Category Archives: Middle East Analysis

The Palestinian Clock Has Many Hands

Posted on by
Reply

The Palestinian clock has many hands.

One points to June 1967 for borders, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Another points to 1948 for refugees and their descendants.

Another reaches to 1947, before the United Nations proposed dividing Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

Another reaches to 1917, before the Balfour Declaration endorsed a Jewish national home in Palestine.

And when even that is too late, the clock can be wound back to the Ottoman era, when Palestine was governed by a Muslim empire.

Muslim women prepare to enter the Western Wall Plaza in 2010 (photo: First One Through)

The hands do not need to agree. They serve different purposes.

The President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas has spent decades demonstrating how it works.

1967: The Border Hand

For the borders of a Palestinian state, Abbas is precise.

In his 2016 address to the United Nations, he said the PLO had accepted a Palestinian state on the “4 June 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

He has repeated the formulation for years. In 2014, he called for Palestinian independence over the “entire Palestinian Territory occupied in the 1967 war,” with East Jerusalem as its capital. In 2022, standing beside President Joe Biden, Abbas again called for a Palestinian state “with East Jerusalem as its capital, on the 1967 borders.”

Why June 4, 1967? Look at the picture the clock produces.

There were no Jews living in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Its Jewish residents had been expelled after the Quarter fell to Jordanian forces in 1948. By June 1967, Hebron’s centuries-old Jewish community no longer existed either, evacuated after Palestinian Arabs massacred them in 1929.

Jordanian soldiers destroyed the Hurva Synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem

So June 4, 1967 creates a remarkably convenient baseline. The Jewish communities that exist today in eastern Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout the West Bank disappear from the photograph.

But the Palestinian clock has another hand.

1948: The Refugee Hand

When Abbas talks about Arab refugees, June 1967 suddenly becomes useless. So the clock jumps backward another nineteen years.

In 2021, Abbas appeared before the United Nations holding up the deed to his family’s property and said Palestinians still possess deeds and keys to their former homes. He argued that Palestinian refugees have the right to “return to their homeland” and recover their properties.

In 2025, he was even more explicit. Abbas said there were now more than seven million Palestine refugees and declared that the “right of return” was an inalienable right that Palestinian Arabs “will not forsake.”

Entrance to UNRWA “refugee camp” in Bethlehem with a key on top representing that UNRWA is the portal for descendants of internally displaced Arabs to move into grandparents’ houses in Israel

Watch the hands.

For the territory of a new Palestinian state, the clock says 1967.

For Palestinians claiming homes and property inside Israel, it says 1948.

Apply 1967 consistently and the mass refugee claim reaching into Israel loses its 1948 baseline. Apply 1948 consistently and Jewish communities and property claims erased by the 1967 baseline return to the picture.

The clock cannot stay on either date.

It has to move with the argument.

1947: The Sovereignty Hand

Israel already exists in 1948, a bone in the throat of Palestinian Arabs, or a “painful settlement” to quote Abbas. So the sovereignty hand moves to 1947.

In November of that year, the United Nations proposed partitioning Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. So the clock reaches a moment before Israeli sovereignty.

But international recognition of Jewish national aspirations predates partition by decades.

Move the hand again.

The Holocaust: The Colonial Hand

Abbas wrote his doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial. He dismisses the entire victimization of Jews and argued that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves – and Palestinian Arabs have been forced to pay the price for it.

In an April 2018 speech in Ramallah he said “the reason for the hatred of the Jews is not their religion but their function in society…. So the Jewish question, which was prevalent in all European countries, the anti-Jewish (sentiment) was not because of their religion, but because of their function in society, which had to do with usury, banks, and so on…. So their narrative about coming to this country because of their longing for Zion, or whatever – we’re tired of hearing this. The truth is that this is a colonialist enterprise, aimed at planting a foreign body in this region…”

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, visiting Nazi Germany in 1943

1917: The Zionism Hand

In his 2016 United Nations address, Abbas attacked not the borders created by the 1967 war or the displacement of 1948, but the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

He called it the “notorious Balfour Declaration” and demanded that Britain apologize for the “catastrophes, miseries and injustices” he said it had created.

Look how far the clock has moved. A century.

A time when there was no modern state of Israel. There was no 1948 refugee crisis. There was no occupation resulting from the 1967 war. There wasn’t even a British Mandate for Palestine yet.

The objection has reached the international recognition of Jewish national aspirations themselves.

Still too late.

The Ottoman Hand

Before Balfour, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. Even though there was no sovereign Palestinian Arab state, the land was totally controlled by Muslims. Jews remained a small minority.

Abbas’ longtime adviser on Religious and Islamic Affairs and the PA’s Supreme Shari’ah Judge, Mahmoud al-Habbash said in 2014 that “The entire land of Palestine is [Islamic] waqf and is blessed land… it is prohibited to sell, bestow ownership or facilitate the occupation of even a millimeter of it.” In 2016 he said about Jerusalem “We cannot allow or agree to it being under sovereignty that is not Muslim sovereignty.”

Israeli police block Jewish man from ascending to the Temple Mount because he is a Jew, in Novemnber 2025 (photo: First One Through)

Abbas referenced the Ottoman period in a speech in 2014 when he said “Jews, Christians and Muslims have lived peacefully together in Palestine for centuries. So peace between religions runs through the heart of the most sacred City in the world, Jerusalem. Peace between the world’s religions runs through Jericho the Oldest City on Earth. Peace between the world’s religions runs through Palestine.”

