Category Archives: Middle East Analysis

The Genocide Script Was Written by Iran in 2001

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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.

And Israel had to be recast as uniquely illegitimate despite being the most liberal, democratic and pluralistic society for a thousand miles in any direction.

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.

AP: Have I Told You Lately That Israel Is Racist?

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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.

AP’s linguistic stacking is relentless:

“ultranationalist Jews.”
“racist slogans.”
“violent confrontations.”
“hard-line government.”
“provocative visit.”
“inflame tensions.”

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.

Nobody Protests the Military Bases in Germany

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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, Japan
Ramstein 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 Korea
Yokosuka 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)

CountryEstimated Annual CostNature of Presence
Japan$12B–$15BMassive naval, air and Marine presence
Germany$10B–$13BNATO logistics and command hub
South Korea$6B–$8BConstant deterrence against North Korea
Qatar$4B–$7BCENTCOM and Middle East air operations
Italy$3B–$5BMediterranean and Africa operations
United Kingdom$2B–$4BNATO, intelligence and airpower support
Estimated Overseas Total$60B–$80B+ annuallyHundreds 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.

The Polls Tell a Very Different Story About Israeli Arabs

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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.

The polling suggests otherwise.

A September 2024 joint survey by Tel Aviv University and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 72% of Israeli Arabs supported a two-state solution. That number was substantially higher than among Israeli Jews and even higher than among Palestinians living in the territories.

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

That does not mean tensions have disappeared. The 2025 Israeli Democracy Index from the Israel Democracy Institute found Arab Israelis continue to report significant discrimination and identify Jewish-Arab relations as the country’s deepest social divide.

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.

That is a transformative distinction.

The divergence becomes even clearer when comparing Israeli Arab polling with polling from Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.

IssueIsraeli ArabsPalestinians in Gaza/West Bank
Support for joining Israeli governing coalitionsStrong majority supportGenerally reject Israeli political framework
Support for non-military national service75.8% among Arab Israeli 12th gradersNot applicable
Feeling of “shared destiny” with Jewish Israelis after Oct. 757.8% said war strengthened itPolling shows sharply increased hostility after war
Preferred prioritiesCrime reduction, housing, education, infrastructure, jobsConflict, statehood, war recovery, resistance politics
Support for two-state solution72%Lower and declining in recent polling
Participation in Israeli institutionsIncreasingly normalizedGenerally viewed as illegitimate
Attitudes toward Hamas after Oct. 7Little evidence of broad supportSignificantly 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)

Palestinians Have Always Been Anti-American

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For over twenty-five years, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has tracked Palestinian political opinion. Through wars, peace talks, intifadas, and four American presidents, one pattern remains strikingly consistent:

Palestinians have never been broadly pro-American.

That may sound counterintuitive. The United States has spent decades mediating the conflict, funding Palestinian institutions, and pouring diplomatic capital into the region. If goodwill were built by investment alone, the polling should show it.

It does not.

PCPSR rarely asks, Do you like America? Instead, it asks the more revealing questions: Do you trust the United States as a mediator? Do you want American involvement? Do you believe Washington is fair?

Across twenty-five years, the answers tell the story.

Palestinians burn American and Israeli flags

After the collapse of the 2000 Camp David Summit and the violence of the Second Intifada, positive views of America’s political role sat around 20 to 35 percent. Negative views often exceeded 60 percent. America was seen less as a broker than as Israel’s protector.

That became the baseline.

The mid-2000s brought modest movement. After Mahmoud Abbas replaced Yasser Arafat, some Palestinians supported stronger American engagement. Yet the support was tactical hoping that Washington might pressure Israel. That did not translate into trust.

Then came the only real exception.

Barack Obama produced the highest pro-American opening in the polling record. In 2009, roughly 60 percent supported a stronger American role in negotiations.

Washington read that as goodwill. The polling suggests something narrower: hope that Obama would pressure Israel.

Even at that high point, majorities still believed America fundamentally favored Israel. The atmosphere improved. The structure did not.

