In an astonishing development, a majority of U.S. Senate Democrats voted to withhold “offensive weapons” from Israel. It was a symbolic vote — the measure failed with Republicans opposing the bill — but the message is clear: Israel may block rockets but not destroy the launchers. Defense in this new moral order means absorbing blows gracefully, not ending the threat.
At the same time, France — home to the third-largest Jewish population in the world — announced it will recognize a State of Palestine without requiring demilitarization. Paris is prepared to bless a future Palestine that could legally import tanks, rockets, and drones — even as its largest faction, Hamas, wages a genocidal war.
The Illusion of Morality
This is not a call for peace but a demand that Israel remain permanently in the center of the bullseye. Washington Democrats and European leaders want to look moral by limiting “excessive force,” but they are scripting a world where Jews may bleed — just not too much at once.
Recognizing a Palestinian state without disarming it legitimizes Hamas’s war aim. It signals that mass murder, hostage-taking, and open calls for Israel’s destruction do not block your path to statehood — they accelerate it. That is appeasement, not diplomacy.
Hamas kidnapping Israeli women on October 7, 2023
The Right to Finish the Fight
Israel was built on thousands of years of history, and the vow “never again.” That means more than survival — it means the right to end the threat. Defensive weapons stop today’s rockets; offensive weapons prevent tomorrow’s.
If Democrats in Washington vote to deny Israel offensive weapons, and if Paris recognizes an armed Palestine, the message is the same: the Jewish state must fight forever.
True peace will not come from tying Israel’s hands — it will come from removing those committed to its destruction and extinguishing their dream.
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Imagine someone telling the Jews of Europe in 1935: accept the butchering and burning of six million of your people, and in exchange, you will once more gain sovereignty in your promised land. Would world Jewry have accepted such a bargain? Unlikely. In Judaism, the value of life as supreme trumps all—perhaps even over the divine inheritance of the Land of Israel itself.
That is why Jews do not take pride in the defenseless millions murdered in the Holocaust. They mourn them, honor their memory, and vow “never again.” The lesson is not that Jewish blood must be spilled for redemption, but that Jewish life is sacred and must be protected at all costs.
This moral foundation has been a hallmark of Jewish thought for millennia. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 4:5) teaches that “whoever saves a life saves the world.” Zionism, too, was never about blood sacrifice but about safeguarding Jewish existence and ensuring dignity, freedom, and self-determination. The rebirth of Israel is framed as a triumph of survival, not of slaughter.
Yet for Palestinian Arabs, the moral calculus is inverted. Martyrdom is not mourned but celebrated. “Glory to the martyrs,” they shout, glorifying not only the dead but the genocidal jihadists of Hamas who carried out the October 7 massacre of unarmed Jews. Streets, schools, and summer camps are named for suicide bombers and killers. Death in the service of destroying Jews is not a tragedy but an achievement.
Columbia University placard of “Glory to the Martyrs”
This glorification of death is not limited to fringe radicals. The majority of Gazans have always supported slaughtering Jewish civilians in Israel. Yasser Arafat, the father of the Palestinian national movement, repeatedly praised the “martyrs” who died attacking Israelis, insisting that “our blood is cheap compared to the goal [Jerusalem].” His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, continues the same practice. He honors terrorists killed while attacking Israelis, declaring that “we bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem.” The Palestinian Authority, under Abbas, even pays stipends to the families of those who die murdering Jews—the so-called “martyrs’ fund.”
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas blesses blood “spilled for Jerusalem”
The same ethos echoed recently in the United States. At the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, Michigan in August 2025, the crowd erupted in cheers for Gaza. Lameess Mahanna, sporting a shirt of the Palestine Youth Movement—employed at Columbia University—declared that the end of Israel would be “justice.” (1:35:00) She closed her remarks by leading the audience in a chant: “Say it clear and say it loud: Gaza, you make us proud!”
If Gaza, in her telling, is suffering a “genocide,” how can its dead make her and the thousands who echoed her cry, “proud?” The answer is chilling: because human life is secondary. For her, for Hamas, for the Palestinian leadership stretching from Arafat to Abbas, and from Gaza to Detroit, “justice” is not measured in lives saved, but in Israel’s disappearance. Every dead body is not a tragedy but a step toward their perverted form of “justice:” erasing the Jewish state and replacing it with Arab Muslim rule.