Hamas’s 1988 foundational charter makes the point clear: “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife.”

Watch the Hands

There is one time the Palestinian clock rarely points to: today. Because today leaves too many Jews in the picture.

Jews live in Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout the West Bank. Israel exists as a Jewish state. Jewish sovereignty and self-determination are facts rather than historical proposals.

To say openly that Jews should be removed from those places, that the Jewish state is illegitimate or that Jews should be denied national rights would make the prejudice difficult to disguise.

History offers a more respectable vocabulary. Just choose an earlier date when the particular Jews, Jewish sovereignty or Jewish rights inconvenient to the argument were absent.

That is why the Palestinian clock needs so many hands. No single date erases everything neatly.

History provides the dates. Antisemitism chooses the hand.

Related:

Mahmoud Abbas’s Particular Anti-Zionist Holocaust Denial (July 2017)

Sanctioned for Bidding to Build Homes

Posted on by
Reply

An Israeli construction company sees a government tender to build residential housing. It prepares a bid and submits it.

It does not have to win the tender or break ground. Merely submitting the bid would be enough to expose it to American sanctions.

Senators Chris Coons (Delaware), Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), Ron Wyden (Oregon) and Ruben Gallego (Arizona) have introduced legislation targeting construction in E1, the area between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim. The legislation would impose sanctions on foreign persons involved in construction there, expressly including those “submitting a bid for E1 tenders.”

Warren makes the consequence explicit: those who facilitate construction in E1 should understand that they “risk losing access to the U.S. financial system.”

That is an extraordinary penalty for bidding to build homes in an allied country.

And the piece of land that has generated this response is remarkably small. E1 covers roughly 12 square kilometers, or 4.6 square miles. The entire West Bank is roughly 5,655 square kilometers. E1 therefore represents about 0.2% of the West Bank—roughly one five-hundredth of its territory.

And that sliver of undeveloped land has generated calls to reach for one of America’s most powerful economic weapons.

The United States has long used its dominance of the international financial system as one of its most powerful foreign-policy tools. Iran has faced sanctions over its nuclear program and other activities. North Korea has been subjected to extensive sanctions over its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. Russia has faced sweeping sanctions connected to its military aggression.

American sanctions can also reach companies outside those countries. Do business with an American adversary and a foreign company may discover that it has to choose between that relationship and access to the American financial system.

Congress has occasionally been willing to impose that choice on allies.

Turkey is a NATO member. Yet the United States sanctioned Turkey’s Presidency of Defense Industries after Ankara purchased Russia’s S-400 air-defense system from Rosoboronexport, Russia’s state arms exporter. The transaction involved an advanced weapons system, an American adversary and concerns about the security of American military technology.

European companies encountered the same American financial power over Nord Stream 2. Congress enacted sanctions aimed at companies participating in construction of the pipeline, including businesses from American allies, for engaging with a Russian pipeline carrying Russian gas into Europe. Congress viewed it as increasing European dependence on Russian energy and strengthening Moscow’s geopolitical leverage.

E1 presents something completely different.

There is no Russia on the other side of the transaction. No Iran. No North Korea. No weapons purchase or nuclear technology. No American adversary receiving the proceeds.

There is an Israeli government tender to construct residential homes in the immediate suburb of its capital.

Nor is this simply an initiative of four senators.

Fifteen additional Democratic senators have joined them: Michael Bennet (Colorado), Tammy Duckworth (Illinois), Martin Heinrich (New Mexico), Tim Kaine (Virginia), Mark Kelly (Arizona), Andy Kim (New Jersey), Jeff Merkley (Oregon), Chris Murphy (Connecticut), Patty Murray (Washington), Jack Reed (Rhode Island), Brian Schatz (Hawaii), Adam Schiff (California), Elissa Slotkin (Michigan), Chris Van Hollen (Maryland) and Peter Welch (Vermont).

That brings the proposal’s Democratic Senate support to 19 senators.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons

The United States developed financial sanctions to confront hostile states, weapons programs and transactions with American adversaries. It is a powerful tool meant to confront grave risks to America. Yet in this proposal, the triggering transaction is an Israeli housing project occupying roughly one five-hundredth of the West Bank, which poses zero threat to the United States.

The Democratic senators sponsoring the legislation describe E1 construction as a threat to a future Palestinian state, presumably because the Palestinian Authority demands a country devoid of any Jews and it must include Jerusalem. Their proposed response is to make companies and individuals participating in that construction grounds for exclusion from the American financial system.

For these 19 Democratic senators, countering Palestinian Arab aspirations has become a threat to the United States.

That is the question their bill puts before Congress: Should the financial weapon America has used against adversaries and national-security threats now be turned against businesses of a close ally because they bid to build homes on 0.2% of the West Bank?

ACTION ITEM

Contact these senators about their proposed bill on E1 and find out whether the Democratic Party has become so unmoored from its mission of protecting Americans that it is using its greatest financial weapon to serve Palestinian Arabs objecting to Jewish homes.