By Obama’s second term, positive sentiment had fallen back into the 20 to 30 percent range.

Then Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and trust collapsed into single digits.

In some surveys, roughly 90 percent rejected American mediation. The illusion of neutrality disappeared. America was no longer seen as merely tilted toward Israel, but openly aligned with Israeli claims to Jerusalem.

Palestinian Arabs burn American flag in 1998

Joe Biden lowered the temperature but did not restore trust. The numbers recovered slightly, climbing back into the teens and twenties.

“Regardless of how great the power of Israel, America, and the world may be, in the end they will disappear, while we are remaining.” – Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki, April 2021

Then came the October 7 attacks and the war that followed. With Washington backing Israel militarily and diplomatically, Palestinian hostility surged again toward its floor: single-digit trust, overwhelming distrust.

The pattern is unmistakable.

When America pressures Israel, Palestinian approval rises. When America stands with Israel, it collapses.

For twenty-five years, Palestinians have periodically wanted America involved. They have never wanted America embraced.

Not under George W. Bush. Not under Obama. Not under Trump. Not under Biden.

The names changed. The percentages moved. The structure held.

America, in Palestinian political opinion, has never been a friend. Only a force—useful when applying pressure, hostile when withholding it.

After a quarter century of polling, that may be the clearest finding of all.

When the Status Quo Becomes the Threat

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For decades the argument over the Jewish Temple Mount has been framed in one direction only: Jewish prayer must be restricted because Jewish prayer may trigger Muslim violence. The legal scaffolding for that argument is old and sturdy. The British Mandate for Palestine built it directly into Article 13, promising free exercise of worship while “ensuring the requirements of public order and decorum.” Later arrangements, including Oslo, preserved the same operating logic in practical form, with Israel retaining security authority even while leaving day-to-day religious administration to the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf.

That logic has governed the Mount for a century.

Israeli police block a Jew from ascending steps to the Temple Mount at the Cotton Gate in November 2025 (photo: First One Through)

But what happens when the status quo itself becomes the source of disorder?

This is the question no one wants to ask.

Every few weeks, Palestinian media like WAFA warns that “the Al Aqsa Mosque is in danger” from “radical settlers.” The phrase has become ritualized, almost liturgical in Palestinian political culture. A Jew walking quietly on the Mount becomes a provocation. A Jew moving his lips in silent prayer becomes an assault. A Jew bowing his head becomes a threat to Islam itself.

That rhetoric has had a practical effect. It has transformed Jewish prayer into a public order problem.

But there is another side to this equation.

What if the continued suppression of Jewish prayer is itself becoming a generator of instability? What if the status quo, designed to contain conflict, has begun producing it?

A legal order built to preserve peace cannot become a machine for preserving grievance.

Under the British Mandate, the answer is surprisingly clear. Article 13 protects “existing rights,” but only while ensuring public order. That means the status quo is protected only insofar as it serves order. If preserving inherited arrangements creates recurring confrontation, the law and history allows recalibration.

That was the hidden flexibility in the Mandate and ongoing governing principle. Status quo is presumptive; order is mandatory.

Oslo is even more direct, though in a different way. Oslo does not sanctify the Temple Mount arrangement. It simply leaves it in place while preserving Israeli security. That means if Israeli authorities conclude that the present arrangement itself is a long term security risk, they possess the legal architecture to modify access, prayer rules, and crowd management.

The Old City of Jerusalem including the Jewish Temple Mount/ Al Aqsa Compound. Thousands of Jews can be sound in the Western Wall Plaza, unable to ascend onto the Temple Mount.

The irony is brutal.

For decades the legal doctrine has been used to suppress Jewish prayer because Muslim violence was threatened. But if that suppression itself produces radicalization, frustration, and growing confrontation, the same legal doctrine could justify expanding Jewish prayer in order to restore order.

The law cuts both ways.

“The status quo” sounds ancient and immovable. In truth it is neither. It is a management system. And management systems are judged by outcomes.

