New York City Mayor and Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani accused a synagogue hosting a West Bank real estate expo of facilitating “illegal land sales” and “displacing Palestinians.” It was an explosive accusation, wrapped in the language of international law, designed to sound precise and morally settled. But the facts—and the law—are far more complicated than that charge suggests.
The first fact Mamdani skips is the most important one: the buyers are Americans.
Not Israelis being relocated by the State of Israel. Not civilians transferred by military order. Not part of a government-directed demographic campaign. Americans, acting on their own, voluntarily exploring whether to buy homes.
That distinction is the legal center of the argument.
The international legal objection to “settlements” rests largely on Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory. The theory is about state conduct: a government moving its own people into disputed land.
That is not what is happening here.
Whatever one thinks of “Israeli settlements,” an American family independently choosing to buy an apartment is not the same legal act as a state transferring its civilian population. It is a private decision, made voluntarily, by people acting on their own behalf.
Brochure from Great Real Estate Event at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City in May 2026
The second problem with Mamdani’s accusation is historical.
Much of the outrage centers on homes in the West Bank neighborhood of Gush Etzion, as though it were simply land taken from Palestinian Arabs after 1967. That telling requires erasing inconvenient history.
Jews legally purchased land in Gush Etzion in the 1920s and 1930s. Jewish communities were established there before the State of Israel existed. In 1948, those communities were attacked, destroyed, and their survivors expelled. These neighborhoods were not owned privately by Palestinian Arabs.
Even more, almost every single presenter at the event was marketing real estate inside Israel. As the event advertised on its opening page “from Jerusalem to Netanya, from Haifa to Eilat,” this was an event showcasing homes inside of Israel.
This event was not about “displacing Palestinians” as Mamdani charged. This was selling homes in the Jewish homeland to American Jews.
That 3,300-year old bond is at the heart of antisemites loathing Israel, much like Mamdani’s mentors in the Soviet Union attacking Zionists decades ago.
Among the dead in Israel were a young Arab man and his fiancée in Yarka, shot dead together just weeks before their wedding. They were building a home, planning a life, and in a moment both were gone.
Their murders did not trigger an emergency session at the United Nations Human Rights Council. No international campaign formed around their names. No protests filled campuses demanding justice.
But the ratio matters.
For every SAP killed by a West Bank Jew this year, more than six Israeli Arabs have been killed by fellow Arabs.
Yet only one category reliably commands international attention.
When Jews kill Arabs, the broader human rights ecosystem reacts swiftly. The UN warns of “ethnic cleansing.” Condemnations follow. Activists mobilize.
Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a side event during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva on March 26, 2024. Photo: Reuters / Denis Balibouse
When Arabs kill Arabs, the deaths rarely travel beyond the local crime blotter.
If Arab life matters, it should matter regardless of who pulls the trigger.
A human rights system that treats one dead Arab as an international crisis and six dead Arabs as a local inconvenience is not organized around human dignity.
It is organized around narrative.
Somewhere in Yarka, two families are mourning a wedding that will never happen.
And the world moved on because no Jew could be blamed.
There was something fitting about Lior Raz standing in Chappaqua, New York last night raising money for Magen David Adom. Raz built his career dramatizing the hunt for terrorists. Magen David Adom exists for the moments after the hunt fails.
Lior Raz being interviewed at a fundraiser for Magen David Adom in Chappaqua, NY April 29, 2026 (photo: First One Through)
For those unfamiliar with Raz, he is more than an actor. Before becoming one of Israel’s most recognizable cultural figures, he served in an undercover Israeli military unit operating inside Arab communities, gathering intelligence and carrying out operations in hostile environments. He grew up with Iraqi and Algerian parents speaking Arabic, making him deeply bi-cultural in Jewish and Arab worlds. That experience and background became the foundation for Fauda, the global hit he co-created and stars in, a drama centered on Israeli undercover units hunting terrorists in the West Bank and Gaza.
What made Fauda different was never simply its action but its realism. Israelis and Palestinian Arabs were not rendered as symbols, but as human beings moving through an intimate, brutal conflict where ideology, family, fear, and violence occupy the same space. For international audiences it was compelling fiction. For Israelis and Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) it often felt closer to lived reality.
Then October 7 collapsed whatever distance remained between fiction and reality.
At the fundraiser, Raz put words to what that rupture did to Israel.
Israel, he said, is living in trauma, not PTSD. It was not an echo of horror but the continuation of it.
It was the most important thing said all night because it captured something essential about the country after October 7. PTSD belongs to memory. Trauma belongs to the present. PTSD is what remains after danger has passed. Trauma is what happens when danger tears through your assumptions and reorganizes how you live.
That is Israel now.
