Category Archives: Israel

Coexistence, Until the Wrong Jews Show Up

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A group of religious Jewish youths recently appeared on a Galilean hillside near the Israeli Arab town of Majd al-Krum. Protesters quickly described them as West Bank settlers establishing an illegal outpost as part of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s campaign to “do in the Galilee what we are doing in Judea and Samaria.”

The facts are considerably different.

Part of the property lies within Majd al-Krum’s municipal boundaries but belongs to the Jewish National Fund. It is surrounded by privately owned Arab agricultural land. In January 2026, JNF granted seasonal grazing rights over approximately 1,050 dunams to Gabi Damari, a livestock farmer from Tal-El, a Jewish community in the Galilee. The purpose was to reduce vegetation and the risk of fires. That authorization came roughly seven months before Smotrich announced his Galilee initiative, and no evidence has emerged that Smotrich sent Damari or the young men.

Damari said he brought youths from Judea and Samaria to guard equipment following thefts while his goats were delayed from arriving on the land by veterinary restrictions. Nothing reported thus far establishes that the young men were moving permanently to the Galilee or creating a residential community. They were living at a grazing site operated by a local farmer under a preexisting JNF authorization. (Ynet)

That did not make everything at the site proper. The camp included large tents, beds, utilities and equipment, some of which reportedly extended onto private land. Those were legitimate grounds for investigation and enforcement. JNF ultimately ordered excess structures removed, restricted the size and location of any shelter and limited how many people could remain. It did not cancel Damari’s grazing rights.

The protest, however, was not confined to property lines or permit conditions. Majd al-Krum’s council warned that the encampment was intended to change the area’s “demographic reality.” Hadash figures called it “land seizure” and “creeping transfer.” Sujood Badran, a local political activist arrested during the demonstrations, later recounted protesters chanting: “Arab land belongs to Arabs. Zionist, get up and leave.” She also described the area as “occupied Palestine.” (Times of Israel, Israel Hayom)

Haviva Ner-David offered the liberal Jewish version of the same exclusion. She praised the Galilee as a shared society “balanced 50-50” between Hebrew and Arabic speakers, including Muslims, Jews, Druze and Christians. Yet she said these particular Jews had come from outside to “ruin that,” pledged to protest “until they are truly gone” and promised that if they tried another Galilean hilltop, “we will go there, too.” (Ner-David’s post)

She proudly carried a protest flag bearing a dove and olive branch, presenting it as a symbol of Arab-Jewish partnership. Yet the flag identifies Majd al-Krum only in Arabic. There is no Hebrew and nothing representing the supposedly Jewish half of that partnership.

The protestors seemingly were taking a page from the Arab League that also protests new Jewish homes inside Israel. And the JNF has taken note, ordering the Jews to leave the area.

The legal standard should be straightforward. Private property must be respected. Grazing permits do not authorize unlimited construction. Theft, intimidation and racism should be punished whether committed by Jews, Muslims, Christians or Druze. None of those principles makes a person’s birthplace, religious appearance or previous residence grounds for expulsion.

Jews living in the West Bank are routinely denounced as obstacles to peace and told to move inside Israel. Now, when Jews associated with those communities appear inside Israel, they remain “settlers,” their presence becomes a demographic threat and self-described coexistence activists organize to make them disappear.

Coexistence that ends when the perceived wrong kind of Jews arrive is not coexistence. It is demographic exclusion in dove’s clothing.

ACTION ITEM

Contact the JNF at jewishnationalfund@jnf.org to make sure that they are not expelling Jews from Israel, but simply keeping grazing land for its intended purposes.

At the UN, Borders Are Inviolable, Except Israel’s

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At the closing of the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, its president, Annalena Baerbock, offered a final defense of the international order.

At 10:15, she invoked Gaza and said “if borders can be changed by force, if sovereignty can be set aside when inconvenient, or upheld only when politics allows, then no Member State can sleep peacefully anymore.” She repeated Gaza alongside Ukraine as she closed her remarks at 17:00.

Israel is a UN member state. Gaza is not. Palestine is not. Yet the UN increasingly discusses this war as though those roles were reversed.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the government of Gaza alongside thousands of Gazans invaded Israel. Thousands of terrorists attacked communities and military installations, killed roughly 1,200 people and abducted 251 into Gaza.

