off their laundry above a bullet factory powered by the British Army’s own electricity — all of it has a quality that belongs in a heist film.

But underneath the cleverness is something more serious: These were mostly teenagers, children from a youth movement who were told that the survival of their people depended on what they did underground, in the dark, in the heat, for 10 hours a day.

They stamped their initials onto every bullet they made, EA, Eretz Ayalon, a signature nobody would ever see but them, pressed into the brass of cartridges that would be fired by soldiers in a war for a country which did not exist yet.

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This is guest essay by Joelle Kaufman, a former corporate executive, speaker, and best-selling author.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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In 1933, Germany forced out the 15 percent of physicists who produced 64 percent of its citations. The pattern is back, and this time the cost is counted in cancer deaths.

Imagine what saves most people from cancer. It usually is not the breakthrough that makes headlines. It is not the celebrity scientist standing beside a microscope or the experimental drug celebrated as a miracle.

Those discoveries matter enormously, but most cancer outcomes are determined much earlier, through systems so ordinary that we barely notice them.

It is the mammogram that catches a tumor at stage one instead of stage three. The colonoscopy that finds a polyp before it becomes something worse. The family doctor who notices that a patient has missed a screening and calls again. The nurse who explains the test in a language the patient understands. The electronic record that flags the person who has fallen through the cracks.

It is prevention, repetition, follow-up, and reach.

It is the primary care doctor in an ordinary clinic, nowhere near a famous cancer center, who orders the screening and makes sure the result does not disappear into a computer system. Most cancer outcomes are decided there, in the community, long before anyone reaches for a novel drug.

This kind of medicine is less glamorous than inventing a new treatment. It does not produce the same headlines or fundraising photographs. But a treatment can only help the patients who receive it. A prevention system can change the fate of an entire population.

Israel does this as well as any country on earth.

Cancer screening runs through primary care as a national quality program, tracked across the entire population through electronic health records. Breast screening participation sits around 70 percent, colorectal screening above 64 percent, measured across more than 1.5 million women’s records, and both climbed after the program launched.

Those numbers represent something larger than compliance with a test. They represent a health system capable of identifying who needs care, reaching them, tracking what happens next, and learning from the results.

Israel’s health system covers everyone. It follows patients not merely through one appointment or one insurance plan, but often across decades. It can connect what happens in a neighborhood clinic today with what happens to that patient years later. That continuity turns everyday medicine into knowledge.

It allows researchers to ask questions other countries struggle to answer. Which outreach methods actually persuade people to get screened? Which communities are being missed? How early does a particular intervention begin to save lives? What happens when screening is coordinated nationally instead of left to individual doctors and patients?

Israel turns the answers into research the rest of the world can use.

Its laboratories have also built artificial intelligence systems that can read pathology slides, expanding access to expertise in places that may never have enough trained pathologists of their own. That is what Israeli medicine often looks like at its best: a small country using scale, data, necessity, and ingenuity to solve problems far beyond its borders.

So when a global congress convenes the world to improve cancer care in the community — the exact thing Israel does best — you would expect Israeli names throughout the program. You would expect Israeli doctors discussing national screening systems, Israeli researchers presenting population-level evidence, and Israeli health organizations explaining how primary care, technology, and long-term records can work together.

There were none. Not one Israeli voice in a room devoted to a field in which Israel has something unusually valuable to contribute.

That absence matters. Conferences do more than distribute information. They decide who is considered legitimate, which research enters the conversation, which institutions form partnerships, and which ideas travel from one health system to another. A conference program is not merely a schedule. It is a map of who is permitted to shape the future of a field.

Erase a country from that map often enough, and its knowledge begins to disappear with it. This is a boycott, and it works the way the boycott of Israel usually works now: quietly. Not with a banner announcing that Israeli scientists are forbidden. Not with a resolution that can be circulated, challenged, and condemned. The modern academic boycott is usually administered through silence.

A name never makes the list. An invitation never arrives. A paper is rejected for reasons vague enough to defend. A partnership is suddenly “under review.” A colleague who once answered emails stops responding. An institution insists that politics had nothing to do with the decision, even when the only thing that changed was the nationality of the people involved.

One Israeli university task force counted roughly 500 boycott incidents in the six months through early 2025, a 66 percent jump. Researchers blocked from conferences, papers turned away, medical exchange programs suspended, and universities severing ties. An absence here. A disinvitation there. Each incident deniable on its own, all of them adding up to a wall.

That deniability is the point. An open boycott creates a scandal. A quiet boycott creates a pattern no single institution must take responsibility for. Everyone can claim that their decision was isolated, procedural, or unrelated to politics. Meanwhile, Israeli scholars gradually discover that the international world in which they once participated has become smaller.

The boycott succeeds not by proving that Israeli research is bad, but by ensuring fewer people encounter it at all.

We have seen this before, and we know exactly what it costs. In 1933, Germany began dismissing Jewish scientists from its universities. The 15 percent of physicists forced out accounted for 64 percent of the field’s citations. Einstein, Franck, and Schrödinger were among the extraordinary scientific figures driven from the German academic world, along with five more future Nobel laureates.

The regime did not only end Jewish careers. It exiled its own best science. It treated the removal of Jews as an act of national purification and discovered, too late, that it had purified itself of brilliance. Laboratories lost their leaders. Universities lost their prestige. Students lost their teachers. Germany’s enemies gained many of the minds Germany had rejected.

And the world lost the discoveries those scientists might have made sooner (or might have made at all) had their work not been shattered by persecution and exile.

Prejudice always takes the best first, because talent is never evenly distributed according to the political categories prejudice invents. Once a society decides that identity matters more than contribution, excellence becomes irrelevant. The scientist is no longer a scientist. He becomes a Jew. The physician is no longer a physician. She becomes an Israeli.

The work is judged only after the identity has already rendered it suspect.

The version running now is quieter. No laws are being posted on university doors. No single global authority has ordered Israeli researchers to leave. The machinery is decentralized, informal, and protected by the language of activism. But its target is prevention, which makes it worse in one specific way.

Excluding a leader in cancer prevention does not cost the world an abstraction. It costs screening protocols that catch disease early. It costs systems capable of reaching whole populations. It costs evidence that other countries could copy tomorrow without waiting twenty years for a revolutionary cure.

Medical knowledge spreads through relationships. Researchers meet at conferences, compare findings, challenge assumptions, begin collaborations, and bring ideas back to their own institutions. A screening model tested in one country may influence a public health program in another. A doctor may hear a presentation, recognize that a similar system could work in her community, and begin the process of adapting it.

Remove Israeli experts from those rooms and no one can calculate exactly what disappears. That is what makes the damage so easy to ignore.

There will be no patient whose chart says, “Cancer detected late because an Israeli researcher was excluded from a conference.” There will be no death certificate listing academic boycotts as a contributing cause. The consequences will be scattered and anonymous.

A health system will continue using a weaker outreach method because its administrators never encountered a better one. A doctor will not learn about a screening strategy that could have reached more patients. A research partnership that might have produced an answer will never begin. A country with too few specialists will adopt useful technology years later than it otherwise might have.

