At 10:15, she invoked Gaza and said “if borders can be changed by force, if sovereignty can be set aside when inconvenient, or upheld only when politics allows, then no Member State can sleep peacefully anymore.” She repeated Gaza alongside Ukraine as she closed her remarks at 17:00.
Israel is a UN member state. Gaza is not. Palestine is not. Yet the UN increasingly discusses this war as though those roles were reversed.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the government of Gaza alongside thousands of Gazans invaded Israel. Thousands of terrorists attacked communities and military installations, killed roughly 1,200 people and abducted 251 into Gaza.
Members of Hamas tear down fence and invade Israel on October 7, 2023
If Baerbock wanted an example of a member state’s border being violated by force, she had one.
Instead, the UN performs a remarkable double inversion. It starts the clock after October 7, making the war appear to begin with Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Then it treats Gaza as the territory whose sovereignty and borders are paramount, while the actual member state that was invaded becomes the accused.
Territorial integrity cannot be a foundational principle when Russia enters Ukraine and an inconvenient technicality when Gazans invade Israel. A rule whose application depends upon who is doing the invading is not a principle. It is politics dressed up as international law.
The organization created to protect member states has demonstrated that when Israel, a member state, is invaded and its civilians raped, slaughtered and kidnapped, by some evil orchestration and institutional design, the terrorist enclave from which the attack emerged can be turned into the aggrieved party.
The UN has not merely failed its own basic test. It has exposed the fine print in its supposedly universal principles: borders are inviolable, sovereignty is sacred, and member states must be protected – unless the member state is Israel.
Hamas terrorist in Israeli kibbutz on October 7, 2023
The New York Times wants to know what New York Jews think about Israel.
Its new questionnaire asks Jewish New Yorkers whether they think about Israel more since October 7. Whether their opinion of Israel has changed. Whether they call themselves Zionists. Whether they have become more vocal or politically active.
The frame is revealing.
The Times wants to know how Israel has changed the Jews.
It does not ask whether October 7 changed their opinion of Hamas.
Did the murder, rape and kidnapping of Israelis change their understanding of the conflict? Did years of Israelis held hostage in Gaza change it? What have they learned about Hamas, its genocidal antisemitic foundational charter, Palestinian politics or jihadist movements committed to Israel’s destruction?
Those questions aren’t there.
Neither is another actor in the past three years: the New York Times.
Has its coverage changed your trust in the newspaper? Do you believe its reporting on Israel and Gaza has been fair? Has its treatment of antisemitism changed your relationship with the paper? Has its language surrounding “genocide”, “occupation” and “resistance” changed how you understand the conflict or how you perceive of the media?
The newspaper wants to know what changed the Jews without asking whether the newspaper helped change them.
Then there is the matter of which Jews.
The questionnaire asks whether you are a Jewish New Yorker. It does not ask whether you are 22 or 72. Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or secular. Democrat, Republican or independent. Progressive, moderate or conservative. Those differences may explain the answers, as discussed in many other polls.
More important, this is an open call published by the New York Times. It is not a random survey of New York Jews. For years, parts of the Jewish community have fought bitterly with the paper over its coverage of Israel and antisemitism. Many longtime Jewish readers have publicly canceled their subscriptions over that coverage. Thousands more privately.
The Jews most alienated by the Times may also be the least likely to see its callout, trust its reporter or volunteer their thoughts. Jews comfortable with the newspaper and its worldview may be more inclined to respond, biasing the poll results. It could collect hundreds of responses showing its Jewish respondents moving away from Israel without knowing whether the Jews moved or its sample did.
Then comes the missing questionnaire.
Where are the questions for Arab and Muslim New Yorkers?
Did October 7 change your opinion of Hamas? Do you consider Hamas a terrorist organization? Do you believe Jews are entitled to national self-determination? Should Jews be allowed to freely access and pray at their holiest site? Should Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups surrender their weapons? Has your opinion of Israel changed? Of Jews?
Those answers would tell New Yorkers quite a lot too.
And the timing is particularly ugly.
Hasan Piker has recently been asking his own version of precisely this question: How attached are American Jews to Israel?
Piker has called Israel “Jewish ISIS” and previously said Hamas was “a thousand times better” than Israel. More recently, he warned that if American Jews continue presenting themselves as deeply invested in Israel, eventually someone may take action against American Jews rather than Israel.
That is antisemitism dressed up as a warning.
And now the New York Times arrives with a questionnaire measuring whether Jewish New Yorkers still call themselves Zionists and whether their feelings about Israel have changed.
The disturbing convergence is the question itself: How attached are the Jews to Israel now? The New York Times wants to know. Millions of antisemites that follow Piker want to know.
ACTION ITEM
So answer the poll. But not their questions.
Tell the Times exactly how October 7 changed your thinking.