Members of Hamas tear down fence and invade Israel on October 7, 2023

If Baerbock wanted an example of a member state’s border being violated by force, she had one.

Instead, the UN performs a remarkable double inversion. It starts the clock after October 7, making the war appear to begin with Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Then it treats Gaza as the territory whose sovereignty and borders are paramount, while the actual member state that was invaded becomes the accused.

Territorial integrity cannot be a foundational principle when Russia enters Ukraine and an inconvenient technicality when Gazans invade Israel. A rule whose application depends upon who is doing the invading is not a principle. It is politics dressed up as international law.

The organization created to protect member states has demonstrated that when Israel, a member state, is invaded and its civilians raped, slaughtered and kidnapped, by some evil orchestration and institutional design, the terrorist enclave from which the attack emerged can be turned into the aggrieved party.

The UN has not merely failed its own basic test. It has exposed the fine print in its supposedly universal principles: borders are inviolable, sovereignty is sacred, and member states must be protected – unless the member state is Israel.

Hamas terrorist in Israeli kibbutz on October 7, 2023

Britain’s Only Acceptable Ethnic Cleansing

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Britain is suddenly alarmed about supposed “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank.

The British government warns that Israeli policies could force Palestinian Arabs from parts of Judea and Samaria. It is sanctioning Israelis, condemning “settlements” and portraying demographic change in territory claimed by Palestinians as a grave moral offense.

Britain has seen ethnic cleansing in this territory before. Its reaction was very different.

In 1948, The Kingdom of Transjordan crossed the Jordan River and conquered Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem. It then destroyed and expelled the Jewish communities that had lived across the territory. The ancient Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City was emptied of its Jews. Jews were then barred from their holiest sites, as synagogues were destroyed or desecrated.

Interior view of a ruined building with crumbling walls and debris, featuring an archway and a soldier standing amidst the ruins.
Jordanian soldiers destroyed the Hurva Synagogue in 1949

The result was remarkably complete: the territory Jordan occupied was ethnically cleansed of Jews. And less than two years later, Britain formally recognized Jordan’s union with the territory it had invaded and conquered, one of the only countries in the world to do so.

Jordan then made the demographic principle explicit. Its 1954 nationality law extended Jordanian nationality to former Palestinian citizens residing in the kingdom while expressly carving out “the Jews.”

Jordan expelled and excluded the Jews in its holy land, and Britain’s response was recognition.

In 2005, Britain would celebrate again, this time in Gaza.

Israel decided to dismantle every Jewish community in the Gaza Strip. Israeli soldiers physically removed roughly 8,000 Jews from their homes and twenty-one Jewish communities disappeared. A Jew-free Gaza emerged.

Britain did not describe this as ethnic cleansing. Prime Minister Tony Blair praised Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “courage” and offered Britain’s “full support” for the withdrawal. His foreign secretary called it a hugely significant step toward peace.

Now consider 2026.

Britain warns against the possible displacement of Palestinian Arabs from Area C of the West Bank, territory that has remained under Israeli civil and security control under the Oslo framework pending a final agreement. It speaks of forcible displacement, imposes sanctions and treats the prospect of Palestinian Arabs losing their communities as intolerable.

The moral principle sounds admirable. It would be more convincing if Britain had ever applied it equally to Jews in the region.

When some Palestinian Arabs might be displaced from territory it hopes to use in a future Palestinian state, Britain suddenly discovers that removing a particular ethnic population from its homes is beyond the pale. Instead, England demands that the region be ethnically cleansed – of Jews – citing the antisemitic UN Security Council Resolution 2334.

There is a British consistency here: ethnic cleansing is only appropriate when Jews are removed.

For generations, British policy has treated the removal of Jews from disputed territory as compatible with peace. A Palestinian Gaza without Jews was progress. A Jordanian West Bank without Jews was acceptable. A future Palestinian state is still routinely imagined as a place where Jewish communities cannot remain.

Only the possibility of some Arab relocation produces moral outrage.

That exposes the deeper problem with the diplomatic vocabulary surrounding the conflict. “Two states” has quietly come to mean one multicultural Jewish state containing a large Arab minority alongside one Palestinian state expected to contain no Jews. One and one-half states for Arabs; half a state for Jews.