Lior Raz being interviewed at a fundraiser for Magen David Adom in Chappaqua, NY April 29, 2026 (photo: First One Through)
The hostages are home or accounted for. The war has shifted phases. But the rupture remains embedded in Israeli life. The confidence that catastrophe could be anticipated and contained has been broken. Every family understands more intimately how quickly ordinary life can split into irreversible loss. The danger may have changed form, but the nervous system of the country remains altered.
That is where Magen David Adom enters the story.
If Fauda is about the front edge of violence—the raid, the chase, the interception—Magen David Adom lives on the back edge: the ambulance, the paramedic, the trauma room, the blood bank, the race to preserve life after violence has already landed. Security exists to stop attacks. Emergency medicine exists for when stopping fails.
Raz spoke with particular pride about what Magen David Adom represents: Jews, Christians, Druze, and Muslims working side by side to save lives. In a region where identity so often organizes conflict, MDA operates at the level beneath identity, at the essence of humanity. No politics, no theology, no tribal sorting. Just the oldest civilizational imperative there is: preserve life.
It is one of Israel’s deepest strengths that even under permanent security pressure, its emergency institutions remain organized around life itself.
Raz also looked forward. The next season of Fauda which will come out in a few months, he said, will directly reflect October 7 and the years after, with half of it set in Marseille, France. That choice is revealing. Marseille is one of Europe’s great pressure-point cities, where migration, communal fragmentation, criminality, radicalization, and fractured civic identity collide. It is a city where many of the tensions Israel has lived with for decades are becoming visible in European form.
The movement of Fauda into Europe suggests something larger. The Israeli condition is no longer entirely Israeli. The fractures Israel has lived with for decades—terror, divided loyalties, imported ideological battles, fear in public life—are increasingly visible across Western democracies. Israel was simply earlier, home to 45% of global Jewry. The anti-Jewish attacks and growing anti-Western attacks are everywhere.
When Raz was pressed on American politics, he declined to engage. He understood the trap of America’s partisan machinery and would have no part of it. He was there to fight violence from wherever it came from, not from a single ideology.
At an event raising money for ambulances, blood banks, and emergency responders, it became clear that this too belongs to the same mission.
Raz is known for Fauda, for portraying the hunt for terrorists, the intelligence work, the raids, the violence used to stop violence. But that is only the outer layer. Beneath it lies something older and deeper.
The mission is to save lives.
To save lives in Israel when violence breaks through. To protect Jewish life abroad when antisemitism rises. To defend the perimeter and preserve the people. These are not separate missions. They are one.
For most of Jewish history, Jews endured violence dependent on the mercy or restraint of others. Now there is a Jewish state with power, intelligence capabilities, and institutions of rescue, carrying with it not only sovereignty but obligation. That obligation no longer ends at Israel’s borders. A Jew threatened in Paris, attacked in New York, harassed in London, or targeted in Melbourne enters the same moral universe.
The perimeter has widened.
Fauda may be about counterterrorism and Magen David Adom may be about emergency medicine. Together, they represent the fight against antisemitism which lies in the same ancient Jewish imperative: protect life, preserve the people, continue.
That may define the ever-present trauma among Jewry today: the need to constantly think about personal and communal safety, without the calm to simply sit at a cafe or send one’s kids to school and purely enjoy life’s moments.
When rabbis portray Israel as a moral problem instead of a Jewish inheritance
Two progressive rabbis – Sharon Brous and David Ingber – sat before a packed Jewish audience in San Diego for a taping of the podcast Being Jewish with Jonah Platt, to wrestle with a distinctly modern Jewish dilemma: how does a tradition forged in exile process the return of Jewish power?
The subject was the rabbinate and Israel, but the deeper argument was Judaism itself.
The language was familiar: fear, shame, democracy, moral crisis. The question underneath it was older than the state and older than Zionism itself. What exactly is Judaism when Jews are sovereign again – and what does that mean for diaspora Jews?
That question is increasingly dividing Jewish life.
For years the pattern has been visible in polling, synagogue life, philanthropy, and communal politics. The further left a Jew moves politically, the more likely that Jew is to become publicly critical of Israel. The less traditional the Jewish framework, the more likely that criticism expands beyond policy into discomfort with Jewish statehood itself. Orthodox Jews criticize Israeli governments all the time, often fiercely, but they rarely place Jewish national existence itself in the dock.
That difference is not merely political. It is theological. It is civilizational.
Because traditional Judaism has always answered the question of Jewish identity in integrated terms: God, Torah, peoplehood, and land. These are particular to the Jewish people. They embody one structure. Remove one and the architecture strains. Remove the land and Judaism survives, but in suspension.
Diaspora Judaism became one of history’s great civilizational achievements, but it was always an adaptation to rupture. The prayerbook points toward Jerusalem. The festivals move according to the agricultural rhythms of the Land of Israel. The fast days mourn national destruction. The closing line of the seder and of Yom Kippur pushes in one direction only: next year in Jerusalem.
That was never metaphor. It was memory preserved as architecture.
