New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani just appointed Ana Maria Archila of the Working Families Party to lead the Mayor’s Office of International Affairs. She will serve as the city’s chief liaison to the United Nations and the State Department.
She doesn’t care much for Israeli Jews.
In 2018, Archila became a national symbol of “believe survivors” during the confirmation fight over Brett Kavanaugh. She demanded that allegations of sexual violence be treated with complete moral seriousness.
Yet in June 2024, she had no issue championing Rep. Jamaal Bowman who had taken to the streets of his district after the heinous October 7, 2023 Arab massacre of Israelis to yell to a crowd that the story of Hamas raping Jewish women was a lie.
To add toxic fuel to the fire, while dozens of Jewish Israeli women remained captive in the terror tunnels of Gaza by the Palestinian leadership, Archila yelled at the Bowman rally (4:47) that “we end foreign policy that keeps Palestinian people in shambles and Palestine in shackles.” That is not an exaggeration: she came out to a rally to support a rape denier and yelled that the victims of kidnapping were actually the perpetrators.
Now Mayor Zohran Mamdani is elevating Archila into an international-facing role for New York City, the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel.
In the alt-left political establishment in New York City today, raped Jewish women are not to be believed, their kidnapping is to be mocked, and their tormentors are to be canonized before cheering crowds.
The modern Paralympic Games began far from the grandeur of an Olympic stadium. Their origin lies on the grounds of a British hospital, shaped by the vision of Ludwig Guttmann, a Jewish refugee physician who transformed both medicine and sport.
Ludwig Gutmann (1899-1980)
Guttmann was born in 1899 in Breslau, then part of Germany. He rose to prominence as a neurologist specializing in spinal cord injuries. With the rise of Nazism, Jewish professionals were pushed from academic and medical institutions, and Guttmann lost his post as antisemitic laws narrowed the space for Jewish life. During the “Kristallnacht” violence of 1938, he reportedly used his hospital authority to admit Jewish patients and shield them from arrest. Soon after, he fled Germany with his family and rebuilt his career in Britain.
In 1944, the British government asked him to lead a new spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. At that time, severe spinal cord injury often led to early death. Patients were confined to beds, vulnerable to infection, and frequently treated as beyond recovery. Guttmann rejected that assumption. He believed survival required more than medical stabilization. It required discipline, ambition, and restored self-respect.
He introduced sport as a core part of rehabilitation. Archery, wheelchair polo, and organized competition became structured therapy. Training cultivated strength and focus. Competition rebuilt identity. Patients who had been defined by injury began to see themselves as athletes preparing for events.
On July 29, 1948, the same day the 1948 Summer Olympics opened, Guttmann organized a small archery competition for sixteen wheelchair athletes on the hospital grounds. He called it the Stoke Mandeville Games. The symbolism was intentional. As Olympians competed in London, injured veterans competed at Stoke Mandeville. Each demonstrated excellence within their arena.
The event became annual and soon attracted international participants. In 1960, following the 1960 Summer Olympics, Rome hosted what is widely recognized as the first official Paralympic Games. A hospital initiative had grown into a global movement.
1960 Rome Paralympics
Guttmann’s work carried deeper resonance because of the era he had survived. Nazi racial ideology had targeted Jews and people with disabilities as unworthy of life. The regime’s euthanasia program murdered tens of thousands of disabled individuals before the broader genocide unfolded. As a Jewish physician forced into exile, Guttmann understood the danger of systems that ranked human worth by race or physical capacity.
The opening of Stoke Mandeville Stadium by Her Majesty the Queen in 1969
His response was constructive and public. He placed disabled athletes on fields of competition and invited the world to witness their performance. Strength, in his framework, was measured by discipline and achievement rather than conformity to an imposed ideal.