This is the precise inverse of the Jewish ideal. Jews mourn their murdered; Palestinians exalt theirs. Jews sanctify life; Hamas sanctifies death. Jews seek peace with dignity; Palestinian leaders glorify death as the path to victory. The Jewish lesson of the Holocaust is the necessity of Jewish strength to prevent further massacres. The Palestinian lesson of their own history is that more massacres are required for them to have “dignity.”
Which brings us to the central question: can two peoples animated by such irreconcilable values ever truly coexist? One side views life as sacred above all else. The other views life as expendable, even desirable, when spent in the service of destroying its cohabitants.
Coexistence demands a shared commitment to life. Without that, “peace” is a dangerous mirage—a prelude to slaughter, the ultimate source of perverted pride.
“The recent fighting and grave risk of further aggravation in an already brutal and deadly conflict raise severe protection concerns, amid a pervasive culture of impunity for human rights violations.” – Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, June 2024
“The RSF and its allied militias have also committed other war crimes and crimes against humanity. These include widespread sexual and gender-based violence, rape, sexual slavery, abduction, and recruitment and use of children in hostilities. The RSF and its allied militias have also systematically engaged in pillage and looting. They have further committed large-scale attacks based on intersecting ethnicity and gender grounds, especially against the Masalit community in El Geneina, including killings, torture, rape, and other forms of sexual violence, amounting to persecution.” – Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan, October 2024
“Famine is present in Darfur. Conflict is increasing. Children are targeted. Girls and women are subject to rape. And the whole landscape is one of destruction, and, we say, criminality. ” – ICC Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan, January 2025
” I have now concluded that members of the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan.” – US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, January 2025
With an estimated 150,000 people dead and some 12 million displaced, the conflict has paralysed Africa’s third-largest country. A catastrophic famine is ravaging the more remote areas, while a nightmare of sexual violence persists for women and girls across the country. – OCHA, April 2025
The numbers are staggering: as many as 150,000 people killed, millions displaced, thousands of women and children raped, villages in Darfur wiped off the map. It has been called “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide” in a land beset with “rape and sexual slavery” and “famine.” Children are dying daily, with half of El Fasher’s trapped population under five.
And yet — the streets of London, Paris, New York are quiet. No bridges are blocked. No university campuses are occupied. No faculty letters demand boycotts of Sudanese products.
The UN and Campus Activists Save Their Fury for Israel
When the UN convenes emergency sessions, it is rarely for Sudan. In 2024, the UN General Assembly passed 15 resolutions against Israel — and only seven against all other countries combined. The Human Rights Council maintains a permanent agenda item (Item 7) targeting only Israel.
On campus, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) calls for “globalizing the intifada” and promotes BDS campaigns to cut economic, cultural, and academic ties with Israel. Faculty petitions accuse Israel of “genocide” while ignoring the UN’s own genocide determinations in Sudan.
The fake narrative is fixed: Israel is a “settler-colonial outpost,” a European implant, a Western beachhead in the Middle East. This is not merely bad history — it is a deliberate attempt to erase Jewish indigeneity and delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.
Limited travel and lack of burial space has led to burials expanding from existing graveyard perimeters to the city roads. (photo: Giles Clarke for OCHA)
Erasing History as Antisemitic Strategy
“Israel’s pattern of practice of dispossession and expansion of settlements dating back to its establishment as a settler colonial state in 1948 has been found to be illegal under international law.” – NY CUNY vote on BDS Divestment, June 2024 (Passed)
This framing is an antisemitic dog whistle: it rebrands Jews as foreign European invaders in their ancestral homeland, turning their self-defense into imperial conquest. It ignores that more than half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi expelled from Arab and Muslim lands. It recasts Israel’s rebirth — championed by the same UN that voted for partition in 1947 — as a sin that must be repented by dismantling the Jewish state.
The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism is attempting to move Israel Studies in universities out of the Jewish Studies department and into Colonial Studies, both attempting to sever Jews from the land of Israel, as well as mark Zionism as a point of European imperialism.
This helps explain why so many are silent about Sudan or Syria. Those wars do not serve the European imperialism narrative, a war between the Global South and Global North. They do not produce graffiti that says “globalize the intifada” or “river to the sea.”