For traditional Jews, Jewish self-rule is not simply politics. It is Jewish history restored. Such belief does not make every Israeli government wise or righteous. Jews argue bitterly over borders, settlements, courts, wars, and coalitions. But beneath those arguments lies a premise that remains fixed: Jewish political agency is indispensable.
Progressive – and especially non-Orthodox – Judaism increasingly begins somewhere else.
Its center of gravity is ethical universalism. Its first question is increasingly not what preserves Jewish continuity, but what satisfies universal justice. That instinct has deep Jewish roots. The prophets placed moral obligation at the center of covenantal life. But prophets do not run borders.
States do.
States defend territory, absorb casualties, deter enemies, and make violent decisions under imperfect conditions. Sovereignty stains the hands. Once universal ethics become the supreme framework, the Jewish state itself becomes vulnerable to indictment.
That is what the Brous–Ingber exchange revealed with unusual clarity.
And it was revealing precisely because it did not end in one room.
Their first conversation exposed a tension neither side could settle. Sharon Brous spoke from the prophetic register of progressive Judaism, where Judaism is primarily moral witness, conscience, and justice. David Ingber, while sharing much of that moral vocabulary, kept returning to something older and deeper: peoplehood, continuity, solidarity, historical necessity.
The disagreement lingered.
Brous later acknowledged discomfort with how the exchange unfolded, and the conversation resumed in a second round on Jonah Platt’s podcast. That itself was revealing. One debate became two because the argument underneath it could not be resolved by clarifying policy or refining moral critique. The disagreement was structural.
And in that second conversation, the divide remained.
Brous continued pressing the prophetic burden, insisting that Jewish moral credibility depends on confronting Jewish power when it acts unjustly. Ingber continued defending something prior to critique itself: the necessity of Jewish collective power in a world that has repeatedly shown its appetite for Jewish vulnerability, especially in light of the widespread antisemitism today.
One critiques Israel primarily as a moral actor, the other defends Israel first as a historical necessity and only then wrestles with its conduct.
It is the difference between inheritance and indictment.
And this internal Jewish struggle is increasingly being exported into the wider world, where it is eagerly consumed.
This week in the United Kingdom, leading progressive rabbis warned that Israel’s political direction poses an existential threat to Judaism itself, tied to the publication of their new book. The phrase was startling.
Israel as an existential threat to Judaism.
For two thousand years, existential threats to Judaism had names: the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the Crusades, the Inquisition, pogroms, the Holocaust, Soviet repression, the expulsions from Arab lands.
Statelessness itself was the existential condition.
Now, for growing sectors of progressive non-Orthodox Jewish leadership, the Jewish state itself is increasingly being cast as the danger.
That is more than criticism. That is inversion.
And notice who was eager to amplify it.
The Guardian, a British publication whose editorial posture toward Israel has long been sharply critical, gave the book and its thesis prominent space. That matters because internal Jewish dissent carries unique public utility in anti-Israel discourse. Criticism from outside can be dismissed as hostility. Criticism from inside acquires the authority of confession.
Progressive Jewish critique often assumes its audience shares its covenantal investment in Jewish survival. The wider world often hears something simpler: if even rabbis are indicting the Jewish state, the case against it must already be proven.
That is one of anti-Zionism’s most valuable currencies: Jewish testimony against Jewish power.
Not because Jewish dissent is illegitimate. Jewish argument is one of Judaism’s oldest arts. But once internal critique detaches from internal solidarity, it stops functioning as family argument and starts functioning as prosecutorial evidence.
The family dispute becomes public exhibit.
And this is where traditional Jewish memory diverges sharply from progressive Jewish moral instinct.
Traditional Jews remember something progressive Jewish politics often struggles to metabolize: the central danger of Jewish history was never Jewish power: It was Jewish powerlessness.
The Holocaust was not a lesson in the abuse of Jewish power. It was a lesson in the consequences of Jewish defenselessness.
Then came 1948 and Jewish agency returned.
And within years, the map of Jewish history changed. Ancient Jewish communities across Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and Morocco collapsed into expulsion, flight, and dispossession. Hundreds of thousands found refuge in Israel.
That memory disciplines judgment. It teaches realism.
Progressive Jewish consciousness inherited a different lesson from modernity: nationalism corrupts, power must be constrained, minorities must maintain moral vigilance.
There is wisdom in that inheritance – as a modifier, not as a ruling ethos. A beleaguered minority does not have the luxury of abandoning all rights and power to satisfy the mob.
That is what Zionism answered, not abstractly but operationally.
German Jews once believed they had solved history. They were cultured, integrated, patriotic, indispensable.
History did not care.
American Jews should similarly be cautious with assumptions of permanence.
Because beneath every synagogue fight, every anguished podcast, every progressive Jewish book tour, lies the same civilizational argument: is Judaism an inheritance to preserve, or a moral vocabulary to deploy?
