In October 2025, after two years of war and the devastation of Gaza, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research published findings that should have dominated headlines around the world:
Hamas remained the most popular Palestinian political movement.
More than half of Palestinians continued to view October 7 as the correct decision.
Nearly seven in ten opposed Hamas disarmament even if disarmament would prevent another war.
After two years of destruction, support for Hamas remained strong. Support for October 7 remained widespread. Opposition to disarmament remained overwhelming.
These findings did not come from Israeli politicians or government spokesmen. They came from Palestinians speaking to Palestinian pollsters.
Yet still, the New York Times publishes lengthy articles that the Gaza war continues because of Israel.
Readers were taken inside Benjamin Netanyahu’s political calculations. They learned about coalition pressures, right-wing ministers, territorial ambitions, and supporters who view the war as unfinished business.
By the end, a clear narrative emerged: the war continues because Israelis want it to continue. Because of greed for land, for power.
There was no mention that Gazans want Hamas to remain armed and for the war to continue. That is the political reality that keeps a ceasefire from taking hold.
The omission matters because it changes the reader’s understanding of the conflict. It places blame solely on Israel when a majority of Palestinians continue to seek the destruction of Israel despite the devastation in Gaza.
Until journalists devote the same attention to Palestinian motivations that they devote to Israeli motivations, Americans will continue receiving a false explanation for why this war endures.
Europe spent twenty years explaining that Hamas had a “political wing.” Hezbollah too. The bomb throwers were one thing, the parliamentarians another. The rocket launchers belonged in one legal bucket, the social service offices reserved for a different one. Western diplomats performed intellectual yoga worthy of Cirque du Soleil to preserve the distinction. The “military wing” was terrorist while the “political wing” was complicated. Nuanced. An unavoidable interlocutor for peace.
Britain finally gave up the act in 2019 with Hezbollah. The distinction, it concluded, was largely fictional. Same leadership, same financing, same ideology, same organization. Europe still technically preserves some of these distinctions in various legal frameworks, but fewer people pretend anymore that the “armed wing” and “political branch” emerge from separate planets.
Which makes the growing sanctions campaign against Jewish housing rights groups so fascinating.
Because now the question flips. Suddenly Europe is no longer carefully distinguishing between ideology and violence. Advocacy for controversial positions – not for violence – can suddenly become complicity in terrorism. Entire categories of speech are treated as unlawful conduct even absent anything remotely resembling the classic terrorism that justified Hamas and Hezbollah designations in the first place.
Take Nachala. It is not Hamas. It does not have brigades. It does not launch rockets. It does not run suicide bombing cells. It is an ideological movement advocating Jewish settlement in disputed territory. One may agree with it or despise it. One may view Jews living in land the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) want as a future Palestinian state as historic justice or catastrophic policy. But that is precisely the point. The dispute is fundamentally political and ideological.
For decades Europe insisted ideology alone was not terrorism. Supporting Palestinian “resistance” rhetorically was not enough. Calling for the destruction of Israel was grotesque but still politics. The line was violence. Actual violence. Material support for violence. Operational involvement in violence.
That was the principle.
Until suddenly the principle became inconvenient.
Now the standard appears to be evolving into something far murkier: movements may be sanctioned not necessarily for carrying out terrorism, but for contributing to environments viewed as extremist or against government foreign policy. Perhaps that standard is morally justified. Perhaps some Israeli activists have crossed legal and moral lines. But if this is the new doctrine, then the West should at least admit the doctrine changed.
Nachala’s Daniella Weiss
If ideology itself is now sanctionable, Western governments cannot apply the principle selectively.
For years crowds across London, Paris, Barcelona and university campuses have openly chanted for the elimination of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea.” Activists routinely declare that Israeli Jews should “go back to Poland,” despite the fact that millions of Israeli Jews descend from families expelled from Arab countries, Ethiopia, Iran and elsewhere. Imagine any other minority in Europe being told to leave the country and “go back” to lands where many never lived, or to where their families were annihilated. Authorities would instantly recognize the ethnic character of the demand.
If Israelis arguing that Jews should again live in Gaza constitutes sanctionable extremism, then what exactly should Britain call organizations openly advocating a “right of return” designed to flood Israel demographically out of existence? If the standard is advocacy for the removal or replacement of another national group, then the principle cannot stop with some Jewish activists in the West Bank.
London protest against Israel in 2021, including rap song
If the line is now ideological support for demographic elimination, then governments must police the radicalism inside their own societies with equal vigor.
That means groups explicitly advocating the destruction of Israel should face the same scrutiny directed at Jewish expansionist movements. Organizations and individuals promoting the forced removal of Jews from the Middle East “from the river to the sea” should not receive a special exemption dressed up as mere “anti-Zionism,” as if Israel is a concept and not a reality. Calls for the end of the Jewish State are not sophisticated geopolitical critiques. They are ethnic slogans calling for violence. And if governments now believe rhetoric itself creates dangerous ecosystems, they cannot pretend those ecosystems exist only on one side of the conflict.