Britain recognized his contributions. He became a citizen in 1945, was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1950, and was knighted in 1966 as Sir Ludwig Guttmann. Within medicine, he is regarded as the founder of modern spinal injury treatment. Within sport, he is honored as the father of the Paralympic movement. During major Games, particularly the 2012 Summer Paralympics, his story has been prominently commemorated.
Today the Paralympics stand as one of the world’s largest sporting events, watched by millions. Their origin traces back to a Jewish refugee doctor who believed that dignity could be restored through competition. From the trauma of exile emerged an institution that reshaped how the world understands disability, excellence, and human worth.
Black Americans have long used a phrase that captures a structural grievance: over-policed and under-protected.
The complaint is that disproportionate scrutiny produces disproportionate outcomes. If people in one neighborhood are stopped more often, searched more often, cited more often, it will generate more arrests. Those arrests are then cited as proof that the scrutiny was justified. The cycle validates itself.
Israel occupies a similar structural position in international institutions.
At the United Nations Human Rights Council, Israel is the only country assigned a permanent, standalone agenda item — Item 7: “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” Every regular session includes debate under this item. No other state – not China, not Iran, not North Korea – is subject to a standing country-specific agenda item.
The numbers reinforce the asymmetry. Since its creation in 2006, the Council has adopted more condemnatory resolutions against Israel than against any other country. In multiple sessions, Israel alone has faced more resolutions than the rest of the world combined.
Volume creates narrative.
Layer onto that the density of global media in Jerusalem – more permanent foreign correspondents than in most active war zones – and the scrutiny becomes constant. Every military action is instantly internationalized. Allegations become juridical language before investigations conclude. Terms like “war crimes” and “genocide” enter discourse early and stick.
The latest war began with an attack Israel did not initiate and repeatedly stated it did not seek. It conditioned an end to fighting simply on the return of hostages and disarmament, to which Gazans repeatedly refused. While urban combat against embedded fighters produces tragic civilian loss, the reported civilian-to-combatant ratios in this conflict fell well below ranges seen in other recent urban wars. That context rarely leads headlines.
Black Americans understand how presumption operates. When systems assume danger, data accumulates accordingly. When institutions assume guilt, findings follow.
“It’s the broader narrative of who belongs and who doesn’t, which allows certain groups to tap in the police department, to use the police department or weaponized the police department in ways that are conducive to violence against Black people” – Lallen T. Johnson, Department of Justice, Law and Criminology at American University
Similarly, the United Nations decided that Jews do not belong in Jerusalem – the holiest city in Judaism – or east of the 1949 Armistice Lines / the “West Bank”, so have developed a criminal system that specifically and persistently targets Jews. The mere presence of Jews is labelled “illegal” and an affront to international law.
“Condemning all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, [presence of Jews] character and status of the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem,” – UN Security Council Resolution 2334
The United Nations made a law declaring Jewish presence at their holiest location to be illegal
When one minority community, whether it be racial or national, lives under permanent investigation, outcomes will look like confirmation of wrongdoing, even when standards are warped and unevenly applied.
Over-policing corrodes trust at home. Over-condemnation corrodes credibility abroad.
Justice requires symmetry. Blacks and Jews know it all too well.
The final season of Game of Thrones disappointed many viewers.
For years the show carried two storylines: an existential threat to humanity and a political struggle for the throne. When the ending came, the cosmic danger faded first and the camera returned to palace intrigue. Technically both plots resolved but emotionally, it felt like the story had mistaken the setup for the destination.
That structural tension comes to mind every year at Parshat Yitro.
The most dramatic moment in Jewish history — Sinai, revelation to the entire people, the Ten Commandments — arrives astonishingly early in the Torah. If receiving the law is the climax, why does it appear so soon in the Bible?
Because it isn’t the ending; it’s the beginning.
Sinai gives the people a constitution. It shapes their character, their obligations, their relationship with God and each other. But from the very first promise to Abraham, the Torah’s narrative is moving somewhere concrete — toward a land.
