The UN Secretary-General’s latest statement on June 8 warns about conflict in Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza.
Yet Israel appears only as the actor, never as the target.
Iranian missiles are fired at Israel. Hezbollah drones cross into Israel. Houthi missiles target Israeli cities. Millions of Israelis live under the threat of attack.
But in much of the international conversation, the war is always somewhere else.
The fighting is “in Lebanon.” It is “in Iran.” It is “in Gaza.”
The reality is that Israel enters the story primarily when it responds.
This framing matters. It transforms Israel from a country under attack into a country that simply attacks. The missiles disappear. The drones disappear. The civilians running to shelters disappear.
A missile launched from Iran toward Haifa is not a conflict “in Iran.”
A drone launched from Lebanon toward Kiryat Shmona is not a conflict “in Lebanon.”
They are attacks on Israel.
Yet too often Israel appears in international statements only after it fires back.
That does not merely distort the geography of the war. It distorts who started it.
The UN Secretary General once again showed its victims of preference and that the global body is not concerned about the fate of Israelis.
On May 28, 1964, the Palestinian National Charter was adopted in Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem. At that time, the West Bank was under Jordanian rule and Gaza was under Egyptian rule.
The Charter explicitly excluded both territories from its claims. It focused on Israel.
“This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area.”
The Charter did not challenge Arab sovereignty. It only challenged Jewish sovereignty.
Palestinian leaders supplied the national cause; Arab governments supplied the armies.
The Charter left little doubt about its objective. It declared:
“The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the State of Israel are entirely illegal.” – Article 17
And that “liberation” of the land is the common cause of all Arabs:
“Arab unity leads to the liberation of Palestine, and the liberation of Palestine leads to Arab unity.” – Article 12
The Palestinian movement was therefore born not as a campaign against an Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but as a movement that denied the legitimacy of Israel itself, and one in which the entire Arab world must unite.
The Charter’s author, Ahmad Shukeiri, was born in Lebanon and was Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1957 to 1962. His pan-Arab worldview called for Arab armies to destroy Israel:
“Those who survive will remain in Palestine, but I estimate that none of them will survive.” – Ahmad Shukeiri June 1, 1967
Another widely reported statement attributed to him declared:
“The Jews of Palestine will have to leave…We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors – if there are any – the boats are ready to deport them.“
Ahmad Shukeiri, circa 1965
Shukeiri’s brothers-in-arms said much the same.
In October 1964, Syrian leader Salah Jadid declared:
“Our army will be satisfied with nothing less than the disappearance of Israel.”
“The Arab national aim is the elimination of Israel.”
That same year, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser proclaimed:
“We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand; we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood.”
Iraqi President Abdul Rahman Arif described Israel as:
“an error which must be rectified.”
In June 1967, the Palestinian movement and the surrounding Arab states were speaking a common language. The PLO and Arab leaders denied Israel’s legitimacy and spoke openly of its disappearance, elimination, and destruction.
The rhetoric was matched by action. Egypt expelled the United Nations Emergency Force from Sinai, followed by Egyptian troops pouring into the peninsula. The Straits of Tiran were closed to Israeli shipping. Military alliances linked Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Arab armies massed on Israel’s borders.
Against that backdrop, Nasser announced on May 26, 1967:
“The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.“
Nine days later, war began.
Today, one of the most recognizable slogans associated with the Palestinian movement is “From the River to the Sea.” People often pretend that it is a call to free the West Bank and Gaza from “occupation” but the Arabic phrase speaks to the deeper truth as outlined by history.
“Min al-nahr ila al-bahr, Filastin ‘arabiyyah” meaning “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.”
Whether controlled by Jordan or Egypt or a hoped for Palestine, the Palestinian movement at its core has always been an anti-Israel movement to destroy the presence of Jews in “any part of Palestine.”
The June 1967 Six-Day War did not create the current dynamic in the Israel-Arab conflict. It was the conclusion of the first chapter of the Palestinian-led pan-Arab rejection of Jews living in and having sovereignty in land they view as purely Arab.
For nearly two thousand years, Jews have ended prayers with the hope of returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding what once stood there. It is the location of the First and Second Temples. Jewish longing for Jerusalem is woven into daily prayers, holidays, weddings, and mourning rituals.