Anti-Israel protesters in Rome, Oct. 28, 2023, shortly after the October 7 massacre and abduction of Israelis by thousands of Gazans. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
The irony is extraordinary. Europe once bent over backwards to separate terrorism from politics when the movements in question were Palestinian or Islamist. Now governments increasingly collapse politics into extremism to be sanctioned only when the movements are Jewish nationalist.
Europe spent decades insisting that ideas were not terrorism. If it now believes otherwise, it should say so openly and explain where the line will be drawn for everyone else.
Pip: There is something clarifying about discovering that a political vocabulary you assumed was spontaneous had a drafting committee — and a host country.
Mara: Today we are following First.One.Through into the history of how anti-Israel rhetoric was systematically constructed, tracing the ideological architecture back to a 2001 conference in Tehran. Let's start with where that script came from.
The Genocide Script Was Written by Iran in 2001
Mara: The central question here is whether the language of "apartheid," "settler colonialism," and "genocide" applied to Israel emerged organically from events on the ground — or whether it was a pre-built ideological framework deployed strategically.
Pip: The post answers that directly. Here is the setup: this was February 2001 — Hamas had not yet seized Gaza, Israel had not disengaged, October 7 was over two decades away — and yet the declaration from Iran's UN preparatory conference already described Israeli policy as "a new kind of apartheid," "a crime against humanity," and "a form of genocide."
Mara: The upshot is that the vocabulary was not a reaction to events. The moral categories were assigned before the events now routinely cited to justify them existed.
Pip: And the post walks through exactly what that vocabulary contained: apartheid, settler colonialism, genocide, racial supremacy, alien domination, decolonization. The full lexicon, complete, in 2001.
Mara: What the post argues is that Iran understood something many Western governments did not — that narratives outlast battlefields. The framing is precise: "Terror attacks shock people temporarily. Moral frameworks reshape generations."
Pip: The mechanism described is a kind of moral laundering. Traditional antisemitism had been discredited after the Holocaust, so hostility toward the Jewish state was repackaged in the language of anti-racism and liberation. The old demand that Jews disappear became "decolonization."
Mara: The post traces how that vocabulary migrated — from the Tehran declaration into NGO reports, university syllabi, newsroom style guides, and eventually street protests. Students repeating those phrases today are, as the post puts it, echoing a script written by regimes that openly sought Israel's destruction.
Pip: The inversion the post identifies is the sharpest part: a regime animated by eliminationist antisemitism repositioned itself as an anti-racist moral authority, while recasting the Jewish state as the great racist evil of the modern era.
Mara: And the asymmetry in the Tehran document itself is telling — exhaustive attention to portraying Israel as racist, and nothing on antisemitism in the Arab world, terrorism against Israeli civilians, or the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries. That imbalance was not accidental.
Pip: The post's conclusion is blunt: October 7 did not write the script. It activated one that had been waiting since 2001.
Mara: Which raises the harder question — what it means to engage with that vocabulary now, knowing where it was built.
Pip: When the moral framework precedes the facts it claims to describe, the facts stop doing the work.
Mara: That is the thread worth pulling — how political language gets built, distributed, and eventually treated as self-evident. More on that next time.
For years, the world was told the “Great March of Return” was peaceful theater. Demonstration. Symbolism. Political performance staged at Israel’s border fence. The real outrage, activists insisted, was not thousands of Gazans converging on a sovereign frontier controlled by a terrorist regime openly committed to Israel’s destruction. The outrage was that Israel refused to let them through.
Every breach attempt became a morality play. The fence itself was cast as villainous. Hamas was downgraded from genocidal jihadist organization to stage manager for a humanitarian spectacle. Foreign correspondents photographed smoke, flags, and crowds surging toward the barrier while carefully avoiding the central question: what exactly did “return” mean in practice?
A picture taken on March 30, 2018 from the southern Israeli kibbutz of Nahal Oz across the border from the Gaza strip shows tear gas grenades falling during a Palestinian tent city protest commemorating Land Day, with Israeli soldiers seen below in the foreground. (Photo credit JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
October 7 answered it.
The world spent years romanticizing the idea of border penetration into Israel. Then Hamas finally achieved it. The infiltrators entered and what followed was not symbolic “resistance,” not coexistence, not liberation theology with subtitles for Western consumption. It was slaughter. Torture. Kidnapping. Burning families alive. Mass rape. Entire communities transformed into killing fields within hours.
The “Great March of Return” was not a protest but a rehearsal for an invasion.
The flotilla theatrics now replay the same script at sea.
Once again, activists sail toward a Hamas-controlled enclave insisting their mission is humanitarian symbolism. Once again, cameras arrive before facts. Once again, Israel is expected to participate in a choreographed morality play where interception itself becomes the crime. The activists want confrontation because confrontation produces images, and images produce headlines, and headlines produce another cycle in which Israel defending its borders is treated as inherently suspicious.
