Words matter. They do more than describe reality. They shape it.
This week, the Palestinian Authority’s WAFA news agency reported that Israel had advanced a housing plan that would “further isolate Jerusalem from Bethlehem.”
The proposal involves building homes, roads, and infrastructure between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. In almost any other place on earth, connecting two urban areas with transportation and housing would be described as integration, development, or greater connectivity.
But not for West Bank Arabs. They object to more Jews living in the corridor connecting them.
In this narrative, Jewish presence itself is an obstacle, an impediment. Jewish life is redefined as separation.
The inversion is striking.
The 1947 UN Partition Plan once envisioned Jerusalem and Bethlehem as a single Corpus Separatum—an internationally administered area shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Whatever one thinks of that proposal, its premise was coexistence, not exclusion. Yet today, not only have the local Arabs refused coexistence, but so has the United Nations.
Contours from the 1947 Partition Plan which included Greater Bethlehem and Greater Jerusalem under a “Corpus Separatum”
Instead of asking how Jews and Arabs can both live, work, worship, and travel throughout the Jerusalem-Bethlehem region, many arguments begin with the assumption that Jewish communities are inherently illegitimate. Under that framework, the more Jews who live or travel there, the more “isolated” the majority-Arab areas are said to become.
When the Partition Plan was being conceived on February 18, 1947, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Ernest Bevin (1881-1951) said “for the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.” Today, we are not only witnessing the continued entrenchment of that tenet, but the profound hostility to the basic presence of Jews.
Don’t let the word isolation fool you. It is not describing geography. It is describing Jews as obstacles, not neighbors.
We know that every death is a tragedy. We all wish there wasn’t war. Yet wars happen.
There have been several attempts to portray the current Gazans war against Israel in various lights. Some people have used the civilian-to-death ratio in this war of roughly 2-to-1 as historically low compared to any urban combat in modern times, especially one in which the army hides underneath the homes and hospitals of the civilian population.
Here, we lay out the civilian death figures relative to other modern wars which had many civilian deaths.
Assuming:
73,356 reported total deaths in Gaza from October 7, 2023 to August 2, 2026
25,000 of those were Hamas or other militants (a rough figure supplied by the Israeli army in January 2026)
Average civilian mortality per month: 2.19% ÷ 34 = 0.055% per month.
That yields the following comparison:
Case
Estimated monthly percentage killed
Multiple of Gaza civilian rate (0.055%/month)
Gaza [2023-present]
0.055%
1×
Guatemala (Ixil) [1981-3]
0.10%
1.8×
Darfur [2003-5]
0.11%–0.17%
2.0-3.1x
Roma genocide [1939-45]
0.20%–0.69%
3.6–12.5×
Anfal (Kurds) [1987-8]
0.22%–0.44%
4–8×
Ustaše genocide [1941-5]
0.36%
6.5×
Cambodia [1975-9]
0.44%–0.59%
8–10.7×
Rohingya [2017-8]
at least 0.67%
12.1×
Holodomor [1932-3]
0.73%–1.04%
13.2–18.9×
Holocaust [1941-5]
1.32%
24×
Yazidi genocide [2014-7]
0.65%–2.5%
11.8–45.4×
Rwanda [1994]
13.8%–22%
250.9–400×
Srebrenica (monthly equivalent) [1995]
~80%
~1,454×
Monthly toll of civilian deaths in wars over last 100 years, as a percentage of the total population, in comparison to current Gazan war against Israel
Yazidis are a non-Muslim ethnic group in and around Iraq targeted for persecution and annihilation by ISIS. They continue to suffer persecution from Muslims in Turkey and Iraq.