If a system preserves peace, it earns its legitimacy. If a system preserves resentment and recurrent crisis, its legal rationale weakens.

The day may soon be arriving that structured, regulated Jewish prayer may become the stabilizing mechanism rather than the destabilizing one.

A designated time. A designated place. A formalized right.

The central legal truth of the Temple Mount has always been misunderstood. The governing principle was never the status quo itself. The governing principle was order.

The Genocidal Chant of “Globalize the Intifada”

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There is a difference between being hated and being hunted. Most people understand that instinctively.

A slur is hatred made verbal. The N-word for Blacks, like “k*ke,” for Jews, carries generations of contempt. It degrades and dehumanizes. When someone says it, there is no confusion about what is being communicated. The message is brutally simple: you are despised.

Ugly as that is, it is at least honest.

But history teaches that some language goes beyond contempt. Some language carries the memory of violence and the method of violence.

For Black Americans, the image of a noose is not abstract. It is inseparable from lynching, terror, and public spectacle. A crowd marching with nooses would never be defended as harmless symbolism or political expression. Black Americans would hear it exactly as history taught them to hear it: as a threat.

That is where Jews place the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

The First Intifada was marked by riots, Molotov cocktails, stabbings, and attacks directed at Israeli Jews. The Second Intifada escalated into systematic suicide bombings: buses blown apart, cafés destroyed, restaurants turned into funeral scenes. Jewish civilians were the battlefield.

Arabs bombing Israeli buses during Second Intifada

Then came what Israelis grimly called the “car intifada” of 2014–2016: vehicles driven into crowds at bus stops and train stations. After that, the “stabbing intifada”: knives pulled in streets, supermarkets, and neighborhoods, ordinary objects turned into weapons for killing Jews.

Palestinian cartoon directing Arabs to run over Israelis in 2015

These were not abstractions. These were methods.

That matters because when someone chants “globalize the intifada,” Jews do not hear a vague political slogan. They hear the globalization of those methods.

Globalize the bus bombing. Globalize the car ramming. Globalize the stabbing. Globalize the killing of Jews.

That is why the phrase lands differently than a slur. A slur says: I hate you. “Globalize the intifada” says: the violence used against your people in Israel should be used against your people everywhere.

And this is no longer merely a Jewish interpretation. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said this week that those chanting “globalise the intifada” should face prosecution, explicitly describing it as rhetoric calling for terrorism against Jews. That recognition matters because it affirms what Jews have been saying for years: history gives words their meaning, and violent history gives them their menace.  

“If you stand alongside people who say globalise the intifada, you are calling for terrorism against Jews – and people who use that phrase should be prosecuted. It is racism, extreme racism and it has left a minority community in this country scared, intimidated, wondering if they belong.” – Sir Kier Starmer

Society already understands this principle elsewhere. A noose is not “just rope.” A burning cross is not “just wood.” History made them symbols of violence.

History made “intifada” one too.

And asking Jews to pretend otherwise is no different than asking Black Americans to pretend a noose is just a piece of rope.

Which Arab Murders Count?

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Some murders become international incidents. Others become statistics.

That is what makes the numbers in Israel and the West Bank so revealing.

As of early May 2026, roughly 98 Israeli Arabs have been murdered this year, overwhelmingly by fellow Arabs in gang violence, organized crime, and clan feuds. In that same period, about 16 Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) in the West Bank were killed by West Bank Jews.

The deaths are a tragedy. In each location.

Among the dead in Israel were a young Arab man and his fiancée in Yarka, shot dead together just weeks before their wedding. They were building a home, planning a life, and in a moment both were gone.

Their murders did not trigger an emergency session at the United Nations Human Rights Council. No international campaign formed around their names. No protests filled campuses demanding justice.

But the ratio matters.

For every SAP killed by a West Bank Jew this year, more than six Israeli Arabs have been killed by fellow Arabs.

Yet only one category reliably commands international attention.

When Jews kill Arabs, the broader human rights ecosystem reacts swiftly. The UN warns of “ethnic cleansing.” Condemnations follow. Activists mobilize.