Tell it what you think about Hamas. Tell it what you have learned about jihadism, hostage-taking and fighters operating among civilians. Tell it whether Palestinian Arabs support for the October 7 massacre and Hamas have changed your understanding of the conflict.
Then tell it about the New York Times.
Tell it whether its coverage has increased or destroyed your trust in the newspaper—its language, its emphasis, its omissions, its telling of the Jihadi-Israel conflict.
Hasan Piker and The New York Times are polling Jews for their attachment towards Israel. Tell them what you think of the global jihad sweeping the world.
The Arab League issued a remarkable condemnation of Israel: it objects to the “expansion of new Jewish communities in the Negev and Galilee and increasing their Jewish populations.”
These are not settlements in the West Bank. They are areas inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
Further, Israel is described as “1948 territories.”
That makes the statement difficult to reconcile with the Arab League’s simultaneous support for a Palestinian state based on the June 4, 1967 lines. Under that formula, the Negev and Galilee remain part of Israel. And why suggest that Israel is just part of Palestine, calling the entire state “1948 territories?”
The question is particularly relevant to Egypt.
Egypt was the first Arab country to recognize Israel and signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, ending the two countries’ state of war. Nearly fifty years later, Cairo continues to endorse a two-state solution: a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines alongside a secure Israel.
That position should carry a simple implication: Israel’s right to develop its own communities within its own territory.
Egyptian officials should therefore answer a straightforward question: Does Egypt believe Israel has the same right to develop Jewish communities within its territory that a future Palestinian state would have to develop its own communities?
If the answer is yes, Cairo should say so.
If the answer is no, then the issue is not simply the borders of a future Palestinian state. It is whether Jewish demographic and community development inside Israel is itself considered illegitimate. It reeks of antisemitism.
But is their another way to think of these hateful remarks?
Egypt made peace with Israel nearly half a century ago to get back the Sinai Peninsula it lost in the 1967 Six Day War. Is Egypt deliberately opening cracks in that treaty? Is it preparing to push Israel to hand some of the Negev to Gazans now – alongside its own contribution of part of the Sinai – as Gazans hope to rebuild the strip after its failed war on Israel?
Is the Arab League simply being antisemitic or is it deliberately setting the course for a new map for Gaza?
Everyone knows why October 7, 2023 changed Israel. But an obscure Ottoman law makes another date worth watching: October 7, 2026.
In 1858, the Ottoman Empire enacted a land code under which three consecutive years without cultivationcould have consequences for rights to certain agricultural land.
Now, three years after October 7, that old rule may suddenly matter.
The Three-Year Rule
Much of the agricultural land of the Ottoman Empire was classified as miri. The sovereign retained ultimate title (“state land”) while individuals could acquire valuable rights of possession and use, known as tasarruf.
Active use of the land mattered.
Article 68 of the Ottoman Land Code addressed agricultural land left uncultivated for three consecutive years without a valid excuse. The original Ottoman mechanism was more complicated than “three years and the government automatically owns your land,” involving tapu, the status of the holder and opportunities to recover the right.
But the underlying principle was clear: continued cultivation could matter to continued land rights.
Ottoman term
Meaning
Relevance
Miri
State land carrying individual possession/use rights
Much agricultural land
Tasarruf
Right of possession and use
The individual’s valuable land right
Mahlul
Lapsed/reverted possessory right
Potential consequence of qualifying non-cultivation
Tapu
Land registration/title system
Documentary evidence of rights
This is not merely an Ottoman historical curiosity. It passed on to the British, Jordanians and then Israel with few modifications.
In 2020, Israel’s Supreme Court addressed the rule directly in HCJ 5426/17, Barakat v. Head of the Civil Administration in the West Bank (Nov. 29, 2020). The Court held that under the Jordanian land law still applicable in the territory, an unregisteredtasarruf right acquired through cultivation could be extinguished if the land was left uncultivated for three consecutive years, causing the land to revert to the government under Article 68’s mahlul doctrine. By contrast, a tasarruf right that had been formally registered generally was not lost merely because the land subsequently lay fallow.
So the three-year rule remains relevant to unregistered land in Judea and Samaria today.
Goats owned by Bedouins graze in Judea and Samaria (photo: FirstOneThrough)
Then Came October 7
After the October 7 massacre by Gazans, security conditions dramatically changed access to agricultural land across the region. OCHA reported that more than 96,000 dunams of olive-cultivated land went unharvested during the 2023 season following access restrictions and violence. By the 2025 olive harvest, OCHA was reporting that farmers from multiple villages had been completely denied access for the third consecutive year to certain olive groves.
That creates the question: How much unregistered agricultural land has actually gone uncultivated since October 7, 2023?
The Eye in the Sky
There is something unusual about these particular three years.
Israel has had extraordinary security reasons since October 7 to maintain extensive aerial surveillance of Judea and Samaria.
