A youngster who hides her older cousin in her bed when the British come looking for him because he is a member of the Irgun. A child stands her younger sister next to the window of the bus carrying them to safety through roads near Arab towns. If someone shoots at the bus, she reasons, her sister will catch the bullet and not her.

A young boy and his friends look out for Egyptian tanks in case they come along the road toward their farming community, a boy who hears the King David Hotel bombing from his home, a girl who plays in the yard between sirens and bullets flying overhead.

A Bedouin child in the Negev who agrees to go to the school the British built and had enough after a month or so and went back to shepherding his family’s flock, an Arab boy in Haifa who remembers the chaos at Haifa’s port where he boards a boat to Acco with his mother and other siblings while his father remains in Haifa.

This is just a selection of moments within the 15 interviews I held with people who were 8-13 years old in Mandatory Palestine and then Israel between 1947-49. After having transcribed these interviews, I see questions I did not know to ask the first time. I hope I can revisit some of my interviewees.

I also want to complete my collection of interviews by speaking with those who spent Israel’s formative years in the north, in Gush Etzion, and other places I have not yet been to. I want to interview more Arabs, and speak with Druze and Christians, and Haredim, men and women.

The book, “Children of ’48,” will not be a collection of war stories in the conventional sense. Rather, it will be comprised of stories of war-witnessing by children who absorbed the attitudes of the adults in their environment. What has surprised me is that they do not share these memories as stories of trauma. In fact, when I asked what they saw in their parents, they mostly gave the impression that their parents were just carrying on with daily life, doing what they had to do, whether they were involved in the war efforts directly, indirectly, or not at all.

Up to this point, I have paid all expenses out of pocket but these future interviews require me to travel farther from home than before. I will need to make overnight stays in some of these places to be able to make the best use of my time.

In addition, some of the Arab, Druze, and Christian elderly may speak neither Hebrew nor English, meaning that I will need an Arabic-language interpreter to accompany me and ensure that the translated transcriptions will be accurate.

The lack of funds has been holding me back. But time is not on our side. My interviewees are in the late 80s to early 90s. Somewhere in the north or Gush Etzion, or among the Arab, Druze, Christian, and Haredi communities I still hope to reach, there may be memories as unexpected as the ones these first 15 interviews have already given me. If you can suggest potential interviewees, that would be great.

I want to find them while I still can.

And I am asking you to help me complete this project: Contribute to my fund-raising campaign so I can complete the interviews and begin writing the book.

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For me, it led to an OMG-moment.

Part 1 of this series: Six Days under “Siege”: What the Reporting does not Resolve
Part 2: How Did a Tent Become a Siege?

The first thing that raised my eyebrows was the fact that Major General Avi Bluth, commander of the IDF’s Central Command overseeing military operations in Judea and Samaria, drove out to the site. I might be wrong, but I don’t remember him having driven out to other similar sites. I mainly remember the IDF having taken down illegal outposts quite unceremoniously – over and over if needed because the settlers often returned to rebuild.

Therefore, I wondered what was special about Qusra that required Bluth’s presence.

Then, five days after the event erupted, we were told that the army had given evacuation orders to 15 families in Qusra. Six families had already left their homes when the evacuation order was rescinded later that day.

That was the second thing that raised my eyebrows.

Some news reports claimed that the evacuation orders were given in relation to the need to conduct a military operation to remove the settlers and protect the local residents.

That made no sense to me: the three home where the tent was erected were isolated and over a kilometer from the center of Qusra so why did homes within Qusra need to be evacuated? Only Times of Israel seemed puzzled by the reason given for the evacuation orders:

It was unclear why the IDF needed to remove Palestinians from their homes in order to clear settlers from the area, but the IDF rescinded the evacuation order shortly after it began making headlines.

The OMG-moment

What the anti-settler articles consistently ignored and what the pro-settler articles consistently emphasized was that Qusra has a documented history of violence involving some of its residents, including attacks on Israeli hikers and shepherds and repeated stone-throwing at Israeli civilians and security forces. A Qusra resident had also been implicated in a Hamas cell responsible for two shooting attacks in 2015, one of them fatal.