Sen. Chris Coons Washington office (202) 224-5042, Wilmington (302) 573-6345, Dover (302) 736-5601

Sen. Elizabeth Warren Washington office (202) 224-4543, Boston (617) 565-3170, Springfield (413) 788-2690

Related:

What Is Actually Being Built in E1? (August 2026)

Coexistence, Until the Wrong Jews Show Up

Posted on by
Reply

A group of religious Jewish youths recently appeared on a Galilean hillside near the Israeli Arab town of Majd al-Krum. Protesters quickly described them as West Bank settlers establishing an illegal outpost as part of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s campaign to “do in the Galilee what we are doing in Judea and Samaria.”

The facts are considerably different.

Part of the property lies within Majd al-Krum’s municipal boundaries but belongs to the Jewish National Fund. It is surrounded by privately owned Arab agricultural land. In January 2026, JNF granted seasonal grazing rights over approximately 1,050 dunams to Gabi Damari, a livestock farmer from Tal-El, a Jewish community in the Galilee. The purpose was to reduce vegetation and the risk of fires. That authorization came roughly seven months before Smotrich announced his Galilee initiative, and no evidence has emerged that Smotrich sent Damari or the young men.

Damari said he brought youths from Judea and Samaria to guard equipment following thefts while his goats were delayed from arriving on the land by veterinary restrictions. Nothing reported thus far establishes that the young men were moving permanently to the Galilee or creating a residential community. They were living at a grazing site operated by a local farmer under a preexisting JNF authorization. (Ynet)

That did not make everything at the site proper. The camp included large tents, beds, utilities and equipment, some of which reportedly extended onto private land. Those were legitimate grounds for investigation and enforcement. JNF ultimately ordered excess structures removed, restricted the size and location of any shelter and limited how many people could remain. It did not cancel Damari’s grazing rights.

The protest, however, was not confined to property lines or permit conditions. Majd al-Krum’s council warned that the encampment was intended to change the area’s “demographic reality.” Hadash figures called it “land seizure” and “creeping transfer.” Sujood Badran, a local political activist arrested during the demonstrations, later recounted protesters chanting: “Arab land belongs to Arabs. Zionist, get up and leave.” She also described the area as “occupied Palestine.” (Times of Israel, Israel Hayom)

Haviva Ner-David offered the liberal Jewish version of the same exclusion. She praised the Galilee as a shared society “balanced 50-50” between Hebrew and Arabic speakers, including Muslims, Jews, Druze and Christians. Yet she said these particular Jews had come from outside to “ruin that,” pledged to protest “until they are truly gone” and promised that if they tried another Galilean hilltop, “we will go there, too.” (Ner-David’s post)

She proudly carried a protest flag bearing a dove and olive branch, presenting it as a symbol of Arab-Jewish partnership. Yet the flag identifies Majd al-Krum only in Arabic. There is no Hebrew and nothing representing the supposedly Jewish half of that partnership.

The protestors seemingly were taking a page from the Arab League that also protests new Jewish homes inside Israel. And the JNF has taken note, ordering the Jews to leave the area.

The legal standard should be straightforward. Private property must be respected. Grazing permits do not authorize unlimited construction. Theft, intimidation and racism should be punished whether committed by Jews, Muslims, Christians or Druze. None of those principles makes a person’s birthplace, religious appearance or previous residence grounds for expulsion.

Jews living in the West Bank are routinely denounced as obstacles to peace and told to move inside Israel. Now, when Jews associated with those communities appear inside Israel, they remain “settlers,” their presence becomes a demographic threat and self-described coexistence activists organize to make them disappear.

Coexistence that ends when the perceived wrong kind of Jews arrive is not coexistence. It is demographic exclusion in dove’s clothing.

ACTION ITEM

Contact the JNF at jewishnationalfund@jnf.org to make sure that they are not expelling Jews from Israel, but simply keeping grazing land for its intended purposes.

Back to School in Somalia: The Jihadi Classroom

Posted on by
1

Summary: Millions of children do not attend school in Somalia; many of those who do are trained in jihad to fight “infidels” by al Shabab. It is a terrifying story of radical Islamic terrorism mapped for generations.

“I was always worried when they were at school,” a Somali mother told Human Rights Watch after her 17-year-old daughter was abducted by Al-Shabaab during a school tea break in Mogadishu. “Every day you get your child back at the end you are thankful.”

For parents in most countries, back to school means teachers, books, friends and homework. In parts of Somalia, it can mean wondering whether the child who left for school in the morning will return in the afternoon – or whether the school itself will become the beginning of a journey into jihad.

“I was with al-Shabaab for three months in 2010…. They wanted to train us to fight and I was afraid. I didn’t want to kill people. I wanted to go back to school and learn.” – Amare A. (not his real name), 10-year-old boy from Mogadishu, living in Kenya, June 2, 2011

Somalia has one of the world’s most severe education crises. UNICEF says more than three million Somali children are out of school, while its more recent educational work puts the out-of-school rate at approximately 65% for primary-age children and 75% at the secondary level. Poverty, displacement, drought, insecurity, distance and a shortage of teachers all contribute to the enormous educational vacuum.

Into that vacuum has stepped Al-Shabaab, an Al-Qaeda affiliate.

The European Union Agency for Asylum estimated that Al-Shabaab controls around 30% of Somalia’s territory, including large rural areas and numerous district capitals, while exercising influence or forms of co-governance well beyond the territory it directly controls. Its leadership remains intact, and the group has continued making territorial gains.