Yet major international bodies have passed resolutions referring to the site primarily through its Muslim names while minimizing or omitting its central place in Jewish history. Imagine a resolution discussing the Vatican without mentioning Christianity, or Mecca without mentioning Islam. The absurdity would be obvious.
The issue extends beyond language.
Official United Nations map labeling the Temple Mount as holy only to Muslims
The international community supports a protocol under which Muslims may pray freely on the Temple Mount while Jews are restricted from praying at Judaism’s holiest site. The result is extraordinary: the world’s only Jewish state is expected to enforce a policy under which Jews do not support a basic human right at their holiest location in favor of members of another faith.
The Temple Mount is not merely a religious site. It sits at the heart of a larger question: whether the Jewish people are entitled to the same rights afforded to every other people.
Around the world, international institutions celebrate indigenous peoples reconnecting with ancestral lands, reviving ancient languages, protecting sacred sites, and preserving cultural traditions. Yet only in the case of the Jewish people does a return to the place where their civilization, language, religion, and national identity were born become a form of “colonialism.“
International institutions routinely describe the Temple Mount and the Jewish Quarter as part of “occupied Palestinian territory.” Yet these are the very places where Jewish civilization was born, where the ancient Temples stood, and where Jewish communities lived for centuries.
Jordan’s capture of eastern Jerusalem in 1948 resulted in the expulsion of its Jewish population and the denial of Jewish access to the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, and the Jewish Quarter for nineteen years. It granted citizenship to residents as long as they weren’t Jewish. The UN seemingly liked this. International discussion of the Old City of Jerusalem begins after the expulsion of Jews, as though their absence were the natural condition and their return the disruption.
The same pattern appears in discussions of territory.
The Green Line was never intended to be a permanent border. The 1949 Armistice Agreements explicitly stated that the line was not a political boundary and would not prejudice future negotiations. It was a military ceasefire line drawn after a war.
Yet decades later, much of international law treats that armistice line as though it were a sacred border whose crossing transforms ordinary Jews into international criminals.
A Jew who moves across that line becomes a “settler.” An Arab who moves into the same building does not. The geography is identical. The identity of the resident is what changes.
International institutions frequently oppose changes to the “demographic character” of eastern Jerusalem. But demographic character relative to what date?
The answer is effectively 1949, the year after Jordan captured eastern Jerusalem and expelled every Jew from the Jewish Quarter and surrounding areas. Why should the demographic baseline for justice be the moment immediately following the ethnic cleansing of Jews?
Why not 1980? Why not 2000? Why not today?
Human beings move. Cities evolve. Neighborhoods change.
The only way to preserve a specific demographic snapshot forever is to decide that one particular population must be prevented from returning.
In Jerusalem, that population happens to be Jews.
Then there is the question of refugees.
The same international system that opposes Jews moving into neighborhoods beyond the Green Line frequently endorses claims that millions of Palestinian refugees and descendants should be allowed to settle inside Israel.
Movement in one direction is described as a right. Movement in the other direction is described as a violation of international law.
The asymmetry is impossible to miss.
Every era develops its own vocabulary for antisemitism. In medieval Europe it often spoke the language of theology. In the nineteenth century it spoke the language of race. Today it increasingly speaks the language of international law.
Around the world, international institutions celebrate indigenous peoples reclaiming ancestral lands, reviving ancient languages, protecting sacred sites, and restoring cultural traditions.
Jews have done all of those things.
They returned to the land where their civilization was born. They revived Hebrew from a language of prayer into a language of everyday life. They restored Jewish sovereignty to the city that has stood at the center of Jewish life for three millennia. They reestablished communities at many of their most ancient holy sites.
Yet only in the case of the Jewish people does this story become one of colonialism rather than return.
Europe spent twenty years explaining that Hamas had a “political wing.” Hezbollah too. The bomb throwers were one thing, the parliamentarians another. The rocket launchers belonged in one legal bucket, the social service offices reserved for a different one. Western diplomats performed intellectual yoga worthy of Cirque du Soleil to preserve the distinction. The “military wing” was terrorist while the “political wing” was complicated. Nuanced. An unavoidable interlocutor for peace.
