Category Archives: Israel

What Is Actually Being Built in E1?

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Israel’s decision to move forward with construction in E1 produced the familiar headlines: settlers, seized Palestinian land, displacement and the death of a Palestinian state.

WAFA reported that Israel issued a tender for 1,234 “settlement units” in E1, presenting it as “one of the most controversial settlement schemes” in a colonial project designed to fragment Palestinian territory.

Before debating E1, start with what is actually being built, where, on whose property and for whom.

An Extension of Ma’ale Adumim

E1 is an approximately 12,000-dunam, or 12-square-kilometer, planning area between Jerusalem and the existing community of Ma’ale Adumim.

It lies in Area C, where the Palestinian Authority and Israel agreed under the Oslo framework would be under Israeli security control and civil administration. Israel is building within the municipal planning jurisdiction of Ma’ale Adumim, not a new area. E1 has not been annexed to Israel.

The current project is E1 South, one part of that larger area. The 1,234 units are in apartment blocks adjacent to the existing city, not isolated houses spread across 12 square kilometers of West Bank hills. The plans contemplate the infrastructure of a normal urban community: elementary schools, kindergartens and daycare, synagogues and a mikveh, community buildings, parks and gardens, commercial facilities, roads and infrastructure.

E1 is not a new project of the current Israeli government. Its planning dates back roughly three decades to the Rabin era. Roads and the Judea and Samaria District police headquarters were built there years ago, even as residential construction remained frozen under international pressure.

Building Does Not Draw the Border

Area C was created under Oslo as an interim administrative arrangement, not a permanent international border. Borders, settlements and Jerusalem were reserved for permanent-status negotiations, and Israel subsequently transferred authority over the major Palestinian population centers to the Palestinian Authority as part of Area A.

E1 South could therefore ultimately remain with Israel, become part of a Palestinian state, or be addressed through a negotiated territorial exchange. Construction changes the facts future negotiators confront; it does not establish sovereignty.

E1 does not make a Palestinian state geographically impossible simply because it creates a narrow connection between northern and southern Palestinian population centers. Israel itself has long existed with a narrow neck across its principal population center, historically only about nine miles wide at its narrowest point. If a narrow neck makes statehood impossible, Israel itself should have been geographically impossible for decades.

Palestinian north-south travel east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49)/ Judea and Samaria already happens and is being made easier. A route already exists east of Ma’ale Adumim, and Israel is constructing additional roads intended to connect current Palestinian Arab communities around E1.

A Land System Older Than Israel

Much of E1 is classified by Israel as state or government land, but Israel did not invent that category in 1967.

The underlying system begins with the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which established categories of land and rules involving government ownership, registration, possession and cultivation. The Ottomans created the system, the British Mandate retained and amended it, and Jordan continued administering and registering West Bank land under it. Israel inherited that legal structure after 1967 and subsequently administered and modified it through military orders.

Private Palestinian Property Was Excluded

Approximately 775 dunams — about 6.5% of E1 — consist of recognized private Palestinian parcels interspersed through the area.

Israel did not classify those parcels as state land, and they were excluded from the official E1 plans. Bimkom, an Israeli planning organization opposed to E1, notes the importance of continued agricultural cultivation to the status of some private parcels.

Critics argue that surrounding development could make access to some excluded private parcels more difficult. That is a legitimate issue, but does not suddenly turn building these apartments into theft of privately owned Palestinian land.

1.55% of E1

The scale of the current project is considerably smaller than the overall E1 map suggests.

On August 18, 2026, Israel issued Tender 186/2026 for E1 South, Plan 420/4/7: 1,234 apartments divided among seven construction complexes. Bids are due October 19, 2026.

The current development parcels therefore occupy about 22.7% of E1 South and only 1.55% of the entire E1 planning area.

A companion residential plan, 420/4/10, contemplates another 2,173 apartments. The current tender, however, is specifically for the 1,234 units in E1 South.

The Bedouin Question

There is a separate Bedouin issue. Jahalin Bedouin communities live and graze animals throughout the broader Ma’ale Adumim/E1 area, and B’Tselem and OCHA argue that development, roads, demolition orders and restrictions threaten their residence, grazing and movement. Israel has previously considered relocating Jahalin families, including a 2005 plan involving approximately 200 families that was never implemented.

Bedouins in E1 (photo: FirstOneThrough)

Who Owns It — and Who Can Live There?

The seven parcels are being marketed in the tender as government/state land. Developers receive development rights over government property. The precise ultimate leasehold or ownership structure for apartment purchasers depends on the final land agreements.

Tender 186/2026 is a regular public tender, not a direct allocation to a religious or ideological organization. Foreign-controlled developers may face additional governmental approval requirements, but there is no requirement that bidders be Jewish-owned.

Nor do the E1 planning and tender provisions identify a religious or ethnic restriction reserving the apartments for Jews. Israeli Arabs could purchase or develop these apartments.