Israel is Vulnerable
“They can crush the flowers, but they cannot delay the springtime.” MIT vote on BDS, September 2024 (passed)
Israel is a small democracy, one that can be pressured and condemned without risk. Many seem to feel the UN’s vote to create Israel in 1947 was a mistake that must be corrected. The endless parade of UN resolutions, the obsessive focus of NGOs, and the boycotts pushed by activists reveal a not-so-hidden goal: not to protect Gazans, but to destroy Israel.
When Hamas butchered 1,200 Israelis on October 7 — burning families alive, gang-raping women, kidnapping children — the global street roared. Not in sympathy, but in accusation. The protests called Israel “the real terrorist” and demanded its isolation. When Israel finally defended itself, the outrage multiplied.
Meanwhile, Sudan burns — and the world yawns.
Mohamed Maysara, 2, cries at the Al-Buluk Hospital in Omdurman. He was there to receive treatment for malnourishment (photo: Giles Clarke)
A Moral Compass Pointed the Wrong Way
The world has turned its outrage into a weapon, aimed squarely at the one Jewish state. Genocide in Sudan, mustard gas in Syria, mass killings in Yemen — they elicit murmurs. But Israel’s attempt to dismantle a terror army that openly calls for its annihilation provokes riots, boycotts, and international tribunals.
This is not human rights activism but a global campaign to strip Jews of sovereignty. And it is why the contrast between Sudan’s silence and Gaza’s deafening clamor is not just hypocrisy — it is proof of a deeper animus that cannot be explained by compassion. It is the validation and desired implementation of Hamas’s genocidal charter.
In Biblical times, wells were beacons of life. To dig and find water was to unlock the possibility of home and permanence. Water fed crops and cattle; it drew families and trade; it birthed cities. Wells were light in the desert.
But not every hole in the ground was a well. Some were empty pits, barren of water and purpose. They became places of danger—sites where wanderers fell or where enemies cast prisoners to languish. Wells meant sustenance, while pits meant despair.
Well in the Judean city of Lachish
Today, the search for peace in the Middle East feels much the same. Those who find the right spring, like the signatories of the Abraham Accords, discover flourishing opportunities for coexistence. New ties of trade, technology, and tourism have watered once-barren fields.
But failed efforts—like the Oslo Accords—are pits. They began with hope, but quickly turned treacherous. The optimism of 1993 was buried under the violence of the Second Intifada (2000–2004) and has been further extinguished by the ongoing Gazan War since 2023. What was meant to be a well has become a hazard, a pit in the sand that swallows the unsuspecting. Like any abandoned well, it should be filled in and covered, not revisited.
The digging was not in vain; the effort was noble. But it is time to recognize Oslo for what it became—a failed blueprint. A peace process crafted with antisemitic design that insisted Jews may not live in a Palestinian state or pray at their holiest site in Jerusalem, while promising a false faith that millions of Arabs would be welcomed into Israel, is not a formula for life. It is an unbalanced design destined for collapse.
And the Philistines stopped up all the wells which his father’s servants had dug in the days of his father Abraham, filling them with earth. (Genesis 26:15)
A new well must be dug with clear foundations:
A State of Palestine where millions of Arab “refugees” can live—but not in Israel.
A Palestine that allows Jews to live there, just as Arabs live in Israel.
A Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty, open to all religions for access and worship.
Only once these parameters are accepted can the finer details of peace be discussed. Until then, the Oslo pit must be buried beneath the sand, its lessons remembered but its structure abandoned. The new effort can be called the Isaac Accords, to reflect the promise of wells of peace and abundance for everyone.
Isaac dug anew the wells which had been dug in the days of his father Abraham and which the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham’s death; and he gave them the same names that his father had given them. (Genesis 26:18)
Wells give life. Pits destroy. The task before us is to dig with the knowledge of past failures and not let ignorant hope set our shovels.
Parshat Shoftim begins with a straightforward command:
“Judges and officers you shall appoint in all your gates … and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment.” (Devarim 16:18)
Rashi explains that every town needed both judges to rule fairly and officers to enforce those rulings. Justice could not be a distant idea — it had to be rooted locally, available to every community. That is the Torah’s formula for a moral society: equal justice, applied where people live.
Justice Where You Live
The genius of Shoftim is its insistence that justice must be accessible and equal. Not some imperial tribunal deciding cases in faraway capitals, but local courts where every person could seek fairness and truth.
