No Jews, No News
“No Jews, No News” is a popular aphorism summarizing the global preoccupation with this unique Middle Eastern indigenous ethnic group.
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On January 12th, 2024, the United Nations Security Council spent the afternoon attempting to tackle a widening crisis in the Middle East.
With the Israel-Hamas war approaching its 100-day mark, Algeria was granted a briefing following its request for the council to meet over what it called the threat of “forced displacement” of Gazans by Israel.
Later on Friday, the 15-member council discussed the escalating conflict in the Red Sea, ignited the incessant attacks on commercial vessels by Yemen’s Houthis.
Israel’s UN envoy chided the Security Council for its relentless focus on Israel’s effort to dismantle Hamas’ terror regime in Gaza. Addressing the body, Ambassador Gilad Erdan noted actual displacements taking place elsewhere around the world — actions that have not drawn a whisper from the council:
“As we speak, there are over one million Muslims being forcibly removed from their homes, all of their possessions taken from them as they face poverty, famine and disease. No, I am not talking about the situation in Gaza, but about Pakistan’s forced displacement of 1.3 million Afghans.”
“Why does the forced displacement of Muslims from a Muslim country mean nothing to the Algerian representative and the council? I’ll tell you why: No Jews, No News.”
Over the past decade, some 50,000 Christians in Nigeria have been butchered and hacked to death. The Iranian-backed Houthis have killed 500,000 civilians in Yemen. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad has murdered approximately 700,000 people. North Korea is starving millions of its citizens to death and has executed 1.2 million political dissidents. Iran kills gays and often murders women and girls for not wearing a hijab.
Where is the outrage against actual oppression?
As for the Palestinians, Hamas recently hung two men in the West Bank after accusing them of collaborating with Israel.
“Imagine if instead a mob from Israel executed two people on the streets,” wrote Zionist activist Eden Cohen. “It’d make headlines everywhere, with The New York Times bombarding you with 100 push notifications about it. But here we can very clearly see no Jews, no news!”1
Meanwhile, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has not turned out to be the champion of freedom and democracy some had hoped for. While refusing to reengage in peace talks with Israel, hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to terrorists and their families have been made, and European Union-funded textbooks have taught hatred and violence to Palestinian children.
Corruption runs deep, too; Abbas recently began the 16th year of his four-year presidency. He once again canceled elections in 2021, further preventing any kind of democratic transition from taking place. But despite this reality, the demonstrations in the West Bank and the ensuing crackdown have been almost entirely ignored by Western media, politicians, and societies.
The traditional champions of the Palestinian cause, those on the Left who vehemently protest Israel’s actions in Gaza during its war against Hamas, have remained silent. For the Palestinians publicly opposing their own government, there have not been slogans or “Palestine will be free” shirts. There have been no condemnations by progressive politicians or supermodel social media posts.
Why do people who identify themselves as “pro-Palestine” and torchbearers of human rights, have this incredible blind spot? How can we explain the complete apathy in the face of these recent events, or the silence over what has happened to Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk, Syria over the past decade, during which the Assad regime and allied militias killed, arrested, and displaced thousands of Palestinians? Who in the West can honestly say that they even heard about this?
Why is there such a lack of interest in human rights by the same actors when Israel is not involved? Why do we not hear them speak out about the Muslim Uyghurs being ethnically cleansed by the Chinese dictatorship, about the Rohingyas being displaced by the Burmese junta, about the Kurds and Yazidis being raped and tortured in Syria and Iraq, about Iranian athletes being killed and women activists imprisoned?
For the Left’s ideological obsession to “work,” for them to practice empathy towards Palestinians, they need for the imagined “racist,” “colonizing,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “oppressive” Jews to be part of the picture. Jews are not immune from criticism, but this unhealthy obsession with the “imagined Jew” is not really about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or about human rights, liberation, and self-sovereignty.
“It’s about a rather successful propaganda campaign by Palestinian leaders, their allies, and multilateral institutions around the world,” wrote Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, Managing Director of American Jewish Committee Europe. “It’s about an ideological shift on the political left in the West, in which race and other demographic categories have replaced class as the crucial axis.”2
And it has catastrophic consequences for Jews around the world who have become undeserving targets. They are the victims of what can only be called an “anti-Zionist” (really, an anti-Jewish) obsession, which demands total rejection of Israel and every Jew, lest they been seen as complicit in the “evils” of the Jewish state.
This “Zio-centric” approach is one reason why the British Labour Party under former leader Jeremy Corbyn had become riddled with antisemitism, why we have seen this “new antisemitism” in Europe over the last two decades, and why we continue to see antisemitic attacks in the streets of London, Paris, Sydney, New York, Los Angeles, and other Western cities.