Keep a leader in prevention out of the conversation, and the bill eventually comes due somewhere. It comes due as cancers found late that could have been found early. As treatment that begins after the easiest window has closed. As surgeries that become more invasive, therapies that become more punishing, and families that hear news they might not have had to hear. It comes due as people who die who did not have to — most of whom will never know that a boycott had anything to do with it.

There is a bitter symmetry here: The same prejudice that once drove Jews out of the laboratory is now removing Jewish and Israeli science that would save Jew and gentile alike. The language has changed. The mechanisms have changed. The people enforcing the exclusion tell themselves an entirely different story. But the underlying bargain remains the same: sacrifice knowledge in order to preserve prejudice.

Cancer does not check the nationality of the researcher who developed the screening protocol. It does not ask how the scientist voted, what flag hangs outside her institution, or whether activists approve of her government. It only cares whether the disease is found, and whether it is found in time.

A mammogram developed through Israeli research does not work only on Israelis. An artificial intelligence system trained in an Israeli laboratory does not refuse to read the pathology slide of an Arab, a European, an African, or an American. Knowledge does not inherit the nationality of the person who produced it.

Boycotters understand this when the innovation benefits them. They are perfectly willing to use Israeli technology, medicine, cybersecurity, agriculture, and research while trying to remove Israelis from the institutions that create them. They want the discovery without the discoverer; the medicine without the Jew.

That arrangement cannot last. Science depends on exchange, criticism, replication, and contact. You cannot indefinitely isolate the people producing knowledge while expecting the knowledge to keep arriving on schedule.

So name this plainly, because the quiet version depends on no one naming it: When a room is built to improve care for everyone and the people who do it best are edited out for being Israeli, that is not scientific judgment. It is not humanitarianism. It is not principle. It is discrimination with a conference badge.

It is the oldest prejudice wearing this decade’s clothes. And on this subject, its consequences will not be measured only in canceled invitations, damaged careers, or diminished universities. They will be counted in lives.

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Donald Trump built his public identity around “The Art of the Deal” — the belief that successful negotiation requires leverage, pressure, unpredictability, and the willingness to walk away.

The Iranian regime has perfected a different art: the art of the deal(ay).

On Sunday, reports emerged that mediators were attempting to revive the memorandum of understanding signed by the United States and Iran on June 17th. The proposed arrangement would renew the ceasefire and reopen the Strait of Hormuz without fees, but only for another 60 days. At the same time, Iranian officials announced that negotiations with Oman over a mechanism to govern shipping through the strait were entering their “final stages.”

That phrase — for another 60 days — contains the entire Iranian strategy.

Iran is not offering to resolve the crisis. It is offering to postpone it. It is not agreeing that one of the world’s most important waterways must remain permanently open to international commerce. It is offering the world a temporary license to use it. It is not abandoning its attempt to control the Strait of Hormuz. It is asking everyone to stop fighting while the Iranian regime negotiates the terms under which it will exercise that control.

In other words, Iran is not negotiating an end to the crisis. It is refinancing the crisis.

The original memorandum was supposedly a breakthrough. It declared an end to military operations, reopened the Strait of Hormuz, began the removal of the American naval blockade, and created a 60-day period for negotiating a permanent agreement.

But look more closely at how it was constructed: Iran promised to use its “best efforts” to guarantee the safe passage of commercial ships without charge “for 60 days only.” The future administration of the strait would then be negotiated with Oman and other Gulf states.

Meanwhile, the framework placed sanctions relief, oil waivers, access to frozen Iranian assets, and an enormous reconstruction and development plan on the table. The most important nuclear questions (including enrichment and the disposition of Iran’s enriched material) were pushed into negotiations over a future final agreement.

The West was being asked to begin delivering tangible benefits while Iran’s most important obligations remained matters for future discussion. This is not accidental ambiguity. The ambiguity is the product. The regime’s objective is to make every basic obligation temporary, conditional, reversible, and renegotiable.

Iran does not permanently reopen the Strait of Hormuz. It opens it for 60 days. It does not dismantle its nuclear infrastructure. It agrees to discuss what might eventually happen to it. It does not surrender its ability to threaten international shipping. It negotiates which routes ships may take and what authority the Iranian regime might exercise over them.

Then, when the temporary period approaches its end, or when Iran decides the agreement is no longer useful, the regime manufactures another dispute.

The route is unacceptable. The inspections are unfair. The sanctions relief is insufficient. The Americans violated the spirit of the agreement. The international community failed to respect Iranian sovereignty. The details require further technical discussion.

The result is another emergency, another round of mediation, another temporary framework, and another celebration in Western capitals that diplomacy has been “saved.”

The original memorandum did not even survive its first few weeks intact. Iran attacked a commercial vessel in the strait just over a week after the agreement was signed, triggering another exchange of strikes. The disagreement centered precisely on the vague language governing Iranian control over shipping routes and future fees.

Now the world is negotiating its way back into essentially the same arrangement. That is not progress. It is a subscription service. Every 60 days, the international community must renew its access to normality.

The most remarkable part of this diplomacy is that Iran is treated as though it is making an extraordinary concession by allowing commercial ships to travel through an international waterway. But Iran helped create the crisis in the first place.

Closing or threatening the Strait of Hormuz gives the Iranian regime leverage because the waterway carried roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas before the war. Disrupting it raises energy prices, frightens Gulf governments, pressures Western voters, and creates immediate demands for de-escalation.

Iran therefore benefits twice. First it benefits from the crisis, then it benefits from temporarily suspending the crisis. This is the basic Iranian business model: Manufacture instability, demonstrate the ability to intensify it, and then demand political or economic compensation for briefly restoring the conditions that existed before Iran disrupted them.

A government takes hostages and demands concessions for their release. A proxy militia attacks shipping and demands recognition as a political actor. A nuclear program advances beyond previously accepted limits and is then partially frozen in exchange for sanctions relief. A waterway is threatened and then reopened for 60 days as though the Iranian regime has bestowed a gift upon humanity.

The regime transforms ordinary compliance into a valuable commodity. And because the agreement is temporary, Iran can sell the same commodity again.

This method is not unique to Iran. It is part of the strategic culture of revolutionary Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah — movements whose ultimate objectives cannot be reconciled with permanent coexistence and whose continued survival is itself considered a form of victory. Such movements do not necessarily negotiate to reach an agreed destination. They negotiate to survive the journey.

Hamas has repeatedly used phases, sequencing disputes, temporary pauses, partial hostage releases, and demands for guarantees to preserve its leverage. Even the latest Gaza roadmap remains entangled in another dispute over who must move first. Hamas says Israel must cease its operations, withdraw forces, and increase aid before Hamas places its weapons into storage. Israel says meaningful withdrawal cannot occur before genuine disarmament. Previous efforts have repeatedly collapsed around this sequencing problem.

Both sides can accuse the other of delay. Both sides can reject proposals or dispute implementation. But Hamas possesses a particular strategic advantage: It does not need to produce peace in order to claim success. It needs to remain alive, armed, relevant, and capable of rebuilding.