But after October 7, Israel no longer has the luxury of indulging symbolic breaches.
A blockade around a terrorist enclave is not abstract political philosophy. It is a security perimeter. Every intercepted vessel is being measured against the memory of what happened when infiltrators were not stopped. The Israeli Navy does not have the privilege enjoyed by European activists thousands of miles away who can romanticize “breaking barriers” while knowing they will never personally absorb the consequences if those barriers collapse.
That is why the flotilla activists are ultimately engaged in theater. They know they will be intercepted. Israel knows it must intercept them. The performance depends on the interception itself. Their goal is not to deliver aid more efficiently than established channels. Their goal is to create imagery in which Israeli enforcement appears oppressive by definition.
Sumud flotilla
The irony is impossible to miss. For years, activists treated Israel’s insistence on secure borders as paranoia. Then October 7 became the bloodiest validation imaginable of exactly why those borders existed.
And so the boats are seized and returned to port. The activists call it repression. Israel calls it survival.
Perhaps the flotillas deserve a more honest name: the Great Return to Sender.
Every modern humanitarian organization insists the same thing: suffering is not a business. The starving child is not a marketing asset. The bombed hospital is not a fundraising funnel. The crying mother under rubble is not a revenue generator.
Then the annual reports arrive.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) / Doctors Without Borders crossed roughly €2.3 billion in annual revenue in 2022. Then roughly €2.35 billion in 2023 and €2.36 billion in 2024. Three consecutive years above €2 billion. Ninety-eight percent of funding came from private donors. More than seven million donors worldwide.
The organization presents this as proof of global compassion. It is also evidence of something else: misery has become one of the most effective fundraising products on earth. Especially if loaded with charges: “Genocide.” “Starvation.” “Ethnic cleansing.”
The humanitarian industry now operates inside the same emotional attention economy that drives political campaigns, cable news, and social media outrage. The more horrifying the imagery, the more morally charged the narrative, the more emotionally shattered the audience becomes, the faster the money moves.
And nobody understands this dynamic better than MSF.
MSF’s public communications increasingly fused emotionally maximalist language with direct fundraising infrastructure. A visitor no longer encountered merely medical updates. They encountered emotional conversion architecture.
The modern humanitarian sector has discovered what every digital platform already knows: emotionally devastating content converts. A dusty child under rubble produces more engagement than a policy paper. A charge of genocide and starvation moves directly into emotional reflex.
The uglier the images and explosive the charges, the healthier the fundraising pipeline becomes.
Doctors Without Borders is very selective in its explosive terminology regarding Israel. For MSF, Israel is the cause of all the ills in Gaza, not Hamas. Israel is directly called out, not the genocidal terrorist group that launched the war and hides in tunnels without letting civilians use them for protection. No excuse proffered by Israel will satisfy.
Doctors Without Borders doesn’t do this in other conflicts. Not in Sudan nor Somalia. Not in Syria nor Haiti. In those wars, either no one is called out or “all sides” are vilified.
And MSF takes its anti-Israel campaign on the road. Wherever Israel is dragged into a defensive war against those determined to annihilate it, like Lebanon and Iran, MSF is standing guard and pointing fingers.
MSF does not limit itself to smear campaigns against Israel. It is a full lobbying shop, taking out full page ads in newspapers to rally the public against Israel. It pushes governments to stop supporting Israel in its defensive war.
So it is no surprise that MSF has officially backed the entire Iranian proxy war against Israel, telling the world that it rushes to protect “Gaza, Lebanon and Iran” from Israel.
Doctors Without Borders: 1) runs to assist jihadists in their active war against Israel; 2) raises money claiming the belligerent parties are the victims; 3) lobbies to have governments stop supporting Israel and 4) calls for the masses to protest the Jewish State. It does all of this, uniquely in Israel’s war.
Doctors Without Borders is not a humanitarian organization but an active instrument in the war to destroy Israel.
In February 2001, long before Hamas ruled Gaza, long before Israel withdrew from Gaza, long before the security barrier, and long before the phrase “genocide in Gaza” became a campus chant, a United Nations “anti-racism” conference in Tehran was already accusing Israel of being a racist apartheid state guilty of crimes against humanity and “a form of genocide.”
The language was not improvised after October 7. It was drafted decades earlier.
Buried in the archives of the UN World Conference Against Racism sits a document that now reads like the prototype for today’s anti-Israel activism. Hosted by the Islamic Republic of Iran as the Asian preparatory meeting for the infamous Durban Conference, the 2001 declaration accused Israel of “racial discrimination,” “settler ideology,” “apartheid,” and genocide years before the events now routinely cited to justify those accusations.
The Tehran declaration described Israeli policy as “a new kind of apartheid,” “a crime against humanity,” and “a form of genocide.” It condemned “foreign occupation founded on settlements” and portrayed Israel as a uniquely racist state. It attacked Israel’s Law of Return as “racially based” while endorsing a Palestinian “right of return,” and framed the conflict almost exclusively through the language of colonialism and racial supremacy.