Britain finally gave up the act in 2019 with Hezbollah. The distinction, it concluded, was largely fictional. Same leadership, same financing, same ideology, same organization. Europe still technically preserves some of these distinctions in various legal frameworks, but fewer people pretend anymore that the “armed wing” and “political branch” emerge from separate planets.
Which makes the growing sanctions campaign against Jewish housing rights groups so fascinating.
Because now the question flips. Suddenly Europe is no longer carefully distinguishing between ideology and violence. Advocacy for controversial positions – not for violence – can suddenly become complicity in terrorism. Entire categories of speech are treated as unlawful conduct even absent anything remotely resembling the classic terrorism that justified Hamas and Hezbollah designations in the first place.
Take Nachala. It is not Hamas. It does not have brigades. It does not launch rockets. It does not run suicide bombing cells. It is an ideological movement advocating Jewish settlement in disputed territory. One may agree with it or despise it. One may view Jews living in land the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) want as a future Palestinian state as historic justice or catastrophic policy. But that is precisely the point. The dispute is fundamentally political and ideological.
For decades Europe insisted ideology alone was not terrorism. Supporting Palestinian “resistance” rhetorically was not enough. Calling for the destruction of Israel was grotesque but still politics. The line was violence. Actual violence. Material support for violence. Operational involvement in violence.
That was the principle.
Until suddenly the principle became inconvenient.
Now the standard appears to be evolving into something far murkier: movements may be sanctioned not necessarily for carrying out terrorism, but for contributing to environments viewed as extremist or against government foreign policy. Perhaps that standard is morally justified. Perhaps some Israeli activists have crossed legal and moral lines. But if this is the new doctrine, then the West should at least admit the doctrine changed.
Nachala’s Daniella Weiss
If ideology itself is now sanctionable, Western governments cannot apply the principle selectively.
For years crowds across London, Paris, Barcelona and university campuses have openly chanted for the elimination of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea.” Activists routinely declare that Israeli Jews should “go back to Poland,” despite the fact that millions of Israeli Jews descend from families expelled from Arab countries, Ethiopia, Iran and elsewhere. Imagine any other minority in Europe being told to leave the country and “go back” to lands where many never lived, or to where their families were annihilated. Authorities would instantly recognize the ethnic character of the demand.
If Israelis arguing that Jews should again live in Gaza constitutes sanctionable extremism, then what exactly should Britain call organizations openly advocating a “right of return” designed to flood Israel demographically out of existence? If the standard is advocacy for the removal or replacement of another national group, then the principle cannot stop with some Jewish activists in the West Bank.
London protest against Israel in 2021, including rap song
If the line is now ideological support for demographic elimination, then governments must police the radicalism inside their own societies with equal vigor.
That means groups explicitly advocating the destruction of Israel should face the same scrutiny directed at Jewish expansionist movements. Organizations and individuals promoting the forced removal of Jews from the Middle East “from the river to the sea” should not receive a special exemption dressed up as mere “anti-Zionism,” as if Israel is a concept and not a reality. Calls for the end of the Jewish State are not sophisticated geopolitical critiques. They are ethnic slogans calling for violence. And if governments now believe rhetoric itself creates dangerous ecosystems, they cannot pretend those ecosystems exist only on one side of the conflict.
Anti-Israel protesters in Rome, Oct. 28, 2023, shortly after the October 7 massacre and abduction of Israelis by thousands of Gazans. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
The irony is extraordinary. Europe once bent over backwards to separate terrorism from politics when the movements in question were Palestinian or Islamist. Now governments increasingly collapse politics into extremism to be sanctioned only when the movements are Jewish nationalist.
Europe spent decades insisting that ideas were not terrorism. If it now believes otherwise, it should say so openly and explain where the line will be drawn for everyone else.
In February 2001, long before Hamas ruled Gaza, long before Israel withdrew from Gaza, long before the security barrier, and long before the phrase “genocide in Gaza” became a campus chant, a United Nations “anti-racism” conference in Tehran was already accusing Israel of being a racist apartheid state guilty of crimes against humanity and “a form of genocide.”
The language was not improvised after October 7. It was drafted decades earlier.