Walk the text and it reads like a map: journeys, wells, borders, inheritances. The story is geographic as much as spiritual. It is about building a nation in a place.
Torah and land were always meant to live together.
Torah without a homeland leaves Jewish life suspended in theory. A homeland without Torah loses its moral compass. Sinai forms the people; the land is where that formation is meant to be lived.
Over a thousand years of exile forced a different emphasis. When Jews lost soil, they carried scrolls. When borders disappeared, mitzvot became portable homeland and identity. That devotion was critical for survival.
Now history has shifted again.
For the first time since antiquity, a plurality of Jews lives in the Land of Israel, and soon it will likely be a majority. The part of the Torah that once felt distant and theoretical — sovereignty, agriculture, public responsibility, national life — is no longer abstract. It is daily reality.
Which reframes Parshat Yitro.
Sinai is not the finale of the Jewish story. It is the preparation. The training. The moment a people receives the tools it will need to build something lasting in its own land.
The Torah itself tells us this by where it ends: at the edge of the land, looking forward.
After centuries of mastering how to live as guests in other people’s history, Jews are being invited back to the main storyline: living in the land, with the Torah in hand.
The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela was an eight year travelog from circa 1165 to 1173, chronicling the pilgrimage of a Jew from Spain to the Jewish holy land.
On the day after Holocaust Remembrance Day—after solemn vows of “Never Again”—the Secretary-General of the United Nations chose to praise a cleric who has spent years demonizing Jews and denying their right to exist in their holiest city under the framework of an “International Day of Human Fraternity.“
António Guterres elevated “His Eminence the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb” as a global partner for peace, despite a record steeped in antisemitic incitement. Under el-Tayeb’s authority, Jews are framed as conspirators, Jewish prayer is cast as desecration, and Jewish presence in Jerusalem is portrayed as a civilizational crime. At events tied to his influence, chants calling for the killing of Jews and the eradication of Jewish sovereignty are tolerated and normalized.
“both Judaism and the Hebrew language have nothing to do with Jerusalem and Palestine.” – official statement of Al-Azhar
The ideology behind it is familiar. It rests on an Islamic superiority complex that treats Jewish sovereignty as illegitimate, Jewish history as fraudulent, and Jewish worship as contamination. In this worldview, Islam may rule Jerusalem absolutely; Jews may exist only conditionally and quietly—preferably elsewhere. Jewish presence in their ancestral capital becomes an offense demanding correction.
“”Do not think that we will ever give up on Jerusalem. We cannot abandon our rights there as a Muslim people. Allah will not enable you to erect a single stone on this land as long as Jihad persists.”” – official statement of Al-Azhar
El-Tayeb has given voice to this logic. Crowds gathered under his prestige repeat it. The demand is explicit: Jerusalem must be purged of Jewish claims, Jewish history, and Jewish life.
“In their attempt to judaize Jerusalem, the Zionists, in reliance on brutal Western imperialist powers, are risking the future of the Jews themselves by overstepping the limits of the Muslim Nation whose population is about a quarter of humanity, and who are able, one day soon, to restore their usurped rights by force.”
When the UN Secretary-General praises this man as a moral authority, he aligns with that demand. The language used by the UN confirms it. The profound antisemitism is ignored. Calls to violence dissolve into “grievance.” Incitement becomes “cultural difference.” Jewish presence is reframed as provocation.
This is how the United Nations defines peace: Jewish invalidation, submission, removal.
Guterres speaks of “a world based on equal rights for all and compassion” while elevating a cleric who denies Jews equality in the one place central to their faith and history. That contradiction is structural and vicious.
A jihadi antisemite is rebranded as a peacemaker, with ethnic cleansing repackaged as protection of holy sites.
And so, holocaust remembrance evaporates overnight.
History will read this moment clearly. When antisemitism returned cloaked in religious authority and liberation rhetoric, the United Nations offered applause, legitimacy, and a podium.