I put that fact together with the evacuation orders and Bluth’s visit to the site and suddenly was hit with the possibility that a counterterrorism operation had been planned to take place in Qusra and that the youths, by setting up their tent, may have inadvertently foiled it. What an irony, I thought to myself: the Hilltop Youth justify their vigilantism on their view that the IDF does not do enough to fight Palestinian Arab terrorism against Jews.

I had nothing to support that hypothesis, however. And I tried to get information about when the evacuation orders were really handed down. If it was before the tent was originally set up, I would have had my substantiating evidence. If it was after the tent, it would neither support nor contradict my theory.

I found nobody who could answer my question.

One of the people I spoke with was Maurice Hirsch, former director of the IDF Military Prosecution for Judea and Samaria and now at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. We spoke on the phone.

Maurice Hirsch

Hirsch raised the possibility of a counterterrorism operation before I told him my thoughts.

He was unequivocal about one thing: The tent was erected in Area B, where Israel has no civil jurisdiction. Whatever else happened afterward, he said, the youths had no legitimate reason to establish themselves there. And once the IDF ordered them to leave, they should have left and stayed away. To those who argue that the Palestinians built illegally in Area B and these three homes served as a base from which terror attacks against Jews emanated, Israel has no authority to police construction violations in Areas A and B.

Continuing, he said:

The youths’ wrongdoing does not explain why dealing with them apparently required such a substantial military deployment or why 15 or 16 Palestinian houses were supposed to be evacuated and used as military positions.

By Wednesday evening, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir had ordered an additional standing-army infantry battalion into the Qusra area “to strengthen operational control,” with further forces placed on standby. The reinforcement was subsequently identified as Golani’s 51st Battalion. Border Police and other IDF forces were already operating at the site.

The counterterrorism hypothesis potentially explains the anomaly between the scale of this deployment and Avi Bluth’s involvement. After all, all of this cannot be accounted for by the “military problem” consisting of several youths on a sofa and mattresses under a makeshift tent, however close it was to the outlaying homes on the hill outside of Qusra.

But what became of the operation? We have heard nothing more about it and as of this writing, I understand that the youth are still camped out in the terrace beneath the three homes, with the IDF occupying one of the three homes.

Was an intended operation to clear Qusra of terrorists foiled by a group of Hilltop Youth who accuse the Israeli authorities of not doing enough to fight terrorism in Judea and Samaria?

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­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­14 August 2026

Now an international incident, I first learned of what happened in Qusra, from a report on Israel’s Kan 11 TV channel yesterday evening. Qusra is a Palestinian Arab village in Area B in Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank). Area B is under exclusive Palestinian Authority (PA) civil administration and conjoint PA and Israeli security responsibilities.

Not interested in their next segment, I zapped the remote and went to Channel 14 just as they began reporting on the same Qusra incident.

If I ignored the landscape shown in both videos, I could have imagined they were reporting on different events. Channel 11 told viewers that extremists established an outpost beside Palestinian homes, blocked access routes, cut water and electricity, and effectively trapped three families in their homes. Its reporter attempted to reach the families but was stopped by the IDF about 300 metres away.

The translated transcript is in the Appendix.

Channel 14 physically took viewers to the location of the disputed settler outpost structure, pointed out that one home was approximately 30 to 40 metres away, and declared that whatever occurred, it was certainly not a “siege.” It then provided evidence and testimony about Palestinian attacks on the settlers.

The translated transcript of this news report is in the appendix.

Channel 11 is a public broadcasting station, and I do not find it biased toward the left in the way I find Channels 12 and 13, or toward the right as I find Channel 14. I watch both of them and i24 for my news. I24News did not add anything new and was somewhere between the two other reports.

I want to share with you where my thinking about what I had just seen took me.

Moving along

I drew up a table comparing the major claims of the Channel 11 and Channel 14 reports:

Table 1. Differential reporting of the Qusra incident

As I sought more details that would help me understand what really happened at Qusra, I thought it would be instructive to look at Facebook posts by activists on both sides of the political spectrum.