Every temporary ceasefire that leaves Hamas intact can be presented as proof that Israel failed to destroy it. Every prolonged negotiation gives the organization more time to reorganize politically, pressure mediators, manipulate international opinion, and turn the continued captivity of Israelis into bargaining leverage.

The negotiations may appear to be about ending the conflict. For Hamas, they are also about extending the organization’s lifespan. The same is true of the Iranian regime.

Western governments tend to assume that both sides in a negotiation want the negotiation to succeed. That assumption is often wrong. Sometimes one side wants an agreement while the other side wants a process. An agreement creates obligations. A process creates time.

Time allows international pressure to shift. Time allows military forces to recover. Time allows alliances to fracture. Time allows public attention to fade. Time allows elections to approach. Time allows energy prices, economic anxiety, and political exhaustion to weaken the other side’s determination.

The United States wants an answer. Iran wants another meeting. The United States wants a final document. Iran wants another framework. The United States wants the Strait of Hormuz reopened. Iran wants the world to accept that its opening is negotiable. The United States wants Iran’s nuclear threat eliminated. Iran wants another 60 days to discuss what “eliminated” means.

This asymmetry is especially dangerous for U.S. President Donald Trump, who genuinely believes in using overwhelming pressure to produce rapid agreements. That instinct can be effective when the other side believes delay will make its position worse, but Iran believes the opposite.

The regime sees Trump’s hunger for a visible deal as something to exploit. It understands that he wants the dramatic announcement, the capital letters, the breakthrough, the photograph, and the declaration that a war has been avoided. Iran can feed that appetite with the outline of a deal, then the parameters of a deal, then the framework for implementing the parameters, then technical negotiations over the framework, then a temporary extension while the technical negotiations continue.

Trump announced this weekend that he would hold off on new attacks, subject to the rapid completion of an agreement reopening Hormuz and ending Iran’s nuclear threat. Iran, however, immediately separated its talks with Oman over shipping routes from the larger question of whether the strait would actually be fully opened. Washington heard “deal.” The Iranian regime heard “more time.”

The Strait of Hormuz should not be reopened for 60 days as though Iran is doing the world a favor. Permanent freedom of navigation must be treated as the baseline, not as a recurring Iranian concession. Deadlines must carry automatic consequences. Violations must trigger predetermined costs rather than another emergency conference to determine whether the violation was sufficiently serious.

Most importantly, the same obligation must not be purchased repeatedly. Iran should not be rewarded in June for reopening the strait, allowed to challenge the arrangement in July, and then rewarded again in August for reopening it once more. That teaches the Iranian regime that violating an agreement increases the value of its next agreement.

A successful deal must change the underlying reality. It must leave Iran with less ability to threaten shipping, rebuild its nuclear program, finance its proxies, or manufacture another crisis. Otherwise, it is not a deal. It is an intermission.

Donald Trump wrote “The Art of the Deal.” The Iranian regime has answered with “The Art of the Deal(ay).” It creates urgency, offers temporary relief, delays the decisive questions, collects immediate benefits, violates the ambiguous provisions, and then returns to the negotiating table demanding compensation for restoring what it had already promised.

The only way to defeat that strategy is to reverse its central calculation: Delay must stop protecting the Iranian regime, and delay must start costing it.

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This is a guest essay by Andres Spokoiny, President and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network.

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One of the keys to understanding Western attitudes toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is to distinguish between Palestinians and Palestinianism.

Palestinianism is something else entirely. It is not a movement for Palestinian rights. It is a Western ideological framework that transforms “Palestine” from a particular conflict into the central moral lens through which every other issue is interpreted.

The extent to which Palestinianism has colonized public life is difficult to exaggerate.

Climate movements suspend campaigns against global warming to organize demonstrations for Gaza. Pride marches become platforms for “Palestinian liberation.” Labor unions issue declarations about Israel. Literary festivals, immigration protests, museum openings, academic conferences, municipal elections, even mining festivals in Scotland suddenly discover that their central concern is “Palestine.”

At the 2025 Durham Miners’ Gala — a celebration of Britain’s mining heritage — speakers insisted that defending British workers required “freeing Palestine.”

The underlying assumption is breathtaking in its ambition: “Palestine” is no longer one conflict among many, but the hidden key to all of them. Solve “Palestine” (or, more accurately, eliminate the Jewish state) and capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, climate change, and every other great evil suddenly disappear.

I’m not exaggerating. Irish author Sally Rooney recently declared that “the struggle for Palestine is also and has always been a struggle for human liberation and for our future on this earth.” American political activist Angela Davis described “Palestine” as “the center of the world.” The Climate Justice Alliance proclaimed that “the path to ecological justice runs through a free Palestine.”

None of these statements merely express solidarity with Palestinians or promote a realistic solution for their plight. They assign “Palestine” a unique symbolic role among the world’s foremost injustices.

Of course, people are free to express solidarity with causes they consider just. Nothing is objectionable about that. But solidarity alone cannot explain why a conflict involving a tiny strip of land has acquired a symbolic centrality unmatched by wars that have killed vastly more people, displaced vastly more civilians, or reshaped the international order far more profoundly.

What we are witnessing is not solidarity but something else: The global Palestinianism movement has become so culturally powerful that “Palestine” functions less as a concrete cause than as a universal symbolic language. The result is paradoxical: The more “Palestine” comes to stand for everything, the less attention is paid to the concrete conditions, institutions, compromises, and policies that might actually improve Palestinian lives.

The political theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe help explain how this transformation occurs. Laclau argued that successful political movements are not built simply by accumulating protests, but by weaving disparate grievances into a common narrative. Political entrepreneurs present seemingly unrelated issues as different manifestations of the same underlying structure of oppression. Laclau called this a “chain of equivalence.”

At the center of that chain stands what he called an empty signifier: a symbol broad enough to absorb multiple, often unrelated aspirations. Concepts such as “the people,” “justice,” or “democracy” acquire enormous political power precisely because they remain undefined. Different constituencies can project onto them their own hopes, fears, and grievances.

Chantal Mouffe later emphasized that such symbols can become the master signifier, the symbolic center that gives emotional coherence to an otherwise heterogeneous coalition. If the central symbol derives its power from being “empty,” then the same must eventually become true of its antagonist; in other words, the enemy no longer matters for what it actually does but for what it comes to represent.

Once emptied of their concrete reality, “Palestine” and Israel become infinitely useful. Palestinians cease to be a people and become the “Every Victim.” Israel ceases to be a country and becomes the “Ultimate Evil” itself. The less either resembles reality, the more valuable they become as symbols.

Once this happens, the conflict itself becomes strangely irrelevant. There is little reason to study its history, understand its competing narratives, grapple with its moral ambiguities, or search for workable compromises. Accepting the complexity of this conflict threatens the very symbolic architecture that gives it power.

Indeed, peace itself becomes almost subversive. A negotiated settlement would collapse the ideological structure that Palestinianism has painstakingly constructed. Once “Palestine” becomes one territorial dispute among many — messy, compromised, tragic, and painfully ordinary — it can no longer function as the master metaphor of “global oppression.”