Buried in the archives of the UN World Conference Against Racism sits a document that now reads like the prototype for today’s anti-Israel activism. Hosted by the Islamic Republic of Iran as the Asian preparatory meeting for the infamous Durban Conference, the 2001 declaration accused Israel of “racial discrimination,” “settler ideology,” “apartheid,” and genocide years before the events now routinely cited to justify those accusations.
The Tehran declaration described Israeli policy as “a new kind of apartheid,” “a crime against humanity,” and “a form of genocide.” It condemned “foreign occupation founded on settlements” and portrayed Israel as a uniquely racist state. It attacked Israel’s Law of Return as “racially based” while endorsing a Palestinian “right of return,” and framed the conflict almost exclusively through the language of colonialism and racial supremacy.
This was February 2001. Hamas would not seize Gaza for another six years. Israel had not yet disengaged from Gaza. The major Gaza wars had not occurred. There was no October 7 massacre. There were no TikTok videos, no encampments, no “Globalize the Intifada” marches winding through Western capitals.
Yet the ideological framework already existed in complete form.
The core vocabulary was already there:
apartheid
settler colonialism
genocide
racial supremacy
alien domination
decolonization
The slogans were set. The distribution system under the framework of “anti-racism” needed time to become global.
Iran understood this battlefield earlier than much of the West did.
The Islamic Republic did not wage war against Israel on only one front. It developed a multi-front strategy: terror proxies, missile programs, regional encirclement, propaganda networks, diplomatic campaigns, university activism, NGO penetration and information warfare. The battlefield extended from southern Lebanon to UN conference halls.
Iran understood something many Western governments failed to grasp: narratives can outlive battlefields. Terror attacks shock people temporarily. Moral frameworks reshape generations.
The achievement of the campaign was not inventing new hatred. It was laundering their own very old anti-Jew hatred through the moral vocabulary of human rights.
The regime in Tehran openly sought the destruction of the Jewish state while simultaneously helping construct an international framework portraying the Jewish state itself as the great racist evil of the modern world. The inversion was deliberate. A regime animated by antisemitism and eliminationist rhetoric repositioned itself as an anti-racist moral authority while recasting Israel as a global pariah.
Reality itself had to be inverted for the framework to function:
The Jewish people had to be stripped of indigenous identity despite Judaism being born in the Land of Israel and the core of the Hebrew Bible.
Jerusalem had to be detached from Jewish history despite being the holiest city in Judaism for three thousand years, and the direction of daily Jewish prayer.
Hebrew had to become the language of “colonizers” despite originating in the same soil activists insist Jews have no connection to.
The objective was to transform the Jewish state from a country that could be criticized into a moral obscenity that could not legitimately exist.
The Tehran document placed Israel into the moral category occupied by apartheid South Africa, colonial domination and crimes against humanity. Once a country is assigned that status, compromise becomes collaboration and coexistence becomes moral surrender.
Iran supplied the ideological fuel. Large parts of the Western activist ecosystem supplied the distribution network. The result was one of the most successful political rebranding campaigns of the modern era.
NGOs, academics, journalists, activist groups and eventually corporate and educational institutions absorbed the vocabulary and repackaged it as the language of progressive morality. Traditional antisemitism had become morally discredited after the Holocaust, so hostility toward the Jewish state was translated into the vocabulary of anti-racism, anti-colonialism and social justice.
The old image of the malevolent Jew became the malevolent Zionist.
Ancient hatreds were repackaged as the language of anti-racism and liberation.
The old demand that Jews disappear became “decolonization.”
And because the rhetoric arrived wrapped in the language of human rights, millions of educated Westerners could participate while imagining themselves enlightened rather than radicalized.
The asymmetry inside the Tehran declaration is particularly revealing. The document devoted extraordinary attention to portraying Israel as the embodiment of racism while saying nothing about antisemitism in the Arab world, terrorism against Israeli civilians, the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, or the openly eliminationist ideologies as the bedrock of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The imbalance was not accidental.
The conference was not constructing a universal anti-racism framework. It was constructing a hierarchy of permissible outrage in which Jewish sovereignty itself could increasingly be reframed as a moral offense.
