Category Archives: Jews

Palestinian Authority Mocks Jewish Children Murdered in Holocaust

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How do you comprehend six million murdered Jews? One million murdered children?

The numbers are so large that the human mind struggles to grasp it. Six million becomes a statistic. A statistic becomes an abstraction. And an abstraction risks becoming forgettable.

For decades, Holocaust educators wrestled with that problem. Their answer was simple: stop counting and start remembering.

Programs such as Names, Not Numbers were created in Jewish schools to teach students that every Holocaust victim was an individual human being. Students interviewed survivors, recorded testimonies, learned family histories, and transformed statistics back into people. The goal was not merely to teach history. It was to restore identity to those whom the Nazis sought to erase.

The same idea appeared in the remarkable documentary Paper Clips.

In the film, students in a small town in Tennessee learned that six million was too large a number to understand. They discovered that Norwegians had worn paper clips as symbols of resistance to Nazi occupation and decided to collect six million paper clips – one for every murdered Jew.

As the clips accumulated, the students began to understand something profound. It was hard to gather millions of ordinary clips – it required enormous resources and participation of people and organizations far and wide. That millions of people could be exterminated deliberately was terrifying.

The educational programs also sought to do more than humanize the victims and demonstrate the scale of the atrocities.

Nazis literally transformed people into numbers. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, many prisoners were stripped of their names and tattooed with identification numbers. It was part of a larger project to erase individuality, dignity, and humanity. The Holocaust was not only a campaign to murder Jews. It was a campaign to reduce them to anonymous units in a machinery of extermination.

Jewish children display tattooed numbers that Nazis put on their arms during the Holocaust

The Holocaust was not simply a story within a war. More than one million Jewish children were murdered not because they were caught in a battlefield, not because they belonged to an opposing army, but because they were Jewish. The Nazi regime actively hunted them for liquidation. Jewish babies, toddlers, and schoolchildren were marked for death from birth.

They were not collateral damage. They were targets.

For decades, educators, museums, survivors, and Jewish communities worked to preserve those names and those stories. The idea that victims should be remembered as human beings rather than statistics became one of the defining themes of Holocaust education around the world.

Which is why the recent Palestinian campaign, “Their Names Are Not Numbers,” is so striking.

The slogan echoes language that Holocaust educators spent generations developing. It draws upon a framework created to explain why victims of genocide should be remembered as individuals rather than numbers.

Palestinian Arabs are using a cruel tool in a flimsy attempt to wipe away their own guilt for launching a genocidal war with broad support, and for deliberately banning children from entering the tunnel infrastructure that leadership spent years and billions of dollars constructing. The Palestinian Authority is not merely making the dead children martyrs at someone else’s hands rather than their own, but deliberately lifting the campaign from an actual genocide. They have turned Holocaust remembrance against the Jewish state.

This is a moral perversion.

The Holocaust was a state-directed project of extermination whose goal was the disappearance of the Jewish people. Israel’s war against Hamas is a war against an armed movement that invaded Israel, massacred civilians, took hostages, and openly declares its intention to destroy the Jewish state.

Equating those realities with the Holocaust is not simply immoral but antisemitic. Borrowing the language developed to remember murdered Jews is not simply appropriation but sadistic.

Names, Not Numbers was created to ensure that the victims of history’s greatest campaign of anti-Jewish extermination would never be reduced to statistics. To take that language and deploy it as part of a campaign that casts Israel as Nazi Germany not only vilifies Israel unjustly but negates the Holocaust of its meaning and mocks the memory of a million murdered Jewish children.

From Jesus the Jew to Gaza: The Vatican’s Dangerous Narrative

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For years, pro-Palestinian activists have promoted the false claim that Jesus was a Palestinian.

Jesus was a Jew, born to a Jewish family, living in the Jewish homeland, speaking to Jewish audiences, teaching from the Hebrew Bible, and making pilgrimages to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The word “Palestine” was not even the name of the province during His lifetime. The Roman renaming of Judea to Syria Palaestina occurred about a century after His death.

Yet the claim persists because it serves an ahistorical but political purpose: If Jesus can be transformed from a Jew into a Arab, then the central figure of Christianity can be detached from Jewish history and reinserted into a modern political narrative. Suddenly, Jews are no longer obvious indigenous people in the Holy Land, but Arabs – who did not arrive en masse to region for another six centuries – are the real Jews.

