On October 4, 2026, as Jews marked Simchat Torah and the third Jewish-calendar anniversary of the Hamas-led massacre that killed about 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage, Britain’s Green Party voted to declare Zionism a form of racism.
By 1,022 votes to 813, the party formally declared itself anti-Zionist and endorsed replacing Israel with a single Palestinian state throughout the pre-1948 region of Palestine.
An earlier vote at the same conference was even more revealing about the party’s attitude towards Jews.
Jewish Green member Sam Alston proposed an amendment protecting Jewish members from being pressured or disciplined because they belonged to synagogues and other Jewish institutions associated with Zionism. He warned that without such protection the policy could result in “indirect religious discrimination.”
The Greens rejected his safeguard, 1,026 to 684.
So at this same conference, Jewish members were provided a safe room because some feared for their safety during the debate about Jews and the Jewish State, while rejecting their proposed protection from its new racism policy.
“We continue to see antisemitic sentiment appearing with increasing frequency,” – Laurence Taylor, the head of counter-terrorism policing
There may also be a legal problem.
Adam Wagner KC, a prominent British human-rights barrister, has warned of a “strong risk” that the resolution contravenes the Equality Act 2010. British law protects qualifying philosophical beliefs, and Wagner argues that Zionism is likely capable of qualifying for that protection.
There is already precedent from the other direction. David Miller, the former University of Bristol professor, successfully established before an employment tribunal that his anti-Zionism qualified as a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act. Greens for Palestine cited the Miller case in defending anti-Zionist beliefs before the conference.
British law may already protect both the anti-Zionist and the Zionist.
The Green Party is no longer a fringe environmental entity. Membership has surged above 200,000, tripling its total in a single year.
Their electorate also looks markedly different from Britain as a whole. Analysis of the 2024 Green vote found an average age of 42 compared with 49 across the electorate. Green voters were more female, much more likely to be university graduates and less likely to own their homes. They were also twice as likely to be Muslim – 6 percent versus 3 percent nationally – and considerably more likely to have no religion.
The two conference votes reveal something more troubling.
While the voters against Zionism and protection for Jews stayed roughly the same – 1,022 and 1,026, respectively – 16 percent of those supporting Israel did not vote on protections for Britain’s Jewish community.
That leaves a question extending well beyond this conference: As hostility to Zionism moves deeper into the politics of the alt-left, who will insist on protecting Jews whose religious and communal lives remain connected to it?
Two Iranian men – Salam Ahmadyan, 36, and Rahman Salehi, 34 – charged with attempting to bomb a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur 2026, one year after other Jews were stabbed to death in the city
This Simchat Torah, I keep thinking about what is missing.
For some families, the absence is unbearable and permanent. A child, a parent, a spouse, a friend who was alive on the last Simchat Torah before October 7 and is no longer here. Every holiday marks time, but an anniversary holiday also measures absence. Another year has passed. Another place at the table remains empty. Another circle forms with someone missing from it.
Aryeh Ziering with his parents, killed as he responded to the massacre by Gazans on October 7, 2023
Loss is embedded in Simchat Torah itself. We reach the end of the Torah and lose Moses.
The man who confronted Pharaoh, led us through the sea, brought down the commandments and carried an impossible people through the wilderness does not cross into the Jewish Promised Land. The Torah does not soften his death or pretend it did not happen. It records it and we read it aloud.
Moses seeing the Promised Land before he dies by James Tissot (1896-1902)
Over the past three years, other things have felt as though they have gone missing as well.
I have watched context disappear from too much of the media coverage of Israel and the Middle East. Iran can threaten Israel and the region through proxies, missiles and terrorism, yet somehow vanish from the frame through which individual events are reported.
I have watched the United Nations lose all credibility as an institution capable of treating Israel with the same standards it applies elsewhere. Its institutions can devote extraordinary attention to Israel while regimes and movements that openly threaten Jews and Israelis often recede into the background.
I have watched universities where “Globalize the Intifada” could become part of the vocabulary of protest after Jews had just experienced the deadliest day since the Holocaust. A recent report on American antisemitism could devote enormous attention to Israel, Palestinian Arabs, race and politics while ignoring the jihadist antisemitism that helped produce October 7 in the first place.