This was February 2001. Hamas would not seize Gaza for another six years. Israel had not yet disengaged from Gaza. The major Gaza wars had not occurred. There was no October 7 massacre. There were no TikTok videos, no encampments, no “Globalize the Intifada” marches winding through Western capitals.
Yet the ideological framework already existed in complete form.
The core vocabulary was already there:
apartheid
settler colonialism
genocide
racial supremacy
alien domination
decolonization
The slogans were set. The distribution system under the framework of “anti-racism” needed time to become global.
Iran understood this battlefield earlier than much of the West did.
The Islamic Republic did not wage war against Israel on only one front. It developed a multi-front strategy: terror proxies, missile programs, regional encirclement, propaganda networks, diplomatic campaigns, university activism, NGO penetration and information warfare. The battlefield extended from southern Lebanon to UN conference halls.
Iran understood something many Western governments failed to grasp: narratives can outlive battlefields. Terror attacks shock people temporarily. Moral frameworks reshape generations.
The achievement of the campaign was not inventing new hatred. It was laundering their own very old anti-Jew hatred through the moral vocabulary of human rights.
The regime in Tehran openly sought the destruction of the Jewish state while simultaneously helping construct an international framework portraying the Jewish state itself as the great racist evil of the modern world. The inversion was deliberate. A regime animated by antisemitism and eliminationist rhetoric repositioned itself as an anti-racist moral authority while recasting Israel as a global pariah.
Reality itself had to be inverted for the framework to function:
The Jewish people had to be stripped of indigenous identity despite Judaism being born in the Land of Israel and the core of the Hebrew Bible.
Jerusalem had to be detached from Jewish history despite being the holiest city in Judaism for three thousand years, and the direction of daily Jewish prayer.
Hebrew had to become the language of “colonizers” despite originating in the same soil activists insist Jews have no connection to.
The objective was to transform the Jewish state from a country that could be criticized into a moral obscenity that could not legitimately exist.
The Tehran document placed Israel into the moral category occupied by apartheid South Africa, colonial domination and crimes against humanity. Once a country is assigned that status, compromise becomes collaboration and coexistence becomes moral surrender.
Iran supplied the ideological fuel. Large parts of the Western activist ecosystem supplied the distribution network. The result was one of the most successful political rebranding campaigns of the modern era.
NGOs, academics, journalists, activist groups and eventually corporate and educational institutions absorbed the vocabulary and repackaged it as the language of progressive morality. Traditional antisemitism had become morally discredited after the Holocaust, so hostility toward the Jewish state was translated into the vocabulary of anti-racism, anti-colonialism and social justice.
The old image of the malevolent Jew became the malevolent Zionist.
Ancient hatreds were repackaged as the language of anti-racism and liberation.
The old demand that Jews disappear became “decolonization.”
And because the rhetoric arrived wrapped in the language of human rights, millions of educated Westerners could participate while imagining themselves enlightened rather than radicalized.
The asymmetry inside the Tehran declaration is particularly revealing. The document devoted extraordinary attention to portraying Israel as the embodiment of racism while saying nothing about antisemitism in the Arab world, terrorism against Israeli civilians, the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, or the openly eliminationist ideologies as the bedrock of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The imbalance was not accidental.
The conference was not constructing a universal anti-racism framework. It was constructing a hierarchy of permissible outrage in which Jewish sovereignty itself could increasingly be reframed as a moral offense.
The Durban process that followed later became notorious for antisemitic incidents, anti-Israel propaganda and efforts to revive the old “Zionism is racism” framework using newer terminology. Western democracies eventually began boycotting later Durban conferences because they viewed them as platforms for anti-Israel demonization masquerading as anti-racism initiatives.
But by then the political grammar had already escaped containment.
Over time, phrases first drafted in Iran migrated into university syllabi, NGO reports, newsroom style guides, faculty petitions, diversity trainings and street protests. Students who have never heard of the Tehran conference now repeat its vocabulary almost word for word, unaware they are echoing a political script written decades earlier by regimes that openly sought Israel’s destruction.
Long before October 7, the architecture had been built, the slogans drafted, and the moral categories assigned. More powerful than even the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, the new format for the 21st century is anti-Zionism is anti-racism.
For twenty years the distribution system slowly penetrated the world, and reframed Jew-hatred as morally acceptable under willing and unwilling eyes.
October 7 did not write the script. It activated one that had been waiting since 2001.
The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff caused a stir when he reported on the daily rape of Palestinian Arabs by Israeli dogs while incarcerated. Pro-Palestinians were appalled and pro-Israelis were shocked at the charge – what kind of inanity? How is this even possible?
New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff
Let me tell everyone about the ugly reality. I have been investigating this for years. I have a mole (an actual one) as well as a source inside the Zionist security apparatus. Let me just call him Colonel Klink to protect his identity, and I will fully expose what Kristoff only touched upon.
