For most of the Torah, the covenant looks backward.
God remembers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Their children inherit promises made before they were born. The land before them was promised to their fathers.
Jewish history begins with memory.
Then, near the end of the Torah, the direction reverses.
Moses gathers the people on the edge of the Land of Israel and tells them:
“Not with you alone do I make this covenant… but with those who are standing here with us today before the Lord our God, and with those who are not here with us today.” (Deuteronomy 29:13–14)
The covenant changes tense. Until now, we are bound to people who came before us. Now people who do not yet exist are bound to us.
A Jewish father blesses his son at the Kotel in Jerusalem, as he puts on tefillin for the first time (photo: FirstOneThrough)
Abraham enters a covenant whose fulfillment he will never see. Generations later, his descendants stand together and accept a covenant for generations they will never see.
Genesis says: You are here because of those who came before you. Nitzavim says: Those who come after you are part of what you do here.
And connecting them is the land.
Almost immediately after extending the covenant to generations yet unborn, Moses foretells that the Jewish people will be scattered among the nations. Then God will gather them and “bring you to the land that your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it.” (Deuteronomy 30:5)
The land comes from the fathers. The covenant passes to the children. Exile comes between them. And still the chain holds.
It is a story that cannot begin at a convenient modern date. Jews do not suddenly appear in Europe, in Israel in 1948, or Jerusalem in 1967. Nitzavim describes a people moving through time, bound backward to its ancestors and forward to its descendants, with the land running through it all.
The New York Times wants to know what New York Jews think about Israel.
Its new questionnaire asks Jewish New Yorkers whether they think about Israel more since October 7. Whether their opinion of Israel has changed. Whether they call themselves Zionists. Whether they have become more vocal or politically active.
The frame is revealing.
The Times wants to know how Israel has changed the Jews.
It does not ask whether October 7 changed their opinion of Hamas.
Did the murder, rape and kidnapping of Israelis change their understanding of the conflict? Did years of Israelis held hostage in Gaza change it? What have they learned about Hamas, its genocidal antisemitic foundational charter, Palestinian politics or jihadist movements committed to Israel’s destruction?
Those questions aren’t there.
Neither is another actor in the past three years: the New York Times.
Has its coverage changed your trust in the newspaper? Do you believe its reporting on Israel and Gaza has been fair? Has its treatment of antisemitism changed your relationship with the paper? Has its language surrounding “genocide”, “occupation” and “resistance” changed how you understand the conflict or how you perceive of the media?
The newspaper wants to know what changed the Jews without asking whether the newspaper helped change them.
Then there is the matter of which Jews.
The questionnaire asks whether you are a Jewish New Yorker. It does not ask whether you are 22 or 72. Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or secular. Democrat, Republican or independent. Progressive, moderate or conservative. Those differences may explain the answers, as discussed in many other polls.
More important, this is an open call published by the New York Times. It is not a random survey of New York Jews. For years, parts of the Jewish community have fought bitterly with the paper over its coverage of Israel and antisemitism. Many longtime Jewish readers have publicly canceled their subscriptions over that coverage. Thousands more privately.
The Jews most alienated by the Times may also be the least likely to see its callout, trust its reporter or volunteer their thoughts. Jews comfortable with the newspaper and its worldview may be more inclined to respond, biasing the poll results. It could collect hundreds of responses showing its Jewish respondents moving away from Israel without knowing whether the Jews moved or its sample did.
Then comes the missing questionnaire.
Where are the questions for Arab and Muslim New Yorkers?
Did October 7 change your opinion of Hamas? Do you consider Hamas a terrorist organization? Do you believe Jews are entitled to national self-determination? Should Jews be allowed to freely access and pray at their holiest site? Should Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups surrender their weapons? Has your opinion of Israel changed? Of Jews?
Those answers would tell New Yorkers quite a lot too.
And the timing is particularly ugly.
Hasan Piker has recently been asking his own version of precisely this question: How attached are American Jews to Israel?
Piker has called Israel “Jewish ISIS” and previously said Hamas was “a thousand times better” than Israel. More recently, he warned that if American Jews continue presenting themselves as deeply invested in Israel, eventually someone may take action against American Jews rather than Israel.
That is antisemitism dressed up as a warning.
And now the New York Times arrives with a questionnaire measuring whether Jewish New Yorkers still call themselves Zionists and whether their feelings about Israel have changed.
The disturbing convergence is the question itself: How attached are the Jews to Israel now? The New York Times wants to know. Millions of antisemites that follow Piker want to know.
ACTION ITEM
So answer the poll. But not their questions.