A Palestinian Arab resident presents a more complicated property-law question because the West Bank retains layers of Jordanian law, including a 1953 Jordanian law restricting certain sales and long-term leases to foreigners. The ability of a Palestinian from Abu Dis or a Jahalin Bedouin to acquire and register the same long-term property interest as an Israeli citizen therefore depends on the applicable land and registration rules. That complication is because of old Jordanian law, not Israeli.

Three Questions, Not One

The E1 controversy really involves three different legal questions: whether privately owned Palestinian property is being taken; whether Israel properly classified government land under the inherited Ottoman-British-Jordanian system; and whether international law permits Israel to use even legitimately public land in Area C for Israeli civilian development.

The first concerns ownership. The second concerns land law. The third concerns the law of occupation and sovereignty.

They are not the same question.

What Does “Palestinian Land” Mean?

That brings the argument back to WAFA’s description of E1 as Israeli construction on “Palestinian land” via “land seizure.”

The phrase can mean property privately owned by a Palestinian, public land geographically located in the West Bank, or territory Palestinians want incorporated into a future Palestinian state.

Those are three very different things.

E1 can be challenged because of its impact on future negotiations, Israel’s interpretation of inherited land law, international law or nearby Bedouin communities. But none of those arguments turns government property into privately owned Palestinian land, an urban extension of Ma’ale Adumim into the destruction of a Palestinian village, or housing without a religious purchaser restriction into “Jewish-only” apartments.

And construction today does not determine where tomorrow’s negotiated border must run.

E1 is controversial enough on the facts. There is no reason to blur them.

The Illiberal Global South’s War on the Liberal Global North

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From 9/11 to October 7

On September 11, 2001, jihadi terrorists turned passenger airplanes into missiles and murdered nearly 3,000 Americans.

Only three days later, while bodies were still being recovered, ANSWER—Act Now to Stop War and End Racism—was formed to protest what America might do in response.

The name was important.

ANSWER viewed American military power abroad and racism at home as pieces of the same system: a wealthy, largely Western “Global North” dominating the poorer, disproportionately black and brown “Global South.”

For this anti-Western group, America was not defending itself. It was exercising imperial power. Those fighting it could be engaged in “resistance.”

Seven months after 9/11, Israel was pulled into the same framework.

On April 20, 2002, ANSWER organized more than 100,000 people in Washington under “Free Palestine, No War on Iraq.”

The Iraq War had not even begun.

Later that year, Medea Benjamin, Jodie Evans and others founded CODEPINK to oppose the coming Iraq War. The organizations forming around it had a broader worldview: America and its allies represented imperialism, while their opponents represented oppressed peoples fighting back.

Israel became another perfect target.

It was democratic, prosperous, militarily powerful and allied with America. It therefore became part of the “Global North.”

Never mind that roughly half of Israeli Jews have roots in the Middle East and North Africa. Never mind that Israel’s citizens include Arabs, Druze and other minorities. The supposedly racial framework somehow classified this remarkably diverse Middle Eastern country as the white colonialist.

That classification did something important.

It determined who was allowed to fight back.

Palestinian Arab jihadi violence could be “resistance.” Israeli force became “aggression.” ANSWER could call itself an antiwar organization while defending Palestinian attacks because it wasn’t really applying a rule against war. It was applying different rules to different sides.

Then came October 7, 2023. Thousands of Gazan terrorists invaded Israel, murdered roughly 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 250.

Israelis were still recovering bodies when ANSWER was mobilizing for “Free Palestine.”

The parallel with September 11 was remarkable. America gets attacked. Focus immediately turns to restraining America. Israel gets attacked. Focus immediately turns to restraining Israel.

Twenty-two years separated the attacks, but the ideological framework had barely moved.

The liberal societies being condemned have been spectacularly successful. People from every race, religion and continent continue trying to move to the United States, Canada, Europe and other liberal democracies. Israel itself absorbed Jews fleeing Europe, the Soviet Union, Ethiopia and the Arab and Muslim worlds.

People vote with their feet. They generally flee toward societies with elections, property rights, women’s equality, education, religious freedom and economic opportunity—not away from them.

The divide is not really white versus brown or North versus South. It is between those who view successful liberal societies as achievements worth defending and those who view their success and power as evidence of oppression.

September 11 exposed that divide in America. October 7 exposed it again in Israel.

The anti-Global North’s victims of preference changed from Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine. And the vocabulary remained: imperialism, colonialism, oppression and resistance.

And so did the fundamental question: When terrorists attack a successful liberal society, who has the right to resist whom?

The Hydra Can Die

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In Greek mythology, the Hydra was almost impossible to kill.

It had many heads. Cut one off and more grew in its place. Heracles eventually understood that killing the monster required more than endlessly chopping at whichever head was attacking him. Each severed neck had to be cauterized so it could not regenerate.

Heracles battling the Lernean Hydra

For nearly three years, Israel has been told that Hamas is a Hydra. Kill its leaders. Destroy its tunnels. Eliminate its fighters. It won’t matter. Hamas—or something worse—will simply grow back.

Queen Rania of Jordan articulated the underlying argument shortly after the October 7 massacre, that Israel’s actions against Hamas:

“create a new generation of resistance that is fiercer and more violent” – Queen Rania of Jordan

Retired U.S. Army Colonel Peter Mansoor was more explicit, predicting that “Hamas 2.0 will rise” from the destruction.