It is inside the gates where justice takes hold. That’s what builds trust, stability, and morality in a society.
The ICJ’s Distant Spectacle
Contrast this with the International Court of Justice in The Hague. It claims universal authority, yet its judgments fall unevenly. Brutal regimes that slaughter their own citizens often escape its scrutiny. But Israel, a country with one of the most independent and activist judiciaries in the world, is hauled before it repeatedly.
This is an inversion of the Bible’s call for justice: a court far removed from the people, applying rules unevenly, more performance than principle.
Israel hauled before ICJ
Israel’s Local Justice vs. International Bias
Inside Israel, anyone can petition the Supreme Court — Arabs, NGOs, critics of the army. Judges regularly check government policy and military decisions. That is exactly what the Torah envisioned: justice dispensed locally, equally, and consistently.
The ICJ, by contrast, applies law selectively and from a distance. It does not strengthen justice; it hollows it out.
Conclusion
The United Nations had the opportunity for courts in its gates — with its agency UNRWA on the ground in Gaza, running schools, hospital and providing loans. It could have confronted Hamas’ crimes. Instead, it chose silence. It abandoned justice, allowed Hamas to fester, and turned Gaza into a terrorist enclave for Israel to face.
Now the same UN condemns Israel in The Hague. A body that ignored justice locally dares to preach it globally.
But the Torah is clear: a land cannot be moral when evil is allowed to sit at its gates. Hamas must be expelled. And the UN — which empowered terror and continues to undermine justice — has no rightful place in the Holy Land either.
Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, posted on X that Jesus was a Palestinian. The implication was not only that Jesus was Arab, but also Muslim. Both are historically false. Jesus was a Jew in Judea. He lived, preached, and died as a Jew in his homeland.
If alive today, Jesus would not be celebrated by the Palestinian Authority. He would be condemned. The United Nations would call him an “illegal settler” for living in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Palestinian leaders would brand him a “colonist” because his Jewish family had the audacity to live in their ancestral land.
This is not a new stunt. A few years ago, activist Linda Sarsour declared that Jesus was a Palestinian from Nazareth. She conveniently ignored the fact that Nazareth is in Israel, and that Jesus was Jewish—observing Jewish holidays, quoting Jewish scripture, and praying in Jewish synagogues. He was as much a “Palestinian” as King David or Moses.
Radical preacher Omar Suleiman – invited to speak before Congress by Nancy Pelosi – said the same. His goal was to peel Christian support away from the Jewish State. Evangelical Zionists needed to hear the gospel from an Islamic extremist.
Why this persistent rewriting of history? Of cultural appropriation? Because anti-Israel agitators have a larger project: erasing Jewish ties to the land of Israel. They cannot admit that Jews have been in their holy land continuously for millennia, so they try to recast Jewish history in Arab clothing. They claim Jews are foreigners and interlopers while appropriating Jewish figures for their own narratives.
The irony is striking. For all their rhetoric about “coexistence” and “justice,” the pro-Palestinian movement reveals its antisemitic moral rot in these fabrications. They would rather deny Jewish history than seek peace with the Jewish people. They would rather invent a fictional Palestinian Jesus than accept the historical Jewish Jesus.
Jesus has now become the latest Jew taken hostage—not in body, but in identity. Uygur, Sarsour, and their fellow travelers parade his name as a prop in their campaign against Jewish sovereignty. But no amount of Twitterstorms, hashtags, or revisionist slogans can undo the reality: Jesus was a Jew, in Judea, in the land of Israel.
Jesus, like every Jew before and after him, is bound up with the land that antisemitic anti-Israel activists desperately want to sever from its true indigenous people.
In a bold step to preserve humanity’s “most fragile treasures,” UNESCO voted to add the Hamas Charter to its list of endangered cultural artifacts. The decision came during the organization’s annual heritage summit, which initially convened to safeguard vanishing African oral traditions, disappearing tribal instruments, and lost languages. But the spotlight quickly shifted after the State of Palestine—recognized as a full UNESCO member—submitted the 1988 Hamas Charter as a candidate for protection.
Delegates debated the proposal with solemn reverence, as though they were discussing ancient scrolls or fragile clay tablets. “This is not merely a document,” intoned one UNESCO official, “it is a vibrant example of humanity’s enduring talent for mixing medieval theology, paranoid conspiracy, and genocidal intent into a single cultural artifact.”