At the same time, the Civil Administration already uses sophisticated geographical information in determining land status. Its Surveying Unit maintains cadastral and mapping information, while its Supervision Unit operates a team whose stated function is examining land through survey procedures “aimed at locating state land in the area, for declaration as such.”
The Civil Administration therefore potentially possesses an extraordinarily detailed record of whether cultivation occurred.
Request For Access
Consider two claimants whose land appears uncultivated in aerial photographs for three years. One produces repeated applications showing: I wanted to cultivate my land. Israel prevented me from reaching it. The other has no comparable record.
Those are materially different factual cases based on the background discussed above.
OCHA reports that Palestinian liaison authorities submit farmers’ access requests to Israeli authorities and tracks approvals, denials and pending requests in particular areas. Those applications coupled with the aerial documentation, may move the land into a different legal category.
Meanwhile, Israel Is Looking for State Land
This is where the 1858 law meets 2026.
The Civil Administration openly maintains a Survey Lands team charged with examining whether land can be declared government property. Its newly published procedures show that potential survey areas are placed on a priority list requiring approval by the head of the Civil Administration and the Defense Minister or an authorized representative.
The State Comptroller describes the same team’s purpose as locating and marking land in Judea and Samaria that can be declared government property.
And Israel has dramatically accelerated state-land declarations.
In February 2026, the Israeli government approved the resumption of systematic land-registration proceedings in Area C, allocating approximately NIS 244 million to the effort—the first such broad registration initiative since Israel suspended the previous settlement-of-title process after 1967.
Peace Now calculates that approximately 27,119 dunams had been declared state land under the current government by June 2026, nearly as much as it says had been declared during the entire period since the Oslo Accords. A Palestinian Authority commission consequently calculates that approximately 29,335 dunams have been included in state-land declarations since October 7, 2023.
And we haven’t yet reached the anniversary when many West Bank Arabs encountered more restrictions on movement due to the war their Gazan brothers waged on Israel.
October 7, 2026
That is what makes the third anniversary different.
Consider the ramifications of Ottoman law to this point in time:
1858: Ottoman law makes three years of non-cultivation legally significant for certain land rights.
2020: Israel’s Supreme Court confirms that the Article 68 mahlul doctrine remains relevant to unregistered tasarruf rights in Judea and Samaria.
2023: October 7 is followed by enormous disruption of access to agricultural land.
2023–2026: Israel accumulates an extraordinary photographic record of what is happening on the ground.
2024–2026: state-land declarations accelerate.
2026: Israel funds a major new land-registration initiative.
October 7, 2026: three years have elapsed for when many West Bank Arabs accessed land they had used previously.
Nothing automatically changes ownership at midnight of 10/7. Many questions remain.
How much affected land is actually unregistered miri land? Was it legally “uncultivated”? What constitutes a sufficient excuse? What happens when Israeli security restrictions themselves prevented cultivation? And what evidence exists showing that individual claimants continued asserting their rights?
Those questions will have to be answered parcel by parcel.
But after October 7, something will exist that did not exist before: three complete post-massacre years of evidence.
October 7, 2023 changed the security map of the Middle East. October 7, 2026 may begin changing the actual map of Judea and Samaria as well.
The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMC) has an ambitious mission. It calls for “anti-racist and decolonial pedagogy” in which students study imperialism and oppression, resistance movements and the struggles of peoples to reclaim their identity and agency.
By those standards, one extraordinary case study should sit near the center of the curriculum: The Jews.
Israel may be one of history’s greatest examples of successful decolonization.
Indigenous
Jewish civilization did not originate in Europe. It arose in the Land of Israel.
Israel, Judah, Judea, Jerusalem and Zion are not modern colonial names. They are ancient names embedded in Jewish history. Judaism developed there. The Hebrew Bible is centered there. Jewish holidays follow its seasons and agricultural cycles. Jerusalem became the religious and national center of the Jewish people.
1630 Map of the Israelite tribes in the holy land, together with images on the border from the life of the Jewish prophet Moses, and the Children of Israel’s exodus from Egypt
Even the people’s name—Israel—is ancient.
Colonized
Then came conquest. Jewish kingdoms were conquered by successive imperial powers, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans.
The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple and carried many Jews into exile. Rome later destroyed the Second Temple, crushed Jewish revolts and accelerated the dispersion that would define Jewish existence for centuries.
The Jewish people lost sovereignty in its own homeland but never its connection.
Dispossessed—but Not Disconnected
Dispersion scattered the Jews without eliminating Jewish peoplehood. Jews in Poland did not simply become Poles. Jews in Morocco did not simply become Moroccans. Jews in Iraq did not simply become Iraqis.
Across continents, they retained a common religion, history, calendar and connection to the same ancestral land. They prayed toward Jerusalem. They ended Passover with “Next year in Jerusalem.” Hebrew survived as the language of scripture, prayer and scholarship.