These have become competing theories of Jewish survival.
For two thousand years Jews prayed toward Zion because history taught them exile was fragile. Progressive Judaism increasingly asks whether Israel deserves that loyalty, while traditional Judaism believes the land is central to Judaism and disagreements are best managed internally.
Whether in public or private discussions, the policies of Israel are becoming an exhibit in the philosophical rift between progressive and traditional Judaism.
This week, Israel began bringing the first members of the Bnei Menashe community from northeast India to Israel, the latest chapter in one of the most improbable stories in Jewish history. These are Jews who have long understood themselves as descendants of the Tribe of Manasseh, one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, exiled by the Assyrian Empire nearly 2,700 years ago. Across centuries, empires, languages, and continents, they preserved fragments of ritual, memory, and identity tied to ancient Israel. In modern times, after study, rabbinic engagement, and formal recognition, thousands have made aliyah. Hundreds more are now on their way. For the Jewish world, it is an extraordinary scene: a people scattered to the farthest reaches of the earth still finding their way home.
That is the Jewish story in miniature.
Exile was never meant to be permanent. The Jewish calendar, Jewish prayer, and Jewish memory are saturated with return. From The Hebrew Bible to the modern Zionist movement, the idea of ingathering has been the central thread of Jewish continuity. Operation Wings of Dawn is not an immigration program in the ordinary sense. It is the continuation of that ancient civilizational arc.
It is also a reminder that Jewish peoplehood never fit modern racial categories. Jews came back to Israel from Ethiopia, from Iraq, from Yemen, from Russia, from France, and now again from India. Different languages. Different appearances. Different histories of exile. One people.
That should be a remarkable human story.
And yet, in some corners of the media world, it became something else.
Quds News Network ran a story framing the arrival as a “settlement push” of “new colonizers” in northern “Occupied Palestine”, reducing the Bnei Menashe to instruments of a political project rather than recognizing them as Jews returning to join the Jewish people in the Jewish state. The framing is familiar: Jewish return is recoded as colonial expansion.
This is not an isolated habit of language. Across anti-Israel activist media and parts of the NGO ecosystem, Jewish presence in Israel is increasingly interpreted through a “settler-colonial” framework in “Occupied Palestine,” meaning anywhere in Israel. Amnesty International’s apartheid framework leans heavily on this vocabulary, turning Jewish sovereignty itself into a structural offense rather than a legitimate act of national self-determination. That language then migrates outward, shaping how journalists, activists, and political movements speak about Jews in Israel. The result is a moral inversion in which Jewish return becomes aggression by definition.
And this is where the word colonizer collapses under its own weight.
Colonialism has an actual meaning. It is when an imperial center sends its people outward to dominate foreign land for extraction and rule. Britain in India. Spain in the Americas. France in Algeria.
Operation Wings of Dawn is the reverse movement: A dispersed people carrying an ancient memory of Israel, choosing to gather into the one Jewish homeland.
Calling that colonialism empties the word of meaning.
And the asymmetry is impossible to ignore.
When Palestinian Arabs preserve the memory of villages lost 77 years ago, the world treats it as sacred inheritance, a claim passed from generation to generation. Even when those same Arabs live just a few miles away from their grandparents’ homes, in the same land, with the same people, language and culture, people advocate for their relocation.
Yet when Jews preserve the memory of exile in distant lands and act on it, the same world increasingly calls it colonization.
That difference tells you everything.
The issue has never been whether Jews are European or Middle Eastern, white or brown, indigenous or diasporic. The Bnei Menashe expose how flimsy those categories always were. Indian Jews arriving in Israel should shatter the lazy caricature of Zionism as European implantation.
Instead, the caricature simply repeats the mantra:
A Jew from Poland returns as a colonizer. A Jew from Iraq returns as a colonizer. A Jew from Ethiopia returns as a colonizer. A Jew from India returns as a colonizer.
For those committed to denying Jewish belonging, even a homecoming from India must be rewritten as invasion.
When Israel declared independence in 1948, it had roughly 717,000 Jews and roughly 156,000 Arab citizens and residents. Those numbers were small, but what they carried was enormous: the ambition to reverse two thousand years of Jewish dispersion and gather a scattered people back into sovereignty.
Yet the first demographic fact that emerges from Israel’s modern history cuts against so much of the political mythology surrounding it. Since 1948, Israel’s Arab minority expanded at a faster proportional rate than its Jewish majority. The Jewish population grew from 717,000 to nearly 8 million, roughly elevenfold. Israel’s Arab population grew from 156,000 to more than 2.1 million, more than thirteenfold.
That fact strips away one of the central distortions in the debate over Israel. The rise of the Jewish state did not require the disappearance of its Arab minority. Quite the opposite. Israel’s Arab population expanded dramatically under Israeli sovereignty. Two populations grew inside the same state, but through entirely different engines. The Jewish story was one of ingathering, especially during the early years.