And increasingly, I wonder whether I am losing the Democratic Party I knew.
Senator Chris Coons is not someone I associated with the anti-Israel fringe. Yet he spearheaded legislation that would authorize American sanctions connected to construction in E1, including against foreign persons who simply submit bids for construction tenders. Threatening private parties with the force of the American financial system for bidding on residential construction near Jerusalem represents a place in that debate I never expected mainstream Democrats to reach.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons threaten financial retribution against firms considering building residential homes in Jerusalem suburbs
Some losses happened in a morning. Others have accumulated slowly enough that it took me time to recognize them.
Judaism does not ask us to pretend that loss isn’t real. The Torah certainly doesn’t.
Moses dies. But then we do something remarkable.
We don’t pause to mourn Moses on Simchat Torah. We stand up, sing and dance. We lift the Torahs and our children. And when we have read the Torah’s final words, we refuse to leave the scroll there. We immediately return to Bereishit, to the beginning.
We don’t erase the loss or manufacture comforting explanations for it. We don’t avert our eyes from the people and institutions we have lost or from the lessons their loss may teach us. But neither do we build our lives around the empty spaces.
That may be the lesson I need most this Simchat Torah.
Notice who is missing. Remember them. Look clearly at what else we have lost since October 7 and understand why. Fight where something worth preserving can still be preserved.
Then look around the circle and see who is still there. Hold them a little closer.
A Jewish prayer book is now a “highly dangerous development” in the Middle East according to the region’s Muslim leaders.
That was the Arab League’s description Sunday of reports that Israeli police are testing allowing Jewish prayer books — siddurim — onto the Temple Mount. The League warned that allowing them could establish new Jewish religious practices and alter the “historical and legal status quo.”
It wasn’t the only alarm sounded during Sukkot.
Over 1,000 Jews visited the Temple Mount on Sunday, with some openly praying and carrying the Four Species.
For perspective, roughly 80,000 Muslims attended the first Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa during Ramadan earlier this year. In normal years, Ramadan Friday attendance can reach 200,000.
For the Muslim world, Muslims were “worshippers” while Jews were “extremist” Israelis conducting “Talmudic rituals.”
Jewish men covered in prayer shawls hold the Four Species as they take part in morning prayers during the holiday of Sukkot at the Cotton Merchant’s Gate entrance to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, September 27, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh warned that Israel risked transforming the political conflict into a “religious war.” He declared the entire 144 dunams of the Temple Mount an exclusively Muslim place of worship that cannot be divided or shared.
The reaction extends well beyond the Palestinian Authority.
Jordan condemned Sunday’s Jewish visits and again declared all 144 dunams exclusively Muslim. And Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have jointly used the same formulation: the entire compound is exclusively for Muslim worship and the Jordanian Waqf has exclusive jurisdiction to administer it and regulate entry.
Three weeks ago, I wrote about the effort to redefine the Temple Mount “status quo,” transforming restrictions on Jewish prayer into a broader claim that the entire compound is exclusively Muslim.
Sukkot takes the story further.
There is no question that Israel is changing its own practice. For decades, Israeli governments maintained the policy that Muslims prayed on the Temple Mount while non-Muslims visited. Israeli police restricted Jewish prayer and barred siddurim and other Jewish religious objects.
Israel observed those restrictions for decades. But it never enacted a permanent statutory ban on Jewish prayer or agreed that the entire Temple Mount would forever be exclusively Muslim.
Now Israel is allowing some Jews to worship at Judaism’s holiest site.
The response is not simply a demand that Israel return to its previous practice. Multiple Muslim governments are declaring that all 144 dunams are exclusively Muslim. The possibility of a Jew carrying a siddur is described as a “desecration of its sanctity,” and jihadi calls for a “religious war.”
And this is happening during Sukkot, one of Judaism’s three biblical pilgrimage festivals, historically centered on Jews traveling to Jerusalem and the Temple. Jews were making pilgrimage there during Sukkot more than a thousand years before Islam existed.
A small number of Jews praying peacefully at their holiest site during their pilgrimage holiday is used as incitement to jihad. And Muslim governments demanded that the “international community” take actions against the Jews.
Perhaps it is time for the international community to explain to radical Islamists what coexistence means.
One points to June 1967 for borders, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Another points to 1948 for refugees and their descendants.