None of this means that Palestinians have not suffered. They have suffered. Precisely because Palestinians deserve to be treated as a real people rather than as ideological raw material, they deserve something better than being endlessly recruited into Western culture wars. They deserve to be discussed as a nation with political choices, competing visions, institutions to build, leaders to hold accountable, and a future to secure.

This raises an obvious question: Why Palestine? Why did this conflict, and not another, become the master signifier of our age?

Some explanations are straightforward.

Modern politics rewards moral simplicity. “Palestine” appears to offer a perfectly symmetrical drama: oppressed versus oppressor; colonized versus colonizer; victim versus power. It is a story that can be understood instantly, compressed into a slogan, and exported to almost any political context. That simplicity, though false, is politically useful.

“Palestine” offers a common banner under which movements that otherwise have little in common can march together. Islamists who would imprison homosexuals suddenly become allies of LGBTQ activists. Radical feminists overlook movements whose treatment of women fundamentally contradicts their own principles. Anti-racist activists who rightly denounce ethnic massacres elsewhere suspend those concerns when the perpetrators happen to fit the preferred revolutionary narrative.

“Palestine” allows mutually incompatible ideologies to postpone their contradictions in favor of a common enemy.

“Palestine” also functions less as a foreign-policy position than as a marker of moral identity. Supporting “Palestine” increasingly signals membership in a broader moral community. It tells others not simply what one thinks about the Middle East, but what kind of person one is. That is why “Palestine” appears, often incongruously, in municipal elections, school board meetings, labor disputes, academic hiring committees, and cultural institutions that possess no conceivable influence over events between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Then there is social media. Algorithms reward emotionally powerful symbols, visual narratives, and moral certainty. “Palestine” plays on those three dimensions. Images circulate instantly, stripped of context and embedded within stories that users already wish to tell about capitalism, colonialism, racism, or empire. The conflict is not merely reported; it is optimized for virality. Other tragedies — equally horrific but less photogenic, less familiar, or less useful — simply disappear beneath the algorithmic horizon.

Yet none of these explanations fully accounts for Palestinianism’s extraordinary success.

The comparison with the Uyghurs is especially revealing. Since 2017, the Chinese government has subjected the Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang to one of the most extensive campaigns of repression in the contemporary world.

Credible investigations have documented the mass arbitrary detention of hundreds of thousands (and possibly millions) of people in internment camps; pervasive digital surveillance through facial recognition, biometric data collection, and electronic monitoring; torture, sexual violence, and other forms of abuse in detention; forced labor programs; severe restrictions on religious practice, language, and cultural expression; the destruction of mosques, shrines, and cemeteries; the separation of children from their families into state-run boarding schools; and coercive birth-control measures, including forced sterilizations and IUD insertions.

If one were searching for a contemporary example of colonial domination, cultural destruction, mass incarceration, religious persecution, and technological authoritarianism, Xinjiang would appear to satisfy every criterion.

Yet, the Uyghur cause has not colonized the Western imagination. It does not appear compulsorily at climate marches, literary festivals, Pride celebrations, labor conferences, museum openings, or municipal elections. There are no demands that every movement first declare its position on Xinjiang before discussing its own agenda.

There are, to be sure, legitimate reasons for the difference. Some Western governments are more deeply entangled with Israel than with China. “Palestine” has enjoyed decades of well-funded organized international solidarity. China has been extraordinarily successful at restricting access to Xinjiang while suppressing images and testimony.

But that still fails to explain the extraordinary symbolic value attached to Israel — the ease with which one small conflict comes to represent colonialism, capitalism, racism, militarism, policing, borders, environmental destruction, and the entire system of “Western domination.” To understand that, one must examine not only the victim but also the antagonist.

What probably explains why Uyghurism is not a thing while Palestinianism has colonized the political imagination is that Palestinianism derives much of its symbolic power from the identity of its enemy: the Jews.

Antisemitism has never treated Jews as merely another disliked minority. It has consistently transformed them into explanatory figures. Across radically different societies and ideologies, Jews have been imagined as the embodiment of money, capitalism, communism, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, rootlessness, modernity, decadence, secrecy, manipulation, finance, media, and invisible power.

Whatever a civilization most feared or hated, Jews somehow came to personify. Long before Ernesto Laclau described empty signifiers, Jews had already served as one for nearly 2,000 years. They became the receptacle into which societies poured their anxieties, contradictions, and failures.

Israel allows this ancient symbolic structure to be translated into the moral vocabulary of the 21st century. The Jew is no longer imagined merely as the hidden power behind the curtains. In the figure of Israel, Jewish power becomes visible, sovereign, armed, technologically sophisticated, and therefore capable of personifying not merely one country but an entire system.

This means that Palestinianism has inherited a sort of moral structure that places “the Jew” as the embodiment of evil. Sometimes that inheritance is unconscious, sometimes it is adopted and used deliberately. Either way, Israel becomes the state whose wrongdoings acquire a different dimension. Russia, China, Syria, and Iran may commit crimes, but those crimes remain Russian, Chinese, Syrian or Iranian crimes; they are not made to explain the world.

The Uyghur cause is “boring” because it merely directs attention toward the Uyghurs. Palestinianism directs attention toward a theory of the world — and the historical availability of Jews as universal explanatory figures helps explain why. China may oppress a people, but Jews can still be made to explain the universe.

And that has consequences.

It hurts Israelis, certainly. It fuels a political culture in which the Jewish state is judged not by the standards applied to other nations, but by standards reserved for metaphysical evil. It also hurts Jews around the world. Once Israel becomes the symbolic embodiment of global injustice, Jews inevitably become its local representatives. The oldest habit of antisemitism reasserts itself in contemporary language: Jews once again become responsible not merely for what they do, but for what they supposedly represent.

Above all, Palestinianism hurts Palestinians because the actual flesh-and-blood Palestinians disappear into a symbol. They cease to be a people who need functioning institutions, accountable leadership, economic opportunity, personal security, and rule of law. Instead, they become the indispensable protagonists of a universal morality play, valued less for who they are than for what they signify.

Their suffering is transformed into political currency used to explain capitalism, colonialism, racism, climate change, patriarchy, and the failures of the West. But symbols cannot negotiate borders, build schools, reform governments, create jobs, attract investment, fight corruption, or make the painful compromises on which every durable peace depends.

Indeed, Palestinianism creates a perverse incentive structure. The movement rewards theatrical maximalism over attainable improvement. It elevates slogans over institutions, symbolism over governance, permanent resistance over political responsibility. Every concession becomes betrayal. Every compromise becomes collaboration. Every practical success threatens the ideological purity of the cause.

That is why Palestinianism shows little curiosity about Palestinian political failures. Hamas’ absolute authoritarianism, the Palestinian Authority’s rampant corruption, the absence of formidable institutions, the suppression of dissent, the failures of governance, the fragmentation of Palestinian society — these are all awkward facts because they restore agency to Palestinians, and agency complicates the allegory.