“IS fighters invaded Yazidi villages and towns in Northern Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, rounding up men, women, and children. Yazidi men were ordered to convert to Islam; those who did not, and even some who did, were executed in mass graves. Yazidi women and girls were abducted and sold into sexual slavery, being forcibly “married” to jihadists and other individuals in Iraq, Syria, and other countries. Yazidi boys were also kidnapped by the Islamic State and sent to training camps, where they were indoctrinated into the group’s severe interpretation of Islam and trained to become soldiers. IS glorified its atrocities online in gruesome videos, propaganda magazines, and religious publications, emphasizing its commitment to eradicating Yazidi identity.” – Vicken Cheterian, “ISIS Genocide against the Yazidis and Mass Violence in the Middle East,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 48, no. 4 (2019): 1-7, doi:10.1080/13530194.2019.1683718.
Measured against the last century’s ethnic group civilian deaths, the war in Gaza has produced a far smaller death toll than the wars that shaped recent history. Yet few conflicts of comparable scale have generated such an extraordinary level of international media attention, UN action, street protests, and campus activism.
The conflict has spilled far beyond the battlefield. Around the world, Israelis and Jewish communities have increasingly become targets of hostility, harassment, and violence tied to the war. Whatever one’s views of the prosecution of the war, the global reaction has extended well beyond criticism of a government and the borders of Israel unlike every other conflict, raising profound questions about why this war has become so singular in international political and cultural life.
The numbers remind us that history matters. A world that loses its sense of proportion does not become more moral but selective, narrow and biased.
For generations, antisemitism sought to remove Jews from the future. Today, it increasingly seeks to remove them from the past.
That is the deeper significance of the growing campaign to recast Jewish history as Palestinian history. It is not simply a dispute over archaeology or competing national narratives. It is an effort to strip the Jewish people of their origins, their memory, and ultimately their legitimacy and basic human rights.
The examples are becoming impossible to ignore.
The Holocaust—the systematic murder of six million Jews—is routinely appropriated as a metaphor for Palestinian suffering. Jewish victims become a rhetorical device rather than a people with a unique history. The descendants of Holocaust survivors are cast as the new Nazis, while the actual genocide of European Jewry is emptied of its historical meaning.
Some Europeans have taken the Jewish girl, Anne Frank, and dressed her in an Arab kefiyeh as if she were a Palestinian Arab or would have supported the murder of Jews. During World War II, Anne hid in an attic while Nazis hunted her and other Jews for years, before the Nazis took her and murdered her in a concentration camp.
Now even Jesus is being rewritten.
Rather than acknowledging the historical reality that Jesus was a Jew who lived, taught, and died among the Jewish people in Judea, activists increasingly describe him as “Palestinian.” The purpose is to transplant one of history’s most influential Jews from the Jewish story into a Palestinian national narrative that not only didn’t exist in his lifetime, but Arabs didn’t invade the Jewish holy land until the seventh and eighth century CE, hundreds of years after Jesus lived.
The same pattern extends across nearly every cornerstone of Jewish civilization.
The First and Second Temples become myths or located in far-way lands. The Western Wall is detached from Jewish history. Jerusalem is reframed as an exclusively Muslim city. The Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs are recast. Ancient Israel is dismissed as colonial fiction. Hebrew becomes a borrowed language rather than the indigenous language of the Jewish people. Even Jewish holy sites are repeatedly described as exclusively Islamic or Christian.
United Nations 1949 map of of holy sites in Jerusalem lists the Jewish Temple Mount as only holy to Muslims
Each claim may appear isolated. Together they reveal a coherent project.
The goal is not simply to elevate a Palestinian Arab identity or an Islamic one. Every people is entitled to tell its own story. But no national movement has the right to build its identity by erasing another people’s history, heritage and human rights.
If a Palestinian Arab national identity is legitimate, it should be able to stand on its own. It shouldn’t require denying that Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel. It does not require pretending the Temples never stood in Jerusalem. It does not require transforming Jesus into an Arab. It wouldn’t require appropriating appropriating words and people from their national tragedies.
Anti-Israel author Susan Abulhawa repeatedly uses terms like “Holocaust” to turn Jews into Nazis, in an attempt at misdirection from the popular Palestinian Arab political-terrorist group Hamas, which are actual modern-day Nazis
Yet this pattern of historical theft has increasingly been accompanied by something darker: the revival of some of Europe’s oldest antisemitic ideas.