That combination should be terrifying: millions of children disconnected from conventional education alongside a jihadist organization controlling substantial territory and building an education system of its own.

A “Jihadi Worldview”

The Hiraal Institute, a Mogadishu-based security research organization, examined Al-Shabaab’s education system in a report appropriately titled The Fighters Factory. Its description should receive far more attention than it has.

“Children are indoctrinated in the Islamic institutes and made to understand current affairs through a Jihadi worldview. Additionally, the illegitimacy of the Somali government and the obligatory nature of the AS Jihad are ingrained upon them. Quran teaching is done at a faster pace than in traditional schools in order to make time for Jihadi literature. Most children graduate within two years, with many being sent directly to a training camp if they have passed age 15, the Islamic age of maturity.” – Hiraal Institute

The objective is not hidden. Hiraal concluded that Al-Shabaab built the system to create “a steady stream of ideologically pure fighters.”

The U.S. State Department independently documented what that ideology means inside Al-Shabaab-controlled schools: that students should wage war against those the organization considers “infidels,” including people in neighboring countries as well as Somalia’s federal government and international forces.

Consider the progression.

A child does not begin with an assault rifle. He begins with an explanation of the world.

The government is illegitimate. Jihad is obligatory. There are infidels against whom war should be waged. Martyrdom is honorable. The organization providing the lesson possesses religious authority.

This is hatred taught; prejudice as obligation.

Children learning to read the Quran at the Gaabow Islamic school in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, August 2013. (photo: REUTERS/Ismail Taxta)

From Classroom to Training Camp

The distinction between education and recruitment consequently begins to disappear.

Hiraal reported that children educated entirely inside the Al-Shabaab system could become some of its most ideological and fanatical fighters because they had never been exposed to an opposing argument.

American and international reporting describes what can happen next.

The State Department has repeatedly documented Al-Shabaab raiding schools, madrassas and mosques, coercing families and clan elders and recruiting children into its ranks. Children in its camps have undergone physical and religious training alongside weapons training. They have been used to carry ammunition, gather intelligence, plant explosives, fight in combat and serve as human shields and suicide bombers.

The State Department reported that training has even included forcing children to punish and execute other children.

This is not merely recruitment of child soldiers – already a war crime. It is the attempted manufacture of a worldview capable of reproducing violence from one generation to the next.

Young child in al Shabab training camp in Somalia

The Lesson Does Not Stay in Somalia

The categories taught in the classroom can become categories for selecting who lives and who dies. “Infidel” is not merely an ugly word; it is placing a target according to religion to facilitate murder.

That is why the education system deserves to be studied as part of Al-Shabaab’s terrorist infrastructure.

The Jihad Factory

The individual facts have been documented for years. What has been missing is the decision to put them in the same frame.

  • One institution records children out of school.
  • Another documents Al-Shabaab’s curriculum.
  • Another counts child recruitment.
  • Another records religious persecution.
  • Terrorism researchers count the dead.

Each is describing a different station along the same potential pathway: educational vacuum, ideological instruction, identification of the infidel, glorification of jihad, weapons training, recruitment and violence.

Al Shabab fighters in Somalia

That is why Al-Shabaab’s schools matter far beyond Somalia’s education statistics. A terrorist killed on a battlefield is one fewer terrorist. A child taught a “Jihadi worldview” represents something altogether different: a wager that the ideology can survive the men currently fighting for it.

Millions of Somali children remain outside school today. Across substantial territory, the organization positioned to exploit that vacuum has already demonstrated what it wants children to learn and, in documented cases, what it has subsequently demanded that children do.

The frightening question is therefore not how many Al-Shabaab fighters can be killed this year. It is how many replacements are sitting in classrooms.

1979: The Year Terrorism Changed and Jihadism Became Impossible To Ignore

Posted on by
Reply

Look at the world’s prominent terrorist organizations in the 1960s and 1970s and something is striking: religion is largely absent.

The PLO and its factions pursued Palestinian nationalism. The IRA fought over Northern Ireland. ETA sought Basque independence. The Red Brigades in Italy, Red Army Faction in Germany and Japanese Red Army embraced revolutionary leftist ideologies.

An analysis by RAND captures what happened next. In 1968, it identified zero religiously motivated international terrorist groups. In 1980, there were two among 64. By 1992 there were 11 among 48. By 1995, 25 of 58—43 percent—were religiously motivated.

Some point to 1979 as the pivotal year, when radical Islam found permanent footholds and inspiration.

In Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic Republic. Political Islam had demonstrated that it could overthrow a western-aligned government.

Iranian revolution of 1979

Iran then exported its revolutionary ideology and supported armed Shiite Islamist movements. Hezbollah, established in Lebanon in the early 1980s, became its most consequential manifestation.

Then came Afghanistan.

The Soviet Union invaded in December 1979. Resistance to a non-Muslim foreign army occupying a Muslim country became an international Islamic cause. Saudi and other Gulf money flowed to the “resistance.” Pakistan became its essential staging ground. The United States supplied extensive assistance as part of its Cold War campaign against Moscow.

Afghanistan became a transnational incubator for Sunni jihad. Militants from different countries met, fought together and developed recruiting, financing and logistical networks. Osama bin Laden joined this world, and al-Qaeda eventually emerged from it.