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, António Guterres reached for the safest symbol available: Nuremberg. He spoke of universal lessons, multilateralism, and the dangers of unchecked hatred. It sounded solemn, but it was evasive. By invoking Nuremberg instead of Eichmann, the UN spun a story in which institutions matter more than victims, and legality matters more than justice.
That choice is not accidental. It is institutional self-protection.
Why the UN Prefers Nuremberg
The International Military Tribunal flatters multilateral ideals. It universalizes guilt, diffuses responsibility, and allows the UN to present itself as the heir to postwar justice. It avoids a harder truth: the world did not finish the job. Genocide went unnamed. Jewish extermination was evidence, not the charge. Many perpetrators melted back into ordinary life.
The Nuremberg trials were necessary but insufficient. And on Holocaust Remembrance Day, sufficiency is the point.
“I have always understood the clear link between the horrors of the Holocaust and the spirit of multilateralism, justice and rights that founded our organization. Just over 80 years ago, the Nuremberg trials began. These trials represented the beginning of a new era in international criminal law; an era 78 which individuals, including the most powerful, are held accountable. Today, more than ever, we need to reclaim that spirit.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Holocaust Remembrance Day
Eichmann Is the Missing Sentence—And the Turning Hinge
The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem did what Nuremberg did not. It named genocide as genocide. It put survivor testimony at the center. It replaced bureaucratic fog with individual culpability. Eichmann was not tried as a generic war criminal; he was judged as an architect of the annihilation of Jews.
Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem, many years after the Nuremberg trials
As Hannah Arendt observed, the case exposed how extermination was operationalized by ordinary men. And it exposed a global failure: Eichmann lived freely for years after the war. Many like him were never tried at all.
That is why Eichmann is not an “example” to be mentioned in passing. He is the pivot of postwar justice—the moment when the Holocaust was finally understood, named, and judged as what it was.
Universalism That Erases the Crime
Guterres’s language collapses the Holocaust into a general warning about hatred. of course hatred matters. But flattening the crime turns extermination into general prejudice and genocide into an abstraction. The Holocaust was not simply bigotry run amok; it was a state-organized project to destroy a people everywhere it could reach them.
Universalism should follow truth—not replace it. When remembrance avoids naming genocide plainly, “Never Again” becomes a slogan that comforts institutions rather than indicts them.
The Uncomfortable Lesson the UN Avoids
The defining act of Holocaust justice did not come from the UN system. It came from a Jewish state acting unilaterally. Without Israel, Eichmann would have died untried, his crimes dissolved into postwar amnesia. That is not a political claim; it is a historical conclusion.
The UN prefers Nuremberg because Eichmann exposes its limits. Nuremberg affirms process; Eichmann exposes failure. One reviews general war crimes while the other points the finger squarely at demonic antisemitism. One is safe to cite as the other forces accountability.
Holocaust Remembrance Day is not a seminar on international law. It is a reckoning with a singular crime and a singular abandonment. The Jewish state does not exist to teach the world lessons, but we see plainly that the world failed to protect Jews—and then failed to prosecute their murderers. And it fails to recognize the clear difference to this day – on the very day designated to remember.
The Line That Cannot Be Dodged
Remembrance without judgment is theater. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the honest citation is not Nuremberg’s promise but Eichmann’s dock. One symbolizes aspiration. The other delivered judgment.
If the UN wants this day to mean more than ritual, it must say the truth it avoids: the Holocaust was finally understood, named, and judged because Jews had a state willing to act when the world would not. That is not a complication of remembrance. It is its core.
The modern left claims to speak in absolutes. Borders are immoral. Enforcement is cruelty. Language itself must be purified so that no human is illegal. That creed is recited with missionary confidence—until the subject becomes Jews in the Middle East. Then the absolutes vanish. The language hardens. Expulsion becomes justice.