England understands the ethnic cleansing of Jews – it did it itself in 1290 – the only minority group to ever be expelled from the country. It seems to continue to only have a taste for that kind of hatred and ethnic cleansing, including in the Jewish homeland.

The Temple Mount Status Quo Is Being Rewritten

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The Palestinian Authority has declared the Temple Mount — the holiest site in Judaism — the “exclusive right of Muslims.”

That is not the historic status quo. It is an attempt to rewrite it.

After Israel took control of Jerusalem’s Old City in 1967, day-to-day religious administration of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif remained with the Islamic Waqf, while Israel retained responsibility for security and substantial control over access. The Waqf permitted Muslims to pray on the Mount, while non-Muslims could visit, prayer was restricted.

The arrangement governed administration, access and worship. It did not declare the Temple Mount the exclusive possession or religious entitlement of Muslims.

The Palestinian Authority’s Jerusalem Governorate crossed that line explicitly on September 6. It condemned Jews conducting “Talmudic rituals and prayers” as attempts to “alter its religious character,” declared the entire 144-dunam compound the “exclusive right of Muslims” and warned against changing its “identity.”

Those words matter.

Waqf administration is one thing. Restrictions on Jewish prayer are another. Declaring the site itself the “exclusive right” of Muslims is something else entirely.

The status quo regulates what Jews may do there. It never determined what the place is.

The First and Second Jewish Temples stood on the Temple Mount. Jewish prayer has faced Jerusalem for millennia. Jewish liturgy, mourning and hopes for redemption are bound to it. Many observant Jews have historically declined to walk upon portions of the Mount precisely because they consider the ground too holy to enter without the required ritual purity.

For some Jews, not ascending is itself an expression of the Mount’s extraordinary Jewish sanctity.

That makes the new language especially provocative. Jews visiting Judaism’s holiest place become “settlers” conducting “incursions.” Jewish prayer becomes threatening “Talmudic rituals.” A restriction accepted to preserve religious peace is transformed into evidence that Jewish religious expression does not belong there at all.

Jewish restraint was supposed to preserve coexistence. It cannot become a permission slip for Jewish erasure.

The international reaction sharpens that dynamic. The United Nations itself has called upon the parties to refrain from “provocative actions, incitement and inflammatory rhetoric,” especially in places of “religious and cultural sensitivity.” In the very next paragraph, it demanded that Jerusalem’s historic status quo be respected “in word and practice” and urged “all sides” to halt provocations and incitement at the holy sites.

By the UN’s own standard, words can threaten the status quo. Yet when an official Palestinian governmental authority declares Judaism’s holiest site the “exclusive right of Muslims,” it is greeted with a silent nod of approval.

And this occurs as the anti-Israel horde discusses so-called “Jewish supremacy.” Zohran Mamdani has attacked privileging one religion over another (meaning Jews over Muslims). Hasan Piker denounces “ethnoreligious supremacist values.” At the Jewish Temple Mount, the principle stripped of abstraction: one religion claiming exclusive entitlement to the holiest site of another.

And that raises a more fundamental question about the status quo itself.

Perhaps placing religious administration of a multi-faith holy site exclusively in the hands of one of the religions claiming it was always structurally unstable.

The Waqf is not a neutral administrator. It is an Islamic religious institution representing one faith at a site sacred to several. That arrangement can function while custodianship means administration. It becomes difficult to justify when the authority entrusted with the site participates in or endorses a doctrine that denies another faith any legitimate claim to it.

The test should be remarkably simple: Can the authorities administering the Temple Mount state unambiguously that it is Judaism’s holiest site?

Acknowledging that fact surrenders nothing about Islam’s attachment to Al-Aqsa. But an administrator that cannot acknowledge the most basic religious identity of the people whose holiest site it administers has a profound conflict with the responsibilities of custodianship.

If the Waqf and Jordan cannot pass that test, their fitness to exercise exclusive administration should be questioned.

The logical alternative is administration by a political authority obligated to protect multiple religions rather than a religious authority representing one of them. Israel already bears responsibility for security at the compound and exercises substantial control over access. Any new arrangement would have to fully protect Muslim worship and Islamic holy places while recognizing rather than suppressing the religious attachments of others.

The status quo was built on the assumption that Islamic administration could coexist with Jewish restraint. The assertion of “Muslim exclusivity” is breaking that bargain.