Tell the Times exactly how October 7 changed your thinking.
Tell it what you think about Hamas. Tell it what you have learned about jihadism, hostage-taking and fighters operating among civilians. Tell it whether Palestinian Arabs support for the October 7 massacre and Hamas have changed your understanding of the conflict.
Then tell it about the New York Times.
Tell it whether its coverage has increased or destroyed your trust in the newspaper—its language, its emphasis, its omissions, its telling of the Jihadi-Israel conflict.
Hasan Piker and The New York Times are polling Jews for their attachment towards Israel. Tell them what you think of the global jihad sweeping the world.
The Met has promised a replacement. And to go bigger.
Instead of John Galliano, the Costume Institute will honor Kanye West. It is an inspired substitution. Kanye is enormously influential in fashion, globally famous and has expressed considerably more recent thoughts about Hitler and Jews. He brings the Met’s original concept fully into the 21st century.
But fashion is only one artistic medium. The Met will establish the Anna Wintour Center for Antisemitic Excellence, celebrating achievement across the arts, literature, media and public life.
Roger Waters will anchor the music galleries and show clips of “Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The Musical.” Inflatable pigs adorned with Jewish stars will be available for purchase in the gift shop.
The children’s wing will celebrateRoald Dahl. Parents can walk their children through an oversized exhibit of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach, followed by an interactive display of Dahl’s thoughts about Jews.
The Met’s new Film Department will honor Mel Gibson, ensuring his legacy.
The American Wing will have a permanent exhibit for Henry Ford. Many of the automobiles will remain in Detroit, but the Met will showcase Ford’s other publishing achievement, The International Jew, allowing visitors to explore how an industrial genius helped mass-produce something besides automobiles.
Contemporary media deserves its own galleries.
Candace Owens can become Director of Jewish Studies.
Tucker Carlson can chair the Department of Contextualization.
Nick Fuentes can lead Emerging Voices, introducing younger audiences to one of civilization’s oldest traditions.
Institutional leadership should reflect the museum’s expanded mission.
Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) has been asked to join the Board’s Committee on Jewish Community Relations.
The Met should also dramatically expand accessibility.
All United Nations personnel receive complimentary membership. Security Council members receive Patron status. UN Human Rights Council members enter through a dedicated express lane.
And the Met needs an international partner for 2027. Fortunately, Iran has experience.
In 2006, Tehran hosted its Holocaust-denial conference. Two decades later, the Islamic Republic can bring the concept to New York as a special Met partnership: ERASURE: Reimagining Holocaust Memory Presented in partnership with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Anna Wintour Center for Antisemitic Excellence.
Vogue will commemorate each new addition to the Met lineup with a full spread in every international edition. Antisemitism, after all, should never be allowed to suffer from poor distribution.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani cheered the latest Met and Vogue moves and is considering making attendance to the museum mandatory for all public school students.
John Galliano was still disappointed about being canceled but was thrilled to see how the Met stepped up with counter-measures. He has moved on. He is pushing Britain and France to move past their memories of World War II, and reimagine their police uniforms to echo the outfits donned by the military of Nazi Germany.
The Arab League issued a remarkable condemnation of Israel: it objects to the “expansion of new Jewish communities in the Negev and Galilee and increasing their Jewish populations.”
These are not settlements in the West Bank. They are areas inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
Further, Israel is described as “1948 territories.”
That makes the statement difficult to reconcile with the Arab League’s simultaneous support for a Palestinian state based on the June 4, 1967 lines. Under that formula, the Negev and Galilee remain part of Israel. And why suggest that Israel is just part of Palestine, calling the entire state “1948 territories?”
The question is particularly relevant to Egypt.
Egypt was the first Arab country to recognize Israel and signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, ending the two countries’ state of war. Nearly fifty years later, Cairo continues to endorse a two-state solution: a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines alongside a secure Israel.
That position should carry a simple implication: Israel’s right to develop its own communities within its own territory.
Egyptian officials should therefore answer a straightforward question: Does Egypt believe Israel has the same right to develop Jewish communities within its territory that a future Palestinian state would have to develop its own communities?
If the answer is yes, Cairo should say so.
If the answer is no, then the issue is not simply the borders of a future Palestinian state. It is whether Jewish demographic and community development inside Israel is itself considered illegitimate. It reeks of antisemitism.
But is their another way to think of these hateful remarks?