The first is written by rightwing activist Elisha Yered, a resident of Ramat Migron in the Binyamin region of Samaria north of Jerusalem; the second by Standing Together, a leftwing anti-“occupation” NGO in Israel.

Elisha Yered’s Facebook Post

I translated the Facebook post in which Yered gives his account of the context in which the Qusra incident took place. I have not independently verified all of Yered’s claims. However, his allegation concerning Qusai Abu Rida is not without supporting evidence. Channel 14 previously aired video that it identified as showing Abu Rida participating in an attack on a Jewish shepherd and reported that he was arrested following the incident and later released. The report also showed footage it said depicted him throwing stones at Jews walking on the terraces below his home.

Here, I will only show his summary; the full details are in the translated post in the Appendix to this article. According to Yered:

• A village [Qusra] that supports terrorism.

• An Arab [Qusai Abu Rida] who is himself involved in terrorism and should be in prison.

• A house built far from the village for clearly nationalist purposes

• Zero violence against Arabs by the shepherds, who themselves have been attacked.

• Zero violence against the security forces.

Standing Together Facebook Post

After a solidarity march to the site with other leftwing NGOs, Standing together published a video of the visit, accompanied by an explanatory text. For space considerations, I am giving you the bullet points here and you can read the entire text on Facebook:

• For days, violent Israeli settlers – with the backing and protection of Israeli forces – have surrounded these families’ homes, harassed and threatened them from outside, and blocked the roads leading to them.

• The settlers cut off the families’ water and electricity, while their presence and threats left the families afraid that stepping outside could put their lives in danger.

• Food and urgent medical assistance were also prevented from reaching them.

• They should not have to depend on activists pushing past military obstruction simply to receive what they need to survive.

• This is what occupation and settler terror look like in everyday life. Delivering basic supplies is not enough, the siege must end, the settlers must be removed, and these families must be protected and rescued immediately.

• We will keep fighting settler terror, forced displacement, and the system that enables them, and we will keep fighting until the occupation ends.

Synthesizing what we have

Drawing on the Israeli reports and other material I examined, here is what I can say with confidence that I know at this point:

1. Hilltop youths set up a tent along a road or path near three homes on the outskirts of Qusra and apparently near a spring at which they were watering their sheep.

2. They spread rocks from the roadside rock barrier onto the road, preventing the movement of vehicles when the army came to take their van.

3. Everyone says the tent and their grazing plot are in Area B, where the Palestinian Authority exercises civil authority and the youths had no authorization to establish an outpost.

4. Israeli soldiers compelled the youths to leave the area after they had joined them in prayer.

5. The youths came back.

Here is what is missing from all the reports to substantiate claims made:

1. Visual evidence of property damage, of broken water pipes, and of disconnected power infrastructure.

2. Visual evidence of the settlers surrounding the houses rather than just at one spot down the road from them.

3. Visual evidence of settlers attacking residents of the houses.

4. Views of the backs of the houses to see if there were other ways of moving in and out.

This APT image gives the clearest view I found of the physical relationship between the encampment and one of the homes. The tent is visible down the road from the walled compound. What the image does not show is what was happening on the other sides of the house.

But even if there was no usable back entrance, that does not establish that the families were deprived of food, water or other necessities. Israeli forces were already present at the site. The IDF has delivered humanitarian supplies under active wartime conditions in Gaza; supplying a small number of families in Qusra would hardly have presented a comparable logistical problem. Yet none of the reports I examined asked about this and only talked of the families’ dwindling food and water supplies.

What I need to know

I would have loved to drive out there and see the location for myself and talk to the Arab residents of those homes myself. I would have loved to talk to the Hilltop Youths who set up their tent illegally.

But more than that: I would love to talk with all the politicians, IDF officials, and journalists who called this a siege and claimed that the Hilltop Youths there were preventing the residents of the house from going out to get food for 3-4 days. I wanted to know what they were basing their statements on.

Then I read a statement released by Oded Revivi in which he called the behaviour of the youths “contrary to morality and justice.” Revivi has over 15 years of experience in leadership roles in Judea and Samaria and has also represented the settlement movement in its dealings with representatives of the United States, Europe and others. I was interested in understanding his thoughts.”