Fondapol calls the Soviet-Afghan war the “matrix of contemporary Islamist terrorism.”

Other events show 1979 to be a pivotal year.

Islamist militants seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, denouncing the Saudi monarchy as corrupt and insufficiently Islamic. The episode helped push Saudi Arabia toward greater religious conservatism just as it entered an intensifying competition with revolutionary Iran for leadership and influence across the Muslim world.

Meanwhile, Egypt and Israel made peace. Along with it, secular Arab nationalism, which had dominated much of Middle Eastern politics, began to lose prestige. Islamist movements increasingly presented themselves as the alternative. [Think of Hamas’s 2023 attempt to disrupt the expanding Abraham Accords].

The consequences of radical Islamism entering global terrorism developed gradually and then exploded.

Fondapol records 2,194 Islamist terrorist attacks and 6,817 deaths from 1979 through 2000. From 2001 through 2012, it records 8,265 attacks and more than 38,000 deaths. From 2013 through April 2024, the toll surged to more than 56,000 attacks and roughly 205,000 deaths.

Altogether, its database catalogs 66,872 Islamist terrorist attacks killing nearly 250,000 people between 1979 and April 2024.

And this is not principally a story of Muslims attacking the West. Nearly 89 percent of those deaths occurred in Muslim-majority countries. The Taliban, Islamic State, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda became the five deadliest organizations in the database.

The transformation was both ideological and geographic. Al-Qaeda built affiliates. ISIS built provinces. Boko Haram devastated communities around Lake Chad. Al-Shabaab entrenched itself in Somalia and East Africa. Jihadist organizations spread across the Middle East, South Asia and increasingly Africa.

Iran demonstrated the revolutionary potential of political Islam; Afghanistan created the great transnational Sunni jihadist network; Mecca exposed another radical Islamist current; and the decline of secular Arab nationalism created room for Islamism to expand.

1979 was the year several forces converged and the center of gravity began to shift.

We readily study how nationalism, communism, fascism, white supremacy and other ideologies produced political violence. Jihadism has become the leading driver of terrorism in the world and must have the same intellectual clarity.

The Temple Mount Status Quo Is Being Rewritten

Posted on by
Reply

The Palestinian Authority has declared the Temple Mount — the holiest site in Judaism — the “exclusive right of Muslims.”

That is not the historic status quo. It is an attempt to rewrite it.

After Israel took control of Jerusalem’s Old City in 1967, day-to-day religious administration of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif remained with the Islamic Waqf, while Israel retained responsibility for security and substantial control over access. The Waqf permitted Muslims to pray on the Mount, while non-Muslims could visit, prayer was restricted.

The arrangement governed administration, access and worship. It did not declare the Temple Mount the exclusive possession or religious entitlement of Muslims.

The Palestinian Authority’s Jerusalem Governorate crossed that line explicitly on September 6. It condemned Jews conducting “Talmudic rituals and prayers” as attempts to “alter its religious character,” declared the entire 144-dunam compound the “exclusive right of Muslims” and warned against changing its “identity.”

Those words matter.

Waqf administration is one thing. Restrictions on Jewish prayer are another. Declaring the site itself the “exclusive right” of Muslims is something else entirely.

The status quo regulates what Jews may do there. It never determined what the place is.

The First and Second Jewish Temples stood on the Temple Mount. Jewish prayer has faced Jerusalem for millennia. Jewish liturgy, mourning and hopes for redemption are bound to it. Many observant Jews have historically declined to walk upon portions of the Mount precisely because they consider the ground too holy to enter without the required ritual purity.

For some Jews, not ascending is itself an expression of the Mount’s extraordinary Jewish sanctity.

That makes the new language especially provocative. Jews visiting Judaism’s holiest place become “settlers” conducting “incursions.” Jewish prayer becomes threatening “Talmudic rituals.” A restriction accepted to preserve religious peace is transformed into evidence that Jewish religious expression does not belong there at all.

Jewish restraint was supposed to preserve coexistence. It cannot become a permission slip for Jewish erasure.

The international reaction sharpens that dynamic. The United Nations itself has called upon the parties to refrain from “provocative actions, incitement and inflammatory rhetoric,” especially in places of “religious and cultural sensitivity.” In the very next paragraph, it demanded that Jerusalem’s historic status quo be respected “in word and practice” and urged “all sides” to halt provocations and incitement at the holy sites.

By the UN’s own standard, words can threaten the status quo. Yet when an official Palestinian governmental authority declares Judaism’s holiest site the “exclusive right of Muslims,” it is greeted with a silent nod of approval.

And this occurs as the anti-Israel horde discusses so-called “Jewish supremacy.” Zohran Mamdani has attacked privileging one religion over another (meaning Jews over Muslims). Hasan Piker denounces “ethnoreligious supremacist values.” At the Jewish Temple Mount, the principle stripped of abstraction: one religion claiming exclusive entitlement to the holiest site of another.

And that raises a more fundamental question about the status quo itself.

Perhaps placing religious administration of a multi-faith holy site exclusively in the hands of one of the religions claiming it was always structurally unstable.

The Waqf is not a neutral administrator. It is an Islamic religious institution representing one faith at a site sacred to several. That arrangement can function while custodianship means administration. It becomes difficult to justify when the authority entrusted with the site participates in or endorses a doctrine that denies another faith any legitimate claim to it.