And Jews never disappeared from the land itself. Jewish communities remained through centuries of foreign rule.
Resistance
Jewish history is also a story of resistance. The Maccabees resisted Seleucid repression and restored Jewish sovereignty. Jews later rebelled against Rome.
Judah the Maccabee, Wood engraving by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (German painter, 1794 – 1872), published in 1860.
After military resistance became impossible, survival itself became resistance. A small, scattered minority endured expulsions, forced conversions, discriminatory laws and massacres without surrendering its identity.
Eventually came Zionism: the modern movement to restore Jewish national self-determination where Jewish national history began.
A stateless people sought to cease being stateless.
Decolonization
And then something extraordinary happened. The dispersed people returned in large numbers.
There was no Jewish Britain or France directing an overseas colony. Jews came from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere to the land at the center of their collective history.
They restored sovereignty.
And they accomplished perhaps their most astonishing act of cultural decolonization: they revived Hebrew.
Not Polish, Russian, German or Arabic. Their ancestral language became the everyday language of children, schools, newspapers, commerce and government.
They made Jerusalem their capital. They called their national movement Zionism, after Zion.
So apply LESMC’s vocabulary consistently: Indigenous. Conquered. Dispossessed. Resistance. Return. Cultural restoration. Self-determination.
The Jewish story fits remarkably well.
So What Happened?
Why does this seemingly perfect LESMC case study become almost its opposite when the curriculum reaches Israel?
Some of the people shaping the curriculum help explain the disconnect.
Samia Shoman, a Palestinian-American member of LESMC’s leadership, co-coordinates the Teach Palestine Project, which develops curricula for American schools. Her materials describe Israel as an “institutionalized system of oppression and apartheid.” After California rewrote its original ethnic-studies curriculum, Shoman blamed “Zionist and other rightwing lobbyists” for what she said was the destruction of its “anti-racist, decolonial and liberatory” approach.
Jody Sokolower, who is Jewish, co-coordinates Teach Palestine. Her student history says Britain promised Palestine to Zionists and describes Zionists as subsequently carrying out plans to push Palestinian Arabs and Britain out. The larger Teach Palestine curriculum explicitly seeks to put these perspectives into American classrooms.
Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, a founding member of Liberated Ethnic Studies, has spent her career developing what LESMC itself describes as “critical curriculum” and helped build the Liberated alternative after the original California curriculum was substantially changed.
This isn’t a peripheral connection. LESMC lists Shoman, Cardona and Theresa Montaño among its leadership, while Teach Palestine produces lessons connecting the conflict to forced relocation, criminalization and a “culture of resistance.”
“Zionism is a nationalist, colonial ideology that, from the late 19th century on, has called for the creation and expansion of Israel as a Jewish state in historic Palestine by any means necessary. As support for Palestine and criticism of Israel’s apartheid policies have grown in the US and internationally, Zionist organizations have stepped up their efforts to silence discussion of Palestine/Israel in movement circles, on college campuses, and now in K–12 education.” – Teach Palestine’s Understanding Zionist Backlash
Now the inversion makes more sense.
A framework supposedly built to recognize indigeneity, dispossession, resistance and decolonization encounters a people whose history contains all four—but influential architects approach Jewish national restoration through an anti-Zionist and settler-colonial lens.
So:
The indigenous become settlers. The dispossessed become colonizers. Return becomes colonialism. National liberation becomes oppression.
The Jews should be a textbook LESMC case study: an ancient people conquered and dispersed, preserving its identity and ancestral language for centuries, returning home, reviving that language and restoring sovereignty.
Instead, one of history’s most remarkable decolonization stories is recast as colonization.
The history didn’t change. The ideological lens did.
ACTION ITEM
Be involved in your local school board and investigate the materials used in the classroom.
Long before the Islamic prophet Muhammad was born, long before Arab armies invaded Jerusalem, there was Judea.
It was called Judea in the Books of Maccabees. The Greek geographer Strabo called it Judea. Josephus called it Judea. The Roman historian Tacitus called it Judea. The Christian New Testament called it Judea. Rome governed a province called Judaea.
And when the Romans defeated the Jews there, they minted coins celebrating IVDAEA CAPTA — “Judea Captured.”
All of that happened centuries before Muhammad was born in Arabia and Arabs invaded the Jewish holy land.
Yet today WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, describes Israel’s use of “Judea and Samaria” as an effort to give its “bogus claims… a veneer of historical and religious legitimacy.”
Bogus?
The Romans weren’t Zionists. Tacitus wasn’t working for the Israeli government. Roman coins celebrating the defeat of a Jewish rebellion certainly weren’t designed to manufacture Jewish history.
They called it Judea because Judea was its name.
And Judea, Judah and Jew share the same historical root. The Jewish people carry the connection to this land in their very name.
So why does the Palestinian Authority choose to call that heritage and homeland claim “bogus”?