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a side event during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva on March 26, 2024.
Photo: Reuters / Denis Balibouse

When Arabs kill Arabs, the deaths rarely travel beyond the local crime blotter.

If Arab life matters, it should matter regardless of who pulls the trigger.

Israelis protest in Haifa, Israel, against the crime wave impacting their community, on August 31, 2025. An estimated 252 Israeli Arabs were killed by fellow Arabs in 2025. (photo: Kareem Khadder/CNN)

A human rights system that treats one dead Arab as an international crisis and six dead Arabs as a local inconvenience is not organized around human dignity.

It is organized around narrative.

Somewhere in Yarka, two families are mourning a wedding that will never happen.

And the world moved on because no Jew could be blamed.

The Most Important Debris To Clear in Gaza is Ideological

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The world now knows what Gaza costs to rebuild: $71.4 billion. What it still does not know is what Gaza is supposed to become.

That is the number in the 2026 Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA), produced by the United Nations with the World Bank and the European Union in April 2026. It is a vast and meticulous ledger of destruction, broken into sectors, sub-sectors, losses, and needs. It is also a revealing document, because the table tells you what the world thinks Gaza is.

A physical problem.

  • Housing: $16.21 billion.
  • Health: $10.03 billion.
  • Agriculture: $10.49 billion.
  • Commerce and industry: $8.99 billion.
  • Social protection: $5.78 billion.
  • Education: $4.71 billion.
  • Water and sanitation: $4.24 billion.
  • Energy: $2.73 billion.
  • Transport: $1.54 billion.

Total direct damages: $35.2 billion.
Total economic losses: $22.7 billion.
Total reconstruction needs: $71.4 billion.

RDNA assessment of cost to rebuild Gaza, April 2026

It is a complete inventory of physical devastation. Buildings crushed into powder. Water systems ruptured. Hospitals crippled. Roads fractured. Farms destroyed. Markets emptied.

The UN has priced the debris.

It has even priced the removal of the debris: $1.7 billion just to clear more than 68 million metric tons of wreckage.

But the table reveals something else.

There is no line item for civic reconstruction. That is the missing category. There is something for “social protection” and even calls to improve “gender equality, and social inclusion,” but a refocus on building a healthy culture is absent.

RDNA report on rebuilding Gaza, April 2026

Not because it is unimportant. Because it is the hard. And the public may still be unwilling to accept it.

Civic reconstruction is the rebuilding of the political and social architecture of a society: education, norms, legitimacy, coexistence, rule of law, pluralism, and the delegitimization of political violence as a governing method.

Without it, reconstruction is replacement. There will be new buildings but the same “deformity” of ideology, to quote James Zogby in his testimony to the United Nations in June 2023.

Civic reconstruction requires power. And commitment. The UN has frameworks, funding channels, and institutional tools. It does not have sovereignty. It cannot rewrite a society by decree.

And that only makes the omission more consequential.

The UN report itself hints at the deeper crisis. It states that Gaza’s human development has been pushed back 77 years, with the Human Development Index projected to collapse to 0.339, the lowest level ever recorded.

Human development is not just electricity and sewage. It is the civic conditions that make human flourishing possible.

The report includes gender equality. Social inclusion. Employment. Governance.

All necessary.

But governance itself is budgeted at just $530 million, and that is administrative. Municipal function, institutional capacity and service delivery. Not civic transformation.

That distinction matters.

There is no budget line for:

  • coexistence education
  • curriculum reform
  • dismantling political incitement
  • independent civil society
  • women’s civic and legal empowerment beyond emergency protection
  • minority rights
  • ideological deradicalization

That is not a technical omission. It is the central question.

Postwar Germany was rebuilt through more than roads and housing. It went through total defeat, disarmament, a state monopoly on force, educational overhaul, and the systematic delegitimization of the ideology that had led it into catastrophe.

Postwar Japan followed the same path: constitutional redesign, political restructuring, educational transformation, and a new civic contract.