The test should be remarkably simple: Can the authorities administering the Temple Mount state unambiguously that it is Judaism’s holiest site?

Acknowledging that fact surrenders nothing about Islam’s attachment to Al-Aqsa. But an administrator that cannot acknowledge the most basic religious identity of the people whose holiest site it administers has a profound conflict with the responsibilities of custodianship.

If the Waqf and Jordan cannot pass that test, their fitness to exercise exclusive administration should be questioned.

The logical alternative is administration by a political authority obligated to protect multiple religions rather than a religious authority representing one of them. Israel already bears responsibility for security at the compound and exercises substantial control over access. Any new arrangement would have to fully protect Muslim worship and Islamic holy places while recognizing rather than suppressing the religious attachments of others.

The status quo was built on the assumption that Islamic administration could coexist with Jewish restraint. The assertion of “Muslim exclusivity” is breaking that bargain.

If the Waqf cannot acknowledge Judaism at Judaism’s holiest site, it should no longer be entrusted to administer it.

Related:

US Embassy In Israel Only Invites Muslims To US To Study (September 2023)

Names and Narrative: Terrorist and Genocide

Posted on by
Reply

Hamas has been a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997, when the list was first developed. On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attackers invaded Israel, deliberately murdered civilians and kidnapped over 250 people.

It was designated terrorists committing terrorism.

Yet “terrorist” became a troublesome word for mainstream media and alt-left politicians.

The Associated Press advises journalists to describe specific acts and generally attribute the terms terrorism and terrorist to people or organizations, rather than independently apply them. Amnesty International has gone further, explaining that it generally avoids the terms because they lack an agreed legal definition and carry strong political and emotional connotations.

That restraint evaporates around “genocide.”

Genocide is the more demanding accusation. Death, destruction and even war crimes do not establish it. The Genocide Convention requires the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such. Israel emphatically denies that intent, maintaining that it went to war to defeat Hamas – the terrorists which had committed mass terrorism – and recover its hostages, not destroy Palestinian Arabs.

Amnesty nevertheless declares that Israel is committing genocide. The same organization that will not call Hamas a terrorist organization after its deliberate slaughter and kidnapping of civilians has no hesitation resolving the vastly more difficult question of Israeli intent.

Progressive politicians follow the same linguistic path. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) was accusing Israel of genocide within weeks of October 7 and later called Benjamin Netanyahu a “genocidal maniac.” Zohran Mamdani repeatedly describes the October 7 massacre as a “horrific war crime” rather than a terrorist act, while calling Israel’s war “genocide” and Netanyahu the “architect of a horrific genocide.”

The burden of proof has been turned upside down.

Calling October 7 terrorism requires looking simply at what Hamas did: a designated terrorist organization deliberately murdered and kidnapped civilians for political and ideological purposes. It is plainly terrorism.

Calling Israel’s war genocide requires establishing why Israel fought it: that its actual intent was to destroy Palestinian Arabs as a people rather than defeat Hamas in a defensive war.

Yet the first conclusion is treated as dangerously judgmental while the second is repeated as established fact.

Mehdi Hasan offered an almost grotesque demonstration this week while attacking a New York Times essay by Gazan Palestinian Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib urging Palestinians to resist Hamas. Hasan called people sharing the essay “pro-genocide people,” Israel “the genocidaire,” the essay “a pro genocide piece” and the war “this current genocide.”

Hasan suffers a genocide stutter.

He cannot bring himself to say clearly and unambiguously that Hamas is a terrorist group and committed a heinous terrorist act, but cannot get the word “genocide” out of his mouth as he tries to hypnotize viewers into believing the unbelievable about Israel.

And the accusation does not remain attached to Israel’s government. Once genocide becomes the premise, anyone defending Israel can become pro-genocide. Even a Palestinian Arab arguing that his own people must resist Hamas can produce a pro-genocide piece for the obsessive compulsive stutterer.

That is how a defamatory vocabulary spreads.

Genocide is among the gravest accusations that can be made against a people or state. Repeating it as established fact without establishing the specific intent the crime requires does more than distort a war. It tells millions of people that Israel is deliberately destroying Palestinian Arabs and that those who defend Israel are defending that destruction.

That is an incendiary allegation in a world where Jews and Israelis are already threatened and attacked over Gaza.

Meanwhile, terrorist is handled delicately when describing the organization that deliberately slaughtered civilians on October 7 in the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

The asymmetry is morally grotesque. Hasan, Tlaib, Mamdani are trafficking in the asymmetry of whataboutery as a heinous veneer to protect antisemitic terrorists, plain and simple.

The Arab League Condemns New Jewish Communities Inside Israel. Is This Simple Antisemitism or Strategic?

Posted on by
1

The Arab League issued a remarkable condemnation of Israel: it objects to the “expansion of new Jewish communities in the Negev and Galilee and increasing their Jewish populations.”

These are not settlements in the West Bank. They are areas inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

Further, Israel is described as “1948 territories.”

That makes the statement difficult to reconcile with the Arab League’s simultaneous support for a Palestinian state based on the June 4, 1967 lines. Under that formula, the Negev and Galilee remain part of Israel. And why suggest that Israel is just part of Palestine, calling the entire state “1948 territories?”