The Durban process that followed later became notorious for antisemitic incidents, anti-Israel propaganda and efforts to revive the old “Zionism is racism” framework using newer terminology. Western democracies eventually began boycotting later Durban conferences because they viewed them as platforms for anti-Israel demonization masquerading as anti-racism initiatives.
But by then the political grammar had already escaped containment.
Over time, phrases first drafted in Iran migrated into university syllabi, NGO reports, newsroom style guides, faculty petitions, diversity trainings and street protests. Students who have never heard of the Tehran conference now repeat its vocabulary almost word for word, unaware they are echoing a political script written decades earlier by regimes that openly sought Israel’s destruction.
Long before October 7, the architecture had been built, the slogans drafted, and the moral categories assigned. More powerful than even the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, the new format for the 21st century is anti-Zionism is anti-racism.
For twenty years the distribution system slowly penetrated the world, and reframed Jew-hatred as morally acceptable under willing and unwilling eyes.
October 7 did not write the script. It activated one that had been waiting since 2001.
The Associated Press did not cover Jerusalem Day as a story about Jews returning joyfully to the holiest city in Judaism after nineteen years of exclusion under illegal Jordanian occupation. It covered it as a story about Jewish menace.
That framing decision is visible before readers even reach the second sentence.
“Ultranationalist Jews chant racist slogans during annual march into Jerusalem’s Old City.”
The rare racist chants reported at the march were ugly and deserve condemnation. But AP transformed the fringe into the essence of the event itself. Tens of thousands of Jews marched peacefully, sang, danced and celebrated Jerusalem Day. Yet readers encountering the article for the first time would assume the defining feature of the event was racist hooliganism when in fact it was joyous celebration.
Every descriptor pushes readers toward the same emotional conclusion: Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem is dangerous, aggressive and destabilizing. Palestinians are the natural residents and Jews are interlopers who threaten violence.
The false narrative erases the actual historical meaning of the day.
Jerusalem Day marks the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 after Jordan’s nineteen-year occupation of the eastern part of the city. During those years Jews were expelled from the Jewish Quarter, synagogues were destroyed, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and Jews were barred from praying at the Western Wall despite explicit guarantees of access under the armistice agreements.
Without that context, Jewish celebration is transformed into something alien and sinister. Readers are shown Jews marching through Jerusalem, but never fully told why entering the Old City carries such emotional and historical weight in the first place.
Erased from the narrative is the uncomfortable fact that Jews were once the excluded population in the very places now described almost exclusively through Palestinian identity.
The asymmetry in labeling is impossible to miss. Arabs in Jerusalem are described as “Palestinians” or “Palestinian residents,” language that subtly implies an already-existing Palestinian sovereignty over the city. Jews, meanwhile, are repeatedly subdivided into ideological categories: “ultranationalists,” “hard-line,” “settlers.”
One side receives an organic national identity. The other receives political suspicion.
AP even refers to “Palestinian areas” of Jerusalem while never acknowledging the basic legal and political reality that these residents are primarily Israeli citizens or permanent residents under Israeli administration. There is no Palestinian state governing Jerusalem. Yet the article’s language continuously nudges readers toward imagining Jews as intruding into someone else’s sovereign national space.
Even the treatment of the Temple Mount follows the same pattern. AP describes MK Itamar Ben Gvir’s visit as “provocative” before readers are even reminded that the site is the holiest place in Judaism, where the biblical temples once stood.
Imagine covering Muslims praying in Mecca or Catholics gathering in the Vatican first through the lens of how upsetting their presence might be to others.
Buried later in the article is a participant explaining that the racist chants came from “a small minority” of marchers. But by then the framing work is complete. The reader has already absorbed the article’s core emotional message: Jewish nationalism itself is the problem.
There is a profound difference between reporting that some participants at a massive public gathering behaved disgracefully and presenting those fringe elements as representative of the gathering’s essential character.
One reports misconduct. The other assigns collective identity.
And the asymmetry becomes impossible to ignore when comparing coverage standards. When participants at a pro-Palestinian rally praised terrorism or chanted genocidal slogans, major international outlets avoid headlines assigning those slogans to Palestinians collectively. Readers would receive sociological context, political nuance and careful distinctions between extremists and the broader movement.