Another reaches to 1947, before the United Nations proposed dividing Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.
Another reaches to 1917, before the Balfour Declaration endorsed a Jewish national home in Palestine.
And when even that is too late, the clock can be wound back to the Ottoman era, when Palestine was governed by a Muslim empire.
Muslim women prepare to enter the Western Wall Plaza in 2010 (photo: First One Through)
The hands do not need to agree. They serve different purposes.
The President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas has spent decades demonstrating how it works.
1967: The Border Hand
For the borders of a Palestinian state, Abbas is precise.
In his 2016 address to the United Nations, he said the PLO had accepted a Palestinian state on the “4 June 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
He has repeated the formulation for years. In 2014, he called for Palestinian independence over the “entire Palestinian Territory occupied in the 1967 war,” with East Jerusalem as its capital. In 2022, standing beside President Joe Biden, Abbas again called for a Palestinian state “with East Jerusalem as its capital, on the 1967 borders.”
Why June 4, 1967? Look at the picture the clock produces.
There were no Jews living in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Its Jewish residents had been expelled after the Quarter fell to Jordanian forces in 1948. By June 1967, Hebron’s centuries-old Jewish community no longer existed either, evacuated after Palestinian Arabs massacred them in 1929.
Jordanian soldiers destroyed the Hurva Synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem
So June 4, 1967 creates a remarkably convenient baseline. The Jewish communities that exist today in eastern Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout the West Bank disappear from the photograph.
But the Palestinian clock has another hand.
1948: The Refugee Hand
When Abbas talks about Arab refugees, June 1967 suddenly becomes useless. So the clock jumps backward another nineteen years.
In 2021, Abbas appeared before the United Nations holding up the deed to his family’s property and said Palestinians still possess deeds and keys to their former homes. He argued that Palestinian refugees have the right to “return to their homeland” and recover their properties.
In 2025, he was even more explicit. Abbas said there were now more than seven million Palestine refugees and declared that the “right of return” was an inalienable right that Palestinian Arabs “will not forsake.”
Entrance to UNRWA “refugee camp” in Bethlehem with a key on top representing that UNRWA is the portal for descendants of internally displaced Arabs to move into grandparents’ houses in Israel
Watch the hands.
For the territory of a new Palestinian state, the clock says 1967.
For Palestinians claiming homes and property inside Israel, it says 1948.
Apply 1967 consistently and the mass refugee claim reaching into Israel loses its 1948 baseline. Apply 1948 consistently and Jewish communities and property claims erased by the 1967 baseline return to the picture.
The clock cannot stay on either date.
It has to move with the argument.
1947: The Sovereignty Hand
Israel already exists in 1948, a bone in the throat of Palestinian Arabs, or a “painful settlement” to quote Abbas. So the sovereignty hand moves to 1947.
In November of that year, the United Nations proposed partitioning Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. So the clock reaches a moment before Israeli sovereignty.
But international recognition of Jewish national aspirations predates partition by decades.
Move the hand again.
The Holocaust: The Colonial Hand
Abbas wrote his doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial. He dismisses the entire victimization of Jews and argued that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves – and Palestinian Arabs have been forced to pay the price for it.
In an April 2018 speech in Ramallah he said “the reason for the hatred of the Jews is not their religion but their function in society…. So the Jewish question, which was prevalent in all European countries, the anti-Jewish (sentiment) was not because of their religion, but because of their function in society, which had to do with usury, banks, and so on…. So their narrative about coming to this country because of their longing for Zion, or whatever – we’re tired of hearing this. The truth is that this is a colonialist enterprise, aimed at planting a foreign body in this region…”
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, visiting Nazi Germany in 1943
1917: The Zionism Hand
In his 2016 United Nations address, Abbas attacked not the borders created by the 1967 war or the displacement of 1948, but the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
He called it the “notorious Balfour Declaration” and demanded that Britain apologize for the “catastrophes, miseries and injustices” he said it had created.
Look how far the clock has moved. A century.
A time when there was no modern state of Israel. There was no 1948 refugee crisis. There was no occupation resulting from the 1967 war. There wasn’t even a British Mandate for Palestine yet.
The objection has reached the international recognition of Jewish national aspirations themselves.
Still too late.