The recent Vatican News article about Gaza takes that process one step further.

The article does not explicitly call Jesus a Palestinian. Instead, it wraps a Gazan narrative in the language of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. Gaza becomes the tomb. The refugee becomes the suffering servant. The journey out becomes resurrection.

The symbolism is unmistakable.

For centuries, Christians looked to the suffering of Jesus as a uniquely sacred story. Increasingly, anti-Israel agitators are attempting to woo parts of the Christian world by recasting that story through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Palestinian Arabs occupying the role once reserved for Christ Himself.

The war in Gaza did not begin with suffering descending from heaven. It began with decisions made by thousands of Gazans. Hamas invaded Israel, murdered civilians and took hostages. Hamas launched a war that it knew would bring devastating consequences to Gaza as it hid it tunnels and refused to let women and children enter the shelters.

Does that resemble Jesus?

Genocidal psychopaths are being transformed into the innocent sufferer. The political and military context disappears from view. Agency gives way to symbolism.

What makes this especially troubling for many Jews is that the institution promoting this narrative is no longer just fringe anti-Israel groups or university protest movements.

It is the Vatican itself.

For two thousand years, the Church has wrestled with the consequences of separating Christianity from its Jewish roots. In recent decades, Catholic-Jewish relations made enormous progress by reaffirming the Jewishness of Jesus and Christianity’s historical connection to the Jewish people.

That progress is undermined when contemporary narratives replace Jesus the Jew with a new symbolic figure: the Palestinian sufferer who cheered Jews being burned alive.

Let Israel Live

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Israel is home to nearly 10 million people.

They are Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bedouin, and others. They are children going to school, parents going to work, soldiers defending their country, and grandparents hoping to see their families thrive. Like people everywhere, they seek safety, opportunity, dignity, and peace.

Those aspirations should not be controversial.

Yet few nations are asked to justify their existence as frequently as Israel.

That is why the phrase “Let Israel Live” matters.

At its most basic level, it is an affirmation of a simple principle: a people has the right to live in security in its homeland. Israeli children should not grow up under the threat of rockets, missiles, terrorism, kidnappings, or calls for their destruction. Families should not have to wonder whether a bus ride, a concert, or a holiday celebration will become the target of violence.

In October 2003 – well before there was a blockade of Gaza – 89% of Palestinian Arabs supported killing Jewish civilians in the West Bank and Gaza; 54% supported killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel. Gazans were much more blood-thirsty than West Bank Arabs.

Security is not a privilege. It is a right.

To say “Let Israel Live” is to recognize that Israelis are human beings rather than symbols in a political debate. Discussions about Israel often revolve around governments, borders, diplomacy, and conflict. Lost in those discussions are the millions of ordinary people whose lives are directly affected by them.

Member of Hamas in Israeli kibbutz after killing family

The phrase carries an even deeper meaning for the Jewish people.

For centuries, Jews lived at the mercy of rulers, empires, and majorities. Again and again they were expelled, persecuted, or denied the ability to determine their own future. Israel represents the restoration of Jewish self-determination in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.

To say “Let Israel Live” is therefore not merely a statement about physical security. It is an affirmation that the Jewish people, like all peoples, possess the right to govern themselves and shape their own destiny.

The phrase “Let Israel Live” asks for nothing extraordinary.

It asks that Israel be granted what every people seeks for itself: the right to live, the right to flourish, and the right to exist in peace.

Solomon’s Pools and the Battle to Replace the Builders

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The Palestinian Authority has announced plans to transform Solomon’s Pools, between Bethlehem and Efrat, into a major Palestinian tourist, cultural, and religious destination. The project includes a mosque, tourism infrastructure, educational programs, international advocacy campaigns, and efforts to preserve what officials describe as the site’s historical and demographic character.

The irony is hard to miss.

Solomon’s Pools are among the most important surviving engineering works of ancient Judea. Built during the Second Temple period, the reservoirs and aqueducts supplied water to Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple. Their existence is evidence of the Jewish civilization that built and governed Jerusalem over two thousand years ago, that grew the city towards the end of the Second Temple period to approximately 50,0000 people.