The Hamas Charter drew explicitly from antisemitic conspiracy theories and echoed themes long propagated by Nazi ideology. Since October 7, the world has again witnessed chants, slogans, and propaganda that do not merely oppose Israeli government policies but deny the legitimacy of Jewish peoplehood itself. Public figures, writers, and activists have too often trafficked in narratives that portray Jews not as an indigenous people with a continuous history, but as impostors who fabricated their past.
If Jews can be separated from Jerusalem, from the Temple, from Abraham and Sarah, from David, from Hebrew, from the Holocaust, and even from Jesus, then they become a people without roots. A nation without ancestors is easier to portray as foreign. A foreign people is easier to cast as colonizers. And colonizers, in the moral framework of today’s activists, can be removed. Should be removed.
Historical negation is not an academic exercise. It prepares the ground for political exclusion, eviction, and violence.
The attempt to steal Jewish history is not ultimately about the past. It is about deciding whether the Jewish people have any legitimate place in the future.
Fair enough. But where is the equivalent sentence for the Palestinian claim?
What evidence was presented that the warehouse contained only medical supplies? Who independently verified it was not also being used by Hamas? The reporting does not say.
Reuters and CNN took the Palestinian Authority version of events as plain facts but left a question outstanding about the Israeli account. The reader is left with one side making a factual assertion, while the other appears to be offering an unsupported excuse.
Journalists should demand evidence from Israel. They should also demand it from Palestinian authorities. If neither side has independently substantiated its account, then neither claim should receive a presumption of truth.
In war, the burden of proof should not belong to only one side. Journalism earns trust when it applies the same evidentiary standard to everyone.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey will introduce a new generation to one of civilization’s oldest stories. Yet the tale of the Trojan Horse is not really about ancient Greece. It is about human nature.
For ten years, the Greeks could not breach the walls of Troy. So Odysseus abandoned force in favor of deception. The Greeks appeared to sail home, leaving behind a magnificent wooden horse as a peace offering. The Trojans admired it. They celebrated it. They pulled it through their own gates as a symbol of victory.
Only after nightfall did they discover what they had really accepted.
Clip from movie “Troy” on the Trojan horse
The lesson has survived for nearly three thousand years because it was never simply about a horse. It was about the danger of lowering one’s guard in the presence of an extraordinary gift.
Which brings us to a Boeing 747 from Qatar.
When Qatar offered President Donald Trump a 14-year old luxury aircraft for eventual use as Air Force One, the gesture was unlike almost anything in modern American history. The discussion quickly became political. Was it legal? Was it ethical? Should the United States accept such an expensive gift from a foreign government?
Those are important questions. But the first question national security professionals must ask is Can we trust it?
Air Force One is not merely an airplane. It is the President’s office, military command center, intelligence platform, and secure communications hub. Every inch of the aircraft—from its wiring and electronics to its communications systems and defensive capabilities—must be assumed vulnerable until proven otherwise.
Recent reporting highlighted the practical reality behind that principle. Secret service advised the president from flying on the Qatari aircraft as he left a NATO summit in Turkey. Heightened threats from the Islamic Republic of Iran on the president’s life, while he flew on a gifted plane from Qatar, another leading state sponsor of terrorism, as he departed from Turkey, an increasing radical Islamic country, demanded precaution.
None of this requires believing Qatar intended harm. In fact, that misses the point entirely.
The Trojan Horse was not a warning about any particular adversary. It was a warning about the responsibilities of those charged with protecting a nation. Their job is not to assume good intentions. Their job is to imagine every possibility before someone else does.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as frozen. It isn’t.
Both Israelis and Palestinians appear to believe that now is NOT the moment for a final peace agreement. Instead of negotiating, each side is using this period to improve its position for whatever comes next.
They have adopted two very different strategies.
Israel’s strategy is physical.