Egypt made peace with Israel nearly half a century ago to get back the Sinai Peninsula it lost in the 1967 Six Day War. Is Egypt deliberately opening cracks in that treaty? Is it preparing to push Israel to hand some of the Negev to Gazans now – alongside its own contribution of part of the Sinai – as Gazans hope to rebuild the strip after its failed war on Israel?
Is the Arab League simply being antisemitic or is it deliberately setting the course for a new map for Gaza?
Everyone knows why October 7, 2023 changed Israel. But an obscure Ottoman law makes another date worth watching: October 7, 2026.
In 1858, the Ottoman Empire enacted a land code under which three consecutive years without cultivationcould have consequences for rights to certain agricultural land.
Now, three years after October 7, that old rule may suddenly matter.
The Three-Year Rule
Much of the agricultural land of the Ottoman Empire was classified as miri. The sovereign retained ultimate title (“state land”) while individuals could acquire valuable rights of possession and use, known as tasarruf.
Active use of the land mattered.
Article 68 of the Ottoman Land Code addressed agricultural land left uncultivated for three consecutive years without a valid excuse. The original Ottoman mechanism was more complicated than “three years and the government automatically owns your land,” involving tapu, the status of the holder and opportunities to recover the right.
But the underlying principle was clear: continued cultivation could matter to continued land rights.
Ottoman term
Meaning
Relevance
Miri
State land carrying individual possession/use rights
Much agricultural land
Tasarruf
Right of possession and use
The individual’s valuable land right
Mahlul
Lapsed/reverted possessory right
Potential consequence of qualifying non-cultivation
Tapu
Land registration/title system
Documentary evidence of rights
This is not merely an Ottoman historical curiosity. It passed on to the British, Jordanians and then Israel with few modifications.
In 2020, Israel’s Supreme Court addressed the rule directly in HCJ 5426/17, Barakat v. Head of the Civil Administration in the West Bank (Nov. 29, 2020). The Court held that under the Jordanian land law still applicable in the territory, an unregisteredtasarruf right acquired through cultivation could be extinguished if the land was left uncultivated for three consecutive years, causing the land to revert to the government under Article 68’s mahlul doctrine. By contrast, a tasarruf right that had been formally registered generally was not lost merely because the land subsequently lay fallow.
So the three-year rule remains relevant to unregistered land in Judea and Samaria today.
Goats owned by Bedouins graze in Judea and Samaria (photo: FirstOneThrough)
Then Came October 7
After the October 7 massacre by Gazans, security conditions dramatically changed access to agricultural land across the region. OCHA reported that more than 96,000 dunams of olive-cultivated land went unharvested during the 2023 season following access restrictions and violence. By the 2025 olive harvest, OCHA was reporting that farmers from multiple villages had been completely denied access for the third consecutive year to certain olive groves.
That creates the question: How much unregistered agricultural land has actually gone uncultivated since October 7, 2023?
The Eye in the Sky
There is something unusual about these particular three years.
Israel has had extraordinary security reasons since October 7 to maintain extensive aerial surveillance of Judea and Samaria.
At the same time, the Civil Administration already uses sophisticated geographical information in determining land status. Its Surveying Unit maintains cadastral and mapping information, while its Supervision Unit operates a team whose stated function is examining land through survey procedures “aimed at locating state land in the area, for declaration as such.”
The Civil Administration therefore potentially possesses an extraordinarily detailed record of whether cultivation occurred.
Request For Access
Consider two claimants whose land appears uncultivated in aerial photographs for three years. One produces repeated applications showing: I wanted to cultivate my land. Israel prevented me from reaching it. The other has no comparable record.
Those are materially different factual cases based on the background discussed above.
OCHA reports that Palestinian liaison authorities submit farmers’ access requests to Israeli authorities and tracks approvals, denials and pending requests in particular areas. Those applications coupled with the aerial documentation, may move the land into a different legal category.
Meanwhile, Israel Is Looking for State Land
This is where the 1858 law meets 2026.
The Civil Administration openly maintains a Survey Lands team charged with examining whether land can be declared government property. Its newly published procedures show that potential survey areas are placed on a priority list requiring approval by the head of the Civil Administration and the Defense Minister or an authorized representative.
The State Comptroller describes the same team’s purpose as locating and marking land in Judea and Samaria that can be declared government property.
And Israel has dramatically accelerated state-land declarations.
In February 2026, the Israeli government approved the resumption of systematic land-registration proceedings in Area C, allocating approximately NIS 244 million to the effort—the first such broad registration initiative since Israel suspended the previous settlement-of-title process after 1967.