The question is particularly relevant to Egypt.

Egypt was the first Arab country to recognize Israel and signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, ending the two countries’ state of war. Nearly fifty years later, Cairo continues to endorse a two-state solution: a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines alongside a secure Israel.

That position should carry a simple implication: Israel’s right to develop its own communities within its own territory.

Egyptian officials should therefore answer a straightforward question: Does Egypt believe Israel has the same right to develop Jewish communities within its territory that a future Palestinian state would have to develop its own communities?

If the answer is yes, Cairo should say so.

If the answer is no, then the issue is not simply the borders of a future Palestinian state. It is whether Jewish demographic and community development inside Israel is itself considered illegitimate. It reeks of antisemitism.

But is their another way to think of these hateful remarks?

Egypt made peace with Israel nearly half a century ago to get back the Sinai Peninsula it lost in the 1967 Six Day War. Is Egypt deliberately opening cracks in that treaty? Is it preparing to push Israel to hand some of the Negev to Gazans now – alongside its own contribution of part of the Sinai – as Gazans hope to rebuild the strip after its failed war on Israel?

Is the Arab League simply being antisemitic or is it deliberately setting the course for a new map for Gaza?

October 7, 2026: When an Ottoman Land Law Could Change the Map of Judea and Samaria

Posted on by
Reply

Everyone knows why October 7, 2023 changed Israel. But an obscure Ottoman law makes another date worth watching: October 7, 2026.

In 1858, the Ottoman Empire enacted a land code under which three consecutive years without cultivation could have consequences for rights to certain agricultural land.

Now, three years after October 7, that old rule may suddenly matter.

The Three-Year Rule

Much of the agricultural land of the Ottoman Empire was classified as miri. The sovereign retained ultimate title (“state land”) while individuals could acquire valuable rights of possession and use, known as tasarruf.

Active use of the land mattered.

Article 68 of the Ottoman Land Code addressed agricultural land left uncultivated for three consecutive years without a valid excuse. The original Ottoman mechanism was more complicated than “three years and the government automatically owns your land,” involving tapu, the status of the holder and opportunities to recover the right.

But the underlying principle was clear: continued cultivation could matter to continued land rights.

Ottoman termMeaningRelevance
MiriState land carrying individual possession/use rightsMuch agricultural land
TasarrufRight of possession and useThe individual’s valuable land right
MahlulLapsed/reverted possessory rightPotential consequence of qualifying non-cultivation
TapuLand registration/title systemDocumentary evidence of rights

This is not merely an Ottoman historical curiosity. It passed on to the British, Jordanians and then Israel with few modifications.

In 2020, Israel’s Supreme Court addressed the rule directly in HCJ 5426/17, Barakat v. Head of the Civil Administration in the West Bank (Nov. 29, 2020). The Court held that under the Jordanian land law still applicable in the territory, an unregistered tasarruf right acquired through cultivation could be extinguished if the land was left uncultivated for three consecutive years, causing the land to revert to the government under Article 68’s mahlul doctrine. By contrast, a tasarruf right that had been formally registered generally was not lost merely because the land subsequently lay fallow.

So the three-year rule remains relevant to unregistered land in Judea and Samaria today.

Goats owned by Bedouins graze in Judea and Samaria (photo: FirstOneThrough)

Then Came October 7

After the October 7 massacre by Gazans, security conditions dramatically changed access to agricultural land across the region. OCHA reported that more than 96,000 dunams of olive-cultivated land went unharvested during the 2023 season following access restrictions and violence. By the 2025 olive harvest, OCHA was reporting that farmers from multiple villages had been completely denied access for the third consecutive year to certain olive groves.

That creates the question: How much unregistered agricultural land has actually gone uncultivated since October 7, 2023?

The Eye in the Sky

There is something unusual about these particular three years.

Israel has had extraordinary security reasons since October 7 to maintain extensive aerial surveillance of Judea and Samaria.

At the same time, the Civil Administration already uses sophisticated geographical information in determining land status. Its Surveying Unit maintains cadastral and mapping information, while its Supervision Unit operates a team whose stated function is examining land through survey procedures “aimed at locating state land in the area, for declaration as such.”

The Civil Administration therefore potentially possesses an extraordinarily detailed record of whether cultivation occurred.

Request For Access

Consider two claimants whose land appears uncultivated in aerial photographs for three years. One produces repeated applications showing: I wanted to cultivate my land. Israel prevented me from reaching it. The other has no comparable record.

Those are materially different factual cases based on the background discussed above.

OCHA reports that Palestinian liaison authorities submit farmers’ access requests to Israeli authorities and tracks approvals, denials and pending requests in particular areas. Those applications coupled with the aerial documentation, may move the land into a different legal category.

Meanwhile, Israel Is Looking for State Land

This is where the 1858 law meets 2026.

The Civil Administration openly maintains a Survey Lands team charged with examining whether land can be declared government property. Its newly published procedures show that potential survey areas are placed on a priority list requiring approval by the head of the Civil Administration and the Defense Minister or an authorized representative.

The State Comptroller describes the same team’s purpose as locating and marking land in Judea and Samaria that can be declared government property.

And Israel has dramatically accelerated state-land declarations.