Hamas, which currently holds 58% of the Palestinian parliament and continues to govern Gaza with an iron fist wrapped in a prayer shawl, celebrated the recognition. “We thank UNESCO for finally appreciating the poetic quality of our prose,” said one Hamas spokesperson, pointing to passages citing Jews as orchestrators of every global evil, from wars to stock market crashes. “It is art. Dark, sinister art, but art nonetheless.”
The Islamic Republic of Iran, a member of UNESCO with a keen eye for heritage preservation, reportedly helped prepare the submission. Delegates noted the Persian calligraphy used in the cover page of the proposal as “an exquisite touch of cultural diplomacy.”
Critics, however, were less charitable. Human rights groups asked why UNESCO would protect a text calling for the eradication of an entire people while ignoring actual endangered communities being eradicated in real time. UNESCO officials brushed off such concerns. “Our mission is not to judge,” said one diplomat. “If we can safeguard Stonehenge, we can safeguard Stone Age thinking.”
The vote passed overwhelmingly, though with several European countries abstaining in embarrassment. The document will now be digitally preserved and inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, alongside such treasures as the Magna Carta, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and the forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
As the session closed, one delegate mused: “Perhaps one day humanity will look back on this charter the way it looks at medieval torture devices—an artifact of cruelty, once revered, now displayed in a museum of shame.”
For now, however, UNESCO has declared the Hamas Charter an endangered cultural jewel which must be preserved. Its continued existence may be a threat to peace, but, as the organization reminded the world, “heritage must be protected, even when it is heritage of hate.”
For decades, the pro-Palestinian narrative labeled any Jew living east of the 1949 Jordanian Armistice Lines a “settler.” The term was never about accuracy but about framing. “Settler” implied that Jews were foreign interlopers, distinct from Arab residents who were cast as the indigenous population. So when Jewish and Arab families from Jaffa moved to Jerusalem’s Old City, only the Jews were called settlers. The transplanted Arab was considered at home, while the transplanted Jew was branded an intruder.
Even more strangely, the label of “settler” wasn’t tied to the founding of a new community. A Jew moving into an existing neighborhood—or even just a single apartment—could suddenly transform the entire edifice into a “settlement.” Words bent reality; the label carried the weight of illegitimacy.
But the terminology seems to be shifting. Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official media arm, now increasingly calls Jews in these areas not “settlers,” but “colonists.” The updated lingo seems to fit better with the intellectual currents flowing through Western universities, where post-colonial studies cast Jews as Europeans imposing themselves on native lands. Never mind that Jews are the indigenous people of Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem, and that there are more Mizrachi Israeli Jews than Ashkenazi—the narrative works if repeated often enough.
Wafa website on August 19, 2025
If the key to eroding U.S. support for Israel lies in framing Jews as oppressors and colonizers, then the Palestinian Authority is adapting accordingly. By embracing this academic jargon, it aligns itself with progressive activists abroad.
Expect the United Nations, NGOs, and sympathetic media outlets to follow suit. Language is a weapon, and the word “colonist” sharpens the blade. The campaign is not just to vilify Jews east of an arbitrary line—it is to recast Jewish presence anywhere in the land as alien, invasive, and illegitimate.
Further, “settlers” is deeply embedded with an anti-Jewish narrative. A pivot to a generic smear appears less antisemitic as well as more universal in condemning the entire Western world’s imperialism and colonialism. Take on Jews everywhere in “Palestine.” Take on Americans throughout “Turtle Island.”
“Colonists” are the new cudgel in the effort to purge Jews from their homeland. It’s a deliberate term and effort, crafted so as to be easily next replicated against Americans by radicals as the new school year begins.
Nothing so captures the European mindset like soccer. It’s a global sport with scant appreciation in North America, but Europeans are glued to it. Consequently, soccer (“football”) matches become backdrops for activists to shout their causes, knowing that it will attract millions – or perhaps billions – of eyeballs.
It was a moment anti-Israel advocates would not pass up.
UEFA had been criticized by pro-Gazan agitators for not coming out against Israel during this war. On August 12, the day before the match, UEFA announced an expansion of its existing “support for the humanitarian efforts for children in conflict zones,” to include Gaza. The wording was careful to not criticize either Israel or Hamas, and just focused on children.