Perhaps because acknowledging Judea creates an enormous problem for the narrative the PA and WAFA promote every day, calling Jews living in the land of Israel as “colonists.” But colonizers are outsiders who arrive in someone else’s homeland. It becomes considerably harder to sustain that description while acknowledging that the people being called colonizers take their name from the very land in which they supposedly have no indigenous history.
This is antisemitic historical erasure—and it should be condemned as such.
It should be condemned at the United Nations. It should be condemned by governments that have chosen in recent years to recognize a Palestinian state. Britain, Canada and others should demand something elementary in return: recognition of the history and heritage of the Jewish people.
Because recognition cannot sensibly run in only one direction.
If the Palestinian Authority asks the world to recognize the local Arabs attachment to this land while its own official news agency dismisses the Jewish people’s vastly documented attachment as “bogus,” the problem is larger than terminology.
It goes to coexistence.
Two peoples cannot make peace if one insists that acknowledging the other’s history is itself illegitimate. A Palestinian state cannot be built on the proposition that Jewish history deserves international negation.
ACTION ITEM
Contact governments of Canada, Britain, France, Australia, Mexico and others that they demand that the Palestinian Authority stop calling the long Jewish history in the holy land “bogus.”
Israel’s decision to move forward with construction in E1 produced the familiar headlines: settlers, seized Palestinian land, displacement and the death of a Palestinian state.
WAFA reported that Israel issued a tender for 1,234 “settlement units” in E1, presenting it as “one of the most controversial settlement schemes” in a colonial project designed to fragment Palestinian territory.
Before debating E1, start with what is actually being built, where, on whose property and for whom.
An Extension of Ma’ale Adumim
E1 is an approximately 12,000-dunam, or 12-square-kilometer, planning area between Jerusalem and the existing community of Ma’ale Adumim.
It lies in Area C, where the Palestinian Authority and Israel agreed under the Oslo framework would be under Israeli security control and civil administration. Israel is building within the municipal planning jurisdiction of Ma’ale Adumim, not a new area. E1 has not been annexed to Israel.
The current project is E1 South, one part of that larger area. The 1,234 units are in apartment blocks adjacent to the existing city, not isolated houses spread across 12 square kilometers of West Bank hills. The plans contemplate the infrastructure of a normal urban community: elementary schools, kindergartens and daycare, synagogues and a mikveh, community buildings, parks and gardens, commercial facilities, roads and infrastructure.
E1 is not a new project of the current Israeli government. Its planning dates back roughly three decades to the Rabin era. Roads and the Judea and Samaria District police headquarters were built there years ago, even as residential construction remained frozen under international pressure.
Building Does Not Draw the Border
Area C was created under Oslo as an interim administrative arrangement, not a permanent international border. Borders, settlements and Jerusalem were reserved for permanent-status negotiations, and Israel subsequently transferred authority over the major Palestinian population centers to the Palestinian Authority as part of Area A.
E1 South could therefore ultimately remain with Israel, become part of a Palestinian state, or be addressed through a negotiated territorial exchange. Construction changes the facts future negotiators confront; it does not establish sovereignty.
E1 does not make a Palestinian state geographically impossible simply because it creates a narrow connection between northern and southern Palestinian population centers. Israel itself has long existed with a narrow neck across its principal population center, historically only about nine miles wide at its narrowest point. If a narrow neck makes statehood impossible, Israel itself should have been geographically impossible for decades.
Palestinian north-south travel east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49)/ Judea and Samaria already happens and is being made easier. A route already exists east of Ma’ale Adumim, and Israel is constructing additional roads intended to connect current Palestinian Arab communities around E1.
A Land System Older Than Israel
Much of E1 is classified by Israel as state or government land, but Israel did not invent that category in 1967.
The underlying system begins with the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which established categories of land and rules involving government ownership, registration, possession and cultivation. The Ottomans created the system, the British Mandate retained and amended it, and Jordan continued administering and registering West Bank land under it. Israel inherited that legal structure after 1967 and subsequently administered and modified it through military orders.
Private Palestinian Property Was Excluded
Approximately 775 dunams — about 6.5% of E1 — consist of recognized private Palestinian parcels interspersed through the area.
Israel did not classify those parcels as state land, and they were excluded from the official E1 plans. Bimkom, an Israeli planning organization opposed to E1, notes the importance of continued agricultural cultivation to the status of some private parcels.
Critics argue that surrounding development could make access to some excluded private parcels more difficult. That is a legitimate issue, but does not suddenly turn building these apartments into theft of privately owned Palestinian land.
1.55% of E1
The scale of the current project is considerably smaller than the overall E1 map suggests.
On August 18, 2026, Israel issued Tender 186/2026 for E1 South, Plan 420/4/7: 1,234 apartments divided among seven construction complexes. Bids are due October 19, 2026.
The current development parcels therefore occupy about 22.7% of E1 South and only 1.55% of the entire E1 planning area.