They identified a real danger. But regeneration is not immortality.

Hamas is more than leaders, tunnels, rockets and gunmen. It is a political and military organization built around an ideology. Destroy the organization while preserving everything capable of regenerating it and another head may indeed grow.

The question is whether everything capable of regenerating it must also be allowed to survive.

Nearly three years of Palestinian polling shows the problem.

As detailed recently in Palestinian Arabs Turn Inward, But Not Away From Hamas, Palestinian Arabs have dramatically lowered their expectations after three years of war. Support for Hamas and armed struggle has fallen sharply from the extraordinary levels recorded after October 7. But losing faith in Hamas’s ability to win is not the same thing as rejecting Hamas.

In the August 2026 PCPSR poll, 72% opposed Hamas disarming before a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Asked what Hamas would become if it gave up its weapons, 53% envisioned it remaining both armed and political and another 36% solely political. In all, 89% envisioned Hamas surviving in some form.

That is the Hydra problem.

And Hamas is only one head.

Hezbollah sits to Israel’s north. The Houthis attack from Yemen. Palestinian Islamic Jihad fights alongside Hamas. Above them, the Islamic Republic of Iran spent decades financing, arming and connecting organizations surrounding Israel.

October 7 exposed not simply a Hamas problem, but an ecosystem.

That is why eliminating Hamas militarily cannot be the entire definition of victory. As FirstOneThrough argued in From a Hamas Double Standard to the Hamas Dangerous Standard, an organization cannot maintain an independent army committed to destroying another state while simultaneously being normalized as an ordinary participant in democratic politics.

And military defeat addresses only part of what allows another head to grow.

FirstOneThrough addressed another part in The Only Way The Conflict Can End: the Palestinian claim to a so-called “right of return” into Israel itself.

A Palestinian state alongside Israel cannot simultaneously mean millions of Palestinians receive a state of their own while millions more retain a claim to move into Israel. That is 1.5 states for Arabs and 0.5 of a state for Jews.

American policy once said this plainly.

The 2004 Democratic Party platform called for Palestinian refugees to settle in a Palestinian state “rather than in Israel.” The 2008 platform repeated the position before the language was omitted in 2012.

President George W. Bush made the same commitment directly to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in April 2004 as Sharon prepared the Gaza disengagement. A realistic solution, Bush wrote, would involve establishing a Palestinian state and “the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.”

The principle was straightforward: Palestinian statehood was supposed to resolve Palestinian statelessness, not provide another mechanism for eliminating the Jewish State.

Defeating the Hydra therefore requires ending not only Hamas’s ability to wage war, but the expectation that Israel is temporary.

History offers another model.

Nazi Germany did not fight alone, and victory did not consist of killing Hitler while leaving the Axis intact. Germany and its allies were defeated or surrendered.

Then came political defeat. The Nazi military and political apparatus was dismantled. The Nazi Party was outlawed. Its leaders were prosecuted. Germany was not invited to preserve a rebranded Nazi Party so its supporters could recover through elections what they had lost through war.

The Axis was defeated as a system.

The same principle should define the defeat of Hamas.

Hamas cannot be permitted to lose its army, change clothes and emerge as an internationally accepted political party. Global institutions and governments should treat Hamas as one organization, dismantle its financing and international infrastructure, and isolate organizations that materially finance or facilitate its terrorism.

Prohibition is only half the answer.

Muslim governments, religious leaders and international institutions should strengthen Muslim movements committed to peaceful coexistence, religious equality and acceptance of Jewish sovereignty. Muslim-majority countries that have made peace with Israel already demonstrate that Islam and permanent war against Jewish sovereignty are not synonymous. Isolate the jihadis in the Jihadi-Israel Conflict and empower the moderate Arab and Muslim countries.

Make the institutions of coexistence stronger while making the institutions of violent supremacy militarily, financially and politically untenable.

The Hydra has many heads.

Hamas is a head. Hezbollah is a head. The Houthis are a head. The Islamic Republic supplies the Hydra with blood. The ideology gives it reason to regenerate.

The Hamas 2.0 warning should therefore be taken seriously—but not accepted as prophecy.

The Hydra is difficult to kill. It is not immortal.

It Is Time to Call It the Jihadi-Israel Conflict

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It was once called the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

The name made sense at Israel’s founding. Israel fought wars against the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and other Arab states. The conflict was understood principally as one between the Jewish State and the surrounding Arab world.

Then the map changed.

Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979. Jordan followed in 1994. During the horrific Second Intifada, the suicide bombings, shootings and other attacks were overwhelmingly part of a localized war involving Palestinian Arabs. The terminology narrowed accordingly. The Arab-Israeli Conflict increasingly became the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.

That description is now inadequate too as the map evolved again over the past several years.

The Abraham Accords fundamentally changed the regional picture. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco normalized relations with Israel. Trade, tourism, investment and security cooperation followed. Other Muslim-majority countries have also maintained or developed relations with the Jewish State.

