I should first say, utterly feel free to skip this if you are (rightfully) expecting a post aligned with my main research interests, as this is merely an apology and account of why I have been absent over a long period. I am increasingly eager to reestablish myself in the topics that I care so deeply about, but feel it necessary first to convey my story of becoming one with the masses of women who have experienced this “sandwich generation” stage of life, who sadly find that their personal and professional pursuits fall to the wayside as caretaking responsibilities for both one’s children and for one’s aging parents come to a height at around the same time. In my case, this has also included a somewhat difficult pregnancy while caring for my toddlers, my own health issues and related health journey, and a mother with unique physical and mental health needs that have required a lot of my time and energy to manage.

Firstly, I am pregnant with our third baby - and in fact am now in my third trimester. We already have a 3.5 year old girl and a 1.5 year old boy, and will soon be adding a newborn boy to the mix! While we are delighted and quite excited about this addition, this has not been an easy pregnancy for me. I have spent a lot of this pregnancy more or less bed-bound due to several issues, including my HG-like symptoms - a condition with which I have not been officially diagnosed with, but with symptoms similar enough to warrant the comparison for narrative’s sake. Even now during the later stages of pregnancy, if I am not extremely careful with taking my three different nausea-related medications like clockwork and a following somewhat rigid pattern of when to eat and when to rest, then I still struggle to keep food down. Earlier in pregnancy, I spent prolonged periods in bed for the simple sake that I would otherwise be sick around 4 times a day or so with unrelenting nausea between such bouts, barely eating and barely able to move without triggering an escalation of my nausea.

As pregnancy progressed, I have dealt with what I somewhat jokingly call “pregnancy narcolepsy,” where I have been having extreme fatigue to the point that I struggle to stay awake during daytime hours and can easily sleep 16-18 hours in a 24 hour period. Aside from having slightly low iron levels and being advised to take iron supplements - which do not seem to help with energy in my case - the medical professionals have been attributing this to just generally unknown pregnancy weirdness. Anyone who has gone to the doctor about issues particular to women’s health will be familiar with the shrug and refrain of, “hormones are weird and women’s bodies are a beautiful, life-giving mystery. That’ll be $250, and sorry, we don’t validate parking.”

Finally, this pregnancy has been causing severe lower back pain and otherwise other forms of pain and mobility limitations associated with SPD and PGP. This is not unexpected due to the release of the hormone Relaxin - which rises throughout pregnancy and loosens your joints and ligaments - in combination with the fact that I already live with regular chronic back pain that has been diagnosed as in part due to lifelong hypermobility. The hypermobility itself is now viewed as likely stemming from a fairly obscure genetic condition that I have, but that had previously been thought to be harmless, having to do with an excessive number of repeats of a particular nucleotide on the X-chromosome.

Additionally, while not fun to admit, much of this pregnancy, related health issues, and other life events seem to have contributed to some sort of perinatal depression and anxiety, and has created for me a vicious cycle of procrastination followed by anxiety and shame based on that procrastination, leading to more procrastination, and so on.

During the times of the day in which I am awake, not too sick, and not in too much pain, I have been working quite hard on my health in order to be a better mom to my children, with more endurance, stamina, and general energy and ability. I have basically been on a mission to re-learn how to move my body, but correctly this time. My understanding is that hypermobility causes incorrect proprioceptive feedback from the lack of healthy “stop” signals, which triggers a whole chain of incorrect movement patterns and compensations, leading to muscular atrophy and poor coordination for the proper units of movement. This ends in chronic musculoskeletal misuse and, thus, chronic pain.

So now, in my sparse spare time, I have essentially been on a personal health endeavor that is equal parts introduction to computer programming, introduction to movement and exercise science, and a significant amount of resistance training and functional exercises. Also, I must thank my fantastic and equally as intellectually-pursuant physical therapist for his aid in my quest!

Using Obsidian, I have been creating a robust set of queryable, interrelated directories in exercise, anatomy, movement theories, and so forth with detailed educational, multimedia, and wiki-formatted pages for each topic. I assign all of my directory entries different “properties” and use those to create queries or commands that can create specific exercise programs. For example, if I want a day programmed for all three “planes of movement” in working upper body agonist and antagonist muscles, then I can use Obsidian’s version of SQL or Javascript to scour my directory pages for those properties and build a program in a format of my choice. I can then easily click on the exercises to see step-by-step directions, videos, other relevant muscles or joint actions, etc. I can also click into the muscles and other anatomy pages to make sure that as I exercise, I can review how each anatomical unit is actually supposed to work and make sure I am actually using the correct parts in the correct manner to accomplish the goal of creating new, functional movement habits. My - perhaps utopian - goal is that through such whole-body movement training and education, I will develop muscle memory, strength, and habits that override past chronic movement and proprioceptive dysfunction, leading to a reduction or elimination of chronic pain.

While having a difficult pregnancy with a pre-existing chronic pain issues and taking care of two toddlers has been hard enough, I have been dealing with a third variable that is hard to even begin talking about: increasingly becoming the caretaker for my aging mother in light of her declining physical and mental health.

My mother’s case is somewhat...unique. She has clinically diagnosed Dependent Personality Disorder, Panic Disorder, treatment-resistant Major Depression, clinical Hypochondria, routine suicidal ideation, and other such mental health issues, but then also has real physical health issues in the form of ongoing fractures from severe osteoporosis. I am getting better now about keeping more of an emotional distance as she has frequently wanted to rely on me for the brunt of her emotional support: she would routinely call me to cry, repeat to me that she is “afraid,” express her suicidal ideations, or have a panic spiral over something fairly innocuous that she wanted me to talk her down from. It has been very frustrating as oftentimes her physical pain would trigger a mental health crisis, but she would be too afraid to take even the lightest of pain medication, not even 100mg of Gabapentin, nor to follow a physical therapy routine, because she was too afraid of “side effects” or of “injuring herself.” I even once got a technically HIPPA-violating call from her pharmacist in NY, letting me know that my mom was calling him at least 5 times a day with fears that she was experiencing some side effect or another. At one point, she was calling the suicide hotline number also around 5 times a night every night rather than sleeping, as she would be too afraid that if she went to sleep, she wouldn’t wake up. At another point, I learned that she had 100 different doctor appointments within a 90 day period. Unfortunately, this sort of reverse “doctor shopping” ends up being counterproductive, as she generally would just find at least one professional to agree with her on something along the lines of, “well I suppose in theory the Gabapentin could cause this side effect that you think you are experiencing,” at which point she would then stop medications, leading to frustration for all regular providers trying to work with her. It has also become routine over the past few years that my mom will call 911 while having a panic attack and ask them to take her to an Emergency Room, after which she will be put into a short term geriatric psychiatric stabilization program, leave after a few weeks, but repeat the cycle not long afterwords.

Additionally, she has severe osteoporosis, and in the past three years has had a shoulder replacement surgery, lower back fusion, and earlier this year, a hip fracture and hip replacement surgery. After her hip replacement, she spent 180+ days in skilled nursing facility for physical rehab in New York, after which Medicare stopped paying, though she is still unable to walk, get into bed on her own, shower on her own, or do most daily tasks independently. She also has unknown “tremors” that are making fine motor skills difficult as well.

After a lot of difficulty in trying to find my mom some sort of appropriate care, my husband and I were recently able to move my mom out near us in California from our hometown of New York, having found for her a high-needs assisted living facility here in CA and working through the difficult logistics of a cross-country move for someone with such medical issues. Unfortunately, she has only spent a few nights in the assisted living facility, as first she went to the ER on her second night due to extreme pain - where they found several spinal compression fractures- and then when she tried to check herself in to another short-term psychiatric stabilization program due to extreme panic a few nights later, she was diagnosed with a UTI and sent back to the hospital for treatment, which is where she still is now.

I am an only child, and while my mother and father are technically married by law, they largely live separate lives and cannot communicate functionally with one another, though my mother experiences a lot of emotional anguish on the topic of their relationship. The reality of their marriage and joint assets logistically complicates my role in helping them with their own elder care plans, their desires to move, and my mother’s health plans. My father also wishes to move to California, and between the two of them, the logistics in which I am trying to navigate are...adding up.

All of this with my mom while dealing with my most physically strenuous pregnancy yet, while barely keeping down food or being able to walk and leave bed, and trying to be a good mom to a 3.5 year old and a 1.5 year old who both have quite a bit of energy, while also trying my best to resolve my own pre-existing health problems and mitigate the degree to which those pre-existing health problems effect my perinatal and postpartum health…well lets just say, this has been hard.

Alas, in this chaos, I have lost sight of one of the few things keeping me sane, which is my research and writing centered around correcting all of the propaganda and mob zealotry regarding Israel and Jews that has captured many of our institutions and flooded the internet, as well as analyzing the sociological and political conditions that have allowed such a hate movement to flourish in our time. As even when I have a spare moment between pregnancy, illness, mothering, and running the bureaucratic and other caretaking needs for my geriatric mother, that spare moment has generally gone towards my own personal health project, in hopes that prioritizing my own health mission will help pay off in the future. Hopefully focusing more on my own health will help expedite my postpartum recovery, make parenting easier parenting, and make my research and writing in the future easier as well.

So please bear with me, my Substack friends, allies, colleagues, and readers. I have actually still been working on many of an article idea continuing to read a number of books and research articles that I have found illuminating and would like to discuss in more depth. I fully believe that after pregnancy and the immediate postpartum period, I will have much of my health back - and frankly, much of my brain back, which has felt quite hazy in the journey - and that with the major hurdle of finding my mom assisted living and getting her across the country, my caretaking role will be a bit more manageable than when trying to manage her affairs from across the nation. In the meanwhile, I am telling myself that I do not need to be a perfectionist, and can indeed make posts that I consider less than academically-rigorous and that instead serve more as “think pieces” during this time in which life has become a bit chaotic. Indeed, I have a few pieces that are more or less in a final draft form that I keep neglecting to finish, which is I think the emotional and physical overwhelm of this pregnancy and these life circumstances talking. I am looking forward to having this baby, and to enjoying the first few months with my newborn, and then returning full force to the more intellectual life that I feel at loss without living.

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Today’s Columbia “student protestor” is not an organic movement of scared undergraduates fed up with domestic matters that their institution was participating in, and that was directly affecting them. Unlike the student protestors of the 1960s, the students of today did not come from a perspective of lifetime vigilance over life and death in light of bomb drills: today’s student demonstrators are not acting for any action from Columbia that is within Columbia’s reach, they are acting for Columbia to partake in a symbolic scheme of delegitimization of a foreign sovereign nation in furtherance of a war of annihilation against a sovereign nation. These demonstrators are not pro-peace; they are pro-war, and they ask not for Columbia to change any policies that would bring about concrete material advances in favor of greater peace and participation; they are asking for symbolic actions that would cast a wider circle of exclusion and militancy.

As a reminder, “SJP,” or “Students for Justice in Palestine,” is the national organization that has given rise to many local chapters across the United States. SJP is not a student organization: it is part of a non-profit ecosystem led by the middle-aged activist Hatem Bazian whose related shell companies and parent companies like AMP give the funding, training, and scaffolding for local SJP chapters. The SJP parent companies are staffed only with employees who had previously been part of organizations shut down by the American federal government for funding Hamas, the terrorist organization abroad devoted to the genocide of world Jewry for religious purposes and who initiated and continue the war that began on October 7^th, 2023. These past Hamas-affiliated organizations, headed by the people who now run Bazian’s SJP ecosystem, are known through court records and FBI transcripts to have been developed in response to the Oslo Accords - the measure that was supposed to create a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine so that each could have political sovereignty and peace. Instead, these institutions - HLF, KindHearts, and IAP - all worked to sabotage the idea of the Oslo Accords, since they refused to “surrender to peace with the Jews,” seeing it as against their religion. These transcripts and records are available for reading firsthand in the links to the transcripts and analyses of these cases in my prior post on the topic.

Now, let us take a look at what Columbia’s local SJP chapter - run even at the local level not by recent high-school graduates, but by men in their 30s like Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil from foreign hostile territories who are now leading impressionable teenage Americans in hate rallies that disparately impact Jewish college kids. Let us see exactly what they believe, before moving on to what actions they have taken, to see if their beliefs are comparable to the beliefs espoused by the undergraduate Columbia protestors of the 1960s.

Columbia SJP/CUAD

While Columbia SJP was technically “shut down” after enough violations of campus policies and acts of harassment against Jewish students, they merely reconvened under a smaller, subset group that they had formed years earlier, called Columbia University Apartheid Divest. While I am loathe to give them traffic, let us go to their Substack manifesto to see what they believe.

CUAD’s Substack

CUAD REMAINS COMMITTED TO OUR DEMANDS | A TRIBUTE TO YAHYA SINWAR | AL-MAYADEEN DEFENDS CUAD

Contents…

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2 years ago · 18 likes · CUAD

AFFIRMING OUR COMMITMENTS AND CONTEXTUALIZING OUR DEMANDS:

1. Financial Divestment: Divest all of Columbia’s finances, including the endowment, from companies and institutions that profit from “Israeli” apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine.

Analysis: CUAD repeatedly places “Israeli” in quotation marks and uses phrases like “Zionist entity.” These are not neutral stylistic quirks. They function as non-recognition cues and are even borrowed from anti-human rights foreign dictators who work in collaboration with Hamas such as the Ayatollah of Iran, whose repeated use has popularized the phrase “the Zionist Entity.” The point of these quotations is not to critique a government policy while affirming the state’s legitimacy, but to treat the state itself as illegitimate, while humanizing - through familiarity with and normalization of the language of the anti-Jewish terror regimes - the perpetrators of war and torture against those living o on Israeli ground.

This and similar phrases are employed to clarify what SJP/CUAD means by “occupation:” they do not mean Israeli civilian or military presence in territory disputed under international law; they are referring to the existence of the Israeli nation itself as an “occupation.”

What the ask of Columbia has nothing to do with them as students - their grades are not being given over to intelligence agencies to recruit them for Israeli work, their are no Mossad or IDF recruiters on the ground.

Moreover, their divestment demand is undefined and diffuse with no targeted or defined mechanism: which companies? Which contracts? Which specific relationships do they wish to see severed?

The 1960s had concrete demands of Columbia for topics in which they had proximate and imminent effect. The demands of the 2020s is a demand for ever-present vigilance.

What they ask of Columbia is, if taken in full, materially impossible. Are they asking investors to perhaps sift through the uncountable numbers of ETFs and investments in which Columbia’s immense endowments are managed in order to find and extract any microscopic semblance of a relationship to something made within or going to Israel - a lithium mine that trades with Israel as casually as it trades with other nations? Is there ever some point at which it would be “enough?” SJP/CUAD has given no metric for implementing their demand, which would lead to nothing but a McCarthyist style witch hunt. What we see here is an implied ideal of creating a culture of hyper-vigilance and ever-present purity tests lest one accidentally slips into action or language that normalizes Israel.

And notably: this demand, as stated, does not even hinge on the current war in Gaza. It belongs to a longstanding BDS framework whose animating premise is not “end this war,” but “treat Israel as uniquely illegitimate.” The BDS network itself was a product of the domestic Hamas cells campaign to sabotage the Oslo Accords, as is covered in my previous article on this topic.

2. Academic Boycott: Sever all ties with “Israeli” universities including the Global Center in “Tel Aviv,” the dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, all study-abroad programs, fellowships, and research collaborations with “Israeli” academic institutions.

Analysis: This “academic boycott” is a direct attack on academic freedom, a call to exclude the majority of the world’s Jews - who live in Israel - from global brotherhood of scholar, and does exactly the opposite of what the 1968 protestors demanded of Columbia: uses the university as an instrument of war rather than divesting the university of its alignment with military institutions.

There is no weapons program, there are no military recruiters, there is no connection to a military branch of the Israeli government. This is another example of the entirety of Israel being illegitimate.

Worse, as both Adam Louis-Klein and myself in response have noted recently, this acts as another means of delegitimizing the “zionist” voice and casting it out of the order of rationality. Here, we are seeing an explicit demand to not judge scholarship on its merits, but on its origin in a body presumptively deemed illegitimate and thus outside of the realm of participation in legitimate and rational, legible speech. This does not just attempt to ostracize the majority of Jewish scholars in the world, as the majority of the world’s Jews live in Israel, but also the most diverse set of ethnic and religious scholars with roots in the Middle East across all religions and ethnicity, as well as the output of academies in the Middle East that are allowed the most freedom of expression from government oversight and regulation.

What we see here is nothing less then a demand for another form of Judenrein and ethnic-cleansing in favor of the “imagined community” of pan-Islamist and/or pan-Arabist supremacy, of a claim to being the sole proprietors of the Middle East and its history, peoples, and scholarships, a demand to acquiesce to the powerful leaders who shape the historical and political scholarship of the widespread institution of the university that it partakes in an ethnically pure nation-building process.

Israel is the only Middle Eastern nation that allows a plurality of voices and forms of research. Without it, Middle Eastern scholarship is entirely an outcome of Arab ethnonationalist or Islamosupremacist nation-building, entirely an output of propaganda to influence domestic and geopolitical vision of what it means to be Middle Eastern and thus how to interpellate and interact within the geopolitics or domestic events of the Middle East.

This demand is asking us to allow one region of the world to produce political documents under the title of “scholarship” without interference that could disprove it and give agency to numerous disenfranchised minorities expelled from the ethnically cleansed and homogeneous social order elsewhere in the region - Druze, Mizrahi Jews of all stripes who are descendants of the various waves of MENA dispossession and who make up the majority of the Jews of Israel, Circassians, the Yazidi, the Maronites, the Coptics, Muslim women and homosexual Muslim individuals advocating for their rights, all who live with full freedom of expression in Israel and can push back on their erasure through their voice within the Israeli university. Instead, this demand asks us to strip away their voice and any semblance of power - the world’s most disenfranchised from some of the harshest, anti-minority, gender-traditionalist regions - while accepting the constricted university narratives produced under punitive authoritarian regimes.

This demand is the utter opposite of “freedom of speech.” It is the weaponization of academic institutions to enforce a political embargo on minority voices, ostracizing and stripping of legitimacy Jewish voices at home, and exulting the voices of dictators and majoritarian supremacy abroad.

“3. Stop the Displacement - No Land Grabs Whether in Harlem, Lenapehoking, or Palestine: Cease expansion, provide reparations, and support housing for low-income Harlem residents. No development by Columbia without real community control.”

Analysis: This is a very clear attempt - one of many such transparent attempts once you know to look for them - of trying to steal the valor of the undergraduate 1960s protestors. SJP writers are here unselfconsciously trying to compare themselves to the undergraduate fighters of the 1960s who demanded that Columbia not try to “grab land” for “Gym Crow,” for the allegedly segregationist gym development project in Mornginside Park. This is merely a ploy to insert themselves as dependents of a lineage that is not theirs: whenever they reference anything about the “people of Harlem,” it is never as its own, independent struggle in its own right, much as the SAS of the 1960s occupied Hamilton Hall without the SDS to make sure that their anti-“Gym Crow” message would not get conflated with SDS’s anti-war message. On the contrary, while the 1960s protestors worked to keep these messages clear and not allow one to become subsumed to the other, CUAD/SJP only invokes anything “local” when it would further their claims about the “imperialism” of ‘the Zionist entity.”

The next two “demands” are similarly senseless demands that both try to harken to the 1960s without creating a cognizant form of comparison: asking to end campus policing/defund Public Safety, perhaps a whistle to the era when NYPD members arrested some of the 1960s students who took over Columbia buildings - but here, they make no moral argument as to why Public Safety or the NYPD has been in the wrong, merely assuming by their existence, like with Israel, that they are illegitimate, again hiding under the stolen valor of the 1960s. Same extends to their fifth demand, “Amnesty for all involved in pro-Palestine protests,” which again, is a demand without any clear reference point and no way for the audience to adjudicate the rightness or wrongness of the person who faced discipline. Unlike the 1960s, the 2020s campus demonstrators have not all been undergraduates - most of their leaders have not been, nor anyone who has organized anything of material significance, like the Hamilton Hall trespass - and their actions have neither been non-violent nor anti-bigotry, instead, with findings in court and in state and federal agencies time and again showing displays of disparate impact and harm that has come to Jewish students and the low-income workers, generally people of color, who have been dealing with the violence and damage dealt by today’s antizionist hate demonstrators.

CUAD/SJP shows what they really mean at the start of the last paragraph that explains their demands:

“Without the US there would be no Zionist entity.”

Ultimately, their argument rests on extracting Israel out of the geopolitical order based on a deep hatred of the United States.

Moreover, SJP uses whatever tacit connection it can make between the United Startes and Israel to give the local students a justification for their singlehanded fixation on Israel, a way to give legitimacy to their claim that “they are not antisemitic, just antizionist,” as their actions and beliefs cause great harm to Jews locally and worldwide. Since they are American, then they are responsible, so surely can speak up exclusively on this one topic in exclusion of others, correct?

Except: this is wrong in every regard. The top four recipients of funding from the specific American budget entitled “foreign aid” (and that is to say, not USAID programs, not American-supplemented NGOs/public interest programs, not American trade, nor any other way that money moves from the US into other institutions and nations) are: Ukraine, Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, not to mention the general billions that the United States distributes for the sake of counterterrorism to the entire region to help fend of Iranian imperialism. Ukraine receives more than five times the foreign aid than Israel receives. Egypt and Jordan combined receive more than Israel, and independently, receive not too insignificant of a difference. Cumulatively, Egypt and Israel have received about equal amounts of American foreign aid since 1946.

This claim necessitates, once again, that we subject only Israel to scrutiny while treating the Arab as the natural, “noble savage” generic being whose existence is stable and has always been from time immemorial, regardless of outside funding. This is a lie. The people who have, since around 1967, coalesced under the identity of “Palestinian” have received billions of dollars in foreign aid, with the Arab nations alone contributing about $40 billion to Palestine since 1994; the difference is, their “leaders” have stolen it to enrich themselves to the tunes of billions, and rather than investing in their local economy or defense, they invested in a massive tunnel infrastructure exclusively for Hamas affiliates and fighters.

That is to say, CUAD/SJP’s claim insists that we see the United States as the only geopolitical power that gives money to advance their interests in other nations, doing for current events what they do for scholarship: cutting out any other geopolitical influence in order to create a flat, one-dimensional caricature that reinforces hateful stereotypes. Instead, see my research article on the relationship of Russia, China, and Iran in the creation of October 7th and the fortification of Hamas based on shared material interest and ideology.

There is far more we can say on this topic: that Israel relies the least on American aid as compared to any of the other states or institutions to whom the US gives funding, and that we spend far more money on countries with far worse records on human rights and actual, internationally-recognized genocides, such as the $500 billion in trade we give to China each year despite their Uyghur genocide and Tibetan ethnic cleansing. And again, this is to ignore that “Palestine” has arguably been far more of a political project propped up by foreign nations as a way to wage a proxy war against the US than “Israel” has ever been some ambiguously-defined “imperialist project,” yet the lack of conversation about the Soviet Union, the Arab League, present day Russia, Iran, or China at either supposedly “pro-Palestine” meetings or in their textbooks tells you all you need to know about how much concern they actually have for the average Palestinian and for general accuracy.

And this is becoming the mainstream position amongst many American youth and future leaders of the Democratic Party.

In addition, SJP/CUAD continues to repeat known blood-libel, utter fabrications meant to defame the Jewish state and by association, Jews who do not wish to see the genocide of the Jewish state, as well as other Iranian and Hamas propaganda.

One particularly incredulous paragraph reads as follows:

“Ex-IOF members use their experiences in the Zionist intelligence apparatus to develop surveillance technology in Harlem. The Empire State Development Corporation has direct economic ties to the Zionist entity, using the wealth generated by these ties to enable Columbia’s expansion into Harlem. The NYPD is trained by the IOF, importing their methods of terrorism and torture.”

For those unaware, “IOF” is a seemingly juvenile attempt to give a new acronym to Israel’s “defense forces,” placing an “O” in the center to connote “occupation forces.” From this presumption of illegitimacy and continued refusal to use regular nomenclature in order to deepen the normalization of Israel’s discriminatory treatment, they go on to repeat conspiratorial and repeatedly debunked myths.

They claim that the “Zionist intelligence apparatus” created the “surveillance technology” in Harlem, and that the “IOF” also “trained the NYPD,” claims that have been repeatedly debunked. As ludicrous as this sounds to the casual reader, this is a normal, mainstream position amongst elite academic youth. The overwhelming majority of student groups at Columbia have signed on in solidarity with CUAD/SJP, giving legitimacy to this generation’s version of Simon of Trent. Unfortunately, now even the mayor of New York City is someone who has believed and espoused this debunked libel, as preposterous as it reads while on a manifesto, showing the power that can be wielded when these extremist campus groups normalize this discourse as within the realm of reason, no different than conspiracy theorists of other stripes, such as Q-anon anti-vaxxers.

Their Ode to Sinwar and PFLP Recommended Readings

The rest of the same Substack page lists their ideological beliefs, their recommended readings, and odes to their heroes. These heroes include Yahya Sinwar - the man who was first arrested by Israel for when he was the head of the Hamas secret police that would kidnap, torture, and execute dissident Palestinians, and who later then was the principle orchestrator behind the attempted genocide and complex of sexual torture, kinocide, and crimes against humanity from infants to the elderly that took place on October 7^th and has continued since. Likewise, they recommend readings and share discussions of some of the works of the PFLP, the designated terrorist organization that had hijacked airplanes in the 1970s, landed them in Jordan, segregated out the Jewish from the non-Jewish passengers, and then held the Jewish passengers for the ransom release of terrorist members, and who continue to exist and work alongside Hamas, having in fact aided in the transference and holding of the Bibas family, including 9 month old Kfir Bibas, his four year old brother Ariel Bibas, and the mother Shira Bibas, when they were kidnapped in the act of terror and torture inflicted on their community under the authority and commands of Sinwar. These are their heroes and role models. Let us delve in a bit more.

They praise Sinwar’s time in prison - during which he developed a fascination with the use of kidnapping Jews for hostage exchange, smuggled out messages to help plan such events, learned Hebrew and got ahold of confidential Israeli material to disseminate to Hamas and took up a study of Jewish history so that he could market himself as a “historian of the Jew” to others in Hamas

.

When CUAD describes Sinwar’s prison years as:

“revolutionary use of the resources at his disposal”

They are praising the operational discipline of an organization whose strategy includes violence against dissident Palestinians and violence against Israeli civilians. That is not “anti-war” nor is it pro-Palestinian. In Sinwar’s own words, his job was to “hunt and kill suspected [Palestinian] informants,” as he confessed to during his first arrest in 1988. In that confession, he spoke with the assured righteousness. According to the New York Times, Sinwar “dispassionately described shooting one man, strangling another with his bare hands, suffocating a third with a kaffiyeh, and choking and punching a fourth before tossing him in a hastily dug grave.”

As the head of the Beersheva prison Hamas-wing, Sinwar used his time to brutalize dissident Palestinians and to learn about and plot harm against Israel, with a decided appreciation for kidnapping and hostage exchanges. Sinwar personally “ordered the beheadings of at least two prisoners he suspected of snitching,” and under his command, “Hamas operatives would throw their [Palestinian prisoners who were accused of disloyalty] severed body parts out of the cell doors and tell the guards to “take the dog’s head.”” He also learned Hebrew through an online prison education program and began studying Israeli and Jewish history, values, military and counterterroism concepts in order to better understand “the enemy,” and he smuggled cellphones into the prison and used layers and visitors to get messages out of the prison. And these were no innocent messages. As the New York Times states in the link above, the messages were often “about finding ways to kidnap Israeli soldiers to trade for Palestinian prisoners,” an idea he continued to refine over the years until he masterminded the massacres and kidnappings of October 7th, 2023.

CUAD’s manifesto also describes a reading group built around texts by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). They frame the PFLP’s worldview as an instructional guide to identifying “friends and enemies,” and they echo the dehumanizing language of “Zionist entity” alongside an explicit argument that Arab states that normalize relations with Israel are “adversaries.”

For our last reading group, we read selections from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)’s Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine and selections from the October 1981 edition (No. 55) of the PFLP Bulletin.

We began by discussing the importance of identifying our friends and enemies. One comrade highlighted that while Arab states may share a cultural identity with Palestinians, their subservience to imperialism positions them as adversaries. These states’ wealth and power are tied to the preservation of the Zionist entity…”

The PFLP is a terrorist organization that was until recently sponsored by Bashar Assad’s Syria who has been working alongside Hamas throughout their war of terror for the ethnic cleansing of the Jews of Israel. Their origins are different - one pan-Islamist, the other pan-Arabist - but their agenda the same: no compromise and no peace, exclusively the removal of Israel and of Jews. They are notorious for their attempted assassination and uprising against the Hashemite King of Jordan as they also tried to gain Jordan as part of their perceived territory, and for their segregationist, anti-Jewish kidnappings, as well as their participation with Hamas after October 7th and with the handling and transportation of the hostages kidnapped from Israel.

Conclusion of Columbia Then and Now, Part III: Beliefs

A reader doesn’t need to know every detail of Middle Eastern factional history to understand the basic point: SJP/CUAD is publicly aligning itself with ideological frameworks that treat Israel’s existence as a removable obstacle, and that view violence not as a regrettable breakdown that should be replaced by pro-peace forms of democratic conflict solving, as the 1960s protestors did, but as a necessary and righteous tool to right perceived past wrongs, where only their side gets the legitimacy of being included in discourse with the presumption of “rightness,” and the other subject to routine dehumanization in speech and action with the aim of normalizing that behavior amongst students, faculty, and casual observers alike. That is worlds apart from a campus movement aimed at specific institutional reforms and pro-democracy, pro-peace agendas.

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Before I begin, I want to be careful to not to give the impression that I dislike Aziz or his work; on the contrary, he is a brave, pro-peace Palestinian activist who dares to raise his voice against Hamas while he is living in the West. This is not a task that many Palestinians, even those who individually found safety in a Western nation, feel comfortable doing. Hamas is known for not only kidnapping, torturing, and executing any Palestinian who criticizes or disagrees with them as “collaborators” with Israel; they also threaten the critics’ families. I commend John Aziz for his bravery and his commitment to peace in a world that primarily values self-righteous hatred as its top virtue and as the basis of coalition-building. I hope to write this in a manner that respectfully engages with what John Aziz wrote, and if it feels combative or in anyway hurtful to him or his readers, I would like to apologize in advance and hear feedback on how to better engage with such work in the future.

With that, here is a slightly edited, but largely copy-and-pasted, version of what I wrote to John Aziz on his original article.

My Comment to Aziz on Why I Use The Names “Judea and Samaria.”

Aside from a Twenty-Year Period of Jordanian-Enforced “Judenrein” Following Several Decades of a Racial and Religious Supremacist War to Ethnically Cleanse the Jewish Minority of Pre-State Israel, Jews have Lived Contiguously as Either Majority or Minority in Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem for Several Thousand Years.

Respectfully, I’d like to explain why I use the term Judea and Samaria, and perhaps how even in the writing on this topic from a peace activist, I see the reason to continue to do so. Much of what I write below is sourced from my larger research article, The Myth of the Indigenous, which had also been republished by the publication The Future of Jewish. Feel free to double check what I am about to state with the citations I use in that research article.

Preceding your discussion on the Jewish relationship to the region, you qualify it as “these are the ancient names given in the Bible,” and other references to it as of antiquity, followed by only discussing its modern usage as a post-1967 artifact. Then, this is followed both by saying “many claim it erases Jewish history somehow,” and also making a claim about the Arab population existing there from “time immemorial,” or at the very least, “for thousands of years.”

This herein sadly does exactly what I think you do not want to do, and I will explain the “somehow” that you use to qualify why many Jews see using the term West Bank as erasure.

Firstly, the names Judea and Samaria were not merely used as biblical references, and Jews did not only live within that region and within what is now called “the West Bank” in antiquity. Far from it: the region many now call “the West Bank” has had thousands of years of contiguous Jewish presence that only began to decline due to increased Arab violence against them after the passage of the Ottoman Tanzimat Reforms mandating Jewish equality in the mid-19th century, followed by the brief period of European presence in the interwar period after the Ottoman empire collapsed at the end of World War I, then during a collaboration with Nazi Germany, then during the Arab League war of annihilation against Israel, and then continued in a collaboration with Soviet Russia.

For the sake of defining our terms, I am going to use the term “native” to mean anyone who lived in the region of Judea and Samaria or this region at large prior to the Ottoman Tanzimat Reforms of around 1850, which in combination with the later decline and fall of both its own empire and neighboring empires, precipitated enormous demographic changes across the Middle East. I will also use my largely-disliked term of “indigenous” to refer to populations that existed in these lands prior to the Roman occupation.

The Jewish communities of Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem that were attacked by an increase in Arab violence like the horrific attacks we saw in the 1920s were not the “European settlers,” it was those “native” and “indigenous” longstanding Jewish communities whose existence in that same region preceded the birth of Islam as a religion and who continued to speak forms of ancient Hebrew and/or Judeo-Arabic. It also included Jewish communities for whom that had been home since around the 1000s or 1100s. And it included others who immigrated later during the Inquisition, around the 15th and 16th century. These are just some of the major sources of Jewish residency in Judea and Samaria that continued until the mid-20th century, including the longstanding, indigenous Jews who simply never left the region for several millenia, withstanding the Romans, the Arab conquests, the Crusades, and so forth.

The Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria - the hills around Jerusalem - continued to grow during the immigration waves that came about when the Ottoman Empire passed its egalitarian reform bills in the mid-19th century known as the Tanzimat Reforms. These reforms allowed Jews and other minorities the right to purchase land, migrate and develop that land, act as witnesses in court, get equal police protections, ride horses like Arabs and not just donkeys as they had previously been constrained to riding, and other acts of formal legal equality.

Additionally, as the Tanzimat Reforms strengthened the policing of local Arab tribal violence between the Yamans, Qays, and Bedouins, and as Jews began developing land that had previously gone undeveloped, more and more Arab and Muslim immigrants from different regions, not of the “native” three groups listed above, began moving from other “vilayets” or other “sanjaks,” that is places that would now be seen as different nations, to join in a new and booming economy. The period of 1850-1912 saw a massive change in demographics across the Ottoman Empire, both due to the egalitarian laws passed both in the Middle East and also in neighboring and distant empires, and then due to the populist backlash to such egalitarian efforts and the decline and fall of neighboring empires around World War I.

As a result, it is quite difficult to say which Arabs or Muslims were “native” to Judea and Samaria if we are to use consistent definitions of “native” for both Jewish and Muslim residents. While I have done some preliminary research to better understand the Jewish genealogy of the region, I have done less to try to follow non-Yaman, Qay, or Bedouin in-migration of other Arab or Muslim populations. In part, this has to do with the institutional failures to capture and record such movement. However, there are scholars working in this region, like Ruth Kark Seth Frantzman, whose PhD dissertation I cite below.

Jews of the Middle East Also Deserve the Defense and Rights of Minorities that the West Affords to Their Own

My point herein is: the native Jews of Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem were a minority, but a substantial and indigenous minority by one metric, or a native minority by another metric, or a modern minority that immigrated alongside with a modern majority by yet another metric. But minorities, it is generally agreed upon today, have just as much of a stake in their land as do the majorities. Arguably, in Western discourse, “indigenous” minorities have more of a stake - or should have more of a stake - in the discourse and ongoing politics, and the Jews of East Jerusalem and the hills of Judea and Samaria were communities of the indigenous Jews to what is now Israel.

The Muslim Population in Judea and Samaria Today is Almost Certainly Different than the Muslim Population in Judea and Samaria Prior to the Tanzimat Reforms of the 1850s, as Research Shows that Jewish and Muslim In-Migration to Pre-State Israel Followed Roughly the Same Pattern

Likewise, as Aziz makes the claim that Arabs have existed in Judea and Samaria for “thousands of years,” it is likely that just like the Jews after the Tanzimat Reform - and other populations worldwide during the massive demographic changes of roughly 1850-1950 - the Muslim population who currently lives there is not “age old,” but the result of the same political and economic changes that brought about different Jewish demographies. The research that we do have on this topic indicates that Jewish and Muslim demographic changes were entwined and occurred as a result of the same confluence of legal and international events. Thus, while many speak of Arabs and/or Muslims as having existed in Judea and Samaria “for thousands of years,” as in Aziz’s post, the truth is, a that the modern use of the term Arab only truly arose during the fall of the Ottoman Empire during the rise of pan-Arabism and other nationalist agitations and ideas that the most of the world faced during this time period as documented in books such as Nations and Nationalism since 1790 by Hobsbawm. The native Arab clans like the Yamans, Qays, and Bedouins who lived in the regions are likely not the same as the Arab clans that moved later alongside with Jews due to political and economic changes, or the Arabs who moved in after the Jordanian occupation of 1948. But due to the obfuscation of which to which populations we refer to when we use a phrase like “Arab” that emerged as part of modern nationalisms in our world war periods, it is easy to lose site of demographic changes when the contemporary inhabitants can claim the same name as those who preceded them, even when the genealogy is quite different.

East Jerusalem was Home of the “Jewish Quarter” Since the Crusades

East Jerusalem - home of the “Jewish Quarter” since the time of the crusades, and the surrounding mountain ranges of Judea and Samaria, were the central home of Jewish life, commerce, education, and culture as it existed for thousands of years. Not as a matter of the ancient past, not as a matter of biblical claims, but as a matter of real, living, breathing, indigenous and native minority groups with a contiguous presence.

However, soon after the Tanzimat Reforms and then the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Muslim backlash to Jewish equal rights resulted in the genocide of the Jews of Judea and Samaria.

The 1929 Genocide and Torture of the Indigenous Jews of Hebron as The Start of the Ethnic Cleansing of Jews in Judea and Samaria, and As the Model for October 7th.

In 1929 when the Arab notable appointed by the British as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem - Amin al-Huseyni - organized the genocide of the Jews of Hebron, this caused a drastic decrease in the numbers of Jewish occupants. This genocide and the terror used therein may have even been the example upon which October 7th was built.

When Sinwar was in prison for his torture and execution of other Palestinians to gain their allegiance to Hamas, he taught himself Hebrew and began reading up on Jewish culture and history so that he could market himself as the “specialist in Jewish people’s history” to Hamas.

Some scholars now believe that October 7th, 2023, was directly influenced by the Hebron Genocide of 1929, in which the Arab leader Amin al-Husseini - later one of many Arab antisemitic Nazi collaborators - organized a brutal wave of ethnic cleansing and torture against the native Jews of Hebron, including castrating Jewish boys in front of their parents and rabbis, and acts of sexual violence and rape against girls in front of their families, amongst other acts of terror and torture. People generally just refer to this as the “Hebron Massacre,” but in a sense, it was a precedent for terror attacks that would occur later to try to get Jews to leave, in that it worked: it caused many of the Jewish inhabitants of Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem to flee.

In the 1931 census data and onwards, we see a decline of the Jewish communities of Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem, down to around 60,000 Jews or so from a previous higher number that I will look towards retrieving later. In the meanwhile, one should know that there was census data in many forms: from the British Mandate period, earlier Ottoman “deftar” censuses, and other non-governmental surveys such as those of Montefiore. Collecting all the land surveys to show demographic trends will be a project for another day, but in a meanwhile, in this Ph.D. dissertation in historical demography written by Seth Frantzman, we can see a number of the different types of charts and data collected for this time period, and one can browse through his dissertation and his cited works to retrieve other data sets to show this point until I have a chance to retrieve them again.

Violence against Jews in the region continued, with some labeling it as a “civil war” of certain sects of Arab violence against Jews, while other sects of Arabs signed peace treaties with their Jewish neighbors. Oftentimes, both communities moved to the region and formed at roughly the same time period. Take the introductory paragraph to Seth Frantzman’s above-linked Ph.D. dissertation as but one example:

On June 19, 1937, a gathering took place at a Bedouin tent a few kilometers west of the Jordan River in the Baysan Valley of Palestine. In attendance were Assistant District Commissioner for Safed Lewis Y. Andrews and Hana Eff. Boulos, the Arab District Officer of Baysan.[^1] Other Mandatory government representatives were also present. There were sheikhs and members of the Bawati and Bashatiwa Bedouin tribes, as well as Jews from the nearby settlements of Beit Joseph and Kafr Giladi, along with Joseph Nahmani, a Jewish KKL representative from Tiberias.

As the highest-ranking official, Mr. Andrews approached the tent, where a white flag was flying. In a solemn manner, he tied a knot in the flag and turned to face the assembled men. Arabs, Jews, and Englishmen then shook hands, and revelry soon followed, including celebratory gunfire, target practice, and a feast featuring roast lamb. The ceremony marked the finalization of a peace agreement between the Jewish moshav Beit Joseph and the neighboring Bedouin tribes—one of whose members, Ahmed Nazzal, had recently been shot by a Jewish guard.

According to newspaper accounts, the most interesting aspect of this peace pact was that a plot of land was given to the heirs of Mr. Nazzal by the Jews of Beit Joseph.[^2]

This story is not unusual as an account of a peace pact between neighboring Arab and Jewish villages. What is striking, however, is the fact that neither Beit Joseph nor the village of Bawati existed a mere fifty years before this meeting took place. Bawati was one of many Arab villages in the Baysan region—and elsewhere—that were founded between 1871 and 1948.

which when Europe pulled out of acting as its protectorate during its brief period in the region during the interwar period after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, all of the surrounding Arab League nations joined with those Arab internal fights to try to exterminate or re-subordinate the remaining Jews throughout all of Israel.

Unfortunately, when the brief two-decade period of the French and British mandate left the region, the hostile actors of the newly-formed Arab League joined in with the internal Arab militias attempting to exterminate the Jewish inhabitants of the region. Luckily, they did not get all of the Jews. But in 1950, Jordan did get Judea and Samaria.

Jordan’s Successful Continuation of Judean and Samarian Jewish Ethnic Cleansing.

Successfully Erasing Jewish Residential Continuity Through Renaming the Land to the West Bank, Excluding Jews from Citizenship by Law, and Destroying Jewish Cultural Heritage.

Jordan’s first act after their unlawful annexation of Judea and Samaria was an immediate violation of the new order of international law after World War II: it was to ethnically cleanse the region of not just its remaining Jewish inhabitants, but all Jewish culture - its architecture, graveyards, synagogues, homes, stores, etc. Jordan’s occupation of Judea and Samaria was violent and purposefully tried to make the region “Judenrein.” This connection to the German is direct, since there was still a large pro-Axis contingent that existed in that region even after WWII officially ended. This contingent later blended into both Soviet-pan-Arabist, and Muslim Brotherhood and other pan-Islamist beliefs and actions.

We do not have good numbers on a lot of these topics precisely due to the goal of Judenrein, the goal of trying to erase Jewish history and presence from these regions and other parts of pre-state Israel and the Middle East in order to better claim that it never therein existed.

We know that Jordan burned down something along the lines of 60 synagogues and other institutions like Yeshivot and homes in East Jerusalem alone, which had been the home of the thriving Jewish Quarter since the Crusades - the largest area of continuous Jewish living in the Jerusalem sanjak for over 1,000 years. Gone. Not to mention other remaining evidences of Jewish presence and our presence in the surrounding hills of Judea and Samaria.

Jordan also purposefully desecrated a Jewish cemetery, the Mount of Olives Cemetery, using Jewish gravestones to pave roads and even for latrines for the Arab League armies.

In 1954, Jordan passed the Jordanian Nationality Act, officially then stripping any remaining Jew of citizenship and precluding any others from gaining it again. This Act explicitly says out that no Jews who still remained in their conquered region shall be allowed to have citizenship. This act was the final nail in the coffin of the contiguous Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria. There are various estimates as to how many Jews were left at that time after repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing since the 1850s as backlash to the equality bill of the Tanzimat Reforms, let alone since the creation and surge of “antisemitism” as its own distinct form of hatred popular in Europe and with the Axis allies in the Middle East, as we saw at least starting in the 1920s.

Reality versus Rhetoric

In truth, there has only been around a 20-year period in which Jews did not live in Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem - areas that now, many wish to call the West Bank, using the language of Jordan’s completion of several decades of violent anti-Jewish ethnic cleansing. And the entire time that we have lived there, for thousands of years but the 20 year period of Jordanian-enforced Judenrein, we have always continued to call it “Judea and Samaria.” Not as something of the past. Not as something of the bible, of thousands and thousands of years ago. As simply the place where we lived, calling it what we have always called it.