Oded Revivi

An English translation of Revivi’s full written statement is in the Appendix. He agreed to speak with me on the phone.

Revivi told me that he was not an eyewitness to what happened in Qusra but was relying on “what [he] managed to collect from different sources and the picture that [he] managed to create for [himself].” And he believes that he has “more or less the full picture.”

I began by asking if he had seen evidence for the claims made against the youths aside from the simple fact they built a tent and blocked the access road to the spring. He saw no evidence of a siege around the homes in question, saw no evidence of property damage or interference with water or power supplies to the homes.

Then he told me that giving him a list of immoral things the youths may or may not have done was beside the point.

I still pressed the matter. I told him that there seemed to be other trails and roads between the houses under “siege” and the village. But he was as adamant as I was:

It is clear that what the youths did, and even just bringing materials, building the huts or whatever construction they built, was not on land that was designated for them, was not land which is owned by them. . . . It does not matter to me if there are two roads leading to a specific house or one road is blocked, so you can say it is not a full siege, it is a partial siege. Why does there need to be any blockage on a road that does not belong to you?

“In Qusra, you have one specific event,” he stated, “and two different interpretations for it. It brings up two different emotions and then leads to at least two different acts of response.” And the main concern for him was the “bigger picture and it is what some of the people who do these acts do not understand.” Even given the context concerning the violence against Jews emanating from Qusra’s population, he says:

In no scenario and in no circumstances is it the job of the youths to do law enforcement.

He fears:

. . . that at the end of the day, the phenomenon will become so widely spread that even if they are a small minority, they are the ones who are going to dictate the response and policy of foreign countries against Israel. . . . I think that is something we need to try and have, not in the back of our heads, but just in front of us at all times.

What remains unresolved for me

Several outlets told us that 15 Palestinian families had been instructed by the IDF to leave their homes because of an imminent IDF operation in the town. It was not clear to me whether the three families at the centre of the “siege” reports were included among those 15. Six families had already left before the rest were told they could, actually, remain in place.

Some news reports suggested that the IDF operation was related to demolishing the illegal encampment near Qusra. But one possibility I could not rule out was that the planned operation concerned counter-terrorism rather than the encampment. Qusra has a documented history of violence against Israelis. But without knowing when the evacuation orders were first issued, I could not establish whether the operation plans predated the youths’ arrival.

I asked Revivi if he could tell me when the original orders to leave their homes were given to residents of Qusra. He did not know and he said that is irrelevant to the immoral and dangerous behaviour on the part of the youths.

Just before I spoke with Revivi, Regavim shared a new report in which they argued that American-Palestinian dual citizens are exploiting their unique position in the town of Turmus Ayya, not far from Qusra, to manipulate public opinion into believing that “settler violence” is a widespread phenomenon. The parallel caught my attention. The owner of one of the “besieged” houses in Qusra, Loui Ridi, lives in Ohio, and he returned just as I was finishing editing this piece. CNN recorded him putting an American flag up on his property.

Revivi commented that this:

. . . creates more complexity to a situation that historically is complex, and we know that we have enemies who are trying to take advantage of it, and in that respect, we are playing into their hands.

In Conclusion

I began this exploration wondering if I could find what really happened on the outskirts of Qusra. My readers already know (from this article and others) that I publish what I find whether it supports my political position or not.

For some of my readers, what the youths did in this instance is illegitimate regardless of the details, whereas for other readers, the context plays an essential part in looking at what they did.

The Crux of the Matter

After speaking with Revivi, I find myself reflecting on a different question: does moral judgment depend on proving the most dramatic version of events? If the youths illegally established themselves on land that was not theirs and deliberately blocked even one road, how much does the rest matter to the moral judgment?

And then, if that alone is enough, how did the story become one of families besieged in their homes, settlers swarming around them, utilities cut and people being starved out if “all” they did was set up a tent 40 metres down the hill from one of them?

But there was another twist in this story and I will have to leave that for a separate article. Stay tuned . . . .