Yet at the same time, Israel has faced repeated war from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and, increasingly directly, the Islamic Republic of Iran. These forces are separated by borders, ethnicity and even the Sunni-Shiite divide. What connects them is not Arab identity. It is a radical Islamist rejectionism that refuses to accept a sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East.

It is therefore time for the terminology to catch up. This is increasingly the Jihadi-Israel Conflict.

Ahlam Tamimi, who helped plan and transported the suicide bomber to the 2001 Sbarro restaurant bombing in Jerusalem and now lives in Jordan.

The term captures the venom, vitriol and violence of Hamas and the armed Islamist movements aligned against Israel. It encompasses Hezbollah and the Houthis and, most importantly, the Islamic Republic of Iran that has armed, financed and supported much of the network surrounding Israel.

It also leaves room to describe the roles of Qatar and Turkey, whose close relationships with Hamas and fierce political hostility toward Israel place them in a very different category from Muslim and Arab governments pursuing normalization.

Most importantly, the new terminology does something the old terminology cannot: it separates Muslims and Arabs who seek peace with Israel from radical Islamists committed to its destruction and the slaughter of Jews.

Hamas leader calling for slaughtering Jews as a religious Islamic principle

The dividing line has moved.

And that makes the choices facing Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia especially important. They can move toward a Middle East built around trade and coexistence, or remain trapped in a conflict driven by radical Islamist movements that reject Jewish sovereignty, basic human rights and self-determination.

The conflict has become crystallized for what it likely always was: the Jihadi-Israel Conflict.

The Summer of 2021 and the Wars of Today

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Two events separated by three months in 2021 delivered the same message to Islamist movements confronting more powerful enemies:

Keep fighting. Keep waiting. Eventually the infidels leave.

The first came in Israel.

In May 2021, Hamas launched rockets toward Jerusalem and Israeli cities, casting itself as the defender of Al-Aqsa and Palestinian Arab families facing possible eviction in Sheikh Jarrah.

Eleven days later came a ceasefire and the Israelis never moved forward with the evictions.

Immediately after the fight, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research’s June 2021 poll described a “paradigm shift” toward Hamas and armed struggle. 77% of Palestinian Arabs believed Hamas had won, versus 1% who thought Israel had won. And 65% believed Hamas had achieved its declared objectives regarding Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Aqsa.

The perceived lesson was simple: Violence worked.

Then came Afghanistan a few months later.

On August 15, 2021, the Taliban returned to Kabul, twenty years after the United States had removed it from power. The lesson for jihadist movements was not that they needed to defeat a stronger enemy. They needed to outlast it.

As described at the time in Gaza, The Terrorist Enclave, Hamas met with the Taliban and congratulated it for expelling Western forces from Afghanistan.

By June 2023, Palestinian confidence had moved beyond believing Hamas could win a confrontation. PCPSR asked Palestinian Arabs whether Israel, then celebrating its 75th anniversary, would survive to celebrate its 100th. 66% said no. Only 27% believed Israel would still exist. Another 51% believed Palestinian Arabs would eventually recover historic Palestine and return refugees to their former villages and cities.

Just four months later came October 7.

Nearly three years of war have weakened that opinion – in the near-term. As FirstOneThrough detailed in Palestinian Arabs Turn Inward, But Not Away From Hamas, support for armed struggle has fallen sharply and only 20% of Palestinian Arabs now believe Hamas won the Gaza war but 89% believe Hamas will continue to exist in some capacity.

Weakened but waiting. “Resistance” with resolve.

Which brings the argument from the Taliban and Hamas to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iran is making the same wager on time. That it can outlast the United States and send it packing much as the Taliban did in Afghanistan.

But for the United States, Iran is not Afghanistan.

Iran has called America the “Great Satan” since 1979 and built a regional military network directed against American forces and allies. Iran has developed increasingly long-range ballistic missiles and pursued nuclear weapons capabilities that could threaten far beyond its borders.

Afghanistan did neither.

Iran also sits on the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s petroleum consumption passes. Disruption there reaches energy markets and economies around the world.

Afghanistan had no comparable leverage over the global economy.

America had no long-term goals of staying in Afghanistan. It was not going to keep thousands of troops and pour billions of dollars in a region thousands of miles from its shores to make sure girls went to school and women had equal rights.

But Iran is a real concern for the entire western world, both militarily and economically.

The current U.S. war has already achieved important aims by severely degrading Iran’s nuclear, missile and proxy capabilities. But degraded is not finished.

Iran does not need to reverse its losses today. It only needs to survive long enough for politics to change.

And two elections are approaching. Israelis vote on October 27 and Americans vote in November 3.

For Iran, Hamas and the broader jihadist world, those are more than elections. They are milestones testing the strategy of patience.

While the strategic logic for Israel and U.S. to continue the fight may be sound, their citizens may vote differently. And that is what the jihadists are waiting to observe.

Israel cannot leave Israel. America cannot simply walk away from an Iran threatening its forces and allies, pursuing nuclear and long-range missile capabilities, and holding a critical artery of the global economy at risk.

But jihadist strategy places a different bet: Can they wait until Israelis and Americans vote to stop fighting?