Around 60,000 Jews who remained in Judea and Samaria after the Hebron genocide. By some estimates, 10,000 Jews remained after the Arab League 1948 war to finish the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from the Middle East or to return Jews to their pre-Tanzimat subordination as happened to nearly all other minorities in the Middle East, including the Yazidi, Maronites, Druze, Alawites, Coptics, and so on. And finally, those who remained were kicked out in 1954 by the Jordanian Nationality Act. Jews may have been a minority, but they were real and contemporary, surviving for millenia in the same region despite living in a sequence of empires that were set up to exclude them from having equal rights as the majority under the law and subject to violence without justice at the whim of the majority. Once Jordan and the other Soviet-client states of the Arab League lost the Six Day War - a war started by false Soviet information given to Egypt - Israel was able to begin rebuilding the regions that Jordan had desecrated. In doing so, Israel created an immediate open application for Arab residents of East Jerusalem to apply for full and equal Israeli citizenship, and promised protection for Muslim holy sites - quite the opposite of what Jordan did for the prior twenty years of its occupation of Judea and Samaria, which included stripping Jewish citizenship and destroying our homes and heritage. But rather than celebrating, the world has chastised us, asking us to voluntarily refuse from living in the region from which we had faced a violent genocide not just twenty years prior.

And the only way for the world to believe that their command that we not go back to live in our home towns nor call it by the same name we have always called it is for the world to believe precisely what was laid out in the article to which I am responding - that Judea and Samaria are merely names of “antiquity,” and no Jew had a relationship to it until 1967, a patently false claim that is easily decimated with a modicum of historical research. Thus, modern scholars have responded by cutting out much of the minority history, including the Jewish history, of the modern Middle East.

So I personally will not use the term that Jordan created to purposefully continue erasing Jewish contiguous residency and shift international attention away from the Palestinian Arab and Jordanian acts of ethnic cleansing the native and indigenous against Jews of Judea and Samaria.

What I Fear are the Implications of Continued Use of Jordan’s Phrase “the West Bank.”

By using only the term “West Bank,” the media and academia creates a false vision of history that acts to erase both Jewish and Arab historic demography, creating a false historical memory for the popular psyche from which people form distorted, offhand politico-moral opinions. It paints Arab peoples of that region as the “real victims” after Jordan lost its second attempt to exterminate its Jewish neighbors, and ignores the reality that much of the globe lives in entirely new territories after the periods of the end of empire through World War I - including the Muslim and Arab populations throughout Israel and Judea and Samaria, who are almost certainly not all of the same lineage of the three Muslim tribes that lived in the region prior to the Tanzimat Reforms.

The term “West Bank” erases Muslim and Arab existence from the historical conditions that have effected all people throughout the mass migrations and demographic changes that characterize the period from the egalitarian reforms of the 1850s through the rise of new national boundaries after World War II by the 1950s. It places the Arab families that live in Judea and Samaria now outside of time and space, disconnected from the same events that brought Jewish and Arab migration alike to the region. Instead, it creates another biblical, Adam and Eve historico-political myth of a unified, utopian pastoral people, blissfully unaware of the world outside of their domain, who only “fell” when introduced to the sin of the big bad world outside - the snake of Europe and the Jew - who corrupted the original utopia to which they strive for return.

Meanwhile, the term “West Bank” is far too often used to lay the claim for continued Jewish ethnic cleansing. Many people - not necessarily Aziz, as I do not know his stance on this matter and I do not believe he is a hateful person, but a brave defender of peace - use the term “The West Bank” in conjunction with an argument that Jews are merely “settlers,” and not simply returning or righting an injustice after a 20-year hiatus due to a genocide. Normalizing Jordam’s occupation and how they named the land - deceivingly neutral in relationship to Jordan’s namesake river - leads to increased calls of forcibly migrating the Jewish population of 600,000 people - the third largest Jewish population in the world after Israel and the United States.

So when I hear West Bank, I hear it largely in the context of people thinking it noble to demand Jewish ethnic cleansing, which repeats the general history of antisemitism: people who believe that they are acting with self-righteous and moral conviction, but whose demands, if carried out, would lead to the forcible removal of Jews.

When I hear “West Bank,” I hear a successful propaganda campaign, one started by the Arab League, propagated through world institutions by the Soviet Union, and now under the mantle of the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran.

The most convincing argument that Aziz makes is that he says it is the name of the land that he calls home, and is thus part of his identity. I would not want to deny anyone the right to describe their home and roots as feels best to them. But I think that, as we see too much in the history of Israeli policy, “no good deed goes unpunished.” Israel was willing to cede the issue of how to name the region on a global scale, and rather than that being rewarded with understanding, it was punished by denying the Jewish near-recent history and ethnic cleansing from that region. Having backed down on the issue of the “name” in exchange for peace - yes, we were willing to give away this land from which we had only been recently ethnically claimed in nearly its entirety but the 4% of it or so where Jews were living, both during the Oslo Accords and then during the Olmert proposal - has allowed the world to forget our history, as eager as we were to not press the issue in exchange for peace.

I do not want to tell anyone that they cannot use the term that resonates with who they are and their family’s history. I hope that one day, we can live in a world where the name does not matter, because there is an accurate account of all people’s history, told without the biases people have learned from nearly a century of the region being used as a pawn by international superpowers like Russia and Iran. Until then, I will use “Judea and Samaria” if only because, without it, I do not know how else to keep our story and our history alive. “Judea and Samaria” is my one small and feeble attempt to push back against the continuous push for Jewish ethnic cleansing in the region, from the erasure in our history textbooks to the calls for Jewish expulsion that exist currently. Using this name seems to be the only way to tell this history in a world determined to ignore it and repeat its atrocities.

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Judaism is a civilization, not an “identity.” Identity is a term that forms the basis for a system of ideology that is made from elements of revelation-based social cohesion, self-testimony, zealous evangelizers who gain positions of power, and a borderless movement that is always looking for new subjects - and relinquishing its duties over other, non-compliant subjects. Identity is a topic that has redefined our metaphysical unerpinnings of the polity and our psychological sense of selfhood.

I think of “identity” today as better understood through looking at about three categories: (1) the “identity-phenotype,” which is the individual manifestation of the “identity” trait in question, such as skin color, sexuality, religious background, and so forth; (2) the “identity-collective,” which is how an individual’s identity-phenotype is not viewed as part of the individual’s personal story and sense of self, but how it merges into a collective that has a shared psychosocial and political existence, often held sacrosanct over other aspects of selfhood and given greater access to resources and consideration above other political interests; (3) the “identity-ideology,” which is the ideology that arises from and governs the identity-collective - and the identity collective does not refer to a group of people necessarily, but also how we see our own sense of self - as a microcosm of the collective. Our meaning and norms-making institutions today - such as the university, non-profits, the media, INGOS, and so forth - operate primarily by creating and enforcing procedures that reward those who affirm identity-ideology. Our sense-making institutions are centers of power that have the capacity to give people proximity to agency and resources, and have the power to decide which explanatory narratives can be given a platform, amplification, reproduction, and distribution. The workers and evangelizers of identity-ideology are those I will call “identitarians,” or identity-ideologues.

Identity is an interesting word, because while it sounds individualistic, it is really the opposite: it nullifies individual distinction and only exults the part of the individual that can be regarded as a microcosm of an identity-collective, as understood through identity-ideology.

The use of the term “identity” no longer means something personal about one’s history and sense of self, but about one’s beliefs and practices within the identity collective, whereby the individual now is but one outpost for that collective.

Oftentimes, identity-language us used in a manner crucial to our understanding of Western Civilization: as revelation. One speaks of one’s sense of “identity” as an awakening, as self-revelation, and then as seeing the rest of the world revealed through the lens of that identity.

Similarly, identity-language can be invoked as defense or privilege. Appealing to one’s identity, in so much as it confirms the identity-collective and thus identity-ideology, makes one’s following words sacred and untouchable, or casts upon any who disagree an air of crassness or blasphemy. It lowers scrutiny and increases benefit of the doubt with less work for the individual who merely has to appeal to identity, such as one would appeal to authority.

However, the power of identitarian language does not rest on identity-phenotype; only if you refer to yourself in terms of the identity-collective and not merely as a carrier of the identity-phenotype can your words be given the access to power, resources, distribution, reverence, and legitimacy that such an invocation can grant. And this is the point: it is not an individualistic philosophy. It is a philosophy of submission, whereby the self is subsumed to a collective identity that does not allow for deviance in personal story or understanding.

“Identity,” as an emblem of a greater collective that demands obedience and devotion, is the only part of the “self” that is viewed as sacred in our modern landscape. Other parts of the self and our capacity for reason and expression are dismissed or viewed with hostility.

So while it might seem like modern society has “progressed” and we have lessened our application of taboos, we have done the opposite: we have expanded that which is taboo by making taboo nearly any individual expression that cannot fall into a collective.

Thus, what looks like diversity - different expressions of sexuality or melanin - is strictly homogenous, only differing in their cosmetic presentation of an underlying ideology.

Identity is only individualistic in so much as we venerate the individual’s vows of allegiance to an identity-collective as a core demonstration - and operation - of the power of identity-ideology. This identity-ideology is the rubric by which bureaucrats and other employees of vast norm-making webs determine which type of speech can be given form, amplified, or reproduced and distributed.

Identity-ideology is the core operation of the modern public sphere: one which we primarily watch or consume, not one in which we primarily participate towards material ends or a sense of closure when ends are met. While we can express ourselves on social media or sometimes in institutions that give us access, we rarely do so with the expectation of physical events or concrete operational changes. When we speak now about participating in the public sphere, we do not generally expect a position on our local PTA, or on a town council or in terms of a higher position with our jobs, or creating new activities for our local social organizations or churches or fraternal orders; we truly are “bowling alone.” Our primary interaction with our “public sphere,” the primary near-material reward we expect, is perhaps a “like” on a social media post.

In the past, participation in the public public sphere could be constricted by physical characteristics: race, gender, national background, language, accents. Items that were palpable on first encounter and stood out over time. Today, most first encounters with others and what stands out over time is immaterial to the individual but substantive to ideology: are they correctly expressing their individual queries and ideas in accordance with the identity-collective that legitimizes their participation? If they themselves are not the holder of an identity-phenotype, does their language nonetheless hail identity-ideology as the sovereign ruler of ethical analysis and expression?

In as flawed as was the past, we did have a period of time where a difference of social and political opinion was not only tolerated, but seen as a market of a progressive civil society, even as a status marker. In reading American or English literature from the 19th, sometimes 20th centuries, there is a marked sense of respect for when - usually men - retreat to speak of “matters of state.” Partaking in disagreements over “matters of state” is portrayed as noble, upper class, and good. Perhaps, this is because the sense of self was not yet reduced to its part of an identity that affirms an ideology which in itself is a form of statecraft; that is, there was a distance between “the self” and “the state” that today has been collapsed into the form of “identity.” There is no more room for individual disagreement, let alone noble disagreement, when governed by an identity-ideology movement, because the “state” is no longer spoken about as a distant entity whose operations we can only hope to influence through voting and expression, but as something contained within each of us, where all of our expressions are nothing but some manifestation of power not from our individual self but from something higher that interpolates us and binds us to a collective, be it a morally good or morally bad collective.

But, in the contemporary perception, that part of the self that represents a microcosm of a collective, its “identity,” is a one way street: a “self” can claim its part in a collective as an “identity,” but that collective is no longer allowed to determine which “selves” may or may not constitute its members. This makes the entire concept of the “collective” or some group higher than the individual something malleable and borderless, subject to change from out under the feet of its initial adherents or believers, who are not allowed to hold copyright to the name and must often remake their name as something else if they want to hold on to something unique within that collective, lest they be accused of “gatekeeping.”

The identity-collective cannot define itself, its meaning, and its members, because those identity-collectives do not actually exist in any tangible form: there is no real leader, no organization, no laws and procedures. There might be NGOs or non-profits, but that is not where power lies, and the minute that the masses that constitute the identity-collective have shifted in a manner that is not in sync with the NGOs and non-profits, those non-profits will be cast aside as part of the “establishment” or the “state” in some derogatory manner. If a set of bureaucracies do not stay malleable to the shift in identity-definition, then those are cast aside as outdated, unless a critical mass across a critical group of bureaucracies were to hold fort.

As it is now, one does not often need worry that bureaucracies will often step out-of-sync with ideology, as only those most aligned with identity-ideology can generally gain employment within such institutions. Perhaps this protocol is a consequence of the depressed economic realities of about 2008 onwards, when the the only places where many recent college grads with a humanities major could find work were in the “softer” fields of the corporate world, from HR, to the jobs programs of DEI, thus setting the requirements for who may or not even get into proximity of structures of power.

One challenge to the power of the identity-collective is if an individual who would normally be positively hailed within the collective does not affirm the same ideological norms. For example, if a person who is black, gay, trans, of Muslim background, or who otherwise presents as part of a vaunted “identity” chooses not to align that part of themself with the exulted collective. However, such people are dismissed as someplace on the spectrum of ignorant to malicious, and the norm-making institutions that operate based on identity-ideology do their best to either shut out such voices - as it often easy to do - or if faced with the inevitability of encountering these voices, write of them in as defamatory manner as possible within the law, be it through tokenizing their ideas and work, trivializing their perspectives, misconstruing their motives, or assigning them to another ideology that is then cast as an enemy ideology, such as conservatism.

That is why so many Westerners will believe that Hassan Piker will be a better moral authority and representative on Palestinians and Hamas then people like Mosab Hasan Yousef or Ahmed Faoud Al-Khatiab - the latter of whom has specifically written about the NYT telling him as much. Sometimes, our meaning-brokers will cast these dissident identity actors onto the “malicious” side of the spectrum, often falling into conspiracy theory traps that are smoothed over by the intelligentsia: the above Palestinian men must be getting paid by (((Israel))) or (((AIPAC))) for their work. Similarly will black people who disagree with the identity-ideology framework, or even just specific policies, be called “self-hating” or “uncle Toms.” Likewise will trans people - who find issue in how identitarians grant more and more access to the label of “transness” to more and more people who do not in fact seem to be tran - be labeled as something like “gatekeepers.”

The latter claim - that a trans person is a “gatekeeper” for saying what is or is not actually a form of transgenderism - truly gets to the heart of the issue: when there is no other conspiracy by which to besmear the identity-phenotype that steps out of line with identity-ideology, the identitarians invert morality, ethics, and practice - much as they too do with Jews and power - and claim the one speaking as part of a minority of voices is actually the “gatekeeper.” Meanwhile, the power-wielding identitarian who is trying to redefine the terms that others have lived by for decades, see themselves not as gatekeepers but as door-openers: anyone can have this particular identity, as long as you pledge allegiance to our ideology.

This mistakes allegiance to an ideology for respect for the material humanity from which this ideology developed. This severs the link between identity-ideology and identity-phenotype. Now, a caricature or a performance of an identity phenotype - something once castigated as mockery or appropriation - is expected in order to gain power and legitimacy, and can in fact usurp the people whose existence originally gave rise to that line of identity-ideology. And if those who themselves helped bring about a world in which they can live with more rights and respect dare to go back to define what it is that gave them such rights and respects, they are cast from the movement they started, accusing of trying to “gatekeep” something that has been stolen out from under them and put to use for a self-replicating system of power, not for their underlying personhood.

This severance between the identity-phenotype and the identity-ideology lies at the heart of why so many people find today’s identitarian logic not only flawed due to its anti-reason basis that elevates first-person experience over dialogue and persuasion based on the procedural and neutral collection of evidence and reason, but identity-ideology has now kicked out the first-person of resulting identity-rational, so that one only needs to appeal to the ideology in order to confirm the legitimacy of the ideology. That is, identity-ideology is now utterly circular onto itself, a system that only gains legitimacy through self-appeal, but can sustain itself in such a manner through its occupation of key positions of power and continued evangelization into new generations emerging into adulthood through the internet and the university.

Now, identitarians maintain their power by gatekeeping how others may or may not understand their own sense of self and thus their history, their roots, their social relationships, their political history, and their personal psychology. If you are unlucky enough to have something core to your sense of self be captured by masses who have interwoven that in with an identity-collective, you will be hardpressed to be able to publicly speak your own mind and truth in a manner that deviates from the script without the need to selectively edit and backpeddle, if not consciously, then even subconsciously, perhaps thinking that doing so is moral or considerate.

But many whose selves contain within it some captured identity-phenotype are becoming discontent. The identitarian becomes the enemy of the transperson who dares to think of themselves separately from a political collective. For such an identity-dissident, the animosity they feel towards identitarians who uses this unique part of their self for power is only second to the animosity they feel towards the reactionary whose anti-trans stance really stems from their anti-identitarian stance. Such trans or other people with an identity-phenotype who rejects the identity-collective and its governing ideology are in an unwinnable position, enmired between two sides that feed off of one another and leave no room for the actual person of “identity” to breathe and exist as people.

And so the identitarians try this tactic with Jews too: we must, supposedly, accept anyone who claims the category of Jew for themself, or validate those who claim to be a part of us as somehow representing a “legitimate perspective.” But Jews have never accepted this at any stage of our existence. During the past several millenia, when two new major religions that were entwined with imperialism each insisted that in order to join that revelation, intent did not matter, only a willingness (or even an unwillingness) to convert mattered, this set the norm for what we still see today: anybody can join any revelatory movement in so long as they too feel that they experienced such “revelation” and have their testimony of how they arrived. But this is not a premise that exists within Judaism. To be Jewish and to be seen as a voice for Judaism, one must go as Ruth did: to follow wherever we follow, to worship our god as one’s own, to be a part of our nation. And when other Jews step outside of the norms and customs of our nation, let alone commit perhaps the chief sin within Judaism: sell out our people and join the nations that would destroy us, to aid Amalek or at least stay behind and disappear into the masses of Egyptians who saw in our ability to remain a group and leave as one something unwanted or immoral: them and their descendents are not Jews who were now know. We believe in a definable unity of our people, and to join, you must join on the terms of that definable unity. If you are of us and disavow that which makes us one people, we will hope for your teshuva, but will not welcome such positions as a valid representation of our peoplehood.

While to modern eyes, this might sound parochial, it in practice allows far more freedom for the individual self than is allowed under the identity-construct of power. There is an expression, “two Jews, three opinions,” an expression that could not arise under identitarianism. We have never been a nation of one opinion. We in fact even have systematized our respect for pluralism into something called “minhagim,” or “custom.” Most Jews do not practice in the same way as one another or necessarily hold the same textual interpertations. But that is okay. Because what is important is not the conclusion to which we have arrived, but how we have arrived at that conclusion: was our sense of reason in good faith under the procedures for analysis that we have gained from the Torah and rabbinic precedent.

Generally, our politics and our religious practices are kept separate. My modern orthodox Jewish school that I attended until I was 18 was likely half Republican and half Democrat. My friends and I went around the school together once putting up pro-gay marriage bumper stickers on various lockers. Our rabbis debated this, and decided that it was okay and those stickers could say: even if it was not aligned with the holdings of the Talmud, we were expressing an American political opinion, not an interpretation of Talmud. Furthermore, the man who ran my school was a rabbi who had been, as a child, hidden by nuns in France while his parents were taken to Auschewitz: his father was killed on site, his mother managed to survive. Despite his and his families early tragedies, he became ever more committed to creating a vibrant and successful Jewish life, and continued on both to practice Chasidism and to gain a PhD at University of Paris, before opening a school in the United States for Jewish refugees to maintain their practice of Judaism and sense of Jewish community. This man, in response to our bumper stickers, said that he did not survive a totalizing state simply to tell others what is or is not allowed as political expression.

This mindset is quite different than the identitarian mindset that has overtaken the West, one that could be seen as a post-Judaic Abrahamic heresy, one that privileges “experience” and “belief” if experienced as “revelation” over any underlying reality or reason, which allows for the political accumulation of power through what I think of as the social-revelatory bond, whereby institutions can create systems that allow for the reproduction of these bonds and diminish the reach and power of those who do not profess the same sense of bonding, making them easier to govern. Having a guiding rubric like Judaism does, which allows for difference in so far as one pledges to support one another and our existence, well that is something that exists too: this is called the nation-state, and according to many philosophers and scholars in fields like Political Hebraism, this insight of “Judaism as the first nation-state and creator of pluralism” is precisely that from which our current era of ideological reign deviates and seeks to demonize. The nation-state is cast as exclusionary since it solely looks out for the interests of one “group” or another; whereby the rule by ideology - or in times earlier, revelation - is borderless - but this also means that its power is borderless, as are its subjects. Under rule by revelation, as was the case for Jews for almost two millenia in both Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East, if one does not ascribe to the revelation that binds the subjects of this form of government, then one can live in that land and yet never be of that land, can have that government wield power over you without being able to exercise power within that government.

So, like Hannah Arendt, I will continue to reject the precepts of identity-ideology with its amorphous borders and subjects, and any encroachment of this theory into Judaism, while I will continue to defend the often unpopular theory of the defined polity and its right to exist and care for its people as such, regardless of the individual thoughts held by the people therein.

In the last part of this series, we covered the defining characteristics of student protest at Columbia in the 1960s. In honor of my middle school social studies teacher (shoutout to Mr. Hoffecker if you somehow found my Substack), I have summarized the “Five Ws” of Columbia’s 1960s protests in the chart below.

Hamas and the Student Groups Organizing the Protests

In contrast to the 60’s, the anti-Israel events taking place on Columbia’s campus today are not run by students; they are run by Hamas, and the responsible Hamas network for campus anti-Israel agitation is called Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). More specifically, the campus unrest, now channeled through SJP and its parent organization, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) - both organizations founded by a man named Hatem Bazian - is run by longstanding Hamas networks that began in the United States in 1988, then as an organization called the Palestine Committee. The Palestine Committee is but one of many global cells of the Muslim Brotherhood - an Islamic supremacist organization intent on exterminating Jews, that arose from the collaboration or admiration of Arab leaders with Adolf Hitler in the 1940s - that activated in their respective countries during the first round of Israel-Palestine peace talks that would later lead to the Oslo Accords, for the sole purpose of sabotaging peace in the name of their religious beliefs - which again, includes exterminating Jews. Peace with Jews, therefore, was a blasphemous proposal, and today’s youth-facting organizations that were first created by the Muslim Brotherhood - and are still administered by Hamas-operative, Brotherhood members - to promote Hamas in the United States echo that agenda: eliminate Israel “by any means necessary” since there can be no two-state solution, only “one-state solution” called Palestine.

Hamas Was Created to Sabotage the Oslo Accords and Fatah Leadership, Be It Through Violence or Persuasion, Both in the Middle East and in the United States

Hamas operatives opened networks in the United States in tandem to Hamas’s start in the Middle East - with entwined personnel on both soil - in order to “not surrender to peace with Jews.”1 As the Soviet Union was on the wane and no longer exerted as much influence on the ethnosupremacist Arab League nor on Yasser Arafat, then the leader of the Fatah wing of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), peace seemed not only plausible, but imminent. The U.S.-backed Oslo Accords - in which Yasser Arafat finally conceded Israel’s right to exist and the willingness to lay down arms in exchange for land that would become an independent Palestinian state - were seen as revolutionary throughout the world. Its participants - regardless of their own history or later continuation of terrorism - were preemptively awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize: PLO leader Yasser Arafat, and Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzchak Rabin and Shimon Peres.

A Brief Background on Why Hamas is Anti-Peace: With Roots in Nazi Collaboration, their Mission is to Herald a Messianic Age by Exterminating Global Jewry, not to Advance Palestinian Rights.

When Hamas began in 1988, as they state clearly in their founding charter, their agenda was to assure that there could be no peace between Palestine and Israel, since like their patron of Iran and their larger umbrella of the Muslim Brotherhood, they believe that they must exterminate Jews worldwide in order for their Messianic age to come. As they state in Article Seven of their charter while citing a Hadith:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him…” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem)2

Hamas reaffirms to its audience that they are indeed a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood, as their charter states clearly in Article Two:

The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine. Moslem Brotherhood Movement is a universal organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement in modern times.

The Muslim Brotherhood and Nazi Collaboration: A Short History of the “Martyr,” Al-Banna, Who Hamas Praises in Their Introduction

So cites Hamas in the introductory paragraphs of their founding charter, a quote that sums up their overarching aim and that they attribute to “The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory.”

Al-Banna is the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and a man who worked closely with - and later provided postwar refuge for - Haj Amin al-Husseini, the primary Middle Eastern collaborator of Adolf Hitler and the man who bears the most responsibility for the genocide of Middle Eastern Jewry. In the 1920s, Husseini led the terror attack and extermination of the 3,800 year-old Jewish community in Hebron - the single most ancient site of nearly-unbroken, continuous Jewish residence, dating to the origination of Jewish civilization itself. The 1929 Hebron massacre was quite similar to the October 7th terror attacks in 2023 - including the kinocide, mass rape, sexual torture, humiliation such as castration of youth in front of their families or teachers, and other forms of mutilation and torture. This has lead some scholars and journalists to posit that Hamas’s October 7th “Al-Aqsa Flood” was inspired by Husseini at Hebron. After all, October 7th’s architect, Yahya Sinwar, did market himself as a “specialist on Jewish history” based on the readings he undertook in prison in order to aid Hamas. As such, Husseini later fled to Berlin, joining other Muslim Brotherhood adherents and Arab supporters of the Nazi movement. There, Husseini worked with the Axis by broadcasting Nazi-Islamist fusion polemics across Arabic radio, tried to create an Arab armed force for the Axis, advised the Bosnian Muslim SS Waffen Batallions in Yugoslovia and other Muslim SS units, and by mustering the support of local, radicalized Islamic militias across the Middle East and North Africa, instigated the greater genocide and ethnic cleansing of MENA Jewry, such as the Nazi-motivated Farhoud in Iraq.3

While the postwar Allies had Husseini under house-arrest in France as Yugoslovia and others tried to bring him to the trials at Nurmberg, he managed to escape to Egypt, where it was al-Banna, head of the Muslim Brotherhood, who welcomed Husseini in with open arms. Banna publicly praised Husseini’s survival and took that as proof that Allah had blessed the cause of exterminating global Jewry, stating that while Hitler and Mussolini may not have survived, the fact that Husseini escaped was proof of Allah’s desire for the extermination of Jews.4

In fact, from a letter penned by al-Banna in 1946, he had this to say on the matter of Husseini, Mussolini, and Hitler:

Hitler’s and Mussolini’s defeat did not frighten you (Husseini). What a hero, what a miracle of a man….Yes, this hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle.

I only provide the above, and extra bibliographic citations in the footnotes below, to again remind a self-righteously milquetoast Western public, who prefers to keep its heads in the sand rather than ruffle its appearance of gentility, that Hamas does not represent a movement for Palestinian statehood nor does Hamas wish for Palestinian peace and prosperity. Hamas is not the rational, materially-driven, justice-seeking actor that Westerners assume constitutes the subject of all grievances globally. No, Hamas represents the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a global wing of Islamofascist supremacists with genocidal and imperialist aims whose origins lie in its collaborations with Nazi interests in the post-Ottoman Middle East.

Like the Soviet Union and the Arab League before them, Hamas sees Palestinians as pawns in a greater war for the destruction of Israel and global Jewry. In Hamas’s own words:

““We make the headlines only with blood,” Sinwar said in the interview at the time with an Italian journalist. “No blood, no news.””5

Thus, beginning in the late 1980s but truly exploding throughout the 1990s as the Oslo Accords were underway, Muslim Brotherhood organizations in America emerged and focused explicitly on entering the American university system. The largest Muslim Brotherhood-led Hamas operation in the United States was created by current senior Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook, whom we will speak of more below - for the specific purpose of turning Americans away from their support for peace treaties like the the Fatah-signed Oslo Accords, with a secondary bonus of being able to fundraise in American dollars.

Where Is Fatah? The Answers to the Origins of the “Protests” Lie in Who the Demonstrators Omit

In the pictures above from the Columbia demonstrations, we see in one a student advocating for Al-Qassam, the “military” wing of Hamas, and in another, advocating for the release of an imprisoned terrorist from the Palestinian Liberation Front (PFLP). The PLFP is the terrorist organization that began the “strategy” of kidnapping Jews to ransom for the release of terrorists. They are currently allied with Hamas and were until just recently sponsored by Bashar Assad of Syria. The PFLP began their influential method of kidnapping Jews first by hijacking airplanes in the 1970s in order to segregate out the Jewish passengers and hold them for the ransom of released terrorists, and were instrumental in October 7th, being one of the groups that kidnapped the 9 month old and 4 year old Jewish Bibas children, though the two were later passed on and murdered through barehanded strangulation by a different jihadist group. The signs above are not uncommon on American college campuses: Hamas, PFLP, Houthis, and even Iranian Islamic Republic slogans and chants have been rampant throughout college campuses since the cruelty of attacks launched at innocent college-aged kids and families on October 7th, 2023.6

If you look closely at the Palestinian signs and symbols waved on college campuses, there is always one party not represented: Fatah, the party once of the PLO led by Arafat, and now of the Palestinian Authority (PA). And this is the point. Fatah, the lead political party of the Palestinian Authority - the closest we have to a “legitimate” government of Palestine - is conspicuously absent amongst the youth chanting against Israel, because the organizers of these “student organizations” are not students. They are Hamas operatives who began the project of creating American-facing establishments that would make Hamas seem an appealing option, and make Fatah, the PLO, and any type of international “peace treaty” that had the cooperation of Israel, regardless of which Israeli Prime Minister or political party was in office, - appear to be “oppressors.” And as you look around campuses now, with knowledge of the signs and symbols of different Palestinian entities, it is quite clear that exclusively Hamas affiliated entities are represented, and the only vaguely legitimate Palestinian leadership is simply ignored.

The Palestine Committee of 1988: The Muslim Brotherhood Cell Whose Mentors Studied at American Colleges in the ‘60s, and Who Created Today’s Campus Hamas Groups

The reason why American Hamas networks have had such success with mimicking the 1960s is that many of the members of the Palestine Committee and their offshoot organizations were mentored by Muslim Brotherhood initiates who had studied at American universities during the protests of the 1960s. This is recounted in The Hamas Networks in the U.S.: A Short History, by distinguished attorney and international relations professor, Dr. Lorenzo Vidino in his capacity as the Director of the George Washington University Program on Extremism.7

Since its 1988 origins, the founding members of the Palestine Committee - or at least, those who were not arrested or deported - have created and staffed dozens of other organizations, including sham charities that funneled money abroad to Hamas, non-profits to promote Hamas propaganda and fundraising, lobbyist groups to promote Hamas interests, and student organizations to promote youth alignment with the agenda of Hamas. One of these student organizations will probably sound familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to anti-Israel hatred on American campuses: it is called SJP, or Students for Justice in Palestine.

The United States v. The Holy Land Foundation: The Origins of Students for Justice in Palestine

Central to our analysis of Hamas’s domestic operation of Students for Justice in Palestine is a landmark case that does not get near enough attention considering that its former employees currently lead SJP: the U.S. vs. The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (2008), one of the largest terrorism-finance cases in the FBI’s history.8 The Holy Land Foundation (HLF), like two other supposed “charities” with overlapping employees that were similarly shut down, was an organization that grew from the Palestine Committee and was found to have its startup funds from Hamas, brokered through Mousa Abu Marzook.9 By the time of their conviction just a few years later, HLF had funneled $12.5 million abroad to Hamas.10

FBI wiretapping from early Palestine Committee meetings was crucial evidence in the HLF case, proving not only their fundraising mechanisms, but that their domestic agenda was to promote Hamas propaganda in the United States in a manner that would appeal to the values of Americans, and specifically to infiltrate American universities in order to later influence congress. The case against HLF began after their terrorist designation in 2001, after which the the HLF defendants - known as the “Holy Land Five” (and unfortunately praised by current NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdami in a song he released in 2017) challenged their designation and criminal convictions, though their convictions were upheld in 2008 and their appeal denied in 2012.

Two other “charities” stemming from the Palestine Committee followed, shut down by the federal government for their material support of Hamas terrorism: one called KindHearts for Charitable Development (KindHearts), and the other called the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP).11

The fact that only five members of HLF were convicted is perhaps the greatest tragedy of this series of three court cases, considering that now, those who were not arrested are either founders and members of CAIR: the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or on the board and staffing the parent company of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the “student group” behind today’s college campus agitations.12

FBI Wiretap and U.S. Department of the Treasury Terrorism Finance Analysis Shows Hamas was Never Local to the Middle East: It Has Had Leaders in the United States Since its Inception.

The establishment of Hamas was not as localized and regional of an affair as most Westerners think: Hamas was established in its current capacity for geopolitical power by a man residing on U.S. soil within the protective guise of a “student,” named Mousa Abu Marzook, and he concurrently established Hamas networks abroad as he built up Hamas networks in the United States, all at the start of the peace talks. Currently, Marzook is a senior Hamas official, but in the 1980s and 1990s, was the man responsible for initiating the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas infrastructure in the United States, starting with the Palestine Committee and helping to establish its reconstitution in the forms of HLF, IAP and KindHearts. Simultaneously, Marzook brokered the first-ever meeting between Hamas and Iran. Marzook accomplished his featswhile he was a student studying abroad from Gaza at Louisiana Tech University. At the time of the HLF court cases, he came to be known as the head of the Hamas politiburo, and today, he is reffered to as the Hamas “Foreign Relations Chief.”13

Each of these three organizations stemming from Marzook’s Palestine Committee: the Holy Land Foundation, KindHearts for Charitable Development, and the Islamic Association for Palestine, are incontestably Hamas fronts in the United States and have been shut down by the federal government as a resut, and yet are also introvertibly linked with Hatem Bazien, founder of Students for Justice in Palestine. Bazian’s SJP and AMP is staffed and lead with former employees and leaders of HLF, IAP, and KindHearts. Moreso, Bazien himself has spoken - during at least two occassions of which we know, if not more which do we not know - at fundraising dinners for organizations later shut down as Hamas finance fronts, including KindHearts for Charitable Development, and a separate in England called Interpal. Worse, at interpal, Bazian collaborated with Mohammed el-Mezain to give a speech together.14

The reason why Bazian’s collaboration with Mohammed el-Mezian is quite worrisome is that senior Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, had designated Mohammed el-Mezain - then an officer of the HLF - as the Hamas leader in American.

Thus, Hamas’s start and its ongoing operations have never been localized to the Middle East, let alone to the radicalized territories of Palestine that border Israel, Egypt, and Jordan

Palestine Committees Agenda: To Convince Americans that “Surrendering to Peace with Jews” Would Not Be Aligned with American Values.

The FBI’s wiretap evidence and collection of internal memos in U.S. v. The Holy Land Foundation that showcases, in their own words, the Palestine Committee’s intent, its relationship to HLF, IAP, and KindHearts, and its origination from Hamas itself as propped up by Hamas senior officials Mousa Abu Marzook and Khaled Meshal. Frankly, it should be required reading for those weighing in on the campus agitation against Israel, along with later congressional testimonies (that will appear further along in this article) as to the financial and employment background behind SJP.

For example, an October 1992 memo from America’s “Palestine Committee” minces no words in describing their primary agenda:

“Palestine is the one for which Muslim Brotherhood prepared armies…to liberate its land from the abomination and the defilement of the children of the Jews and they watered its pure soil with their honorable blood which sprouted into a jihad that is continuing until the Day of Resurrection and provided a zeal without relenting making the slogan of its children “it is a Jihad for victory or martyrdom”…

-Government Exhibit 1B64/0000377-0000383 in United States v. Holy Land Foundation. (Vidino, 7)

How did the Hamas wing in America make this clearly stated agenda seem amenable to liberal American youth? The FBI’s wiretap of the Palestine Committee’s “Philadelphia Meeting,” held in haste after the announcement of the Oslo Accords, shows their considerations.

At the wiretapped, Marriot hotel-held Philadelphia Meeting of 1993, representatives of three of the primary groups of the Palestine Committee - HLF, KindHearts, and IAP - assembled to discuss the best means of undermining the Oslo Accords in the eyes of Americans. At its start, those leading the meeting asked its attendants - attendants with blood ties across the global ecosystem of Hamas - to only refer to Hamas backwards as “Samah,” or merely as “the movement.” Following this largely unenforced formality, attendants began condemning the Oslo Accords, which Omar Ahmed - the director of IAP’s Public Relations - called a treaty “between infidels and infidels.” While they could easily condemn it, figuring out how to turn Americans against peace was more difficult.15

The meeting came to a consensus: to turn Americans away from the idea of a peace treaty and the Oslo Accords, they must frame their dissent to it in a manner that would appeal to American values, framing it as a matter of choice over leadership, oppression, collaboration, freedom, and other core values.

Regardless, figuring out how to frame their condemnation of a peace treaty to Americans would be tricky, both because they would either garner the wrath of Americans who would think of them as terrorists for opposing peace, or by garnering the wrath of other devout Muslims if they appeared to waver in their call for the destruction of Israel.

“If someone asked you if you want to destroy Israel, what are you going to say on TV? If you give an inconclusive response which is like you didn’t answer the question, someone will come to you and tell you that you have forsaken your principles.” (Vidino, 10)

Thus, they came to the conclusion that they could only equivocate to the American public on the strength of their desire to annihilate Israel in so far as they worked to fund what they saw as the necessary violence to disrupt the Oslo Accords abroad:

“In the coming stage, the most important thing we can provide…is to support Jihad in Palestine. I believe it is the only way if we want to bring the goals of the [Oslo peace] accord to fail.” (Vidino, 11).

The Seven-Part Agenda of the Palestine Committee, Culminating in “Infiltrating the American media outlets and universities” in order to “influence Congress.”

Following this realization, they outlined several goals for how to turn Americans against peace and prosperity, or as they called it, “surrendering to peace with the Jews,” while still supporting the violent destruction of Israel abroad. In order to carry out this agenda, they needed to:

1. raise funds for the sake of “Jihad” abroad;

   We give the Islamists $100,000 and we give others 5,000,” stated Abu Baker, outlining how HLF could maintain the semblance of being a charitable organization and avoid scrutiny from authorities. (Vidino, 11)

2. moderate the terms with which they speak, in order to gain American sympathies;

   “It does not benefit me to show to the American people that...I am against the accord because I hate Abou Ammar [Yasser Arafat]”…Instead of “attack[ing] the [Palestinian Liberation] Organization in a personal and direct manner,” they should speak of, “democracy and freedom of expression,” “concepts that are dear to most Americans.” (Vidino, 10).

3. pressure Muslims in the United States to reject peace treaties and to instead support Hamas over the PLO;

   “The Committee should have engaged in an extensive effort to educate the American Muslim community, convincing them that…Hamas was the only force worth supporting.” - (Vidino, 11)

4. Educate children against “peace with Jews,” (Vidino, 11)

   “We don’t want the children of the [American Muslim] community who are raised here in schools and in Islamic schools and non-Islamic schools to grow up surrendering to the issue of peace with Jews” (Vidino, 11)

5. “influence Congress.” (Vidino, 11)

   Ahmed, in particular, stressed the need to increase the Committee’s “influence with Congress.” (Vidino, 11)

6. Infiltrate academia in order to later create more influence on Congress.

   “This (influencing Congress) can be achieved by infiltrating the American media outlets, universities and research centers…” (Vidino, 11)

7. create a “carefully crafted media campaign,” with an importance placed on training Hamas supporters and others against peace on how to speak to Western journalists, circling back to their first point of discussion on how to appeal to American values:

   “training and qualifying individuals in the branches and the communities on media activism through holding special courses on media.” (Vidino, 12)

Evidence from the FBI wiretap evidence submitted against the Holy Land Foundation and their two other affiliated “charities” also show that the Philadelphia Committee spoke about the need to create new organizations that institutionally could not be traced back quite as easily to them, just in case the court cases against them continued and Hamas or other Muslim Brotherhood entities were more formally designated as terrorist organizations: which Hamas was in 2007. As shown from internal memos, one such organization is believed to be the Council on American Islamic Relations, or as its better known, CAIR.16 CAIR, however, is still up and operational.

Hatem Bazian: Founder of Students for Justice in Palestine Creates American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) To Train SJP; Staffs AMP with Former HLF, KindHearts, and IAP Employees.

This leads us to college campuses today, in which zealous anti-Israel rallies have been planned and run in synchronicity across the country by a group called Students for Justice in Palestine, which is run by the former members of the Palestine Committee and the employees of the Committee’s federally prosecuted and abolished sham-charities that financed Hamas: HLF, KindHearts, and IAP. The rise in anti-Israel hysteria and concurrent violent intolerance of dissident speech and Jewish exclusion and assault is the direct result of the plans that the Palestine Committee explicitly stated was their goal in the transcript of their FBI wiretap: to “infiltrate the American media outlets and universities” in order to “influence Congress” so that Americans would come to view Hamas favorably and take on the cause of not “surrendering to peace with Jews.”

Hatem Bazian forms AMP, widely Recognized as an HLF/KindHearts/IAP Reconstitution, Treated Interchangeably with NSJP.

During a 2016 Congressional hearing on the links between the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement (BDS), SJP, and Hamas, former US Department of the Treasury Terrorism Finance Analyst, Jonathan Schanzer, testified as to the primacy of Hatem Bazian’s “American Muslims for Palestine” in Bazian’s SJP and the BDS movement. According to not just Schanzer, but most analysts and investigators, SJP is merely the campus-facing front of AMP. As Schanzer recounts at the beginning of his territory,

“AMP is arguably the most important sponsor and organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is the most visible arm of the BDS campaign on campuses in the United States.” AMP provides speakers, training, printed materials, a so-called “Apartheid Wall,” and grants to SJP activists. AMP even has a campus coordinator on staff whose job is to work directly with SJP and other pro-BDS campus groups across the country. According to an email it sent to subscribers, AMP spent $100,000 on campus activities in 2014 alone.”17

After the federal government dismantled IAP as yet another reconstitution of the HLF-style Hamas fronts, a man named Hatem Bazian formed a non-profit called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). The ADL, former Treasury Department Terrorism Finance Analysts, numerous members of both our Congressional House and Senate, state-level officials, foreign governments, and a host of scholars and attorneys recognize AMP as merely a reconstitution of IAP and the previous Palestine Committee offshoots.

Likewise, AMP is treated by Congress and state-level investigators as essentially the same organization as “National Students for Justice in Palestine.” NSJP does not have a mailing list and merely lists a web form for means of contact; as such, Congressional letters to National SJP are sent to AMP leadership, as in the example below of a House Committee on Oversight and Accountability request for documents from NSJP that is sent instead to Osama Abuirshad, the Executive Director of American Muslims for Palestine.18

AMP and SJP has been the topic of multiple investigations across all branches of government, both state and federal, for specifically the topic of their employment of prior employees of organizations shut down for aiding Hamas. Much like HLF, KindHearts, and IAP before it, Bazian’s AMP hired the same cycle of people who had been floating around the different Hamas operations in the US since 1988, and began immediately following the same structural formats and messaging.

Below, I have cited in-full a list of just some of the coordinators of AMP who thus oversee Students for Justice in Palestine and who had previously worked for either HLF, KindHearts, or IAP. This citation comes from the website of Senator Bill Cassidy - as the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee (HELP) -and his recently launched investigation into AMP/SJP and its ties to Hamas and role in the skyrocketing rates of antisemitic attacks and discrimiation on American college campuses.

Partial List of SJP and AMP Leadership that Once Worked for the Palestine Committee’s HLF, IAP, and KindHearts

Sadly, the way in which the names below are discussed do not convey the full horror of their past actions, though they do the job of highlighting the connection between current SJP/AMP employees and past Hamas operations on American soil. In the next section, many of the histories, actions, and current employment of the various individuals below will be discussed more robustly:

• Jamal Said: “[A] regular keynote speaker at AMP fundraisers” and head of the Mosque Foundation, which sponsors AMP conferences. He also raised money for the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), a now-shuttered charity founded by Hamas’s Deputy Director, Mousa Abu Marzook. The HLF was shut down by the U.S. government after it “sent approximately $12.4 million outside of the United States with the intent to willfully contribute funds, goods, and services to Hamas.”⁵

• Kifah Mustafa: “[A] speaker at AMP’s conferences and events.” He also raised funds for the HLF.⁶

• Salah Sarsour: An AMP board member and Director of AJP who advertises and fundraises for AMP conferences. He also raised funds for the HLF and reportedly sent funds to Adel Awadallah, a Hamas military leader.⁷

• Mohammed El-Mezain: One of the speakers at a 2023 event sponsored by AMP. He was also a leader of the HLF.⁸

• Rafeeq Jaber: Prepared tax forms for AJP. He previously served as President of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), an organization that was “founded with startup money from Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook” and that provided “media, communications, and fundraising services” to the HLF.⁹

• Abdelbaset Hamayel: Listed on a public Internal Revenue Form (IRS) Form 990 as the individual “who possesses the [AJP’s] books and records,” and described on social media in 2014 as AMP’s executive director. He previously served as “secretary general” of the IAP, as well as a representative for KindHearts, a now-shuttered charity connected to HLF and IAP whose assets were temporarily frozen by the U.S. Treasury before it closed under the conditions of a settlement agreement with the U.S. government. Kindhearts’ founder, Khaled Smaili, reportedly worked for Global Relief Foundation, which the U.S. Treasury sanctioned in 2002 for funding al-Qaeda.¹⁰

• Sufian Nabhan: A former member of AMP’s National Board. He previously served as “Michigan representative” for the IAP.¹¹

• Osama Abuirshaid: The current executive director of AMP. He previously “worked as the editor of IAP’s newspaper, Al-Zaytounah,” “has . . .published interviews that highlight his communications with Hamas leader Abu Marzook and other Hamas leaders in Gaza .[and] in 2014 . . . was featured on the website of Hamas’s self-declared military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades.”¹² In addition, you were allegedly “a frequent speaker at IAP events” and “helped raise money for Kindhearts in 2004.”¹³19

This investigation, launched in March of 2025, is but one of many similar investigations or hearings that have been ongoing since at least 2016 and which have grown since October 7th, 2023, due to the skyrocketing antisemitism and repetition of Hamas ideology on college campuses.20

As such, I will compile below a partial and incomplete list as to past and ongoing state and federal - legislative, judicial, and executive - actions that are trying to bring to light the direct Hamas origins of Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine.