In February 2026, the Israeli government approved the resumption of systematic land-registration proceedings in Area C, allocating approximately NIS 244 million to the effort—the first such broad registration initiative since Israel suspended the previous settlement-of-title process after 1967.

Peace Now calculates that approximately 27,119 dunams had been declared state land under the current government by June 2026, nearly as much as it says had been declared during the entire period since the Oslo Accords. A Palestinian Authority commission consequently calculates that approximately 29,335 dunams have been included in state-land declarations since October 7, 2023.

And we haven’t yet reached the anniversary when many West Bank Arabs encountered more restrictions on movement due to the war their Gazan brothers waged on Israel.

October 7, 2026

That is what makes the third anniversary different.

Consider the ramifications of Ottoman law to this point in time:

  • 1858: Ottoman law makes three years of non-cultivation legally significant for certain land rights.
  • 2020: Israel’s Supreme Court confirms that the Article 68 mahlul doctrine remains relevant to unregistered tasarruf rights in Judea and Samaria.
  • 2023: October 7 is followed by enormous disruption of access to agricultural land.
  • 2023–2026: Israel accumulates an extraordinary photographic record of what is happening on the ground.
  • 2024–2026: state-land declarations accelerate.
  • 2026: Israel funds a major new land-registration initiative.
  • October 7, 2026: three years have elapsed for when many West Bank Arabs accessed land they had used previously.

Nothing automatically changes ownership at midnight of 10/7. Many questions remain.

How much affected land is actually unregistered miri land? Was it legally “uncultivated”? What constitutes a sufficient excuse? What happens when Israeli security restrictions themselves prevented cultivation? And what evidence exists showing that individual claimants continued asserting their rights?

Those questions will have to be answered parcel by parcel.

But after October 7, something will exist that did not exist before: three complete post-massacre years of evidence.

October 7, 2023 changed the security map of the Middle East. October 7, 2026 may begin changing the actual map of Judea and Samaria as well.

An Election for a Failed State

Posted on by
Reply

Palestinian Arabs are scheduled to vote on November 28 in their first legislative election in twenty years. International observers will naturally ask whether the election is free and fair. But there is a more fundamental question:

Will Palestinians actually be electing a government capable of governing?

The problem begins with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The PLO was established in 1964, decades before there was a Palestinian Authority. In 1993, it was the PLO—not the Palestinian Authority—that entered the Oslo process with Israel. Those agreements established the framework for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza and contemplated an elected Palestinian Council. The Palestinian Authority and the executive institutions emerged from that process as the interim governing apparatus.

The PLO is the institutional skeleton on which the Palestinian political system was built.

And that makes the coming election peculiar.

Electing People Who Reject the System

The August modification to the election law requires candidates to commit to recognition of the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, as well as its political and national program and relevant international resolutions.

Yet Palestinians overwhelmingly reject that requirement.

According to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, two-thirds oppose requiring candidates to accept the PLO’s commitments, including its agreements with Israel. Only 27% support the requirement.

That is not an opinion related to dissatisfaction with Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah or the incumbent government. That is an outright rejection of the entire government structure and institutions. Palestinians want to elect the government while leaving unsettled whether the people elected to run it accept the foundations of the system they are entering.

It is a election whose foundation is anarchy.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas

If insufficient, the Arabs want to vote for terrorism.

Ballots Without Giving Up the Guns

Democratic government requires more than elections. Ultimately, the elected government must possess political authority and a monopoly on legitimate force. Yet Palestinian politics continues to blur the distinction between a political party and an armed organization.

Hamas is the clearest example.

The devastation of the Gaza war appears to have changed Palestinian calculations. Only 20% now say Hamas won the war, compared with 39% ten months earlier. Support for “armed struggle” (terrorism) as the most effective means of achieving Palestinian statehood has fallen from 41% to 27%, which was around two-thirds immediately after October 7, 2023. Meanwhile, support for negotiations has risen from 36% to 44%, its highest level in four years.

That all sounds encouraging. But look more closely at what changed.

Palestinians only moved toward negotiations as violence has proven devastating and unsuccessful. Yet even after that experience, 72% oppose Hamas disarming before Israel completely withdraws from Gaza. And 53% believe that even if Hamas gives up its weapons, it will remain both an armed resistance movement and a political movement. Only 36% expect it to become solely political. So 89% (basically everyone) thinks the group that most of the Global North has labeled a terrorist organization, will be part of the Palestinian government.

That holds true for the various Palestinian terrorist groups. A society established in which various militias will be free to operate their own foreign affairs and military engagements.

An Elected Government That May Not Govern

If not appalling enough, there is another revealing number.

If elections are held and a new Palestinian government is formed, only 28% of Palestinians say they would prefer that elected government to administer Gaza. Thirty-two percent prefer the separate National Committee, while 34% prefer neither.

Consider these three facts:

  • Palestinians are preparing to elect a legislature for a political system whose foundational commitments most do not want imposed on candidates.
  • They may elect factions that retain independent armed power outside the government’s control.
  • They do not want the resulting elected government to govern Gaza.

Combined, this is not merely an imperfect election in the shadow of war of a fledgling state.

It is a vote for anarchy with a veneer of cohesion.

Related:

Israel Is Surrounded by Failed States – and Failed States in Waiting (July 2026)

Before Palestinians Can Hold an Election, They Must Decide Who Is Palestinian (June 2026)