Whatever the adults waging wars think they are doing, the children are innocent.
Aleksander Čeferin, UEFA President
UEFA took an added step during the match and had nine children from conflict zones where it supports humanitarian efforts – Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, and now Gaza – unfurl a banner on the field that read “stop killing children. stop killing civilians.”
Qatar-owned Al Jazeera would use the UEFA actions to generate its own anti-Israel story.
In an article titled “UEFA unfurls Gaza-related plea banner after Palestinian tribute fallout,” the pro-Hamas media site said that the banner was all about Gaza, even when children from multiple countries participated. The article pushed a Gaza narrative with “in the wake of heavy fallout over its meek tribute to a Palestinian player killed by Israel,” it mentioned Liverpool forward Mohamed Salah who condemned UEFA on August 10 for not calling out Israel in its statement.
Al Jazeera would then manufacture history, writing “Nine children refugees from Palestine, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iraq carried the banner onto the field of play before the game began.” But Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iraq are actual countries, Palestine is not. The two children from Gaza who took part in the ceremony were in Milan receiving medical treatment, not fleeing persecution “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,” which is the definition of a refugee according to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees. Unless Al Jazeera believes these children are being targeted by Hamas.
Just days before this incident, on August 10, Al Jazeera had some of its journalists in Gaza killed by an Israeli strike. Israel said they were legitimate targets, as they were terrorists paid by Hamas. It was shocking to all that the media company which is owned by the wealthiest regime in the world needed its journalists to make some extra coin from an antisemitic genocidal organization that is supposedly “starving,” not that the journalists were terrorists, which was common knowledge.
The Qatari propaganda company has long accused Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza. It claims that “Israel kills an average 28 Palestinian children daily in Gaza,” attempting to make the Arab youth the primary victims and focus of the war, and portray Israel as a bloodthirsty monstrosity. It did not inform its readers that children under 18 account for 47% of the population of Gaza, but a much lower 31% of the fatalities according to OCHA, which gets its information from the Hamas run Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza.
When further considering that many of the children between 15 and 18 years old are part of the Hamas war machine, the much lower percentage of child fatalities points to Israel’s efforts to target Gazan fighters, not children. Even Hamas admits that nearly half of all fatalities in Gaza have been fighting-aged males (49%), even though they account for just one-quarter of the population (26%).
As for the 6,000 Gazans who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, Al Jazeera had no concern for how they treated Jewish children. The Gazans killed 38 Israeli children in front of their parents. They took the same number as hostages to Gaza. What kind of people take babies as hostages as a matter of policy?
Bibas children Kfir and Ariel, with mother, Shiri, all taken as hostages by Gazans, later returned dead in an exchange for Gazan terrorists
“Don’t kill children. Don’t kill civilians,” should be the understood motto of all civilized people and organizations. That Qatar and Al Jazeera continue to stand by Hamas after all they have done – and then attempt to misdirect the world towards Israel – makes them deeply complicit in the deaths of thousands.
Desire Doué and Ousmane Dembélé of France St. Germain lift the UEFA Super Cup Trophy, sporting jerseys embossed by their sponsor, Qatar Airways
In a recent speech at the United Nations, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy declared his country was “determined to protect the viability of the two-state solution.” At first glance, this appears to be a standard diplomatic statement. But in elaborating on Britain’s historical role in the region, Lammy offered a revisionist take on the Balfour Declaration that reveals a deep and dangerous misunderstanding of Middle Eastern history—and raises questions about the UK’s current policy stance toward Israel and the Jewish people.
Lammy said the Balfour Declaration came with the “solemn promise that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the Palestinian people.” This phrasing might sound accurate to the uninformed, but in fact, it fundamentally distorts the language and intent of the original 1917 Declaration. The actual text stated that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” That is a significant difference—not a matter of semantics, but of historical and political accuracy.
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy brings up the Balfour Declaration which he doesn’t comprehend
1. The Myth of a “Palestinian People” in 1917
In 1917, there was no recognized Palestinian national identity. The population of the region known as “Palestine” was a mix of Jews, Arabs, Druze, Bedouins, and others. They lived across a geographic region that included modern-day Israel, Jordan, Gaza, and what is now termed the West Bank. The idea of a distinct Palestinian Arab national identity only began to emerge decades later, especially in reaction to the creation of the State of Israel.