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Appendix: Translations of Raw Material from Hebrew to English

Channel 11 TV News Item

Clashes this morning between Border Police forces and settlers on the outskirts of the village of Qusra in Binyamin. Several days after a tent was erected adjacent to the Palestinian homes, this morning the IDF and Border Police finally evacuated it, but the settlers returned immediately afterward. The evacuation did not go smoothly. Additional activists streamed to the area, blocking access roads with large rocks and making things difficult for the security forces.

Footage from the scene shows extremist settlers blocking the access roads and later continuing to sit at the site on sofas and mattresses, even though the IDF had previously announced that the illegal outpost would be evacuated.

[Palestinian speaker:] “Really, [they are making] films, black films. Everyone sees, and the journalists see. The settlers are making a lot of trouble.”

The new outpost was established three days ago by Jewish extremists from the nearby Tal Talpiyot outpost, several hundred metres away, and is closing in on the homes of three Palestinian families, comprising about ten people.

[Palestinian speaker:] “They cut off the water, they cut off the electricity, and they settled there. The army comes, sits with them, drinks coffee, takes pictures with them, mingles with them, and leaves.”

According to the IDF Spokesperson, during attempts to evacuate the site, Central Command chief Avi Bluth and other commanders arrived. They condemned the incident and ordered further measures. It was also decided to take disciplinary action against the force involved, which had been documented at the location several days earlier, when it was seen praying with the settlers and refrained from evacuating them.

[Palestinian speaker:] “All these paths, everything you see here, all these houses, nobody dares approach there because of the settlers. And most of the time the army helps them.”

“The spring, the water source of our village, which provides water to many homes here in the village, they cut it off from the village. They use it alone.”

[Several sentences here are badly garbled in the transcription. The speakers appear to be discussing their presence at their own homes and their ability to approach them.]

Several media outlets organized together in an attempt to reach the homes of the besieged families, after journalists who had tried to reach them on previous days were attacked by settlers.

[Channel 11 reporter:] “We are here at a roadblock manned by Home Front Command reservists. We are approximately, I think, 300 metres from the besieged Palestinian home here among the houses of the village of Qusra. Home Front Command reservists are here.”

“Under IDF instructions and an order from the commanding general, they are telling us that this is a closed military zone. We cannot continue toward the family. Despite the evacuation that took place here, despite the IDF reporting that the routes had been opened, these are currently the instructions they have received. They cannot allow us to pass.”

Despite IDF briefings that Border Police forces were expected to arrive during the day and once again evacuate the settlers, the evacuation did not take place and the settlers remain in the area.

[Palestinian speaker:] “I always said that the State of Israel is a state of law. But now I say the State of Israel has no law. Where is the law? Where is the government? Where is the Shin Bet? Where are the police? Where is the army? Where? Where is everyone? Do they not see this?”

Since the terrorist attack two weeks ago in the village of Tal in Samaria, 13 outposts have been established. But it appears that the IDF is deterred by the settlers’ response and is afraid to act in the manner required of it.Channel 14 TV News Item

A turbulent morning in Binyamin. Arabs from the village of Qusra claimed that several settlers were imposing a siege on homes containing Palestinian families.

With the assistance of anarchists and extreme-left activists who were invited to the area, media crews arrived and hurried to declare that residents of the nearby Tal Talpiyot farm were besieging the Palestinian family’s home.

The IDF Spokesperson later joined this determination, noting that the commanding general would arrive at the scene to ensure that the besieged family had sufficient water.

[Channel 14 reporter at the site:] “I am now near Tal Talpiyot, at the point where the structure that was talked about so much this morning stood.”

“You can still see the posts from the structure here, and the sofa that the youths used. About 30 or 40 metres from me is the building in which, it was claimed, the people who were supposedly under siege were located.”

“You can clearly see the distance between the place where the structure stood and the buildings belonging to the Arab residents who live here in the area. Many things can be said about what happened here today, but a siege is certainly not what happened.”

We came today to the Tal Talpiyot farm to see up close what really happened.

[Settler:] “We are here in a huge bloc where, until now, there was terrorism here. Until now, at this antenna, there was an armed guard. A few years ago...” [remainder of sentence unclear in transcript] “...there was an armed guard here at this antenna.”