Partial List of Government Investigations into the Hamas-Ties of AMP and SJP

Congressional House Hearrings

• April 19, 2016: House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing

  Jonathan Schanzer, former U.S. Treasury terrorism analyst, testified that several founders and senior officials of AMP had previously worked for organizations shut down for funneling money to Hamas, urging renewed scrutiny of the group’s nonprofit activities.21

• May 12, 2016: House Homeland Security Subcommittee hearing

  Follow-up testimony before the Counterterrorism and Intelligence Subcommittee reiterated concerns that AMP effectively continued the work of Hamas-linked predecessors, identifying it as a key node in domestic Islamist influence networks.22

• November 15, 2023 – House Ways and Means Committee hearing

  In From Ivory Towers to Dark Corners, lawmakers examined potential misuse of tax-exempt status by campus groups with financial or ideological ties to Hamas; Schanzer again named AMP as a central conduit connecting defunct terror-finance entities to student activism.23

• May 15, 2024 – House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing

  During Antisemitism on College Campuses, multiple expert submissions, including ISGAP’s report, explicitly cited AMP for coordinating anti-Israel campus activity and supplying ideological materials to student groups.24

• July 23, 2024 – House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee hearing

  Witnesses from the ADL, ISGAP, and the Program on Extremism at GWU described AMP as a primary vehicle channeling tax-deductible donations toward entities spreading antisemitic propaganda and defending Hamas violence.25

• October 6, 2025 – Letter from House Ways & Means Committee to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requesting examination of AMP’s tax-exempt status

  Congressional leadership formally asked the IRS to prioritise investigations into AMP and related organizations for alleged misuse of tax-exempt status, including suspected links to designated foreign terrorist organizations and domestic campus unrest.26

Senate Actions

• May 9, 2024: Letter from U.S. Senators to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) demanding investigation of AMP’s tax-exempt status

  Senators from both parties requested the IRS open a formal investigation into AMP (via its parent entity AJP Educational Foundation) and other nonprofits to determine whether they misused their 501(c)(3) status by supporting or coordinating with campus protest activities tied to foreign organisations.27

• June 4 & 13, 2024: Senate Appropriations Subcommittee (FSGG) hearing

  In questions for the record, senators pressed Treasury officials on oversight of nonprofit groups such as AMP alleged to finance campus proxies for Hamas, marking the first Senate-level reference to the organization.28

• September 24, 2024: Follow-up letter from the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means to the IRS requesting revocation of tax-exempt status of AMP and other groups

  The House Ways and Means Committee formally sought revocation of AMP’s tax-exempt status by submitting an appendix of alleged misconduct and campus activity inconsistent with charitable purposes.29

• March 28, 2025: Senate HELP Committee investigation

  Senator Bill Cassidy, Chair of the Senate HELP Committee, announced a formal congressional investigation into AMP for alleged financial, organizational, and ideological ties to Hamas and its influence on antisemitic campus protests following October 7. The Committee issued investigative letters demanding records from AMP and associated student networks, marking the first Senate-level probe explicitly linking domestic campus unrest to Hamas-affiliated organizations.30

State Judicial Actions and their Movement through Federal Courts:

• October 31, 2023: State level investigation by the Office of the Attorney General of Virginia into AMP (AJP Educational Foundation, d/b/a AMP)

  The Virginia Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Section launched an investigation into AMP for potential violations of state charitable solicitation laws, including unregistered fundraising and alleged impermissible use of funds.31

• October 17, 2025: U.S. District Court decision granting injunction in the State of Virginia’s investigation of AMP (Contempt / CID proceedings)

  Sentence for list: In the course of a CID issued by the Jason S. Miyares (Virginia Attorney General) to AMP (via AJP Educational Foundation), a federal court granted a preliminary injunction halting efforts to enforce a donor-list production demand and stay a contempt sanction over AMP’s non-compliance.32

State Legislative Actions

• March 19, 2025 – Florida Senate Resolution 1684: The Florida Senate adopted a resolution condemning Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), explicitly referencing that SJP “has been described as being founded and controlled by American Muslims for Palestine (AMP),” and calling on state universities to remove SJP from campuses.33

Pending Civil Litigation

• April 2025 – Federal civil lawsuit filed by Israeli hostage families against Columbia University, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP)

  Sentence for list: Families of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023, filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Columbia University, its SJP chapter, and the national AMP network acted as unregistered foreign agents and facilitators of Hamas propaganda and fundraising operations in violation of federal anti-terrorism laws. The complaint also accuses the university of knowingly providing material support to groups operating on behalf of a designated terrorist organization.34

Bazian, Founder of SJP, Has Worked in the Past with Two Federally Designated Hamas Finance Fronts in the U.S. and England.

Hatem Bazian had founded Students for Justice in Palestine during the rise of the Oslo Accords and the heightened peace talks between Israel and Arafat while he was a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley; unsurprisingly, he has also has been involved with at least two other organizations in both the U.S. and the U.K. that were shut down for Hamas terror financing: KindHearts for Charitable Development, and Interpal. As such, it should come as no surprise that the employees he hired to staff his SJP-oversight company, AMP, would come from the same pool of employees that worked at KindHearts, IAP, and HLF, and more broadly with the Palestine Committee umbrella organization.

According to the Congressional testimony of former U.S. Department of the Treasury Terrorism Finance Analyst Jonathan Schanzer,

“In December 2014, Bazian spoke at an event sponsored by a UK-based charity called Interpal…The U.S. Treasury designated Interpal as a terrorist entity in 2003 for providing money to Hamas…Interpal was a branch of Hamas’s international fundraising organ, the Union of Good, itself designated by the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 2008.It is also worth noting that Bazian was 1 of 2 featured speakers at a 2004 KindHearts fundraising dinner in California. The other speaker at this dinner was Mohammed el-Mezain. Mezain is currently serving time in prison for his role in the Holy Land Foundation and for providing financial support to Hamas.” 35

Bazian created AMP in 2006, after the last of the three sham-charity Hamas fronts were shut down, which now is functionally the operating company of SJP. As early as 2016, former U.S. Department of the Treasury Terrorism Finance Analysts Jonathan Schanzer testified to Congress about the dangers of the AMP board and its relationship to SJP, the creation of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement (BDS), and American universities.

Columbia’s “Who:” Middle-Aged Men Involved in Hamas-Backed US Organizations Found Civilly and Criminally Liable For Funding and Aiding Hamas.

In short, our youth go to universities where they join “student groups” that are run by middle-aged men whose past employment was exclusively in sham-charities that were shut down by the federal government after indisputable proof that they operated as domestic fronts for foreign terrorist organizations.

AMP, which Congress currently addresses interchangeably with National Students for Justice in Palestine in the delivery of mail to NSJP, began informally in 2005 as a “volunteer organization,” before Bazian coalesced it into the group it is today. AMP first emerged in Palos Hills, Illinois in 2005, in the same town in which KindHearts and the Global Relief Foundation emerged - the latter being a separate “charity” whose officials overlapped with KindHearts and who was shut down in 2002 as a Specially Designated Terrorist Organization by the U.S. Treasury Department for funding Al Queda.36

The federal government has surfaced some disturbing information from the original AMP national headquarters in Illinois. In Schanzer’s 2016 testimony, he included in his evidence as to their alignment with Hamas ideology a picture that AMP had hung up in their Illinois headquarters that showed Arabic language photos of Jerusalem with the phrase, “No Jew will live among them in Jerusalem.” And in 2014, AMP hosted an annual conference with the topic of navigating “the fine line between legal activism and material support for terrorism.”37

Today, all members of AMP’s senior leadership as hired by Hatem Bazian - and thus those who shape the local campus chapters of SJP - were previously working with the Holy Land Foundation, KindHearts, or IAP. Others sponsors of AMP, or their tax preparers, speakers, extra-AMP colleagues and friendships, and so forth, include not only the three above-listed Hamas-fronts that were already shut down by the US, but organizations and peoples associated with other US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), like Al-Qaeda and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Below is an incomplete list of AMP’s employees and donors, as is currently known by Congress and under investigation by several state and federal legislative committees and administrative agencies. Some of these descriptions come from this April 19, 2016 Congressional Testimony of Jonathan Schanzer, which deserves to be read in full Other descriptions come from yet other Schanzer and more Congressional testimonies and both state and federal descriptions.

List of AMP and SJP Leaders Who Have Been a Part of American Hamas-Fronts, or Have Relationships to Other US-Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

Salah Sarsour

Salah Sarsour is still currently a national board member of Bazian’s AMP and the director of AMP’s 501(c)(3) arm. His name might not ring any bells, but it should. When HLF was designated as a terrorist organization for, amongst other counts, sending $12.5 million to Hamas, it was done through the bank account of Salah Sarsour’s commercial “furniture store” in Milwaukee.

Salah Sarsour’s commercial bank account routed these funds not merely to “Hamas,” but specifically to a Hamas Al-Qassam Brigades Leader - ie, a terror combat leader - by the name of Adel Awadallah. And it turns out, Salah Sarsour had - prior to his arrival in the United States - spent 8 months in Israeli prison for his work for Hamas, where he was cellmates with…can you guess? Adel Awadallah, the Hamas brigade leader to whom HLF funnelled $12.5 million while using Sala Sarsour’s account.

Despite this, Salah Sarsour was not indicted in the HLF case. Instead, he today runs the organization that trains supposed “student groups” across the country in how to think, speak, and act about Israel and Hamas.

In 2015, Sarsour told Al-Jazeera in an interview about AMP’s events that “the conference aims to keep up with and support the Palestinian people’s continuous intifada.”

Likewise, at an AMP conference in 2015, Sarsour was listed on an AMP booklet as the point of contact for directing donations.

And finally, guess which businesses AMP publicly recognizes as amongst their top commercial donors? If you were to guess “A furniture store run by Salah Sarsour called Prime Furniture Store Milwaukee,” you would be correct.

Again, Sarsour is not in prison, nor has he faced deportation. Instead, he shapes the youth of America and leads their actions on campus. 38

Hussein El-Khatib

Hussein El-Khatib spent five years as a Holy Land Foundation regional director, and he served as a national board member of AMP until his death in 2018.39

Jamal Said

Jamal Said was an undincited co-conspirator in the HLF trials, and a keynote speaker for AMP fundraisers in 2014, 2015, and 2016. Formerly, Said would raise money for HLF as the director of the 501c3 Mosque Foundation, which continues to now act as a sponsor for AMP.40

Rafeeq Jaber

Rafeeq Jaber is the current tax preparer for AMP’s tax-exempt arm, also founded by Hatem Bazian, called AJP Educational Foundation - a shady fiscal arrangement that we will discuss in further depth later. Previously, he was the former president of IAP.

As of 2016, Jaber’s financial offices were still located in the prior IAP building.

Jaber has also been recognized by Palestinian newspapers as the “spiritual father” of AMP and other similar coalitions.41

Abdelbasset Hamayel

Abedlbasset Hamayel was formerly IAP’s Secretary General, and as of 2016 was AMP’s registered agent in Chicago, and appeared in AJP’s Educational Foundation’s IRS 990 form as the person "who possesses the organization’s books and records.” He has appeared on other documents listed either as the “Director of American Muslims for Palestine,” or an AMP’s past Facebook page as AMP’s “Executive Director.”

In additional to being the IAP “Secretary General,” he also acted as KindHeart’s “Illinois and Wisconsin” representative.42

Kifah Mustapha

Kifah Mustapha was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trials. With AMP, he has filmed promotional videos and spoke frequently at AMP conventions, despite having beein recognized as a registered agent for HLF in Illinois and fundraising for HLF.

Like Jamal Said - who was also an unindicted conspirator in the Holy Land case - Mustapha had also been soliciting money for HLF as a director of the Mosque Foundation.

Interestingly, in December, 2009, Mustapha had joined the Illinois State Police in a voluntary chaplainship capacity. He was fired from this position after police officers found in his office that he kept videos of himself from younger years chanting terroristic slogans against a background of children holding guns. Mustapha tried to challenge this through the courts as “discrimination,” but the courts ruled that the police were well within their rights to remove him from a chaplainship position after the video evidence was presented.43

Sufian Nabhan

Sufian Nabhan was another AMP board member who had previously been IAP’s Michigan representative.44

Osama Abuirshaid

Osama Abuirshaid is a man currently being investigated, alongside Hatem Bazian,by the attorney state general of Virginia and by several House committees for the unusual use of legal entities that are used to run the AMP and SJP ecosystem, as well as for their possible ties to terrorism. He was also an unindicted co-conspirator on the HLF trials. Abuirshaid is AMP’s “National Coordinator” or other high-level titles.

Congress currently addresses any letters meant for the head of SJP to Osama Abuirshaid, if not also Hatem Bazian.

In August 2015, Osama Abuishaid been denied naturalization by the US Citizenship and Imigration Services for his failure to disclose his past work with IAP, making him “inelligible,” but perhaps unfortunately, not deportable.

Furthermore, shortly after Shanzer’s April 2016 testimony to congress, Abuirshaid posted on his facebook page that he was going on a “surprise trip” to Doha, Qatar. There, he posted pictures of himself with a man by the name of Ayman Jarwan. This is notable because Ayman Jarwan had spent 15 months in American prison for sending money to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, before being deported to Jordan. It has not been revealed why Abuirshaid met with Jarwan.

Abuirshaid was also the editor of IAP’s newspaper, and as of 2016, ran a newspaper called Al-Meezan that would write articles praising Hamas.45

Middle Eastern Financial Services (MEFS)

MEFS, with offices in Palos Hills, Illinois, and Dearborn, Michigan, has had under their employment AMP members, such as San’a Abed Daoud, who shares a last name with the MEFS owners though it is unclear if there is a connection. Another employee with the same last name, Salah Daoud, was previously an IAP board member, and in exchange for immunity, testified in court that another IAP volunteer, Hatem Fariz, would use MEFS to wires tens of thousands of dollars to the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad over the course of months - amounting to $60,000 total.

Nevertheless, AMP has listed MEFS as one of its top three commercial donors.46

Zakat Foundation and Khalil Demir

Khalil Demir was the executive director of yet another charity called the Zakat Foundation, where he had also signed the IRS 990 forms of a group called the “Benevolence International Foundation (BIF), which was later designated in 2002 for sending funding to Al-Qaeda.

Zakat was an AMP “Platinum Sponsor” in 2014 an 2015.47

Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine

As one of the signs visible on the AMP publication posted above, the Chicago Coalition, which has worked with AMP members, has had numerous questionable peoples and organizations involved. These include:

Ghassan Barakat

Barakat worked as the President of the Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine had also formerly worked as a consular notary for the PLO.

Senan Shaqdeh

Senan Shaqdeh is the “coordinator” of the Chicago Coalition, alternately referred to as the “U.S. Coalition to Boycott Israel,” but has been identified as a former fighter who had moved up the ranks of the terrorist organization that has become popular, along with Hamas, on college campuses, called Palestinian Liberation Front (PFLP)

Troublingly, Shaqdeh claims to have been one of the founders, along with Bazian, of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Shaqdeh has also been found in YouTube videos with President Mahmoud Abbas and PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah to discuss the success of the BDS movement in the United States, the movement for which SJP and its affiliates is the primary organizer, as lead by AMP48.

Hatem Bazian’s Shell Companies Obfuscating the Flow of Funds in his SJP Ecosystem

It is important to note that SJP and AMP are not the only organizations created by Hatem Bazian: Bazian has a number of shell companies that obscure the flow of funds between his various organizations. AMP, for example, is not filed as a traditional 501c3 tax-exempt non-profit. Instead, AMP is a non-profit that “receives tax-exempt donations from its fiscal sponsor, the Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation (AJP).”49

A “fiscal sponsorship” is a nonprofit arrangement where a larger 501c3 tax-exempt organization sponsors, in the words of the DC Bar Association, “a new, temporary, or small-scale charitable initiative” that has not had the chance or ability to file their own 501c3 tax-exempt status with the IRS, but who needs to begin work and have someone facilitate their donations and expenditures. Typically, the “sponsor” is an older, more established organization that helps newer or temporary causes begin their work right away, such as in the case of community emergency relief funds for natural disasters.50

However, the fiscal arrangement behind both AMP and SJP is highly unusual, and is leading lawmakers and state investigators to ask questions. For example, AMP is an older organization that AJP Educational Foundation. And the principle officer of AJP is none other than Hatem Bazien. Both organizations share “significantly overlapping staff,” which is generally discouraged by the IRS for purposes of creating a fiscal sponsorship.

Worse, In 2021, AJP launched an affiliated 501(c)(4) lobby called AJP Action, also run by Bazian. This is significant in that 501(c)(4)s are often called “dark money” organizations: unlike 501(c)(3)s, 501(c)(4)s are permitted to lobby and endorse political candidates, and thus they also do not need to disclose their donors or other sources of income.

What this all means is that Bazian has found a way to hide both the donors and the expenditures of his SJP ecosystem. AJP Action does not have to disclose its donors as a 501c4, and can then fund AJP Educational Foundation. AJP Educational Foundation, as a registered 501c3, has to make its financials transparent, but all they need to show is from where they receive their funds - which is AJP Action, and to whom they distribute their funds - which is to AMP. AMP, under a “fiscal sponsorship” does not have to disclose information about their finances. Thus, we do not know who gives money to AMP and SJP, nor how the money is spent.51

Additionally, National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) seems to purposefully obscure its funding for the benefit of the story it tells of itself to reporters. Although NSJP presents itself as a loose coalition, its scale, coordination, and alignment with American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) points to a centralized network. NSJP operates across dozens of campuses with shared branding, synchronized protest language, the same toolkits, and AMP materials and resources, yet it has never registered as a 501c3 nonprofit nor filed public disclosures.

Instead, it reportedly relies on another “fiscal sponsorship” arrangement with WESPAC Foundation in White Plains, New York, which ostensibly channels funds on its behalf. Unfortunately, how WESPAC itself receives and distributes those funds remains unclear due to their Schedule B filing that hides their donors.

SJP does not follow the standard procedure for student organizations with chapters across national college campuses; it is highly abnormal, and I have not found others with a similar fiscal structure. There arrangement stands in stark contrast to other comparably-sized and synchronized groups like Hillel International, Young Democrats, or Students for Life, which maintain 501c3 status and IRS filings.

IRS and National Council of Nonprofits guidelines indicate that national organizations coordinating campaigns, soliciting donations, or engaging in sustained activity across state lines are expected to register.52

Additionally, many universities - including Columbia and Princeton - explicitly ban student groups from keeping off-campus accounts or fundraising outside university-approved systems, which based on Columbia SJP’s own twitter posts, we know is a rule that they do not keep.53

Due to this unusual arrangement and purposeful absence of paper trails, both the federal government and one of the state governments in which AMP is headquartered - Virginia - are currently actively investigating this fiscal structure.54

Current Lawsuits and Investigations into the Terrorist ties of SJP’s Ecosystem

Today, Students for Justice in Palestine along with several other organizations including CUAD, and individuals including Mahmoud Khalil, are being sued by the families of hostages in Israel as collaborators who aided and abetted terror. Freed Jewish hostages have reported that their Hamas kidnappers would brag to them about collaborating with SJP and “having operatives” on American college campuses, particularly at Columbia. It is a lawsuit that continues to unfold as new documents come to light that suggest further collaboration between Hamas and national anti-Israel organizations that set their sites on the theater of the American campus.

The suit begins by alleging that the Columbia SJP chapter, after months of inaction, sent a mass email telling students of “big things to come,” mere minutes before the terror attack on October 7^th, 2023 occurred. Similarly, the National SJP began a new publication, “the Written Resistance,” a mere day before the October 7^th terrorist attacks.

This suit comes on top of another case against AMP that has been ongoing through the courts since 2017 and is in its discovery phase: Boim vs. American Muslims for Palestine, which alleges that AMP is a new front for IAP, a group that had previously been ruled by the courts as liable for David Boim’s death at the hands of Hamas due to their aid of Hamas.

Currently, AMP is being investigated by the Virginia State Attorney General for violating state charitable solicitation laws and “benefitting or prodding support to terrorist organizations.”55

In the 1960s, Student Groups were Created By Students. Today? Not so Much

I will end this section of my series (yes, I do believe that I have more to come), by saying that I think that at the very least, it is undeniable to even the greatest skeptic that the mass agitation against Israel on American campuses arose due to highly-affected undergraduates in light of recent events, who took it upon themselves to mobilize into original action. The timeline itself is quite clear: anti-Israel agitation started in the US and on college campuses in tandem with the growth of peace talks. The actions and organizers who fund and train the campus organizations today all worked at former groups found liable for supporting Hamas and other terrorist organizations abroad. The wiretap evidence that we have of their backgrounds suggest that this is a purposeful targeting of American youth for the sake of “not surrendering to peace with the Jews.”

And this bring me to my second major point that I think should be obvious as well, even to the greatest skeptic: these are not anti-war demonstrations. The people who organize these groups are, again, explicit that they are anti-peace. I frankly have found the widespread chants of the formerly obscure-term “ceasefire” quite suspicious since day one after October 7th - and for good reason, as these networks are global and are facilitated by other foreign powers supporting Hamas such as China, as we will come to another time. Regardless, from day one it struck me that “ceasefire” is not “peace.” It is a desire to continue hostility, but to hold violence - for now. “We will not surrender to peace with Jews.”

I have not even mentioned in this article the virulent antisemitism of Hatem Bazien, and have only hinted as to the strong, antisemitic background to these figures in giving the background to Hamas’s origins in the first place and its goals - which again, are not about land, and certainly not about peace, but about exterminating Jewry.

We do not see Fatah signs on campus. We see Hamas. We do not see compromise or peace. We see “resistance by any means necessary” and “ceasefire.”

These are not “student protests.” These are middle-aged men whipping up mobs of American youth in a desire to kill Jews.

In the next part (oy, yes, I do believe there will be one), I have been extensively breaking down the exact activities that have happened at Columbia this time around. How they mimic the 1960s. Where they clearly are initiating “stolen valor.” Unrepentent acts of collusion, slander, and assault. The dearth of undergraduates involved in leadership, except for the most frighteningly murderous in their avowed intent. Their websites and channels dedicated to promoting “readings” from Sinwar and the PFLP. The truth behind the temporary-media darling of Mohsen Madhawi.

Until then, thank you all for reading once again, and shabbat shalom. Hope you all have a good weekend.

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The Real Sixth Sense: Our Historical Sense

A Theoretical Prologue to my Coverage of the Sixties: Feel Free to Skip This Section and Move Straight to my Account of Columbia in 1968.

Tangentially, this is what drew me to the study of history - how utterly powerful one’s imagination of history is at shaping our sense of morality and worldview. We learn right and wrong, who we are, who we are not, belonging, animosity, hierarchy, injustice, and so much more about out selves and our world through an unexamined, background, historical consciousness that we share with others of our in-groups. I think of this as one’s “historical sense,” and it is a fundamental yet largely unexamined component in how we develop our faculties of judgement. Necessarily, our historical imagination is not limited to the individual - it is a shared social vision and a fundamental force of unity in society. We are united into our various in-groups, from our niche in-groups as Jews or New Yorkers, to our wider in-groups as “Westerners,” through those with whom we have the most overlap in our shared visions of the past.

Mention any particular time or place and most of us will have a similar set of images and feelings that arise. For example: the Middle Ages. For most, we think of knights and swords, women with flowing dresses, perhaps a king in a dark stone castle or monks in long flowing robes. There is generally an emotive element, perhaps of awe, quietude, the echo of dark stone halls, dignity, virtue, bravery, battle. Is this an accurate, comprehensive, or proportionate representation of the time periods in question? Absolutely not. When we hear “the Middle Ages,” we generally do not quickdraw to an image of the peasant wife’s never-ending, Sisyphean task of home pest-control, nor images of young men roughhousing in the fields in different sports that were encouraged to break up clods in the soil. Most of us have zero idea as to the importance of the agricultural calendar. We hear “the middle ages,” we see swords and dresses.

I bring this up here because most of us are quite unaware of the power of our historical sense. We hear “the 1960s” and we think “peace, protest, love, justice.” Others might hear “the 1950s” and think “happy families, prosperity, safety, community.” Regardless of the political “side,” invoking the past and associating it with your own claims can be a powerful way to bypass the need for making rigorous arguments replete with citation and fact to persuade others to your side. It allows any new agenda or “issue” to work its way into our society’s binary set of boxes - of which we each generally buy the whole package: associate some new issue with the “1950s” and in it goes to the conservative box, associate some new issue with the “1960s” and in it goes into the liberal or leftist box. It is frighteningly powerful and we lack awareness of how essential our mere images, our feelings, our sensory evocations of the past are for how we form our beliefs today. It is a great vulnerability and one that is easy to exploit - as is being done now by what we will see in later articles is Hatem Bazien’s SJP ecosystem that began around the origins of Hamas itself. Thus, I find it important to try to bring into relief the reality of whatever historical time period or event is being used as a metric by which to judge some current event.

The Whos, Whys, and Whats of Columbia in 1968.

What caused the student protests of the 1960s, and what were the student demands?

Spurred by the Vietnam War and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Columbia protestors of the 1960s wanted three things: (1) an end to on-campus military recruitment and the provision of student grades to the CIA, (2) an end to a contract between Columbia University and the Department of Defense in the form of a think tank called the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), and (3) the end of a Columbia University-planned gym development project that the protestors believed would create a new element of racial segregation in their primarily black neighborhood of Harlem in New York City - this became known as “Gym Crow.”

There were two concurrent issues that Columbia students and Harlem community members had with the important gym development issue. One is that the gym would be built in Morningside Park, taking away some of the only public space for the neighborhood’s primarily black residents. Another major issue is that while Columbia billed the gym as a “community facility,” the realities of its blueprint showed anything but so. There were two entrances: one facing the primarily white student housing, and one facing the primarily black neighborhood residential housing. The student entrance was quite nice, while the neighborhood entrance was through a basement. The students would also be allowed full use of the building, while the neighborhood residents - again, primarily black individuals - would only have use of a small, separated portion of the facility.

When exactly were the "protests of the ‘60s” at Columbia?

While there were about two protests that occurred in 1967, the majority of the protests took place in 1968, particularly during one week in April of 1968, the week in which the building sit-ins took place.

Who Created the Student Groups that Started the Protests? Who Joined the Protests?

These protests were organized and led by undergraduate students at Columbia College - teenagers straight out of high school.1 Amongst the undergraduate students, there were many different student groups with different and sometimes opposing beliefs and practices, along with well-organized counter-protestor groups who were active and unafraid to make their presence known. Of note is the fact that the majority of these undergraduate students were male. While some students at the women’s-only Barnard College tried to and did join, the majority of their classmates were opposed to the protests.

One of the main Columbia student groups organizing protests was called the Student Afro-American Society (the SAS), and they are the student group responsible for the original, all-black, takeover of Hamilton Hall in 1968. The SAS, an all black-male organization, was initially inspired by the southern civil disobedience movement. They formed in 1964, and began to organize protests against “gym crow” in 1968, shortly after the assassination of MLK that triggered the rise of other protests on campus. Led by Columbia undergraduate juniors Cicero Wilson and Ray Brown, this undergraduate student-created and run organization also enlisted local Harlem residents and influential black activists of the city of New York to put a stop to Columbia’s de facto segregationist building project. While they at times worked with other student groups like the SDS - to be discussed below - they also often did not want their tactics or causes to be conflated with those of the SDS.

Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS for short, was another group that was started and ran by undergraduate students, and was responsible for planning a number of the protests. Despite their outsized presence in our historical memory - perhaps because so many of their former members went into academia themselves or otherwise influenced academia, as was part of their mission statement that will be discussed below - they were numerically small in both adherents, with only about 50 students enrolled, and polled low in popularity.2 They were viewed unfavorably even by other student protestors who opposed the Vietnam war or who were in favor of further civil rights action.

While the SDS was started by several undergraduate students at University of Michigan in 1960, the Columbia chapter began in 1965, and began organizing the historically cherished protests we associate with “the ‘60s” in 1968 under the leadership of a college junior named Mark Rudd. Ultimately, the most “radical” ideas of the SDS was that of radical non-violence. They wished to replace all violence with an expansion of democratic forums, seeing in the debate and discussion of ideas the true means to conflict resolution as opposed to violence and warfare.

Regardless, most students who showed up to the protests did not adhere to any particular ideological dogma or student group’s set of beliefs. Instead, the general student body that did attend protests did so out of their opposition to the war, or the draft, or out of exasperation of living under threat of the nuclear bomb. Some had religious oppositions, and a number of faith-based and chaplain-based groups were also involved in organizing anti-war events on campuses. Still, other more moderate groups arose, each with their own approach to thinking about the conflicts of the day.

Importantly, the student activity on campus was not one-sided: a group of students who called themselves the “Majority Coalition,” altogether opposed many of the ongoing campus affairs, be it the ideas behind the protests themselves, or the methods involved. Some were in favor, for example, of the university’s work with the defense department out of a sense of patriotism or different politics. This was not a marginalized or ostracized group: their presence was at times of near-equal size to the protestors who we culturally memorialize. Dialogue, disagreement, and opposition was all a feature of this year and a half of undergraduates on campus raising their voices.

Since SDS Is Known as the “Most Radical Group,” What did the SDS Believe?

The SDS was started by undergraduate boys at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1960, who in 1962 released a letter known as the “Port Huron statement,” which sparked the interest of other undergraduates throughout the country, with Columbia undergraduates creating a division in 1965.

The central vision that the SDS founders wrote into the Port Huron document was their vision of radical anti-violence.3 The rest of their document is theory for how to bring a system of anti-violence to fruition. In order to resolve conflict and enact social change without violence, the SDS claimed we needed a great expansion of democratic venues, as only through increased participation and discussion can conflict be resolved without violence. As such, they were staunchly anti-Soviet as well, seeing in the Soviet Union an authoritarian regime whose antidemocratic regime stymied the institutions necessary for peace. And how did they envision beginning the process of expanding democratic participation? The SDS argued that the American university system was politically and socially underutilized, partially due to its defense contracts with the military4, but that the university system was full of political potential and could aid in the creation of more democratic and social changes throughout the nation.

The SDS saw the university itself as the ultimate expression of democracy. As they state in their Port Huron document:

“…the university is the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.”5

They believed that through acting from their positions as students - or later, becoming faculty - at universities, they could also aid other organizations - like trade unions - in developing better intellectual rationale and reigniting in them passion for their intellectual heritage so that they could better democratically advance their interests.

The Port Huron document might read to us today as an ad hoc assembly of unrelated and sometimes oppositional theories born of youthful malaise and optimism. It begins with stereotypical suburban teenage angst - discomfort and an emptiness of feeling with one’s own comfort - before confronting the reader with the effect that the Bomb and the arms race has had on their psyche; the feeling of the imminence of death. Despite Marxist language, they state their unabashed anti-Soviet stance since they place the ideals of democracy over socialism. They tweak Marxist economic teleology - that global industrialization is inevitable and will lead to a global “leveling” of wealth and class - into a story of our active need to aid in global industrialization, since the subsequent industrial-wrought prosperity is what would enable democracies - not equalities - to develop. This argument would be read by today’s self-proclaimed socialist not as radical, but as “neo-liberal” or even “right-wing.” And yet, the SDS’s favored institute from which to initiate political advocacy - the university sector - may read as the “white man’s burden” transformed into the “intellectual’s burden.” Where the SDS believed they had a duty to aid the poor, the minority, or the worker through intellectualism the 19th century European believed in a duty to “civilize the savages.” And now, each era shares in common the swell of people’s resentment against the self-proclaimed civilizers or intellectual-elites, tired of being called either ignorant or immoral.

How did the Columbia students in the 1960s express their demands?

Columbia student protests began in April 1967 in response to a U.S. Marine Corps Recruitment event on the Columbia university campus. This resulted in an “hour-long melee of fist fights and name-calling.” Interestingly, not all students opposed the on-campus recruitment. Politics were mixed, and on April 21, 1967, the first student-on-student clash emerged, with 500 students in favor of supporting recruitment on college campuses, and 800 students disagreeing with on-campus recruitment. Additionally, protests arose as students learned that Columbia University was submitting their students’ grades to the Selective Service Boards for both military and CIA recruitment on campus. Later in the spring of 1967, students staged an anti-war “teach-in” which drew hundreds of people for intellectual debate about the merits of the war.

However, the main trigger for student protests at Columbia was the assassination of Martin Luther King. During a campus-wide eulogy during which the chaplain and head-administrators were speaking, 20-year old college junior Mark Rudd, the undergraduate student leader of Columbia’s SDS, walked up front to the podium, took the microphone, and spoke about what a betrayal this campus was to the vision of MLK, claiming that Columbia was hypocritical and hiding their own malfeasance by eulogizing MLK on the one hand while pushing policies that MLK would not endorse on the other hand.

Amongst Rudd’s arguments, he said that MLK endorsed labor unionization, while Columbia was fighting to stop its primarily hispanic dining and janitorial staff from forming a union.6 MLK was a pacifist, while Columbia was working with the Institute for Defense Analysis to create more destructive tools of violence for use in Vietnam and allowing on-campus recruitment. MLK clearly stood for racial equality, while Columbia’s building development plans could have racially discriminatory effects in their primarily black Harlem neighborhood. After that, Rudd and 40 other students walked out.

After the initial walkout sparked by Mark Rudd, other student groups began to take action on their grievances, such as the SAS - Society of Afro-American Students - ramping up their protest of Columbia’s gym proposal. Both Columbia students and local black residents of Harlem had already been regularly meeting to air their upset with Columbia’s gym plan. Specifically, the students and community members opposed not just the privatization of land in Morningside Park by the university, but also the fact that despite Columbia claiming it to be a “community gym,” the primarily white students would be given access to a nice entrance and the entirety of the building, while the entrance facing the black neighborhoods was through the basement and allowed only a fraction of the facilities access. The protestors thus took to the construction site itself tear down the fencing that had already been put in place in expectation of the construction project ahead.

Several weeks after Rudd’s walkout from the MLK eulogy, the SDS and SAS organized what would become a week of campus sit-ins, beginning on April 23rd, 1968 and lasting until April 30th, 1968. SDS caused more chaos and promoted more radicalism on campus, while SAS - the Student Afro-American Society - was primarily inspired by the nonviolent southern civil disobedience movement and wished to keep their actions as orderly and disciplined as possible.

On April 23, 1968, SDS and SAS began their rally at the site of the Sundial on Low Plaza, the starting point of a larger week to come. First, they attempted to march to the site of where the gym would be constructed through Morningside Park, but were stopped by campus police and redirected back to campus. Undeterred, they continued through campus and began their university building “occupations,” stating that they would not leave until their demands were met. There demands were: halting the gym project, dropping Columbia’s contract with the Institute for Defense Analysis and military recruitment, and additionally, “amnesty” for the student protestors and more of a role for students in the administrative and disciplinary processes of the university.

April, 1968: Occupation Week

Introduction: Cleanliness and Janitorial Respect

Despite the chaos that comes to mind when one thinks of the protests of the 1960s, it should be noted before any other tale that despite the differences in agendas, backgrounds, or tactics of the participating students, the student occupiers had at least one thing in common: a dedication to cleanliness and maintaining the facilities, lest the put more work on the janitorial staff for whom they were also advocating. Student protestors handed out fliers reminding their fellow students to clean up after themselves and to keep their spaces clean.

Only during the police raids did Columbia property become damaged. As explained in the Columbia University Archives:

“Students in occupied buildings made a point of cleaning and organizing building facilities. The images of destroyed offices and classrooms that appeared in the media after the police bust were often the work of the police themselves as they cleared the buildings.”

Hamilton Hall: The All-Black, SAS Occupation of “Malcolm X Liberation College.”

The first building that the SDS and SAS approached was Hamilton Hall, but the all-black SAS quickly declared this their specific project and requested that any non-black student and SDS organizers leave for fear of obfuscation of their message and tactics.

The SAS wanted the story of Hamilton Hall to be the story of “Gym Crow,” and their presence in Hamilton Hall associated with that of the southern civil disobedience practitioner. They did not want their presence associated with that of the rowdy and rule-breaking hippie, a generally less sympathetic figure to moderate Americans and to the local political and bureaucratic class who could make or break the Columbia gym project. Instead, they wanted their presence to evoke the dignity with which the black families of the south went about mundane tasks like eating in restaurants - when a sign said “whites only” - and were met with angry mobs and police, highlighting the injustice of the laws and the humanity of those whom the laws targeted, making the ruler enforcers, not the rule breakers, look like the rowdy and unhinged segment of the population. The SAS and the SDS too both knew that were the police to then specifically raid the all-black and uneventful Hamilton Hall occupation, the optics would look quite bad.

The 86 black student protestors went on to occupy Hamilton Hall for nearly a full week, voluntarily leaving on April 30th after negotiations with administration, with no police intervention.

SDS Lead-Occupations and Their Demands

Meanwhile, the SDS and other interested students went on to take over other buildings, including Low Library, Mathematics Hall, President Kirk’s office, Fayerweather Hall, and Avery Hall. These other building takeovers lead to faculty and administrators to create their own gatherings in trying to negotiate with the students to get them to leave.

As held in common by both the SDS and the SAS, the initial three demands of ending the gym project, military recruitment, and affiliation with the IDA transmuted into a list of six. Of these demands, the new ones included: dropping academic disciplinary charges against the first student protestors, exercising influence over the NYPD to have any criminal charges dropped, and getting the Columbia president to reverse an edict on indoor protests. Finally, we also see the last edict representing the ideology of the SDS in specific: a request for greater student involvement in decisions made at the school, framed in terms of “due process” and other democratic norms.

The One Day of Graduate Student Involvement from the Columbia School of Social Work

Graduate students only became involved on Thursday, April 25th, 1968, joining in the Fayerweather Hall occupation. The graduate student involvement was largely from students in the school of social work.

The Few Female Participants and their Discontents

A small number of female Barnard students joined in as well, amounting to about one hundred. However, Barnard as a whole seemed more skeptical about the protests. In their student publications, Barnard women wrote articles trying to convince their peers that their efforts were not meaningless nor in vain. Their articles begin with words showing the general contempt or apathy with which the Barnard student held the Columbia protest, such as the opening of the article posted below:

All this week, Barnard girls have crossed our picket lines, claiming that our strike was unjustified…

Likewise, the all-female Barnard students recounted that despite the revolutionary spirit, they were still treated as second-class protestors, assigned secretarial roles rather than vocal and political roles. As explained at the Columbia University Digital Exhibition on the protests of 1968, “Many female participants recall male strike leaders encouraging women to embrace their own sexual liberation while simultaneously treating them as social and political subordinates.” Though the small number who attended shared much of the same beliefs as the Columbia protestors, they did not feel fully included nor seen as equals, and indeed may have felt that they were only valued in so far as they were sexualized under the guise of it being “liberation.”



Anti-SDS Counter Protestors: The Majority Coalition

However, not all students were happy with this state of affairs. During this week the student group entitled the Majority Coalition established a cordon around Low Library in an effort to keep more protestors from going inside, and to prevent collaborators from sending more food, water, or supplies into the buildings. Majority Coalition representatives stated that they wanted SDS gone. Other student groups too came out to protest the protestors, leading to skirmishes in front of the occupied buildings.

Post-Occupation Weeks

Finally, on April 30, 1968, the police intervened, clearing all of the still-occupied buildings. After this one week, protests became less frequent and less forceful. Several other “strikes” occurred, but with ongoing time and negotiations with administration, the chaos came to a close. Likewise, a number of groups splintered from any association with the SDS, seeing in the Columbia SDS the growth of a useless and counterproductive radicalism. The SDS under Rudd at this point had come to take a position that the university was unresolvable and must be eliminated, whereas new student groups emerged that embraced the original ethos of participatory democracy.

Columbia 1968: The Purpose and the Impact

The Columbia student protestors of the 1960s had several concrete grievances that imminently and directly affected the students and the local neighborhood residents, and for each of those grievances, the university had a significant ability to provide a redress.7 During the year of student-driven protests at Columbia, they came to include further grievances, such as demanding that the janitorial staff be allowed to unionize, demanding amnesty for any students involved in the protest on both legal and academic grounds, and that students have more of a say in the administration of the university.

Following the disruptions on campus that began in a piecemeal fashion in 1967 and that culminated in 1968, the university administrators, faculty, and student protestors came to an agreement of halting construction on the gym - a major win for the black students of the SAS that strove hard to distinguish their cause and their methods from that of their surroundings while still maintaining other student cooperation and alliances. And this win was done on behalf of the immediate community surrounding the ivory tower who would have born a further loss in quality of life through a project that took public recreation space and created from it a de facto racially segregated facility.

The SDS’s vision of participatory democracy “won” by the granting of a new University Senate with representatives from across Columbia interest groups: faculty, administrators, students, and so on. Moreover, while there was not total amnesty for students who broke the law and campus policy, there was partial or conditional amnesty granted. Some students had charges dropped or had their academic penalties lowered, though it depended on the student’s rank-and-file in leading the protests and the degree of involvement.

The Next Article to Come: Columbia in the Present

For my following articles that will cover the ongoing agitation on Columbia’s campus since the Hamas regime’s terror attacks against Israeli civilians on October 7th, 2023, this article on the 1960s will be an ongoing reference point in considering the similarities or dissimilarities.

In 1968, even the most “radical” organization - the SDS - was formed by undergraduate students in response to events that directly impacted their lives.

In 2023, undergraduates have little to no influence except as bodies that fill space in events. They did not create the groups that have organized the demonstrations that they attend, and they do not carry out the logistics - such as the acts of breaking in to Hamilton Hall. Instead, the campus groups organizing anti-Israel riots on campus go back several decades into the past and even then do not derive from students, but again, from the time of the creation of Hamas itself, and the Hamas-affiliates desire to sabotage the Oslo Accords, ie, peace via a two-state solution.

Today, the parent-company of Students for Justice in Palestine, called American Muslims for Palestine, which provides the funding and campus coordinators for SJP and are both founded and run by the same middle aged man - Hatem Bazian - is run nearly entirely by former employees of organizations that were shut down after being found liable for materially financing Hamas to the tune of millions of dollars.

Regardless of the professional establishment and ongoing nonprofit management - or evasion of proper nonprofit filings - of these organizations calling themselves “student groups,” the fact that the sole media representatives of the Columbia “student” “protests” are both foreign-born men in their mid-30s should give some indication as to the relevancy of the American youthful college kid io the “campus protest” today.

In 1968, the radicalism consisted of a desire to eliminate violence and replace it with democracy. In 2023, the radicalism consists of a desire to legitimize violence and eliminate democracy.

In 1968, undergraduate students wished to rid the university of any relationship to war. In 2023, due to the past several of decades of influence on graduate students, faculty, and the network of nonprofits that are directing the messages on the ground, the campus agitators seek to militarize the university, and use the university itself as a weapon of war.

This might all sounds hyperbolic. And I wish that it was. But stay tuned for my next article of the series, in which I show exactly who is responsible for the current events and ideas sweeping through Columbia University and other American colleges, and of equal misfortunate, what ideas they promote. If only it were so “radical” as eliminating violence and replacing it with greater opportunities for dialogue.

Later, we will also see exactly what the “protestors” of 2023 have been doing on campus, to once again ask: is this comparable to the the 1960s? And if not, what slights of the hand have been accomplished to cause this association?

Stay tuned!

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“Building on a tradition of student-led anti-war protests at Columbia, a coalition of students established encampments on campus, held rallies and staged “teach-ins.”