But it also has frightening consequences for Palestinians, whose supporters are choosing to ignore the terrorism and tyranny that have wrecked Palestinian politics and provided cover for a political structure in “Palestine” that these supporters would never accept for themselves.
Finally, it has negative consequences for human rights in general across the world. From its inception in 2006, the UN Human Rights Council has only had one separate and permanent agenda item, and it is the one dedicated not to North Korea, not to Iran, not to China, and not to Venezuela — but to Israel.
Out of the 24 sessions that criticize countries, more than 35 percent have targeted Israel. This obsession with one country is not only unfair to Israel, but also means the UN Human Rights Council continues to ignore many human rights violations in many other places.
“The saying ‘No Jews, No News’ unfortunately describes this worldview all too well. What is at play has less to do with the world of politics than with the world of psychology, and less to do with Israel than with those obsessed with Israel,” wrote Simone Rodan-Benzaquen. “It is only if we understand how this logic operates and the consequences it has for Israelis and Palestinians, for Jews in the Diaspora and for the forgotten conflicts around the world, that one can effectively fight back. The sooner the better.”
“No Jews, No Jews” is a popular aphorism summarizing the global preoccupation with this unique Middle Eastern indigenous ethnic group from nearly the time most of its members were exiled from their ancient homeland by its Roman invaders in the first century CE.
Depending on definition, there are between 11,500 and 24,000 different ethnic groups in the world distributed among only 195 sovereign states. The Philippines, for example, is inhabited by more than 182 ethnolinguistic groups — people with distinct cultures and languages going back millennia. The 17 UN recognized Middle Eastern states are populated by dozens more ethnic groups.
China is one of the harshest critics of Israel’s “treatment” of the Palestinians, even though the former is a country with 56 officially recognized ethnic groups, including the aforementioned Muslim Uyghurs, a 12-million strong Turkic ethnic group occupying the so-called autonomous region of Xinjiang.
Since 2014, the Chinese government has been accused by various organizations of subjecting Uyghurs in Xinjiang to widespread human rights abuses, including forced sterilization, forced vocational training, and forced labor in what has been described as crimes against humanity, or even genocide. Almost none of this condemnation has come from the UN.
Even less is ever written about the mainly Muslim Kurds, a people with their own language and distinct culture going back to at least the Middle Ages. Numbering between 35 and 50 million people, they are the world’s largest stateless nation.
Denied a promised state of their own in 1920, they continue to live in exploited minority status in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Tens of thousands have perished in 40 years of off-and-on fighting between the militant Kurdish Workers Party and its many regional enemies with hardly a murmur of outrage from an outside world consumed only by news about the Jews.
Indifferent to the weak relation between ethnicity and statehood, Western political elites endlessly keep pushing for two sovereign states in a region the Roman invaders named Syria Palestinia during their short-lived conquest. The main conquered people, most of them later exiled, were indigenous Jews divided into two independent states, the Kingdom of Israel (in Samaria) and the Kingdom of Judah (in Judea). No such people known as “the Palestinians” existed at that time.
This history formed the basis for an endless yearning among Jews to return to their ancestral homeland, a hope fulfilled with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
The name Palestine was an obvious choice for the UN-sanctioned rebirth of the ancient homeland because the Jews living there were called Palestinians until 1948. But it was rejected by Jewish officials because, as they wrote:
“It is likely that the Arab state that will be established in the Land of Israel will also be called Palestine in the future, which could cause confusion.”3
They also rejected the name Zion seemingly because the words “Zion” and “Zionist” already had a pejorative meaning in the Arab world. Calling the country Zion “would cause real difficultly for the Arab citizen in the Jewish state,” they wrote.
In the end, the most straightforward option was Israel, which means “to wrestle with God” in Hebrew.
“As for the people now calling themselves Palestinians,” wrote Hymie Rubenstein, a retired professor of anthropology, “their national identity largely originated in opposition to Israel’s statehood: Had Israel never been recreated, there would never have been any call for a separate Palestinian people or state.”4
In other words: No Jews, No News
Eden Cohen on X
“The Left Only Cares About Palestinians When It Can Blame Israel | Opinion.” Newsweek.
“Why Israel’s first leaders chose not to call the country ‘Palestine’ in Arabic.” The Times of Israel.
“‘No Jews, no news’ explains preoccupation with Palestinian statehood.” True North.
It should say: "No Jews, no progress!" Almost All most significant inventions come from Jews: Binary code, on which all electronics operate (German Jew), internal combustion engine, Austrian Jew, just to name a few....
Josh, just a quick reminder that the Jews are a religious group of many ethnicities and races. Don't fall into the mistake of calling Jews a single race because to do so would not be factually correct.