“And since we came here, everything has opened up. Jews walk around everywhere here. We have returned here, improved the springs on this mountain, we have returned here.”

“We experience a lot here from the Arab side.”

The youths who established the farm at this strategic location, situated in the heart of Area B, have been attacked many times by Arabs from the village of Qusra.

As can be seen in this footage, residents of the houses who complained about the settlers can be seen throwing stones at the youths.

[Settler:] “This is something one of these Arab rioters did to us. And that is it. This is what we live with every day. We try to work as much as possible with the police, with the army.”

“As things become more publicized, we try to work through the system. Everything that happens, we report to the authorities.”

It therefore appears that the terrorists attacking the settlers are doing everything possible to prevent the expansion of the settlement enterprise.

And they do not hesitate to promote a false narrative, as happened this morning.

Elisha Yered’s Facebook Post

There are some incidents I can still understand, but what is happening with the Yesha Council and the chorus of condemnations from the right, who are being swept along like a blind herd, is a complete bankruptcy.

Not one of them checked the details or even tried to understand the incident. They all rushed to echo the media’s messages and play their part as tools in the cynical and malicious election campaign of the left-wing parties.

Stay with me for a moment. Try to ignore the background noise you have heard, and let us go through the details together, because the descriptions being thrown around here, including by people on the right, have gotten completely out of control.

• The location of the incident at the centre of the uproar is the slopes of Jabal Ein Eineh, the second-highest mountain in Samaria, situated between Migdalim and the Shiloh bloc.

• On the ridge adjacent to the mountain lies the village of murderers, Qusra, which has for years carried with it a rich history of terrorist incidents: a horrific lynching of boys during a bar mitzvah hike, additional lynchings of hikers, explosive-device attacks, and regular rioting.

• Over the past five years, the Palestinian Authority and the village councils have designated Jabal Ein Eineh as a critical target for Arab control. It dominates the entire area and effectively constitutes a regional base of control. Whoever controls the Jabal will control the entire area.

• From that point, an extensive operation began to build roads to the mountain, prepare plots, and rapidly construct houses with assistance from the Palestinian Authority. The village councils also provided assistance and funding to encourage an Arab foothold on the mountain. One of the Arabs who took up the task was Qusai Abu Rida, an Arab nationalist from the village of Qusra.

• About eight months ago, at the eleventh hour before the ridge was taken over, a settlement nucleus consisting of families and young men went up and established a foothold on the summit of the Jabal. The site was given the name Tel Talpiyot.

• In Qusra, they understood the strategic significance and launched a series of terrorist incidents against the residents of the hilltop and any Jew who dared set foot in the area. A flock of sheep was poisoned, two explosive devices were planted and neutralized at the last moment by bomb-disposal experts, residents were subjected to lynchings, and shepherds were attacked and injured.

• One of the leaders of the terrorist activity was Qusai Abu Rida, who built his house on the slopes of the mountain. He was documented participating in a severe lynching of a shepherd, forcibly restraining the shepherd together with other rioters while another tried to behead him with a hoe. He was arrested but, absurdly, released. In another incident, masked rioters were documented throwing stones from his house at hikers who were on their way to a nearby spring. And only about three weeks ago, terrorists fired from the vicinity of his house toward the hilltop.

• About two weeks ago, following the heat wave that made it difficult for the flock to walk long distances, several shepherds erected a shade structure on the slopes of the hill, two terraces below Qusai’s house, which, as noted, served as a forward stronghold for terrorism and sits on the main route to the spring used for watering the flock.

• No one acted violently toward any of the residents of the house, despite the fact that these are full-fledged terror operatives. No one prevented the family from leaving and returning to its home. And certainly no one raised a hand against the security forces. On the contrary, those on the hilltop have always made an effort to maintain cooperation and good relations with IDF soldiers in the sector. The soldiers were even documented praying Mincha together with the young men, an event that, strangely, became controversial.

• Qusai, the Arab who, as noted, is waging a campaign to remove the Jewish presence from the entire mountain and is connected to left-wing organizations, decided, regardless of the facts, to launch a campaign. Journalists reported dramatically, the IDF Spokesperson came under pressure and issued a condemnation, Avi Bluth hurried to the scene, and forces were sent to carry out demolitions and confiscate the hilltop’s vehicles.