Peace Now calculates that approximately 27,119 dunams had been declared state land under the current government by June 2026, nearly as much as it says had been declared during the entire period since the Oslo Accords. A Palestinian Authority commission consequently calculates that approximately 29,335 dunams have been included in state-land declarations since October 7, 2023.
And we haven’t yet reached the anniversary when many West Bank Arabs encountered more restrictions on movement due to the war their Gazan brothers waged on Israel.
October 7, 2026
That is what makes the third anniversary different.
Consider the ramifications of Ottoman law to this point in time:
1858: Ottoman law makes three years of non-cultivation legally significant for certain land rights.
2020: Israel’s Supreme Court confirms that the Article 68 mahlul doctrine remains relevant to unregistered tasarruf rights in Judea and Samaria.
2023: October 7 is followed by enormous disruption of access to agricultural land.
2023–2026: Israel accumulates an extraordinary photographic record of what is happening on the ground.
2024–2026: state-land declarations accelerate.
2026: Israel funds a major new land-registration initiative.
October 7, 2026: three years have elapsed for when many West Bank Arabs accessed land they had used previously.
Nothing automatically changes ownership at midnight of 10/7. Many questions remain.
How much affected land is actually unregistered miri land? Was it legally “uncultivated”? What constitutes a sufficient excuse? What happens when Israeli security restrictions themselves prevented cultivation? And what evidence exists showing that individual claimants continued asserting their rights?
Those questions will have to be answered parcel by parcel.
But after October 7, something will exist that did not exist before: three complete post-massacre years of evidence.
October 7, 2023 changed the security map of the Middle East. October 7, 2026 may begin changing the actual map of Judea and Samaria as well.
There is a progression from intimidation and expulsion.
A heckler’s veto prevents you from speaking.
A chilling effect teaches you to remain silent.
Self-concealment teaches you to hide the identity that makes you a target.
Constructive exclusion makes the environment sufficiently hostile that you stay away or leave.
Forced expulsion completes the progression: someone else decides you must go.
American Jews have been moving through these stages over the last decade.
Don’t Speak
In 2015, Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal came to the University of Minnesota to lecture on the ethical obligations of militaries to protect civilians. Protesters repeatedly interrupted him, delaying his lecture for about half an hour as police removed them.
It was a classic heckler’s veto: make enough noise and the speaker cannot speak.
Eventually, Halbertal did.
Over time, intimidation becomes more efficient. People learn the consequences of speaking and begin censoring themselves. The expectation of the heckler creates the chilling effect.
Then the intimidation moved beyond speech.
Hide Who You Are
In May 2021, Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israel and antisemitic incidents surged concurrently in the United States.
Aaron Keyak had served as Jewish engagement director for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and would become the State Department’s deputy special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. His advice to frightened American Jews was extraordinary: “If you fear for your life or physical safety take off your kippah and hide your magen david.”
The Jew walking down the street had given no speech and joined no protest. His Jewish identity itself made him a target.
The response from the highest levels of government was self-concealment: take off the kippah and hide the Star of David.
This was 2021, more than two years before the October 7 massacre.
Stay Out
After the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel, the progression took over the Democratic Party.
Dana Nessel is Michigan’s attorney general, the state’s chief law-enforcement officer and its highest-ranking Jewish state official. This June she decided to stay away from the Michigan Democratic Party convention. “I don’t feel safe going,” Nessel said. She feared being chased, harassed, yelled at and booed because, she explained, “it’s been happening to me.”
Consider where the progression had reached: Michigan’s chief law-enforcement officer felt safer staying away from her own political party’s convention out of fear.
And Nessel is not alone.
Earlier in the summer, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice David Wecht left the Democratic Party and became an independent. Wecht is Jewish, was elected as a Democrat and had once served in the leadership of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. “Acquiescence to Jew-hatred is now disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party,” he wrote. “I can no longer abide this.”
Nessel stayed away. Wecht walked away. Revulsed by what they saw happening inside the Democratic Party.
Get Out
The next stage has already begun.
In 2024, anti-Israel artists protesting at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts issued a list of demands. Among them: remove all “Zionist Board members and funders.” While the institution rejected the demand, its Jewish interim CEO, Sara Fenske Bahat, subsequently resigned, saying the climate surrounding Israel and Palestine in the Bay Area had become “untenable.”
The demand itself crossed the line into the final stage: Get them out.
If one needs proof, consider how the alt-left treated one of its own, NYC Mayor-endorsed politician Brad Lander. He was tossed from a far-left political rally in August 2026 because he was a “Zionist,” even though he is highly critical of Israel.