The settlement movement is racing to create new facts on the ground – approving settlements, establishing outposts, extending infrastructure, and expanding the Israeli presence in disputed territory of Judea and Samaria. The calculation is straightforward: when negotiations eventually resume, the map itself will have changed.
The pace has been striking.
ACTION
2025
2026 (through April)
What it Measures
Official settlements approved
54
34 additional approvals (bringing the current government’s total to 102 since January 2023)
Government approval of new settlements or legalization of existing communities.
Rather than altering the geography, Palestinian leaders have concentrated on shifting international opinion. They have sought additional recognition from foreign governments, expanded support within international organizations, pursued legal and diplomatic campaigns against Israel, and strengthened ties with constituencies – particularly within the U.S. Democratic Party – that may wield greater influence under a future American administration. Their calculation is equally straightforward: when negotiations eventually resume, the political environment will have changed.
Expanded formal recognition beyond the Global South.
Major Western powers (2025)
France, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia
First major Western/G7 countries to recognize Palestine, signaling a shift among traditional allies of Israel.
International legal initiatives
Expanded
Increased reliance on the UN, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court to advance Palestinian objectives.
Political support
Increased
Growing support in parts of Europe and among segments of the U.S. Democratic Party.
Measured by their own objectives, both sides can point to progress. Israel has expanded its physical footprint while the Palestinians have expanded their diplomatic footprint. One strategy seeks to change the map while the other seeks to change the politics surrounding the map.
What is striking is what neither side is emphasizing.
Neither is devoting comparable energy to the difficult work of strengthening governance at home: confronting corruption, reforming institutions, addressing political dysfunction, or building the domestic political consensus that any lasting agreement would ultimately require.
Instead, each is attempting to improve its negotiating position by changing the external environment. It is a race between geography and diplomacy.
The next round of negotiations will not begin where the last one ended. It will begin with a new map and a new political landscape.
The United Nations speaks constantly of justice, equality and freedom of worship in Jerusalem. Yet when confronted with the denial of the most basic religious freedom at Judaism’s holiest site, it demands that the discrimination continue.
This is not the position of one committee or one conference. It is the official position of the United Nations.
Following a recent visit by Israel’s National Security Minister to the Temple Mount, Secretary-General António Guterres declared that “the status quo at the Holy Sites must be upheld.” His spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, went further on July 23, insisting that “there is a status quo regarding the holy sites of Judaism, Christianity and, of course, Islam in Jerusalem” and that “the faithful of all religions are able to interact with those sites… in a free manner.”
Those statements cannot both be true.
On the Temple Mount—the holiest site in Judaism—the “status quo” bars Jews from praying openly. Jews may visit during limited hours, but they are prohibited from conducting public prayer under the religious administration of the Islamic Waqf.
The United Nations therefore advocates preserving a system that denies Jews the freedom to pray at their holiest site while simultaneously claiming that people of all faiths are able to worship freely.
That is not religious equality. It is institutionalized religious discrimination.
Imagine the United Nations calling for the preservation of a system that prohibited Christians from praying at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or Muslims from praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Such a position would rightly be condemned around the world. Yet when the restriction applies to Jews, it is described as preserving the “status quo.”
The phrase has become a euphemism for unequal rights. For sanctioned antisemitism.
The UN states that the “Palestinian people” have “inalienable rights” in Jerusalem, while insisting that Jews have none
Peace is not built by requiring one religion alone to surrender the right to pray at its holiest place.
The United Nations should stop demanding preservation of the Temple Mount status quo and instead demand its reform.
The UN Human Rights Council should establish a permanent agenda item asking a single question: Why are Jews still barred from praying openly at Judaism’s holiest site?
Every report by the Secretary-General on Jerusalem should state whether that prohibition remains in force.
Every General Assembly debate on Jerusalem should require Jordan and the Islamic Waqf to explain why the ban continues and what concrete steps are being taken to end it.