The summer of 2021 taught Islamists that they don’t have to win the wars against more powerful foes. Iran has ten more weeks to stall negotiations and wait for democracies to decide whether to pursue long-term strategic benefits or move on to more immediate matters.

Democracies have elections. Their enemies know it.

Will Israelis and Americans turn their elections into the jihadists’ exit strategy.

Who Are the Foreign Country Fanatics?

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Is this the Democrats’ brand now—lying to people?

AIPAC isn’t run by Israel. It is run by Americans who support Israel, just as Planned Parenthood is backed by pro abortion people, not aborted fetuses.

Israel isn’t committing genocide. It is preventing one by trying to eliminate Hamas, the genocidal jihadi group that invaded Israel, massacred civilians and seeks Israel’s destruction.

Israel isn’t an apartheid state. It is a multi-ethnic society in which Arabs are citizens, vote and serve throughout society. Meanwhile, Palestinian Arab leaders continue to demand a future Palestinian state devoid of Jews.

And then there is the claim about Americans losing their lives for Israel. Israel has overwhelmingly fought its own wars with its own soldiers. The American military presence inside Israel has historically been tiny compared with the enormous U.S. deployments around the world – about 110 people versus 175,000 around the world.

The money tells a similar story. The United States has spent roughly eight times as much supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia as Israel itself has spent fighting its eight-front war. Yet somehow Israel—not Ukraine, Europe or the dozens of countries where America stations troops—is presented as the foreign country consuming American lives and resources.

But there is something even more revealing about the Democrats.com post.

The entire thrust of the post was Pearson’s attack on Israel. Nothing about jobs. Nothing about housing, education, crime, taxes or the cost of living. Democrats.com chose his obsession with a foreign country as the reason Americans should see him as the future of their party.

And Democrats.com is not an obscure Facebook account.

Its founder and president, Bob Fertik, has spent more than two decades building a massive progressive Democratic communications network. Democrats.com says its network reaches more than 10 million supporters and boasts that “nearly every Democratic state party has rented our emails for nearly every competitive candidate since 2008.” It sells Democratic candidates access to its activists to raise money, recruit volunteers, mobilize supporters and turn out voters.

Fertik’s network has become part of the Democrats’ election-mobilization apparatus. So it matters what Fertik’s Democrats.com chooses to promote as the party’s future.

Pearson accused an American organization of being “the Israeli government’s lobbyist,” accused Israel of genocide and apartheid, and claimed Americans are losing their lives on behalf of Israel. Democrats.com took that anti-Israel statement, put it beneath his photograph and announced that this is the present and future of the Democratic Party.

So who exactly are the foreign-country fanatics?

Pearson is supposedly warning Americans that they are too consumed with the interests of a foreign country. Yet his showcased political message isn’t about Americans at all. It is about Israel. And Democrats.com apparently found that message so important that it used it to define both Pearson and the future of the party.

If Justin Pearson really is the “present and future” of the Democratic Party, the problem is much bigger than Justin Pearson.

Israel By The Numbers

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Israel is discussed with hyperbole and adjectives: massive settlements, enormous American aid, rampant settler violence, Jewish encroachment, disproportionate war.

It’s a fiction. A ruse.

Skip the adjectives. Look at the numbers.

750,000 → 5.9 Million;
850,000 → 0
— Two Refugee Populations

Between 700,000 and 750,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees when they fled the battlefield as they awaited fellow Muslim Arab armies to destroy the nascent Jewish State during the 1948-9 war. In the same era, roughly 850,000 Jews left or were expelled from Arab countries with many more leaving non-Arab Muslim countries like Iran and Afghanistan.

Even though the Jewish refugee population was larger, we never speak of it today.

Today, UNRWA registers 5.9 million Palestinian Arab refugees, predominantly consisting of descendants of the original refugees, and those who married or were adopted by refugees. The comparable number of registered Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries and their descendants is zero.

The Jews were absorbed as citizens of Israel and other countries. Their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were not perpetuated as refugees, they way Palestinian Arabs have been forced by those same “brotherly” Arab countries which went to war with Israel in 1948-9, in order to perpetuate the war they initiated and lost.

650 Times
— Arab League Territory to Israel

Israel covers roughly 22,000 square kilometers and the 22 members of the Arab League collectively cover roughly 13–14 million square kilometers.

The territory of the Arab League is approximately 650 times the size of Israel.

127 Times
— Muslims to Jews

There are roughly 2 billion Muslims in the world, twice the size of the entire populations of North, Central and South America.

There are roughly 15.8 million Jews.

That is approximately 127 Muslims for every Jew.

Muslims account for roughly one-quarter of humanity. Jews account for about 0.2%.

Yet people in the West refer to Muslims as a “minority.”

60 to 1
— Muslims to Jews Ascending the Temple Mount

Before COVID, roughly 1.8 million to 2 million Muslims visited the Temple Mount annually, compared with approximately 30,000 Jewish visits in 2019. That is roughly 60 Muslim visits for every Jewish visit.