Democratic politician Brad Lander – supported by NYC Mayor, DSA’s own Zohran Mamdani – tossed from a rally because he is a “Zionist”
The heckler’s veto was already an assault on a basic American principle: everyone gets to enter the public square and speak. What has grown from it is far uglier and deeply un-American:
Don’t speak. Don’t be seen. Don’t come. Get out.
This is intimidation being rewarded with territory. Each retreat gives the intimidators another piece of the public square: the microphone, the street, the political convention, the institution itself.
And this poison is now flourishing inside the Democratic Party.
A party that claims to champion minorities and protect people from intimidation now has a Jewish attorney general afraid to attend its own convention, a Jewish state supreme court justice who concluded that Jew-hatred had become sufficiently tolerated that he could no longer remain a Democrat, and an anti-Israel DSA-mayor-endorsed Jewish politician run out of the streets of New York.
That is disgraceful. It is frightening.
The American answer to intimidation is to protect the person being intimidated and confront the intimidator. Nobody should gain control of a microphone, a street, a political convention or an institution by making someone else afraid to enter it.
Leaders of the Democratic Party should understand what is happening inside its own tent. The heckler’s veto has metastasized into something deeply toxic and deeply un-American.
The hecklers no longer simply want to only decide what Jews may say. They want to expel Jews from the room.
The Jewish story in the Land of Israel is often told with an enormous hole in the middle.
The script runs something like: there were ancient Jewish kingdoms and then Rome destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. Jews were forced into exile, and then, nearly 1,800 years later, Zionists began arriving in Palestine.
That shorthand turns one of history’s longest relationships between a people and a land into an unexplained disappearance and sudden reappearance.
The actual story is more remarkable.
After the Destruction of the Second Temple
The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE was catastrophic, but it did not empty the land of Jews. Six decades later, Jews launched the Bar Kokhba Revolt from Judea. After its defeat in 135, Roman repression devastated Jewish life in Judea and severely restricted Jews in Jerusalem.
Ancient coins minted during the Bar Kochba revolt
So Jewish life shifted north. The Galilee became its major center, particularly Tiberias and Sepphoris. Around 200 CE, Judah ha-Nasi compiled the Mishnah in the Land of Israel. Centuries later, Jewish scholars there produced the Jerusalem Talmud. Archaeology has uncovered synagogues across the country from this period.
The Jewish state was gone. The Jews were not.
Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed and Hebron
The rulers changed repeatedly with new invaders: Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman. So did the size and location of the Jewish population.
Under early Muslim rule, Jews reestablished themselves in Jerusalem. The Crusader conquest brought another catastrophe, including killings and displacement.
Again, Jews returned.
In 1267, Nachmanides—Ramban—arrived in Jerusalem and helped rebuild its shattered Jewish community.
After the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the Ottoman conquest in 1517, Safed became an international center of Jewish civilization, producing Joseph Karo, whose Shulchan Aruch became a foundational code of Jewish law, and Isaac Luria, whose teachings transformed Jewish mysticism.
Old synagogue in Safed / Tzfat (photo: FirstOneThrough)
Ottoman tax records make the population visible. Safed/Tzfat contained 233 Jewish households in 1525–26; by 1567–68 there were 945. Jews were also recorded in Jerusalem, Gaza, Nablus, Peki’in and elsewhere.
The Four Holy Cities
Over time, four cities became especially identified with Jewish life in the land: Jerusalem. Hebron. Safed. Tiberias.
Their Jewish populations rose and fell through war, disease, earthquakes, economic hardship and persecution. The communities kept being rebuilt, and Jews kept arriving.
Hundreds accompanied Judah HeHasid to Jerusalem in 1700. Hasidic Jews came from Eastern Europe in 1777. Beginning in 1808, disciples of the Vilna Gaon arrived in successive waves.
By the nineteenth century, the continuity becomes difficult to miss. Moses Montefiore’s censuses recorded dramatic growth:
City
1839
1875
Jerusalem
2,916
11,237
Safed
1,384
3,753
Tiberias
801
1,552
Hebron
419
939
Jaffa
86
660
Haifa
138
531
The communities covered by the census tripled from 6,173 Jews in 1839 to 18,672 in 1875.
Historical estimates differ because Ottoman-era demographic records were not modern censuses. But the trend is unmistakable. One reconstruction estimates roughly 6,700 Jews in the country in 1800, 42,900 in 1890 and 94,000 by 1914.
And Jews were not simply scattered individuals. By 1880, one reconstruction estimates Jews constituted approximately 57% of Jerusalem, 52% of Safed and 60% of Tiberias.