Jewish events rarely receive the same interpretive charity.
The deeper issue exposed by the article is not merely media bias. It is discomfort with Jewish sovereignty itself.
Jewish attachment to Jerusalem is welcomed when it is passive and distant. The moment it expresses sovereignty, history or power, the vocabulary changes. Then Jews become “ultranationalists.”
The article unintentionally reveals a larger truth about modern international discourse surrounding Israel. Jewish history is acceptable. Jewish prayer is acceptable. Jewish suffering is acceptable. What remains difficult for much of the international press is Jewish power: Jews governing Jerusalem, policing Jerusalem, marching through Jerusalem and refusing to behave like temporary guests in their own civilizational center.
Every year, the United States spends tens of billions of dollars protecting foreign countries. Not during wars. Not during emergencies. Every single year.
American taxpayers fund enormous military infrastructures across the globe: bases in Japan, Germany, South Korea, Qatar, Italy, and dozens of other nations. The United States maintains air bases, naval facilities, missile defenses, hospitals, schools, intelligence hubs, fuel depots, and entire support systems overseas. Hundreds of thousands of American personnel have rotated through these countries over decades.
Kadena Air Base – Okinawa, JapanRamstein Air Base – Germany
Those expenditures serve American interests too. America protects trade routes, deters adversaries, stabilizes key regions, and projects power abroad. The postwar security architecture benefited both the United States and its allies.
But it is still true that Americans spend staggering sums every year defending allies and preserving peace abroad.
And nobody protests it.
There are no mass encampments demanding America close bases in Germany. No demonstrations condemning the billions spent protecting Japan. No chants against the enormous costs of deterring North Korea. Few activists march through campuses denouncing America’s sprawling military infrastructure across Europe, Asia, and the Persian Gulf.
Camp Humphreys – South KoreaYokosuka Naval Base – Japan
Which is precisely the point. Peace is expensive. Deterrence is expensive. Preventing large wars is expensive.
Estimated Annual U.S. Military Presence Costs By Country (2025)
Country
Estimated Annual Cost
Nature of Presence
Japan
$12B–$15B
Massive naval, air and Marine presence
Germany
$10B–$13B
NATO logistics and command hub
South Korea
$6B–$8B
Constant deterrence against North Korea
Qatar
$4B–$7B
CENTCOM and Middle East air operations
Italy
$3B–$5B
Mediterranean and Africa operations
United Kingdom
$2B–$4B
NATO, intelligence and airpower support
Estimated Overseas Total
$60B–$80B+ annually
Hundreds of global installations
When wars erupt, the spending surges even further. The United States has already committed over $188 billion to Ukraine following Russia’s invasion because Washington understands that instability among major powers carries enormous strategic consequences, weakening Russia among them.
Yet when the discussion turns to Israel, the framework suddenly changes. Protesters and politicians often speak as though Israel represents the centerpiece of American military spending abroad – the singular foreign country siphoning money away from struggling Americans.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has argued that America should be investing in housing, healthcare, education, and climate action — not “endless war.” Representative Rashida Tlaib has asked “Why is it that our government always has enough money for bombs, to bomb people, to kill people, but never seems to have money to provide people with healthcare, with housing, enough food for their families?”
Rep Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Rep Cori Bush (D-MO)
On its face, this sounds like a broad critique of American military spending but that is not how the rhetoric is actually deployed.
The slogans are overwhelmingly attached to Israel. Protest signs do not read “Housing Not Germany.” Student encampments are not organized around shutting down bases in Japan. Activists do not chant about the billions spent maintaining troops in Korea, Qatar, or Europe. The largest permanent American military expenditures abroad are treated as background noise – accepted features of the international system.
Only Israel is singled out as the foreign country supposedly taking food, housing, healthcare, and education away from Americans.
The actual numbers tell a very different story.
The United States does not maintain giant permanent bases in Israel. There are no sprawling American military cities resembling Germany, Japan, or Korea. No 50,000-troop deployments. No vast permanent occupation-sized infrastructure funded by U.S. taxpayers.
Al Udeid Air Base – Qatar
Israel largely fights its own wars with its own soldiers. Unlike many American allies, it maintains a large, technologically advanced military capable of defending itself rather than depending on permanent U.S. troop deployments for day-to-day security.