So writes CNN in a heavily editorialized article about Mahmoud Khalil, a 31-year old resident of the U.S. from Syria who moved to New York in 2022, married an American citizen, obtained a green card, graduated Columbia with his M.A. in December 2024, and has continued leading the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) - the national student organization behind today’s rabidly anti-Israel campus environment. Most articles use the same 1960s framing, such as this one involving Mohsen Mahdawi, a 34 year old man from the West Bank who gained entry to the U.S. after marrying an American woman and who has spent the past 17 years as an undergraduate at different universities, where he would create and lead anti-Israel organizations at each one, until taking center stage in the anti-Israel rallies at Columbia. When reading the totality of this man’s checkered and underreported history, one might wonder, how has the media so readily neglected their own duties as fact-checkers, and instead crafted a story in which this nearly-40 year old man is the archetype of the persecuted undergraduate protestor?

It is simple: we love the 1960s. Throw in a reference to the pride that many upper middle class, older liberal professionals feels in discussing the protests of the 1960s, and little else needs to be said, the story is already written. We know the plot, so the media simply plays Madlibs with the story, deleting some old nouns and adding in some new ones. Every paragraph that begins with some iteration of, “and like the 1960s, the protestors in Hamilton Hall..” has already answered all of the “who, what, where, why, whens” of the story.

Intentional Mimicry: SJP and Stolen Valor

Not only is this wrong, but it is intentional: the SJP and other such actors organizing the anti-Israel demonization at universities are well-aware of the blinding effect that invoking the 1960s has on our public narrators and cultural gatekeepers. Frankly, until I read some of the current lawsuits facing Columbia, such as the one of the janitors of Hamilton Hall suing the occupiers of the building - mainly non-students - for physical assault, false imprisonment, civil rights violations in being called “Jew Lovers,” etc.1- I thought I was the only one to notice the cultural appropriation of positive American memories, and how they are weaponized to prevent more incisive inquiry into campus events, which would have resulted in an extremely different narrative than the copy-and-paste of the ‘60s. Luckily, at least the attorneys seeking to bring justice for the past two years of unabated Civil Rights violations at American universities also seem to have picked up on what becomes this transparent techniques of anti-Israel agitators as one reads through the facts alone, minus the profit-driven editorializing.

Introduction

Below, I am going to give a theoretical overview of the premise of an upcoming series of articles. I have written a number of essays exploring the origins of today’s anti-Israel campus organizations, the beliefs that they hold, the people and organizations involved, and the discriminatory affects it has had on students on college campuses. Likewise, I have written an overview of stark, material details of the 1960s to show where the comparison lies. For the sake of “brevity,” I have focused exclusively on Columbia University, creating a series of “Columbia: Then and Now.”

My next several articles will go into the meet of the factual differences between these two eras, and show precisely why the 1960s are wholly irrelevant to the campus climate today. However, before doing so, I am going to provide some of the theoretical background guiding my work and my understanding of this strategy of using what I think of as “the trojan horse of cultural nostalgia,” or what can perhaps be understood as SJP and its affiliates claiming “stolen valor” from the efforts of the 1960s students.

A Brief History of Systemic Antisemitism, and Its Relationship to the Anti-Israel Agitators “Trojan Horse” Strategy Today.

Anti-Israel agitators appropriating the cherished pillars of a culture who they desire to gain as an ally is not new; it has deep roots in the history of systemic antisemitism, and was also institutionalized as state policy by the Soviet Union when the USSR created the concept of “anti-zionism.” For millenia, the Jew was not a member of the national peoples on whose land they were granted residency, and certainly they were not citizens. Instead, they were people who the sovereign granted the ability to live in some quarter on condition that they have some utility to the state, often by doing cultural taboo and impure jobs, like moneylending in most of Europe and the Ottoman Empire, or silversmithing in Yemen. But oftentimes, the utility of the Jew would lay not in their production of impure labor, but in their expulsion or massacre. The Jew has long been considered the opposite of the highest moral value of a culture, the greatest transgressors of goodness. If the great virtue of a society was in the spread of Christianity, not only were Jews an impediment to its universalization - the roadblocks to world peace and justice, but the Jews were also the Christ killer, a people of no humanity, the “homo sacer” in the words of Giorgio Agamben. If populist agitation demanding moral purity became too strong, expelling the Jew gave those in power higher political and economic yields than would keeping the Jew around do for the economy. The Crusader then would be held in the highest of regard, standing up to the corrupted state that would ever deign tolerate the Jew for material ends. Thus another component of antisemitism is that not only is the Jew the greatest violator of virtue, but their existence is conditional on the privileges granted to them by a corrupt state, and if one wants reform and turns against their state, they too turn against the Jew. Underlying that is the assumption that the place of a Jew’s residence is temporary and conditional.

When Israel became a state, they merely became the Jew of the Nations, and the Soviet Union institutionalized the above antisemitic protocol at the state level. Whatever was the highest moral value of one culture, the Soviet Union would posit Israel as its opposite in order to gain the allyship of that culture rather than see them choose an allegiance with the United States. Thus, in courting alliances with South Africa, how would Soviet universities in their departments of “Zionology” and Soviet propaganda bureaus in their “anti-zionist” committees depict Israel? As an “apartheid state.” If the greatest moral value of a time is racial equality, Israel is the greatest blasphemer. If human rights is the greatest moral value at the time - well, forget looking into the relationship of China to the Uyghurs, or the system of state-rape and torture before execution of women in Iran. No, it is Israel who is the greatest transgressor of human rights. All other nations are part of the fellowship of nations, dipping in and out of rights and wrongs as happens with states and politics. But not Israel. Because like the Jew, Israel - the Jew of Nations - is seen as conditional in its existence, only inhabiting their land due to the corruption of some higher state power that wanted their utility. Israel should simply go away, as did the Jew of territories past, and would if only the sovereigns that must be propping up its existence would step aside.

SJP’s Methods Today: Promoting the Traditional Public Understanding of the Jew

And so, the anti-Israel campus agitator today relies on two methods to isolate those (mainly, Jews) who question their actions: they equivocate the Western Jew as transgressing the cherished virtue of the American liberal college protest. And since the anti-Israel agitator treats Israel as the singular transgressive force against global justice and human rights, the Jew is doubly cast as not just rejecting a cherished cultural pillar, but also as doing so for the sake of justifying the unjustifiable.

Today’s anti-Israel actors embed this age-old trope into the unconscious Hegelianism that guides the general Westerner’s grasp of history, whereby history is seen as a progressive arc of struggle until all struggle is eventually resolved and gives rise to some stable societal ideal. The SJP-aligned Palestinianist poses their “Free Palestine” as the resolution of that struggle, and they take no pains to hide the fact that the elimination of Israel as a Jewish nation-state is necessary for their “Free Palestine” zeitgeist. Under the SJP philosophy, which - as we will see in the forthcoming articles - is a secularized and sanitized derivation of Hamas’s philosophy itself, the belief that so long as Israel - the Jew of the nations - exists, unacceptable moral transgressions will still exist that will continue to deny true justice to Palestinians.

But with this strategy comes erasure, one that all Americans must be wary to not participate in, such as has already happened widely across the media with regards to the 1960s history of Hamilton Hall.2 The SJP and affiliated actor transmutes the antiwar protest out of the American or the minority historical arc, and instead simply positions the 1960s antiwar protests into a stepping stone towards the zeitgeist of a Free Palestine and dissolution of Israel, erasing core historical details of the 1960s and frames of analyses in the process. This appeals to both the Marxist who sees in the SJP narration of a “Free Palestine” the story of the class struggle, the Marxian who sees in it the story of oppressors and oppressed, or the liberal, who sees in it the globalization of Enlightenment ideals into the Fukuyama-esque “end of history” state of democratic, liberal, rights-based societies.

Judenrein: The End Goal

Functionally, SJP and their affiliated anti-Israel agitators have only had one affect, and it is their primarily desired affect: campus Judenrein. Judenrein was a term that 1930s Germans gave to what had been the unnamed end goal of all past Jewish expulsions: not just the physical absence of Jews, but the absence of Jewish thought, ideas, cultural influence. The Germans were quite frank that this is there goal even before the Nazi party won power - contrary to many of the narratives that see the university as merely falling prey to the dogma of Nazism, the universities were the greatest champions of utopianism such as Nazism, and the voting habits of the electorate too support this demographic analysis of who supported Nazism.3 The head of German maths and physics departments even wished to rid them of any possible Judaic influence, attributing to Jewish “power” something biased and thus constraining the field of its true power. This is why Albert Einstein, whose works were seen as quintessentially Jewish in their abstractions, lost his job in Germany, and instead took up a post at Princeton, freeing German universities to pursue purer and better fields of physics…or so they believed.

So too now, these “protests” are not and never have been about having any sort of impact on the Israeli economy or policy, but as written about by other scholars such as in the book Israel Denialism, the main end-game is to create fear within the public of listening to Jewish or Israeli voices, of Jewish influence, of daring to provide such people academic collaborations and equal consideration in hiring committees or in speaking positions at conferences. It is to create conditions at newspapers or journals where the Jewish columnist who proposes a different narrative is isolated from her peers and the subject of ridicule in exclusive group texts, such as was the case of Bari Weiss at the New York Times.

What to Expect In the Coming Weeks: An Overview of the Columbia Protests of 1968, compared to an Overview of the Columbia Mobs of the 2020s

This is not the 1960s. This is the 1930s. In fact, before pivoting in the direction of comparing today to the 1960s, I first intended to write an article comparing today’s universities to those of the 1930s - both those in the United States and in Germany. I felt though that it was better to first negate the erroneous analogy spread far and wide in American media, before reporting on a much more accurate analogy.

In my articles that will come ahead, I will explain exactly where the tenuous analogies of today’s campus climate to the 1960s falls apart. For example, these are not “student protests.” Even the “leaders” we see highlighted in our newspapers are not the American youth straight out of high school of the 1960s, watching their friends drafted in an unpopular war, warding off military recruiters on campus and their black friends aggrieved and in mourning. These are 30-something year old men. Most of the leaders are graduate students or even faculty, unless like Mohsen Mahdawi, you maintain your position as an undergraduate for 17 years. Even still, the individuals given a face in the media are not the orchestrators of the campus events.

It is far worse: the groups that organize SJP and their affiliates descend from the early creation of Hamas itself, a group we once thought of as regionally localized and that we now know had a far larger geopolitical presence. Unlike the organic growth of the student groups at American universities at the start of the Vietnam War, SJP and its affiliates were born of organizations were decades in the making. Their roots are in one particular political moment - the Oslo Accords and the growth of the reactionary group of Hamas as funded by Iran, the desire to sabotage peace since peace meant a two-state solution, as opposed to their religiously-motivated belief that it is blasphemous for Israel to exist as a Jewish country.

The web of anti-Oslo-Accords born-organizations that today orchestrate our university youth into an anti-Israel frenzies are staffed and run by none other than Hamas affiliates themselves. SJP’s parent company, American Muslims for Palestine ((AMP) -Both AMP and SJP were founded and run by Hatem Bazian and AMP provides SJP with its funding, resources, campus coordinators, and other means that the later articles will discuss) is run entirely by employees whose former places of work were shut down by the federal government for providing millions of dollars to Hamas, despite Hatem Bazian’s attempts to hide these relationships under a web of currently-investigated shell companies.

Despite life with an 8-month old and a two-year old, I have put enormous research into the work ahead. Please sit tight and hopefully enjoy as I release a series of exposes on the falsities of the 2020s campus “protest” narratives over the next couple of weeks.

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In a certain sense, the institution-building that came out of the Nuremberg Trials - institutions like the International Criminal Court - actually destroyed the very idea of “human rights” that Nuremberg tried to establish. If the Nuremberg Trials envisioned human rights as a higher law than that of state law, then creating more law-giving, governing bodies brought the concept of human rights back down to the political and material. The utility of the concept of human rights is in its institutional transcendence. It is a north star for political actors. But when we try to codify human rights and embody that code in bureaucracies, it no longer provides its prime purpose: a mechanism for political actors to stray from proceduralism when procedure enables injustice.

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This was a central topic of the postwar jurisprudential debates on how Western concepts of “the law” enabled the rise of Nazism. Legal theorists like the Weimar-era Minister of Justice Gustav Radburch, and his defenders like the American legal philosopher Lon Fuller, argued that Nazism was able to rise not by coup, but by its adherence to the letter of the law. This could have been averted, they argue, had the German political and legal system not so thoroughly ejected natural law from its tools of governance, replaced instead with the fashionable concept of positive law; meaning, a concept and practice of law that is distinct from morality, based solely on text and procedure.

Positivists did not believe it was within the realm of the “legal” for jurists to account for morality in their process of practicing law and judgement, arguing that the natural law concepts of morality are too unclear, changeable, and subjective. Instead, the theory and then practice of law needs to distinguish between “what is” and “what ought to be.” This view originated with English utilitarians like Bentham and Austin, and was widely written about and promoted by the early 20th century American Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes. But after World War II, the tenor of the legal theorists changed, with postwar intellectuals critiquing a strict practice of legal positivism and rediscovering older ideas of natural law that had been discarded along with other pre-Enlightenment political concepts such as the “divine right of kings.”

The Nuremberg Trials and their resulting institutions like the ICC were partly an attempt to bridge the divide of positive and natural law, but in a way this attempt has failed, since it merely created another strictly - if performatively - procedural system, which is the very problem it hoped to solve. Our lesson from the postwar jurisprudential debates should have been one of reforming the mechanisms of institutional proceduralism itself, not of duplicating such mechanisms for even larger systems of governance. To channel Hannah Arendt, legal positivism and the institutions and practices it may facilitate - bureaucracies and proceduralism - may excise human agency from our concept of governance, replacing the loud actions of politics with the silent automations of bureaucracy.

Thus, institutions like the ICC not only are counter to the very agenda that brought them into existence, but have also served the unfortunate and regressive step of obscuring and distorting the concept of human rights and its abuses. By claiming to embody and proceduralize something that is supposed to transcend sovereign institutions and their procedures, the Western human imagination has been stripped of the one of the main concepts of human rights - the ability to imagine a world different than what is, and to notice and judge injustice without the cognitive block of the convention. Furthermore, the diminishment of human rights into a series of procedures, again channeling Arendt, robs humans of our ability to act upon our essential nature as political animals, who together exercise our thought, imagination, and creativity.

“It’s turtles all the way down,” except, “it’s turtles all the way up.” Any law-giving institution will need human rights as an ideal above it to allow for human agency and political action, no matter how many institutions we create and add to our global governing systems. Our institutions and procedures are all inherently corruptible, regardless of which noble ideas they incorporate into their namesakes and charters. Since no institution can embody human rights, claiming to do so unfortunately obscures its a-institutional nature, weakening its use in our discourse and opening the concept to ideological capture and exploitation as a rhetorical weapon. Meanwhile, any institution that has claimed the semantics of human rights has effectively masked its own institutional web of power and influence, as many in the public will not even think to look for a mask, mistaking whats at face value for that which is contained therein.

Unfortunately, just as we were all recovering, the California wildfires broke out in very close proximity to where I live. My whole family - me, my husband, our newborn, our toddler, and our two pet bunnies - had to evacuate for an unknown period of time and were under the impression that our house was going to burn down. For three weeks, while still in the midst of postpartum bleeding and recovery, and with a newborn recovering from Covid, we were away from home and in about three different AirBnBs.

The first two nights of evacuations we barely slept. I was up all night on my phone in my local moms’ WhatsApp group as we discussed the fate of our homes and did our best to collect information and figure out where the fires were heading. Some people had stayed behind despite evacuation orders and were either putting out fires on their own, or alerting the Los Angeles Fire Department as to where there were structure fires in our neighborhood. For the first couple of nights, it seemed that Los Angeles County forgot about us, or did not prioritize our community, and we were all quite tense. Luckily, things soon changed, and my specific neighborhood-within-our-neighborhood in particular became the site of an epic firefighting battle, of which we somehow came out the victor. I wish I could post a picture of the maps of the fires without revealing such personal information as my address, but the fires came within 1,000 feet of our home, and homes a short walk uphill from us were unfortunately lost. By some miracle, our home and our whole block survived.

When the evacuation orders were lifted and we were finally allowed to return to our homes, we then had some other issues to contend with: damage from the winds and smoke, and concerns about air and soil quality. Firstly, the winds knocked out the fiber optic cable for our house, meaning we had no internet. After two days of no success in trying to speak with a person at Frontier customer service, I wrote a public Twitter comment to them about our issues on their corporate account, after which they immediately responded and had someone fix our internet the next day. We also had a trampoline that blew into our yard and landed on our propane tank, which we took some time to remove. And finally, with a newborn recovering from respiratory ailments that had him hospitalized, I was quite nervous about air quality and smoke damage. Despite officially being allowed to return, we waited a bit for our region’s air quality to get better, and until a number of air purifiers that we ordered arrived at our house. We also scheduled some HVAC repairs, as due to our solar battery that had continued to supply power to our home despite the power lines being down, our HVAC system continued to circulate air in our home, which drew some smoke into our home and our ducts.

We have finally gotten to a point where we have been able to feel comfortable in and outside of our home again, with air quality concerns dissipating, damage fixed, and normal life resuming - including our toddler starting preschool for her first time, which she absolutely loves. Of course, our two-year old starting preschool means that now we are all, once again, sick with colds.

Finally, while our home is now safe, our main roadways to get to most of our daily or weekly functions are closed due to either fire damage or mudslides during the subsequent rains. Now, many errands that would take us perhaps 20 minutes to drive towards take us about an hour and a half to two hours through extremely circuitous routes, and have left us scrambling for other options with regards to our children’s health care and the like.

I do not feel right complaining really, as we are extremely fortunate compared to so many. We had no loss of life. No loss of pets. Our home survived. Our whole community survived. Damage was minimal. Our children are unaware of any of the hardships and there are no emotional issues with which to contend. My toddler seems to think we just went on a fun tour of the playgrounds of Southern California.

Mainly, I have been feeling sad, feeling like I lost much of our precious newborn bonding time during the stress and constant movement of the evacuations. Now that we are home with something close to a resumption of normalcy, I have been trying to spend as much time as possible with my now 2-month old baby to make up for lost time.

All of that being said, I sadly have not gotten to write on all of the many topics on which I have been long reading and considering. I have written a number of smaller think-pieces during downtime with the baby, ideas off the top of my head, which are not as research-heavy as I would like, but that I think I will begin refining to post here.

I hope life has been going well for all of you, and that anyone else who lives in a part of the world beset by some sort of hardship is holding on. Looking forward to writing more soon!

Moreover, we all unfortunately got sick right during our newborn’s first week of life. Despite taking numerous precautions, first our toddler got sick and then it spread to the family, including me in my postpartum recovery phase, and to our poor little newborn. He ended up having to spend two nights in the hospital, which my incredible husband spent with him while I stayed home with our toddler. Luckily our newborn is just fine, they just wanted to monitor him and provide him with some supplemental oxygen; since newborns can only breathe through their noses and not their mouths, even a simple cold with congestion can become quite dangerous if not monitoered and properly addressed. Luckily he never spiked a fever! Now he is home with us, he has on his Owlet breathing monitor, we constantly suction his nose, and do many, many cuddles. His older sister has been amazing at blowing him kisses and giving him pacifiers.

Thus, as may be expected, I have not quite had the time to research and write. But I do have many ideas in mind for future articles, and I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts on what people think about these ideas! They are as follows:

1. I have been thinking a lot about how we exceptionalize Jewish and Israeli history, presenting it in a vacuum, unique from other world events, and thus those who are justifying their double standards for Israel can hold it up as particularly evil in some unique way, an abberation on world history. As a response, I would like to write an article placing Zionism and related migration into its historical context of similar movements for independence and national sovereignty occuring for the same reasons at the same time period, starting with the fall of empires and the resulting desire that groups had to create a sovereign nation-state, to the mass statelessness and migration patterns that followed the battles proceeding World War I to the outcome after World War I. Greece, Turkey, and Romania seem like particularly apt areas for writing an intersecting, cross-border history of migration and national sovereignty, although without having done much research on this topic already, I could go in quite a different direction with it.

2. Relatedly, I’d like to research and write a piece on the meaning of “ethnicity.” I notice how those who have a knee-jerk reaction to Israel will latch on to whatever terminology can be used with a sinister overtone to, once again, exceptionalize and then demonize the country. But I do not think that most people could give a definition of “ethnicity,” and frankly, neither could I, not without doing a lot more reading into the term’s origins and uses over the years. I notice that the term “ethnicity,” when applied to Jews, can either be used to deny us the term “ethnicity,” like when people would like to claim that Israel is part of a white, European colonial project or when denying that Jews in the U.S. can suffer discrimination since we are white, but will be embraced by the same group of people so long as it can demonize Israel by calling Israel an “ethnostate.” And, of course, this pearl-clutching at the term “ethnostate” is only deployed against Israel and no other country. “Ethnicity” is an amorphous term, another empty signifier whose main meaning is to be a weapon against whatever claims to rightness and belonging a Jew might make. This is something that I generally like doing: picking apart commonly used terms like “indigeneity” or “identity” whose meanings are generally ambiguous but that carry a sacred and untouchable social function when deployed.

3. The falsehood that all youth, university, and intelligentsia protests are inherently moral and on the “right side of history.” I have heard this idea repeated far too often: the baby boomer generation often looks at their campus activities, and those who protested South African apartheid, as a pinnacle of morality that can be expanded to include today’s campus climate against Israel, and in doing so, they both erase or minimize any problematic activities from the historical protests that they idealize, while also generalizing them to mean that all such student protests will similarly be on the “right side of history.” Simply in the American sense, this is false, as elite and Ivy League institutions in the 1930s and 1940s were overwhelmingly pro-Nazi Germany and dismissive to outright hostile towards Jewish concerns. Fascism too was a widely embraced philosophy by both students and faculty. One good book on this topic is Stephen Norwood’s The Ivy Tower and the Third Reich, and another book that touches on this is Under the Axe of Fascism by Gaetano Salvemini. While this is simply in an American context, ideological youth movements have harkened in many of the worst turns in world history, from the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran with the overthrow of the Shah, to the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, to, of course, Bolshevism. For an article on this topic, I would probably prioritize problematic historical American university protests along with related changes in society like the historical shift in the socioeconomic class and status of journalists. Even if I generally focus on the American sinister side to campus idealism, I think that incorporating some of Leo Strauss’s reflections on the Germany university system prior to the rise of Nazism would be helpful, as well as analyzing the voting records we have for who voted for Nazism - surprise, in urban centers, it was overwhelmingly the most educated and highest of the socioeconomic classes that voted for the Nazi party, whereas the working classes did not. So to that end, I think looking at foreign examples could be helpful in understanding the American rise in high socioeconomic classes embracing antisemitism under the guise of morality, and celebrating Jihadism under the guise of a respectable and intellectual resistance movement.

4. Jews and the nation-state. A more philosophical piece, this would be a reflection on my readings of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, a book I have finally finished in full, and her most notable observation in Volume One on Antisemitism that trails through the rest of the book as a main theme: totalitarianism is not nationalism, it is the opposite of nationalism, it is the rise of ideological “movements” over the conept of the nation-state and related rules of law. And under such anti-nation-state movements, Jews tend to come under the most fire due to subconscious percieved relationships that the non-Jewish public has about the Jew and the State, a relationship seen as going back centuries. When an ideological mob comes to see the State as the enemy, they also come to see the Jew, with our perceived relationship to the State, as also an enemy. This is very evident in today’s anti-Israel rhetoric, where Israel’s “relationship to America” is often given by the run of the mill “anti-Zionist” zealout as an excuse for singling out Israel from all other nations.

5. Though this is more “fun,” I have been listening to Leo Strauss’s famous speech “Athens and Jerusalem,” and I have simultaneously started reading a Breslov Chassidic work about Chanukah. In my short amount of time devoted to this, I have found some striking similarities and would be interested to see if those similarities pan out as I continue reading. I would then like to write a bit about the main theme of both writings, which is that Western civilization has two distinct but intertwining foundational axioms, two frameworks for culture and governance that Strauss would call “Reason and Revelation.” Thus the title, “Athens and Jerusalem.” I am also then curious to continue reading a book I have called Leo Strauss on Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, edited by Kenneth Green, which I think will provide greater insight on the topic of the relationship between reason and faith in our greater civilizational history.

Those are but a few of the ideas that I have that I have been wanting to work on. During the day when the newborn is crying and will only be soothed by being held for contact naps, I can hopefully get some reading done, though typing out my notes and delving deeper into research, like searching for and organizing articles I find on JSTOR, might be difficult. However, hopefully I will be able to get enough ideas percolating and take enough notes with citations that when it comes time to write once more, I can actually get something out there sooner rather than later.

Thank you all again for your patience and understanding! I’m open to any sort of feedback or comments, be it on my research agenda, or even just on parenting and things like how to help foster relationships between toddlers and their baby siblings.

Hope you all are having a happy Chanukah, a merry Christmas, or an enjoyable whatever else one might be celebrating!

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“We should try hard to export our revolution to the world…If we remain in an enclosed environment we shall definitely face defeat…we shall confront the world with our ideology”

- Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding Ayatollah of the Islamic Republic of Iran after the Revolution of 1979, from a speech in 1980.

Imperialism

Across college campuses and media platforms, people who consider themselves progressive angrily refer to the United States and Israel as “imperialist,” and use this label to excuse indiscriminate acts of violence against Israelis as not acts of terror, but as acts of “resistance.” Under the same logic, they cast Israel’s self-defense as unjustified and oppressive due to the very nature of Israel’s existence. After all, in the current progressive narrative, Israel is the result of historical European imperial projects and continues to exist due to American imperialism. Even more, many assert that Israel is itself an expansionist nation, whose military uses the pretenses of defense to carry out their true aim of conquering surrounding regions. In this narrative, violence against empire is “decolonization” and “resistance,” and the empire should justifiably fall for the sake of justice.

Applying these terms to Israel, however, is to play precisely into the hands of the actual current global imperialists: the “Triangular Alliance” or “Axis” of Iran, China, and Russia. These three nations, working closely together, share in common an ideology that can sound “liberationist” when presented as geopolitical talking points, but that have the sinister underlying function of excusing extraterritorial violence and brutality against minorities. They refer to their worldview as one of “multipolarity:” the belief that each “civilization” has its right to practice as it sees fit over its own territories. In this vision, the main force blocking the equal power of different civilizations is the United States, with its imperialist projection of a particularly Western vision of human rights and democratic norms.

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Multipolarity, with its emphasis on civilization as the cornerstone for sovereignty, raises the question of what constitutes a civilization, who has the right to make that determination, and where are the geographic boundaries of different civilizations. Moreover, what is to become of minority cultures and individuals who live within those boundaries, and what happens when one civilization claims as part of its rightful heritage a land that currently has a different sovereign nation? As strategically used by Russia and China, and in the cover it provides for Iran, multipolarity has allowed the concept of imperialism to be flipped on its head: certain countries have the right to violent expansion, while other countries are imperialist simply for existing where another civilization stakes its ownership. This result is evident across the globe, from Ukraine to Taiwan, from the Armenians, Kurds, Yazidi, Tibetans, Uyghurs, and others who get in the way of a more powerful nation’s claims to civilizational ownership. But nowhere are the claims of this current imperial alliance more widely believed by Western observers than when it comes to Israel.

A Short History of Multipolar Ideology And Its Current Sphere of Influence

In 1996, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, China, Russia, and three other Central Asian nations convened under the name of the “Shanghai Five” to resolve territorial disputes, which lead to a joint treaty between China and Russia that declared their intent to “promote the multi-polarization of the world and the establishment of a new international order.” In this same treaty, they similarly claimed that they are in favor of “mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity…and non-interference in each other's internal affairs.”1 During the third post-Soviet meeting of these countries, they announced another ideological cornerstone: a new commitment to fighting “the three evils: separatism, fundamentalism, and terrorism.”2 These proposals were highly lauded at the United Nations since with the Cold War over, there should be no more need to “pick a side.” The various countries of the world could operate according to their own multiplicity of ideas, not by picking between the binary ideologies of Communism and Capitalism. The era of bipolarity was to end in favor of multipolarity.

Today, what was once the “Shanghai Five” has transformed into the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” an organization that has been likened to “Asia’s NATO,” and has gone far beyond the initial number of countries and scope of discussions. Now, the SCO includes India, Pakistan, and most recently, Iran, as well as numerous other countries as illustrated in the map below. This organization, lead by China and Russia, encompasses 60 percent of Eurasia’s total land area, nearly 2 billion people, about 25 percent of the world’s population, and 15 percent of the world’s GDP. Together, the member nations and their partners negotiate trade, military ventures, defense agreements, investments, oil, natural resources, technology, infrastructure, and all other manners related to the region and beyond.3

A few years later, several developing nations wished to have better bargaining power with global financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and thus created their own economic coalition to balance the power of the developed world’s “G7” coalition. This resulted in an organization called BRICS, which stands for the initial members of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and currently includes many more countries globally. BRICS has historically had a number of “swing states” that could go either way between favoring partnerships with more Western-allied countries or with illiberal autocracies. But as China and Russia hold much of the institutional power, they have been able to invite notoriously anti-Western regimes such as Iran, who joined in 2023, thus giving power and legitimacy to such states in geopolitical and financial affairs. Currently, BRICS’s collective bloc includes 46% of the world’s population and 37% of the global GDP,4 exceeding the 32% of the world GDP represented by the G7.5

Between the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, in which China and Russia play a leading role, let alone other institutions like the United Nations where China and Russia both occupy permanent seats on the Security Council, China and Russia have been able to expand their sphere of influence, and recently come to include Iran as central in their partnerships. “Multipolarity” is rhetoric that they regularly invoke in gathering allies, excusing the criminal acts of foreign states, and otherwise supporting their own expansionist interests, and they regularly use their institutional power in transnational organizations to do so China and Russia’s power in such organizations continues to grow as they recruit more sympathetic members, and trade diplomatic favors with other member states. As such, many nations who are quick to cry “imperialism” - usually done as demagogic rhetoric against the United State and/or Israel - are likely to look the other way when their patron states or allies of China, Russia, and Iran carry out their own imperialism that we see throughout each of these respective countries’ recent histories. In this article, I dive deeper into each of these three main players turn toward violent imperialism, couched in the language of multipolarity and civilizational sovereignty

China

China under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and particularly now under Xi Jinping’s leadership, is overt in their expansionist ambitions and domestic policies of Sinofication - meaning, brutally enforced national homogenization, which they justify by invoking the fight against the “three evils of separatism, fundamentalism, and terrorism.”6 This fight is often aimed at their country’s “autonomous zones,” regions that have historically been independent or fought for independence, and that consist primarily of religious and ethnic minorities. We see this process today most often in Tibet and Xinjiang - the latter being the home of the Uyghurs - where this “fight” becomes tantamount to genocide and ethnic cleansing. Similarly, China brings this “fight” to its “administrative provinces” - Macau and Hong Kong - that were transferred to China by the British in the 1990s, but that had previously developed their own unique systems of governance and culture and still maintain some administrative independence. China additionally uses its claims of civilizational rightness and combating the three evils to seize territory in the South Seas while setting its ambitions on overtaking Taiwan.7

Under Xi Jinping, one of China’s most central state policies that had been brutally enforced since the Cultural Revolution has been radically altered: namely, the CCP’s ban on pre-Maoist Chinese civilizational history such as Chinese myth and philosophy. Instead, he has stridently incorporated Chinese civilizational history into state institutions. Such topics were strictly outlawed throughout the CCP’s history based on the Marxist-Leninist idea that religion and other elements of culture are “false consciousness” that lead people astray from the singular truth of class struggle and communism. Now, however, Xi has brought the emphasis on historical Chinese civilization and culture to the forefront of his politicking and calls it the “Sinicization of Marxism.”8 Xi has amended the two constitutions of China, both the National and the Party constitutions, to include what he calls “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” This shift has so thoroughly permeated the Chinese polity that his writings on the topic are now one of three official state textbooks issued by the CCP’s central school, the other two being on the works of Mao and of Deng Xiaoping.9

Xi uses this emphasis on Chinese mythology and history to provide him with legitimacy for imperialism and domestic Sinofication under the framework of multipolarity, and in particular, invokes the premodern Chinese concept of tianxia. Tianxia, meaning “all one family under heaven,” asserts the idea that China has never been imperialist in its history; instead, other nations have willingly sought to join Chinese kingdoms after witnessing the superiority of Chinese culture and social order. By invoking the need to reestablish tianxia, Xi can justify the country’s policies as part of rebuilding authentic Chinese civilization, a form of resistance to the prior binary, colonial, world order.10 Other times, the CCP will insert topics of Chinese culture into propaganda as a means of shoring up national pride and support for state policies, such as in this state music video released to promote China’s 14th Five-Year Plan, where the singer casually references the once-banned Daoist myth of the rabbit on the moon.

China’s “Civilizational” Imperialism and Ethnic Cleansing

We can see how China uses the language of restoring historic Chinese civilization in how it subjugates minority populations. In Tibet, it is evident how China’s fight against the “three evils,” in conjunction with its policies of Sinofication under their civilizational myth of tianxia, justifies the CCP’s system of ethnic cleansing. In 1950, Chairman Mao had seized the once-independent Tibet, claiming it was China’s by historic right, and exiled 80,000 Tibetans, setting the norm for China’s treatment of Tibet today.11 Now, under China’s ongoing Tibetan “Sinofication” programs, China uses state “incentives” to move Han Chinese into the Tibetan autonomous zone in order to displace ethnic Tibetans. Simultaneously, China creates “voluntary” relocation programs for moving rural ethnic Tibetans out of Tibet - which, as one might guess, is not quite so voluntary.12 Most frightening of all is China’s policies towards Tibetan children and education. As of 2023, the United Nations estimated that 1,000,000 Tibetan children have been forcibly taken from their parents and sent to Chinese state facilities for “reeducation.” This is all not to mention that China systematically outlaws Tibetan cultural signifiers and Tibetan language in institutions while often policing such activities under martial law, all in the name of preventing “separatism” and “terrorism.”13

Meanwhile in Xinjiang, China again uses its fight against the “three evils” to carry out what is recognized by the U.S. State Department as a genocide against the largely Muslim Uyghur population. The Uyghurs became a target of the CCP after September 11th, 2001 under the guise that they could represent a “separatist,” “terrorist,” or “extremist” movement. As a result, the CCP began increased policing and surveillance of the region, culminating in a flare up of ethnic tensions, and a wave of state-mandated “reeducation” camps.14 Currently, it is estimated that between 1-2 million of the 11 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang are imprisoned in such camps.15 Survivors have testified before the U.S. Congress on the abuses they have faced, including rape, torture, sterilization, executions, and other crimes against humanity. They have recounted deeply disturbing stories arising, such as, “innocent female Uyghur detainees were held by the thousands, heads shaved, in gray uniforms…Guards tortured the women by electric shocks and by gang rape, sometimes combining both.” Meanwhile, like in Tibet, the Uyghur children who have been essentially orphaned by their parents’ captivity are forcibly sent to state boarding schools for reeducation.16

Furthermore, in their pursuit of tianxia and reunification of China’s “rightful” territories, the CCP has been unlawfully expanding into the China South Seas for decades and is continuing to do so. China has built naval bases and artificial islands in the South Seas in maritime waters that they claim are Chinese, but over which surrounding maritime neighbors are supposed to exercise sovereignty. Thus, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, and others are alarmed at China’s encroachment onto their territory and the power that it wields to do so. Meanwhile, China flips the script to claim that it is their maritime neighbors encroaching on “historically Chinese” waters.17

Taiwan, however, remains the most critical component of Xi’s “New Era” ambitions. According to the foremost scholars on Xi Jinping’s ideology, Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung, Xi asserts that the primary purpose for China’s military - the People’s Republic Army - is to “reclaim” Taiwan, a territory he asserts belongs to Chinese civilization, as run by the CCP, by right. Furthermore, Xi believes that conquering Taiwan is the foremost goal Chinese geopolitical strategy, as it would shift the global balance of power away from the United States and towards China, much in the same way that Russia regards Ukraine, and that Iran regards Israel.18

Xi’s Taiwan ambitions are more than a future aspiration: China actively works on weakening and alienating Taiwan on the world stage, both via their own state policies and at the United Nations. Xi makes heavy use of “sanctions, export bans, visa restrictions, diplomatic expulsions,” and other tactics in order to punish any “countries, organizations, and individuals” that interfere with Xi’s concept of China’s rights, including his claim to Taiwan.19 Even more concerning, Xi uses the United Nations towards this goal. Xi has, “turned the UN into a Chinese instrument of power,” where he has, “successfully persuaded many developing countries to express "unequivocal support" for China… As a result, many have voted for candidates nominated or endorsed by China to lead UN agencies. They second China's efforts to restrict or reduce the diplomatic space for Taiwan and to bar those who do not toe China's "One China'' policy from UN platforms or from entry into UN buildings.”20

Due to the primacy that Xi places on conquering Taiwan, one of his top priorities for China is to bolster the strength of the Chinese military. He has thus begun working closely with Russia and Iran21 on joint military exercises and ventures, weapons trades, intelligence exchanges, sharing military technology, and other means of modernizing China’s forces and the militaries of those with whom he shares an ideology of civilizational imperialism under the framework of multipolarity that rests upon dismantling the West.22

China’s Focus on Multipolarity through Trade

Another way that China provides cover for its imperialism is under the language of multipolarity and framing their ambitions as part of the shift to a world away from Western dominance, and instead, supporting each country’s claim to its own sphere of determination. In doing so, China takes great pains to mirror public opinion of the Global South, which includes turning publicly against Israel. According to Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, “Whether it is believing in the likelihood of Russia winnings it war with Ukraine, the likelihood that the EU might fall apart, or the fragile state of American democracy, China’s official positions take great care to reflect the sentiments of the average Brazilian or average Turk.”23 Likewise, in their pursuit of the Global South’s trust, China has heavily invested in Iran’s proxy wars against Israel, both through global diplomatic strategies and material supplies to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, gaining support from much of the Islamic world.24

One aspect of this strategy of multipolarity is building trade networks that lie outside of Western jurisdiction and thus Western sanctions. This goal has motivated China’s turn against Israel and partnership with Iran, in that it facilitates the CCP’s new economic strategy of building these trade networks. In March of 2021, for example, China and Iran signed a 25-year cooperation pact that they called “permanent and strategic,” in which China promised to invest in Iranian energy, infrastructure, and otherwise, facilitate its trade in order to evade Western sanctions. In exchange, Iran provides oil to China at a steep discount. As such, China lobbies for Iran in transnational organizations and bolsters Iran’s proxy wars both by supplying military aid and on the global diplomatic stage, assuring their ongoing supply of cheap oil.25 Likewise, China has been investing $2 million into what is known as “the Belt and Road” initiative, a massive infrastructure project meant to create more economic integration between China, Western Asia, and Europe via a transport grid that is conveniently outside of the jurisdiction of Western sanctions. Ultimately, China is working to “sanction-proof” its own economy and facilitate an alternative economic network to the wealth of the West.26 Xi has thus based many geopolitical strategies around this trade agenda, which includes working with Iran in undermining Israel.

As part of China’s multipolar economic strategy, it has also been attempting to broker normalization efforts between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, thus securing for themselves more trade with the Middle East as a whole. China’s rhetoric of multipolarity to position itself as a global mediator has been paying off, as China’s exports to Saudi Arabia have risen four-fold since 2018, and general exports to the whole MENA region have doubled since 2018, while American exports have been stagnating.27 Notably, China’s economic importance to the region has even caused some nations to turn their back on once-strongly held causes. The dictator of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once welcomed in Muslim Uyghur refugees fleeing from Chinese persecution. Now, he not only has stopped criticizing China’s abuses against the Uyghurs, but has been actively returning Uyghur refugees back to China.28

Multipolarity and Israel after October 7th

This emphasis on building a multipolar world to counteract Western influence can clearly be seen in China’s response to the October 7th pogrom against Israel, a country viewed by many in the Global South as an agent of Western unipolarity. A mere day after Hamas committed unspeakable acts of cruelty against innocent Israelis, China began its campaign to de-legitimize Israel’s responses. On October 8th, 2023, China called for a ceasefire and a two-state solution without any mention of Hamas. The CCP then began spreading both internal propaganda and external social media disinformation campaigns amplifying anti-Zionist and antisemitic messages. For example, a Chinese state television channel declared that, “Jews account for 3 percent of the U.S. population but control 70 percent of the wealth.”29 China, alongside Russia and Iran, then began a massive social media disinformation campaign via bots and influencers to spread extremism against Israel, which has had tremendous reach and engagement.30 The China-Russia-Iran social media disinformation campaigns have only grown since then, such as how one prominent Chinese newscaster bragged in a viral video,“TikTok has won big for Palestine.”31 Today, we know that these organized social media disinformation campaign have played direct roles in the onslaught of both public and academic anti-Israel “protests,” as the State Department has traced a number of internet accounts that have promoted, organized, and even funded such protests, directly to Iran and to other global “information operations” projects.32

China quickly brought their post-October 7th campaigns against Israel to their favorite transnational forums, including BRICS and the United Nations. Just a month after the Hamas attacks, Xi Jinping participated in a virtual BRICS summit about the war in Gaza that included Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, Brazil, India, South Africa, and Argentina. There, his participation was more a matter of optics than substance, with the goal of legitimizing Iran’s claims for the region and delegitimizing Israel’s sovereignty. China’s gamble to not condemn Hamas and to support autocratic values paid off on the international stage when, on November 20th, 2023, a group of Arab foreign ministers embarked on a tour of the countries that are permanent members of the UN Security Council - and started with China, an intentional choice.33

China’s Partnership with Iran and Hamas

To further undermine supposed Western influence and support their vision of multipolarity, China has been working with Hamas directly to advance Hamas and Iranian aggression against Israel. At the end of April 2023, China hosted 14 rival Palestinian factions and negotiated the “Beijing Declaration,” in which China, along with then-Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, reconciled Hamas with the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah Party - which governs the West Bank - under the agreement that Hamas would lead both Palestinian Territories while Fatah carries out the domestic duties of governance. According to Matthew Levitt, Director of the Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute and former deputy assistant secretary for intelligence at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, China’s “Beijing Declaration” benefited China’s image globally by portraying them as mediators of unity, while facilitating their true goal of aiding Iran, as Iran was attempting to position Hamas as the leader of a unified Gaza and West Bank by following the model of Hezbollah in Lebanon. In Lebanon, the official Lebanese government still carries out the bureaucratic functions of government, while Hezbollah assumes ultimate control over the direction of Lebanese policies, freeing Hezbollah to focus on their primary goal of destroying Israel. So too with Hamas, Iran wants the PA to be as the Lebanese government, doing the grunt work of governance, while freeing Hamas to focus on their main goal of dismantling Israel.34

Hamas and China have had a favorable back-and-forth relationship, one that Xi has leaned into quite heavily since October 7th. Khaled Meshal, a senior Hamas leader, has given interviews on Arabic TV where he bluntly states that “Hamas seeks cooperation with the superpowers, China and Russia.” Meshal then went so far as to also say that China should find in Hamas an inspiration for China’s own longed-for conquering of Taiwan.35 China reaffirms this desire for cooperation, as China declared to then-Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in March of 2024, “The Hamas movement is part of the Palestinian national fabric and China is keen on relations with it."36 It is no wonder that China immediately condemned Israel after they assassinated Ismail Haniyeh. This humiliated China on the world stage, as they were expected to gain both more global prestige and economic advantage through Haniyeh’s future leadership across a unified set of Palestinian Territories.37

More than just diplomatic relations, China has been providing direct military support to Hamas and Iran, much to the concern of Israel’s neighbors in the Middle East. ““The majority of their [Hamas’s] arms are of Russian, Chinese or Iranian origin…” quotes Politico from an arms expert interviewed for an expose on the terror regime’s weapon supply.38 The IDF too regularly finds Chinese military equipment in Gaza, and it is well known that Iran and their “axis of resistance” receives much of their weapons and technology from China. Now, it has been discovered that Chinese tunnel warfare specialists were instrumental in creating Hamas’s underground tunnel network. According to Guermantes Lailari , a top expert on counterrorism and irregular warfare in the Middle East, and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, two tunnel engineers from the Chinese military were found with Hamas in tunnels by the IDF, though Israel released them back to China after intense negotiations.39 Furthermore, leaders of the Arab League and of the Gulf Cooperation Council have expressed grave concern about the flood of Chinese weapons to Iran, considering Iran is the number one state sponsor of terror and uses their terror proxies to attempt to build an empire across the Middle East.40

In this way, we see how China has been using the guise of civilizational sovereingty and multipolarity to not only provide cover for its own violent imperialism, but to also build a coalition of like-minded autocracies that support their modern day goals of global supremacy, expansion, and colonization.