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says “no human being is illegal,” she isn’t hedging. When Ilhan Omar insists “undocumented does not mean illegal,” the point is categorical. When Julián Castro calls the word illegal dehumanizing, the doctrine is clear: presence confers legitimacy.
“This bill prohibits any executive agency from using the term alien to refer to an individual who is not a U.S. citizen or national, or illegal alien to refer to such an individual who is unlawfully present in the United States or lacks lawful immigration status. This prohibition does not apply when quoting certain texts.” – H.R.457 — 117th Congress (2021-2022) submitted by Joaquin Castro (D-TX) with 13 Democratic co-sponsors
And then Jews cross the only line that matters.
Beyond the 1949 armistice lines—lines drawn to stop a war, never to define a state—the same mouths reverse themselves. Jews become “illegal settlers.” Homes become “violations.” Removal becomes moral necessity. The word that supposedly dehumanizes migrants is suddenly deployed eagerly against Jews. The same politicians who recoil at deportation rhetoric now demand the dismantling of Jewish communities that have existed for decades.
The contrast is not accidental. Rashida Tlaib brands Jewish towns “illegal” and calls for their removal. Bernie Sanders repeats the charge as if the label itself settles every moral question. Even Omar—who rejects illegality as a concept at home—embraces it fully when applied to Jews. Same actors. Same vocabulary. Opposite rules.
This is where anti-Zionism sheds its disguise. A politics that claims to defend Black and Brown people from delegitimization turns around and singles out Jews—alone—for collective criminalization. When a political doctrine singles out Jews—alone—for criminalization and expulsion, it stops being anti-Zionism and becomes antisemitism, full stop. If a principle applies to everyone except Jews, it isn’t principle. It’s prejudice.
The United Nations provides the laundering. Resolutions passed by automatic anti-Israel majorities are treated as moral verdicts rather than political artifacts. When the Barack Obama administration chose not to veto Security Council Resolution 2334, it handed activists a legal-sounding alibi. The appeal is obvious: demand expulsions while pretending your hands are clean. Outsource conscience. Invoke “international law.” Move on.
“any decisions and actions which purport to have altered the character, status or demographic composition [added Jews] of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal effect, are null and void and must be rescinded in compliance with relevant resolutions of the Security Council” – UN General Assembly
The hypocrisy spills into the street. Protestors harass synagogues and Jewish institutions, targeting Jews for contemplating life in Israel. That behavior would be condemned instantly if aimed at any other minority. Instead, it’s excused as activism—supposed to make people uncomfortable, as Cori Bush once put it. When the discomfort belongs to Jews, the moral bar drops through the floor.
Strip away the slogans and the pattern is unmistakable: hierarchy. Some groups are granted innocence without agency. Jews exercising sovereignty are denied legitimacy regardless of history, law, or fact. The left that insists words can wound has no trouble criminalizing Jewish existence.
If no human is illegal, Jews aren’t illegal. If deportation is immoral, ethnic cleansing is immoral. If harassment is violence, it applies outside synagogues too.
Yet the antisemitic anti-Israel crowd miss the entire point and attempt to reframe the story. Palestine Chronicle wrote that “Israel has come home to roost in Minnesota. The people of Minneapolis and St. Paul have become the Palestinians of Minnesota,” misdirecting people that Arabs are targeted by Israel, when in fact it is Jews being targeted for being “illegal” by the UN and the Muslim world.
The rules change only for Jews. That isn’t progressivism. It’s selective morality—rigged, tribal, and exposed.
In July 2023 alone, 67,769 Gazans were allowed to exit Gaza through Israeli crossings according to the United Nations. In the entire year of 2023, only 50,098 Jews were allowed onto the Temple Mount — Judaism’s holiest site — in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish state according to Beyadenu a Jewish rights advocacy group.
One month versus one year. A border crossing versus a holy site in a nation’s capital. The comparison is damning.