The more recent figures of 2025 after the October 7 massacre launched by Gazans has roughly halved the visits by Muslims and doubled those by Jews, lowering the figure to about 15 times at Judaism’s holiest site.

57 to 1
— OIC States to the Jewish State

There are 57 countries in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation that perpetually lambasts Israel. There is one Jewish state.

The Jewish state exists alongside a Muslim world dozens of times larger in countries, population and territory.

25 to 1
— American Defense Spending Outside Israel

Israel receives about $3.8 billion annually under the U.S.-Israel security assistance agreement. For every dollar America spends annually on Israel’s defense, roughly $25 is spent on defense elsewhere—defending the United States, maintaining forces abroad, supporting allies and providing security assistance around the world.

Even more striking, there are over 220,000 military personnel stationed around the world, of which slightly over 100 are in Israel. The baseline ratio is over 1,500-to-1, rising to 2,200-to-1 when reserve personnel are included.

The anti-Israel discussion focuses solely on Israel while ignoring the enormous American monies and personnel in Japan, Qatar, Germany and elsewhere.

14 Times
— The Growth of Israel’s Arab Population

Approximately 156,000 Arabs lived in Israel in 1948 when the modern Jewish State was reestablished. Today, approximately 2.16 million Arabs live in Israel.

Israel’s Arab population has grown almost 14-fold since the establishment of the Jewish state. Meanwhile, the number of Jews inside Israel hasn’t even grown 12-times in that same time.

And people accuse Israel of “ethnic-cleansing.”

12 Times
— Israeli Arabs Killed by Israeli Arabs
Versus West Bank Arabs Killed by West Bank Jews

Thus far in 2026, Arab Israelis are murdered by other Arab Israelis at roughly 12 times the number of Palestinian Arabs killed by West Bank Jewish civilians in Judea and Samaria.

Hundreds of Arab Israelis have been murdered amid the organized-crime epidemic inside Israel over the last few years. Yet the international narrative solely focuses on settler violence.

10 to 1
— Muslim Gates to the Jewish Entrance

Muslims have access to the Jewish Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem through ten gates. Jews and other non-Muslims enter through one: the Mughrabi Gate. There, Jews must pass through metal detectors and security clearance at only specified times of the day, even as Muslims ascend and descend at will through every other portal.

Muslim women descending from the Temple Mount through one of the many gates exclusively available for Muslims (photo: First One Through)

9
— Number of Times Hamas Charter Refers to Jews and Judaism

Hamas’s 1988 foundational charter is replete with antisemitic rhetoric. The opening lines begin with “Our struggle against the Jews…” and continues throughout its genocidal jihadist call to wipe out the Jewish people and Jewish State.

While the anti-Israel crowd pretends that the conflict is merely over land which can easily be compromised and carved up, they ignore the deep antisemitic ideology embedded in the Palestinian Arab culture.

8 Times
— U.S.’s Ukraine War Spending Versus Gaza War Spending

The United States has spent roughly eight times more in connection with the Ukraine war with Russia than the Gaza war against Israel.

America has made roughly $195 billion available for Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion. American expenditures associated with Israel and the Gaza war are a fraction of that amount.

Yet it is spending associated with Israel that is routinely presented as uniquely extraordinary.

6 to 0
— UN Bodies for Palestinians Versus Israelis

The United Nations maintains six standing bodies, offices or mechanisms focused specifically on Palestinian Arabs and Israel’s treatment of said Arabs: UNRWA; the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People; the Division for Palestinian Rights; the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices; the Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories; and the Human Rights Council’s permanent Agenda Item 7.

There is no comparable UN agency, committee or permanent agenda item devoted to protecting Israelis from the conflict, nor is there any group in the entire world (think the Kurds) so over-represented at the global organization.

5
— Gaza Wars Since Hamas Took Control

Israel withdrew every Jewish civilian and military asset from Gaza in 2005. Hamas subsequently took control of Gaza in 2007. Since then, it has launched five major rounds of war with Israel: in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2023-.

Five wars in sixteen years.

2.5 to 1
— Israel Versus the Rest of the World at the UN

In 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted 18 resolutions focused on Israel. It adopted seven country-specific resolutions concerning the rest of the world combined.

That is roughly 2.5 to 1. One country received more than twice as many resolutions as every other country combined.

1 to 1
— An Equivalency of 15 Kilometers Which Matters for One But Not the Other

At its narrowest along the pre-1967 lines, Israel is roughly 15 kilometers wide. It is a stretch that continues along its major population centers.

After Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem’s east, the remaining West Bank corridor is also roughly 15 kilometers wide at a single narrow point where virtually no West Bank Arabs live.

15 kilometers versus 15 kilometers. Over a million Jews in the narrow stretch versus a few thousand Arabs.

Israel’s narrow waist is never described as dangerously vulnerable, while the West Bank neck is cast as making a two-state solution “impossible.”

1
— The Jewish State Whose Capital the World Challenges

There is only one country in the world whose national anthem is all about its capital.

Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, expresses the Jewish people’s ancient longing for Zion and Jerusalem.

The Knesset is there. The president is there. The prime minister is there. The Supreme Court is there. The government ministries are there.