The Israeli prisons have vast storehouses of Bamba that they crumble and smear all over their Arab captives for interrogations. The peanut butter smell drives the dogs wild as they sexually maul the exposed Gazans and West Bank Arabs. The Israeli guards allow the abuse to go on until the Arab prisoners reveal the sordid plans they have for Israeli Jews, which the guards write down and then sell to Lior Raz for plots for the next season of Fauda.
Lior Raz of Fauda during a fundraiser for the Zionist ambulance service
This is only the tip of the canine iceberg.
Israeli border collies have been herding Palestinian sheep into “open air prisons” for years. The Israel Guide Dog Center for the Blind offers the yellow Labradors and Golden Retrievers to Jews, while reserving the black Labradors for Israeli Arabs because of the deep racism embedded in Israeli society – even for blind people.
The animal cruelty knows no bounds.
ASPCA locations around the United States have been used as Mossad safe houses since the founding of the Zionist state. Dogs that people adopt have chips in them which the Israeli government uses to track millions of Americans.
The colonialists have even established an elite cat unit trained in pickpocketing, emotional manipulation, and knocking over glasses of water during hostage negotiations. One tabby roaming tourist cafes allegedly stole three passports, two vapes, and an unopened yogurt from a Scandinavian journalist.
In New York, Israeli units have dispatched Portuguese Water Dogs in Times Square where they operate Thee Card Monte tables to rob tourists. The same unit uses Standard Poodles to sell knock-off Gucci handbags while they gather intel on Muslim Halal food cart vendors, who are in turn, casing American streets for easy targets.
In the Holy Land, Palestinian Authority President-for-life Mahmoud Abbas has accused Israel of “weaponizing pigeons” to deliberately defecate across public spaces in Palestinian cities. “This is organized biological warfare,” Abbas reportedly declared. “The pigeons target only Palestinian vehicles, Palestinian balconies, and Palestinian laundry.”
The humanitarian crisis expanded into the political sphere this week after activists accused Israel of operating what one NGO called “a sophisticated interspecies apartheid system” stretching across land, sea, air, and now apparently pollination networks, as Israeli bees are chemically treated to be unable to approach plants in Arab fields.
Speaking emotionally before reporters, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) condemned what she described as “the ongoing Animal Nakba. Not only are Palestinians suffering under the imperialist Zionist regime,” she declared, “the indigenous animals and insects are suffering too.”
One Gazan who was set free in a prisoner exchange told me that he witnessed parrots repeatedly curse prisoners in multiple languages to degrade the Palestinian spirit. Worst of all, the parrots deliberately spoke in Arabic with a lisp, which made several Palestinians admit to raping Israelis.
Students for Justice in Palestine at Harvard, having heard of this, set up in the center of the campus with placards “Polly want a ceasefire!” Brown University faculty followed launching a new course “Decolonizing Veterinary Power Structures.” Col. Klink has been drafted to be one of the lecturers. The university is seemingly unaware that he is a double agent, trashing the Jewish State to progressive audiences while simultaneously surveilling them.
Brown University online lecture about decolonizing Palestine, seeking to replicate Hamas around the world
Francesca Albanese of the United Nations said the latest findings are deeply upsetting and more evidence regarding the “occupation of bees, apartheid Labradors, militant parrots, and psychologically traumatized hamsters,” although no reports of hamsters being involved in Zionist oppression have emerged. Yet.
Anti-Israel members of New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s team have urged the mayor to stop the Celebrate Israel Parade, which the mayor is reportedly considering. He has also suggested banning all Jews from adopting pets in the city, but his lawyers said that crossed the line into antisemitism. Zohran reportedly just shrugged and said “so what?”
In Washington, DC, President Trump has reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about deploying the specially trained animal units in the Islamic Republic of Iran and against various anti-American groups inside the United States. “Bibi” is expected to not only comply, but share data from the sleeper pet cells in millions of American homes.
A new front in the Zionist war has been exposed which runs much deeper than even the most virulently anti-Israel groups ever imagined. It’s inter-species, which Candace Owens claimed further proved that Jews aren’t even 100 percent human. (Her agent continues to state that she is not antisemitic).
The Associated Press did not cover Jerusalem Day as a story about Jews returning joyfully to the holiest city in Judaism after nineteen years of exclusion under illegal Jordanian occupation. It covered it as a story about Jewish menace.
That framing decision is visible before readers even reach the second sentence.
“Ultranationalist Jews chant racist slogans during annual march into Jerusalem’s Old City.”
The rare racist chants reported at the march were ugly and deserve condemnation. But AP transformed the fringe into the essence of the event itself. Tens of thousands of Jews marched peacefully, sang, danced and celebrated Jerusalem Day. Yet readers encountering the article for the first time would assume the defining feature of the event was racist hooliganism when in fact it was joyous celebration.
Every descriptor pushes readers toward the same emotional conclusion: Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem is dangerous, aggressive and destabilizing. Palestinians are the natural residents and Jews are interlopers who threaten violence.