The Jewish state allowed more Gazans to cross its border in one month before the Gaza leadership launched a war, than it allowed Jews to step foot on their holiest site over an entire year.
That is not security policy. That is civilizational self-sabotage.
Every country controls its borders. That is normal. What is not normal is a nation blocking its own people from their central religious site in their own capital city.
Jews face time windows, group limits, police escorts, and de-facto prayer bans to walk on ground their ancestors sanctified 3,000 years ago. The result is obvious: Jewish presence is suppressed by design.
Fifty thousand Jews in a year is not demand. It is managed scarcity.
Thousands of Jews congregate in the Kotel plaza on Passover, unable to ascend onto the Jewish Temple Mount
The Western Wall Plaza is sold as Jewish religious freedom. It isn’t. It is a containment zone — a consolation prize engineered to keep Jews away from the mountain that actually matters.
This is why the Gaza comparison cuts so deep.
Israeli policy makers allowed in more Gazans into Israel, during a blockade, knowing that the area is led by an antisemitic genocidal jihadist group sworn to destroy the Jewish State, than for Jews just seeking a basic human right of prayer.
A sovereign nation that polices Jewish prayer more aggressively than cross-border traffic has lost the plot. A capital that cages its own sacred history is not free.
Until Jews can walk onto the Temple Mount without escorts, quotas, and humiliation, the Kotel Plaza remains exactly what it is: an open-air prison with good lighting and a propaganda budget.
The blood libel begins with how the Book of Exodus is misremembered. Exodus is a story of Jewish liberation, yet antisemites preserve it as a story of punishment. That inversion is not confusion but tradition. Every generation dresses the libel in new language, while the structure never changes.
The plagues were directed at dismantling Egyptian authority with precision. The opening strike hit the Nile—Egypt’s god, economy, and source of life—and exposed a crime already committed there. Egypt had drowned Israelite infants in that river to erase a future it feared. The first plague named that bloodshed and stripped Egypt of moral order.
What followed was escalation with restraint. Egypt lost land, productivity, and cosmic claims. Darkness collapsed Pharaoh’s divine authority. What remained was the empire’s final refuge: the belief that continuity would return, that tomorrow would repair what today exposed.
The final plague took it. The death of the firstborn judged a state that had already made children expendable. It revoked Egypt’s claim on the future. Regimes that destroy children forfeit moral legitimacy. Measure followed measure.
The Israelites did not celebrate death. They marked their doors, stayed inside, and departed at dawn. Their defining act was escape from bloodlust, not indulgence in it. Freedom—not punishment—was the center of the story.
Antisemitism begins by erasing that fact.
Across centuries, Jews were remembered not as a people who fled violence but as a people who embodied it. Divine judgment on a tyrannical state was detached from context and reassigned as a permanent Jewish trait. Victims became perpetrators. Liberation became threat. From this inversion, the blood libel followed naturally, and not surprisingly, during Jewish celebrations of Passover when they left Egypt.
The charge did more than justify violence; it recoded Jews as a permanent danger. If society believes Jews possess bloodlust, then Jews must be watched, monitored, restricted, and scrutinized. They become an unwanted risk. Suspicion overwhelms citizenship. Surveillance replaces equality. In this logic, it is only a matter of time before Jews are assumed to act—and preemptive punishment becomes rationalized as self-defense.
This is how the libel works. It marks Jews forever as dangerous rather than as people who long for freedom. It recasts victims as villains and turns survival itself into evidence of guilt. The blood libel means that Jews are never trusted as equals, and never accepted as free.
That inheritance governs today’s rhetoric. Calling Jews “baby killers” is not a factual claim; it is the inherited reflex of a culture that never accepted Jewish freedom. The accusation is identity-based, not evidence-based. It exists to keep Jews outside the circle of legitimate humanity and to deny the moral standing of Jewish self-defense before it is even asserted.