A companion residential plan, 420/4/10, contemplates another 2,173 apartments. The current tender, however, is specifically for the 1,234 units in E1 South.
The Bedouin Question
There is a separate Bedouin issue. Jahalin Bedouin communities live and graze animals throughout the broader Ma’ale Adumim/E1 area, and B’Tselem and OCHA argue that development, roads, demolition orders and restrictions threaten their residence, grazing and movement. Israel has previously considered relocating Jahalin families, including a 2005 plan involving approximately 200 families that was never implemented.
Bedouins in E1 (photo: FirstOneThrough)
Who Owns It — and Who Can Live There?
The seven parcels are being marketed in the tender as government/state land. Developers receive development rights over government property. The precise ultimate leasehold or ownership structure for apartment purchasers depends on the final land agreements.
Tender 186/2026 is a regular public tender, not a direct allocation to a religious or ideological organization. Foreign-controlled developers may face additional governmental approval requirements, but there is no requirement that bidders be Jewish-owned.
Nor do the E1 planning and tender provisions identify a religious or ethnic restriction reserving the apartments for Jews. Israeli Arabs could purchase or develop these apartments.
A Palestinian Arab resident presents a more complicated property-law question because the West Bank retains layers of Jordanian law, including a 1953 Jordanian law restricting certain sales and long-term leases to foreigners. The ability of a Palestinian from Abu Dis or a Jahalin Bedouin to acquire and register the same long-term property interest as an Israeli citizen therefore depends on the applicable land and registration rules. That complication is because of old Jordanian law, not Israeli.
Three Questions, Not One
The E1 controversy really involves three different legal questions: whether privately owned Palestinian property is being taken; whether Israel properly classified government land under the inherited Ottoman-British-Jordanian system; and whether international law permits Israel to use even legitimately public land in Area C for Israeli civilian development.
The first concerns ownership. The second concerns land law. The third concerns the law of occupation and sovereignty.
They are not the same question.
What Does “Palestinian Land” Mean?
That brings the argument back to WAFA’s description of E1 as Israeli construction on “Palestinian land” via “land seizure.”
The phrase can mean property privately owned by a Palestinian, public land geographically located in the West Bank, or territory Palestinians want incorporated into a future Palestinian state.
Those are three very different things.
E1 can be challenged because of its impact on future negotiations, Israel’s interpretation of inherited land law, international law or nearby Bedouin communities. But none of those arguments turns government property into privately owned Palestinian land, an urban extension of Ma’ale Adumim into the destruction of a Palestinian village, or housing without a religious purchaser restriction into “Jewish-only” apartments.
And construction today does not determine where tomorrow’s negotiated border must run.
E1 is controversial enough on the facts. There is no reason to blur them.
On September 11, 2001, jihadi terrorists turned passenger airplanes into missiles and murdered nearly 3,000 Americans.
Only three days later, while bodies were still being recovered, ANSWER—Act Now to Stop War and End Racism—was formed to protest what America might do in response.
The name was important.
ANSWER viewed American military power abroad and racism at home as pieces of the same system: a wealthy, largely Western “Global North” dominating the poorer, disproportionately black and brown “Global South.”
For this anti-Western group, America was not defending itself. It was exercising imperial power. Those fighting it could be engaged in “resistance.”
Seven months after 9/11, Israel was pulled into the same framework.
On April 20, 2002, ANSWER organized more than 100,000 people in Washington under “Free Palestine, No War on Iraq.”
The Iraq War had not even begun.
Later that year, Medea Benjamin, Jodie Evans and others founded CODEPINK to oppose the coming Iraq War. The organizations forming around it had a broader worldview: America and its allies represented imperialism, while their opponents represented oppressed peoples fighting back.
Israel became another perfect target.
It was democratic, prosperous, militarily powerful and allied with America. It therefore became part of the “Global North.”
Never mind that roughly half of Israeli Jews have roots in the Middle East and North Africa. Never mind that Israel’s citizens include Arabs, Druze and other minorities. The supposedly racial framework somehow classified this remarkably diverse Middle Eastern country as the white colonialist.
That classification did something important.
It determined who was allowed to fight back.
Palestinian Arab jihadi violence could be “resistance.” Israeli force became “aggression.” ANSWER could call itself an antiwar organization while defending Palestinian attacks because it wasn’t really applying a rule against war. It was applying different rules to different sides.
Then came October 7, 2023. Thousands of Gazan terrorists invaded Israel, murdered roughly 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 250.
Israelis were still recovering bodies when ANSWER was mobilizing for “Free Palestine.”
The parallel with September 11 was remarkable. America gets attacked. Focus immediately turns to restraining America. Israel gets attacked. Focus immediately turns to restraining Israel.
Twenty-two years separated the attacks, but the ideological framework had barely moved.