Every UNESCO discussion of the Temple Mount should address not only Jewish history at the site, but whether Jewish freedom of worship is being respected there today.
Every UN conference on Jerusalem should repeat the same demand until the answer changes:
End the prohibition on peaceful Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount.
The United Nations cannot credibly champion freedom of worship while defending a religious order that denies Jews that very freedom at Judaism’s holiest site.
Al Jazeera is the global media company funded by Qatar, governed through a board appointed by the Qatari state and used to project Qatari influence around the world. Its digital arm, AJ+, was built in 2013 specifically for younger Americans who consume news through social media rather than television. By the late 2010s, it had become one of Facebook’s largest news-video publishers, generating billions of views and millions of followers while focusing heavily on race, social justice and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a peculiar cocktail of a socialist-jihadi alliance at that time, which is now mainstreamed.
AJ+ has a long history of peddling Hamas propaganda
In September 2020, the Trump Justice Department concluded that AJ+ was acting on behalf of a foreign principal and ordered it to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Registration would not have restricted its journalism, but simply would have required public disclosure of its relationship with Qatar and periodic reporting similar to that required of other foreign state-backed media organizations like those from Turkey (TRT), China (CGTN) and Russia (RT).
AJ+ refused to register. Republican lawmakers including Chuck Grassley, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Todd Young pressed DOJ to enforce its own determination.
Then, in May 2022, the Biden Justice Department withdrew the order after reviewing additional information submitted by AJ+. What changed has never been publicly explained. DOJ has not identified the decisive new facts, released its legal analysis or explained why AJ+ was treated differently from other foreign state-funded broadcasters.
“AJ+’s reporting ‘supports an inference’ that its broadcasts are ‘designed to influence the opinions and perspectives of its U.S. audience as directed by the foreign principals and for their principal benefit.’…
Given Al Jazeera’s and TikTok’s public prominence in the U.S., mounting evidence of their use to advance foreign agendas, and the Biden Administration’s own national security concerns with the two companies, the Committee is puzzled that the Department appears to have either ceased or paused enforcement of FARA registration requirements for the companies without explanation.” – February 8, 2024 letter from the Committee on Oversight and Accountability
The timing naturally raises questions.
Only months earlier, the United States had completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan. Qatar had become indispensable to Washington—hosting negotiations with the Taliban, assisting the evacuation from Kabul and serving as one of America’s principal diplomatic intermediaries in the region.
There is no public evidence that the FARA reversal was connected to Qatar’s diplomatic role but it is reasonable to ask whether a government relying heavily on Doha’s cooperation became less interested in forcing Qatar’s flagship media network to register as a foreign agent.
The same question now confronts the second Trump administration. Although Trump’s first Justice Department initiated the FARA action, his current administration has not publicly reopened the case. That may simply reflect DOJ’s legal judgment or competing priorities. It may also reflect Qatar’s continuing importance as a partner in addressing Iran, Gaza and other regional crises.
A final question – closer to home – may be the most consequential. During this same period, antisemitism reached levels not seen in decades while anti-Israel activism surged across American campuses and social media, principally from young people. And AJ+ was one of the most influential foreign state-funded digital news brands reaching young Americans, peddling such hatred over this time.
The unanswered question is whether Washington accepted greater Qatari influence inside the United States – including directly and indirectly promoting antisemitism – in exchange for Qatar’s assistance abroad.
Whether making Al Jazeera and AJ+ register under FARA would suddenly change these trends is unknown. But it is also unknown and curious why the government stopped asking the Qatari media powerhouse to do so.
Founded in 1969, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is a coalition of 57 Muslim-majority nations, making it the second-largest intergovernmental organization in the world after the United Nations. Stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, and from Kazakhstan to Nigeria, it represents roughly a quarter of the world’s countries and speaks collectively on issues affecting the Muslim world.
OIC Member states
One of the organization’s longstanding positions is that extremist groups claiming to act in the name of Islam do not represent Islam. Over the years, the OIC has repeatedly condemned organizations such as:
ISIS (Daesh) — for attacks across Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Nigeria, all OIC member states.