Mazar, A.A. 2002. Survey of the aqueducts to Israel. In The Aqueducts of Israel, ed. Amit D., Patrich J., and Hirschfeld Y., 212–244.

Without Jewish Jerusalem, there would be no Solomon’s Pools.

Yet Palestinian officials speak of preserving the site’s historical character while proposing changes that have no connection to the history that made the site significant.

  • If the goal is to preserve the site’s historical character, why alter it?
  • If the goal is to protect its demographic character, what demographic character existed when the reservoirs were built?

The people who built Solomon’s Pools were Jews. The reservoirs were built to serve a Jewish capital. The aqueducts carried water to the Jewish Temple. The site’s significance is inseparable from ancient Jewish Jerusalem.

Solomon’s Pools c. 1890

So why place a mosque at a reservoir built by Jews to serve Jewish Jerusalem while claiming to preserve its historical character?

The answer appears in the language of the project itself. Officials speak of strengthening Palestinian presence, reinforcing Palestinian identity, and mobilizing international support for Palestinian claims.

This is not preservation. This is a battle of historical replacement.

A generation from now, visitors may encounter a mosque, Palestinian tourism facilities, and Palestinian historical narratives. What may become increasingly distant is the reason the site exists at all: it was built by Jews to serve Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people.

“We know that the prime Zionist goal is emptying this land of its Christians and Muslims. They [the Jews] don’t want anyone here other than themselves. The Christians before the Muslims, because the Christians were here on this land before the Muslims… the Christian is the brother of the Muslim. They celebrate together, suffer together, live together, work together, and fight together against their enemy, because we have been the owners of this land since this land’s existence… We will remain in this land forever, while the attackers [the Jews] have no place in Jerusalem and no place here.” – Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas March 2023

That is how historical replacement works. The monument is not destroyed. The identity of its builders is replaced.

Solomon’s Pools stand as evidence of Jewish statehood, Jewish engineering, and Jewish life in the land of Israel long before the rise of Christianity, Islam, or modern Palestinian nationalism.

Solomon’s Pools is located off Road 60, between Efrat and Bethlehem

Palestinians’ nationalism is being built on erasing Jewish history and heritage. Today, it is clearly evident at Solomon’s Pools.

The Missing Jews at Tikvah’s Celebration of America

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The Tikvah Society recently gathered in lower Manhattan to celebrate America’s 250th birthday and make the Jewish case for American exceptionalism.

It was an impressive gathering. Jonathan Silver moderated a conversation between Ruth Wisse, Bret Stephens, and Eric Cohen. Yet as the evening unfolded, a question lingered:

Who was missing?

Not from the audience, but from the conversation itself.

The answer matters because the people in the room represent a remarkably small slice of both America and American Jewry. Jews comprise roughly 6 million people in a nation of 330 million (1.8%). Within American Jewry, the Modern Orthodox and strongly Zionist non-Orthodox communities that dominate much of American Jewish intellectual life represent only a fraction of the next generation. And the attendees represented the most engaged of that small sliver.

The setting itself made the omission more striking. The discussion took place in the very neighborhood where some of the foundational events of the American Republic unfolded. Within walking distance stand the sites of Washington’s inauguration, the first Congress, and the earliest experiments in American self-government. Yet for an event dedicated to celebrating America, surprisingly little attention was paid to the place itself.

American flags on Fifth Avenue (photo: First One Through)

Instead, the conversation focused on the future of Jews, universities, religion, and politics.

The panelists disagreed on important questions. Wisse argued that Jewish unity is not paramount if unity comes at the expense of conviction: better a smaller community of committed Jews than a larger one saturated in ambivalence. Stephens returned to a theme he has emphasized before: stop obsessing over the haters and invest in Jewish education. Cohen broadened the argument, suggesting that both Jewish and Christian religious education are essential to strengthening America itself. The country’s experiment with secularism, he argued, has weakened the civic and moral foundations on which the Republic depends.