That also explains why Palestinianism appears strangely indifferent to outcomes. If the goal were primarily to improve Palestinian lives, one would expect an obsessive interest in economic development, institutional reform, educational achievement, anti-corruption measures, diplomatic breakthroughs, and the difficult work of preparing a society for statehood.

Instead, the movement overwhelmingly rewards symbolic confrontation. The greatest prestige accrues not to those who improve Palestinian lives, but to those who most effectively dramatize Palestinian victimhood.

Consider Greta Thunberg. She has become one of the world’s most recognizable faces of the Palestinian cause. Yet it is difficult to identify a single concrete improvement in the daily lives of Palestinians that resulted from her activism. Her flotilla generated headlines, photographs, and social-media engagement, but it did not open a border crossing, build a school, create a job, reform a Palestinian institution, or bring the parties any closer to peace.

That is a feature and not a bug. Palestinianism produces political capital for the activists, and virtually nothing for the Palestinians.

The result is that Palestinians become indispensable to the movement precisely insofar as they remain unresolved. A “Palestine” at peace with Israel would matter profoundly to Palestinians, but it would be catastrophic for Palestinianism.

My name is Joshua Hoffman, and I’m reaching out on behalf of Future of Jewish — a publication dedicated to helping people better understand, think critically about, and feel more connected to Judaism, Israel, and the Jewish world.

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

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Many Jews are asking themselves this question in our post–October 7th world: What does it mean to be a good Jew now?

Does it mean keeping Shabbat? Defending Israel? Attending synagogue? Giving charity? Raising Jewish children? Fighting antisemitism? Studying Torah? Supporting Jewish institutions? Speaking Hebrew? Caring about Jews you have never met?

There are endless possible answers, and Jews have never been particularly good at agreeing on only one, but beneath nearly all of them is something more fundamental: Jewish literacy.

A good Jew is a Jew who is increasingly learning the Jewish story.

Not because knowledge alone makes a person virtuous. A Jew can know every date, text, holiday, and historical argument and still behave terribly. Ignorance does not automatically make someone bad, either. Many Jews were raised with almost no meaningful Jewish education and cannot be blamed for what no one bothered to teach them.

But it is difficult to take responsibility for a people whose story you do not know.

It is difficult to understand Jewish traditions when you do not know what they were designed to preserve. It is difficult to understand Israel when you do not know what exile meant. It is difficult to recognize antisemitism when you do not know the forms it has taken before. It is difficult to understand Jewish peoplehood when Judaism has been presented to you only as a set of private religious beliefs.

Jewish literacy does not answer every question automatically, but it gives us the language, context, and memory required to ask better ones.

We were given fragments.

Most Jews today were not raised with a coherent Jewish story. We were given fragments.

We learned that Hanukkah involved candles, Purim involved costumes, Passover involved matzah, and Yom Kippur involved not eating. We may have been told that the Holocaust was terrible, Israel was complicated, and Judaism valued education and charity. But these facts often floated separately from one another. We were rarely shown how they fit together.

Why did Jews continue observing Passover after being expelled from their land? Why did Jerusalem remain central to Jewish prayer for two thousand years? Why did Jewish communities emerge in Iraq, Poland, Morocco, Yemen, Ethiopia, and Spain? Why were Jews repeatedly treated as foreigners even in countries where they had lived for centuries? Why did Zionism emerge? Why did the creation of Israel feel not merely political, but civilizational?

Without Jewish history, Judaism can look like a collection of peculiar habits. With Jewish history, those habits become evidence of an extraordinary act of survival.

The holidays are not random cultural celebrations. They are a people’s memory system. The prayers are not only expressions of faith. They are records of longing, loss, gratitude, and return. Hebrew is not merely a religious language. It is one of the great connective tissues of Jewish civilization. Israel is not simply a country that appeared in 1948. It is the modern political expression of an ancient people’s refusal to disappear.

Jewish literacy connects the fragments.

October 7th exposed the cost of not knowing.

October 7th did not only expose Israel’s physical vulnerabilities. It exposed the intellectual vulnerability of the Jewish world.

Many Jews suddenly found themselves confronted with arguments they were unprepared to answer. They heard that Jews were foreign colonizers in the land where Jewish civilization began. They heard that Zionism was merely a European project. They heard that Jewish national identity was invented, that Jewish ties to Israel were religious mythology, and that the conflict began in 1948 — or perhaps in 1967.

Some Jews knew these claims were wrong but did not know why. Others absorbed them because the people making them sounded confident, academic, and morally certain. This was not merely a public-relations failure. It was an educational failure.

Too many Jews had been taught how to feel about Israel without being taught enough about Israel. They had been encouraged to support it, criticize it, visit it, donate to it, or distance themselves from it, but not necessarily to understand the historical conditions that made Jewish sovereignty necessary. Then, when the moral and political pressure intensified, feelings proved fragile.

A Jewish identity built primarily on sentiment can collapse when sentiment becomes uncomfortable. A Jewish identity built on knowledge has deeper roots.

Jewish literacy allows a person to understand that Zionism was not born because Jews wanted to imitate European imperial powers. It was born because Jews had spent centuries learning that tolerated minorities could become persecuted minorities with terrifying speed.

It allows a person to understand that Jewish sovereignty is not a guarantee against danger, but a transfer of responsibility. Jews are no longer entirely dependent on kings, governments, neighbors, or temporary political fashions for their survival.

It also allows us to discuss Israel honestly. Jewish literacy should not produce blind loyalty or simplistic slogans. It should produce mature commitment: the ability to criticize particular policies without treating Jewish statehood itself as a moral error.

Knowledge gives us the ability to distinguish between criticism and delegitimization, between policy debates and historical erasure, between concern for Palestinians and indifference to Jewish survival.

Without knowledge, all of these things blur together.

Judaism is not only a religion.

One reason Jewish literacy matters so much is that Jews are regularly misunderstood — even by ourselves.

Modern Western society likes clear categories. A religion is a system of belief. A nationality is a citizenship. An ethnicity is an ancestry. A culture is a set of customs. Judaism refuses to fit neatly into any one of them.

Jews are a people with a religion, a history, a legal tradition, languages, collective memories, a homeland, and a shared fate. A Jew may be deeply religious or entirely secular and still feel bound to the Jewish people. A Jew may never enter a synagogue but feel shattered when Jews are attacked somewhere else in the world. A Jew may disagree with Israeli leaders yet understand that Israel’s survival matters personally.

This is Jewish peoplehood. It is one of the most important ideas that many Jews were never properly taught.

If Judaism is understood only as a religion, then Jewish solidarity can seem tribal or irrational. Why should a secular Jew in Los Angeles care what happens to a Jew in Paris, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, or Kyiv?

But if Jews are a people, the answer becomes clearer.

We care for the same reason members of any extended family care, even when they disagree, live differently, or have never met. We are connected not because we are identical, but because we belong to a shared historical community.

Jewish literacy teaches us that peoplehood is not an abstraction. It is what allowed scattered Jewish communities to raise money for one another, rescue one another, correspond across continents, preserve common texts, and maintain a sense of collective responsibility through centuries of exile.

“Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh” (all Jews are responsible for one another) is not merely a pleasant slogan. It is a survival ethic.

Literacy changes tradition from burden to inheritance.

Many Jews experience Jewish tradition primarily as obligation.

Do this. Do not do that. Eat this. Avoid that. Show up. Fast. Pray. Light candles. Marry Jewish. Raise Jewish children.

Presented without context, tradition can feel like a list of demands issued by dead people. Jewish literacy changes the experience. It helps us understand that traditions endured because they carried memory, identity, discipline, and belonging across time.

Shabbat was not simply a restriction on work. It was a declaration that human beings were more than labor, and that Jewish time would not be controlled entirely by the surrounding society. Passover was not simply a dinner. It was a yearly insistence that freedom must be remembered, narrated, and transmitted. The fasts were not exercises in misery. They were ways of refusing to let national catastrophe disappear from collective memory.

The Jewish calendar turned history into habit.

This does not mean every Jew will become observant in the same way. Jewish literacy does not eliminate disagreement. It makes disagreement more serious. There is a difference between rejecting a tradition after understanding it and abandoning it because no one explained or learned it well.

A literate Jew can ask: What human need did this practice address? What historical memory does it preserve? What kind of person or community was it designed to create? How might I carry its purpose into my own life?

The question stops being merely, “Do I have to do this?” It becomes, “What will be lost if no one does?”

A good Jew is not a perfect Jew.

The phrase “good Jew” can become dangerous when it is used as a weapon.

Throughout history, Jews have accused one another of not being Jewish enough, religious enough, loyal enough, universal enough, Zionist enough, or critical enough. That is not the purpose of the question. There is no single personality type, political ideology, denomination, or level of observance that defines Jewish goodness.

The standard cannot be perfection. Perfection produces either arrogance or despair.

The better standard is responsibility. Are we taking responsibility for learning what came before us? Are we taking responsibility for what we will transmit? Are we trying to understand Jewish disagreements before repeating the loudest argument we encountered online? Are we connected to actual Jewish people and communities, or only to Jewish opinions?

And are we building something that will remain after us?

A good Jew understands that they inherited something. Not merely trauma. Not merely persecution. Not merely an obligation to fight antisemites. We inherited a civilization. We inherited arguments about justice, holiness, responsibility, power, family, memory, law, exile, return, and God. We inherited the words of prophets and poets, rabbis and rebels, mystics and skeptics. We inherited a people that outlived empires that once appeared indestructible. We inherited Jerusalem — not always as a physical home, but always as a direction.

And inheritance creates responsibility.

We are not required to preserve every custom exactly as it was practiced before us. We are required to understand that when a generation fails to receive and transmit its inheritance, something irreplaceable can vanish.

October 7th reminded Jews that history was not finished with us, but our response cannot be only defensive. We cannot build Jewish identity entirely around those who hate us. Antisemitism may explain why Jewish strength is necessary, but it cannot explain why Jewish life is valuable.

For that, we must know more. We must know what Jews created, not only what Jews survived. We must understand the traditions, dreams, tensions, texts, institutions, memories, and moral responsibilities that made Jewish survival meaningful in the first place.

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Dear Young Jew,

We were supposed to bequeath you a comfortable world.

Instead, you inherited one where people who know nothing about Jews have very strong opinions about us. A world where terrorism is explained away but Jewish self-defense requires a thousand footnotes. A world where your grandparents’ warnings suddenly sound less like ancient history and more like tomorrow’s news.

Welcome. Pull up a chair.

The first thing you need to know is that none of this is new.

Jews have always lived in an age that believed it had discovered the perfect reason to hate Jews. Religion. Race. Money. Capitalism. Communism. Colonialism. Cosmopolitanism. Nationalism.

Today, the fashionable excuse is Israel. The accusation changes every century or so. The target never does.

Do not be intimidated by people who insist they are merely “anti-Zionist.” If the world’s only Jewish state is the only nation they obsess over, if every Jewish student somehow becomes responsible for events thousands of kilometers away, if every synagogue needs police protection while they explain this is all about “politics,” then congratulations, you have discovered antisemitism wearing a fake mustache.

Don’t argue over the mustache. See the face beneath it.

The second thing you need to know is that you owe nobody an apology for existing. Not for wearing a Star of David. Or speaking Hebrew, visiting Israel, or defending Israel. Not for succeeding or surviving. Especially not for surviving.

Your ancestors crossed deserts, survived pogroms, expulsions, inquisitions, gas chambers, and terrorist bombs so that you could stand upright without asking anyone’s permission to be Jewish. Don’t waste their gift by apologizing for it.

You will be told that being proudly Jewish is provocative. Smile politely and stand even more proudly Jewish. Wear the necklace. Celebrate Shabbat. Learn Hebrew. Know your history. Show up. Nothing irritates antisemites quite like happy Jews.

The third thing you need to know is that ignorance is expensive. You cannot outsource your Jewish education. Forget whether you are religious or secular, observant or an atheist. Read the Bible and Jewish history. Learn about Zionism from Zionists instead of TikTok activists who do not know where the Middle East begins and ends. Understand why Israel exists, why it had to exist, and why it must exist.

If your knowledge of Israel begins in 1967, someone has already stolen half the story from you. Israel is not a guilty European experiment. It is the oldest indigenous success story on Earth. It is Jews returning home after history’s longest exile. Know the facts and know them cold. Confidence comes from knowledge, not slogans.

The fourth thing you need to know is that courage is contagious. When one Jew hides a Star of David, another notices. When one Jew refuses to hide it, another notices that too. You have no idea who is watching you. Perhaps another frightened Jewish student. Perhaps your younger sibling. Perhaps your own future children. Your courage gives other people permission to discover theirs.

The fifth thing you need to know is that Israel changes everything. For nearly 2,000 years Jews had prayers. Now we also have fighter jet pilots. For two millennia Jews had hope. Now we have hope and an army. Jews once begged kings for protection. Now Jews protect themselves. That changes Jewish history forever.

Israel is not perfect. Neither are you. Neither is your country. Perfection has never been the admission price for nationhood. Israel’s existence means Jews are no longer guests in history. Never forget what an astonishing privilege that is.

The sixth thing you need to know is to choose your battles wisely. Not every social media troll deserves your attention. Some people are mistaken. Some are ignorant. Some are genuinely curious. Too many are committed antisemites wearing activist language like camouflage. Learn the difference. You can educate the first three. The fourth is simply looking for an audience. Don’t provide one.

The seventh thing you need to know is that Jewish humor remains one of history’s greatest survival mechanisms. Keep laughing. The people who wish us gone absolutely hate that. Every Jewish wedding, every Jewish joke, every Jewish baby, every Friday night dinner, every Hebrew song. And, most importantly, every family argument about who overcooked the brisket.

These are tiny victories over people who wanted Jewish history to end. Existence can be wonderfully spiteful.

The eighth thing you need to know is that allies matter. You do not need to fight alone. Many decent people reject antisemitism completely. Find them, work with them, and thank them. Yet never become dependent upon them. Jewish self-reliance is indispensable.