Modern Zionism Accelerated the Return
This is where conventional histories often begin. But it wasn’t the beginning; it was an acceleration.
Petah Tikva was founded in 1878, in part by Jews from the existing Jerusalem community. The First Aliyah began in the 1880s, helping establish and expand agricultural communities including Rishon LeZion, Zikhron Ya’akov and Rosh Pina.
The Second Aliyah brought another wave. In 1909, Jews founded Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, something extraordinary was occurring: Hebrew returned as the everyday language of a society. A language preserved through centuries of prayer, scholarship and literature became the language of children, workers and shopkeepers.
What About the Land?
By the end of the British Mandate, Jews did not privately own most of Palestine. British statistics for April 1945 put Jewish landholdings at approximately 1.49 million dunams, or 5.67% of the total territory.
The remaining territory was not privately owned “Arab land.” It included state domain, desert, communal lands and other Ottoman and British legal classifications.
Jewish ownership was concentrated where Jewish society was developing. By the mid-1940s, historical land statistics put Jewish ownership at roughly 39% in the Jaffa/Tel Aviv subdistrict, 38% in Tiberias, 35% in Haifa, and 18% in Safed.
And much of this land had been purchased.
The British Survey of Palestine recorded a net 938,365 dunams purchased and registered by Jews between 1920 and the end of 1945 alone.
Presence, Memory, Return
The nearly 1,900 years between Rome and Israel can be understood through three words.
Presence. Jews continued living in the land, sometimes in substantial communities, despite conquest, persecution and repeated displacement.
Memory. Jews elsewhere continued facing Jerusalem in prayer, praying for return, remembering Jerusalem at weddings, ending Passover with the hope of being there the following year and financially supporting Jewish communities in the land.
Return. Ramban came in 1267 after the Crusades. Jews came from Spain after 1492. Many followed Judah HeHasid in 1700, the Hasidim in 1777, the disciples of the Vilna Gaon beginning in 1808, the First and Second Aliyahs, fleeing Russian pogroms and Nazism, and as survivors of the Holocaust.
The scale changed. The political objective changed. The ability to return changed.
1948 Was Not the Beginning
Beginning the story of Israel in 1948 – or even with Herzl in 1897 – fundamentally distorts Jewish history. Those were not years when Jews suddenly showed up. They were the times when Jews accelerated their return and became self-governing once again.
The Israeli flag waves in the foreground, with the white domes of the rebuilt Tiferet Israel and Hurva Synagogues in the center, and the grey Al Aqsa mosque dome to the right. In the distance, cranes build new residential towers in the western parts of the city. (photo: FirstOneThrough)
Palestinian Arabs are scheduled to vote on November 28 in their first legislative election in twenty years. International observers will naturally ask whether the election is free and fair. But there is a more fundamental question:
Will Palestinians actually be electing a government capable of governing?
The problem begins with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The PLO was established in 1964, decades before there was a Palestinian Authority. In 1993, it was the PLO—not the Palestinian Authority—that entered the Oslo process with Israel. Those agreements established the framework for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza and contemplated an elected Palestinian Council. The Palestinian Authority and the executive institutions emerged from that process as the interim governing apparatus.
The PLO is the institutional skeleton on which the Palestinian political system was built.
And that makes the coming election peculiar.
Electing People Who Reject the System
The August modification to the election law requires candidates to commit to recognition of the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, as well as its political and national program and relevant international resolutions.
Yet Palestinians overwhelmingly reject that requirement.
According to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, two-thirds oppose requiring candidates to accept the PLO’s commitments, including its agreements with Israel. Only 27% support the requirement.
That is not an opinion related to dissatisfaction with Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah or the incumbent government. That is an outright rejection of the entire government structure and institutions. Palestinians want to elect the government while leaving unsettled whether the people elected to run it accept the foundations of the system they are entering.
It is a election whose foundation is anarchy.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas
If insufficient, the Arabs want to vote for terrorism.
Ballots Without Giving Up the Guns
Democratic government requires more than elections. Ultimately, the elected government must possess political authority and a monopoly on legitimate force. Yet Palestinian politics continues to blur the distinction between a political party and an armed organization.
Hamas is the clearest example.
The devastation of the Gaza war appears to have changed Palestinian calculations. Only 20% now say Hamas won the war, compared with 39% ten months earlier. Support for “armed struggle” (terrorism) as the most effective means of achieving Palestinian statehood has fallen from 41% to 27%, which was around two-thirds immediately after October 7, 2023. Meanwhile, support for negotiations has risen from 36% to 44%, its highest level in four years.