The physical debris mattered. But so did the ideological debris.

And ideological debris is harder to clear.

It does not sit in the streets. It lives in textbooks, political institutions, media ecosystems, religious messaging, and the stories a society tells itself about violence and legitimacy.

That debris remains.

The UN has measured Gaza’s physical debris. It has priced the roads, the hospitals, the pipes, the farms, the power grid. What it has not priced is the ideological wreckage underneath them.

That is the danger.

Physical reconstruction without civic reconstruction does not produce peace. It produces restoration.

And restoration means returning to the conditions that made destruction inevitable.

Schools can teach coexistence or sanctify martyrdom.
Hospitals can preserve life or sustain armed rule.
Roads can carry commerce or carry war.

A rebuilt Gaza can become the foundation of peace or the staging ground for the next war.

You can clear 68 million tons of rubble and still leave the most dangerous ruins standing.

A Culture of Building and a Culture of Destruction

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Two words sit on the same date and define the cultures of the respective people.

Yom Ha’atzmaut – Independence Day in Hebrew – marks the moment a dispersed people executed a long-planned return to sovereignty. The modern engine was Zionism, but the impulse runs far deeper. A people with an ancient memory chose to translate that memory into institutions, borders, and power. The declaration in 1948 was the culmination of a project that built governing bodies, an economy, and a military before the flag went up. It was construction with intent.

Across the same date sits Nakba – “catastrophe” in Arabic. The word is used to describe a collapse that followed a war. In 1947, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine offered a fork in the road: two states, side by side. Jewish leadership accepted a constrained map and moved to build. Arab leadership rejected the partition and moved to prevent a Jewish state from coming into existence in “any part of Palestine.” Local forces and surrounding Arab states chose war at the point of birth.

This is the hinge that still carries the weight.

One side organized for sovereignty and then defended it. The other side organized to block that sovereignty and then defined its politics around that goal. The result was not an abstract failure. It was a battlefield outcome with lasting consequences.

The pattern did not end in 1948. It hardened into a language and culture of rejection—of undoing the Jewish state rather than existing alongside it—reappears across decades, sometimes dressed in diplomacy, often in violence. When you look at public opinion at key moments, you see the persistence of that horizon. In surveys like those conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in June 2023 (before the October 7 massacre), the majority of Arabs in West Bank and Gaza expressed confidence that Israel would not endure to its centennial and endorsed continued “resistance” (violence) as the path forward. The expectation is not coexistence after compromise. It is reversal over time.

A standard question in Palestinian quarterly polls like the one above (Q67) asked whether people supported “armed attacks against Israeli civilians.” In Gaza, the percentage was 76.7%

This is where the narratives diverge in a way that matters for the future.

The Israeli story is anchored in a completed act of construction that must be maintained. It argues from existence. It invests in capacity—military, economic, technological—because survival depends on it. It measures success in what stands and functions.

The dominant current in Palestinian politics has been anchored in an unfinished act of negation. It argues from a horizon in which Israel is temporary. It invests in leverage—diplomatic pressure, internationalization, and violence—because the objective is to change the end state rather than to consolidate its own future alongside it.

You can trace every failed negotiation back to that split. Offers are read through different endgames. Concessions are weighed against different destinations. One side asks what it takes to secure a state that already exists. The other asks what it takes to transform the map.

There is a moral discomfort here that people try to smooth over with softer language. It doesn’t hold. History keeps intruding with hard edges. A decision to reject partition and wage war in 1948 set a trajectory. Repeated bets on pressure and violence to force a different outcome have reinforced it. Each round that ends without destroying Israel strengthens the very state the strategy set out to undo.

A century is a long time in politics and a short time in memory. The Jewish project marked its independence by building a country that persists. The opposing project has too often measured progress by how close it can get to erasing that country. That is a strategy that has not delivered a state.

The calendar will keep bringing the same day back. One side will celebrate a construction that proved durable. The other will revisit a war whose objective still shapes its politics. The future will turn on whether the goal shifts from ending a state to building one of its own.