Finally, remember this: You belong to one of humanity’s oldest stories. A tiny tribe who gave the world ethical monotheism, the Hebrew Bible, extraordinary scholarship, remarkable science, astonishing literature, Nobel Prizes galore, startup companies, life-saving medicine, and an annoying habit of surviving everyone who predicted our disappearance.

That last achievement seems to upset people the most. Good. Let it. There will always be fashionable movements declaring that Jewish history has reached its conclusion. Ignore them. Rome is gone. The Nazis are gone. The Soviet Union is gone. Countless empires are museum exhibits. The Jewish People are still arguing over dinner.

Bet on us. Walk taller than you feel. Know more than your critics. Love your people without embarrassment. Defend Israel without hesitation. Reject victimhood without denying danger. Refuse to surrender either your confidence or your sense of humor.

Above all, remember this simple truth: You are not the last Jews. You are the next Jews. Act accordingly. Even I have to admit immodestly that was a pretty inspiring valedictorian-like speech. There is only one thing wrong with it: It does not quite fully capture what I feel.

You are growing up at a strange moment. Not because antisemitism has returned. It never left. What has changed is that millions of people have decided that it no longer embarrasses them. They have simply updated the vocabulary. They do not hate Jews. They just happen to despise the world’s only Jewish state, not Jewish existence.

They just believe the only nation whose disappearance they openly discuss should be Israel. They do not boycott China, Russia, Iran, Qatar, or North Korea. Just the Jews. Amazing coincidence.

The first lesson is this: Never let someone else define your identity. Your enemies certainly will. To them you are never simply a student, a lawyer, an engineer, a musician, or a bartender. You are “the Zionist.” “The colonizer.” “The privileged one.” Maybe the oppressor. Funny how Jews are simultaneously accused of being weak, powerful, rich, poor, white, non-white, capitalist, communist, indigenous, and foreign.

When accusations become mutually contradictory, stop treating them as arguments. They are symptoms.

The second lesson is even simpler. Never apologize for surviving. The world has spent 2,000 years trying to teach Jews that survival itself is offensive. We survived Pharaoh, Rome, the Crusades, pogroms and expulsions, Auschwitz, Soviet persecution, suicide bombers, and even deadly levels of idiocy. Now you are expected to apologize because Jews possess fighter jets and are damn good at flying them. No. Absolutely not.

The world had centuries to discover a better solution to the so-called Jewish problem. Instead, Jews solved it themselves. It is called Israel. Get used to saying that without lowering your voice.

You will hear endless lectures about Jewish power. Listen carefully. The people delivering them almost always mean one thing. That they preferred Jews when we were powerless.

Powerful Jews make antisemites deeply uncomfortable. Good. I like making such people uncomfortable. Given history, Jews should value being armed more than being admired. Personally, I want to be admired for the strength of Israel’s army.

Understand something your generation desperately needs to hear: Approval is not security, likes are not allies, and trending hashtags are not history.

The same campuses that celebrate every minority often discover remarkable philosophical nuance the moment Jewish students ask not to be harassed. The same newspapers that can identify oppression in a supermarket parking dispute somehow lose their reading glasses when Hamas publishes its objectives. Do not chase applause from people who resent your existence. You will never earn it.

Another piece of advice: Stop trying to be the “good Jew.” Every generation invents one. The Jew who condemns Israel loudly enough, or distances himself from other Jews and assures hostile audiences that he is one of the acceptable ones. Beyond being misguided, “good Jews” are boring, and I do not share my Arak with boring people.

“Good Jews” must learn that antisemites do not grade on a curve. When hatred arrives, distinctions disappear. They never ask whether you voted Left or Right, if you attend synagogue, keep kosher, or posted enough Palestinian flags throughout our neighborhood.

They simply notice your surname. Learn from history before history reminds you.

Now let us discuss Israel. Israel is not just another country, and if you say it is, I will give you a good clip around the ear. Israel is the insurance policy history wrote in Jewish blood. For nearly 2,000 years Jews relied for safety on kings, governments, neighbors, and corrupt international organizations. Each eventually and inevitably failed.

Israel exists because “Never Again” is not a plea by Jews; it is a warning from Jews not to fuck around with us or you will pay a fearsome and terrible price. “Never Again” requires borders, soldiers, pilots, intelligence officers, engineers, and, sadly, taxpayers. It needs parents willing to send their children to defend a country that much of the world judges by standards it has never applied to anyone else.

You do not have to pretend Israel is perfect. Only children think perfection exists. Adults compare. Compare Israel to its neighbor states. Compare its courts, elections, free media, minority rights, hospitals, and scientific achievements. Then ask yourself why the world’s outrage seems permanently reserved for Jerusalem while genuine tyrannies — ones that impose apartheid against the female half of their population — receive little more than diplomatic throat-clearing.

Be proudly Jewish, not performatively so. It need not be aggressive, but it must be unapologetic. Wear the Star of David, learn Hebrew, know your history, celebrate your holidays, read Jewish books, and support Jewish institutions. Visit Israel one day.

Do not forget to laugh loudly for the sole reason that it chafes antisemites’ ears. Nothing infuriates them more than Jews who refuse to behave like victims.

One more thing: Develop a sense of humor. Seriously. You will need it.

The people chanting for “liberation” while celebrating Islamist murderers are often the same people who need emotional support after receiving the wrong oat milk. Treat their moral lectures accordingly.

Mercilessly mock pomposity, ridicule hypocrisy, and laugh at absurdity. Humor has always been one of the sharpest Jewish weapons because tyrants and fools cannot tolerate being laughed at.

Finally, understand your place in history. You are not living at the end of the Jewish story. You are living in one of its greatest chapters. For the first time since the Maccabees, Jews possess sovereignty and children speak Hebrew as their native tongue in the streets. For the first time since antiquity, Jews can defend themselves without asking permission from kings who rarely intended to grant it.

Do not squander that miracle trying to impress people who despise it.

Walk taller. Study harder. Build businesses. Write books. Win Nobel Prizes. Raise families. Volunteer. Argue. Invent. Prosper. And box the ears of antisemites when needed.

When someone tells you that Jews have no future, smile. The Romans, Crusaders, Cossacks, Nazis, and Soviets said that — and they are gone. The Jews are still here. One lesson of history is that Jews are always hated. Another is that those who built their identity around hating Jews eventually disappeared into history’s footnotes.

The Jews wrote the next chapter. So will you.

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

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You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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There are Jews in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) who commit serious crimes against Palestinians.

Some have assaulted innocent people. Some have destroyed property, burned fields, vandalized homes, and participated in acts intended to frighten Palestinian communities. When violence is deliberately used against civilians for political or ideological purposes, it can reasonably be described as terrorism. Jewish perpetrators should be arrested, prosecuted, and punished under Israeli law.

That should not be difficult to say. Indeed, it is not.

But neither should this: Jewish terrorism is not the central issue facing Israel, it is not an existential threat to Zionism, and it is not remotely comparable in scale, organization, reach, or purpose to the terrorist movements that have spent generations attempting to destroy the Jewish state.