Jonathan Silver, Eric Cohen, Bret Stephens and Ruth Wisse address audience at Tikvah Society event on June 9, 2026 in New York City (photo: First One Through)

Both Stephens and Cohen spoke favorably about Chabad. It is not difficult to see why. Chabad has become one of the few institutions capable of reaching Jews across virtually every level of observance. The Rebbe’s army continues to grow because it understands something many institutions have forgotten: people are attracted to confidence, purpose, and personal relationships. Tikvah has absorbed this – it is curious how it plans on applying it.

Education

The discussion of education was compelling. Nothing is more important than good teachers, and few things are more destructive than bad ones. The panelists lamented the continuing flow of Jewish philanthropy into institutions such as Columbia University, where many faculty members and students openly disparage Zionism, America, and increasingly Jews themselves.

Yet the evening largely avoided a more uncomfortable reality.

In the greater New York area, roughly 490,000 Jewish students attend K-12 schools. Only about 40,000 (8.2%) are found in the Modern Orthodox and Zionist day-school ecosystem (“The 8%”) that forms the backbone of many organizations such as Tikvah. The largest and fastest-growing populations are elsewhere. The majority remain in public and secular schools. Even more significant is the extraordinary growth of Chassidic and Yeshivish communities, which now educate approximately 145,000 students (“30% and Growing”).

Those numbers matter.

Ultra-Orthodox

A strategy centered solely on strengthening the already committed may preserve one segment of Jewish life. It does not answer the larger demographic question facing American Jewry. The central challenge is will Tikvah and “The 8%” engage the overwhelming majority of Jewish children who are either in public schools or in the rapidly growing ultra-Orthodox world.

The same demographic blind spot appeared later in the discussion. Cohen argued that religious Jews and religious Christians should work more closely together to defend the values that built America. There is logic to that argument. Tikvah itself appears to be moving in that direction through its decision to award its Herzl Prize to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, one of Israel’s most outspoken Christian supporters.

Yet there is a striking irony here. As Jewish leaders search for allies among millions of religious Christians, they overlook the “30% and Growing” communities. Leaders commend Chabad for successful outreach to the secular but don’t consider building bridges to the Chasidic and Yeshivish communities, and engaging the majority of students in public and secular schools.

Public Schools

The challenge facing American Jewry is therefore not simply how to build alliances with Christians who share Jewish concerns. It is also how to build relationships among Jews whose lives increasingly unfold in separate educational, cultural, and social worlds.

The same issue applies to America’s educational crisis. If America is worth saving, public schools matter. Any serious defense of American exceptionalism must include an effort to improve the institutions educating most American children. Reforming public education should not be viewed as somebody else’s problem. It is central to the future of both America and American Jewry.

American Jews need to become highly engaged in local school boards. They need to help moderate and defend the institutions form the worst influences which are overwhelming America’s public schools, poisoning America’s future. The evening was silent on this crucial point.

Universities

The conversation about universities also requires greater precision.

Harvard is not a monolith. Columbia is not a monolith. Administrations, trustees, faculty, students, and donors often have different interests and agendas. Too often Jewish philanthropists write nine-figure checks in exchange for buildings bearing their names. It is a poor investment.

The activists and professors who dominate many campuses are not impressed by another Jewish donor’s name on a wall. In some cases, they actively mock the very people who funded the buildings in which they teach.

A better approach would be to invest in people rather than structures: scholars, faculty, teachers, fellowships, civic education programs, and scholarships for students committed to the values that made America successful. Buildings create monuments. Educators create generations.

AreaTikvah ApproachRealityBetter Tactic
Ultra-OrthodoxIgnore. Focus on Christian groupsFastest growing population Engage, perhaps via important issues for both like public funding for religious schools
Public SchoolsUnaddressedLargest current segmentEngage school boards
UniversitiesDon’t fund or send students / make new onesStill prevalent and dominantRedirect contributions

Perhaps the most important lesson from the evening is that preserving American exceptionalism requires more than celebrating it.

American exceptionalism was never simply a belief that America was superior. At its best, it reflected an understanding that liberty is fragile and must be constantly renewed by citizens willing to sacrifice for something larger than themselves.

The people gathered in that room care deeply about America and about the future of the Jewish people. Their commitment is admirable. But commitment alone is not enough. The arithmetic cannot be ignored.

A movement centered on “The 8%” in a community of 1.8% of Americans (0.15%) cannot secure the future.