Yet most countries still refuse to locate their embassies in Jerusalem or fully accept Israel’s designation of Jerusalem as its capital.

The numbers are there. Before accepting the narrative which is infused with anti-Israel bias, look at them.

Correcting An UNRWA School

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A school in Jerusalem’s Shuafat refugee camp is reopening. The building is the same but UNRWA is no longer running it.

The school is now affiliated with Israel’s Ministry of Education and the Jerusalem Municipality. Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Aryeh King posted video of UNRWA signs being removed as the school prepared to open.

Sign of UNRWA run school in Shu’afat, Jerusalem

The change ends an educational arrangement dating back more than sixty years.

UNRWA established the Shuafat refugee camp in 1965, when Jordan controlled “East Jerusalem.” UNRWA’s educational policy, dating to 1952, has been to use the curriculum of the “host countries,” allowing refugee children to take local examinations and continue into local schools and universities.

So UNRWA worked with Jordan at that time.

There was nothing internationally settled about Jordan’s sovereignty over Jerusalem. Jordan seized eastern Jerusalem in 1948 and annexed the West Bank – including East Jerusalem in 1950. Even Britain, one of only two countries (along with Pakistan) which recognized Jordan’s illegal annexation of the West Bank, specifically withheld recognition of Jordanian sovereignty over Jerusalem. It only recognized Jordan’s de facto authority there.

Yet Jordan administered East Jerusalem, so UNRWA worked with Jordan there.

Then came 1967.

Israel captured East Jerusalem and became the government actually administering Shuafat, much like Jordan had previously. But UNRWA did not treat Israel the same way as the de facto administrating authority.

The Jordanian curriculum continued for years. After the Palestinian Authority was established, UNRWA increasingly coordinated its West Bank education program with it and ultimately used the Palestinian Authority curriculum.

That is difficult to square with the simple explanation that UNRWA follows the curriculum of its host country. The Palestinian Authority did not govern Jerusalem; Israel did. Yet UNRWA chose the PA curriculum for schools there.

The contrast is particularly striking today. Israel has nine foreign embassies located in Jerusalem, with Nauru announced as the tenth. Jordan never enjoyed anything approaching that level of international recognition of its rule over Jerusalem. Yet UNRWA had been willing to work with the authority actually administering the city when that authority was Jordan.

UNRWA offices in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)

But the problem at Shuafat went beyond which government UNRWA chose to recognize educationally. It was what children at this particular school were saying they learned.

UNRWA says its curriculum framework must reflect UN principles of neutrality, human rights, tolerance, equality and non-discrimination.

Footage recorded at an UNRWA school in Shuafat in 2022 and published by Ynet in 2024 showed something very different.

Students said that stabbing and running over Jews brought Palestinians honor. One said he was prepared to carry out a suicide attack. Another said they were taught that Jews were terrorists. Another said they were taught that Jews were deceitful and evil and that he would stab and run them over.

The videos offer a horrifying vision of what is taught at UN schools.

Israel eventually acted.

In May 2025, Israeli authorities closed six UNRWA schools in eastern Jerusalem, including three in Shuafat. UNRWA protested that hundreds of Palestinian children were being deprived of education. Israel said alternative schooling would be provided through the Jerusalem education system.

Now that alternative is becoming tangible.

A former UNRWA school in Shuafat is reopening under the Israeli Ministry of Education and Jerusalem Municipality.

The choice was never between UNRWA and no education. What can change is the system educating them and the content of that education.

The UNRWA sign coming down in the Shuafat school is symbolic. What the children learn when they walk back through those doors will determine whether the real change happened inside.

How the Arab Israeli Mafia Took Over

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Two decades ago, Israel had a Jewish mafia problem.

Crime families including the Abergils, Rosensteins, Abutbuls and Alperons fought over drugs, gambling and territory. Their wars spilled into public spaces. In 2003, an attempt to assassinate mob boss Zeev Rosenstein with a bomb in Tel Aviv killed three innocent bystanders and wounded about 50.

Israel responded aggressively. Police investigations, prosecutions and financial enforcement eventually broke much of the power of the major Jewish crime organizations.

But something unexpected followed.

An analysis by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) cites a comprehensive government report that “suggests that the collapse of Jewish crime organizations in the early 2000s transferred criminal activity to Arab towns, where police presence is lacking and enforcement is ineffective.”

Arab communities offered criminal organizations opportunities to flourish: illegal weapons, black-market lending, protection rackets, socioeconomic problems and deep distrust of police.

The enforcement gap was enormous. The State Comptroller found approximately 9,200 shooting incidents in 2019 alone, while indictments were filed in only 3% to 5% of investigated shooting cases between 2017 and 2019. Government gun-collection campaigns recovered just 15 weapons in 2017 and 19 in 2019.

Criminal organizations grew from gangs into economic powers.

In 2021, Public Security Minister Omer Barlev told the Knesset that crime families were infiltrating government spending intended for Arab communities by threatening bidders and extracting protection payments.