Turkey fans the blood libel in Hamas’s latest war to destroy Israel
This mindset survives because it is passed down, laundered through new vocabulary, and presented as moral concern. But it is the same lie. It refuses to see Jews as a people who escaped societies that murdered their children and insists instead on seeing Jews as the source of murder itself.
The story that antisemitism started when Pharoah forgot Joseph and became worried about the growing number and power of Jews was the fear of a monarch. Antisemitism was instilled in the masses when the Exodus story was flipped that Jews had a bloodlust and didn’t deserve equality. Every society that accepted the libel eventually convinced itself that Jewish freedom was intolerable—and acted accordingly.
Modern political language compresses history into slogans. The United Nations speaks of “occupied Palestinian territory,” which it insists be Jew-free. The “pro-Palestinian” movements echo false claims of Jewish colonialism, as if Jews are newcomers.
Archaeology answers differently—through the infrastructure of everyday life.
Across Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the Galilee, ancient mikva’ot—Jewish ritual immersion baths—appear in homes, villages, farms, and neighborhoods. They date from the First Temple and Second Temple periods and into the Mishnaic era. Their construction follows strict Jewish law. Their distribution tracks permanent settlement. Their purpose is singular: Jews lived here as a rooted society, organizing life around inherited religious practice.
This is not an argument from ideology. It is a statement of fact.
Jerusalem—Including the East: A City Immersed
Jerusalem contains the highest concentration of ancient mikva’ot anywhere in the world, with hundreds surrounding the Jewish Temple Mount as people immersed themselves before entering. In the City of David—today known as Silwan, a village established by Yementite Jews in the 19th century—dozens of ritual baths are embedded in residential quarters dated from the 1st century BCE to 70 CE. North and east of the later city walls, mikva’ot appear in neighborhoods now called Shuafat and Sheikh Jarrah, including the Shimon HaTzadik complex. The ancient mikvahs are also found to the west and south.
Mikvah under the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem
“The widespread distribution of ritual baths in and around Jerusalem reflects strict observance of Jewish purity laws as part of everyday life.”
These installations predate Islam by centuries. They show a city whose rhythm followed Jewish law across its full geographic footprint—west and east alike.
Judea: Bethlehem, Jericho, Hebron, and the Southern Hills
South of Jerusalem, the Judean Hills—now routinely labeled “occupied”—were a Jewish heartland in antiquity. Around Bethlehem, archaeological surveys identify rock-hewn mikva’ot associated with agricultural estates and villages from the Hasmonean and Herodian periods. Comparable installations appear near Hebron and Tekoa.
“Ritual baths, agricultural installations, and burial caves indicate dense Jewish settlement throughout the Judean Hills during the Second Temple period.”
These were family communities organized around Jewish practice, embedded in the land over generations.
Samaria: Villages of Law and Land
In Samaria—today’s northern “West Bank”—mikva’ot appear in rural villages and estates tied to farming and household life. Near Shiloh, stepped pools carved into limestone meet halakhic requirements and date to the late Second Temple period.
These finds demonstrate continuity between biblical Israelite centers and later Jewish communities. They record a population living according to inherited law, rooted to fields and seasons, long before later demographic changes.
What Mikva’ot Prove
Mikva’ot appear only where Jewish law structured daily behavior. They require permanence, planning, and communal norms. They cluster where families lived and expected their children to live.
Plotted together, they form a map that predates:
Arabic language in the region
Creation of Islam
Medieval and modern political boundaries
They belong to a Jewish civilization indigenous to the land for centuries before the Arab conquests of the seventh century.
Conclusion
International bodies can rename the land and activists can repeat slander but archaeology restores history to human scale. Mikva’ot record where Jews prepared for worship, marriage, birth, and community life. They mark neighborhoods, not narratives.
Across all of Jerusalem and through Judea and Samaria, these ritual baths establish a simple historical truth: Jews are indigenous to this land, and their daily life shaped it long before later conquests and long before modern politics.
First One Through 