Today, Israel stands at more than 10.2 million people, nearly 8 million Jews and more than 2.1 million Arabs. A state born in scarcity became a fully formed society. But the road from 1948 to 2026 can best be understood through four distinct demographic phases: ingathering, expansion, retention, and preservation.
The first phase was ingathering. At first, Israel was an immigration state, and its earliest years were powered by catastrophe. The survivors of Europe came first, the broken remnant of the Holocaust arriving in a country still fighting its first war. Then came the collapse of Jewish life across the Arab world. Ancient Jewish communities in Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, and Libya emptied under expulsion, violence, and state pressure. More than 800,000 Jews left the Arab world, many rebuilding their lives in Israel.
Then came the Soviet opening. The collapse of the Soviet Union released nearly one million Jews into the largest migration wave since the founding of the state. Europe’s destruction, the Arab world’s expulsion, and the Soviet opening formed the three great waves of Jewish ingathering. Three different historical ruptures, one destination. That is how Jewish Israel was built.
While Jewish Israel was growing through migration, Israel’s Arab population was growing through birth. Higher fertility and falling mortality created uninterrupted expansion over decades. That is why the proportional growth of Israel’s Arab population exceeded the proportional growth of the Jewish population.
Then the second phase began: expansion. At first, Jewish growth depended on aliyah. Over time, it depended increasingly on birth. The immigrants became citizens, the citizens became parents, and the children of refugees became the country itself. The engine of Jewish demographic growth shifted from the airport to the maternity ward. That is the deepest demographic transition in Israel’s history.
In 2025, Israel recorded approximately 177,000 births. Immigration that year stood at roughly 24,600. Births now outnumber immigration by more than seven to one. What would have been unimaginable in 1948 has become ordinary in 2026. Israel began as a refuge. It now reproduces itself.
That changes the meaning of the state. Political Israel started as the answer to Jewish vulnerability, a place Jews could flee to when the world closed. That remains true. But demographically, it is no longer Israel’s primary function. Israel is no longer merely where Jews go when exile fails. It is where Jewish continuity principally lives.
And here, another old assumption collapsed. For decades, Israeli politics was shaped by demographic anxiety: would Arab fertility permanently outpace Jewish fertility? Would a demographic clock eventually run down the Jewish majority? That fear shaped strategy, borders, and diplomacy. For years, the numbers seemed to support it.
Then the numbers changed. Arab fertility declined as Arab society modernized. Jewish fertility remained unusually strong for an advanced economy. Today, Jewish fertility has reached parity with, and in some years slightly exceeded, Arab fertility. The demographic trajectory shifted. A generation of political strategy was shaped by a demographic clock that slowed while everyone kept hearing it tick.
Fertility Shift
1990 Arab █████ Jewish ███ 2026 Arab ███ Jewish ████
But demographic success creates its own new challenge.
For most of Israeli history, migration remained positive. Even when aliyah slowed, more Jews came than left. That changed in the last two years. In 2022, Israel absorbed more than 74,000 immigrants, driven heavily by war in Ukraine and departures from Russia. That surge faded quickly. By 2024 and 2025, net migration turned negative – more Israelis left than new immigrants arrived.
This is not a demographic crisis. Births still overwhelm migration losses, and Israel continues to grow. But the Zionist test has changed. For decades, the question was how many Jews Israel could gather. Now the question is how many it can keep.
The founding generations came because they had to. Future generations stay because they choose to. That is a different kind of national test. And the retention question is not merely numerical. If those leaving are disproportionately engineers, doctors, founders, investors, and elite military talent, the demographic issue changes shape. A state can absorb numerical loss. It feels the loss of capability much faster.
Above all these numbers sits the larger civilizational shift. In 1948, around six percent of world Jewry lived in Israel. Today, around 45% does. Soon it may be the majority.
Share of World Jewry Living in Israel 1948 ██ 6% 1970 ████ 18% 1990 ███████ 30% 2010 ██████████ 42% 2026 ████████████ 45%
There is one more demographic question hanging over Israel in 2026, larger than fertility, migration, or retention. It sits beneath almost every diplomatic formula and every argument about the future of the conflict.
The question is the scale and meaning of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) having a “right of return.”
For decades, the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations have insisted on a “right of return” for Palestinian “refugees” and their descendants. The number most commonly cited is roughly 5.9 million. That number matters because it clarifies what the argument actually means in demographic terms.
Israel today has roughly 10.2 million people. Add 5.9 million Palestinian Arabs to that number and the demographic map changes overnight. Israel would become a country of more than 16 million people. Its Arab population would jump from 2.1 million to more than 8 million. Its Jewish population would remain just under 8 million. The Jewish majority would collapse into parity or slightly minority status.
That is not a marginal adjustment. It is a structural transformation of the state itself.