The challenge is larger than preserving one vision of Jewish life. It is rebuilding the institutions that form Americans in the first place: families, schools, synagogues, churches, civic organizations, and local communities. That is where outreach to BOTH Christian and Ultra-Orthodox groups matters.

And that work begins with Humble Faith. Humble faith built the America being celebrated in lower Manhattan. Humble faith may also be the only way to bridge the growing divides within the Jewish community itself. As we search for a better America, American Jews may first need to rediscover one another.

From Salute to Celebrate to Am Yisrael: The Next Chapter of New York’s Israel Parade

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The children who dominate New York’s Israel parade are no longer the children who dominate Jewish education.

Each spring, Fifth Avenue fills with students from Modern Orthodox and Religious Zionist schools waving Israeli flags, singing Hebrew songs, and celebrating the Jewish state. Yet these students represent only a small fraction of Jewish children in the New York metropolitan area. The largest group of Jewish children attends public and secular private schools. The largest group attending Jewish schools is Chassidic and Yeshivish.

Jewish yeshiva day school students and faculty march up Fifth Avenue in New York City’s Israel parade, May 31, 2026 (photo: First One Through)

That reality raises an important question about the future of one of American Jewry’s most visible public events.

The parade’s own history reflects the evolution of American Jewish identity.

When it was founded in 1964, it was called the Youth Salute to Israel Parade. The name reflected its era. Israel was only sixteen years old. The Holocaust was still within living memory. American Jews were not merely celebrating Israel; they were standing with it.

In 2011, the event became the Celebrate Israel Parade. Israel was no longer a struggling young state. It was a global technology center, a military power, and home to millions of Jews. The emphasis shifted from solidarity to celebration.

After October 7, the parade adopted a third name: Israel Day on Fifth.

The parade’s three names trace the evolution of American Zionism itself. The first generation saluted Israel. The second celebrated Israel.

Today, the challenge is different. Support for Israel can no longer be assumed, and Jewish unity can no longer be taken for granted. The question is whether Israel can continue to serve as a bridge connecting an increasingly diverse Jewish community.

The challenge is particularly visible when looking at Jewish children in the greater NYC area.

The best available estimates suggest that roughly 450,000 to 500,000 Jewish school-age children live in the greater New York metropolitan area. About 170,000 attend Jewish day schools and yeshivot.

Of those, roughly 130,000 to 140,000 attend Chassidic and Yeshivish schools, compared with only 20,000 to 25,000 in Modern Orthodox schools. Outside the day-school world are another 280,000 to 330,000 Jewish children attending public schools, secular private schools, Catholic schools, and other educational settings.

Yet anyone watching the parade could be forgiven for drawing the opposite conclusion.

The schools most visible on Fifth Avenue are overwhelmingly Modern Orthodox and Religious Zionist institutions. They are among the most committed supporters of Israel in American Jewish life. But they represent only a small share of Jewish youth. The fastest-growing segment of Jewish education is Chassidic and Yeshivish. The largest segment of Jewish children overall attends public and secular private schools.

The parade therefore showcases some of the most engaged Jewish children in America, but not necessarily the full spectrum of Jewish youth.

That matters because Israel remains one of the few ideas capable of connecting Jews across denominational, ideological, and educational lines. At a moment when Jewish attachment to Israel is increasingly challenged on college campuses, contested on social media, and questioned in parts of American public life, institutions that connect young Jews to Israel have become more important, not less.

If the goal is Jewish unity in the decades ahead, the parade may need to ask a different question.

Rather than “How do we celebrate Israel?” the question may be “How do we bring the Jewish people together around Israel?”

A future parade organized around Am Yisrael rather than a particular expression of Zionism could create room for every community to participate in its own way.

  • Charedi schools could march under banners celebrating Torah in the Land of Israel.
  • Public-school students could march through camps, youth groups, synagogue programs, and community organizations.
  • Modern Orthodox schools could continue expressing their Religious Zionist vision.
  • Israeli cultural groups, charities, universities, first responders, and innovation organizations would all still have their place.

This would be Am Yisrael Day on Fifth Avenue.

The original parade was created to demonstrate solidarity with a young Jewish state. The next challenge is ensuring that future generations of American Jews remain connected both to Israel and to one another.