Russia

Vladimir Putin, longtime leader of post-Soviet Russia, is also motivated by a desire to conquer and recreate what he considers Russia’s imperial, civilizational heritage under the framework of multipolarity. Just as Xi’s vision is encapsulated by his “New Political Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” and his vision of tianxia, so too does Putin embrace the Russian equivalent to these concepts: Eurasianism. According to Marlene Laruelle, author of Russian Eurasianism: an Ideology of Empire, the concept of Eurasianism is centuries old, but was first formalized in Russia’s intellectual movements during the interwar period, continued up through the Soviet Union, and has now gained more influence than ever before due to Putin and his embrace of the prominent Russian philosopher and statesman, Aleksandr Dugin.41

Eurasianism stemmed from an old question that has haunted Russian intellectuals and politicians for centuries: “what does it mean to be Russian?” Seeing themselves as neither part of the East nor the West, Russian intellectuals of the 19th century created their own terms for defining Russian national identity, which became embodied in the “Slavophile” movement. The Slavophiles largely rejected the Western European, Enlightenment based-rationalism that had been heavily promoted through the political reforms of Catherine the Great. Instead, they sought to recreate a “true” Russian identity by turning to the Russian Orthodox Church, Russian history, Russian language, Russian art, architecture, community, social order, myth, and mysticism that had existed prior to Peter the Great.42

Towards the end of the 19th century, Slavophilism moved from an intellectual journey to a political movement called “Pan-Slavism.” The Russian Empire was collapsing, as were the other major world empires with whom they had been entangled: the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Each declining empire turned to “pan-nationalist” movements to try to bolster their existence, with the Ottomans turning to Pan-Islamism and Austro-Hungarians turning to Pan-Germanism. These three pan-nationalist movements became the basis of much of 20th century history via the rise of Nazism, Bolshevism, and Jihadism, and continue to impact the world today. Eurasianism as promoted by Aleksandr Dugin and Putin stems directly from this history of Slavophilism and Pan-Slavism.43

Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Dugin

Since the early 1990s, political observers have noticed that Eurasianism was growing into a foundational principle of post-Soviet Russia, and nobody has done more to promote and implement Eurasianism than Dugin. The most influential book on Eurasianism and its current practice by Putin today was Dugin’s 1997 treatise, Foundations of Geopolitics, which is now required reading across the Russian military, and required in many police forces, universities, and public schools.44

Dugin argues in Foundations that Russia needs to once again become an empire in order to preserve Eurasian civilization due to what he sees as the fundamental incompatibility of the two most prominent types of civilizations: Atlantic societies, which are primarily seafaring and trade-based, and Eurasian societies, which are primarily land and culture-based. Atlanticism, he contends, naturally spreads cosmopolitanism and change, while Eurasianism succeeds through geographic and civilizational preservation. As such, Dugin says Atlanticism and Eurasianism cannot co-exist, as Atlanticism is inherently growth based and thus will wipe out Eurasianism if left unchecked, and thus the only way Eurasian civilization can survive is by destroying the United States. Foundations lays out his strategy to achieve that ultimate goal, which rests both on military conquest of areas that Russia considers to be theirs by historic right, and on creating strategic partnerships with various other civilizational “poles,” with the result that once the United States is defeated, the ultimate collaborative, multipolar world order, not threatened by Atlanticist growth, can emerge.45

In addition to military force and strategic partnerships, Dugin’s geopolitics promotes propaganda via “campaigns of subversion, destabilization, and disinformation…supported by a hard-headed use of Russia’s gas, oil, and natural resource riches to pressure other countries to bend to Russia’s will.”46 Dugin proposes Russia must “bring geopolitical turmoil into the US domestic reality by encouraging all kinds of separatism, various ethnic, social and racial conflicts, and actively supporting all dissident movements of extremists…that destabilize internal political processes in the USA,” while also, “supporting isolationist tendencies in US politics…”47

As for Europe, Dugin asserts that the most important Eurasian strategies should be to weaken NATO, and then to “reunify” with other regions he considers Russian. Throughout “Foundations,” we see many examples of what Dugin considers to be rightfully Russian, such as: a subsection entitled “Serbia is Russia;” references to Moldova as “The Russian South;” and predictions that in time, Romania, Macedonia, “Serbian Bosnia,” and even Greece will unify into a Russian-led Eurasian empire. Dugin takes particular issue with Ukraine, stating, “The continued existence of a unitary Ukraine is unacceptable,” as the continued sovereignty of Ukraine is “a monstrous blow to Russia’s geopolitical security, tantamount to an invasion of its territory.”48 Dugin’s reasoning stems from his theory of civilization, stating that “Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical sense. It has no special cultural heritage, no geographical uniqueness, and no ethnic exclusiveness.” Ultimately, Dugin believes that Ukraine only exists as a “puppet state” for NATO and the West to block Russia’s rightful reclamation of its empire, and as such, should be a top priority of Putin’s military ventures, much as Xi conceptualizes Taiwan.49

Similarly to Xi, Dugin promotes Russian religion and pre-modern myth as central to Russia’s civilization-based territorial claims, which, like China, were considerations that were outlawed in Russia’s Communist past for promoting “false consciousness.” Instead, Dugin’s identification of which regions Russia should lead in consolidating a Eurasian empire is, like the the Slavophiles of old, based on areas where the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Cyrillic Script, and pre-Christian Russian myth and superstitions are prominent, or where he believes they can be revived.50

Finally, an important part of Dugin’s geopolitical vision is what he calls “the Moscow-Tehran axis.” Dugin claims that Tehran can “organize a solid Central Asian geopolitical block” that is capable of “resisting Atlanticist influence in the whole region.” Due to Iran’s own hardline commitment to its civilization’s religion, Dugin believes out of all of the nations of the Middle East, Iran is most capable of resisting Westernization. As such, he argues that Russia needs direct infrastructure leading from Moscow to Tehran for increased trade and military collaboration, and that to create an unimpeded geographic route, one needs to rid the Caucasuses of any Atlanticist influence. Dugin states that the anti-Atlanticists across Eurasia and the Middle East should provoke the Kurds, Armenians, and others minorities to create “geopolitical shocks” that will drive out the Atlanticists, meaning, NATO, the United States, and other allies. “The Moscow-Tehran axis is the basis of the Eurasian geopolitical project. Iranian Islam is the best version of Islam for joining the continental bloc, and it is this version that should be prioritized by Moscow,” Dugin concludes.51

Russia’s First Overtures with Hamas and Iran

Russia and Iran’s partnership formally began in 2005 after Israel ended what many called the occupation of Gaza, pulling out all Israeli settlers and military from the Gaza Strip. Gaza then held their own elections, which Hamas won, and immediately used their newfound power to execute all political opponents and begin a reign of rocket attacks against Israel, leading to Egypt and Israel to jointly begin “the blockade” against Gaza in 2007, two years after Israel’s withdrawal from the territory.

Hamas’s rise was a boon for Russia’s stated ambition of partnering with Iran to secure an anti-Atlanticist, anti-American bloc throughout the Middle East, as Hamas is largely funded and directed by Iran as part of their “axis of resistance.” In 2006, Russia met with a Hamas delegation in Moscow - the first time that Hamas visited a nation outside of the Islamic world - and spoke with Hamas delegate Khaled Meshal, one of today’s most wanted terrorists for the orchestration of the October 7th attacks. Like with China, this had the dual affect of elevating Russia in the world’s esteem as a mediator of global affairs, and of lending Hamas an air of legitimacy that it lacked beforehand. “The Russian invitation has broken the Israeli and American effort to isolate Hamas," said Saleh Bardawil, a Hamas leader who was elected to the Palestinian parliament, “It is a political achievement and a victory for the Palestinian people.” Putin himself admitted that undermining the United States was part of his goal in inviting a Hamas delegation to Russia: “At a news conference in January, Mr. Putin described Hamas's electoral victory as "a very serious blow" to American diplomacy.”52

Russia and Iran in the Syrian Civil War

The Syrian Civil War began in 2011, just a few short years after the Hamas-Iran coup in Gaza, presenting another opportunity for Russia to partner with Iran, this time with direct military cooperation rather than just with diplomacy. An internal Syrian rebellion had sought to overthrow the brutal Shiite dictator and Iranian-ally, Bashar al-Assad, and Russia saw Syrian discontent with Assad as a product of American influence, leading to the Russo-Iranian-Syrian military partnership that is still ongoing in Syria today.53 In 2016, Iran granted Russia the right to use Iranian air space and bases for cruise missile strikes and other operations against Syria. Currently, Russia also has its own bases in Syria, which gives Russia greater access not just to Iran, but also to Libya and the Sahel in Africa, where Russia’s military presence is expanding and their arms trade is growing. Russia also sees Syria as an example of where it has “come out on top,” a global message that partnering with Russia and disavowing the United States is a good strategic move for other regimes worldwide.54

Due to this collaboration, Russia has a vested interest in explicitly supporting Iran’s notoriously anti-Israel proxy militias, as many, like Hezbollah, have large bases in Syria where they come into direct conflict with Israel. In fact, Russia has already employed their military against Israel in defense of Hezbollah. After Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire on Syrian grounds, Russia began electronically jamming Israel’s operations through Russia’s naval base in Syria’s Tartus and its airbase in Hmeymim. Furthermore, Russia has been allowing Hezbollah and other Iranian proxy groups to use Russian air defense systems against Israeli fighter jets.55

Russia’s Crimean and Ukrainian Aggression

Russia’s partnership with both Iran and China continued to strengthen under Putin’s pursuit of Dugin’s Eurasianist goals, starting with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. When Russia annexed Crimea, both China and Russia benefited from increased economic and military cooperation between the two nations. Between 2013 and 2021, China’s share of Russian trade doubled from 10 to 20 percent, and between 2021 and 2018, Russia supplied a total of 83% of China’s arm imports. By early 2022, Putin and Xi signed a joint manifesto pledging a “no limits” partnership, much like Xi and Iran’s partnership mentioned earlier, and within their manifesto, pledged for “international relations of a new type.”56 Furthermore, Russia and Iran’s military cooperation grew, as the Iranian military began providing training to the Russian forces occupying Crimea.57

After Putin attacked Ukraine in early 2022 in accordance with the primacy that Dugin placed on conquering Ukraine, the trade and military cooperation between Russia, China, and Iran grew even stronger. Russia began providing Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran with more weaponry and intelligence, while Iran likewise has provided Russia with drones, intelligence, and infrastructure. By May of 2024, 3,700 of the drones that Russia has deployed into Ukraine were from Iran, and Russia and Iran have been collaborating on building a new drone factory together inside of Russia. Likewise, within the first 10 months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia exports to Iran rose by 27%. Russia is now Iran’s largest source of foreign investments.58

China too has been supportive of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and has also received benefits in turn. Xi refused to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine and instead has provided Russia with much of their warfare technology, including: jet fighter parts, radar, electronic communications-jamming devices, and computer chips, of which more than half comes from China. Thus, despite Western sanctions and with the aid of China, Russia’s computer chip imports are back up at pre-Ukrainian War levels.59 Furthermore, in February of 2024, Russian officials confirmed that they are working with China on developing the use of AI for military purposes.60 Russia, China, and Iran have now held joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Oman for three years in a row, and Russian officers who have fought in Syria and Ukraine are helping China’s “People’s Liberation Army” via joint military exercises, which have “grown in scope and frequency.”61

Finally, these three countries are working to reduce their reliance on the U.S. dollar, particularly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Russia’s imports invoiced in Chinese renminbi jumped from 3 percent in 2021 to 20 percent in 2022. And in December 2023, Iran and Russia finalized an agreement to conduct bilateral trade in their local currencies.” By strategically divesting from the U.S. dollar for trade with one another, they have collaborated not only to evade Western sanctions, but have also aided money-laundering efforts to terror groups.62

A Land Bridge to Iran

As part of the strategy outlined by Dugin, Putin has additionally set his sights on the Caucuses. Azerbaijan and Armenia had long fought over what is called the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the South Caucasus - a region that borders Iran - yet Russia had kept peacekeeping troops there for years to avoid full on conflict. However, come September 2023, Russia’s peacekeeping forces stepped aside in what appears to be a purposeful tactic to allow Azerbaijan to seize the territory and force around 100,000 Armenians to flee. The day after Azerbaijan’s capture of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev traveled to Moscow to discuss creating a north-south corridor and a doubling of Azerbaijan’s commercial rail capacity between the two countries - seeming proof that Putin handed Azerbaijan the region. Like with China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” Putin’s gambits in the Caucasus can allow Russia to create trade routes outside of Western jurisdiction to avoid sanctions and undermine the Western economy. Most importantly, Russian dominance in the Caucasus can allow for Putin’s ultimate goal of creating direct land and rail access to Iran via what is now called the “Zangezur Corridor,” earlier known as “The Persian Corridor.” In order to gain complete Russian access through the corridor, however, Russia, Azerbaijan, and other allies would need to military take over more Armenia’s southern border, which would not just undermine Armenia’s sovereignty, but would also undermine the strength of the West’s alliances in the region.63

Russia and October 7th

Since the brutal Hamas terror attacks against Israel on October 7th, 2023, Russia has benefited on the world stage. As the United States continues to support Israel, Russia and China both have encouraged global anti-Israel sentiment so as to fuel anti-American hatred and portray the United States as weak and unjust. Russia and China’s strategy has been aimed both at the global public via disinformation campaigns and state propaganda, and at global leadership via institutions like the United Nations.

Only a week after October 7th, Russia tried, but failed, to pass a resolution in the U.N. Security Council condemning violence and terrorism against civilians, while making no mention of Hamas. While it was struck down, it unsurprisingly gained the votes of both China and the United Arab Emirates.64 As permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, Russia and China have repeatedly used their platform to soapbox against the United States for not supporting various “ceasefire” resolutions - resolutions that were ultimately political theater that placed responsibilities solely on Israel with almost no burden on Hamas, let alone Iran. After the U.S. vetoed one such resolution, Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia was able to gloat, “With its veto the American side essentially issued a license to kill and now bears full responsibility for each new victim of the conflict in Gaza," thus using the U.N. for their continued campaigns against the United States.65 Furthermore, when the U.S. in turn proposes its own, more balanced, ceasefire resolutions, Russia abstains from voting, which gives Russia further credence as a global force in parts of the world sympathetic to pan-Islamism and/or illiberal autocracies.66

Russia is no stranger to using its position at the United Nations to lobby for pro-Islamist sentiments (and not just due to the Soviet Union’s long history of using the UN to condemn Israel as a Cold War strategy). As early as 2018, Russia was working for Iran in the United Nations by vetoing sanctions against Yemen and vetoing resolutions that would condemn Iran for illegal supplies of weapons to the Houthis67- - an Iranian proxy organization whose official slogan is ““God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”68 Instead, Russia has tried to propose its own version of the resolution, which left out any mention of Iran.

Since October 7th, the Houthis have ramped up both their attacks against Western shipping vessels and have begun missile attacks into Israel proper while Russia and China have continued to support them. For example, when the United States and United Kingdom responded to Houthi strikes in the Red Sea in 2024, Russia used the UN to condemn these responses as “illegitimate,” and have even called for Biden to face criminal proceedings.69 Meanwhile, Russia has been in secret talks with Iran as of September 2024 to help the Houthis buy more missiles,70 and Russia has begun diplomatic relations with the Houthis, inviting a delegation to Moscow.71 To the Russian public, Putin asserts that they will benefit from the Houthis attacks on shipping vessels through the Red Sea as it may stimulate global trade to reroute through Russian and Chinese trade corridors, which one Kremlin politician has described as a “new logistics infrastructure for Eurasia.”72 In exchange for their support, the Houthis have guaranteed both Russia and China safe passage through the Red Sea.73 Thus, it has been in Russia’s best interest to dissuade the world from supporting Israel, as Russia is benefiting diplomatically and economically from supporting Iran’s various anti-Israel proxy militias such as the Houthis.

In this way, Russia is actively building a coalition of nations to mutually support their violent imperialist expansions, all under the cover of promoting a “multipolar” world that rests on dismantling Western “unipolarity,” which they will refer to as “Western imperialism” for demagogic reasons.

Iran

The history of the Islamic Republic of Iran is not too different than that of contemporary Russia and China, as Iran’s revolution was based on rejecting ideological bipolarity - the first Ayatollah’s motto was “neither East nor West" - in order to create their own civilizational “pole:” Islamic Shia clericalism.74 In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini usurped power from Iranian leader Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, aided by protestors in Iran who believed the Pahlavi regime was too “Western” and corrupt. Among those anti-Shah protestors were some Islamists, but primarily, a large coalition of left-wing student protestors, university faculty, journalists, and other intellectuals. However, the ruler who they ushered into his place - Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - was no friend to the leftwing intellectual class that ushered him into power. Instead, Khomeini’s pursuit of “neither East nor West,” brokered no room for left-wing intellectuals, as his main goal was to create an empire outside of the binary and non-Islamic global order. Over the next several years, the Ayatollah murdered tens of thousands of the very intellectuals who had brought him to power, setting the path to “purge” Iran of its non-Islamic influences and create a “pure” clerical Shia civilization.75

Khomeini’s theology differed from prior interpretations of Shi’ism in one fundamental way: the Ayatollah did not believe one needed to wait for a Messianic return of the Twelfth Imam - a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammad - to reinstate a regime of clerical Islamic law.76 Instead, Khomeini argued that Sharia law would become too corrupt under foreign influence if he did not act to purify and re-institute it across the region via a system of Shiite Islamic judges, and argued that he could do so under Shia theology by claiming he himself was a descendant of the Prophet Mohammad.77 Interestingly, the Shia Ayatollah and his early supporters were influenced by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood’s similar beliefs on the urgency of establishing Islamic rule and the Muslim Brotherhood in turn came to support the Ayatollah, which helps explain why Iran today is sponsoring not just Shiite but also Sunni terror organizations like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as both are offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood.78

Iran’s Doctrine of Imperialism and Domestic Brutality

In a speech to the Iranian public shortly after assuming power, Khomeini stated that if Iran’s theocracy were to remain in an “enclosed environment,” it would “definitely face defeat.” Much as China and Russia now espouse, Khomeini identified the United States - but at the time, also Soviet Russia - as the prime obstacles to Islamic purity and expansion. The Ayatollah also announced that geopolitically, the most important Iranian agenda should be to “liberate” the sovereign but non-Muslim countries in the Middle East; namely, Lebanon - then majority Maronite Christian, and Palestine - by which he meant the complete destruction of Israel and any claim to Jewish sovereignty.79 Since then, Iran has pursued these two goals: with success in ending the Christian rule in Lebanon and instead occupying its government with their Shia proxy regime, Hezbollah; and, with its ongoing sponsorship of terror organizations in Palestine devoted to rejecting peace in favor of the singular pursuit of destroying Israel.

In this same speech, the Ayatollah declared that just as Iran must be liberated from “international communism…[and] devourers led by America, Israel, and Zionism,” Iran must also be liberated of the non-Islamist philosophies amongst the intellectual class. “Intellectuals” must “give up their fascination with Westernization or Easternization and follow the straight path of Islam,” and “the professors who are “in contact with the East or the West will be purged.” He followed up this declaration with his general zero-tolerance policy for the Iranian population, setting the stage for the start of his reign of brutality.80

Iranian Imperialism via Hezbollah in Lebanon

Lebanon was a majority Christian nation until Palestinian terrorist organizations and Iran’s newly-created Hezbollah occupied the country and incited civil war. Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), along with the Popular Liberation Front for Palestine (PFLP) were previously stationed in Jordan, where King Hussein of Jordan tolerated Arafat’s sustained attacks against Israel despite local clashes between Palestinian residents and Jordanian citizens. This came to a head after a failed Palestinian assassination attempt against King Hussein, after which the PFLP hijacked four commercial airliners and stole Jordanian airspace on which to land the planes. The PFLP sorted the passengers on the basis of of whether they were Jewish or non-Jewish, then released the non-Jews, keeping the Jewish passengers as hostages to negotiate for the release of terrorists from prisons worldwide. After this series of PLO and PFLP-initiated violence in Jordan known as “Black September,” King Hussein declared martial law and exiled these two groups, who relocated instead to Southern Lebanon. There, the PLO and local Lebanese citizens began to clash, and the PLO used Southern Lebanon to launch attacks against Israel. This in turn started the Lebanese Civil War that lasted from 1975-1990 and resulted in the majority of the Christians fleeing Lebanon. While Israel was able to successfully oust the PLO from Southern Lebanon in 1982, Iran was unfortunately waiting to step into the new power vacuum by creating Hezbollah to occupy Lebanon by proxy.81

Iran began training Hezbollah in 1982 with Iran’s new Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), bolstering Hezbollah’s simple yet direct motto, “Death to Israel,” as espoused by their three-decades long and recently-assassinated leader, Hassan Nasrallah.82 In 2000, Hezbollah claimed responsibility for ousting the IDF from Southern Lebanon, making Hezbollah Iran’s most prized possession and raising Iran’s influence on the global stage. In the 1980s, Iran began to provide training, weaponry, and funds to Hezbollah, with the funding amounting to around $100-$200 million a year in the 1990s,83 and up to $700 million a year as of 2019.84 Hezbollah played a fundamental role in the second half of the Lebanese Civil War and began the practice of suicide bombings, which would go on to become a staple of Islamist terror attacks.85

Hezbollah’s reign of terror extended to anyone who interfered with their occupation, and thus Iran’s occupation, of Lebanon. Three such examples of early Hezbollah suicide bombings and hijackings include: in 1983, driving trucks filled with explosives into an international peacekeeping facility, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 French personnel; in 1984, car bombing a U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 32 Lebanese, 17 Americans, and 14 bystanders; in 1985, hijacking TWA Flight 847 with 153 passengers. Hezbollah would also kidnap, torture, and execute all they perceived as the enemy.86 Declassified American military documents and several lawsuits show that the actions of Hezbollah against these American bases were directly ordered by Iran.87

Iran and Hezbollah would continue acts of terror across Lebanon such as kidnapping and torture. One such case is that of American serviceman William Francis Buckley, whose last harrowing moments after 15 months of torture were captured on video and sent to the CIA, where it was reported that “Buckley was close to a gibbering wretch. His words were often incoherent; he slobbered and drooled and, most unnerving of all, he would suddenly scream in terror, his eyes rolling helplessly and his body shaking. The CIA consensus was that he would be blindfolded and chained at the ankles and wrists and kept in a cell little bigger than a coffin.”88

While the Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990, Hezbollah remained in power and Israel left in 2000. Iran then began to see Hezbollah as their chief model for how to conquer the Middle East, and with the U.S. having left Lebanon in the second half of the 1980s after the numerous Hezbollah attacks on U.S. troops, Iran saw this as proof that terrorism would work as a force for global deterrance. Later in 2005, Hezbollah continued to assert their zero-tolerance policy for any dissent by assassinating former Lebanese prime minister, Raffia Hariri, and Hezbollah became more and more integrated into official Lebanese government.89

Iran and its Proxy Terror Groups Worldwide

Iran’s Shiite terror proxies continued their work across the Middle East, extending beyond Lebanon. In 1981, an Iranian terror proxy attempted to assassinate the king of Bahrain and replace the monarchy with a Shia clerical kingdom modeled after Iran. In 1983, Hezbollah bombed the US Embassy and other American interests in Kuwait. By 1987, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, with close ties to Hezbollah - as will be discussed later - attempted to assassinate Kuwait’s emir. Later, Iranian pilgrims to Mecca in Sunni-run Saudi Arabia instigated anti-Saudi and anti-American protests during the annual Hajj, leading to a violent clash with an estimate of around 400 dead and thousands injured; later, Iranian terror operationists in Saudi Arabia kidnapped a diplomat directly from his embassy in Tehran.90

Iran and its proxies took their terrorism worldwide, particularly targeting Jewish people, Israeli people, and Israel-related institutions, since as Nasrallah had publicly declared, his main objective was not simply to destroy Israel, but to kill Jews worldwide: “If all the Jews gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of chasing them down around the world.”91 In 1982, Hezbollah agents in London and attempted to assassinate the Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom - Shlomo Argov - who remained hospitalized and barely functional due to his injuries for the rest of his life. Moving down to South America, Hezbollah bombed the Israeli embassy of Buenos Aires in 1992, killing 29 people and injuring over 240 more. Worse, just two years later, Hezbollah carried out the largest terror attack in Argentinian history, bombing the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association - a civic community space for Jewish residents to socialize and pursue hobbies - which killed 85 people and injured hundreds more. In 1994, Hezbollah returned to London first to drive a car bomb into the Israeli Embassy, and only thirteen hours later, to bomb one of England’s largest Jewish charities, the United Jewish Israel Appeal (UJIA), whose work helps the Jewish community of London provide aid to the the most disadvantaged Israeli communities regardless of religion or ethnicity.92 Finally, in 2012, a Hezbollah suicide bomber blew himself up on a bus in Bulgaria coming from the airport and going to a hotel, in which the passengers were 42 primarily young adult Israelis who just landed for vacation, killing 5 Israelis, including one pregnant woman, and the Muslim Bulgarian bus driver.93

Iran’s Growing Empire

The past several American presidential administrations have focused on undermining brutal Sunni dictatorships while believing that they could “contain” Iran; unfortunately, this strategy left a power vacuum that Iran was all too ready to fill. For example, when President George Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 and deposed of Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, he allied with a number of Shiite anti-Saddam political dissident groups, many of whom had been working with the Shiite regimes of Iran and Syria. One such group was the Dawa party, whose leader, Jawad al-Malik, became the Prime Minister of Iraq in 2006. He initially cooperated with George W. Bush, but continued working closely with Iran and Syria. Later, Sunni groups would rise up against the Shia reign in Iraq, eventually resulting in the creation of the Sunni terror organization ISIS and their presence in both Iraq and Syria. To combat ISIS, Iran became increasingly in both Iraq and Syria both, setting up more Shiite militias modeled after Hezbollah, including new chapters of Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria, and the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). Occasionally, the U.S. would back the Iranian proxies in order to drive ISIS out of the contested regions.94

Thus, when the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, in which the people of Syria tried to overthrow unpopular Shia dictator Bashar al-Assad, Iran already had a stable brigade of proxy militias waiting to expand throughout Syria in support of Assad. Like with Lebanon, in which Iran helped to thoroughly change the demographics of the country, so to in Syria has Iran been altering the country’s demographics, this time through bringing into the country an influx of tens of thousands of Shiite fighters from different groups across Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The Syrian Civil War has allowed Iran, along with their Russian support, to establish a strong Hezbollah regime along with other proxies. As the current Ayatollah Ali Khomeini gloats in regards to the past several American administrations, “yes, the region’s geopolitical map is undergoing a fundamental transformation, but not to the benefit of the United States…it has changed in favor of the resistance.”95

Iran in the Palestinian Territories

Iran, in their primary mission to destroy Israel, has spent the past several decades backing Islamist terror groups in the Palestinian Territories devoted towards Israel’s destruction, explicitly with the aim of sabotaging any possible peaceful, two-state solution.

Iran’s first Palestinian partnership in the early 1980s was with the terror organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), whose manifesto rejects “any peaceful solution to the Palestinian cause” and states that “the Jihad solution and the martyrdom style” are “the only choice for liberation.”96  The Sunni PIJ began in Egypt as an even more radical offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and was founded by Fathi Shikaki, a man who wrote a book on the successes of the Ayatollah Khomeini and proposed Shiite-Sunni unity for the cause of destroying Israel.97 However, after the PIJ tried to assassinate Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, they were expelled and relocated to Gaza, where Israel too expelled the PIJ leadership. As a result, the PIJ relocated to Lebanon, much like the PLO did from Jordan in the past, and from there began working with Hezbollah, where Iran began providing them with weaponry, military training, and funding. By the year 2000, Iran began incentivizing PIJ attacks against Israel by paying millions of dollars in rewards, and in 2002 the PIJ’s leader, Ramadan Shallah, publicly met with current Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, where he declared that, “the Palestinian Islamic Jihad is another fruit of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fructuous tree.” Soon thereafter, the PIJ became one of the instrumental groups of the Second Intifada, resulting in Khameini increasing PIJ’s funding by 70 percent.98

In 1990, Iran began sponsoring a new Islamist terror organization who also stemmed from the Muslim Brotherhood - Hamas. Like the PIJ, Hamas’s founding charter of 1988 is devoted to rejecting peace, rejecting any two-state solution, murdering Jews in particular, and the destruction of Israel. “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” says the Hamas charter, “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”99 Likewise, Hamas’s charter features a quote from the Quran commanding that, “"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.””100

The specific reason that Iran began funding Hamas and PIJ was for them to disrupt the peace talks that began between Palestine and Israel in the 1990s. Iran began funding Hamas with the promise of $30 million a year and military training specifically to disrupt the Madrid Peace Conference - a conference held after the end of the Gulf War in 1990 that was meant to revive peace talks between Israel and Yasser Arafat, head of the PLO. Members of Hamas then, like the PIJ, then went to Southern Lebanon to begin training with Hezbollah and the IRGC. Iran then hosted an event for Hamas, PIJ, and other groups worldwide, entitled, “International Committee for Support of the Palestinian Intifada,” which focused on how to create a resurgence of violence against Jews and Israel with the aim of disrupting these talks.101

The Second Intifada

Despite Iran’s attempts at sabotaging the peace conferences of the 1990s that began in Madrid, American President Bill Clinton along with Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzchak Rabin, later, Ehud Barak, and PLO leader Yasser Arafat still negotiated the Oslo Accords to set a path for peace, beginning with mutual recognition of each other’s sovereignty. Come the year 2000, Clinton orchestrated what should have been a historic moment - the Camp David Summit - which would have created an official two-state solution, providing Arafat with nearly all that he demanded during the preceding intense negotiations.

Instead, Arafat rejected the Camp David two-state solution and joined forces with the radical Iranian-backed Islamist groups - Hamas and PIJ - to launch the Second Intifada, a wave of terror attacks and suicide bombings across Israel, ensuring that the two-state solution could not materialize. The Second Intifada was spearheaded by Yasser Arafat - who initially denied involvement but was later found to be its chief instigator - and then orchestrated and executed by several terror organizations that were traditionally rivals but worked together for the intifada.102 These groups included: the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was the new structure of Palestinian governance brokered during the Oslo Accords and still run by Arafat; the political party Fatah within the PA, of which Arafat was the head; the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a Fatah terror organization; and then the two Iranian-backed terror organizations, Hamas and the PIJ, who had traditionally been enemies with the PLO, but who came together to sabotage any chance of a two-state solution materializing.103

Arafat found a public pretense to reject the historic summit, but a different story emerged behind closed doors. As recounted by Mosab Hassan Yousef - whose father was a founder of Hamas, who himself was a member of Hamas, and who was present for many an important Hamas and PA meeting - Arafat had never been serious about a two-state solution, preferring the fame, money, and social accords that came from his role as a “resistance fighter.” As such, Hamas and the PA engaged in extensive planning to initiate and prolong the Second Intifada. Yousef, for example, tells of the morning when Secretary General of Fatah, Marwan Baghouti, came to his father’s door and explained that, “Sharon is scheduled to visit the Al-Aqsa Mosque tomorrow, and the PA believes this is a good opportunity to launch an uprising.” And so did the PA and Hamas find a reason to launch the Second Intifada and officially end proposals for a two-state solution.104

Israel’s De-Occupation of Gaza

In 2005, at the behest of George Bush along with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel once again tried to take historic action and give “land for peace;” this time, Israel unilaterally removed all of their settlers and military from Gaza, granting what so many current Western activists claimed to want - an end to the “occupation” and a “free Palestine.” This seemed feasible since Arafat had passed away in 2005, and both Washington and Israel had come to regard him as the primary obstacle to establishing a Palestinian state. Unfortunately, Iran was waiting in the wings to prop up Hamas and assure that no Palestinian state could emerge.

Gaza held elections in 2006, where Hamas, as lead by the recently-assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, won the popular vote. But Hamas did not want to lead a democratic and sovereign Palestine, they wanted to lead a “one state” that requires the destruction of Israel, as is outlined in their charter and is the reason behind Iran’s funding. Thus, the newly ascendant Hamas immediately began a campaign of violence, both internally against rival Palestinian factions and externally, against Israel. When Hamas fully took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, Iran increased Hamas’s funding to $300 million annually, in addition to increasing training, weaponry, intelligence, instructions on making one’s own weapons, and other material goods that allowed Hamas to main total control.

While a Haniyeh-led Hamas was supposed to form a unity government with Fatah, Hamas’s first course of action was to jail, torture, and kill all of their Fatah political rivals within Gaza, and anyone else not in alignment with their specific Islamist vision for Gazan society. One can read first-hand accounts from Gazan political dissidents of the torture and public brutality that they experienced under the new Hamas regime, such as in this article by Palestinian dissident Hamza Howidy.105 The Palestinian Independent Commision for Citizens Rights, founded by Arafat in 1993, and now known as the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR), found that over 600 Palestinians were killed due to the infighting between Hamas and Fatah between 2006 and 2007, with many more killed and tortured in the years following the initial election. All Fatah members of the preliminary “unity” government were killed and their houses looted and destroyed.106 Amnesty International too recounts the various stories of brutality that Hamas reigned down upon the Gazan people. One such story is that of Atta Najjar, a former Gazan, Fatah police officer who had a mental disability, and who was arrested and tortured by Hamas for five years before being executed from his jail cell during another conflict in 2014. ““There were marks of torture and bullet shots on his body. His arms and legs were broken… his body was as if you’d put it in a bag and smashed it… His body was riddled with about 30 bullets. He had slaughter marks around his neck, marks of knives… And from behind the head – there was no brain. Empty… It was difficult for us to carry him… His bones were smashed. They broke him in the prison,” said Najjar’s brother, who retrieved the body from al-Shifa hospital morgue on 22 August 2014.”107

When Hamas seized power in the recently de-occupied Gaza, the Guardian reported that “The Hamas victory is widely seen as a boost for Iran and Syria, which have supported the militants, and a painful reversal for the pro-western regimes in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which worry about the Iranian government's meddling in Iraq and Lebanon, as well as Palestine.” The unrest in Gaza also lead to increase political violence in the West Bank, which was technically run by the PA and their leader Mahmoud Abbas, yet is overrun with gangs affiliated with Hamas and PIJ. The reign of Palestinian terror gangs deeply worried border states such as Egypt and Jordan, themselves subject to Palestinian assassination attempts decades earlier. “Things have never been so bad," said one senior Arab diplomat.”108

Iran and October 7th

October 7th, 2023 and its immediate aftermath were largely positive for the alliance of Iran, Russia, and China.

Since Iran was backing Sunni, rather than Shiite, proxy organization, the ensuing war may have had the effect of facilitating regional pan-Islamic sentiment whereby many people came to see Iran as a champion of all Muslims rather than as a bully solely for Shiite Muslims. Iran’s incitement of pan-Islamism is essential for their main pursuit of a regional Islamic theocracy. After October 7th, Iran gained the confidence of many nations globally by showing that they and their proxies were capable of evading American and Israeli intelligence, and discovering vulnerabilities in Israel’s impressive defense system. Then-Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi spoke directly on the phone to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia for the first time, while other Iranian government officials traveled the region and beyond to position themselves as important figures in the ongoing affairs.109

Moreover, October 7th strengthened Iran in immediate regional politics by disrupting the ongoing normalization efforts between Saudi Arabia and Israel - efforts that are seen as part of why Hamas chose that time to plan their attack. By disrupting normalization, Iran’s geopolitical goal of de-legitimizing and ultimately destroying Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East was strengthened. From an economic perspective, disrupting Israeli-Saudi normalization would block future trade between the two and other countries who then too would have normalized trade with Israel, thus hurting the new trade networks that Iran, China, and Russia have been trying to facilitate.110

Furthermore, October 7th led directly to an increase in global violence and political instability, which has facilitated Iran, Russia, and China’s goal of undermining Western power. Various ideological extremist sects around the globe felt emboldened to act up in light of the Hamas campaign, including even anti-Iranian organizations like ISIS, whose rates of violence skyrocketed. So too did uprisings elsewhere in the Global South, including in South America and Africa.111

One of Iran’s ultimate goals in supporting Hamas and October 7th was for Hamas to take over both of the Palestinian Territories - Gaza and the West Bank. As stated earlier, China attempted to facilitate this goal on behalf of Iran by mediating a reconciliation of Palestinian factions during the April 2023 “Beijing Declaration.” Iran thus expected that Adam Haniyeh would become the leader of a unified Hamas-run Palestine with the PA still doing the grunt work of governance. Iran would have greatly benefited had this arrangement materialized, as then Iran would nearly completely surround Israel at almost every bordering territory - Gaza, the0- West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen (as a southern maritime border). However, Israel assassinating Haniyeh, let alone the head of Lebanon, Nasrallah, created a tremendous setback to that primary agenda.112 From this we see how Iran, alongside China and Russia, has been working to actively become the dominant power in the Middle East in pursuit of a multipolar world.

Conclusion

Russia, China, and Iran have embarked on a series of multi-decade long imperialist quests that have recently coalasced into a singular ideology of “multipolarity,” giving license for each country to support the other’s desired conquests. Under the theory of multipolarity, China has the right to Taiwan, Russia has the right to Ukraine, and Islamic clericalism as led by Iran has the right to Israel. Of these three, only Israel has become the subject of hatred amongst Western progressives, who, like the Iranian anti-Shah protestors of the 1970s, seem duped into believing that left-wing sentiment is one and the same with “deconstructing the West,” and find in the stated aggrievements of radical Islamists - coupled with extensive propaganda dating back nearly a century - a particularly compelling “anti-Western” narrative. To take this position requires ignoring the entire history of the ways in which foreign powers have used Palestinian people by hijacking their governance to fight their own anti-Western proxy wars, be it the Soviet Union using the PLO to fight a proxy war against the U.S. by attacking Israel, or now, Iran using Hamas and PIJ to try to block peace in order to establish their caliphate. It also requires ignoring the tremendous antisemitic zealotry that is the unabashedly self-professed main motivation by groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, who the West will still cast as “resistance” while finding a way to justify or minimize their actual hateful words.

In Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt identifies that a fundamental component of European antisemitism is affiliating Judaism with the State. Due to the long history of Jews needing the assurance of foreign states for their safety and acceptance when relocating as refugees, or due to the “privileges” that a small number of Jews would be granted by the state prior to when Jews had universal European citizenship, Arendt claims that in the European mind, when sentiment turns against the “State,” it turns against the “Jews,” just as it did during the Pan-Nationalisms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus, it may be that as anti-American sentiment grips the current progressive mind, the old virus of antisemitism reemerges, casting the Jews once more as allies of the state and thus as enemies to the rightful populist coalitions rising up against the state. Regardless, the ideology of multipolarity - and in it, the rejection of the existence of Israel as a sovereign Jewish nation in the Middle East - is one that has become the new imperialism and anti-minority movement of our time.

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“Plato demands that the philosophers should become kings; he does not demand that philosophy should become the rule…”

“The quest for knowledge implies that in all cases where sufficient evidence is lacking, assent must be withheld or judgment must be suspended. Now, it is impossible to withhold assent or to suspend judgment in matters of extreme urgency which require immediate decision…”

- Leo Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” 1948.

Edmund Burke, often thought of as the 18th century father of conservatism who argued for reform over revolution, would most likely agree here with the above Straussian insight with the need for a Philosopher King, not a Philosophy Kingdom. Burke argued that creating a governance of pure “reason” lacked empirical evidence and would undo the guidance and order, even the ability to take political and social action, that centuries of refining tradition has provided our individual civilizations. That is not to say he was against incorporating some of the fruits of philosophical endeavors such as the Enlightenment into governance - he did, after all, support the American Revolution, seeing in it essentially a reform movement that would refine and further the virtues of English legal traditions. He just did not think that tradition should be supplanted by philosophical utopianism.

I think a rephrasing or addendum to Burke’s defense of tradition, as drawn from these Strauss quotes, is that society needs “the arbitrary,” not just “reason.” Let us take age of consent laws, for example. What is the difference between the ages of 17 and 18? Nothing that we can fully explain with reason. But we need the arbitrary, such as this a-rational, tradition-based concept of adulthood, for society and the polity to function. To get stuck on reason and rationale would be to infinitely suspend judgement and execution.

In the essay my above quotes are pulled from, Strauss contrasts the concepts of Reason and Revelation, seeing in the origins of philosophy a quest for truth beyond revelation - instead, philosophy demands demonstration. Philosophy entails questioning the rationale of our traditions and beliefs, but to Strauss, philosophers must curtail themselves from absolutely undermining tradition and belief, as without the law and order facilitated by belief, the philosopher would not have the freedom to philosophize. Strauss thus points to the nuances of Plato’s writing, showing that Plato calls for a king who is able to philosophize, but not impose the outcomes of his philosophical deliberations on the polity. Like Burke, Strauss’s interpretation of Plato seems to be that the role of philosophy in politics should be one of measured but restrained guidance so as to not cripple the polity’s foundations and ability to function.

The above Leo Strauss ideas have me thinking about the internal shape of the zealous political ideologies of today. On the left, I think we are seeing an increasing call for a Philosophy Kingdom, not simply a Philosopher King. Throughout my own experiences on the far-left, both socially and professionally while in graduate school or with friends in academic and public interest spaces, I see outright contempt for the notion of reform over revolution, and a belief that being “correct“ based on philosophic reason (say, invoking terms such as neoliberalism, cis-heteronormativity, white supremacy, liberation, etc) gives license to any form of social or political action that “resists” the above philosophic-ish concepts. Perhaps, as we have the term “scientism,” here would be a good place to introduce the term “philosophistism,” which would also serve to highlight the sophistry into which it is so easy for political philosophy to descend.

On the social conservative far-right, we can see the opposite - a political faction that does not want the Philosopher King nor the Philosophy Kingdom, but the Natural Law King and the Natural Law Kingdom. Or, perhaps to be more Straussian in my phrasing and implications, the social conservative far-right could be the Cleric King and the Kingdom of Revelation. Certainly, foreign governments and alliances are already actively pursuing their ambition for tradition-ruled Kingdom over the reason Kingdoms of the West, from Hungary to Iran. However, the Kingdom of Revelation also holds wide appeal in some Western social conservative far-right spaces, such as within “trad” proponents. There is nothing wrong with a personal preference for traditional gender roles, or even thinking that traditional gender roles and family structures are generally a social good that should be incentivized and afforded status. But too often, the internet “trad” movements take what could be a balanced approach to advocating for the role of tradition, and instead, turn it into a theater to fight what they see as the meaninglessness and lack of fulfillment in the philosophic vision of the increasingly mainstream far-left.

Some of our new generation of “trad” social conservatives - a form of social conservatism different than the Religious Right of years past in being less devout, but pragmatically embracing religion via orthopraxy - have motivations that call to mind one of Strauss’s earlier works, “German Nihilism,” that he delivered as a lecture at the New School for Social Research in 1941. In it, Strauss asks of us to recognize the role that utopian left-wing academics played in creating the conditions that gave rise to National Socialism. He argues that there was a general dissatisfaction amongst much of the youth who saw a life based on production and consumption for self-preservation to be meaningless, and the communist and idealist visions being taught by the professoriate to be part and parcel of the meaninglessness of modern life. Learning of no other philosophic alternative, academia being hijacked by one particular ideology, many students simply turned to the opposite. If the highest virtue of the academic left entailed equality and comfort for all, these young “German nihilists” made their highest virtue the virtue of militarism, leading to an outlet in National Socialism.

I only bring this up not because I think that internet “trad” social conservatives are akin to Nazis - far from it. I bring this up because I think it is an example of how ideological extremism begets ideological extremism. We have seen before and we will see again how a social and political commitment to a utopian Kingdom of Philosophy can provoke an opposite Kingdom of Revelation - that is, a kingdom of amplifying and militarizing the arbitrary pillars of tradition, law, and order in an attempt to restore meaning and guidance. Yet each reactionary vision of governance misses the true call of governance that Strauss would argue is present in the vision of the classical philosophers - to facilitate a life of eudaimonia, the good life, one that is not merely safe and comfortable, nor a life of always taking risks in the name of excellence and higher causes, but enriched via discovering and practicing the virtues and with that, the freedom of thought and association that can allow the polis and the individual to flourish.

In our age of technology, I believe that moderating the impulse to fight ideological extremism with ideological extremism is our biggest challenge. In the 1950s, Hannah Arendt was already writing as much, showing that the bureaucracies and sciences of modernity was what created the conditions for the concept of “ideology” to even form, and from there, to become a totalizing force in our internal lives, our interpersonal relationships, and our politics. With social and digital media today, the chain of increasingly immaterial and extreme ideological responsa seems less likely than ever to break.