The Ottoman Hand
Before Balfour, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. Even though there was no sovereign Palestinian Arab state, the land was totally controlled by Muslims. Jews remained a small minority.
Abbas’ longtime adviser on Religious and Islamic Affairs and the PA’s Supreme Shari’ah Judge, Mahmoud al-Habbash said in 2014 that “The entire land of Palestine is [Islamic] waqf and is blessed land… it is prohibited to sell, bestow ownership or facilitate the occupation of even a millimeter of it.” In 2016 he said about Jerusalem “We cannot allow or agree to it being under sovereignty that is not Muslim sovereignty.”
Israeli police block Jewish man from ascending to the Temple Mount because he is a Jew, in Novemnber 2025 (photo: First One Through)
Abbas referenced the Ottoman period in a speech in 2014 when he said “Jews, Christians and Muslims have lived peacefully together in Palestine for centuries. So peace between religions runs through the heart of the most sacred City in the world, Jerusalem. Peace between the world’s religions runs through Jericho the Oldest City on Earth. Peace between the world’s religions runs through Palestine.”
Hamas’s 1988 foundational charter makes the point clear: “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife.”
Watch the Hands
There is one time the Palestinian clock rarely points to: today. Because today leaves too many Jews in the picture.
Jews live in Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout the West Bank. Israel exists as a Jewish state. Jewish sovereignty and self-determination are facts rather than historical proposals.
To say openly that Jews should be removed from those places, that the Jewish state is illegitimate or that Jews should be denied national rights would make the prejudice difficult to disguise.
History offers a more respectable vocabulary. Just choose an earlier date when the particular Jews, Jewish sovereignty or Jewish rights inconvenient to the argument were absent.
That is why the Palestinian clock needs so many hands. No single date erases everything neatly.
History provides the dates. Antisemitism chooses the hand.
On Friday morning, students from SAR, Ramaz, Kehilath Jeshurun and other Jewish institutions will gather outside Gracie Mansion for Shacharit. They will pray, sing and speak about their love for New York, their love for Israel and their right to feel safe in the city where they were born.
Rabbi Binyamin Krauss, principal of SAR Academy, explains that the gathering is both prayer and statement. Its location is intentional: many Jewish New Yorkers believe that the mayor’s rhetoric about Israel and not condemning the phrase shouted at city universities “globalize the intifada” has made them easy targets. Prayer outside his residence ensures that the message cannot easily be ignored.
Yet Friday falls within the Ten Days of Repentance, when Jews should be especially clear about whom they are addressing. Gracie Mansion may be the location, but the mayor is not the audience. God is.
Prayer expresses the Jewish belief that political power is never the highest power. During these ten days, Jews repeatedly say Avinu Malkeinu – Our Father, Our King. They gather before God.
The Torah reading the following morning makes that message unmistakable. Haazinu is Moses’ final song, delivered as the Jewish people prepare to enter the Land of Israel. It calls heaven and earth as witnesses and describes the entire movement of Jewish history: God finds Israel in the wilderness, protects it, brings it to a fertile land and warns that prosperity can produce complacency.
Then comes one of the song’s most famous lines:
“Jeshurun grew fat and kicked.” – Deuteronomy 32:15
Jeshurun is an affectionate name for Israel. The warning is directed at successful Jews who have become so secure that they mistake comfort for permanence. They enjoy the land’s bounty, forget its source and abandon the Rock of their salvation.
The presence of Kehilath Jeshurun and Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz makes the verse impossible to miss. The very congregation joining the prayer bears the name invoked by Moses. This week, the children of Jeshurun will walk from their schools and shuls in one of the most prosperous Jewish neighborhoods in the world and pray in the public square.
Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of Kehilat Jeshrun lighting Chanukah candles next to Gracie Mansion in December 2025 before a crowd and reporters, alluding to the new mayor’s anti-Jewish opinions and statements (photo: First One Through)
These Jews are heirs to what may have been one of the greatest Diaspora golden ages in Jewish history. New York Jews built synagogues, schools, hospitals, charities, businesses and cultural institutions. They rose to the highest levels of civic life and came to regard their acceptance as a permanent feature of the city. Their children could be openly Jewish, openly Zionist and fully American without perceiving any contradiction.