• Several dozen youths tried to block the road to prevent the confiscation of the Ranger, an act of protest of the kind that has been carried out a hundred times or more at Kaplan. But despite their anger, not one of them raised a hand or engaged in violence.

From that point, everything proceeded according to plan. The incident was inflated by brilliant strategists on the left who decided long ago that the settler-violence libel would be a central theme in the left’s election campaign, and even people on the right fell one after another like dominoes.

To summarize briefly:

• A village that supports terrorism.

• An Arab who is himself involved in terrorism and should be in prison.

• A house built far from the village for clearly nationalist purposes.

• Zero violence against Arabs by the shepherds, who themselves have been attacked.

• Zero violence against the security forces.

Now tell me: why the hell have the Yesha Council and people on the right spent the past two days condemning these youths, effectively declaring their blood fair game, and babbling about “raising a hand against the security forces,” when this nonsense bears no relation whatsoever to reality?! Can they not understand that they are simply soldiers in a malicious political game?

Feel free to share this or ask them yourselves.

Oded Revivi’s Statement: Silence Will Cost the Settlement Enterprise Dearly

“As someone who served as head of the Yesha Council’s foreign affairs desk and maintained close contact with Ambassador Mike Huckabee, I feel an obligation to warn those who call themselves right-wing but act against the settlement enterprise: Do not try to label one of the settlement enterprise’s greatest friends in the United States a leftist,” says Col. (res.) Oded Revivi this morning, with evident pain.

Revivi served for more than 15 years as head of the Efrat Local Council and was one of the senior figures in the Yesha Council. He also served as a representative of the settlement movement in its dealings with representatives of the United States, Europe and others.

According to Revivi:

“It was not only the events in Qusra that led Ambassador Huckabee to decide to use very harsh words, calling the Israelis who acted there ‘Israeli terrorists’ and describing their actions as ‘criminal.’ It was also the support of some right-wing leaders who supposedly seek to advance settlement but whose actions result in an own goal and drive people away.

“The silence in Jerusalem in the face of these events also became particularly jarring to the ambassador. When an action like this took place, contrary to morality and justice, one of our greatest friends expected official Israel to point the moral compass in the right direction. When that did not happen, he decided to act.”

Revivi, who oversaw the construction of thousands of housing units during his tenure and also hosted Huckabee in Efrat, added:

“We must not allow ourselves to become confused by the election campaign and the desire to scrape together a few more votes. Domestic politics that tramples the national interest will ultimately endanger everything we have built. If a true friend like Huckabee has to bang on the table, all of us need to stop and ask how we lost our way, and correct it immediately. Continued support, continued silence, will cost the settlement enterprise dearly,” he concluded.

For almost a week, I have been trying to establish what actually happened on the outskirts of Qusra. As I seek the chronology of events, I came across an early report that I feel merits attention even as I continue to investigate what happened.

On August 14, PBS News published an Associated Press (AP) report under the headline, “Palestinians besieged in West Bank village of Qusra fear Israeli settlers will seize their homes.”

It is a powerful story: Dozens of settlers arrive. They block the doors of three Palestinian homes. The families cannot leave. Food and water dwindle. Israeli forces repeatedly remove the settlers, who repeatedly return. The families fear that if they leave, settlers will take their homes. Activists eventually march toward the houses carrying desperately needed supplies.

But there is a problem: The more closely I read the August 14 report, alongside the reporting PBS and AP had published the previous day, the less straightforward the story became.

What does “siege” mean?

The August 14 report says:

The standoff in Qusra began on Sunday when dozens of settlers arrived and blocked the doors to the three houses, preventing occupants from leaving, according to the families inside.

This central factual claim underlying reporting on the incident is “according to the families inside.” While eyewitness testimony is evidence, and while it is obvious that reporters would interview the people inside the houses, what begins as an attributed allegation becomes the organising factual framework of the entire story; i.e., a “siege.” The article describes “the siege of the homes” and activists marching toward “the besieged homes.”