The liberal societies being condemned have been spectacularly successful. People from every race, religion and continent continue trying to move to the United States, Canada, Europe and other liberal democracies. Israel itself absorbed Jews fleeing Europe, the Soviet Union, Ethiopia and the Arab and Muslim worlds.
People vote with their feet. They generally flee toward societies with elections, property rights, women’s equality, education, religious freedom and economic opportunity—not away from them.
The divide is not really white versus brown or North versus South. It is between those who view successful liberal societies as achievements worth defending and those who view their success and power as evidence of oppression.
September 11 exposed that divide in America. October 7 exposed it again in Israel.
The anti-Global North’s victims of preference changed from Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine. And the vocabulary remained: imperialism, colonialism, oppression and resistance.
And so did the fundamental question: When terrorists attack a successful liberal society, who has the right to resist whom?
In Greek mythology, the Hydra was almost impossible to kill.
It had many heads. Cut one off and more grew in its place. Heracles eventually understood that killing the monster required more than endlessly chopping at whichever head was attacking him. Each severed neck had to be cauterized so it could not regenerate.
Heracles battling the Lernean Hydra
For nearly three years, Israel has been told that Hamas is a Hydra. Kill its leaders. Destroy its tunnels. Eliminate its fighters. It won’t matter. Hamas—or something worse—will simply grow back.
Queen Rania of Jordan articulated the underlying argument shortly after the October 7 massacre, that Israel’s actions against Hamas:
“create a new generation of resistance that is fiercer and more violent” – Queen Rania of Jordan
Retired U.S. Army Colonel Peter Mansoor was more explicit, predicting that “Hamas 2.0 will rise” from the destruction.
They identified a real danger. But regeneration is not immortality.
Hamas is more than leaders, tunnels, rockets and gunmen. It is a political and military organization built around an ideology. Destroy the organization while preserving everything capable of regenerating it and another head may indeed grow.
The question is whether everything capable of regenerating it must also be allowed to survive.
Nearly three years of Palestinian polling shows the problem.
As detailed recently in Palestinian Arabs Turn Inward, But Not Away From Hamas, Palestinian Arabs have dramatically lowered their expectations after three years of war. Support for Hamas and armed struggle has fallen sharply from the extraordinary levels recorded after October 7. But losing faith in Hamas’s ability to win is not the same thing as rejecting Hamas.
In the August 2026 PCPSR poll, 72% opposed Hamas disarming before a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Asked what Hamas would become if it gave up its weapons, 53% envisioned it remaining both armed and political and another 36% solely political. In all, 89% envisioned Hamas surviving in some form.
That is the Hydra problem.
And Hamas is only one head.
Hezbollah sits to Israel’s north. The Houthis attack from Yemen. Palestinian Islamic Jihad fights alongside Hamas. Above them, the Islamic Republic of Iran spent decades financing, arming and connecting organizations surrounding Israel.
October 7 exposed not simply a Hamas problem, but an ecosystem.
That is why eliminating Hamas militarily cannot be the entire definition of victory. As FirstOneThrough argued in From a Hamas Double Standard to the Hamas Dangerous Standard, an organization cannot maintain an independent army committed to destroying another state while simultaneously being normalized as an ordinary participant in democratic politics.
And military defeat addresses only part of what allows another head to grow.
FirstOneThrough addressed another part in The Only Way The Conflict Can End: the Palestinian claim to a so-called “right of return” into Israel itself.
A Palestinian state alongside Israel cannot simultaneously mean millions of Palestinians receive a state of their own while millions more retain a claim to move into Israel. That is 1.5 states for Arabs and 0.5 of a state for Jews.
American policy once said this plainly.
The 2004 Democratic Party platform called for Palestinian refugees to settle in a Palestinian state “rather than in Israel.” The 2008 platform repeated the position before the language was omitted in 2012.
President George W. Bush made the same commitment directly to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in April 2004 as Sharon prepared the Gaza disengagement. A realistic solution, Bush wrote, would involve establishing a Palestinian state and “the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.”
The principle was straightforward: Palestinian statehood was supposed to resolve Palestinian statelessness, not provide another mechanism for eliminating the Jewish State.
Defeating the Hydra therefore requires ending not only Hamas’s ability to wage war, but the expectation that Israel is temporary.
History offers another model.
Nazi Germany did not fight alone, and victory did not consist of killing Hitler while leaving the Axis intact. Germany and its allies were defeated or surrendered.
Then came political defeat. The Nazi military and political apparatus was dismantled. The Nazi Party was outlawed. Its leaders were prosecuted. Germany was not invited to preserve a rebranded Nazi Party so its supporters could recover through elections what they had lost through war.
The Axis was defeated as a system.
The same principle should define the defeat of Hamas.
Hamas cannot be permitted to lose its army, change clothes and emerge as an internationally accepted political party. Global institutions and governments should treat Hamas as one organization, dismantle its financing and international infrastructure, and isolate organizations that materially finance or facilitate its terrorism.