Recent attacks and an increasingly hostile public climate have shaken that confidence. Rabbi Krauss writes that students returned to school carrying both fear and a need to answer it. That answer should not be a plea for acceptance from a mayor. It should be a declaration that Jewish identity does not depend upon a mayor’s approval.
Haazinu does not teach that Jewish survival rests upon the favor of rulers. It teaches that the Jewish relationship with God, Torah and the Land of Israel survives the rise and fall of political powers. Moses delivers the song while standing outside the land he will never enter, yet he speaks of the connection between Israel and its land as something deeper than temporary possession or political recognition. Governments may contest it, enemies may attack it and Jews themselves may neglect it, but the covenant remains.
That should be the meaning of Friday’s public prayer. The students should not perform Judaism for the mayor. They should show New York what Judaism looks like: children praying openly, affirming their faith, facing Jerusalem and refusing to sever their attachment to Israel in exchange for political comfort.
Britain is suddenly alarmed about supposed “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank.
The British government warns that Israeli policies could force Palestinian Arabs from parts of Judea and Samaria. It is sanctioning Israelis, condemning “settlements” and portraying demographic change in territory claimed by Palestinians as a grave moral offense.
Britain has seen ethnic cleansing in this territory before. Its reaction was very different.
In 1948, The Kingdom of Transjordan crossed the Jordan River and conquered Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem. It then destroyed and expelled the Jewish communities that had lived across the territory. The ancient Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City was emptied of its Jews. Jews were then barred from their holiest sites, as synagogues were destroyed or desecrated.
Jordanian soldiers destroyed the Hurva Synagogue in 1949
The result was remarkably complete: the territory Jordan occupied was ethnically cleansed of Jews. And less than two years later, Britain formally recognized Jordan’s union with the territory it had invaded and conquered, one of the only countries in the world to do so.
Jordan then made the demographic principle explicit. Its 1954 nationality law extended Jordanian nationality to former Palestinian citizens residing in the kingdom while expressly carving out “the Jews.”
Jordan expelled and excluded the Jews in its holy land, and Britain’s response was recognition.
In 2005, Britain would celebrate again, this time in Gaza.
Israel decided to dismantle every Jewish community in the Gaza Strip. Israeli soldiers physically removed roughly 8,000 Jews from their homes and twenty-one Jewish communities disappeared. A Jew-free Gaza emerged.
Britain did not describe this as ethnic cleansing. Prime Minister Tony Blair praised Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “courage” and offered Britain’s “full support” for the withdrawal. His foreign secretary called it a hugely significant step toward peace.
Now consider 2026.
Britain warns against the possible displacement of Palestinian Arabs from Area C of the West Bank, territory that has remained under Israeli civil and security control under the Oslo framework pending a final agreement. It speaks of forcible displacement, imposes sanctions and treats the prospect of Palestinian Arabs losing their communities as intolerable.
The moral principle sounds admirable. It would be more convincing if Britain had ever applied it equally to Jews in the region.
When some Palestinian Arabs might be displaced from territory it hopes to use in a future Palestinian state, Britain suddenly discovers that removing a particular ethnic population from its homes is beyond the pale. Instead, England demands that the region be ethnically cleansed – of Jews – citing the antisemitic UN Security Council Resolution 2334.
There is a British consistency here: ethnic cleansing is only appropriate when Jews are removed.
For generations, British policy has treated the removal of Jews from disputed territory as compatible with peace. A Palestinian Gaza without Jews was progress. A Jordanian West Bank without Jews was acceptable. A future Palestinian state is still routinely imagined as a place where Jewish communities cannot remain.
Only the possibility of some Arab relocation produces moral outrage.
That exposes the deeper problem with the diplomatic vocabulary surrounding the conflict. “Two states” has quietly come to mean one multicultural Jewish state containing a large Arab minority alongside one Palestinian state expected to contain no Jews. One and one-half states for Arabs; half a state for Jews.
England understands the ethnic cleansing of Jews – it did it itself in 1290 – the only minority group to ever be expelled from the country. It seems to continue to only have a taste for that kind of hatred and ethnic cleansing, including in the Jewish homeland.
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.
“This day you have become a people to the Lord your God.” (Deuteronomy 27:9)
It is a strange declaration in this week’s parsha, Ki Tavo.
Why now?