The false narrative erases the actual historical meaning of the day.
Jerusalem Day marks the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 after Jordan’s nineteen-year occupation of the eastern part of the city. During those years Jews were expelled from the Jewish Quarter, synagogues were destroyed, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and Jews were barred from praying at the Western Wall despite explicit guarantees of access under the armistice agreements.
Without that context, Jewish celebration is transformed into something alien and sinister. Readers are shown Jews marching through Jerusalem, but never fully told why entering the Old City carries such emotional and historical weight in the first place.
Erased from the narrative is the uncomfortable fact that Jews were once the excluded population in the very places now described almost exclusively through Palestinian identity.
The asymmetry in labeling is impossible to miss. Arabs in Jerusalem are described as “Palestinians” or “Palestinian residents,” language that subtly implies an already-existing Palestinian sovereignty over the city. Jews, meanwhile, are repeatedly subdivided into ideological categories: “ultranationalists,” “hard-line,” “settlers.”
One side receives an organic national identity. The other receives political suspicion.
AP even refers to “Palestinian areas” of Jerusalem while never acknowledging the basic legal and political reality that these residents are primarily Israeli citizens or permanent residents under Israeli administration. There is no Palestinian state governing Jerusalem. Yet the article’s language continuously nudges readers toward imagining Jews as intruding into someone else’s sovereign national space.
Even the treatment of the Temple Mount follows the same pattern. AP describes MK Itamar Ben Gvir’s visit as “provocative” before readers are even reminded that the site is the holiest place in Judaism, where the biblical temples once stood.
Imagine covering Muslims praying in Mecca or Catholics gathering in the Vatican first through the lens of how upsetting their presence might be to others.
Buried later in the article is a participant explaining that the racist chants came from “a small minority” of marchers. But by then the framing work is complete. The reader has already absorbed the article’s core emotional message: Jewish nationalism itself is the problem.
There is a profound difference between reporting that some participants at a massive public gathering behaved disgracefully and presenting those fringe elements as representative of the gathering’s essential character.
One reports misconduct. The other assigns collective identity.
And the asymmetry becomes impossible to ignore when comparing coverage standards. When participants at a pro-Palestinian rally praised terrorism or chanted genocidal slogans, major international outlets avoid headlines assigning those slogans to Palestinians collectively. Readers would receive sociological context, political nuance and careful distinctions between extremists and the broader movement.
Jewish events rarely receive the same interpretive charity.
The deeper issue exposed by the article is not merely media bias. It is discomfort with Jewish sovereignty itself.
Jewish attachment to Jerusalem is welcomed when it is passive and distant. The moment it expresses sovereignty, history or power, the vocabulary changes. Then Jews become “ultranationalists.”
The article unintentionally reveals a larger truth about modern international discourse surrounding Israel. Jewish history is acceptable. Jewish prayer is acceptable. Jewish suffering is acceptable. What remains difficult for much of the international press is Jewish power: Jews governing Jerusalem, policing Jerusalem, marching through Jerusalem and refusing to behave like temporary guests in their own civilizational center.
Every year, the United States spends tens of billions of dollars protecting foreign countries. Not during wars. Not during emergencies. Every single year.
American taxpayers fund enormous military infrastructures across the globe: bases in Japan, Germany, South Korea, Qatar, Italy, and dozens of other nations. The United States maintains air bases, naval facilities, missile defenses, hospitals, schools, intelligence hubs, fuel depots, and entire support systems overseas. Hundreds of thousands of American personnel have rotated through these countries over decades.
Kadena Air Base – Okinawa, JapanRamstein Air Base – Germany
Those expenditures serve American interests too. America protects trade routes, deters adversaries, stabilizes key regions, and projects power abroad. The postwar security architecture benefited both the United States and its allies.
But it is still true that Americans spend staggering sums every year defending allies and preserving peace abroad.
And nobody protests it.
There are no mass encampments demanding America close bases in Germany. No demonstrations condemning the billions spent protecting Japan. No chants against the enormous costs of deterring North Korea. Few activists march through campuses denouncing America’s sprawling military infrastructure across Europe, Asia, and the Persian Gulf.
Camp Humphreys – South KoreaYokosuka Naval Base – Japan
Which is precisely the point. Peace is expensive. Deterrence is expensive. Preventing large wars is expensive.
Estimated Annual U.S. Military Presence Costs By Country (2025)
Country
Estimated Annual Cost
Nature of Presence
Japan
$12B–$15B
Massive naval, air and Marine presence
Germany
$10B–$13B
NATO logistics and command hub
South Korea
$6B–$8B
Constant deterrence against North Korea
Qatar
$4B–$7B
CENTCOM and Middle East air operations
Italy
$3B–$5B
Mediterranean and Africa operations
United Kingdom
$2B–$4B
NATO, intelligence and airpower support
Estimated Overseas Total
$60B–$80B+ annually
Hundreds of global installations
When wars erupt, the spending surges even further. The United States has already committed over $188 billion to Ukraine following Russia’s invasion because Washington understands that instability among major powers carries enormous strategic consequences, weakening Russia among them.