I believe for the moment that what we need now is not the Philosopher King nor the Cleric King, but a King who can best do the work both of the philosopher and the theologian, who can understand the human need for, and guidance found in, both reason and revelation. We need a King whose balance of reason and revelation can use that to build a Kingdom not ruled by the principles of either, but who understands the human need for both. We need a Kingdom in which - with balance between both reason and revelation - the individual can find meaning, guidance, fulfillment, and does not feel threatened by an upset to status by the privileging of either one of these two guiding poles over the other.

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The above quotes could easily have been written by Columbia Professor Joseph Massad, who came under Congressional scrutiny when he referred to the October 7th attacks as “awesome”, but instead, these quotes are from decades earlier. In 1970, Soviet KGB and Central Committee employee Yuri Ivanov published these words and more in his best-selling book, Caution: Zionism! Ivanov frequently circles back to motifs from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and, in other works, Ivanov can be found citing from notorious antisemites like Henry Ford. Caution: Zionism! was one of the most influential books of the Soviet Union’s centralized anti-Zionist campaign, and a foundational source of “Zionology scholarship” in Soviet universities.

Statements like, “Zionism is Nazism” or “Israel is an apartheid state,” popularized by modern university students and social media, originated with Soviet Union’s propaganda efforts that ramped up after the loss of the USSR’s client states in the Six Day War. These propaganda efforts were spread domestically, internationally, and institutionally via Soviet foreign press and publishing, Soviet-sponsored resolutions at the United Nations, Soviet university departments, and more.

In the present day, this Soviet propaganda campaign still manifests in academia, the press, Middle Eastern political movements, and shapes our national dialogue. Any progress in the Israel-Palestine conflict will need to overcome this antisemitism disguised as mere “anti-Zionism” that has shaped our perception of current events and halted our ability to move forward.

Why Did the Soviet Union Promote Anti-Zionism?

Russia’s History of Middle Eastern Aspirations and Shifting Alliances

Russian aspirations towards the Middle East did not start with the creation of the Soviet Union. Rather, Russia’s interest and interference in the Middle East had been ongoing for hundreds of years. This aspiration started first with a desire to control the Turkish Straits - the Bosphorous and Dardanelles - and later to have access to Middle Eastern oil. For hundreds of years, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire fought over their borderlands for access to the Turkish Straits, as the Straits connect the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, and would help with both military ventures and trade into Africa, India, and other places around the world. As such, control of the Turkish Straits was a central component of Russia’s involvement in Ottoman Wars, World War I, World War II, the postwar order, and the Cold War.

In the immediate postwar era, the USSR sought to ally with the non-Arab Middle East in order to achieve their geopolitical aspirations. Tel Aviv University historian Yaacov Ro’i documents the trajectory of Soviet Middle Eastern policy from its initial non-Arab strategy to its alignment with Arab and pan-Arab nationalisms in his book, From Encroachment to Involvement: a Documentary Study of Soviet Policy in the Middle East, 1945 - 1973. The USSR had initially backed Israel’s creation, seeing multiple opportunities in backing Israel: Israel was a socialist country and thus the USSR assumed Israel would be an ally, and the USSR believed that supporting Israel would undermine British and American influence in the Middle East. The USSR also put a military presence in northern Iran and otherwise tried to gain control of the Persian Gulf, tried to force Turkey to relinquish control of the Straits, seemed to meddle in the Greek Civil War, and supported Azerbaijani separatists as part of their aim of controlling Iranian oil, among other endeavors . Overall, the USSR specifically aimed at the non-Arab nations since, in the immediate postwar period, the Arab nations were still relatively pro-British and anti-USSR. After all, it was the British who supported the Arab revolts against the Ottoman Empire and set up many of the ruling kingdoms.

When the USSR first started reaching out to the Arab world, the Arab nations were apprehensive and unresponsive. The USSR could not provide economic and military aid to the Middle Eastern countries in the way that Western powers could. However, the Arab world was also growing wary of the West for not supporting their desire for war with Israel, particularly after the 1949 Armistice agreements on borders between Israel and Jordan. Arab states’ uncertainty about the USSR began to change in 1953 after Stalin died, and the new leadership in Russia became more insistent on partnering with the Arab world, while simultaneously, Egypt became more cautious of the United States for initiating defense pacts in the Middle East at the Soviet borders. As such, the USSR and Egypt made agreements regarding military and economic aid, and the United States retracted Egyptian aid as a result, thus allowing the USSR - now under premier Nikita Khrushchev - to ramp up their support and alliance with Egypt.

By 1958, Egypt, now under President Gamal Nasser, and Syria - wary about internal opposition groups like the growing Ba’ath party - formed a union known as the United Arab Republic (UAR). During this time, the USSR’s relationship to Egypt was up in the air. Russia had also allied with Iraq, who the UAR was at odds with, and Egypt and Syria began to prosecute communists internally, while improving their relationship with the United States and referring to the USSR as “imperialists.” Yet when Iraq began turning on its internal Communist Party members and the Iraqi Kurdish civil war broke out, the USSR and Egypt renewed their relationship. Meanwhile, Syria left the United Arab Republic - the UAR now simply consisting of Egypt - and the UAR then declared itself a Marxist Leninist socialist polity. By the early 1960s, a civil war broke out in Yemen, and the USSR and Egypt sent about 70,000 troops to help the socialist rebels against Yemen’s monarch - an expenditure of force and money that later hurt their access to resources in the Six Day War, but that cemented the Egyptian-Soviet alliance. After this series of events, the USSR and the Arab states, particularly as headed by Egypt, grew more entwined.

The Lead-Up to the Six Day War and a Turning Point in Russia’s Attitude Towards Israel

By 1964, the Soviet Union and the Arab states of the Middle Eastern were largely allied with one another. At the First Arab League Summit of 1964, the USSR along with 14 other Arab nations - including Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and Syria - made a common cause of casting Israel as a symbol of Western imperialism, and agreed on fighting Israel as a common goal. The summit then continued on to discuss the right time to attack Israel. Nasser proposed that rather than starting with military encroachment, they could begin with other steps towards ramping up hostilities. The machinations that Nasser proposed at the First Arab League Summit directly lead to the Six Day War, such as the Headwater Division Plan - a plan to violate a 1955 treaty over Israel’s water supply that instead diverted a significant source of that supply to the Jordan River. At this same summit, the Arab nations, but particularly President Nasser of Egypt - helped to form an organization called the Palestinian Liberation Organization - or the PLO - not with the intention of creating a separate Palestinian state, but with the intention of creating a sole Palestinian state in place of Israel. Thus, the creation of the Palestinian cause in the 1960s became part and parcel of the USSR’s causes.

In the years preceding the Six Day War, several more monumental changes occurred in the Middle East and with the USSR. A coup in Syria ushered in a new “Neo Ba’ath” regime that tried to institutionalize the CPSU - the Communist Part of the Soviet Union - as the organizing principle of their regime. Rewarding this newfound political alignment, Egypt and Syria renewed their relationship with one another and created a defense pact in November of 1966. The Syrian-Egyptian defense pact after both countries had institutionalized Soviet communism into their own governments became yet another a prime force behind the Six Day War.

Significantly, in May of 1967, the USSR provided misinformation to Egypt, telling them incorrectly that Israeli troops were concentrating at the Syrian border. Whether this was purposeful or a mistake is still a matter of debate amongst today’s historians, with some historians insisting that instigating war was the USSR’s intent behind providing false information, and other historians attributing human error to this false information. Regardless, Egypt began mobilizing at their shared border with Israel under a false belief about Israel mobilizing to enter Syria, leading Israel to strike preemptively as it appeared that Egypt was preparing to attack Israel. Thus started the Six Day War. Prior to the Six Day War, Egypt militarily occupied Gaza, refusing to annex Gaza and keeping the Arab population of Gaza from traveling into Egypt or obtaining Egyptian citizenship due to the belief that this population would be used to instead take over Israel. Similarly, prior to the Six Day War, Jordan had militarily occupied the West Bank with a similar tactic and agenda. After the Six Day War, Israel captured Gaza, the West Bank, and other territories that had been used by the hostile neighboring nations as strategic areas from which to launch attacks. The land capture of 1967 would later become a focal point of the USSR’s international propaganda against Israel, labeling the Six Day Was as a “war of aggression,” conveniently ignoring their own role in causing the war or the reasons behind Egypt and Jordan’s military occupation of the territories.

When Israel won the Six Day War, the USSR felt that their reputation in the Middle East and abroad was deeply tarnished. After all, Israel was but one small state, yet the client states of the Soviet Union, supposed world superpower, lost. Thus, the USSR changed tactics. No longer did the USSR focus primarily on providing direct military aid and intelligence to their Arab allies in their joint cause of upending Israel. Now, the USSR added a new theater to this war: propaganda. The USSR’s new weapon of choice was to de-legitimize Israel in the eyes of the world.

Jews Fleeing from the Soviet Union: Another Motivation for the USSR to invent, “I am not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist.”

Arab alliances and the Six Day War is not the sole reason that the USSR began to so heavily propagandize against Israel. The Jewish population of the Soviet Union was emigrating en masse to Israel due to the antisemitism of the Communist regime. There are several major events that precipitated such concerns, but they were hardly alone in the atmosphere of terror and instability under which many Soviet Jews lived. One such even was the “Doctor Plot.” During this episode in Soviet history, a rumor began that a group of largely Jewish doctors in the Soviet Union were plotting to murder high level Soviet politicians. As a result, the doctors were dismissed from their jobs, arrested, and tortured for confessions. Around the same time, the notorious “Slansky Trials” occurred, in which Jewish Communist party officials in the Soviet bloc were accused of being “Trotskyists” and having secretly been at “Zionist meetings” with American President Truman in a plot to overthrow the USSR. Jews across the Soviet bloc were let go of their positions, eleven of the accused Jewish communist party members were executed, three sentenced to life in prisons. With this on top of mass Jewish poverty and antisemitism at all levels of Soviet society, Jews of the Soviet bloc were rightly fearful of their futures and began mass emigrating to Israel. As such, and under ongoing threat throughout the existence of the Soviet bloc, the USSR was inspired to demonize Israel, both to propagandize to the Jews at home, and to try to salvage their reputation abroad by starting the now oft-repeated phrase, “we are not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist.”

How did the Soviet Union Spread Anti-Zionism? The Russian Domestic and International Propaganda Apparatus

The Soviet Union had an extensive propaganda apparatus, with a centralized agenda and a strict approach as to how “news” should operate. Professor of political science at University of Haifa, Baruch A. Hazan, documents this extensive propaganda network in his book, Soviet Propaganda: A Case Study of the Middle East Conflict. Starting in the 1920s, the Soviet Union created the Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop). By 1966, this was reorganized into the Department of Propaganda. The USSR’s Politburo would create the policy aims, which then the Department of Propaganda would disseminate. There were multiple agencies that created the propaganda for dissemination.

The propaganda apparatus of the Soviet Union operated according to principles of journalism that Vladimir Lenin had espoused. As Lenin said, “A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer.” Lenin likewise insisted that there is no such thing as “objectivity,” and so the aim of a journalist is to help explain to the audience the events in question from a perspective of partiinost - a phrase akin to party-mindedness. The agencies and instruments that created propaganda included: TASS (the Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union), the Novosti publishing house (also called A.P.N.), the Foreign Press, Radio Moscow, a university called the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University to train foreign students in Marxist-Leninist and Soviet ideology and analysis (also where Mahmoud Abbas, current president of the Palestinian Authority, did his Ph.D.), and more.

TASS was an official agency of the Soviet government. It started in 1917 and by 1973, had offices in 115 countries. TASS’ former director, Nikolay Palgunov, reiterating Leninist perspectives on journalism, said that it is not enough for the news to report merely facts; no “simple photograph.” Instead, it must,

“disseminate information based on Marxist-Leninist theory…news must pursue a definite purpose…news is agitation by facts…”

In addition to journalism, TASS employees were often Soviet foreign intelligence agents as well. But as TASS was too obviously officially a part of the Soviet government, the Soviet Union created many other arms of their propaganda apparatus to give the illusion of impartial journalists operating abroad.

Novosti was one of the most extensive propaganda arms of the Soviet Union. They formed in 1961, officially without government ties, but in reality, the editorial board was largely staffed by those who completed KGB training programs and the publishing house was still under the complete control of the Department of Propaganda. Novosti published information about the USSR to foreign mass media and disseminated brochures, magazines, and other forms of media to the general international public. By the 1970s, according to Hazan, Novosti had activities in 110 countries, representatives in 82 countries, and relationships with 140 major international and national news agencies. Novosti was able to disseminate false or heavily propagandized stories to local media networks around the world, after which larger mainstream media channels would pick up such stories from their local colleagues and amplify them. In that way, the USSR achieved one of their biggest disinformation successes: in the 1980s, Novosti’s mechanisms got CBS television anchor Dan Rather to broadcast to millions of viewers the KGB-fabricated story that American scientists invented AIDS in order to kill African-Americans and gay people.

The Novosti stories were often false, but they operated by the premise - that we still see in use by propagandists like Hamas today - that truth and falsehood did not matter. Instead, they reasoned that by the time the “actual facts” were presented and a story retracted or rectified, it would still be believed and repeated by many, if not most, members of the public. Still today, people believe the claims of the Soviet “Operation Denver,” the disinformation campaign about the U.S. lab origin of AIDs.

The Foreign Press was another organization closely associated with Novosti. They created books, magazines, and newspapers for a foreign audience. Such magazines included Soviet Life, a monthly magazine in the US, Al-Magallya and ash-Shark, in Egypt, Soviet Weekly in England, Soviet News in Iran, and The Land of the Soviets in Syria. They also published not just national magazines, but magazines directed at whole language groups, like Anba Moscú in Arabic and Aube Noubvelle in French for Africa. They also published subject matter magazines in multiple languages, such as Soviet Military Review in English, French, Arabic, and Spanish. After the USSR’s humiliation of the Six Day War, they ramped up their anti-Zionist publications, publishing 75 books on Zionism in foreign languages between 1967-1973 alone, sometimes released in 3 or 5 languages simultaneously.

Radio Moscow was another major source of USSR foreign propaganda. By 1970, Soviet radio was in 70 foreign languages. Radio Moscow employed a large number of foreign speakers to best relate to the countries’ in which they were broadcasting - for example, in 1962, Moscow Radio’s Danish section claimed that half of those who worked there were Danes. Arab countries in specific also had a channel called “Radio University” that aired between 1958-1963, which would teach basic concepts of Marxism to an Arab audience.

Other forms of propaganda included various cultural agreements, such as the “Friendship Circles.” “Friendship Circles’” goal was to negotiate cultural initiatives abroad, such as museum exhibitions, scholarships, and to provide libraries, reading rooms, film showings, and otherwise to engage with intellectuals, a curious public, and politicians alike. By 1972, there were 60 Friendship circles abroad (Hazan, 103). Every four years, there would be an All-Union Conference that would meet to vote on the executives of the Union of Soviet Societies - the heads of the Friendship Circles. President of the Societies would have been been members of the CPSU Central Committee. At Friendship Circle ceremonies, various nations would praise the USSR in their joint-effort to “resist” Israel, such as Jordan’s Ambassador to the UN who thanked Moscow for its military assistance against Israel at a Friendship Circle ceremony.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, the USSR propagandized to foreign audiences through Soviet universities. International students generally studied at the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, which was founded in 1960 with the goal of “helping African, Asian, and Latin American countries train highly qualified specialists.” This was also the university at which Mahmoud Abbas did his Ph.D. Students were supposed to graduate recommending Soviet policies back to their native countries. For example, in 1974, a conference of Lebanese students was held in Moscow at which they advocated for “the Soviet-Arab Friendship as a contributing factor to progress in the Middle East.” When the USSR wanted to better increase their propaganda efforts towards one country in particular, they would open more admissions slots at Patrice Lumumba for students entering from that country. As an example, when the USSR was concerned about the increasingly positive relations between Egypt and the U.S. after 1974, they explicitly announced that they would be taking more students from Arab counties.

The Content of USSR Anti-Israel Propaganda: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the work of Nazi Émigrés to the Middle East and the Soviet Union

Jews in the Russian Empire: a short and violent history of imperialism, ethnic cleansing, child slavery and rape.

None of the Russian hatred towards Jews started with the Soviet Union. In fact, Jews were generally not allowed into the Russian Empire, being considered “Christ killers,” until the late 18th century, when Catherine the Great allied with Austria and Prussia and came to rule a number of areas of Poland. After the final partition of Poland in 1795, the number of Jewish residents in the Russian Empire exploded. However, Jews were not allowed to live in the interior of the country. Treated with deep suspicion, between the years of 1791-1915, the new Jewish residents of Russia were forced to live in exterior regions called “the Pale of Settlement.” The Pale, largely in eastern and southeastern Russia, extended through most of modern-day Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, and more. Historically, much of the Pale had been part of other reigning empires, such as the Ottoman Empire, Crimean Khanate, Polish Commonwealth, and others.

The Jews living in the Pale were subject to sporadic bouts of violent acts of ethnic cleansing, known as the Pogroms. During pogroms, Russians would massacre whole Jewish villages, destroy Jewish business, and rape Jewish women. Jewish boys as young as 12 years old could be conscripted into the czarist army as child soldiers and kept for 25 years. Furthermore, Jews were often forcibly relocated from one region to another depending on czarist interest. By the late 19th and early 20th century, 40% of the Jewish inhabitants of the Pale were so poor as to be living on foreign charity. Russians did not consider Jews to be Russian, and regarded them with suspicion.

The Foundational Work of Russian Anti-Zionism: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Thus, when the infamous forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was introduced to Russia by a czarist foreign agent, Russia was ripe for believing and acting upon the Protocols. The Protocols was first published in 1903 by Pavel Krushevan, a czarist publicist who lived in Paris, and based his fabricated “Protocols” on a text initially meant to be critical of Napoleon. In his forgery, Krushevan claims that he is exposing secrets that were supposedly spoken of at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, 1897.

As explained by historian William Korey in his book, Russian Antisemitism, Pamyat, and the Demonology of Zionism, the Protocols has essentially five major themes.These themes include (1) International Jewry, or Zionism, through the concept of the “chosen people,” aspires towards world domination; (2) this aspiration will be achieved through manipulating “the goyim cattle;” (3) the major form of world domination will come through control of the world banking system; (4) additionally, the Zionists own the press; (5) Zionists will infiltrate and manipulate “Masonic Lodges.”

The Protocols inspired a number of movements prior to the post-Six Day War Anti-Zionist campaign. First, under czarist rule in 1905, a proto-fascist group called the “Union of the Russian People” emerged, angered at Russia’s loss during the Russo-Japanese War. Some historians believe that this group and the movement it inspired directly influenced the creation of German National Socialism. At its core was, in Korey’s words, “vicious antisemitism.” Referred to as the “Black Hundreds,” it morphed in the 1920s and 1930s, using street violence, paramilitary formations, marches, distribution literature meant to incite anger - largely based on the Protocols, and even special dress codes like Yellow Shirts. This movement also overlapped with religious movements that saw Jews as the enemies of Christ, and thus they came to share a common cause of blood libel, onto which the “anti-Zionist” movement would easily attach itself.

As the Soviet Union grew, they molded this historical form Protocols-based antisemitism to conform to their own geopolitical aims. Politicians - when not outright advancing the claims that lead to more antisemitism, would also excuse antisemitism when questioned about it. For example, while visiting with a French parliamentary delegation, Soviet President and strident Syria and Egyptian ally Nikita Khruschev said of anti-Jewish discrimination,

“this is a complicated problem because of the position of the Jews and their relations with other peoples…Should the Jews want to occupy the foremost positions now, it would naturally be taken amiss by the indigenous inhabitants….it is understandable that this should create jealousy and hostility towards Jews.”

Later, such hostility vastly increased when, in 1959, Khrushchev launched a campaign against religion in general.

In August 1967, Russian antisemitism and Russia’s geopolitical interests finally coalesced into what Korey calls the “official demonology” of anti-Zionism. Shortly after Russia’s loss of the Six Day War, Yuri Ivanov - the KGB and Central Committee “specialist” on Israel (only transferred to cover Israel after his repeated issues with drunkeness while covering Africa) published an article called “What is Zionism” in a major and well-circulated paper. Zionism, Ivanov claimed, is a worldwide network of “Zionist organizations” that is “behind the scenes of the international theater.”

Additionally, the USSR did not win support in the United Nations for their first attempt to put pressure on Israel using a transnational organization. The UN at the time, contrary to Russia’s pressure, would not compel Israel to return strategic territories such Gaza and the West Bank that Israel had captured from Egypt and Jordan during the Six Day War. With this loss at the UN, the USSR began ramping up their search for a scapegoat, settling on amplifying the “Zionism controls international politics and media” trope across foreign and domestic press, as extolled by the Protocols and Yuri Ivanov.

In October 1967, a mass-circulated newspaper of the Young Communist League, Komsomolosky Pravda, described to readers that the Zionist enemy consisted of,

“an invisible but huge, mighty empire of financiers and industrialists”

a group of people for whom, “nationality is exploitation and whose God is the dollar.” The author in this edition of Pravda rattled off an astounding array of figures.

“The numbers of Zionists in America totaled twenty to twenty-five million (though there were but six million Jews in the U.S. at the time), 70% of American lawyers were Zionists; sixty-nine percent of physicists were Zionists “including those engaged in secret work on the preparation of weapons,” and forty-three percent of industrialists.”

But most strong, according to this article and as written about in the Protocols, were the Zionists in the media.

The Nazi Relationship to Russian Propaganda

Where did the above figures cited in a major Russian newspaper come from? It should be of no surprise to learn that this extraordinary series of numbers regarding powerful “Zionists” was published in 1957 at a publishing house in Cairo owned and operated by a Nazi emigre named Johannes von Leers, who adopted for himself the Arabic name of Omar Amin, and who had been an employee of Joseph Goebbels, the head of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. Von Leers, among with many other former Nazi zealots, had relocated to the Middle East and continued their campaign to demonize and wipe out Jews amongst countries they recognized as hostile to Judaism, regions that had indeed even allied with Hitler under the pact with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammed Amin al-Husayni, to attempt to bring the “Final Solution” into the Middle East. Historian at University of Maryland College Park, Jeffrey Herf, details more greatly throughout his body of work the relationship between Nazi Germany and violent antisemitism in the pan-Arab and pan-Islamist movements in the Middle East.

But former Nazis did not simply relocate to the Middle East. Others, such as the Nazi soldiers captured at the Battle of Stalingrad, chose to defect to the Soviet Union. The USSR had a particular affinity and acceptance of those who had been employed in Nazi propaganda, and hired them after they pledged to ally themselves to the USSR for employment in Russian propaganda. While Russian proto-fascists from the Black Hundreds may have inspired the creation of Nazism, now Nazism was having a direct affect on the nature and spread of Soviet antisemitic - nay, anti-Zionist - propaganda.

After 1967, many “anti-Zionist” publications with Protocols underpinnings - books, periodicals, “scholarly” works, children’s literature, cartoons, television, films, and so on - proliferated domestically and abroad. One popular book was called In the Name of the Father and the Son, by Ivan Shevtsov, which echoed much of the propaganda of the Nazi Era Der Sturmer. “Zionism,” a character in the novel, was accused of “secretly infiltrating all the life cells of the countries of the entire world…even…the international Communist workers movement.” As such, Shevtsov would refer to “Judas Trotsky (Bronshtein)” as a “typical agent of Zionism,” being sure to put Trotsky’s original last name in parentheses to remind readers of Trotsky’s Jewish origins. This book, like many others, would clearly draw from the Protocols in their description of the relationship between “Zionism” and “American imperialism.”

“You think that international Zionism is in the service of American imperialism,” wrote Shevtsov, “[but] For my part, I am convinced that this is the other way around. American imperialism constitutes the economic and military base of Zionism.”

Shetsov’s popular work was but one of many with motifs drawn directly from the Protocols.

Others Protocols-heavy works include the publications of Vladimir Begun such as his 1977 work Invasion Without Arms. In this, his thesis was that ”Jewish bankers” aspired to take “into their hands the most powerful propaganda apparatus- the mass media.”

“The ideological sources of Zionist gangsterism,” Begun would continue, “originated in the Torah…”

Additionally in 1979, an influential Soviet propagandist by the name of Valery Yemelyanov published another infamous book: De-zionization, this one published in Syria in the Al-Ba’ath newspaper, at the request of then-Syrian president Hazef al-Assad, father of the current dictatorial Syrian president and Putin-ally, Bashar al-Assad. Yemelyanov’s book was also issued by the PLO and distributed by them through their and Soviet propaganda circles at home, in the Middle East, and abroad in cities like Paris. This book presents a version of the Protocols “Masonic” conspiracy, one we hear less about in the contemporary West, but that is nevertheless still incorporated into ideologies and literature in the Middle East. In addition to the connections with Assad and the spread of Zionist Masonic conspiracy theories, Yemelyanov was also insistent that all Soviet Jews were “Zionist agents.”

As part of Yemelyanov’s political mission - he urged the CPSU Central Committee to incorporate a mandatory course of the “scientific anti-Zionism and anti-Masonry” in all major Russian institutions - schools, universities, the army, as well as the creation of such a “scientific” institute as an official government agency. His goals, similar to goals of many other conspiratorial Soviet antisemites, was realized in 1983 when the USSR created the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, (the AZCSP). To legitimize this committee, the Soviet government found “anti-Zionist Jews” to take part in the Committee, thus assuring that they could once again claim, “we are not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist.”

Internationalizing Anti-Zionism at the United Nations

The Soviet Union also used transnational bodies such as the United Nations to spread libel about Zionism. Their first attempt was in 1965, prior to the Six Day War, yet still a politically advantageous tactic in consolidating their relationship with the Arab states. When the UN Commission on Human Rights debated drafting an International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which specifically would condemn “racial segregation and apartheid,” The US attempted to add “antisemitism” to this draft, but the USSR proposed a separate article condemning antisemitism. Then, shockingly, when the USSR produced a draft for this second article, it read that states should

“condemn antisemitism, Zionism, Nazism, Neo-Nazism, and all other forms of the policy and ideology of colonialism, national and racial hatred…”

Thus, the first time that somebody tried to publicly equate Nazism with Zionism was a Soviet campaign at the United Nations to hijack an otherwise neutral and aspirational statement in order to make a political bid with Arab allies in the Cold War.

Worse, the person who proposed equating Nazism with Zionism was Soviet Ambassador Yakov Malik, a man known for his off-color “jokes” about Jews, and a man whose justification for equating Nazism with Zionism came from the Protocols usage of the term “chosen people.” As directly said by Malik,

“Mr. Tekoah [Israeli ambassador to the UN] was indignant at our parallel between Zionism and Fascism. But why not? It is all very simple: both are racist ideologies. The Fascists advocated the superiority of the Aryan race as the highest among all the races and peoples in the world…their (the “Zionists”) racist theory is the same. The Fascist advocated hatred toward all peoples and the Zionist does the same. The chosen people: is that not racism? What is the difference between Zionism and Fascism, if the essence of the ideology is racism, hatred toward other peoples? The chosen people. The people elected by God.”

This draft was rejected and widely viewed as absurd at the time.

This same Soviet Ambassador, Ambassador Malik, was known for his unabashed antisemitism. Having visited the Soviet Jewish autonomous zone of Birobidzhan, Malik commented on the tremendous poverty of the Jewish population therein. He informed others of his perspective on why there was so much Jewish poverty: “since the place had been reserved for Jews, there were no Russians to cheat.”

Unfortunately after 1967, the Soviet Union was more successful at the UN. In 1975, several months before the USSR’s next bid to internationally codify the “demonology of Zionism” into a resolution known as the “Zionism is Racism” resolution, Soviet publications ramped up agitation against Zionism both at home and abroad. The infamous antisemite Yuri Ivanov published one such compelling media analysis in support of the USSR’s 1975 UN resolution. In it, Ivanov quoted directly from Henry Ford to support his assertions. Henry Ford was a notorious antisemite who bought his local newspaper in order to create a column to espouse his Jew hatred, distributed all such issues for free at his car dealerships, published a book called The International Jew, reprinted and distributed copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and won an award from Hitler for his support. And it is this Henry Ford, from a March 8, 1925 editorial that Ford wrote for the New York Times, whom Ivanov quoted to express support of the Soviet Union’s 1975 resolution against Israel. Ivanov reprinted Ford saying,

“50 Jewish financiers who are richer than I am” and “who create war for their own profits” needed to be subject to public control (in this case, Ivanov is referring to the UN), as only then will “wars be eliminated.”

Thus in 1975, the USSR introduced another resolution to the UN to officially equate Zionism with Racism. After lobbying hard for UN support at their Cold War allies in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of South America, the Resolution this time passed, though it was widely regarded as disgraceful and antisemitic by the Western members of the United Nations. This resolution stayed in effect until the early 1990s, at the fall of the Soviet Union, when the new Russian government itself finally admitted to the antisemitism of the Soviet Union and the influences of the Protocols. At this point though, the damage had been done.

Soviet Academic Zionology: The “Scientific” Scholarship of “Anti-Zionism.”

The Soviet Union did not stop at institutionalizing anti-Zionism via transnational organizations and international press; instead, they also sought to give anti-Zionism academic legitimacy. To this end, they created a field of study known as “Zionology,” the supposed scientific study of Zionism. Of course, the supposed scholarship to support such study was negligible, highly distorted, and simply based on the voluminous canon of anti-Zionist propaganda already produced under the direction of Politburo and the Department of Propaganda. Zionology was eventually mandated by the Central Committee of the Soviet Union. In 1972, the USSR issued a directive to mandate such studies as part of “further measures to fight anti-Soviet and anti-communist activities of international Zionism.” As a result, the prestigious Soviet Academy of Sciences established a permanent department for the scientific study of Zionism at the Academy’s Institute of Oriental Studies and incorporated such departmental study with the Patrice Lumumba school.

Some of the “scholarly” anti-Zionist works introduced new themes to downplay claims that their work was anti-semitic, promoting the concept that there are good Jews who are simply being “manipulated” by “Zionist propaganda.” One such article was published in the prestigious Soviet Journal of the Historical Profession, entitled: “Social Democracy, Zionism, and the Middle East Question,” by propagandist L. Dadiani, featuring other writings from the famous antisemite Trofim Kichko. Dadiani proposed that while some Jewish people and socialist allies still argued that Zionism was a labor and socialist movement, in reality, such claims were meant to “brainwash Jewish youth in various countries.”

The theme of good Jews being “manipulated” carried on into many other works, such as in the academic article “The Victims of Zionist Deception” by V. Vladimirsky, who espoused sympathy for the Soviet Jews who were “lured” to Israel by “lying propaganda” and the “subversive activity of world Zionism.” Sadly, the claim that good Jews are being “deceived to support Israel” is still an ongoing claim in today’s politics. For example, on the popular social media site Reddit, a large feminist subreddit with nearly a million members pinned this post that claims, “Jewish grief and collective generational trauma (being victims of genocide and racism themselves) is being exploited and weaponized to justify more violence.”

In 1977, the Soviet Academy of Sciences published what became the definitive work of Zionology, entitled, International Zionism: History and Politics, composed of articles written by “scholars” from a variety of institutions, and trumpeted across international TASS media with glowing commentary. Once again, this work echoed the Protocols, reiterating that international Jewry aspired to world domination via the banking system and media. It did not much bother to differentiate between “Jew” and “Zionist,” as often propagandists would try to do, and singled out the Rothschilds and a variety of Jewish-owned enterprises as promoters of Zionism. Unsurprisingly, this work had barely any scholarly citations, though did have several references. Three of the citations in this definitive academic work on Zionism included (1) The USA: Property and Power, by I.I. Beglov, (2) the mass-produced and popular work Caution: Zionism!, by Yuri Ivanov, and (3) a supplemental text with a few additional citations by Vladimir Bolshakov, an author who the New York Times would report on as being a promoter of Zionist anti-Communist conspiracy theories in the main Russian newspaper, Pravda.

The Bolshakov supplement cited from Middle Eastern “scientific research centers” that claimed to study “international Zionism.” One such center was the Palestine Research Center, which was established by the PLO in Beirut in 1965 and thrived with USSR funding. The other was the “Scientific Center of Palestinian Research” as part of the University of Baghdad. Papers cited in this supplement included those read at the International Conference on the Problems of Israel and Zionism, such as “The Near East in the Plans of Imperialism and Zionism,” written Yevgeny Yeseyev.

Yeseyev was an Arabist whose career began at the Soviet Embassy in Cairo in the 1950s. After his work in Cairo, he returned to the USSR in the 1960s and his work often plagiarized the work that came out the Cairo-based publishing house written about above, the publishing house run by Von Leers, the former employee of Nazi chief of propaganda Goebbels. Yeseyev continued his career by delivering lectures on the “dangers of International Zionism” at Soviet-sponsored conferences in Egypt and Baghdad, and in the 1970s, worked at the PLO-run Palestine Studies Center. He was also a prolific commentator and ardent supporter of the the 1975 Soviet-backed UN resolution to equate Zionism with racism.

Such authors and works as listed above were representative of the caliber of Soviet Zionology.

Mahmoud Abbas, Successor to Yasser Arafat and Current Head of the Palestinian Authority, Does his PhD in Soviet Zionology

Mahmoud Abbas based his Ph.D. on the anti-Zionist “scholarship” that was produced by the USSR, the Nazi-run publishing house in Cairo, and the PLO’s “Palestine Research Center” when he did his Ph.D. in the Soviet Union at the Patrice Lumumba University and the Institute of Oriental Studies. Izabella Tabarovsky - prolific journalist, former Research Fellow and current Senior Advisor at the Wilson Center - elaborates on what exactly was the basis for Abbas’ dissertation claims.

Abbas’ dissertation is entitled “The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-1945.” Considering just how frequently USSR propagandists would publish on this theme, it is clear that goal of his Ph.D. program was not original scholarship, but rather, the mass production of more sources of propaganda. From Abbas’ abstract, he states, “With the deepening of the crisis of capitalism in our time, the crisis of the ideology of Zionism and the inadequacy of its ideological concepts become increasingly obvious.” And in keeping with the “we are anti-Zionists, not antisemites” theme, Abbas explains that “the vast majority of Jews around the world…reject Zionist dogmas.” Instead, Abbas claims, “the natural and objective process of Jewish assimilation” would continue around the world.

The Zionologist “scholars” who Abbas cites in his dissertation include none other than the Henry-Ford citing Yuri Ivanov and his classic, Caution! Zionism. Another piece of Zionologist literature that Abbas cites from includes the anthology, The Ideology and Practice of International Zionism, which has three editors: (1) the above-mentioned Yevgeny Yevesyev, a descendent of the Goebbel’s school of propaganda and worker at the joint PLO-Soviet controlled Palestine Studies Center, (2) Yelena Modrzhinskaya, who was an intelligence officer under Stalin in London whose works included books such as the Poison of Zionism, replete with images of Jewish stars intermixed with dollar bills, and (3) Mark Mitin, who was born Jewish and served as the token “useful Jew” to deflect claims of anti-semitism.

The Palestine Studies Center is important to Abbas’ work as his dissertation is filled with citations to literature published from this center, which is perhaps no surprise as he was the successor to the head of the PLO, Yasser Arafat. In 1978, another work published by the PSC included Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany. Its author was Paris Yahya (Glubb), the son of a British army officer who commanded Transjordan’s Arab Legion between 1939-1956, and later associated himself with the PLO and the PFLP, while reporting for American, British, and Arab media. He had no background in Jewish history, did not know the history of the Holocaust nor World War II, and yet his largely fabricated and distorted piece on the supposed relationships between Zionists and Nazis became another part of Abbas’ work. Thus, the background to Abbas’ dissertation, a background endorsed and often funded by the USSR, was largely produced by two recognized terrorist organizations with no pretense at knowledge of Hebrew, Yiddish, or Jewish history.

In 2020, 40 years after Abbas’ dissertation the Institute of Oriental Studies itself published an article where they state from the early 1970s, “the Soviet party leadership set itself the goal of “fighting the Zionist ideology,” and such studies were “largely guided and controlled by state structures.” The IOS goes on to admit to be being instructed to approach Zionism as “an extreme expression of reactionary bourgeois-nationalist ideology,” and present Israel as an “aggressor.” Yet, their scholars had never visited Israel and there were no Hebrew or Yiddish language specialists among them. Decades too late, with the fabrications and slanders of decades of Soviet-directed “academia,” these tropes are now a part of mainstream culture on the left, with today’s college professors often repeating the ideological fabrications of a Cold War strategy.

The Effects of Soviet Anti-Zionism Today

Unfortunately, the Soviet’s wide-scale campaign to entrench anti-Zionist propaganda within the Middle East, transnational organizations, media, and academia has longstanding ramifications still today.

The Novosti Strategy: Publish False Information; Retract it Only When People Will Unwaveringly Still Believe It

Terror organizations across the Middle East like Hamas and Fatah, and the general strategy of the Russian-Iranian-Chinese axis of press and social media, now follow the Novosti propaganda guidelines. Today, these countries and organizations have followed the strategy of distributing copious amounts of false information, and only publish a “retraction” once these ideas are firmly entrenched in public perception. Hamas, under their “Ministry of Health”, will frequently fabricate numbers - numbers that have been shown to not occur naturally, numbers that do not differentiate between civilians and combatants, or “friendly fire,” and numbers that are later even shown by allied institutions like the UN to be incorrect. But by that point, months later, it does not matter - even politicians and academics still repeat the fake and dis-proven numbers. Similar Hamas propaganda occurs regarding even claims of catastrophes and causation - the al-Shifa hospital bombing hoax is one such example, or claims of a “famine” that even the UN is later forced to retract, stating in their most recent report that “…the available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring.” Even the Hamas run Gaza Ministry of Health admits that their original account of casualties was incorrect, reducing their numbers by 10,000. Nevertheless, not only do people still take the claims made by Hamas and social media accounts at face value, but it simply does not matter when truth is revealed - the Soviet propaganda technique of releasing false information and only correcting it later is working, persisting in empty slogans such as “genocide” that were created based on the above-mentioned falsehoods and more.

State-Endorsed Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation: This Time, with Social Media

And of course, with roughly 100 years of expertise in spreading foreign propaganda as part of official government strategy, Russia continues to do so, this time aided by the ease of social media manipulation. In 2016, American liberals were ready to - correctly - identify that Russia was using social media to agitate Americans towards radical political positions during the Trump campaign in order to destabilize the country and cause disunity. This discovery became a major cornerstone of cultural dialogue and concern. Unfortunately, those same liberals today are unwilling to admit that they too have been captured by Russian social media operations, even as reports have increasingly emerged on the prevalence of “pro-Palestine” bots hosted by Russia and China. The New York Times reports that State Department and cyber security officials claim that this social media disinformation campaign is the “largest they have seen,” yet it gets far less attention in mainstream media than did Russian disinformation during the Trump campaign and is largely untouched across liberal social media or in real life social or academic dialogue. Unfortunately, liberal voters who are repeating Russian and Chinese disinformation and who were the first to recognize foreign disinformation as a factor in the 2016 elections are unwilling to recognize it when they are the audience that has been captured by it.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Zionology, and Official Hamas Political Documents and Media

The founding charter of Hamas and the types of TV programming that airs in Gaza and other areas of the Middle East show that the influence of the Protocols and specific Soviet interpretations of the Protocols are still strong. The Hamas charter, such as in Articles 17 and 32, speak of the “Zionist” ploy to use “masonic lodges,” blames “Zionists” for all world turmoil going back to the French Revolution, and cites by name the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as a source in which to read more such information. Of course, the Hamas charter does not just stop at the masonic conspiracy theories that Westerners now find laughable, but include accusations that still have captured the far-left Western imagination, such as a supposed connection between Zionists and Nazism, as evidenced by the number of anti-Israel Western rioters holding posters with slogans like “Zionism = Nazism.”

Soviet Propaganda Aimed at Children; Now there is Hamas Propaganda Aimed at Children.

The Soviet tactic of distributing ideological anti-Zionist literature to children at home and abroad is unfortunately ongoing in regions that have inherited the legacy of Soviet propaganda techniques. For example, the children’s television show “Tomorrow’s Pioneers” that airs on Hamas’ Al Aqsa TV in Gaza shows children discussing how the only path forward is Jihad, and children discuss the virtues of spilling Jewish blood. Another infamous children’s show airing on Al Aqsa TV shows Farfour the Mouse, a play on Mickey Mouse, discussing with children how one must “annihilate the Jews” and martyr oneself. Hamas is not the only organization to air such children’s show, the issue is unfortunately endemic across the Middle East, such as recounted by Duke University professor and chaplain Imam Abdullah Antepli, a man devoted to fighting antisemitism and promoting Jewish and Muslim coexistence, who recounts his own experiences with antisemitic children’s literature growing up in Turkey in an interview with Bari Weiss, which can be listened to on her podcast.

Soviet Anti-Zionism and Academic Blood Libel

But the most looming and dangerous legacy of institutionalized Soviet Anti-Zionism is the effects today on academia, as the youth who graduate repeating such distortions enter into high-status, narrative-shaping professions. The Soviet policy of equating Zionism with all evils of the world, one that stems from other historical versions of blood libel, has become the academic norm. Israeli historian Nati Cantorovich relates that, in the Soviet Union,

“Zionism played a role of a bugaboo. In Africa, it was about South African apartheid and Zionism. In Latin America it was about American imperialism and Zionism. In Asia, it was Japanese Revanchism and Zionism.”

Today is no different, except that many Western academics have dropped some of the less-compelling-to-modern-audiences associations, such as discussing Masonic Lodges or Japanese Revanchism. Cantorovich’s analysis is similar to that of the late venerable Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of England. As Rabbi Sacks said in his video, “The Mutation of Antisemitism,” antisemitism has historically functioned by defining Jews as the opposite of whatever is the highest virtue of the day. Thus,

“In the Middle Ages, it was religion. In post-Enlightenment Europe it was science: the so called scientific study of race. Today it is human rights.”

In the Middle Ages, Jews were viewed as “Christ killers,” and thus it would be wrong to not despise and isolate Jews. In the Enlightenment and Napoleonic eras leading up to the Holocaust, hatred of Jews was allowed because Jewish blood was “scientifically” impure, harming the countries in which Jews resided after the political decisions to grant Jews citizenship and allow them to live and work next to their Christian neighbors, and thus it was another moral imperative to expel or kill the Jews. And today, Jews are hated because they are “Zionists,” and “Zionist” is defined as the antithesis of our greatest value of the day: human rights.

Anti-Zionist Antisemitism Today: How Can We Interrupt this Ongoing Legacy of Soviet Propaganda?

Nobody in the history of hatred has considered themselves the “bad guy.” Hatred has nearly always emerged from zealous, righteous convictions - from fanatical certainty in one’s moral correctness. The Crusades were not motivated by a mob consciously thinking, “I just do not like Muslims and Jews,” it was motivated by a desire to reclaim land for God, the most noble of aims. The Salem Witch Trials were not motivated by men thinking, “I really do not like young women with a voice, who can I execute?” It was, again, motivated by righteous convictions. Those opposed to legalizing gay marriage, or those stripping women of their full range of reproductive health care options, do not think of themselves as the bad guys - they see themselves as defending traditional Western values, saving civilization, and saving babies. And those who proudly call themselves “anti-Zionist,” using “Zionist” as a slur, they too are convinced they are on the right side of history, that they are utterly morally correct, and as such, they can take whatever sort of action - “by any means necessary” - they see fit to implement their holy Crusade.

How can we stop this? This is worthy of a separate article, or Ph.D. dissertation or two. But in short, I think much of this needs to be addressed in today’s academia. The graduate admissions, networking, and faculty hiring pipelines have been hijacked by a social network of ideological uniformity and zealotry that needs structural intervention to diffuse. Courses on the history of hatred - not in terms of today’s identity-based analysis of hate, but more comprehensively, including the philosophical and psychological underpinnings of hate as stemming from righteousness, groupthink, and moral certainty, should be required as part of universities’ core curriculum, bringing us back to the post-World War II analyses that gripped the thinkers of the day.

And finally, I believe that we need to broaden the ways in which we teach about pre- and post-Napoleonic Jewish history, Middle Eastern Jewish history, antisemitism, and 20th century history. Unfortunately, much of today’s educational curricula regarding Judaism ignores the Soviet Union altogether, and universalizes the history of the Holocaust to be about a general lesson on intolerance instead of as a unique outcrop from a particular trajectory of Jewish history. Furthermore, education on Palestinian politics can be tempered by including in academic curricula the numerous thoughtful, brilliant Palestinian writers and researchers who are critical of the reign of extremism and who instead are open for dialogue - the leaders we should be uplifting as the voices that can bring peace, such as the writings of the Gazan native Ahmed Faoud Alkhatib, or the son of one of the founders of Hamas who later defected and works for peace with Israel, Mosab Hasan Yousef. While I do not agree with all that either says, that is another crucial lesson we must teach our youth: it is okay to disagree with people, and that does not make either side morally irredeemable. Reasonable and empathetic dialogue is of utmost importance to achieving peace. Righteous zealotry will only lead to more violence.