By 1948, the demographics had shifted dramatically, in part due to waves of Arab migration into the British Mandate territories from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt. Lammy’s reference to “the Palestinian people” as the subject of the Balfour Declaration imposes a modern nationalist narrative on a time when none existed. Balfour’s “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” would exclude millions of Arabs who moved into Palestine after the 1917 declaration, whom Lammy probably considers “Palestinian people” today.
Balfour Declaration
2. A Jewish State That Did Not Prejudice Others
When Israel declared independence in 1948, it offered full citizenship to the roughly 160,000 non-Jews residing in its territory. Today, over 20% of Israel’s citizens are Arab, enjoying rights and protections that are absent in many neighboring states. Far from violating the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities, Israel has ensured freedom of worship, speech, and assembly for all its citizens.
So when Lammy said, “this has not been upheld and it is a historical injustice which continues to unfold,” he is lying. Completely. Israeli Arabs today enjoy far greater civil liberties than Arabs in Syria, Egypt, Jordan, or in Palestinian Authority- and Hamas-ruled territories. The “historical injustice” is not Israel’s creation, it exists beyond Israel’s internationally recognized borders.
3. Britain’s Role in Enabling Discrimination—Against Jews
Ironically, it was the UK itself—through the Mandate for Palestine—that laid the legal foundation for a Jewish homeland. And for ongoing antisemitism.
Britain unilaterally partitioned off nearly 80% of that territory in 1921 to create Transjordan (now Jordan), and stood by as the Hashemite Kingdom banned Jews from citizenship and ownership of land. When Jordan illegally seized the area later known as the “West Bank” in 1948, Britain was the only three countries (Pakistan and Iraq, which was also a British mandate) to formally recognize that annexation—a striking contradiction to the Balfour Declaration’s supposed promise of equal rights.
The Hashemite Kingdom, with Britain’s backing, quickly turned its part of Palestine into a Jewish-free zone, passing a citizenship law in 1954 that specifically excluded Jews. This glaring double standard—permitting discrimination against Jews while demanding protections for Arabs—is a historical stain that remains unacknowledged in Lammy’s telling.
Worse, it continues.
4. Britain’s Ongoing Endorsement of a Jew-Free Palestine
In 2016, the UK voted in favor of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which declared Israeli presence in the West Bank—including Jewish neighborhoods in the Old City of Jerusalem—to be illegal under international law. Then, in a joint statement with France and Canada last week, the UK reiterated this view, calling for Israel to “halt [Jewish] settlements,” and warning of potential sanctions.
In effect, the UK is advocating for a future Palestinian state that is entirely Jew-free—while curiously condemning Israel for allowing non-Jews to live freely within its own borders. How is this consistent with the principle of equal civil and religious rights? How can Lammy demand protections for non-Jews – who have rights – while simultaneously supporting policies that trample the rights of Jews to live in their ancestral homeland?
5. A “Two-State” Solution That Isn’t Two Equal States
The fact that millions of non-Jews can live in Israel while Jews are prohibited from living in the proposed Palestinian state is not a path to peace. It is the codification of apartheid, not its cure. Can any reasonable person believe that a state founded on the exclusion of Jews will live peacefully beside the world’s only Jewish state?
6. A Dangerous Historical Amnesia
Lammy’s casual misquote of the Balfour Declaration isn’t just historically inaccurate—it betrays a worldview that has forgotten the lessons of Britain’s own policy failures. Britain once promised the Jews a national home, but reneged repeatedly, prioritizing Arab appeasement and imperial interests. It didn’t vote for a Jewish State in the November 1947 UN resolution and walked away from Palestine in May 1948, leaving the warring parties to fight it out. At war’s end, it blessed Jordan’s illegal seizure and ethnic cleansing of Jews.
Today, that legacy lives on in the UK’s refusal to recognize Israel’s legitimate rights while whitewashing Palestinian maximalist demands—whether from the Palestinian Authority (Jew-free Gaza and West Bank) or Hamas (Jew-free “from the river to the sea.”)
The Foreign Secretary’s focus on providing the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) self-determination, has blinded him to history and the basic human rights of Jews. A vision of peace that requires the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Judea and Samaria and demanding that Israeli Arabs with full citizenship rights get somehow even more rights, is not a peace worth supporting.
First One Through 