The phrase “Jewish terrorism” is increasingly being used not merely to describe specific crimes, but to construct an entire political theory. According to this theory, violence committed by a small group of Jewish extremists in Judea and Samaria represents “a direct threat to Israel’s security and statehood, and thus to Zionism itself.”

That formulation came this week from Bret Stephens, the generally pro-Israel New York Times columnist who occasionally seems compelled to remind his audience that he, too, is willing to place Jews in the dock. It is the familiar performance of respectable Jewish criticism: Exaggerate a marginal phenomenon, elevate it into an existential crisis, and then present the willingness to condemn one’s own people as evidence of moral seriousness.

That is an extraordinary claim.

Even the Israeli critics making the accusation estimate that the population involved numbers only a few hundred people. These extremists may be dangerous. They may disgrace the communities from which they emerge. They may inflame tensions, provoke retaliation, damage Israel diplomatically, and undermine confidence in Israeli law enforcement.

But a few hundred lawbreakers do not pose a direct threat to the existence of a nuclear-armed state with one of the most capable militaries and intelligence systems in the world.

Words must retain proportion. A vandal is not an army. A mob is not a national movement. An illegal outpost is not an international terrorist network. A few hundred extremists are not a civilizational threat to Zionism.

The expression “Jewish terrorism” does something rhetorically powerful: It attaches the identity of an entire people to the crimes of individuals.

When Jews commit politically motivated violence, their Jewishness quickly becomes the story. Their crimes are examined for what they supposedly reveal about Judaism, Zionism, Israeli society, the settlement movement, Jewish theology, and the moral legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty itself. The perpetrators are rarely permitted to remain perpetrators. They become symbols.

Their actions are treated as evidence of something diseased within the Jewish national project. Their existence supposedly proves that Zionism has become corrupted, that Israeli society is collapsing, or that the Jewish state is turning into the very thing it was created to resist.

No comparable intellectual machinery is required when Jews are the victims. When a Palestinian attacks an Israeli, the perpetrator is regularly placed inside an elaborate architecture of explanation: “occupation,” poverty, checkpoints, humiliation, dispossession, despair, trauma, settlements, hopelessness, or resistance.

The violence is not necessarily approved, but it is contextualized until personal responsibility begins to disappear. The Jewish attacker represents his civilization. The Palestinian attacker represents his circumstances. The Jew is examined for ideology. The Palestinian is examined for grievance. The Jew’s violence is said to reveal the true nature of Zionism. The Palestinian’s violence is said to reveal the unbearable conditions under which he lives.

This is not moral consistency. It is a double standard disguised as sophistication.

Context matters in every conflict. It can help us understand how people become radicalized and how violence can be prevented. But context cannot be selectively deployed as an exonerating force for one population and withheld as an aggravating factor from another.

If history, fear, collective memory, religious conviction, insecurity, and political frustration help explain Palestinian violence, then they also form part of the environment in which Jewish extremism develops. Explanation is either available to everyone or it is an excuse reserved for the favored side.

Violence in Judea and Samaria does not take place inside a laboratory. It takes place inside one of the world’s longest-running national, territorial, and religious conflicts. The parties disagree not only about borders but about history, sovereignty, indigeneity, security, sacred land, and whether Jewish political independence should exist at all.

The territory of Judea and Samaria is itself contested. Contrary to modern folklore, it is not occupied or conquered or colonized; it is, in fact, disputed.

Whatever language one uses, violence there did not suddenly appear because several teenagers became unruly on a hilltop. It exists within a conflict in which Arab nationalist and Islamist movements have repeatedly used violence against Jewish civilians and have often framed that violence as both a national struggle and a religious duty.

The modern conflict has included riots, massacres, hijackings, suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, kidnappings, rocket attacks, and the mass murder and kidnappings of October 7th.

That does not make every Palestinian guilty. It does not justify attacks on Palestinian civilians. It does not give Jewish extremists permission to appoint themselves judge, jury, and army. But it does expose the absurdity of discussing Jewish violence as though it were the original engine driving the conflict. It is not.

Jewish extremists did not create Hamas. They did not create Palestinian Islamic Jihad. They did not invent the rejection of Jewish sovereignty. They did not initiate the campaigns of international terrorism that have targeted Jewish communities, Israeli embassies, airplanes, schools, restaurants, buses, holiday celebrations, and synagogues for decades, in Israel and across the world.

The conflict would not disappear tomorrow if every violent Jewish extremist were arrested tonight. That is the test of whether something is truly the issue.

“Jewish terrorism” has not produced a global movement that causes Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or anyone else to fear entering their houses of worship across the world.

There is no international Jewish terrorist infrastructure recruiting followers in dozens of countries, publishing instructions for indiscriminate attacks, building proxy armies, taking territory, firing rockets at foreign cities, or promising religious rewards for the mass murder of civilians.

There are violent Jewish extremists. There is not a global Jewish terrorist movement.

The distinction is enormous.

In 2025, antisemitic attacks produced the highest number of Jewish deaths worldwide in more than three decades. Jews were killed at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, in attacks in the United States, and outside a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur. A Tel Aviv University study found that most physical attacks were carried out by individual white supremacists or radical Muslims.

This is what transnational ideological hatred looks like. It follows Jews across borders. It reaches them in synagogues, schools, community centers, museums, supermarkets, and public celebrations. It does not care whether its victims live in Tel Aviv, Manchester, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Paris, or Washington.

Yet the phrase “Jewish terrorism” is often discussed with greater civilizational alarm than ideologies that have actually built international movements around the killing of Jews and other supposed “infidels.”

Strategic judgment requires scale. A government must distinguish between a domestic law-enforcement problem and an organized international enemy. It must recognize the difference between criminals who damage the state and movements whose stated purpose is to destroy it. Confusing the two does not demonstrate moral seriousness. It demonstrates analytical failure.

Zionism is the belief that the Jewish People possess the same right to political independence, national self-determination, and physical security that other peoples claim for themselves. A few hundred Jewish extremists cannot negate that right.

French terrorism would not eliminate France’s right to exist. American political violence would not dissolve the United States. Islamist terrorism does not invalidate the sovereignty of every Muslim-majority country. Palestinian terrorism is almost never presented as proof that Palestinians have forfeited their right to national aspirations. Only Jewish wrongdoing is regularly used to place Jewish statehood itself on trial.

Why, then, does “Jewish terrorism” receive such extraordinary attention? Partly because democratic countries are rightly expected to police their own citizens. Israel should be held to the standards it claims to uphold.

But there is another reason: Jewish violence is useful to people who want to reverse the moral structure of the conflict. It allows them to transform the Jewish state from the target of organized campaigns of destruction into their supposed source. It changes the conversation from the ideologies and armies confronting Israel to the sins within Israel.

Instead of Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, international jihadism, and the global normalization of antisemitism, the discussion centers on several hundred Jewish extremists. The exception becomes the essence, the fringe becomes the nation, and the vandal becomes Zionism.

And once “Jewish terrorism” is declared a direct threat to Zionism, Zionists themselves are pressured to spend their energy proving their moral worthiness by denouncing people they never supported and crimes they never committed.