Until then, I hope that articles like this, and the many other authors who write on similar topics, are at least able to shed light on why approaching Middle Eastern conflicts through the lens of “anti-Zionism” is inherently antisemitic and stems from a dangerous and violent history.

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“Lived Experience” versus Reason

Something that has long annoyed me about the epistemics of identitarian wokeism is the insistence on argument via “lived experience,” i.e. testimony and confession. Logic, rationality, data, and the general precepts of Enlightenment-based liberalism and the scientific method have been summarily discarded by people who claim that an appeal to experience not only supersedes the above-mentioned means of knowledge, but that also the Enlightenment-derived methods of seeking knowledge are immoral, a relic of some of the original sins of modernity.

Appeal to identity and experience is sacred and taboo. If one claims an identity and makes a statement about it, anyone who tries to nuance the dialogue or disagree will be met not with reasoned argument back, but a righteous and rage-filled dismissal that one could dare “disagree with lived experience.” Claims of identity and of lived experience makes an argument untouchable - one must stand at a distance, in reverence.

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Exposing the Self and the End of Privacy

The contemporary progressive epistemic paradigm forces any other participant in the quest for knowledge to reveal aspects of the self that they may wish to keep private. In fact, privacy is anathema to this regime. If one is not willing to divulge their gender, their history of sexuality, their history of mental illness, their history of physical disability, their ancestry or other matters pertaining to race or ethnicity, or whatever else validates an argument under this paradigm, then one can be not only ignored, but essentially spat upon. The only method to have your voice listened to by adherents to the identitarian religion that privileges “lived experience” is to also engage in a process of public self-revelation.

One must politicize “the self” in order to have legitimacy in the realm of argument by “lived experience.” I find this pressure to publicize and politicize the self nearly blasphemous, a sort of cheapening of one’s life in order to perform it on the internet, on campus, in op-eds, on podast interviews, or otherwise in activist spaces. It distances oneself from one’s own inner world, requiring that one unearths some aspect of one’s life and expose it for all to scrutinize, applaud, meme, and otherwise use as a tool for advancing some politic. “The self” becomes a two-dimensional performance, placed on an altar and rendered static. Worse, becomes a form of self-evasion, distancing oneself from introspection and self-growth, and also forces the self to conform to social perceptions of identity, allowing no room for nuance, for a private inner-world of self-analysis and development. “Argument from experience” is partly a product of our social media age, where we are expected to self-reveal for an audience, for “likes,” and for status in our in-group digital communities. But I believe that revelation of the self is a dehumanizing political ploy.

Self-Reporting is Known to be Unreliable, but is now the Gold Standard for Educational, Media, and Activist Spaces

Worse, we seem to have forgotten that self-reporting is unreliable, not only due to shaky memory and cognitive biases, but also because our recall is primed by environment and institutional frameworks. In scientific studies, we recognize the limitations of studies based on self-reporting, but in activist spaces, we valorize this faulty means of argument. Most of the people who make this sort of “argument from experience” belong to similar classes of social capital.

I see this quite prominently with my best friend, who is trans, as he is absent from these social classes. He never went to college nor has taken any of the numerous “theory” related courses that might prime him to view his own experience through a certain lens, and as a result, he has an incredibly different take on gender and being trans than the dominant narratives. In fact, he detests the dominant narratives on trans ideology. I also think back to my own introduction to “gender sociology” and “gender theory” classes in college - how much did those prime my understanding of my own experiences as a woman? Quite significantly, I would say. It introduced terms and concepts that became a bedrock of how I viewed my own life and the world around me. My self-reporting on my own experiences based on gender thereafter should be taken with a grain of salt, as it took me years to create some distance between my sense of self and the lenses we are taught by which to observe our sense of self.

The American Christian Ritual of Providing “Testimony,” Now Secularized and Universalized, Imposed on the Masses.

This “appeal to lived experience” that is so bandied about is also quite Christian, or at the very least, part of the ritual of American Christianity, albeit it with the “God” aspect stripped away. We have removed the contents of American Christianity but kept the structure. More so, the people who are most fervent about identitarian epistemology are those very same people would be the first to claim that they are “not Christians” since they are atheist, oblivious to the degree to which they are Christian in all manners of epistemology, faith, ritual, worldview, and so forth, simply without the divinity. To me (dare I say, “as a Jewish woman?” despite detesting such identity-appeals?) workeism unleashes systems that were once confined specifically to matters of faith and instead universalizes them as the means by which we should interact with our self, our relationships, our agora. While I am not Christian and have never been to Christian services, I have heard that “testimony” is a central component of a number of Christian denominations (correct me if I am wrong), particularly in American Prostestant sects such as Baptism. One must reveal their own experiences, their own “testimony” of Christ, as a form of “proof” in a sense that this belief system is true, and are thus rewarded by the congregation. Testimony, or lived experience, seems to be an epistemic cornerstone for denominations of American Christianity. I have no issue with this in a religious context, I think most religions have the capacity to provide beauty, order, community, character development, and so forth. But I do take issue with religious ritual or worldview being universalized by the very same people who would decry the Christian faith, and then bully people who do not share that faith-derived worldview and epistemology. It is, ironically, always the people whose war cry includes “decolonization” who are most wont to dehumanize anyone who does not abide by their own religious-derived frameworks.

Identitarian Epistemology: Chills Debate, Encourages Heavy Selection Bias, and Debases the Self.

Identitarian epistemology is but a small component of the failures of identitarian politics and academia, but I think it is an overlooked aspect. I think that the appeal to “lived experience” or appeal to “identity” threatens our ability to live a private life, forcing us to publicize and stifle our inner selves in order to advance political ends. Not only is “lived experience” simply another means of using shaky “self-reporting” to make arguments, giving us poor claims to truth that become publicily taboo and untouchable due to their origins, but it forces us to relinquish our ability to refine and nurture our very own selves, always filtering the Self through a lens of accepted institutional and social frameworks.

Ultimately though, I worry about the chilling effect of “lived experience” epistemology on academic and journalistic research, speech, and debate. We should all be able to engage in spirited dialogue with one another on the political topics de jour, but claiming that “lived experience” is the only means by which one can have a legitimate voice on a topic all but ensures that we no longer believe in attempting objectivity and universal democratic participation. Moreover, it also ensures that we only hear the voices of those most comfortable with performing “the self” publicly and vocally, those with least care to privacy, skewing even the selection of “experiences” we hear. I think back to university and graduate courses that I took such as “Feminist Epistemology” (yes, this was a real course) and how it included none such criticisms of “lived experience” as a means of knowledge. I hope that one day, professors of such courses can provide counterpoints like those I listed above to the dominant narratives that they teach.

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Have you ever heard of the “Mississippian Shatter Zone?” Neither had I, until I TA’ed for a professor who specialized in Native American history. The Mississippian Shatter Zone of the 1500 and 1600s is the breakdown of an earlier Native American political order. Part of it was due to the arrival of the Spanish, some due to longstanding conflicts, some due to new conflicts. In its place, new alliances and new tribes emerged. The Cherokee and Choctaw and Creek emerged as distinct polities. An intra-native slave trade ran rampant. You can read more about this in Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone, edited by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall.

Most Americans would not consider whether the Cherokee had an origin. Most Americans, upon hearing the word “native” or “indigenous,” unconsciously sort these groups into a category without history; they are a static people living on the same land from time immemorial. There is no history, at least, not until the Europeans came.

The U.N.’s working definition of “indigenous” is one that tacitly affirms the notion that people living prior to European contact have simply always existed where they live, static and unchanging. From the definition that the U.N. cites:

“Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories…. They…are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories…”

The U.N., and others enmired in far-left ideology who consider themselves indigenous activists, fixate on the concept of “ancestral land.” “Ancestral” conjures to mind a murky but noble past, one stretching back perhaps centuries, perhaps longer. Time has no meaning with the term “ancestral.” It is sentimental, provokes a strong emotional response, but removes the population in question from anything concrete, from a history of their own.

A-HISTORY AND SUPER-HISTORY

The left today sees those they deem “indigenous” as a-historical. Conversely, those same members of the left sees those they deem as the colonizer as super-historical, held above and outside of other world events. Both the perceived colonizer and the perceived indigenous people are seen as outside of history, as exceptional to their time and place.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the popular liberal and leftist narrative around Israel and Palestine.

Who can go on Twitter without seeing a reference to the entirety of Israel being on “stolen land?” Who can go on TikTok and not hear reference to Palestinians as “indigenous?” Such language is even common in academia, or at least in departmental graduate programs such as the one that I was in. Meanwhile, what of Jews? The history of Jewish immigration into pre-state Israel is super-historical; that is, taken out of its historical context and scrutinized under a microscope to a degree never given to any of the other political movements of their historical contemporaries.

HISTORICALLY CONTEXTUALIZING MUSLIM AND JEWISH MIGRATION IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY: A COUNTER TO THE FRAMEWORK OF INDIGENOUS A-HISTORY AND COLONIALIST SUPER-HISTORY

Who then are the “indigenous people” to Palestine and Israel? Were the Arabs and Muslims who are now living in Gaza, the West Bank, in other countries around the world, or the 20% Arab population in Israel part of the “indigenous” people, and the Jews - or as is popular to say now, the “Zionists” - the colonialists? The former population existing in the Levant from time immemorial, the Jews emerging as agents of European colonialism to steal the land?

Most people would be surprised to learn that the majority of Muslim, Arab, and Jewish immigration into what is now Israel happened at around the same period in time, often for the same reasons. The Ottoman Empire’s mid-19th century Tanzimat Reforms, the empire’s modernization and reorganization efforts, settled tribal violence and opened up land for purchase in Palestine that had never been available before, including to Jewish refugees, other Jews of the Ottoman Empire, and to surrounding Arabs who bought and sold land. The Russian Empire’s Pan-Slavist policies caused Muslims and Jews alike to flee from Russia to the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire’s Pan-Islamist policies diverted many such refugees strategically to the Levant to maintain a Muslim majority and Islamic ideology. Other Arabs migrated to what is now Israel due to other movements within the Ottoman Empire, such as Mehmet Ali’s Egyptian occupation of Syria or immigration waves of Algerian rebels. Altogether, the overwhelming majority of the population in Israel and Palestine migrated there during the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century.

So are the Palestinians, as the left would claim, “native” or “indigenous” to the land, farmers going back eons on ancestral lands? Well, I do not dispute that, now, there are a people who go by the term “Palestinian,” just as there are people who go by the term “Israeli” or “Iraqi” or “Pakistani.” There are real identities based on real polities or nations. But I would not use the term “indigenous.” These are all modern terms for modern nations, created at close points in time to one another. The modernity of these nationalities does not make them any less real.

IMAGINED PASTS

What is less real is, as famed theorist Benedict Anderson would say, the imagined past behind it.

Political historian Karl Deutsch once joked that a nation is, “"a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.” In the 19th century, when theories of nationality and ethnicity abounded, French historian Ernest Renan (a complicated figure) noted that a nation is bound together more by what they have forgotten than what they remember. Later, famed theorist Benedict Anderson more closely inspects how we imagine ourselves as a “nation,” looking at the paradox that the concept of a “nation” is a modern phenomenon upheld through modern bureaucracy and technology, but nationalists and members of nations believe themselves to be reconstituting something of time immemorial, a political truth that stems from antiquity, the resuscitation of ancestral community.

So, let us return to the topic of Arab Palestinians and the left’s imagination of them - simple farmers from time immemorial, working their ancestral lands before the disruption of “European” invasion or colonialism, but most notably, Jewish settlement, which they consider a form of European colonialism, or a project to advance European interests, so ergo, a colonial project.

Instead of relying on that politicized and imagined notion of indigeneity, let us examine the history of the demographics of Ottoman Palestine a bit more closely.

A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE START OF THE 19TH CENTURY: THE BEDOUINS, THE YAMANS, AND THE QAYS

During the 19th century, the land that the West commonly referred to as “Palestine” was part of a region largely ruled from the vilayet, or province, of Damascus in Syria. What was later woven into the British Mandate over Palestine was composed of three sanjaks, or administrative districts: Jerusalem to the South, Nablus in the center, and Acre to the north.

The Arab and Muslim people - not always one and the same - who lived in these districts had a history, just as all people do. A number of historians and researchers, such as David Grossman and Seth Frantzman, have helped piece together the history of migration into Palestine. For example, Frantzman’s Ph.D. thesis was on this very topic, entitled Ottoman Arab Demography in Palestine from 1871-1948. He undertook a massive analysis of the Ottoman census or deftars, various surveys such as those by the Palestine Exploration Fund, land registries, local newspapers, journals, and more, inputting this data into Geographic Information System (GIS) software to reconstruct historical maps of Arab and Muslim migration and settlement into Palestine.

What we see from this research is that prior to the 1850s, there was very little permanent settlement in these three sanjaks of the vilayet of Syria. In fact, as Frantzman cites from the comprehensive study by Wolf Dieter Hütteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah: Historical-Geography of Palestine, Transjordan and Southern Syria in the late 16th Century, the first Ottoman Deftar, or census, of 1596 not only shows that the region was sparsely populated, but by the beginning of the 19th century, Palestine had an even smaller population than it did at the time of the first census in 1596. Some estimates place the total population, including Christians, Muslims, and Jews, at about 200,000. By contrast, according to historian Howard Sachar, before the first crusade in the 1100s, there were 300,000 Jews in the Galilee alone, and they were still a minority. Thus, most historians and visitors of the time period would concur that Palestine was sparsely populated.

In the beginning of the 19th century, of the sparse population in Palestine, there was frequent fighting. While to the present-day observer, we might say all are “Arab,” or even “Palestinian,” that was not how one would have viewed themselves then. Instead, there was fighting between the Qays - those who believed they descended from the Northern part of the Arabian peninsula, and the Yamans - those who believed they descended from the Southern part of the Arabian peninsula. More importantly, there were the Bedouins, who were often considered the “real” Arabs, a nomadic people who, at the time, were the source of much violence - razing farms, robbing travelers, and so forth. Very little development occurred in the region in part due to the Bedouin violence, let alone the other ethnic feuds and the lack of arable land. Of course, all three of these populations would also have a history of immigration from the Arabian peninsula.

Are the groups above those that the left today would call “indigenous?” It is difficult to say, as their numbers were few and they were soon massively outnumbered by new Arab, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish migration to the region in the latter half of the 19th century.

THE 1830S: THE EGYPTIAN OCCUPATION OF SYRIA AND PERMANENT MIGRATION OF 20,000 EGYPTIANS INTO PALESTINE

In the 1830s, the Egyptian leader Mehmet Ali conquered Syria and thus the three sanjaks known colloquially called Palestine, having roughly a decade-long rule there before being driven back out by Ottoman armies. Despite the Egyptian military retreating in 1841, Frantzman reports that 20,000 Egyptians stayed in Palestine, penniless and available as cheap farm labor, constituting the “largest migration that the country had known during the 19th century.”

The Egyptian settlers who remained were largely regarded by those around them as squatters, living on land without having rented or purchased it, or having had it bequeathed through familial or tribal procedures. Moreover, Egyptian migrants, now back under Ottoman rule, settled on land that, as Frantzman cites, “had been reported to Moses Montefiore in 1839 as available for purchase,” a later source of conflict in the region. Moses Montefiore was one of the original Western Jewish European investors after Napoleon’s emancipation of French Jews who aided Jewish refugees by purchasing land in Palestine.

THE TANZIMAT REFORMS AND THE CRIMEAN WAR

Meanwhile, Muslim migration into Palestine and the resultant demography fundamentally shifted due to the mid-century Tanzimat Reforms. The Tanzimat Reforms were a series of Ottoman administrative reforms from the late 1830s to the 1870s that were meant to modernize and reorganize the empire. Part of the Tanzimat laws included land purchase and taxation reform, as well as the nominal guarantee of religious and ethnic equality.

The Ottoman Empire had long been in decline due to a combination of its own failings and a series of wars. For example, the Ottoman ulama, or Muslim religious class, had not allowed in the printing press until the mid-1700s, supposedly out of fear for its impact on the Quran, but quite possibly to protect their own jobs as scribes. The once fierce Ottoman military and system of social mobility was overrun by nepotism. The means by which the administration received taxes was prone to corruption - the Sultan collected taxes via “tax farmers,” who could take money from nearby people, give a fixed amount to the Sultan, and keep the rest. This system lent itself to corruption and many farmers left the countryside to avoid the tax farmers; as a result, agricultural taxes heavily declined. The Ottomans were constantly embarking on or on the defense from religious or ethnic wars at their borders, first losing Hungary to the Austrian Empire at the beginning of the 18th century, and later fighting with Russia, who both wanted certain land and water rights as well as control over their co-religionists and linguistic kin. After the end of the Crimean War in 1856, the Ottoman Empire was deeply in debt to France and Britain for their aid to the Ottomans against Russia.

Part of the impetus for the Tanzimat reforms were to pay off the debts they accrued to Europe. These debts were both financial, but also included concessions with regards to the treatment of non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. Prior to the Tanzimat Reforms, in the three sanjaks of Palestine and particularly Jerusalem, the Ottomans had heavy strictures on pilgrimage to non-Muslim holy sites, did not allow for the public display of non-Muslim religious symbols, did not allow for the construction of new religious institutions that were not Muslim, and did not allow for foreign non-Muslim land ownership. Moreover, throughout the empire, while enjoying autonomy, non-Muslims such as Christians and Jews did not have the same legal and political rights as the Muslim population. Under the Tanzimat Reforms, all such restrictions were lifted and equality was legislated, if not always enforced or respected.

The Sultan wished to refill the empire’s dwindling treasury with taxes on agriculture, a sector of taxation that had lapsed due to both corrupt tax farmers and violence in the countryside. Thus, the Ottomans took a hardline stance against Bedouin violence, which allowed people to settle in land that had previously been seen as too dangerous to enter. Land registries were now systematized, having the effect of ending familial or tribal methods of passing on land that was by nature exclusionary to non-Muslims, but that also had the effect of allowing Arabs in more urban centers to purchase land and sell it to others, such as Jews, but also other Arab immigrants. This also encouraged more Bedouins to settle as well and changed the nature of seasonal work to more permanent residences.

ALGERIAN IMMIGRATION INTO PALESTINE

Additionally, beginning in the 1850s, a number of Algerians who were followers of a rebel leader against France began settling in Palestine. The Algerian settlers came in in immigration waves through the mid-19th century and until the 1920s. Many of those Algerians stayed, but many also sold their land to incoming Jewish immigrants.

RUSSIAN WARS AND THE PAN-NATIONALISM MOVEMENTS OF PAN-SLAVISM AND PAN-ISLAMISM: MUSLIM MIGRATION FROM THE RUSSIAN CAUCUSES TO PALESTINE THROUGH THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY

The demographics of the Ottoman Empire, and in specific the Levant, changed dramatically in response to the rise of a new ideological phenomenon: pan-nationalism, particularly Pan-Islamism and Pan-Slavism. Russia, ever at war with the Ottoman Empire, stirred Pan-Slavic dissent both within their own empire and with Slavic-speaking and Orthodox Christian-practicing members of the Ottoman Empire. As explained in Kemal H. Karpat’s, The Politicicization of Islam in the Late Ottoman Empire, the Tzar’s war against the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Abdulhamid II was often justified by Soviet historians as an attempt to “liberate” the Orthodox Christians from the Ottoman Empire.

In reality, the Tzar was deeply invested in the ideology of Pan-Slavism, the belief that all Slavic-speaking and Orthodox Christian-practicing members of the Ottoman Empire should be under Russian rule, and that Russia should be composed only of such ethnic and religious groups. Additionally, Russia, wanted land that it had lost or failed to obtain in the Crimean War, and wanted a stronghold of ethnic and religious supporters at Ottoman and Russian borderlands. According to Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State, some estimates state that 1 million Muslim refugees from the North Caucasus resettled into the Ottoman Empire at this period as a result of Pan-Slavic violence in the 1870s. Karpat places the numbers at about 500,000 Tartars having fled into the Ottoman Empire following the Crimean war in 1856 and that by 1862, nearly 2.5 million Caucasians, nearly all Muslim, had also migrated down into the Ottoman Empire. This group includes ethnicities such as the Circassians, the Chechens, the Daghestanis, and many more.

Sultan Abdulhamid II responded to Pan-Slavism with a fervent policy of Pan-Islamism. Abdulhamid II, after some of the refugees in Istanbul attempted an assassination attempt against him, settled Muslim Russo-Caucasian refugees at the far reaches of the Ottoman Empire, including into the vilayet of Syria and the area colloquially known as Palestine. This was no accident. According to Frantzman, Abuldhamid II took a “keen interest” in maintaining a Muslim majority in Palestine, and resettled Muslim immigrants in and around the region to make sure Islam remained the ideological basis of the state and the majority in the region in response to Jewish immigration, though the Jews were, like the Circassians and Chechens, also refugees from the tyrannical and violent control of the Pan-Slavic Tzar. According to Hamed-Troyansky too, the Sultan used the Circassian refugees for both religious and ethnically-motivated purposes, such as resettling them into the Levant. Likewise, Hamed-Troyansky states that much of these this province had “relatively sparse populations and an abundance of land,” albeit it, the Sultan shied away from resettling Russian Muslim refugees into Jerusalem or Mount Lebanon, for fear that those regions’ large Christian populations would cause violence and that Europeans would intervene.

Unlike Abdulhamid II’s resettlement of Russian Caucasian Muslim refugees into Palestine, he tried to stymie Jewish immigration into Palestine, even though the Jews were fleeing from the very same government and ideology as their Muslim compatriots. Abdulhamid II also implemented quotas on Russian Jewish refugee land purchases in Palestine and rebuffed the many attempts of French and British Jewish philanthropists who attempted to buy land for their impoverished and persecuted Russian coreligionists. This Sultan, the originator of political Pan-Islamism, is also known as “Abdul the Dammed” for his massacre of Armenian Christians in the 1890s, his suspension of the Ottoman constitution, and his many other attempts to suppress religious minorities that could threaten Islamic sovereignty, until his overthrow by the Young Turks in 1909.

However, Abdulhamid II remained a fervent supporter of Pan-Islamism, issuing decrees that the Ottoman Empire was to be considered a Caliphate and to be ruled by Islamic principle. He resettled Muslim refugees into various regions regardless of their underlying culture or ethnic background, leading to ethnic conflict. But in Abdulhamid II’s mind, that conflict was irrelevant, what mattered was a new conception of the state as one of Islam, not one of distinct nationalities and ethnicities that happened to practice the same religion. Pan-Islamism was a deeply modern phenomenon, a phenomenon that followed a similar historical trajectory to similar reactionary movements across Europe and Russia.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF JEWISH IMMIGRATION INTO PALESTINE AND CO-ARAB MIGRATION FOR WORK ON JEWISH AGRICULTURAL SETTLEMENTS UNTIL THE 1930s

Contrary to much of the contemporary political propaganda that “Jews were gone for 2,000 years and then think they could return,” there was already an active and old Jewish community in Ottoman Syria and Palestine, let alone throughout the rest of the Ottoman Empire. Jewish communities were strong in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and other regions along the Galilee. Over time, the Jewish population in Palestine had waxed and waned. The Jewish heyday was prior to the Roman Empire’s expulsion, massacre, and enslavement of around 600,000 Jews from what was then Judea in the year 70 AD. However, the Jewish population regrew in the region, to the point that, as stated earlier, there were 300,000 Jews living in Jerusalem alone up until about 1,1000 AD, when the first Crusade massacred the Jewish population, with only around 5,000 Jewish families remaining after the Crusader’s religious massacres. However, the Jewish population grew again, in part as an unfortunate side effect of the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, but also simply due to trade and other quotidian reasons for migration. In the 15th and 16th centuries, tens of thousands of Jews immigrated back into Palestine and Jerusalem. There was even a brief period of Jewish political sovereignty in Tiberias. At times, Jews were once again majorities in cities such as Safed and Tiberias, and the Galilee towns became major centers of Jewish intellectual and spiritual life. By the start of the 1800s, Jews were still a minority, but they had hardly been absent for 2,000 years as goes the popular misconception, nor without a geopolitical history of their own. Jews had become a minority, yes, but not by choice.

Meanwhile, in the late 19th century, the Jewish population of Russia was subject to severe violent persecution and poverty. Since Catherine the Great took Jews en masse into Russia in the 18th century after the Partition of Poland, Jews had been forced to live in the Pale of Settlement, a section of southern Russia and Ukraine, where they lived lives of poverty. Worse, however, was the periodic state violence and kidnappings. Jewish children as young as 12 years old could be conscripted into the Tzarist Army as child soldiers and forced to serve 25-year periods, with any offspring of theirs considered to be military property. Under Tsar Alexander III and later Nicholas I, Jews were forced out of the countryside and into city slums, to the point that at the end of the century, 40% of the remaining Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement relied on foreign charity. Even worse, the existing populations were subject to pogroms, periodic episodes of violent ethnic cleansing, with whole Jewish villages subject to extermination. Historian Howard Sachar quotes the Tzar’s advisor Konstantin Pobedonost as saying about the Jews, “One third will die out, One third will leave the country, and one third will be completely dissolved in the surrounding population.”

Thus, during the period of nationalisms, which not only included imperial pan-nationalisms but also ethnic and religious liberationist nationalisms, such as those of Greece and Italy which sought to free themselves of Ottoman rule and have self-determination of their ethnic and religious people, Jews were similarly so inspired. The Jewish political thought around this topic developed a sense of urgency in light of the severe violence that they were facing at the hands of the Russians, and the creeping rise of Western European “scientific racism” and Pan-Germanism, the culmination of which we saw so unfortunately come to fruition less than a century later under the Nazi regime. So too under the Ottoman Empire, despite their sizable numbers and relative autonomy compared to Europe, Jews did not receive equal treatment to their Muslim neighbors under the law until nominally under the Tanzimat reforms. However, Jews had also there been subject to random bouts of violence.

One of many examples of violence against Jews in the Middle East prior to the state of Israel is the Damascus Affair of 1840. During the Egyptian occupation of Syria, a number of Jews in Damascus were accused of classic blood libel - supposedly killing a Christian monk and his Muslim servant to use their blood to make matzo. Many Jews were tortured until they “confessed” to their crimes. This lead to massive waves of violence and vandalism against Jews and synagogues in the region until prominent Jewish voices in Britain and France put political pressure on their consuls to intervene. This event even called to attention American Jewry, 15,000 of whom petitioned President Martin Van Buren to protest the treatment of Jews in the Levant.

Thus, with this background, under the new land laws of the mid-19th century Tanzimat Reforms, as well as the legislation of religious equality and opening up of Palestine to non-Muslim foreign land purchases, Jewish philanthropists, refugees, and intellectuals worldwide began to purchase land in Palestine, believing that Jews needed better protection than that afforded to them at the whims of empires. Some land was purchased by famous Western European Jews such as Montefiore and Rothschild, who helped resettle Russian Jewish refugees. Other land was purchased by wealthy Baghdadi and other Ottoman Jews. Still others bought land from their own funds, and sought to begin learning trades that they had been banned from practicing throughout most of European and much of Russian history. Jews, who had been traditionally banned from numerous professions including agriculture, believed deeply in the need to learn how to be self-sufficient, leading to one of the first forms and still existant forms of zionism: “labor zionism,” heavily also related to socialist zionism.

As Jewish immigrants settled in Palestine, purchasing land from Arab and Ottoman landlords at often exorbitant prices on account of their religion, Jewish settlements were able to create agricultural projects on land that many had previously seen as non-arable, or too dangerous due to swamplands and malaria, or too dangerous due to past Bedouin violence. Jews were not the only to undertake these difficult agricultural projects, but their success also attracted neighboring Arab immigrants, many of whom Jewish landholding agriculturalists employed on their farms.

Economist Fred M. Gottheil analyzes the data behind this phenomenon in his article Arab Immigration into Pre-State Israel, 1922-1931, looking specifically at Arab immigration to what became the British Mandate of Palestine after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. He shows that the growth in the Arab population in British Mandatory Palestine would not be possible with natural birth rate population growth. Instead, he shows that “Arab immigration accounted for 38.7 percent of the total increase in Arab settled population in pre-State Israel,” and in comparison with Jewish immigration at the period, Arab immigration constituted 36.8% of the total immigration. Gottheil also shows that 75% of the workforce in pre-State Israel was at Jewish owned businesses, amongst which 60% were Arab workers, many recent immigrants for the sake of employment in these businesses and farms. Thus, not only did Jews and other Muslim and Arab individuals immigrate to Palestine at the same time periods, Jewish enterprises and the employment opportunities they offered were often a motivating factor for Arab immigration.

THE LEFT’S SUPER-HISTORICAL TREATMENT OF JEWISH MIGRATION AND STATEHOOD IN COMPARISON TO THE CREATION OF GREECE, ROMANIA, IRAQ, AND OTHER FORMERLY OTTOMAN NATION-STATES

There is, perhaps, no better example of the left’s treatment of Jewish history as super-historical, and the region’s Muslim inhabitants as a-historical, than the differential treatment they give to the historical creation of Israel, and the historical creation of other nation-states stemming from the same issues of the same time period within the same fallen empire, including Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania. When Greece was given Thessaly in 1881, for example, they expelled its minority Muslim population at the start of its quest for an Orthodox Greek ethnostate, even after it had gained independence of the Ottoman Empire. As late as the 1930s, Greece was still deporting thousands of Muslims from its shores in an effort to maintain their envisioned ethnic and religious state. Meanwhile, Greek Orthodox who lived elsewhere were persecuted by Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, and turned instead to migrate into Greece. Nearly 500,000 Muslims in total were expelled from Greece, and around 1.5 million Orthodox Greeks from the Ottoman Empire entered the nation-state of Greece. Similar histories abound for other former regions of the Ottoman Empire. Romania, too, became independent by, as Karpat says, “seizing territories inhabited by Muslims,” as did many neighboring countries.

And this is to say nothing of the rise of Pan-Arabism alongside Pan-Islamism, and the expulsion of ethnic and religious minorities from Arab-controlled regions, such as the massacre and expulsion of Jews in Iraq in the early 1940s that is known as the Farhoud, and their subsequent relocation into Israel. In fact, Israel today is majority Mizrahi - meaning Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin - precisely due to mass expulsions of Jews from neighboring regions under Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamic ideology.

INDIGENEITY AS PROPAGANDA

Thus, the claim that the conflict of Israel and Palestine can be reduced to a narrative of the foreign colonists expelling the indigenous natives is not only false, but perpetrates a dehumanization of each side of the conflict, subjecting those who are now called Palestinians and those now called Israeli to a place outside of history. Much like Benedict Anderson’s Paradox of Nationalism, the left imagines a homogeneous Arab Palestinian antiquity that is, in fact, a product of modernity. The modernity of the leftist vision of the indigenous Palestinian is that of the rise of nationalism and pan-nationalisms of the late 19th century. In fact, the leftist concept of indigeneity is an erasure of history that would fully align with the Pan-Islamic goals of Sultan Abdulhamid II: it erases the unique histories of the Muslim cultures and people who settled in Palestine and Israel and view them only through the lens of Islam, and moreso, as having a rightful claim to the land due to their religious commonality.

The leftist imagination of pre-state Israel is one in which Jews were the only immigrants into Palestine. Everyone else already lived there. This is false. It is, in a sense, a warped version of Christian theology as applied to current events: they believe that Israel was once an Islamic Garden of Eden until the Original Sin of Jewish settlement occurred, creating a Fallen World and thus the chaos that now envelopes the region. Beyond the topic of Israel and Palestine, this all-too-often is the leftist vision of indigeneity and political turmoil: a Garden of Eden untouched by conflict or its own history, some subsequent Original Sin, and then a Fallen World.

This is why I have become suspect of the term “indigenous.” While it can be useful and meaningful, it can also be fetishized, used to dehumanize and de-historicize multiple groups of people, playing on sentiment to political ends. “Indigenous,” much like terms such as “nation” or “religion,” has become such a cornerstone of the modern imagination of political and social arrangement that few question it; indigeneity in particular is sacred and taboo. Hopefully, in the fight against our modern incarnation of antisemitism, we can lift these taboos and re-humanize the history of the Jews.

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First of all, I would like to apologize for my long delay. This year has not been an easy-going one for me thus far. It started off on January 1st, when I woke up quite sick, and was more or less bed-bound due to a difficult case of Covid for the entire month. Next, my one-year old daughter caught the flu. This was followed by me developing an ear infection. I then went through a brief period of joy when I found myself pregnant, only to once again hit a physical and emotional roadblock as I suffered a miscarriage. Then, for good measure, I got sick one more time. I hope that with such an extreme first two months of the year, the rest will be smooth sailing.

In other news, I would like to update everyone as to what I am working on. I do not have a conclusive answer yet, and I imagine this line of inquiry will be somewhat of a lifelong project.

Our Understanding of Judaism is Deeply Deficient: How Modern Language and Concepts Obstructs Historical Inquiry

My question is: what is Judaism?

This sounds simple, no? Judaism is a religion. The first monotheistic Abrahamic religion. A persecuted minority for several millennia in both Christian and Muslim-ruled lands. We believe in the Torah, and many also believe Halacha - the laws of Rabbinic Judaism. “White Jews” are from parts of Europe, and we are called “Ashkenazi.” There are also browner Jews who follow slightly different rules, and we call them “Sephardi,” whose customs come from Spain, and some of those are “Mizrahi,” who are Jews of the Middle East and North Africa.

However, this account of Judaism is, at best, deeply incomplete, steeped as it is in the myths of modernity. It uses relatively new conceptual language, like “religion,” or “belief,” that obscures and erases a comprehensive account of our history. Not only does its wording obscure more than it reveals, but its omissions are also glaring. This modern definition of Judaism takes as a given the modern creation and understanding of idigeneity, the nation-state, citizenship, migration, the borders and boundaries that we use to define those preceding phrases, and a whole host of other modern signifiers, creations of Enlightenment, colonial, and postcolonial politics and scholarship. The omissions that are glaring, then, are omissions that, to some degree, we do not yet have the language with which to address. That is to say, by not more fully interrogating what Judaism means, we are also not fully interrogating our modern assumptions about borders, polities, and belonging.

History Academia’s Hyper-Specialization Produces Oversights and Assumptions

Indeed, as even Hannah Arendt pointed out in her introduction to Origins of Totalitarianism, historical scholarship on Judaism is nearly nonexistent. Today’s academia seems to have provided some more investigations into material accounts of our past, but the nature of today’s academic factory is one of the the Marxist account of alienated labor - the worker who only makes a small component of a larger project, and may not even know when the end product is supposed to be. They are specialized to reproduce their own small, siloed component as efficiently and productively as possible.

Today’s historical scholarship, not only in its ideological fervor, but simply in its hyper-specialization that is the response to academic market demands, will produce scholarship with hypothetical titles like, “The Jews of Lisbon: 1250-1255, Textile and Trade.” Or maybe, “The Jews of Lisbon, 1250-1255, Textile and Trade: A Gendered Analysis.” To clarify, these are not real books, as I did not want to purposefully target any historian here, but to anyone who has pursued academic history, such types of titles are commonplace. Now, I do think these types of articles or monographs can contain important reference material. But we are steeped in reference material with little to tie together a cohesive picture, little to question the underlying categories that we are supposedly analyzing and historicizing.

Scholarship in the Right Direction: Analyzing the Modernity of “Religion.”

There are some scholars who do try to breakthrough the conceptual laxity to which Judaism is treated by historians. Of note is Leora Batnitzky, whose book, How Judaism Became a Religion, is a must read on how the concept of “religion” came about. Batnitzky explains how the modern category of “religion” first arose as a product of Protestant exploration and colonialism to describe ritual and practices in foreign lands. When imported back to Europe, Jewish Enlightenment philosophers like Moses Mendelssohn used the new category of “religion” as - if one is being cynical, apologetics, or if one is being optimistic, political activism - an explanation as to why Enlightenment Jews would not simply convert to Christianity if they supported the early Enlightenment ideals of universalism. Batnitzky outlines how, in Western Europe and later, somewhat separately, in Eastern Europe, both Jews and non-Jews alike came to reason their way out of the ancient concept of Judaism as a separate nation residing within nations, as a unique form of polity, and refashion it into a narrative of private faith, to mixed social and political results.

Batnitzky’s book, a true masterpiece for providing much needed conceptual scholarship for Enlightenment and post-Napoleonic European Jewry, is only a start, and should be a guiding light for the future of how historical scholarship addresses Judaism. Her work does not cover the lands we would now call the “Middle East,” nor does it address questions about the structure of pre-Napoleonic Jewry. That is not an indictment of Batnitzky, it is just stating the reality that there is far more ground to cover.

What Was Global Jewish Polity and Governance Prior to the 19th Century?

Going back to the start, let us give some brief political historical background behind the ultimate question of, “What is Judaism,” and what we might now see as the derivative question, “What is a nation,” or “What is a polity?”

Under the Ottoman Empire, for instance, Jews and other religious minorities existed in an organizational structure called millets, where they had some degree of self-governance and autonomy in compliance with the rules of the Sultan, albeit it in a diminished social and political position to their Muslim counterparts, or even other religious minorities. Unfortunately for Jews, we did not have the backing of foreign empires or kingdoms to assure our relative safety and political power, as did the numerous Slavic-speaking and Orthodox Christian-derived minorities who had the protection of Russia, nor other Christians such as the Maronites of Lebanon within the district of Syria, protected by France, nor the general state of Christians even prior to the 18th century due to the Capitulation system with other Christian governments.

Meanwhile, prior to the Napoleonic-era in Western and later Central Europe, we at the very least know that Jews likewise had a form of semi-autonomous governance, living in communities with their own courts, policing, rule of law, contracts, jurisprudential debates, political philosophies, and more. The best analogy I can try to give is that of Native American reservations. Most Native American nations have their own political bodies and have some sort of citizenship beyond that of an American citizenship. Many will also have a faith and associated rituals, but being part of a native nation is not solely a religion, and living on a reservation is not solely a community of co-religionists. Likewise, while American, they are not American alone. Yet for Jews of Europe, while the reservation analogy is helpful in explaining the structure of a polity-within-a-polity, the conditions were far was worse. Jews were not considered to be of the same “nationality” nor entitled to citizenship as were the Christians on whose land their reservations existed, an existence only begrudgingly tolerated when we were deemed useful, while undergoing stringent laws and discipline to ensure our segregation and powerlessness, in conjunction with random sprees of violence and expulsions. Our “reservations” on Christian land, self-governing to some degree, were also at the utter whim of the rulership of such land. The analogy breaks down in that Jews did not get to also be “American” while being “indigenous.” We did not get to be “French” while being “Jewish.” In fact, we did not gain anything akin to the modern political category of “indigeneity.” Instead, we were simply often called “the Hebrew Nation.”

In Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition documents from the 15th century, one can find a plethora of statements such as, “My name is Abraham. I was born in Fez and now live in Lisbon. I am a member of the Catholic faith and the Hebrew nation.” You could not “convert” your way out of your - as our contemporaries might say - your nationality, or your ethnicity.

Furthermore, I did not touch on Jews of the Safavid Empire - the region now largely associated with Iran but also Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, the Caucasus, etc., nor Jews of Russia, as the Jews only entered Russia towards the end of the 18th century, and were heavily restricted to the geographic “Pale of Settlement” and heavily impoverished. My knowledge of the political organization of Jews under the Pale of Settlement is even more lacking than the above examples.

What is Judaism? Breaking Down the Question

With this background, let us go back to trying to break down the question of, “what is Judaism,” into slightly more digestible, albeit still large, components.

(1) What was the political, legal, and social relationship between the different Jewish “reservations” on Christian lands? Such questions can include: what was it like to travel between the Jewish polities on different land, what were the contracts like between separate polities, did they consider themselves to be operating under the common law of Halacha and view themselves as under one government, one “Hebrew Nation?”

(2) What was the relationship between the Jewish “reservations” on Christian lands, and the Ottoman Jewish millet? How would they envision their relationship? What was that material relationship like?

(3) How was the Ottoman Jewish millet modified by location, such as in which district the Jews were residing. For example, did the Jews of Greater Syria (areas that now include Israel and Lebanon) have a different type of political or legal arrangement with the Jews of Anatolia? What was travel like for Jews in the Ottoman Empire between districts? What of land purchases?

(4) As of yet unmentioned due to my own lack of knowledge, what was the relationship further between these polities and the Jews of the Safavid Empire, now a region associated with Iran, or later in history, the Jews of the Pale of Settlement in Russia?

And most importantly,

(5) Can we envision a new and unique political structure to describe this geographically dispersed confederation of Jewish quasi-autonomous polities? In some ways, we can picture the historical polity of Judaism as the inverse of empire: a dispersed political entity whose existence constituted a minority in each geographic region they inhabited, who were powerless over their non-minority neighbors and subject to frequent migrations, but who nevertheless had power within a trans-geographic government of sorts. What would we call this? How can we describe this? It is unique, and introduces a category beyond our defaults: it is not nation, not empire, not city-state, not colony.

To answer these questions, we need more details. Many of our readily available historic reference materials are, unfortunately, slightly too zoomed-in to start analyzing the legal and political relationships between non-geographically adjacent Jewish polities, let alone to use that understanding to challenge our concept of terms like “empire,” “indigenous,” or “nation.”

In an Academic World Ruled by “Theory,” We are Curiously Absent a “Jew Theory;” or, How a Failure to Conceptualize Jewish Political History Allows Left-Wing Antisemitism to Flourish.

Part of why this area is, I believe, so important to study, is not just for the pure intellectual challenge of it - which I admittedly love - but also as a crucial missing piece in the fight against modern antisemitism, which unfortunately is largely coming from the far Left and their ideological alliance with radical Islamism. We live in a world ruled by academic notions of minority “theory.” We have “race theory,” “gender theory,” “queer theory,” and more. We take these “theories” and use them as translating devices, inputing our former scholarship into this translating device and outputting papers with titles like, (again, a hypothetical title), “Queering the Borderlands: an Analysis of Labor and Sexuality.” We have no “Jew theory.” We have no, “Jewing the Borderlands: an Analysis of Migration and Autonomy.”

And to be fair, I am not sure I want anything to bolster the bloated world of “theory” and its algorithmic approach to scholarship. But I do think, for the reality of living in a world imbued with critical theory as a pillar of its ideology, people interpreting such inquiries into a language of “Jew Theory” could be a way to help those who hate us come to understand us in a new light. I am not opposed to investigating what a language of “Jew Theory” would look like so long as we do not do as many self-declared activists of today do, and mistake that lens for the totality of reality, or double down on theory as ideology.

But to be clear, I do not want to envision this project as an offshoot of critical theory. To the contrary. If anything, I want any of the influences of such inquiries on critical theory to be accidental. Instead, I wish to use my inquiries on Jewish historical polity to challenge the dominance of theory in academic scholarship, to show how shaky are its set of foundations, and to reveal the prejudice in how the assumptions of critical theory are made and the how the tools of critical theory are applied. Primarily though, I value historical scholarship that focuses on construction rather than deconstruction.

Historians Do Not Know what they Do Not Know

Let us return to the original question: what is Judaism? The fact that we do not have a good answer has done a disservice not just to Jews, but to the larger state of scholarship. Reading through historical textbooks or monographs, I often find the treatment of Jews to be one-dimensional and intellectual sloppy. A lot of assumptions are taken as given. Historians do not know what they do not know. Moreover, the lack of a language to adequately describe Jewish political history is one that keeps our global analysis of the past stale and presentist.

And to reiterate, this scholarly omission of a comprehensive understanding of the trans-geographic political confederation of Judaism, and its implications for our general understanding of polities and borders, has provided a ripe culture for leftist antisemitism to grow.

I hope to be able to provide some better answers to these questions that I have proposed above. I am focusing my research each day on better understanding a wide swath of history in hopes of contextualizing Judaism, Zionism, and Israel in a manner that few will gain from the current state of humanities or social science academia, let alone from how the classes one takes as an undergraduate or graduate student in this lackluster academic climate feeds into media and other low-paid, high-status cultural drivers, impressing upon millions a false understanding of Judaism and history. I hope that through closely reading a never-ending pile of books and scholarship, I can help distill some of scholarship to the public, piece together the fragments of our past, and help introduce a better language with which to treat Judaism with the wholeness that has been lost to it.