Should the future of the parade remain with the niche schools that already fill Fifth Avenue, it will become a symbol of the fragmentation of Israel support even within the Jewish community, let around the broader world. That would not bode well for Jewish New Yorkers or Israel.

The first generation saluted Israel. The second celebrated Israel. The challenge for the third generation is to ensure that Israel remains a force capable of uniting the Jewish people.

The War Against Jewish History. Will Come For Jews

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A lecture on the archaeology of ancient Israel and Judah was supposed to take place at the British Museum this month. Instead, it was postponed after organizers learned that protesters intended to disrupt the event.

The subject was not the Gaza war nor settlements nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It was archaeology.

It has happened before. In 2014, UNESCO canceled an exhibition on the Jewish people’s 3,500-year history in the Land of Israel after objections from Arab states. More recently, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas repeatedly denied that the Jewish Temples stood in Jerusalem, at one point claiming they were actually located in Yemen.

These episodes share a common thread. The dispute is no longer simply about the modern State of Israel nor its policies or actions. It is increasingly about the history of the Jewish people themselves.

Yet the evidence is overwhelming. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah are among the best-documented societies of the ancient Near East. Their existence is attested through inscriptions, seals, coins, manuscripts, monuments, and the records of neighboring civilizations. The British Museum itself houses artifacts that tell this story.

Seal of King Hezekiah found in Jerusalem, around 700 BCE

That is why archaeology poses such a problem for those who seek to portray Jews as foreign interlopers – colonizers – with no ancient connection to the land. Artifacts cannot be pressured into changing their testimony. Every discovery points in the same direction: the Jewish story in the Land of Israel stretches back thousands of years, before the births of Jesus and Mohammed.

Few people would tolerate a museum debating whether ancient Egypt existed or whether Rome stood in Italy. Yet Jewish history is increasingly treated as uniquely negotiable.

Curiously and alarmingly, the protest at the British Museum had a much more immediate backdrop than the current war. This talk was to take place during Jewish Culture Month and the protestors were assembled by an anti-Israel group called “Jewish Artists for Palestine.” The museum’s efforts to highlight Jewish history in the land of Israel during a period of focus on Jewish culture brought out Jewish anti-Israel protestors.

Institutions are backing away from Jewish history and culture with the backing of fringe extremist Jews and anti-Israel Arabs. So basic history becomes debate, and the debate has moved from the policies of the Israeli government to Jews themselves.

The Nazis physically annihilated the Jews of Europe as it sought to place their culture as historical artifacts in museums. Now, museums and institutions seek to erase Jewish history and culture as a prelude to eradicating Jews in the Middle East.

The United Nations and International Law are Antisemitic

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The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism.

For nearly two thousand years, Jews have ended prayers with the hope of returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding what once stood there. It is the location of the First and Second Temples. Jewish longing for Jerusalem is woven into daily prayers, holidays, weddings, and mourning rituals.

Yet major international bodies have passed resolutions referring to the site primarily through its Muslim names while minimizing or omitting its central place in Jewish history. Imagine a resolution discussing the Vatican without mentioning Christianity, or Mecca without mentioning Islam. The absurdity would be obvious.

The issue extends beyond language.

Official United Nations map labeling the Temple Mount as holy only to Muslims

The international community supports a protocol under which Muslims may pray freely on the Temple Mount while Jews are restricted from praying at Judaism’s holiest site. The result is extraordinary: the world’s only Jewish state is expected to enforce a policy under which Jews do not support a basic human right at their holiest location in favor of members of another faith.

The Temple Mount is not merely a religious site. It sits at the heart of a larger question: whether the Jewish people are entitled to the same rights afforded to every other people.

Around the world, international institutions celebrate indigenous peoples reconnecting with ancestral lands, reviving ancient languages, protecting sacred sites, and preserving cultural traditions. Yet only in the case of the Jewish people does a return to the place where their civilization, language, religion, and national identity were born become a form of “colonialism.“

International institutions routinely describe the Temple Mount and the Jewish Quarter as part of “occupied Palestinian territory.” Yet these are the very places where Jewish civilization was born, where the ancient Temples stood, and where Jewish communities lived for centuries.