Yet when the discussion turns to Israel, the framework suddenly changes. Protesters and politicians often speak as though Israel represents the centerpiece of American military spending abroad – the singular foreign country siphoning money away from struggling Americans.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has argued that America should be investing in housing, healthcare, education, and climate action — not “endless war.” Representative Rashida Tlaib has asked “Why is it that our government always has enough money for bombs, to bomb people, to kill people, but never seems to have money to provide people with healthcare, with housing, enough food for their families?”
Rep Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Rep Cori Bush (D-MO)
On its face, this sounds like a broad critique of American military spending but that is not how the rhetoric is actually deployed.
The slogans are overwhelmingly attached to Israel. Protest signs do not read “Housing Not Germany.” Student encampments are not organized around shutting down bases in Japan. Activists do not chant about the billions spent maintaining troops in Korea, Qatar, or Europe. The largest permanent American military expenditures abroad are treated as background noise – accepted features of the international system.
Only Israel is singled out as the foreign country supposedly taking food, housing, healthcare, and education away from Americans.
The actual numbers tell a very different story.
The United States does not maintain giant permanent bases in Israel. There are no sprawling American military cities resembling Germany, Japan, or Korea. No 50,000-troop deployments. No vast permanent occupation-sized infrastructure funded by U.S. taxpayers.
Al Udeid Air Base – Qatar
Israel largely fights its own wars with its own soldiers. Unlike many American allies, it maintains a large, technologically advanced military capable of defending itself rather than depending on permanent U.S. troop deployments for day-to-day security.
American assistance to Israel instead surges during major conflicts, particularly after attacks from Iranian-backed jihadist organizations openly committed to Israel’s destruction.
After the October 7 Hamas massacre – which included mass murder, kidnappings, sexual violence, and the burning alive of civilians – the United States accelerated weapons shipments and missile defense support to Israel as it simultaneously faced threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Shiite militias, and Iran itself. American funding has helped defang the largest state sponsor of terror in the world which has also threaten the United States.
Even including the wartime surge, total U.S. military support for Israel in the two years following the October 7 massacre was just over $20 billion, including traditional military aid, missile defense replenishment, emergency weapons transfers, naval deployments tied to regional deterrence, and supplemental wartime appropriations.
That is a large figure but it pales beside the recurring long-term costs of America’s military architecture elsewhere. The United States spends more every two years defending Japan and Germany – EACH – than it spent supporting Israel during one of the largest Middle East wars in decades.
And unlike Europe or East Asia, Israel exists in an environment where multiple armed movements and regimes openly call for its elimination.
American forces remain in Germany because Europe once descended into catastrophic war. American bases in Japan exist because Washington concluded lasting peace in Asia required permanent deterrence. Korea remains heavily militarized because North Korea still threatens annihilation.
Nobody claims those alliances make Germany, Japan, or South Korea illegitimate states. Nobody demands those countries lose American protection. Only Israel is treated as uniquely immoral for receiving defensive support while fighting organizations openly committed to genocide.
If the protests were truly about opposing American military expenditures abroad, the largest demonstrations in America would target Germany, Japan, Korea, and the vast global network of permanent U.S. bases that cost taxpayers tens of billions every year.
They do not.
Instead, the outrage fixates on the one major American ally fighting for survival without large U.S. troop deployments, without permanent American bases, and while carrying the overwhelming burden of war itself.
That contradiction reveals something important: for many activists, the issue was never primarily military spending. It was Israel.
For years, one of the most common accusations leveled against Israel has been the charge of “apartheid.” International NGOs invoke it routinely and campus activists repeat it endlessly. Much of the Western conversation now treats the claim not as an argument to be debated, but as an established fact.
The accusation carries a very specific implication: that Arab citizens of Israel are a permanently segregated and oppressed population fundamentally excluded from the society around them, and that Israel is a racist illiberal regime.
But the polling data emerging from inside Israel tells a profoundly different story. Not a simplistic story. Not a utopian story. But a far more human and complicated one.
For decades, much of the world has spoken about Arab Israelis without ever seriously listening to them. Western activists speak in the language of revolution. International NGOs speak in the language of permanent oppression. Campus protesters speak in the language of “decolonization,” “resistance,” and “right of return.” The underlying assumption is always the same: Israeli Arabs are presumed to be a permanently alienated population waiting for the eventual dismantling of the Jewish state.
Yet the actual polling of Arab Israelis increasingly points somewhere else entirely.
The newest evidence comes from a May 2026 study by the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation at Tel Aviv University. The survey found that 75.8% of Israeli Arab 12th graders support volunteering for non-security national service. Even more striking, 77.2% supported Arab political parties joining Israeli governing coalitions, while substantial numbers supported joining coalitions across the political spectrum rather than only left-wing alliances. More than half reported a strong sense of belonging to the State of Israel.