American assistance to Israel instead surges during major conflicts, particularly after attacks from Iranian-backed jihadist organizations openly committed to Israel’s destruction.
After the October 7 Hamas massacre – which included mass murder, kidnappings, sexual violence, and the burning alive of civilians – the United States accelerated weapons shipments and missile defense support to Israel as it simultaneously faced threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Shiite militias, and Iran itself. American funding has helped defang the largest state sponsor of terror in the world which has also threaten the United States.
Even including the wartime surge, total U.S. military support for Israel in the two years following the October 7 massacre was just over $20 billion, including traditional military aid, missile defense replenishment, emergency weapons transfers, naval deployments tied to regional deterrence, and supplemental wartime appropriations.
That is a large figure but it pales beside the recurring long-term costs of America’s military architecture elsewhere. The United States spends more every two years defending Japan and Germany – EACH – than it spent supporting Israel during one of the largest Middle East wars in decades.
And unlike Europe or East Asia, Israel exists in an environment where multiple armed movements and regimes openly call for its elimination.
American forces remain in Germany because Europe once descended into catastrophic war. American bases in Japan exist because Washington concluded lasting peace in Asia required permanent deterrence. Korea remains heavily militarized because North Korea still threatens annihilation.
Nobody claims those alliances make Germany, Japan, or South Korea illegitimate states. Nobody demands those countries lose American protection. Only Israel is treated as uniquely immoral for receiving defensive support while fighting organizations openly committed to genocide.
If the protests were truly about opposing American military expenditures abroad, the largest demonstrations in America would target Germany, Japan, Korea, and the vast global network of permanent U.S. bases that cost taxpayers tens of billions every year.
They do not.
Instead, the outrage fixates on the one major American ally fighting for survival without large U.S. troop deployments, without permanent American bases, and while carrying the overwhelming burden of war itself.
That contradiction reveals something important: for many activists, the issue was never primarily military spending. It was Israel.
For years, one of the most common accusations leveled against Israel has been the charge of “apartheid.” International NGOs invoke it routinely and campus activists repeat it endlessly. Much of the Western conversation now treats the claim not as an argument to be debated, but as an established fact.
The accusation carries a very specific implication: that Arab citizens of Israel are a permanently segregated and oppressed population fundamentally excluded from the society around them, and that Israel is a racist illiberal regime.
But the polling data emerging from inside Israel tells a profoundly different story. Not a simplistic story. Not a utopian story. But a far more human and complicated one.
For decades, much of the world has spoken about Arab Israelis without ever seriously listening to them. Western activists speak in the language of revolution. International NGOs speak in the language of permanent oppression. Campus protesters speak in the language of “decolonization,” “resistance,” and “right of return.” The underlying assumption is always the same: Israeli Arabs are presumed to be a permanently alienated population waiting for the eventual dismantling of the Jewish state.
Yet the actual polling of Arab Israelis increasingly points somewhere else entirely.
The newest evidence comes from a May 2026 study by the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation at Tel Aviv University. The survey found that 75.8% of Israeli Arab 12th graders support volunteering for non-security national service. Even more striking, 77.2% supported Arab political parties joining Israeli governing coalitions, while substantial numbers supported joining coalitions across the political spectrum rather than only left-wing alliances. More than half reported a strong sense of belonging to the State of Israel.
This is not the polling profile of a population preparing for insurrection. It is the polling profile of a population increasingly interested in civic participation, integration, and practical coexistence.
The trajectory matters even more than the raw numbers. In 2010, support for national service among Arab youth stood at only 43%. In fifteen years, support nearly doubled. That is not statistical fluctuation. It is societal evolution.
Then came October 7.
If the fashionable revolutionary narrative were true, one might have expected Arab citizens of Israel to radicalize after the Hamas massacre and the Gaza war that followed. Yet a 2024 survey from Tel Aviv University found that 57.8% of Arab Israelis said the war had actually strengthened feelings of “shared destiny” between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel.
That may be the single most important polling result of the post-October 7 era.