That all sounds encouraging. But look more closely at what changed.
Palestinians only moved toward negotiations as violence has proven devastating and unsuccessful. Yet even after that experience, 72% oppose Hamas disarming before Israel completely withdraws from Gaza. And 53% believe that even if Hamas gives up its weapons, it will remain both an armed resistance movement and a political movement. Only 36% expect it to become solely political. So 89% (basically everyone) thinks the group that most of the Global North has labeled a terrorist organization, will be part of the Palestinian government.
That holds true for the various Palestinian terrorist groups. A society established in which various militias will be free to operate their own foreign affairs and military engagements.
An Elected Government That May Not Govern
If not appalling enough, there is another revealing number.
If elections are held and a new Palestinian government is formed, only 28% of Palestinians say they would prefer that elected government to administer Gaza. Thirty-two percent prefer the separate National Committee, while 34% prefer neither.
Consider these three facts:
Palestinians are preparing to elect a legislature for a political system whose foundational commitments most do not want imposed on candidates.
They may elect factions that retain independent armed power outside the government’s control.
They do not want the resulting elected government to govern Gaza.
Combined, this is not merely an imperfect election in the shadow of war of a fledgling state.
It is a vote for anarchy with a veneer of cohesion.
The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMC) has an ambitious mission. It calls for “anti-racist and decolonial pedagogy” in which students study imperialism and oppression, resistance movements and the struggles of peoples to reclaim their identity and agency.
By those standards, one extraordinary case study should sit near the center of the curriculum: The Jews.
Israel may be one of history’s greatest examples of successful decolonization.
Indigenous
Jewish civilization did not originate in Europe. It arose in the Land of Israel.
Israel, Judah, Judea, Jerusalem and Zion are not modern colonial names. They are ancient names embedded in Jewish history. Judaism developed there. The Hebrew Bible is centered there. Jewish holidays follow its seasons and agricultural cycles. Jerusalem became the religious and national center of the Jewish people.
1630 Map of the Israelite tribes in the holy land, together with images on the border from the life of the Jewish prophet Moses, and the Children of Israel’s exodus from Egypt
Even the people’s name—Israel—is ancient.
Colonized
Then came conquest. Jewish kingdoms were conquered by successive imperial powers, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans.
The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple and carried many Jews into exile. Rome later destroyed the Second Temple, crushed Jewish revolts and accelerated the dispersion that would define Jewish existence for centuries.
The Jewish people lost sovereignty in its own homeland but never its connection.
Dispossessed—but Not Disconnected
Dispersion scattered the Jews without eliminating Jewish peoplehood. Jews in Poland did not simply become Poles. Jews in Morocco did not simply become Moroccans. Jews in Iraq did not simply become Iraqis.
Across continents, they retained a common religion, history, calendar and connection to the same ancestral land. They prayed toward Jerusalem. They ended Passover with “Next year in Jerusalem.” Hebrew survived as the language of scripture, prayer and scholarship.
And Jews never disappeared from the land itself. Jewish communities remained through centuries of foreign rule.
Resistance
Jewish history is also a story of resistance. The Maccabees resisted Seleucid repression and restored Jewish sovereignty. Jews later rebelled against Rome.
Judah the Maccabee, Wood engraving by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (German painter, 1794 – 1872), published in 1860.
After military resistance became impossible, survival itself became resistance. A small, scattered minority endured expulsions, forced conversions, discriminatory laws and massacres without surrendering its identity.
Eventually came Zionism: the modern movement to restore Jewish national self-determination where Jewish national history began.
A stateless people sought to cease being stateless.
Decolonization
And then something extraordinary happened. The dispersed people returned in large numbers.
There was no Jewish Britain or France directing an overseas colony. Jews came from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere to the land at the center of their collective history.
They restored sovereignty.
And they accomplished perhaps their most astonishing act of cultural decolonization: they revived Hebrew.
Not Polish, Russian, German or Arabic. Their ancestral language became the everyday language of children, schools, newspapers, commerce and government.
They made Jerusalem their capital. They called their national movement Zionism, after Zion.
So apply LESMC’s vocabulary consistently: Indigenous. Conquered. Dispossessed. Resistance. Return. Cultural restoration. Self-determination.
The Jewish story fits remarkably well.
So What Happened?
Why does this seemingly perfect LESMC case study become almost its opposite when the curriculum reaches Israel?
Some of the people shaping the curriculum help explain the disconnect.