If the Waqf cannot acknowledge Judaism at Judaism’s holiest site, it should no longer be entrusted to administer it.

Related:

US Embassy In Israel Only Invites Muslims To US To Study (September 2023)

Names and Narrative: Terrorist and Genocide

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Hamas has been a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997, when the list was first developed. On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attackers invaded Israel, deliberately murdered civilians and kidnapped over 250 people.

It was designated terrorists committing terrorism.

Yet “terrorist” became a troublesome word for mainstream media and alt-left politicians.

The Associated Press advises journalists to describe specific acts and generally attribute the terms terrorism and terrorist to people or organizations, rather than independently apply them. Amnesty International has gone further, explaining that it generally avoids the terms because they lack an agreed legal definition and carry strong political and emotional connotations.

That restraint evaporates around “genocide.”

Genocide is the more demanding accusation. Death, destruction and even war crimes do not establish it. The Genocide Convention requires the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such. Israel emphatically denies that intent, maintaining that it went to war to defeat Hamas – the terrorists which had committed mass terrorism – and recover its hostages, not destroy Palestinian Arabs.

Amnesty nevertheless declares that Israel is committing genocide. The same organization that will not call Hamas a terrorist organization after its deliberate slaughter and kidnapping of civilians has no hesitation resolving the vastly more difficult question of Israeli intent.

Progressive politicians follow the same linguistic path. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) was accusing Israel of genocide within weeks of October 7 and later called Benjamin Netanyahu a “genocidal maniac.” Zohran Mamdani repeatedly describes the October 7 massacre as a “horrific war crime” rather than a terrorist act, while calling Israel’s war “genocide” and Netanyahu the “architect of a horrific genocide.”

The burden of proof has been turned upside down.

Calling October 7 terrorism requires looking simply at what Hamas did: a designated terrorist organization deliberately murdered and kidnapped civilians for political and ideological purposes. It is plainly terrorism.

Calling Israel’s war genocide requires establishing why Israel fought it: that its actual intent was to destroy Palestinian Arabs as a people rather than defeat Hamas in a defensive war.

Yet the first conclusion is treated as dangerously judgmental while the second is repeated as established fact.

Mehdi Hasan offered an almost grotesque demonstration this week while attacking a New York Times essay by Gazan Palestinian Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib urging Palestinians to resist Hamas. Hasan called people sharing the essay “pro-genocide people,” Israel “the genocidaire,” the essay “a pro genocide piece” and the war “this current genocide.”

Hasan suffers a genocide stutter.

He cannot bring himself to say clearly and unambiguously that Hamas is a terrorist group and committed a heinous terrorist act, but cannot get the word “genocide” out of his mouth as he tries to hypnotize viewers into believing the unbelievable about Israel.

And the accusation does not remain attached to Israel’s government. Once genocide becomes the premise, anyone defending Israel can become pro-genocide. Even a Palestinian Arab arguing that his own people must resist Hamas can produce a pro-genocide piece for the obsessive compulsive stutterer.

That is how a defamatory vocabulary spreads.

Genocide is among the gravest accusations that can be made against a people or state. Repeating it as established fact without establishing the specific intent the crime requires does more than distort a war. It tells millions of people that Israel is deliberately destroying Palestinian Arabs and that those who defend Israel are defending that destruction.

That is an incendiary allegation in a world where Jews and Israelis are already threatened and attacked over Gaza.

Meanwhile, terrorist is handled delicately when describing the organization that deliberately slaughtered civilians on October 7 in the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

The asymmetry is morally grotesque. Hasan, Tlaib, Mamdani are trafficking in the asymmetry of whataboutery as a heinous veneer to protect antisemitic terrorists, plain and simple.

When the Covenant Changes Tense

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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 Has Some Questions for the Jews

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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 Arab League Condemns New Jewish Communities Inside Israel. Is This Simple Antisemitism or Strategic?

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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?

October 7, 2026: When an Ottoman Land Law Could Change the Map of Judea and Samaria

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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 cultivation could 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 termMeaningRelevance
MiriState land carrying individual possession/use rightsMuch agricultural land
TasarrufRight of possession and useThe individual’s valuable land right
MahlulLapsed/reverted possessory rightPotential consequence of qualifying non-cultivation
TapuLand registration/title systemDocumentary 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 unregistered tasarruf 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.

From Shut Up to Get Out

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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.