Put into historical perspective, the scale becomes even sharper. In 1948, Israel’s Arab population stood at roughly 156,000. By 2026, it had already grown to more than 2.1 million, more than thirteenfold growth, already exceeding Jewish proportional growth over the same period. Add 5.9 million more, and that Arab population would stand at more than 8 million, representing more than fiftyfold growth since the founding of the state.
A “right of return” on this scale is not simply an immigration proposal, already stripping Israel a basic right of sovereignty to determine who to admit into the country. It further demands that the Jewish State cease to be one.
That is why this issue forms the fourth demographic challenge: preservation. Preservation of the demographic framework that allowed Jewish self-determination to return after two thousand years of dispersion and discrimination.
For most of Jewish history, survival meant enduring dispersion. In Israel, survival became concentration, then continuity, and now choice. The next phase may determine whether it remains preservation.
Very few countries have grown by over 10 times since 1948, and none in the developed “Global North”, with Australia and Canada leading the group at 2.5x and 1.9x, respectively (no European country even doubled its population). In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region which saw explosive growth due to the discovery of oil, no country has had the minority populations grow faster than the majority.
Israel is a true anomaly, a developed country with explosive growth, sitting in the MENA region which suppresses the growth of minority groups but the Jewish State still saw oversaw a faster growth of non-Jews. Despite the basic facts, the world still pressures the country to admit even more people adding to the population density, and with minorities who never lived in the country, in particular, undermining the demographic status quo.
As Israel considers its plans for the years ahead, retaining educated talent and ending the so-called SAP “right of return” rank as the leading causes to maintain a thriving democracy.
It looked like a technical vote. In New York City, a proposed buffer zone around houses of worship. A few feet of space so people could enter synagogues, churches, and mosques without confrontation.
And the Democratic Socialists of America bloc on the City Council voted no.
Shahana Hanif (District 39), Alexa Avilés (District 38), Tiffany Cabán (District 22), Chi Ossé (District 36), and Kayla Santosuosso (District 47) held the same line. Protect protest at all costs. Treat any restriction as a threat to speech. Keep the sidewalks open, no matter what is happening on them.
Shahana Hanif (District 39)
On paper, that sounds principled. In practice, it lands somewhere else entirely.
Because in this city, right now, protests are not showing up randomly. They are showing up outside synagogues in growing numbers. The line between Israel and the Jew has been erased, and the synagogue has become a stand-in.
This is where ideology stops being abstract.
For years, the DSA has defined itself through opposition to Israel. That posture has moved from foreign policy into local reality. When Zionism is framed as uniquely illegitimate, and most Jews see it as part of who they are, the translation is inevitable. The target shifts.
No manifesto is needed. The pattern speaks for itself.
Vote against a resolution recognizing hatred against Jews. Argue about the sponsors instead of the substance. Reject a minimal buffer around houses of worship at a moment when Jewish institutions in New York are under visible pressure.
That movement is no longer adjacent to power in New York City; it has the power. With Zohran Mamdani as the city’s new mayor, the worldview is moving from activist circles into the city’s governing core.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a member of the DSA
And the expansion is already underway.
On Tuesday April 28’s special primary day, Mamdani has backed Lindsey Boylan, a member of the DSA to take another seat on the City Council. Jewish City Council Speaker Julie Menin has endorsed Carl Wilson in an effort to stop the radical left gaining even more power in New York.
In the June primaries, NYC-DSA is backing a coordinated slate:
Darializa Avila Chevalier (Upper Manhattan/Bronx)
Claire Valdez (Brooklyn/Queens)
David Orkin (Queens)
Diana Moreno
—alongside a broader Assembly slate backed by the same network.
Aber Kawas has long supported the dismantling of the Jewish State, now running as part of the DSA to gain a seat in the New York State Senate. She is backed by Zohran Mamdani and Jamaal Bowman
This is how local elections stop being local.
When protests move from slogans to synagogue doors in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, who holds the line?
Will NYPD treat intimidation outside Jewish institutions as a line to be enforced—or a situation to be managed?
Power shapes behavior. When activists see their worldview reflected in City Hall and Albany, boundaries loosen. What once felt marginal begins to feel sanctioned. The distance between protest and confrontation narrows.
The question is no longer what DSA believes about Israel where they believe every man, woman and child is a fair target for violence. The question for New York voters is what they are comfortable normalizing here.
On sidewalks outside synagogues. At the doors of people trying to pray. In the space between protest and intimidation.
The City Council vote on buffer zones answered part of that question.
The rest will be answered this coming Tuesday and in June—at the ballot box, and on the sidewalks outside your door.
ACTION ITEM
Support Carl Wilson in the primary on April 28.
Support opponents to the DSA candidates in the June elections.
A video shows officers from the New York City Police Department attack an unarmed man. That kind of footage demands scrutiny—what happened, what justified it, and what didn’t.