MANY ILLEGAL weapons in the Arab community are stolen from Israeli army bases, while others are smuggled from the borders with Jordan and Egypt. Here, illegal weapons are displayed after a police operation against illegal gun dealers, in Nazareth in 2021.
(photo: MICHAEL GILADI/FLASH90)

Four years later, Tira Mayor Mamoun Abd al-Hay told a Knesset committee: “The city is run today by the organized crime groups, not by the police.” He called organized crime “an economic enterprise for all intents and purposes.”

The Abraham Initiatives found that 71.7% of the Arab homicides it could classify in 2023 involved conflicts between criminal organizations or family and clan disputes. Some victims were innocent relatives murdered in revenge attacks.

Israel briefly showed that the trajectory could be reversed.

The Bennett-Lapid government launched Safe Track and Government Resolution 549, a five-year, roughly NIS 2.4 billion campaign against crime and violence in Arab society. Police worked with tax and financial authorities to attack the organizations rather than simply arrest individual shooters.

Arab crime deaths fell in 2022.

But the campaign did not dismantle the organizations. The death toll reached 244 in 2023 and remained above 200 in each of the next two years.

Now WAFA reports that 151 Arabs have already been killed in crime and violence inside Israel in 2026.

That number provides a striking update to the FirstOneThrough article Which Arab Murders Count? published in May. At the time, roughly six Arab Israelis were being murdered in internal violence for every West Bank Arab killed by a West Bank Jew.

The disparity has grown substantially. Using the UN’s broader count of 18 West Bank Arab deaths linked to settler attacks this year—including deaths attributed to Jewish civilians, Israeli forces or disputed responsibility—the comparison is now more than eight to one. Using only the 12 deaths the UN attributes directly to civilians, it exceeds twelve to one.

The Israeli government knows the dimensions of the problem. The State Comptroller launched another audit this year into organized crime and its penetration of municipal tenders after previously finding that nearly 90% of contractors were required to pay protection money. The Knesset National Security Committee has repeatedly examined organized crime, illegal weapons and the low rate at which Arab murders are solved.

Arab organizations blame inadequate policing, discrimination and underinvestment. Police point to illegal weapons, entrenched criminal organizations and witnesses afraid to cooperate.

All may be true. The question that remains is whether anyone will do anything about the runaway Arab Israeli violence that kills hundreds of people each year.

Palestinian Arabs Turn Inward, But Not Away From Hamas

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Three years ago, Palestinian Arabs thought October 7 might change their future by changing Israel. Polls show how much that ambition has changed.

In December 2023, 72% of Palestinian Arabs said Hamas was correct to launch the October 7 attack. 70% believed Hamas would emerge victorious. 63% preferred armed struggle as the best way to achieve Palestinian goals.

Nearly three years of war produced something very different.

According to PCPSR’s August 2026 poll, only 20% now believe Hamas won the Gaza war. Hamas political support has fallen to 24%. Half of Palestinian Arabs say “armed resistance” (aka massacring Jewish civilians) failed to protect them or end the “Israeli occupation” and instead brought destruction. Among Gazans, 65% say so.

Support for armed struggle has fallen from 63% to 27%. 44% now choose negotiations as the most effective strategy.

Their priorities have shifted with it.

Asked in the August 2026 poll what the next Palestinian legislature should address, Palestinian Arabs answered:

  • 19% — Unifying the West Bank and Gaza
  • 18% — Stopping the killing in Gaza
  • 15% — Improving the economy
  • 11% — Rebuilding Gaza
  • 10% — Confronting “settler terrorism”
  • 9% — Combating corruption

Settler violence ranks fifth.

That is a very different Palestinian Arab story from the one dominating international headlines. Palestinian Arabs put reunification, ending the Gaza fighting, economic recovery and rebuilding Gaza ahead of attacks from West Bank Jews.

While the ambitions of October 2023 were directed outward, towards ending the Jewish State, the priorities of August 2026 are directed inward, to unification, rebuilding and recovering.

And Hamas remains part of that project.

The Palestinian Authority wants candidates in the coming elections to accept the commitments of the Palestine Liberation Organization, including its agreements with Israel. 66% of Palestinian Arabs oppose that requirement. Only 27% support it.

Because Palestinian Arabs envision Hamas remaining part of their future.

Asked what Hamas would become if it gave up its weapons, 53% said it would remain both an armed resistance and political movement. Another 36% said it would become solely a political movement. That means 89% see Hamas continuing as a political movement in some form.

There is a historical lesson in what happens after a genocidal society launches a disastrous war and loses.

Postwar Germany did not rebuild by simply disarming the Nazi Party and inviting it to contest elections. The Nazi Party was abolished and banned. Its political structures were dismantled. Germany’s reconstruction required a break with the movement that had led it into catastrophe.

Palestinian Arabs are not making that equivalent break. While they increasingly recognize that Hamas’s war failed, they want Hamas to be part of the Palestinian future.

As the western media and United Nations narrows a focus on violence committed by Israeli Jews against Palestinian Arabs, those same Arabs are no longer focused on those Jews. Instead, the Arabs prioritize rebuilding after the disaster while maintaining the eliminationist ideology in their society for a future war.