This is not the polling profile of a population preparing for insurrection. It is the polling profile of a population increasingly interested in civic participation, integration, and practical coexistence.
The trajectory matters even more than the raw numbers. In 2010, support for national service among Arab youth stood at only 43%. In fifteen years, support nearly doubled. That is not statistical fluctuation. It is societal evolution.
Then came October 7.
If the fashionable revolutionary narrative were true, one might have expected Arab citizens of Israel to radicalize after the Hamas massacre and the Gaza war that followed. Yet a 2024 survey from Tel Aviv University found that 57.8% of Arab Israelis said the war had actually strengthened feelings of “shared destiny” between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel.
That may be the single most important polling result of the post-October 7 era.
Because it directly collides with the apartheid framework so dominant in Western discourse. Apartheid systems do not typically produce growing feelings of shared civic destiny during wartime. Whatever tensions and inequities exist inside Israel, the polling increasingly suggests Arab Israelis themselves do not see their future primarily through the lens of permanent separation.
The polls also tell a subtler story about the so-called “right of return,” perhaps the most emotionally charged issue in the entire conflict. Western activists frequently present the demand for millions of Palestinian descendants to move into Israel proper as though it were universally embraced by all Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Arabs alike.
That finding matters enormously because a genuine two-state framework implicitly rejects the maximalist interpretation of “right of return” that would demographically dissolve Israel as a Jewish-majority state. The same survey found only small minorities supporting one-state frameworks built around domination or elimination of the other side.
In other words, the polling increasingly suggests Israeli Arabs distinguish between support for Palestinian national aspirations and support for eliminating Israel altogether.
That distinction is almost entirely absent from Western activist discourse.
Arab Israelis clearly continue to identify deeply with Palestinians culturally and emotionally. They remain sharply critical of many Israeli government policies. A March 2025 survey by the Institute for National Security Studies found extremely low trust among Arab Israelis in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.
But dissatisfaction with the government has not translated into broad support for Hamas or revolutionary confrontation. Quite the opposite. Poll after poll since October 7 has shown far greater fear of instability, communal violence, and economic disruption than enthusiasm for armed struggle. The dominant priorities emerging from repeated surveys are public safety, economic opportunity, education, housing, infrastructure, and reducing violent crime inside Arab communities.
Communities preparing for revolution do not consistently rank municipal policing, school quality, infrastructure investment, and economic mobility among their highest priorities. Citizens do.
The polling increasingly shows Arab Israelis sounding less like Western campus radicals and more like citizens trying to improve daily life for their families.
This is why the rise of pragmatic Arab political participation inside Israel matters so much. Figures like Mansour Abbas represent something many outsiders still struggle to understand: a growing willingness among Arab Israelis to work within Israeli political institutions rather than reject them outright.
Then Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett (L) shakes hands with the leader of the United Arab List Mansour Abbas during a Knesset session in Jerusalem, Israel, June 13, 2021. — AP/File
But here again, the crucial issue is what Arab Israelis increasingly appear to want done about those grievances. The polls suggest the overwhelming preference is not dismantling Israel, but improving their place within it.
Feeling of “shared destiny” with Jewish Israelis after Oct. 7
57.8% said war strengthened it
Polling shows sharply increased hostility after war
Preferred priorities
Crime reduction, housing, education, infrastructure, jobs
Conflict, statehood, war recovery, resistance politics
Support for two-state solution
72%
Lower and declining in recent polling
Participation in Israeli institutions
Increasingly normalized
Generally viewed as illegitimate
Attitudes toward Hamas after Oct. 7
Little evidence of broad support
Significantly higher support in multiple polls
The table reveals a profound disconnect between Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Arabs, as well as in the ideological activism abroad and lived reality inside Israel itself.
The activists chanting “globalize the intifada” imagine permanent struggle. Yet the polling increasingly points toward coexistence mixed with frustration, and integration mixed with cultural distinctiveness.
Which is why another recent trend in Western media coverage increasingly looks detached from reality: the insistence on replacing the term “Israeli Arabs” with “Palestinian citizens of Israel” as though the latter fully captures how this population sees itself.
These citizens are clearly Arab. Clearly connected culturally and emotionally to the broader Palestinian story. But the surveys increasingly show they also see themselves as participants in Israeli civic life, Israeli institutions, Israeli politics, Israeli education systems, and the Israeli economy. They vote in Israeli elections and increasingly support joining Israeli governing coalitions. Increasingly support national service and increasingly express a sense of belonging to the state itself.
Western activists speak the language of permanent revolution and endless “resistance.” The polling shows Arab Israelis speaking the language of citizenship, coexistence, opportunity, safety, and practical reality.
Israeli Arabs make up 21% of the Israeli population. Their numbers have grown faster than Israeli Jews since 1948. And they increasingly feel at home inside the Jewish State.
Israeli Arabs enjoying the beach in Tel Aviv, Israel (photo: First One Through)
First One Through 