The video is clear; the surrounding facts with each side’s narrative needs to be heard, filtered and assessed.
But such steps are not needed if someone is so sure of his sense of right-and-wrong, and smarter than everyone else. Able to discern motivation, backdrop and situation even sitting comfortably and smugly many miles away.
Especially if named Thomas Friedman.
You see, Thomas Friedman is so so so much smarter than all of you. He knows that everything bad in the world stems from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe occasionally Donald Trump, but his beat is the Middle East so he prefers to haul Netanyahu’s name before his reader base more frequently.
You see, “Israel Lost its Way,” according to the Great Sage Friedman, because Netanyahu has infiltrated Israeli society so deeply. Bibi’s love of Jews and hatred of non-Jews in Friedman’s worldview, has permeated everything in Israel today. So much so, that a soldier fighting in Lebanon who never met Netanyahu in his life, knows that the right thing to do is assert Jewish superiority, even outside of Israeli borders.
Thomas Friedman points to Israeli soldier destroying a statue as attributable to Netanyahu’s “geopolitical strategy.”
Somehow, a rogue soldier – one of thousands exhausted by a multiyear, multifront war – who destroys a religious icon is a perfect encapsulation of Netanyahu’s “geopolitical strategy.” It’s such an absurd comment, that only someone so full of himself would have the chutzpah to place it in the opening paragraph of an opinion piece in The New York Times.
Would Friedman argue that the two NYPD officers were acting under the political strategy of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani? Of course not. Friedman would write that the officers were rogue and acted against Mamdani’s wishes. But Friedman is convinced that Israelis under Netanyahu have all become lunatics. They are not fighting defensive wars that they never wanted; they are engaged in ethnic cleansing in a raw campaign of Jewish superiority.
Friedman mentioned another picture from the anti-Netanyahu Israeli paper Haaretz, the Israeli version of the NY Times. He referred to “right-wing Israeli ministers” celebrating a new community being built that allows Jews – counter to the stated goal of the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations – to live in the area east of the 1949 Armistice Lines.
To add a little punch to the piece, Friedman added that this was “just another day of the Netanyahu government playing President Trump for a fool” to rile up Americans against Israel.
Friedman has been telling readers this for years: Netanyahu is an evil puppet-master. If that sounds like an antisemitic trope, he won’t apologize. He will double-down.
Cartoon in the international edition of The New York Times shows Netanyahu leading a blind Donald Trump around
Because this is the theory that explains everything. Jews are now the jihadists.
Now, every action is merely an expression of someone else’s “climate.” Responsibility floats upward until it becomes untethered from behavior itself. The soldier, the new “settlers”, the police officers no longer matter. Only the chosen author of the “atmosphere” matters.
The New York Times has inverted victim and villain in the Middle East, and Thomas Friedman is all too eager to say “I told you so,” with whatever irrelevant recent media he can find.
Two words sit on the same date and define the cultures of the respective people.
Yom Ha’atzmaut – Independence Day in Hebrew – marks the moment a dispersed people executed a long-planned return to sovereignty. The modern engine was Zionism, but the impulse runs far deeper. A people with an ancient memory chose to translate that memory into institutions, borders, and power. The declaration in 1948 was the culmination of a project that built governing bodies, an economy, and a military before the flag went up. It was construction with intent.
Across the same date sits Nakba – “catastrophe” in Arabic. The word is used to describe a collapse that followed a war. In 1947, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine offered a fork in the road: two states, side by side. Jewish leadership accepted a constrained map and moved to build. Arab leadership rejected the partition and moved to prevent a Jewish state from coming into existence in “any part of Palestine.” Local forces and surrounding Arab states chose war at the point of birth.
This is the hinge that still carries the weight.
One side organized for sovereignty and then defended it. The other side organized to block that sovereignty and then defined its politics around that goal. The result was not an abstract failure. It was a battlefield outcome with lasting consequences.
The pattern did not end in 1948. It hardened into a language and culture of rejection—of undoing the Jewish state rather than existing alongside it—reappears across decades, sometimes dressed in diplomacy, often in violence. When you look at public opinion at key moments, you see the persistence of that horizon. In surveys like those conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in June 2023 (before the October 7 massacre), the majority of Arabs in West Bank and Gaza expressed confidence that Israel would not endure to its centennial and endorsed continued “resistance” (violence) as the path forward. The expectation is not coexistence after compromise. It is reversal over time.
A standard question in Palestinian quarterly polls like the one above (Q67) asked whether people supported “armed attacks against Israeli civilians.” In Gaza, the percentage was 76.7%
This is where the narratives diverge in a way that matters for the future.
The Israeli story is anchored in a completed act of construction that must be maintained. It argues from existence. It invests in capacity—military, economic, technological—because survival depends on it. It measures success in what stands and functions.