Al-Qaeda — for attacks in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and other Muslim-majority countries.
Boko Haram — for its insurgency in Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon.
Al-Shabaab — for attacks centered in Somalia and extending into neighboring countries.
ISIS-K (Islamic State Khorasan Province) — for terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) — for its campaign against the government and civilians of Pakistan.
The common thread is unmistakable. Every one of these organizations has waged war against governments, civilians, or institutions in Muslim-majority countries, mostly members of the OIC itself.
The OIC has consistently argued that Muslims have been among the principal victims of jihadist terrorism. These groups bomb mosques, seek to overthrow Muslim governments, and destabilize OIC member states are denounced as terrorists and rejected as contrary to Islam.
Yet one jihadi terrorist groups is not called out. It is embraced.
Hamas is an Islamist movement whose founding charter and rhetoric have long drawn on jihadist themes and whose October 7, 2023, attack deliberately targeted civilians. Nevertheless, the OIC has not designated Hamas as a terrorist organization or issued the kind of sweeping institutional condemnations that it has directed at ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, ISIS-K, or TTP.
The most obvious distinction is not the use of Islamist ideology or armed violence. It is the target: Israel, the Jewish State.
For an organization that frequently states that terrorism has no religion and that Muslims are among terrorism’s greatest victims, its record reveals a clear pattern. When jihadist groups attack the Muslim world, the OIC is unequivocal in its condemnation. When an Islamist movement wages jihad against the Jewish state, the organization’s response is support.
When Iran offered condolences after the death of former Qatari emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the gesture appeared incongruous. Iran had recently been firing missiles and drones at Qatar and across the Gulf. So why the words of consolation?
Iran was not primarily attacking Qatar as a Muslim or Arab society. It was targeting the American military presence on Qatari soil. The same pattern has extended across the region: U.S. facilities and assets in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, as well as American positions in Iraq and Syria, have come under Iranian attack. Recent strikes included an early-warning installation in Qatar, Patriot systems in Kuwait, a U.S. fuel depot in Bahrain and military facilities in Jordan.
That reveals the real fault line in the Middle East.
It is not simply Sunni against Shia, Arab against Persian or even Muslim country against Muslim country. It is increasingly a divide over how to handle the United States: between governments and movements determined to expel American power and those that invite it in and then seek to shape it.
Iran represents the first model. Since 1979, its hostility has been explicit. It calls America the enemy, demands the removal of U.S. forces and uses missiles, drones and proxies against American military positions. Its war is visible. It announces its contempt and fires at the flag.
Qatar perfected a more nuanced model.
Under Sheikh Hamad, Qatar financed and expanded Al Udeid Air Base, which became central to U.S. operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and across the region. At the same time, Doha built influence inside the United States, financing American university campuses, purchased entry into American television distribution, invested in think tanks and businesses, hired lobbyists and cultivated political relationships. It also hosted anti-Western terrorist groups including Hamas leaders and Muslim Brotherhood figures, and used Al Jazeera to broadcast narratives often deeply hostile to the West and its allies.
Iran attacks American power from the outside. Qatar embraces it corrodes it from within.
anti-American Iranians
Iran seeks direct confrontation; Qatar seeks leverage.Iran’s weapons are missiles and militias. Qatar’s are money, access, prestige and indispensability.
The West is naturally more alarmed by Iran’s model. And Qatar’s model is harder to confront because it arrives as partnership.
The military base protects American interests. The university campus carries a prestigious name. The investment creates jobs. Each relationship is defensible in isolation. Together, however, they create influence on a scale no tiny monarchy could achieve through military power alone.
The broader contest is therefore not between countries that love America and countries that hate it. Iran and Qatar represent different tactics of genocidal jihadists. One strategy attacks the fortress. The other purchases rooms inside it.
Iran’s war is louder. Qatar’s may prove more insidious and enduring.