Jordan’s capture of eastern Jerusalem in 1948 resulted in the expulsion of its Jewish population and the denial of Jewish access to the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, and the Jewish Quarter for nineteen years. It granted citizenship to residents as long as they weren’t Jewish. The UN seemingly liked this. International discussion of the Old City of Jerusalem begins after the expulsion of Jews, as though their absence were the natural condition and their return the disruption.

The same pattern appears in discussions of territory.

The Green Line was never intended to be a permanent border. The 1949 Armistice Agreements explicitly stated that the line was not a political boundary and would not prejudice future negotiations. It was a military ceasefire line drawn after a war.

Yet decades later, much of international law treats that armistice line as though it were a sacred border whose crossing transforms ordinary Jews into international criminals.

A Jew who moves across that line becomes a “settler.” An Arab who moves into the same building does not. The geography is identical. The identity of the resident is what changes.

International institutions frequently oppose changes to the “demographic character” of eastern Jerusalem. But demographic character relative to what date?

The answer is effectively 1949, the year after Jordan captured eastern Jerusalem and expelled every Jew from the Jewish Quarter and surrounding areas. Why should the demographic baseline for justice be the moment immediately following the ethnic cleansing of Jews?

Why not 1980? Why not 2000? Why not today?

Human beings move. Cities evolve. Neighborhoods change.

The only way to preserve a specific demographic snapshot forever is to decide that one particular population must be prevented from returning.

In Jerusalem, that population happens to be Jews.

Then there is the question of refugees.

The same international system that opposes Jews moving into neighborhoods beyond the Green Line frequently endorses claims that millions of Palestinian refugees and descendants should be allowed to settle inside Israel.

Movement in one direction is described as a right. Movement in the other direction is described as a violation of international law.

The asymmetry is impossible to miss.

Every era develops its own vocabulary for antisemitism. In medieval Europe it often spoke the language of theology. In the nineteenth century it spoke the language of race. Today it increasingly speaks the language of international law.

Around the world, international institutions celebrate indigenous peoples reclaiming ancestral lands, reviving ancient languages, protecting sacred sites, and restoring cultural traditions.

Jews have done all of those things.

They returned to the land where their civilization was born. They revived Hebrew from a language of prayer into a language of everyday life. They restored Jewish sovereignty to the city that has stood at the center of Jewish life for three millennia. They reestablished communities at many of their most ancient holy sites.

Yet only in the case of the Jewish people does this story become one of colonialism rather than return.

The Prayer That Never Left Jerusalem

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In 1979, archaeologists excavating a burial cave at Ketef Hinnom, on a hillside overlooking the Old City walls of Jerusalem, discovered two tiny silver scrolls. When carefully unrolled, they revealed words that Jews still recite today.

Ketef Hinnom scrolls

The scrolls, engraved more than 2,600 years ago, contain the priestly blessing from Parshat Naso:

“May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up His face upon you and grant you peace.”

They are the oldest known biblical texts ever discovered.

Every year, Jews encounter these verses when Parshat Naso is read in synagogue. Parents recite them over their children on Friday nights. In Israel, kohanim still stand before congregations every day and deliver the same blessing first commanded to Aaron and his descendants in the wilderness.

What makes the Ketef Hinnom discovery extraordinary is not only its age, but its location.

The silver scrolls were found only a short distance from the Temple Mount, where priests once pronounced these words over the people of Israel. Few archaeological discoveries draw such a direct line across three millennia. The oldest surviving biblical text was found almost within sight of the place where it was commanded to be spoken.

The content of the blessing is equally remarkable. The oldest biblical inscription yet discovered is neither a king’s decree nor a military victory. It is a passage from the Bible that culminates in a single aspiration:

Shalom. Peace.

The prayer asks for blessing, protection, grace, and ultimately peace itself. Those hopes remain as familiar today as they were to the Jerusalem resident who carried the silver amulet twenty-six centuries ago.

The scrolls from Ketef Hinnom remind us that Jerusalem, the Bible, and the pursuit of peace have stood at the center of Jewish life for thousands of years.

“May the Lord bless you and keep you.”

The empires of the ancient world survive in ruins. This blessing survives in a people. 

UK and Canada Sanction Foreign Speech and Ideology. Sometimes

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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.