God had already called the Israelites “My people” while they were slaves in Egypt. They left Egypt together and crossed the sea together.
At Sinai, they received the Torah and entered a covenant with God. There, they were called “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:6)
Yet forty years later, as they prepare to enter Israel, Moses declares: “This day you have become a people.”
What changed?
Ki Tavo opens with the answer:
“When you enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, and you possess it and settle in it…” (Deuteronomy 26:1)
Only then begins the commandment of Bikkurim, bringing the first fruits. Standing on the Land with its produce in his hands, the farmer must recount Jewish history: the descent into Egypt, suffering, liberation and finally:
Palm trees in the Jordan Valley (photo: FirstOneThrough)
“He brought us to this place and gave us this land.” (Deuteronomy 26:9)
The Exodus was not simply about leaving Egypt. It was part of a journey toward somewhere.
Egypt gave us freedom. Sinai gave us the covenant. The Land gave us responsibility.
Israel was already a people in Egypt and a covenantal community at Sinai. But entering the Land changed the nature of that covenant.
Now Jews would have land, property, businesses, courts, borders, wealth and poverty. They would no longer simply receive God’s laws. They would be responsible for effectuating them through a society of their own.
That is why Bikkurim matters. Sovereignty does not permit the successful farmer to begin his story with himself. Holding what he grew on his own land, he must recite the history that put him there.
History creates the claim. Covenant creates the obligation. Sovereignty makes both real.
That gives “this day you have become a people” particular resonance after nearly two thousand years without Jewish sovereignty.
A people is not fully defined by what happened to it, what it believes or even the laws it accepts. It is also defined by what it takes responsibility for building.
Words matter. They do more than describe reality. They shape it.
This week, the Palestinian Authority’s WAFA news agency reported that Israel had advanced a housing plan that would “further isolate Jerusalem from Bethlehem.”
The proposal involves building homes, roads, and infrastructure between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. In almost any other place on earth, connecting two urban areas with transportation and housing would be described as integration, development, or greater connectivity.
But not for West Bank Arabs. They object to more Jews living in the corridor connecting them.
In this narrative, Jewish presence itself is an obstacle, an impediment. Jewish life is redefined as separation.
The inversion is striking.
The 1947 UN Partition Plan once envisioned Jerusalem and Bethlehem as a single Corpus Separatum—an internationally administered area shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Whatever one thinks of that proposal, its premise was coexistence, not exclusion. Yet today, not only have the local Arabs refused coexistence, but so has the United Nations.
Contours from the 1947 Partition Plan which included Greater Bethlehem and Greater Jerusalem under a “Corpus Separatum”
Instead of asking how Jews and Arabs can both live, work, worship, and travel throughout the Jerusalem-Bethlehem region, many arguments begin with the assumption that Jewish communities are inherently illegitimate. Under that framework, the more Jews who live or travel there, the more “isolated” the majority-Arab areas are said to become.
When the Partition Plan was being conceived on February 18, 1947, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Ernest Bevin (1881-1951) said “for the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.” Today, we are not only witnessing the continued entrenchment of that tenet, but the profound hostility to the basic presence of Jews.
Don’t let the word isolation fool you. It is not describing geography. It is describing Jews as obstacles, not neighbors.
Listen to many of today’s most prominent progressive Jewish organizations—T’ruah, Bend the Arc, Jewish Voice for Peace, and many rabbis who speak in similar terms—and a pattern quickly emerges. Their Judaism is explained through a familiar vocabulary.
Justice.
Human dignity.
Welcoming the stranger.
Repairing the world (Tikkun Olam).
Compassion.
These are presented not simply as Jewish values, but as the defining Jewish values.
It is an appealing message. It is also one the modern Western world already overwhelmingly believes.
Nearly every university, corporation, NGO, church, and democratic government affirms human dignity, equality, compassion, caring for refugees, and social justice. Whether one agrees with every application of those ideals is beside the point. They are no longer uniquely Jewish insights. They have become the common moral language of much of the modern world.
The progressive Jewish rabbis and organizations often remind audiences that many of those ideals trace their roots to the Hebrew Bible. That observation is true. Judaism profoundly shaped Western moral thought. Therefore the comment of them being Jewish values is seemingly to educate the western world that they only have their own universal values because of Jews. Also perhaps true, but to what end is the observation? Is it to inform those listening that Jews alone carry the essence of justice, with a transmission extending back thousands of years? That they alone are the actual guardians of values?