Samia Shoman, a Palestinian-American member of LESMC’s leadership, co-coordinates the Teach Palestine Project, which develops curricula for American schools. Her materials describe Israel as an “institutionalized system of oppression and apartheid.” After California rewrote its original ethnic-studies curriculum, Shoman blamed “Zionist and other rightwing lobbyists” for what she said was the destruction of its “anti-racist, decolonial and liberatory” approach.
Jody Sokolower, who is Jewish, co-coordinates Teach Palestine. Her student history says Britain promised Palestine to Zionists and describes Zionists as subsequently carrying out plans to push Palestinian Arabs and Britain out. The larger Teach Palestine curriculum explicitly seeks to put these perspectives into American classrooms.
Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, a founding member of Liberated Ethnic Studies, has spent her career developing what LESMC itself describes as “critical curriculum” and helped build the Liberated alternative after the original California curriculum was substantially changed.
This isn’t a peripheral connection. LESMC lists Shoman, Cardona and Theresa Montaño among its leadership, while Teach Palestine produces lessons connecting the conflict to forced relocation, criminalization and a “culture of resistance.”
“Zionism is a nationalist, colonial ideology that, from the late 19th century on, has called for the creation and expansion of Israel as a Jewish state in historic Palestine by any means necessary. As support for Palestine and criticism of Israel’s apartheid policies have grown in the US and internationally, Zionist organizations have stepped up their efforts to silence discussion of Palestine/Israel in movement circles, on college campuses, and now in K–12 education.” – Teach Palestine’s Understanding Zionist Backlash
Now the inversion makes more sense.
A framework supposedly built to recognize indigeneity, dispossession, resistance and decolonization encounters a people whose history contains all four—but influential architects approach Jewish national restoration through an anti-Zionist and settler-colonial lens.
So:
The indigenous become settlers. The dispossessed become colonizers. Return becomes colonialism. National liberation becomes oppression.
The Jews should be a textbook LESMC case study: an ancient people conquered and dispersed, preserving its identity and ancestral language for centuries, returning home, reviving that language and restoring sovereignty.
Instead, one of history’s most remarkable decolonization stories is recast as colonization.
The history didn’t change. The ideological lens did.
ACTION ITEM
Be involved in your local school board and investigate the materials used in the classroom.
Long before the Islamic prophet Muhammad was born, long before Arab armies invaded Jerusalem, there was Judea.
It was called Judea in the Books of Maccabees. The Greek geographer Strabo called it Judea. Josephus called it Judea. The Roman historian Tacitus called it Judea. The Christian New Testament called it Judea. Rome governed a province called Judaea.
And when the Romans defeated the Jews there, they minted coins celebrating IVDAEA CAPTA — “Judea Captured.”
All of that happened centuries before Muhammad was born in Arabia and Arabs invaded the Jewish holy land.
Yet today WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, describes Israel’s use of “Judea and Samaria” as an effort to give its “bogus claims… a veneer of historical and religious legitimacy.”
Bogus?
The Romans weren’t Zionists. Tacitus wasn’t working for the Israeli government. Roman coins celebrating the defeat of a Jewish rebellion certainly weren’t designed to manufacture Jewish history.
They called it Judea because Judea was its name.
And Judea, Judah and Jew share the same historical root. The Jewish people carry the connection to this land in their very name.
So why does the Palestinian Authority choose to call that heritage and homeland claim “bogus”?
Perhaps because acknowledging Judea creates an enormous problem for the narrative the PA and WAFA promote every day, calling Jews living in the land of Israel as “colonists.” But colonizers are outsiders who arrive in someone else’s homeland. It becomes considerably harder to sustain that description while acknowledging that the people being called colonizers take their name from the very land in which they supposedly have no indigenous history.
This is antisemitic historical erasure—and it should be condemned as such.
It should be condemned at the United Nations. It should be condemned by governments that have chosen in recent years to recognize a Palestinian state. Britain, Canada and others should demand something elementary in return: recognition of the history and heritage of the Jewish people.
Because recognition cannot sensibly run in only one direction.
If the Palestinian Authority asks the world to recognize the local Arabs attachment to this land while its own official news agency dismisses the Jewish people’s vastly documented attachment as “bogus,” the problem is larger than terminology.
It goes to coexistence.
Two peoples cannot make peace if one insists that acknowledging the other’s history is itself illegitimate. A Palestinian state cannot be built on the proposition that Jewish history deserves international negation.
ACTION ITEM
Contact governments of Canada, Britain, France, Australia, Mexico and others that they demand that the Palestinian Authority stop calling the long Jewish history in the holy land “bogus.”
First One Through 