The dominant current in Palestinian politics has been anchored in an unfinished act of negation. It argues from a horizon in which Israel is temporary. It invests in leverage—diplomatic pressure, internationalization, and violence—because the objective is to change the end state rather than to consolidate its own future alongside it.
You can trace every failed negotiation back to that split. Offers are read through different endgames. Concessions are weighed against different destinations. One side asks what it takes to secure a state that already exists. The other asks what it takes to transform the map.
There is a moral discomfort here that people try to smooth over with softer language. It doesn’t hold. History keeps intruding with hard edges. A decision to reject partition and wage war in 1948 set a trajectory. Repeated bets on pressure and violence to force a different outcome have reinforced it. Each round that ends without destroying Israel strengthens the very state the strategy set out to undo.
A century is a long time in politics and a short time in memory. The Jewish project marked its independence by building a country that persists. The opposing project has too often measured progress by how close it can get to erasing that country. That is a strategy that has not delivered a state.
The calendar will keep bringing the same day back. One side will celebrate a construction that proved durable. The other will revisit a war whose objective still shapes its politics. The future will turn on whether the goal shifts from ending a state to building one of its own.
Over the past century, pressure on Jews has scaled, shifting from borders to regions to institutions, changing form while carrying a familiar direction.
The story begins in Europe 1938 with the Anschluss. Persecution inside Germany extends outward as Austria is absorbed and its Jewish population is pulled into the same system. Expansion of antisemitic forces follows conquest. Poland, France, Hungary, the Netherlands become extensions of a single design as control spreads across the continent.
An den Fenstern j¸discher Geschfte werden von Nationalsozialisten Plakate mit der Aufforderung “Deutsche, wehrt euch, kauft nicht bei Juden” angebracht.
Policy matures into infrastructure. Collaboration, coercion, and indifference form a landscape in which Jewish survival is unlikely. At the Wannsee Conference, extermination is organized across borders, ministries, and railways. The Holocaust becomes a continental system aligned toward a single end: the genocide of Jews.
That system collapses with the war’s end but the pattern carries forward, reshaped and redirected.
After 1948, pressure reappears across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Jewish communities rooted for centuries in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco and elsewhere begin to unravel with striking speed.
Baghdad Iraq’s 1941 slaughter of Jews
Each country follows its own path. Laws restrict, property is seized, pressure builds, departures accelerate. In Iraq, the Farhud foreshadows a collapse that soon becomes mass departure. In Yemen, Operation Magic Carpet lifts an entire community into exile. In Egypt, the Suez Crisis accelerates expulsions. Across North Africa, uncertainty and nationalism press communities toward exit. By the 1970s, nearly one million Jews leave and a regional Jewish presence that endured for centuries nearly vanishes completely.
By the 1970s, the arena shifts again. The contest moves from territory into legitimacy itself.
In 1975, the United Nations adopts United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, recasting Jewish self-determination as a moral offense within the central forum of international diplomacy.
US Ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan reversing the Zionism is Racism resolution
The repeal arrives in 1991 through United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/86, yet the framing travels beyond formal votes. It resurfaces at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 and diffuses through NGOs, campuses, and international forums, where evolving language carries forward an enduring challenge to Jewish sovereignty.
From there, the argument migrates into the civic fabric of Western democracies. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, vile ideas become chants in universities, media, and politics.
The mechanisms differ from earlier eras, yet the effects shape daily life. Jewish institutions increase security. Synagogues that once stood open now operate behind layers of protection. Public expressions of Jewish identity carry new calculations. Debates about Israel expand into broader judgments about Jews, blurring lines that once held more clearly.
Across these shifts, the effect becomes visible in the map of Jewish life.
President Joe Biden’s Jewish liaison person suggests that Jews should hide their religious symbols in 2021
A century ago, Jewish communities spanned continents, anchored in Europe and present across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Americas. The destruction of European Jewry removed the largest center. The unraveling of communities across the Middle East and North Africa compressed what remained. Many moved to Israel. Others built new lives in the United States.
Today, roughly 85 percent of the world’s Jews live in those two countries. There are only seventeen countries with more than 25,000 Jews when there used to be dozens just a century ago.
That concentration follows a century in which environments that sustained Jewish life across dozens of countries collapsed, expelled, or eroded. Dispersion gave way to consolidation. Geography followed pressure.
The forces shaping that consolidation continue to evolve. As legitimacy is contested in broader arenas, communities orient toward places able to sustain security, identity, and continuity. The gravitational pull toward Israel strengthens under those conditions, even as the United States remains a central pillar of Jewish life.
While Yom Ha’atzmaut marks Israel’s independence, it also marks the emergence of a center of gravity forged through history rather than theory. Across a century, shifting forms of pressure reshaped where Jews could live, how they gathered, and where they anchored their future.
Three arcs across a century redrew the Jewish map. As the narrative arc is still underway, Israel’s percentage of world Jewry will likely become a majority from a plurality, in just a few years.
First One Through 