Or that they are all on the same page – that the values the West holds dear and the progressive rabbis are one and the same? That one or the other may take the lead on a subject – say condemning genocide, for example – and the other will echo the sentiment?
That approach deliberately strips anything uniquely Jewish from values. It makes the adjective superfluous. Redundant.
Many non-progressive rabbis and the mainstream Jewish organizations have a different view, one that affirms the Jewish component of values. Those are values that are woven into the covenant between God and the Jewish people, as laid out in the Bible and holy books, and debated for thousands of years.
In such telling, justice is not equity as progressive rabbis champion, but based on fairness and balance.
Charity is not generosity. It is tzedakah – an obligation, and one in which helping someone get a paying job and being able to care for themselves is viewed as much greater than making them addicted to welfare.
Rest is not work-life balance. It is Shabbat, a holy day that interrupts commerce, technology, and ordinary life every seventh day because God commanded it. The notion of people adding holiness to something inanimate – like an idol – is actually prohibited in Judaism, while it is encouraged for something specified and incorporeal like the seventh day.
Environmental stewardship is not merely “sustainability.” It includes shmita, allowing the Land of Israel itself to rest every seventh year, because it is a special gift to the Jewish people, much like Shabbat.
Family is not simply important. Marriage, children, circumcision, honoring parents, and transmitting Torah from one generation to the next are sacred obligations.
The list goes on. Some Jewish values are absent from the umbrella of tikkun olam, while others stand in direct contrast to the T’ruah placards.
Recovering the definition matters. Otherwise, “Jewish values” risks becoming little more than progressive ethics wrapped in Hebrew vocabulary—a faith whose unique contribution is remembered mainly as history, while its living covenant is quietly left behind.
“U.S. Jews do not have a single, uniform answer to what being Jewish means…. Many American Jews prioritize cultural components of Judaism over religious ones…. Orthodox Jews are a striking exception…. A plurality of Orthodox Jews say that being Jewish is mainly about religion alone (40%), and they are the only subgroup in the survey who overwhelmingly feel that observing halakha is essential to their Jewishness (83%)… The vast majority of Jews of no religion say that for them, being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry (41%), culture (25%) or both (15%).” – Pew Research May 2021
At this moment in time, the distinction is not theoretical or esoteric. Many progressive left Jewish organizations have adopted stridently anti-Israel positions, some arguing that the Jewish State should be destroyed. They knowingly lock arms with antisemites to advance such future vision.
And should it be a surprise? If the essence of Jewish values for the non-Orthodox far-left is that there is nothing particular about Jews, and that both the noun and adjective “Jew” and “Jewish” are simply historic words without meaning, why should Jews have self-determination any more than left-handed people?
“Supporting Israel is not a battle of political orientation between liberal and conservative Jews. It is a philosophical break in the Jewish community with a fault line regarding the uniqueness of Jews and the Jewish State. The non-Orthodox denominations’ religious philosophy will only let it embrace an Israel that is: about people, not God; about rights not rituals; more secular than religious; more democratic than Jewish; and more universal than particular.” – The Non-Orthodox Jewish Denominations Fight Israel, January 2018
The broader Jewish community should be clear and confident to say that this simply untrue. Judaism and Jewish values are not ancient rock carvings on a cave from which sprang forth the Judeo-Christian values of today. Jews are a living people with a belief in an ongoing covenant which have particular Jewish values that extend beyond universal morality. We should not accept self-erasure in the current environment of cancelling Jews.
More, everyone should fight this approach. Not only Jews but every people who care about their own unique culture and perspective. The lure of the “melting pot” is great but needn’t be absolute. Appreciate the universal AND the particular for Jews and every neighbor.
Judaism helped shape the modern vocabulary of universal values. But Judaism’s enduring contribution is not simply to teach those ideals but show how they are woven into a sacred way of living. One that sanctifies time through Shabbat, family through covenant, body through mitzvot, land through shmita and pilgimmage, and elevates communal responsibilities to a daily obligation.
Jewish values are not simply universal values. And we should not be ashamed to state it clearly.