Because it directly collides with the apartheid framework so dominant in Western discourse. Apartheid systems do not typically produce growing feelings of shared civic destiny during wartime. Whatever tensions and inequities exist inside Israel, the polling increasingly suggests Arab Israelis themselves do not see their future primarily through the lens of permanent separation.
The polls also tell a subtler story about the so-called “right of return,” perhaps the most emotionally charged issue in the entire conflict. Western activists frequently present the demand for millions of Palestinian descendants to move into Israel proper as though it were universally embraced by all Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Arabs alike.
That finding matters enormously because a genuine two-state framework implicitly rejects the maximalist interpretation of “right of return” that would demographically dissolve Israel as a Jewish-majority state. The same survey found only small minorities supporting one-state frameworks built around domination or elimination of the other side.
In other words, the polling increasingly suggests Israeli Arabs distinguish between support for Palestinian national aspirations and support for eliminating Israel altogether.
That distinction is almost entirely absent from Western activist discourse.
Arab Israelis clearly continue to identify deeply with Palestinians culturally and emotionally. They remain sharply critical of many Israeli government policies. A March 2025 survey by the Institute for National Security Studies found extremely low trust among Arab Israelis in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.
But dissatisfaction with the government has not translated into broad support for Hamas or revolutionary confrontation. Quite the opposite. Poll after poll since October 7 has shown far greater fear of instability, communal violence, and economic disruption than enthusiasm for armed struggle. The dominant priorities emerging from repeated surveys are public safety, economic opportunity, education, housing, infrastructure, and reducing violent crime inside Arab communities.
Communities preparing for revolution do not consistently rank municipal policing, school quality, infrastructure investment, and economic mobility among their highest priorities. Citizens do.
The polling increasingly shows Arab Israelis sounding less like Western campus radicals and more like citizens trying to improve daily life for their families.
This is why the rise of pragmatic Arab political participation inside Israel matters so much. Figures like Mansour Abbas represent something many outsiders still struggle to understand: a growing willingness among Arab Israelis to work within Israeli political institutions rather than reject them outright.
Then Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett (L) shakes hands with the leader of the United Arab List Mansour Abbas during a Knesset session in Jerusalem, Israel, June 13, 2021. — AP/File
But here again, the crucial issue is what Arab Israelis increasingly appear to want done about those grievances. The polls suggest the overwhelming preference is not dismantling Israel, but improving their place within it.
Feeling of “shared destiny” with Jewish Israelis after Oct. 7
57.8% said war strengthened it
Polling shows sharply increased hostility after war
Preferred priorities
Crime reduction, housing, education, infrastructure, jobs
Conflict, statehood, war recovery, resistance politics
Support for two-state solution
72%
Lower and declining in recent polling
Participation in Israeli institutions
Increasingly normalized
Generally viewed as illegitimate
Attitudes toward Hamas after Oct. 7
Little evidence of broad support
Significantly higher support in multiple polls
The table reveals a profound disconnect between Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Arabs, as well as in the ideological activism abroad and lived reality inside Israel itself.
The activists chanting “globalize the intifada” imagine permanent struggle. Yet the polling increasingly points toward coexistence mixed with frustration, and integration mixed with cultural distinctiveness.
Which is why another recent trend in Western media coverage increasingly looks detached from reality: the insistence on replacing the term “Israeli Arabs” with “Palestinian citizens of Israel” as though the latter fully captures how this population sees itself.
These citizens are clearly Arab. Clearly connected culturally and emotionally to the broader Palestinian story. But the surveys increasingly show they also see themselves as participants in Israeli civic life, Israeli institutions, Israeli politics, Israeli education systems, and the Israeli economy. They vote in Israeli elections and increasingly support joining Israeli governing coalitions. Increasingly support national service and increasingly express a sense of belonging to the state itself.
Western activists speak the language of permanent revolution and endless “resistance.” The polling shows Arab Israelis speaking the language of citizenship, coexistence, opportunity, safety, and practical reality.
Israeli Arabs make up 21% of the Israeli population. Their numbers have grown faster than Israeli Jews since 1948. And they increasingly feel at home inside the Jewish State.
Israeli Arabs enjoying the beach in Tel Aviv, Israel (photo: First One Through)
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.
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.
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.