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Today’s post will be a bit different. While I am primarily hoping to gear this substack around an analysis of ideology, I am posting instead my unedited response to a sickening local newspaper editorial. The piece in my local paper referred to Hamas as a “revolutionary group,” denied their well-documented use of human shields, denied that Israel could know if underground tunnels exist and where underground tunnels are located, and tried to justify the October 7th massacres and violence as somehow acceptable due to a distorted reading of history. I have cut my official response, to be submitted to my local newspaper, way down from the version I am posting here. I am only posting my longer version here due to recognizing just how prominent is the narrative that my local paper published and the need to have more content that rebuts such propaganda.

It is a good reminder that Jews are a small population of only 17 million worldwide, with the majority living in Israel, while the global Muslim population is about 2 billion. While hopefully it is clear that not all Muslim individuals will hold the same set of beliefs regarding Israel and Palestine, it is clear that Jews - despite our longstanding stereotype of being all-powerful and controlling the media - only have so much of a voice, one that is easily drowned out when the axis of China-Russia-Iran-Qatar overtakes social media algorithms and university funding, and the majority sentiment of people from authoritarian, rabidly antisemitic governments with state-run medias are amplified and uncritically normalized. I think myself and many others are wondering how our voices can be heard over the cacophony of a zealous and hateful majority. So with that, I tried my best to write some sort of slightly more historically and factually-grounded response to the sentiment expressed in my local paper. My response still did not nearly touch the depth of the historical innacuracies in my local newspaper, but hopefully, having some sort of long-form rebuttal out on the internet can help amplify a more truthful narrative, a narrative besmeared as all-powerful while, in actuality, struggling as a frequently silenced minority.

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My Rebuttal

In light of an article in the Canyon Chronicle that called Hamas a “revolutionary group,” I would like to clear up dangerous misconceptions on the terrorist organization of Hamas, and how they are as much, if not more so, of a threat to the Palestinian people as they are to Jews and all those who might be in Israel. Hamas does not want peace. Hamas does not want a two-state solution. They do not even want a peaceful one-state solution. Hamas is a religious extremist organization whose sole mission is the destruction of Israel and the mass killing of Jews, regardless of what that means for the Palestinians trapped under their rule. Any Palestinian who disagrees with Hamas leadership and ideology is subject to torture or execution. 

Hamas’ Charter and their Follow-Through

The following are quotes  from the Hamas Charter, known formally as the Hamas Covenant: The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, first published in 1988 and available to read in full from the Yale Law School website. The Charter is the equivalent of the Hamas Constitution, their founding documents and guiding principles. 

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”- Article Seven

 “…Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” - Article Eight

“Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement…There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” - Article 13

“They (the Jews) were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution… With their money they formed secret societies…They were behind World War I…They were behind World War II…” - Article Twenty-Two

“Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” - Article Thirty-Two

 On October 7^th, 2023, Hamas terrorists broke into Israel and set out to make good on their promises. That morning,  Hamas began their massacre at a music festival full of teenagers and young adults, murdered over 300 attendees, and committed mass rape.  As one survivor reported to the police department as seeing happen to her friend, “They bent her over and I realized they were raping her and simply passing her on to the next.” She continued to recount that her friend was then murdered by being “shot her in the head while he was raping her, didn’t even lift his pants.” Another survivor speaking to PBS recounted, “The terrorists raped girls. And after they raped them, they killed them…(then) they laughed. They always laughed. It's — I can't forget how they laughed in this situation.”  

Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a professor at University of Pennsylvania Law School, who joined as a human rights scholar regarding gender-based violence, put together a presentation for students of various Harvard graduate schools, a presentation replete with difficult topics and even more difficult images. One can watch her presentation and the difficult images on Youtube. Images of naked dead girls with their legs spread eagle in rigor mortis. Videos of naked women with broken limbs being paraded on the back of pickup trucks while crowds on the streets of Gaza grope and beat their bodies.  Some of these women, or at least those who were not killed, Dr. Elkayam-Levy explains, are now held as hostages, most likely still subject to repeated rape, some suffering injuries that can lead to death, some maybe pregnant from the Hamas assault against them. 

Hamas likewise killed and tortured thousands, often targeting the elderly, mothers, and babies. Hamas murdered babies in their cribs. Hamas burned down houses indiscriminately, slaughtering entire families. CNN reported that responders to the scenes of carnage found a Hamas booklet on how to kidnap and torture Israelis. “And first thing what do you do when you find the citizens, you torture them. This is the booklet, it says exactly how to torture them, how to abduct them, how to kidnap them,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog explained to CNN.

Hamas then kidnapped 240 people, hostages to use to demand the release of convicted Hamas terrorists from Israeli prisons. Hamas kidnapped babies, toddlers, children, whole families, and the elderly. Some of these hostages have been released in exchange for prisoners who have helped carry out attacks for this brutal regime. Many have not yet been released. Hostages have now been held for around two months. 

One woman who Hamas kidnapped  was 9 months pregnant, and is believed now to have given birth while in Hamas captivity. One cannot imagine what this woman or her newborn are enduring. We do not know if she has survived or if her baby has survived, and what pain she endured along the way.

Hamas kidnapped multiple children, often after having killed their parents in front of their eyes, such as with Abigail More Eden. Abigail was then a 3-year old American girl whose parents were murdered in front of her before she was taken hostage. As reported by NBC News, Abigail, “was in her father’s arms when a Hamas gunman shot him and he fell on top of her.” Abigail then, “crawled out from under her father’s body … full of his blood,” before she herself was captured as a hostage. Both of her parents are now dead.

The youngest child taken hostage is a boy named Kfir Bibas, only 9-months old when kidnapped by Hamas, along with his 4 year old brother and his mother. 

One child, 12-year old Eitan Yahalomi, who was recently released, was forced to watch video footage of the Hamas October 7^th atrocities on repeat, and was threatened with rifles if he cried. He was beaten repeatedly. 

Another child who was recently released, nine-year old Emily Hand, still speaks in a whisper, being traumatized from two months of being told she could not make any noise. 

Hamas: a Short History

Now, some people might make a “noble savage” type argument, saying that Hamas only acts as they do due to the oppression that they and their people have suffered at the hands of Israelis. This is flawed for at least two reason. One: Hamas has specifically rejected the chance for autonomy and peace in order to try to make good on their explicit constitutional aims of destroying the state of Israel. Two:  Hamas is just as brutal against their own people as they are against Israelis.

Something that many in these current protests tend to leave out is that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Yes, Israeli unilaterally disengaged from Gaza, removing their military presence, and evicting their settlers, often dramatically, in order to give Gaza political autonomy. To understand Israel’s 2005 decision, and why Hamas sabotaged it by using the Israeli withdrawal to attack Israel rather than to establish statehood, one can look back to 1993, the year of the Oslo Accords.

In 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, and Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat, achieved something at the Oslo Accords one never thought would be possible: Palestinian recognition of the right for Israel to exist. This came after years of surrounding regions trying to keep the War of 1948 alive vis a via using Palestinian people and their governance as pawns against Israel, and building up increasing radicalization in Gaza and the West Bank as a result. The Oslo Accords came after the violence of the First Intifada, during which time the PLO was still the primary leadership for Palestinians. However, the Oslo Accords angered Hamas, who as we see above, is a fanatical religious organization not interested in peace or statehood, but who believes they have a religious duty to destroy the state of Israel, and Hamas began to have increasing influence over the PLO. According to Mosab Hassan Yousef, the eldest son of one of Hamas’ seven founders - Sheikh Hasan Yousef - Arafat let the power of being perceived as the “Che Guevara” of Palestinians get to his head. 

After the Oslo Accords, in 2000, Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak offered to Arafat the entirety of the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and 90% of the West Bank in order for Arafat to establish an independent Palestinian state - the longed for “two-state solution.” But Arafat said no. He rejected the offer for Palestinian statehood. After becoming closer with the leaders of the Hamas movement, he began taking the Hamas talking points that the only solution he would accept would be a complete Palestinian “right to return,” which would essentially mean the end of Israel. Arafat knew this offer would be rejected, but according to those such as Yousef who worked with Arafat, Arafat did so purposefully, relishing in the respect that his stance brought him from the upper crust of religious extremists and various princes in the Middle East, while somehow still accruing sympathy from a Western media less concerned with history and the welfare of the Palestinian people than it was with the optics. 

Nevertheless, Israel did not give up, and in 2005, tried again to give Palestinians autonomy in hopes for peace, as Israel’s past efforts for peace in the region had proven fruitful in very small bursts. In 1979 at the Camp David Accords, Egypt recognized Israel’s right to exist and the two nations signed a peace treaty. Until that point, Egypt had been a major force behind the PLO, as the PLO was founded in the 1960s by Gamal Abdul Nasser, the president of Egypt, as a way to use Palestinian governance as a proxy for Egyptian interests. Egypt then recognizing Israel’s right to exist angered many in Palestine who had been essentially used by Egypt for years, hence Hamas referring to Egypt by name and the “treacherous Camp David Accord” in their charter. In 1994, a year after the Oslo Accords, Jordan recognized Israel’s right to exist.

Thus, in 2005, in a gesture of goodwill, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed the he would unilaterally disengage from Gaza - he withdrew all military personnel, evicted all settlers, and left behind millions of dollars in agricultural technology to aid the Gazan agricultural sector. The hope was that Gaza would be able to establish a functioning government via holding elections, and become an independent state,. Unfortunately, that did not happen. After the Gazan elections, Hamas took power, and used their newfound political autonomy to do as Arafat did before them: once again, exploit the Palestinian people for personal interests. Hamas immediately sabotaged the autonomy that Gaza was granted and embarked on their clearly stated goal: trying to destroy Israel.  Thus in 2007, after an onslaught of rocket attacks, Hamas-designated enemies Egypt and Israel jointly agreed to uphold a blockade against Gaza, trying to prevent further weapons from entering the country or further attacks from being carried out.

Hamas and their Own People

Some might still make excuses for Hamas. But then, what of Hamas’ treatment of their own people? 

Mosab Hassan Yousef, as mentioned before, is the eldest son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the seven founders of Hamas, and was considered the Hamas “heir apparent” as the eldest son of his much beloved father. It might come as a surprise, then, to learn that Mosab has not inherited the throne of Hamas - which would have been tempting, considering that today, the current top leaders of Hamas own several billions of dollars in personal wealth while living in luxury apartments in Qatar and flying in private jets.  It might be even more of a surprise to know that Mosab was so horrified with the brutality of Hamas against both the Palestinian people and Israelis that he joined the Israeli intelligence agency, Shin Bet, to help Israel eradicate Hamas. 

In his heart-wrenching autobiography, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices, Mosab says that he was indoctrinated to wish death upon Jews and Israelis from birth. However, even in his childhood, the seeds were planted for him to eventually doubt the Hamas mission. For one, he tells stories of Hamas members  whipping him with electrified wires while he was a child, supposedly to discipline him into behaving in a more serious manner as befitting his father’s status. Later, he recounts stories of his schooling during the period of the First Intifada. At this time, Hamas and the PLO were engaged in a power struggle, which got taken out on the Palestinian people. In Chapter 5, Mosab recounts how during the First Intifada, either the PLO or Hamas would call for business strikes, but often at different times. In Mosab’s words, “If Hamas called a strike and threatened to burn the stores of anyone who stayed open, PLO leaders across the street threatened to burn the stores of anyone who stayed closed.” There was no winning for the Palestinian people. You had to choose a side, and the other side would retaliate by destroying your livelihood.

But Mosab’s first major eye-opening event was after he purchased weapons with the intention of killing Israelis, and found himself in an Israeli prison. There, it was not the IDF who proved to be the villain, but fellow members of Hamas. Mosab recounts with horror - both in his book and as testified in front of the United Nations on November 20^th, 2023 - that Hamas members formed their own internal “guards” who would torture other Hamas members, sometimes under suspicion of being a collaborator, but almost always either because that person was lower status or weaker in some way. Often, it was to satisfy some sick sexual desires of the Hamas “maj’d” guards. Mosab takes us through eye-opening events of hearing the screams of his fellow Palestinians as Hamas would stick nails under their fingernails, or melt plastics onto them, or other forms of inhumanity, oftentimes getting them to “confess” to ludicrous stories such as having sex with animals, which the maj’d would then distribute to that prisoner’s community back home so as to cause them to be social outcasts once released from prison.  

Mosab, as an heir to his father, regularly attended top-level meetings with him. However, Mosab quickly grew disillusioned with the obvious corruption and self-interest of the so-called leaders and their willingness to use Palestinians to serve their own interests.  As  Mosab phrases it, “Arafat had grown extraordinarily wealthy as the international symbol of victimhood. He wasn’t about to surrender that status and take on the responsibility of actually building a functioning society.” He then explains how after Arafat rejected Israeli PM Ehud Barak’s monumental offer to give Palestine nearly all of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, Arafat increduously rejected it, and Arafat and Mosab’s father began working together to orchestrate the Second Intifada.  He explains, “there always seemed to be more to gain if Palestinians were bleeding. Another intifada would surely get the blood flowing and the Western news cameras rolling once again.”

Unfortunately, the reality behind Hamas’ brutality towards their own people is confirmed by multiple sources, going back to Hamas’ rise in power. On April 20^th  2009, the Human Rights Watch published “Under Cover of War: Hamas Political Violence in Gaza,” about Hamas using Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks as an excuse to torture, punish, and execute political dissidents in Gaza. Student organizations, protests, any sort of speech doubting the vision of Hamas were met with torture, if not death. On May 26, 2015, the New York Times reported an uncannily similar article to  that one published 6 years earlier: “Hamas is Accused of Using Gaza War as Cover to Torture and Kill Palestinians.” And so it goes. Projects such as Whispered in Gaza, hosted by the Center for Peace Communications, allows Gazan’s to speak out against Hamas and share their own stories under protection and anonymity.

Despite what the prior article published in the Chronicle said, Hamas’ usage of human shields is well documented, and a topic - one of many - that Mosab Hassan Yousef testified about before the United Nations. The truth of the matter is that Hamas has build their elaborate underground city of tunnels under United Nations-funded schools and hospitals, and Hamas tells their people not to evacuate when Israel seeks to destroy their weaponry, because the deaths of Palestinians help to erode “support for the Zionist cause.” In 2014, Amnesty International issued a report on how Hamas had turned al-Shifa hospital into their de-facto headquarters. This was known at least as early as 2009, when the New York Times similarly reported on the Hamas presence at al-Shifa.  Furthermore, when the Israeli military targets a home that is being used to stockpile ammunition, they call and give warning to the residents to leave. But there is ample video footage of Hamas telling residents not to leave. In a Washington Post article entitled, “We Can’t Ignore that Hamas Uses Human Shields,” the author cites from CNN’s Jake Tapper as saying, “We can’t ignore the truth that Hamas uses human shields…We have video of Hamas…on television telling people to stay in their homes, that it’s an effective way to make sure to fight off Israelis.”

In Mosab Hassan Yousef’s recent testimony in front of the United Nations, one that I would urge all people to watch on the UN’s website, he begs for the international community to support Israel in their quest to eradicate Hamas. “I love my people,” he says, and for that reason, he wants to see the reign of Hamas brought to an end. 

Palestinian Leadership as Puppets for Proxy Wars : First Egypt, now Iran

Furthermore, just as Egypt had set up the PLO in the 1960s to address Egyptian interests, Iran is backing Hamas to promote Iranian interests, and the recent Hamas terror attack on Israel was specifically planned by Iran, in part to provoke an Israeli response that would cement Iran as a world superpower. An article entitled, “Why Iran is Gambling on Hamas: Tehran’s Strategy to Weaken Israel and Divide the Region,” published in Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, helps to explain the Iranian backing of Hamas.  Hamas is part of Iran’s “axis of resistance,” which includes, “Hezbollah and other Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere.” According to the author, Iran views October 7thn as a success in bringing their proxy wars directly to Israel’s soil, and believes it can help coalesce other fighters for Iran in the region.

Foreign Affairs explains the group of Persian fighters who toppled the Shah and set up the Ayatollah in the 1970s trained with Palestinian fighters, then under Yasser Arafat. Once the Ayatollah was installed, they helped to continue training and arming Palestinian fighters. However, it was primarily after Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 that Iran began to ramp up funding and providing arms to Hamas, sensing weakness in Israel and an opportunity to escalate conflict.

Iran planned this conflict alongside Hamas for several years, in part, to cement themselves as an alternative to Western superpowers, to foster outrage and then take a role as a “moral leader” amongst nations of the global south or in the Middle East. Furthermore, they launched this attack in time to destabilize Saudi Arabia normalizing relationships with Israel. In the language of the Hamas charter, too many nations were “leaving the circle of the struggle against Zionism,” which included Egypt, later Jordan, then the UAE after the Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia normalizing relations was a step too far and would jeopardize Iran’s plans. Finally, Iran has been scapegoating Israel for years and planned this current conflict to help cover up their own internal repression. What better way to take eyes off of the recent round of women’s protests, imprisonment and executions around mandatory veiling in Iran than to turn to the classic scapegoat - the Jew - to try to bandy the people around a common enemy? Sadly, so far, it appears that Iran’s plan to generate outrage due to Israel’s response is working. And we should not allow that to happen. 

Did Hamas Change their Charter in 2017? The Answer is No.

Still, some people try to argue that Hamas has “changed,” pointing to a document that they released in 2017 and claiming that it is Hamas’ new charter. “Hamas no longer hates Jews, now they are clear to delineate between the Israeli government and the Jewish faith,” is an actual comment I have read online. This, however, is false. Hamas released their 2017 document during the same week that President Trump was meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas’ only other chief political rival, as a way to try to insinuate that the PA does not have the sole monopoly on diplomacy. Furthermore, Daniel Aaron Miller, a Middle East negotiator and advisor to six different American presidential administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, wrote his analysis of the 2017 Hamas document for the foreign affairs think-tank and consulting group, the Wilson Center. In it, he explains:

But the relatively compressed new manifesto—of 42 articles—was clearly not intended to formally supersede the 1988 founding charter.

Comparing the original charter and this new political document is difficult, mainly because they were intended to serve fundamentally different purposes. The founding charter had a strategic purpose to anchor and guide the organization during its early years. This new document is more a political statement; it has the air of a tactical adjustment. Indeed, even before the new document was released in Qatar, Deputy Gaza Political Bureau Chief Ismail Haniyeh said that it would undermine neither “our principles nor our strategy.”

Haniyeh is a top-leader of Hamas, and one of the main orchestrators behind October 7th, and has stated unequivocably that any political document released in 2017 changed nothing of their underlying beliefs or their tactics. Hamas is clearly not going to change anytime soon, and if anything, have already stated their desite to carry out many more October 7th-type attacks, despite what so much propaganda coming from our legacy instittuions will uncritically claim.

“Oppressor-Oppressed” is Not the Right Framework to Analyze this Conflict

What should Israel do? What will happen if the IDF succeeds in destroying Hamas’ underground city of tunnels? If anybody had an answer to this, they would surely have a Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately though, in recent years, it has become en vogue to collapse the complexity of the Palestinian, Arab, Iranian, and Israeli conflict into a simple “oppressor-oppressed” dynamic, a dynamic that simply does not map onto the current conflict. Worse, trying to force that ideological framework onto the Middle Eastern crisis is to essentially reiterate an age-old antisemitic trope: “Jews are foreigners who do not belong and ruin the purity of the land. They are agents of foreign governments and, paradoxically, control foreign governments. Jews are bloodthirsty, wealthy, and all-powerful, and thus we should remove them.” That is to say, if your solution to the Middle Eastern conflict is to say, “who cares about what happens to Israel?” Your “solution” sounds awfully like “the Final Solution.”  If your protest to help Palestinians is only focused on Israel and is not protesting Hamas and demanding the immediate release of the hostages, if your protest does not demand the surrender of the brutal, fanatical Hamas regime, if your protest to help Palestinians does not condemn Iran and Qatar for funding Hamas and Hezbollah to the tune of billions of dollars in order to fight proxy wars, then your protest might be more about hating Israel than about helping Palestinians. And people who care more about hating Israel than helping Palestinians is precisely why Palestinians are living under the conditions that they are today. 

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"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."

Article Seven, Hamas Charter1

“With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world…They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution…They were behind World War I… They were behind World War II, There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.”

Article Twenty-Two, Hamas Charter

“Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion.””

Article Thirty-Two, Hamas Charter

The words above, from the Hamas Charter, are frightening. But more frightening is how so many people who claim to be on the political left and who have strong opinions about Israel and Palestine have either never read this charter, have chosen to minimize this charter, or have even empathized with this charter. Worse, many have repeated the ideas and language from this charter in their everyday lives. This charter, one that explicitly rejects peace and states, “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time,”2 is but one document available from a mass of information and resources that helps to complicate the growingly standard leftwing narrative that “Israel is largely responsible for this crisis.”

In the days following October 7th and up until today, we have seen people openly celebrating Hamas. People have been justifying, denying, or minimizing the mass torture, rape, infanticide, kidnappings, and general massacres that Hamas inflicted upon Israelis and anyone who happened to be in Israel at the time. A professor at Cornell University called the October 7th massacre “exhilerating” and “energizing,” to the cheers of a crowd. A concerningly large number of student organizations at Harvard issued a statement saying, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” On October 8th, as the world was starting to see the videos of sadism that Hamas members themselves gleefully uploaded to social media, University of California, Santa Barbara Sociology Professor and Department Chair Lisa Hajjar tweeted an image of a bulldozer with a Palestinian flag breaking victoriously through a barricade. Protests across the globe for the welfare of Gazans exclusively lay blame on Israel, ignoring the realities of Hamas, Iran, Egypt and Qatar, and other significant factions. Nobody at these protests are calling for Hamas to surrender, to release hostages, to be tried for war crimes. Nobody is saying Hamas has the ability to end this war. Hamas openly and proudly pledges to reject peace and to prolong conflict as long as possible, so long as that means being able to kill all Jews and destroy the state of Israel. They make this goal loud and clear. But instead, we see American politicans like Rshaida Tlaib trying to justify the use of the genocidal slogan, “from the River to the Sea,” denying what is right in front of them: it is not a slogan for freedom, it is a slogan for destruction.

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In looking at the havoc wreaked by the infectious spread of unfounded self-righteousness, it is clear to me that one cannot be ethical without being attentive to how one pursues and processes information. Likewise, one cannot be ethical if one chooses to minimize or outright ignore information, information such as the Hamas Charter. An example of the way that poor methods of interacting with information affects ethics can be found in the way in which we make medical decisions. For example, if you pursue medical knowledge exclusively via Facebook groups, you are more likely to make medical decisions for yourself or your relatives that can cause harm. Both ignoring the Hamas Charter, or exclusively perusing Facebook groups for medical advice, are examples of how the tools one uses in the pursuit or diregard of knowledge has a real-life ethical impact.

I provided quotes from the Hamas Charter since it is just one small example of something within easy grasp that few have bothered to reach. I would bet that the stronger a person’s opinions, the less a person has read, with an open-mind, anything that challenges said opinions, despite plenty of available resources. Part of the reason someone may have not read those resources is because they are generally not amplified. To use Marxian language, they are not amplified in part because those who own the means of ideological reproduction - universities, media, or social media algorithms - are not reproducing them. But, to poke another hole in the shade of ideological blinders, not only is this information not amplified, many individuals with the strongest opinions choose not to seek it out, not to consider that it might exist.

So, why are people choosing not to seek out this information? I am sure there are many overlapping reasons. But one idea that has been appealing to me since I first came across it several years ago is the idea of “Virtues of the Mind.”

“Virtues of the Mind:” A Blueprint for Ethical Thought

Linda Zagzebski is an American philosopher who is noted for suggesting that virtue ethics is a foundational component of epistemology. What does that mean? Virtue ethics is a branch of the philosophy of ethics - a branch often associated with Aristotle - of what character traits a person should develop to best live a “good life” and behave ethically. Epistemolgy is the philosophy of knowledge, concerning questions such as: what are the best methods for deriving knowledge, what are the limitations to our ability to obtain knowledge, and so forth. Zagzebski, then, says that one cannot come to accurate information without cultivating intellectual virtues, that it is ethical to work on the mind in a particular way so as to yield more accurate information, and the less ethically you are cultivating your mind, the less accurate your knowledge will be.

Zagzekbski’s book, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge, posits something both complicated and simple: the way that we think is also a site of virtues and vices. By identifying the range of intellectual virtues and vices a person might have, we can work on them, or at least recognize them as they arise in ourselves or others. Working on our intellectual virtues will aid in best arriving at knowledge, and the more accurate our knowledge, the more ethical are the speech and actions that we might understake as a result. Zagzekbsi identifies intellectual vices as including, but not limited to:

gullibility, carelessness, close-mindedness, negligence, idleness, obtuseness, prejudice, lack of thoroughness, and insensitivity to detail.

“Intellectual virtues,” by contrast, are virtues she sees as aiding in the correct pursuit of knowledge. These include:

humility, caution, virtuous motives, intellectual courage, open-mindedness, and carefulness.

Zagzebski’s “vices of the mind” are an epidemic in a world overtaken by ideological zealotry. The vices of the mind seem especially apparent when one tries to remove themselves from the adrenaline rush of righteousness, and instead look at how many who claim to care about an issue, such as Israel and Palestine, choose seek and process their information. In University of Warwick’s philosophy professor Quassim Cassam’s article for Aeon about virtue epistemology, he warns that those who are unwilling to check themselves for such intellectual virtues or vices are the first to try to turn the table - that is, to accuse others of the very vice that they themselves are indulging. For example, a conspiracy theorist might claim: it is not they who are gullible for believing Infowars, it is you who is gullible for believing the government!

Many such instances of intellectual vices, and turning the tables, arise in conversations with those on the far-left about Israel. The random person on the internet with an algorithmically-heightened emotion and an algorithmically-induced need to state an opinion often gets their information from a broken telephone game that all originated with the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry or other institutions known to be staffed by antisemites. Additionally, journalists - those supposedly responsible for exercising intellectual virtues such as caution and precision - continue to uncritically publish claims of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry without providing qualifications or complications, and some even refuse to walk back the information when those claims have been debunked. Regardless of if newspapers retract information that has been widely publicized as false, the fact that those papers neglected their duty of intellectual virtue means that the false information is still real on social media, still real in peoples’ hearts and minds. And true to Cassam’s claims about “turning the tables,” we see that many of those online or on the streets who take information from institutions known to be violently prejudiced against both Jews and Israel are the first to claim that others are gullible for believing information from the IDF that has been corroborated by the US government.

The above is just one example of an intellectual vice regarding Israel and Palestine, a vice of gullibility and carelesness, but others abound. There is far more information than most people could reasonably be expected to curate for themselves on the history and reality of the conflict. But many people choose to have a strong opinion, to join in a mob frenzy, while their speech and actions belie a plethora of intellectual vices. I myself do not claim to be absent of these vices or an exemplar of intellectual virtue. Far from it, I have long hesitated in writing on these topics specifically because I am aware of the limitations of my knowledge. But it is impossible to have knowledge without limitations. Instead, I have resigned myself to writing imperfectly while aspiring to the intellectual virtue of open-mindedness, hoping to broaden my knowledge, not to truncate it. Perhaps, in keeping in mind the concept of intellectual virtue ethics, we might help break another chain in the stronghold of ideology.

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This might seem like hyperbole. In fact, it is. It would be more accurate to say, “nearly all historians today are Marxist historians.” There. Now, the hyperbole is gone.

What do I mean by this? Isn’t this simply a right-wing talking point, a boogeyman, a distraction from the “real issues?”

No. It is not, in fact, I would argue that this lies at the heart of the “real issues.”

Noticeably in the past few weeks, let alone the past few years, we have seen a rise in people at all levels of academia sign statements and raise their voices on the topic of Israel. Very few of those members of academia know much of anything about Israel. But what they do know about is how to interpret events through a Marxist framework. And as the German-Jewish postwar philosopher Hannah Arendt says - though I am paraphrasing - that way lies danger. When historians focus more on inserting events into a preexisting framework rather than using their own faculties of judgment to analyze events, we are no longer investigating the past or current events, we are creating ideology.

I am not trying to use “Marxist” as a slur. I am trying to be factual. For many millenials in college studying all things “theory” prior to the 2008 recession, Marx made a lasting impact. For myself, reading Marx in college felt revelatory, but not dogmatic. He was part of my interest in thinkers, in viewing the world through novel lenses. But like so many others, his perspective felt so “correct,” and we read so little counterpoint to his main areas of appeal, that many Marxist theories simply remained as common sense truths in the back of our minds, only emerging as dogma after the Great Recession. For many humanities academics, they have never questioned whether Marxian analysis should remain on the mantle of unquestionable common sense.

Why Marx?

The appeal of Marx was simple: he both provided a relatable account of human nature and a persuasive lens through which to analyze history.

In his early works, Marx proposed that the modern world alienated us of our essential humanity. We are a species of creativity, and when we work without autonomy or ownership over the final product, we are painfully “alienated” from the products of our labor. We only produce one small part of the pin at the factory, never the whole pin. When humans become yet another tool on the assembly line, like a hammer, we are no longer the craftsmen. We are cogs. It is easy to see the appeal this holds in our era of ever-growing bureaucratic strangleholds over workers’ and students’ autonomy.

The second part of the simple appeal of Marx was his explanation of history. According to Marx, the “arc” of history is not the product of individual “Great Men,” not the momentous decisions of kings and inventors. Instead, Marx posits that the arc of history is the arc of class struggle. History is comprised of one disadvantaged group who is materially suffering rising up against those wielding power and holding more of the material resources. This leads to some new status quo, which again gives rise to struggle, and so on, until its eventual resolution via the worldwide spread of industrialization, and then, the economic leveling that leads to the polity of communism.

It is no secret that society has suffered since the time I was in college. The Great Recession is one that many millenials never recovered from, Covid has upended the early lives of many emerging members of Gen-Z, and political, economic, and social disorder remains rampant. The simplicity of the Marxist explanatory myth is intoxicating.

Historians today do not always embrace the materialist elements of Marxism, but they almost always embrace the analysis of history vis-a-via struggle between the oppressor and oppressed. Some view this struggle through gender, some through race, some through colonialism, some through economic class, and some through nearly any other marker of identity. Most historians combine some form of all of them, to some degree or another. The ideology of power struggle between classes or identities has becoming overwhelmingly the dominate lens through which historians tell tales of the past. In fact, I believe many graduate students and professors would struggle to frame their research using any other lens; they would be lost without Marxist analysis. Not only would they be lost without it, they would claim it would be wrong to introduce a different conceptual frame.

The University as Factory

A simple answer as to how humanities departments underwent ideological capture is simply through the mundanity of departmental politics and personal preferences in graduate admissions and faculty hiring. When departments and faculty advisors are choosing who to accept from graduate school applicants, they are looking for research proposals that align with their own areas of knowledge. This seems innocuous in itself - of course an advisor would only wish to advise in their area of expertise. But what happens when an area of expertise becomes not a time period, not a series of events, but the theory being used to analyze those events? And when departments are looking to hire new faculty members, who is it doing the hiring? The very same faculty choosing the graduate students, except now, they wish for colleagues that share their values as well. This leads to the overproduction of research using the same ideological lens, and a hiring market that incentivizes toeing the ideological line from the very onset of one’s career.

The result of this is, unfortunately, that humanities academia has become a factory for the manufacturing and dissemination of ideology. Humanities, and as I understand it, many social sciences departments, have counterintuitively become the very factory that Marx railed against. Yes, history graduate students do peruse archives, read from other historians, cite their sources, and so on. But rarely is this done to unearth new information for that information’s own sake. This is done to write a story crafted to fit a specific worldview, and in today’s academic institutions, it is generally a Marxist worldview.

The graduate student has, ironically, become the factory worker for academic departments’ ideological assembly line. Archives and past academic literature has become the raw material that the worker - the graduate student - assembles into its final form: another ideological “proof,” another affirmation that, yes, reality aligns with this mode of ideological analysis. The graduate student worker, under the managerial supervision of the professor, assembles the archival raw material to fit the factory’s final production goals: more publications to make unassailable a Marxist theory of history, to cement it as a common sense analysis, if not the only analysis. The most productive assembly line workers - that is, the most productive graduate students - are then hired by yet another factory and given a promotion to the position of manager - that is, they become the professor.

Of course, there is no product without a consumer market, and the largest demographic of the consumer market is the undergraduate. Now, the newly-minted professor has at least two implicit responsibilities: like other managers, they must still produce higher-order work product while overseeing their workers in creating more minute aspects of the final product. But they are also a salesperson, selling ideology to the undergraduate. Unlike other salespeople, their job is made easier by having a captive market, and they can also function as disciplinarians, rewarding or punishing ideological conformity according to their own discretion. Of course, they will not admit to doing so, and they probably do not believe they are doing so, as many see themselves as simply arbiters of truth.

Arendt’s Warning

Decades ago, Hannah Arendt was already well critical of this turn in academia. To her, a Hegelian or Marxist approach to history was akin to ascribing a telos to history, an arc of inevitability and progress. In Arendt’s Life of the Mind, she decries when one attributes “semi-divinity” to history, as she sees is the goal of the Marxist historian. Marxist history is dangerous to Arendt since it cuts off the autonomy of the historian, the historian’s faculty of judgment in analyzing events as they occur. Instead, it turns the historian’s role of unearthing and analyzing events into the role in supporting ideology.

Worse, to Arendt, viewing history as an inevitable march towards an end goal whereby the causes are either “natural,” such as the race-based analyses of history prominent under early 20th-century Pan-Germanism, or “material,” such as based in class under Bolshevism, is one small but necessary component behind the rise of totalitarianism. Marxist interpretations of history were not enough on their own to give rise to totalitarianism, but to Arendt, the Marxist or other ideological “Explanations of Everything” were a crucial lifeline, an invigorating and mobilizing message. To the upset masses of the early 20th-century looking for an explanation of their loss of status, loss of order, and loss of finances, a totalizing ideology, including and especially for its use in historical analyses, not only allowed them to explain reality, but to shape reality. Totalizing ideologies became the driving point behind people’s engagement with reality, and ideology was not upheld by any one figure but reproduced and distributed through institutions, including the media and academia. It does not take much to see the parallels today.

Israel and the University-as-Factory

I now think of this often when I see academics I know or academics in the news mimicking one another’s speech and language on Israel. They mimic each other’s hatred for Israel, they mimic talking points on Palestine and Israel, they reaffirm each other’s zealotry and convictions. But very few of them have anything remotely approximating in-depth knowledge about Israel, let alone the surrounding regions in relationship to the Israeli conflict. One might attribute this to simple hubris: they think that due to their advanced degrees and the constant reaffirmation for their intellects that they have received most of their lives, they are blind to what they do not know, and presume that they simply know more than others by nature of who they are and their status. Or, one might attribute this to professional politics - to the desire to network, to stay in professional good graces, to get good reviews from students, and to simply accrue social points.

But I think there is a deeper element to the academic’s tendency to speak with such vitriol combined with ignorance on the topic of Israel: it is endemic to modern humanities academia. The content being analyzed no longer matters, what matters is the lens, the ideology. It is not that professors, graduate students, and undergraduate students are speaking on topics that they do not know about, they are speaking on what they do know about: Marxist and identitarian analysis. If other colleagues have already neatly placed a set of material conditions into the Marxist algorithm, and the oppressor-oppressed binary outputs Israel as the villain, then that is enough confirmation for them to speak confidently and zealously. As Arendt warned, when historians get hijacked by ideology, the content suffers while the ideology grows, and the ideology is given a god-like status.

The rise of student groups with no specific knowledge signing declarations condemning Israel, of professors with only the most tangential relationship to the topic signing documents condemning Israel, of brazen social media posts supporting Hamas, and so forth, belies a distortion in the heart of academia. Academia has moved away from the intellectual enterprise of unearthing and debating knowledge, to the productive enterprise of transforming archives and recycling prior scholarship into an abundance of ideological consumer goods.

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There are several authors and philosophers who I have found deeply influential in understanding ideology and antisemitism in our current world. One is the postwar philosopher Hannah Arendt, particularly her works on totalitarianism. Another is the contemporary author Dara Horn and her work "People Love Dead Jews." And a third is another postwar philosopher, Leo Strauss, and his “sociology of knowledge,” as he calls it in his “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” regarding how to find the true meaning of written ideas through the absences those writings contain, in light of how those ideas deviate from the surrounding regime.

Arendt's collective works are desperately needed in our time. In fact, I would argue that all of the immediate postwar philosophers, regardless of their personal politics - Leo Strauss, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt - are needed more than ever. The "lesson" that they took from the Holocaust was not the current Disneyfied version of "never again." It was not a universalist moral lesson about the absolutes of right and wrong, as we often see coming from the political left today. It was a deep analysis and distrust of groupthink, a recognition of the power of language, dehumanization, and hiding.

Arendt saw "ideology" as a deeply modern form of politic, its own category in the same genre as feudalism, tyranny, democracy, and other governing structures. But "ideology" is new: the existence of modern technology and organizational structures allows politics to become totalizing. Ideology destroys nuance, destroys the bonds between neighbors and between family. When everything is reduced to a right and a wrong as per the ideology, mass hatred and dehumanization flourishes. I wonder what Arendt would write today if she could see social media.

Today, part of the "totalizing" aspect of ideology is how no one material or social problem can be approached outside of an ideological lens. In the binary of American politics, if you support one cause from within one ideological box, you must support all of the other causes in that box. For example, in the American right, if you support policies to strengthen the family, you must be against abortion. On the left, if you support politics about police reform, you must denounce Israel as an "apartheid state." Thankfully, not every person has been quite so swallowed up by ideology that they have lost all ability to distinguish issue from ideological lens. Unfortunately, the number of people who can think outside of ideology is small and dwindling. Of particular concern, many of those who cannot process information outside of ideology are in positions of widespread influence: people in journalism, academia, and on social media.

The Holocaust is not a Universalist Message on Hate, it is a Particularist Culmination of Antisemitism

Dara Horn's, "People Love Dead Jews," is precisely about the moralizing of dead Jews as a universal lesson, a story devoid of the particularities of Judaism and antisemitism. People love dead Jews for how Jewish deaths serve the non-Jewish observer. However, many of the non-Jewish observers who enjoy the lessons of dead Jews hate living Jews. Nearly everyone can name a concentration camp. Nearly no one can name a Yiddish novelist. The basal state of society, contends Horn, is to hate Jews. The basal state is to ignore Jewish voices, to disdain our differences, to hate our successes and our misfortunes equally, to desire the erasure of our culture and our biological existence.

I saw Dara Horn speak once at a Jewish writer's conference. She spoke about the difference between "Purim Antisemitism," which she calls the antisemitism of desiring physical death to the Jews, and "Chanukah Antisemitism," which she calls the antisemitism of desiring cultural death to the Jews. I used to think that the far-right harbored the Purim antisemites and the not-so-far left harbored the Chanukah antisemites. But I was wrong. As evidenced on a wide scale in recent weeks, growing numbers of the left are themselves enablers and supporters of Purim Antisemitism.

Horn and the postwar philosophers, particular Leo Strauss, emphasize the nature of hiding. Our intellectual output always belies a certain level of hiding our true thoughts, our true experiences. To be Jewish in a hostile world, which is simply the world at large, is to hide.

“Jews are Foreigners who Do Not Belong. They are Agents of Foreign Governments, While Paradoxically, Controlling those Foreign Governments. They are Bloodthirsy and Powerful. It is Morally Correct to Remove Them.”

The leftist rhetoric around Israel is frightening because it is a repackaging of the historical structure of antisemitism. "Jews are aliens who do not belong in this land and ruin its purity, they are also agents of a foreign government and, paradoxically, control those governments. They are bloodthirsty for non-Jewish blood, and care for nothing but money and power. It would be better if we got rid of them." This has been the trope for countries that took in Jewish refugees of the inquisitions. This was the trope once Napoleon granted citizenship to Jews in Berlin and Vienna. This was the trope of Germans about the Jews during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. And this is the trope by the contemporary political left about Jews in Israel.

I see a lot of blatantly false information from people who do not know the history of Jews nor the history of the region they speak about, but who speak from a place of zealous, righteous certainty. They epitomize Arendt's takes on ideology. They try to apply their self-serving universalist Lessons of Dead Jews, a la Dara Horn, to justify their Arendtian ideology, even to go so far as to call Israel the "real Nazis" (which in itself, is taken from the Hamas charter).

Nobody thinks of themselves as an antisemite. People who are dangerously bigoted rarely are the Disney villain, reveling in their hatred, acknowledging with pride that they are the bad guy. They simply believe that their framing of the situation is morally correct. Antisemites do not see themselves as antisemites, they see themselves as champions of justice.

To today’s most vocal left, the 20th century genocide of Jews was not a particularized culmination from centuries of a sense of moral certainty that Jews are the problem. Instead, to today’s left, our genocide was merely a "lesson" about the universal dangers of hatred, to be applied whenever one wants to prove that their zealotry is morally correct. And as per the Hamas charter, the left will even apply the de-Judenfied version of “never again” specifically to target Jews.

The left today forces many of us who are Jewish to retreat into our Straussian linguistic caves, hiding carefully, deep precision and restraint to our words, as others on the left continue to chant, "no tone policing," and "believe the experiences of minorities." You see, as per the title of another famous book, Jews Don't Count.

Facts? Unnecessary. In Identitarian Liberalism, Ideology Provides the Answers on Israel

And so, I look on in horror and disgust as I see people I know either glaringly silent, or outright, "yes, but..." ing the horrors unfolding. I am tempted to fight back with facts. For example, the blockade against the Gaza Strip is jointly upheld by Israel and Egypt, but my leftist friends only mention Israel in decrying the blockade. I want to point out that Israel did disengage from Gaza in 2005 and Gaze held elections, whereby they voted in the terrorist organization of Hamas, who never never allowed elections again, and began immediately firing rockets into Israel. I want to explain the decisions many neighboring countries made for why they themselves refuse to take in Palestinian refugees, such as after the early Jordanian and Lebanese experiences in doing so. I want to explain why many of the countries of the Middle East have specifically been against Palestinian statehood. I want to point out the fact that antisemitism flourishes across much of the Middle East, having taken on its current form after Arab leaders of last century met with Hitler. I want to point out that today, a number of countries in the middle east distribute reprints of Mein Kampf, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the International Jew, including in cartoon form for children. I want to point out that the leftist rhetoric of "Hamas was backed into a corner, they are just resisting," is ludicrous when Hamas does not want peace - their charter specifically calls for killing all Jews, for rejecting any peace treaties, references by name the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and blames Jews for all historical and current political instability, from the French Revolution to World War II. I want to point out that Hamas is and always has been an Iranian puppet authoritarian regime.

The amount of unilateral blaming of Israel for what is a multinational catastrophe between multiple factions with their own agency is antisemitic. Furthermore, exclusively blaming the situation in Gaza on Israel, leaving out both Palestinian governance itself and the numerous other nations in the region who have helped create this situation, is a form of"noble savage" racism. If your solution for Palestinian poverty is, "I don't care what happens to Israel and as oppressors, they deserve it" your "solution" sounds awfully like the Final Solution.

I'm tempted to fight back with facts. But what good would it do? The people with these views do not care about facts, they are deeply embedded in a totalizing ideology. In Western identity-focused liberalism, the actions of those claiming to represent Palestine can be held to a much lower standard due to their noble savage status in the identitarian liberal mind, and the Jews of Israel can be placed into the “white” category of oppressor, despite the majority of Israel being Mizrahi. Facts do not matter, only ideology. And thus, the Venn Diagram of the historical trope of antisemitism and identitarian oppressor politics happens to be a full circle.

Ideological Language and its Limitations: Limitations are a Feature, not a Weakness

Jewish history does not fit neatly into the current language of identitarian liberal ideology. Our reality does not conform to the popular language of race, religion, gender, or global south politics. Our history does not conform to analysis via the nation-state and idigeneity. But language is not reality, it is a man-made descriptor at best, and a force of ideology at worse.

Our postwar philosophers understood the limitations of language and the power that came from those limitations. Under totalitarianism and the new regime of ideology, limitations of language were not a weakness, but a feature. Thus, it is time to revive the true lessons of the Holocaust that the postwar philosophers understood. We must divest ourselves of ideology and find the gaps in our language. We must find truth in the silence, as Strauss would urge, in the spaces where language does not reach. And we must recognize current liberal adaptation of the Holocaust for what it is - a gross distortion of a tragedy that views dead Jews as a useful analogy to reinforce the very force - ideology and totalitarianism - that the postwar philosophers warned us about. For anyone who claims to care about the welfare of Palestinians and fighting for justice for the oppressed, if you remain entrenched in ideology, your goals are not for peace, but for extermination.

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