Prohibition is only half the answer.
Muslim governments, religious leaders and international institutions should strengthen Muslim movements committed to peaceful coexistence, religious equality and acceptance of Jewish sovereignty. Muslim-majority countries that have made peace with Israel already demonstrate that Islam and permanent war against Jewish sovereignty are not synonymous. Isolate the jihadis in the Jihadi-Israel Conflict and empower the moderate Arab and Muslim countries.
Make the institutions of coexistence stronger while making the institutions of violent supremacy militarily, financially and politically untenable.
The Hydra has many heads.
Hamas is a head. Hezbollah is a head. The Houthis are a head. The Islamic Republic supplies the Hydra with blood. The ideology gives it reason to regenerate.
The Hamas 2.0 warning should therefore be taken seriously—but not accepted as prophecy.
The Hydra is difficult to kill. It is not immortal.
Two events separated by three months in 2021 delivered the same message to Islamist movements confronting more powerful enemies:
Keep fighting. Keep waiting. Eventually the infidels leave.
The first came in Israel.
In May 2021, Hamas launched rockets toward Jerusalem and Israeli cities, casting itself as the defender of Al-Aqsa and Palestinian Arab families facing possible eviction in Sheikh Jarrah.
Eleven days later came a ceasefire and the Israelis never moved forward with the evictions.
Immediately after the fight, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research’s June 2021 poll described a “paradigm shift” toward Hamas and armed struggle. 77% of Palestinian Arabs believed Hamas had won, versus 1% who thought Israel had won. And 65% believed Hamas had achieved its declared objectives regarding Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Aqsa.
The perceived lesson was simple: Violence worked.
Then came Afghanistan a few months later.
On August 15, 2021, the Taliban returned to Kabul, twenty years after the United States had removed it from power. The lesson for jihadist movements was not that they needed to defeat a stronger enemy. They needed to outlast it.
As described at the time in Gaza, The Terrorist Enclave, Hamas met with the Taliban and congratulated it for expelling Western forces from Afghanistan.
By June 2023, Palestinian confidence had moved beyond believing Hamas could win a confrontation. PCPSR asked Palestinian Arabs whether Israel, then celebrating its 75th anniversary, would survive to celebrate its 100th. 66% said no. Only 27% believed Israel would still exist. Another 51% believed Palestinian Arabs would eventually recover historic Palestine and return refugees to their former villages and cities.
Just four months later came October 7.
Nearly three years of war have weakened that opinion – in the near-term. As FirstOneThrough detailed in Palestinian Arabs Turn Inward, But Not Away From Hamas, support for armed struggle has fallen sharply and only 20% of Palestinian Arabs now believe Hamas won the Gaza war but 89% believe Hamas will continue to exist in some capacity.
Weakened but waiting. “Resistance” with resolve.
Which brings the argument from the Taliban and Hamas to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Iran is making the same wager on time. That it can outlast the United States and send it packing much as the Taliban did in Afghanistan.
But for the United States, Iran is not Afghanistan.
Iran has called America the “Great Satan” since 1979 and built a regional military network directed against American forces and allies. Iran has developed increasingly long-range ballistic missiles and pursued nuclear weapons capabilities that could threaten far beyond its borders.
Afghanistan did neither.
Iran also sits on the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s petroleum consumption passes. Disruption there reaches energy markets and economies around the world.
Afghanistan had no comparable leverage over the global economy.
America had no long-term goals of staying in Afghanistan. It was not going to keep thousands of troops and pour billions of dollars in a region thousands of miles from its shores to make sure girls went to school and women had equal rights.
But Iran is a real concern for the entire western world, both militarily and economically.
The current U.S. war has already achieved important aims by severely degrading Iran’s nuclear, missile and proxy capabilities. But degraded is not finished.
Iran does not need to reverse its losses today. It only needs to survive long enough for politics to change.
And two elections are approaching. Israelis vote on October 27 and Americans vote in November 3.
For Iran, Hamas and the broader jihadist world, those are more than elections. They are milestones testing the strategy of patience.
While the strategic logic for Israel and U.S. to continue the fight may be sound, their citizens may vote differently. And that is what the jihadists are waiting to observe.
Israel cannot leave Israel. America cannot simply walk away from an Iran threatening its forces and allies, pursuing nuclear and long-range missile capabilities, and holding a critical artery of the global economy at risk.
But jihadist strategy places a different bet: Can they wait until Israelis and Americans vote to stop fighting?
The summer of 2021 taught Islamists that they don’t have to win the wars against more powerful foes. Iran has ten more weeks to stall negotiations and wait for democracies to decide whether to pursue long-term strategic benefits or move on to more immediate matters.
Democracies have elections. Their enemies know it.
Will Israelis and Americans turn their elections into the jihadists’ exit strategy.
First One Through 