Yet elsewhere in the same article, we are given a somewhat different physical picture. Qusai Abu Rida., living with his son in his brother’s home, watches settlers move “from where they had erected a tent in front of his house to the valley below.” By Friday, Israeli troops had taken positions around the homes while the settlers remained in the valley.

So what, physically, constituted the siege at different points during those six days?

Were settlers continuously surrounding the houses? Were the doors physically blocked throughout the period? Was a road blocked? Were residents unable to leave because settlers prevented them from doing so, because they feared what would happen if they left, because the IDF had closed the area, or some combination of these at different times?

The article describes these changing circumstances over six days under the single continuous term “siege.”

What the article says, and what it also says

Once I began separating the article’s claims from the evidence and attribution accompanying them, a pattern emerged.

Table 1. What the article says and what it also says

None of these questions establishes that the families’ account is wrong. What it does show is that the narrative is presented as more settled than there is evidence to support that contention.

What about the security cameras?

Since beginning to investigate what happened at Qusra, I wondered why I could find no videotapes or photographs that would show that the settlers were at the door or inside the yard of at least one of the three “besieged” homes. After all, in today’s world, the smartphones are taken out to record altercations and confrontations.

The owner of one of the houses, Loui Ridi, lives in Ohio and his brother is in his Qusra home. In this report, we learn that he had been in constant contact with his brother and had been “watching the siege unfold on security cameras until they went offline Thursday.”

The previous day, PBS News’ Nick Schifrin interviewed Ridi, his brother Qusai Abu Rida and Abu Rida’s son Ahmed. Ridi described waking on Sunday morning, looking at his phone and seeing settlers erecting a tent “literally in front of the house.”

Finally I found PBS’s NewHour report that does show an image that seems to be from the family’s security camera. It is timestamped 12 Aug at 10:25 a.m. and shows a sizeable group of people gathered close to the property. But look at the image yourself. It does not show anyone blocking a door, nor does it show anyone attempting to leave and being prevented from doing so. Yet while showing this image, PBS describes settlers as having “swarmed a home” and trapped the family inside.

Perhaps other security-camera footage shows precisely that. I do not know. But the image PBS chose to show its viewers does not establish what the narration says happened.

And the reporting published the previous day adds another layer.

What the 13 August reporting tells us

The same day as the interview, AP also published a written report describing the family’s serious difficulties. Abu Rida said they were trapped beginning on Sunday (9 Aug) and were unable to access food and medicine. He also told the reporter that electricity and water were cut off and that the family had been forced to drink water from wells unsuitable for drinking.

However, we know that by Tuesday (11 Aug), the military had declared the area a closed military zone and that roads into the village were closed Thursday afternoon. On Friday, activists trying to reach the houses were stopped by Israeli forces.

That does not tell us what prevented supplies from reaching the families earlier in the week. It does tell us that by Thursday and Friday there was another actor restricting access: the Israeli military.

The six days, therefore, cannot automatically be treated as one continuous condition produced by one actor, i.e., the settler youth.

What do we actually know?

Israeli youths established an illegal encampment close to Palestinian homes. The military repeatedly intervened. Palestinian residents say they were threatened and prevented from leaving. Their food and water supplies became limited. The situation attracted the attention of U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, who called the conduct a “horrific act of terror.”

What I am asking is how much of the story presented in the August 14 report has actually been established by the evidence presented to its readers? This is important because something happened to the reporting with time: A family says settlers blocked its doors. The incident becomes a “siege.” A homeowner fears his house will eventually be taken. The settlers “apparently want to push them out.” The families have dwindling supplies. The shortage becomes part of the siege narrative, although by Thursday the military itself was restricting access to the area.

And then the article places Qusra within the broader story of settler violence across the region. That can make one interpretation of this particular incident feel established before the evidence presented for this particular incident has established it.

I am still investigating Qusra. I want to track what witnesses say happened and what the available evidence establishes. I would like readers to be as curious as I am when there seems to be a disconnect between the two.

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After reading it, however, I found myself thinking about a different question. What if our goal is not to win today’s argument?

What if we have weeks or months with the same people? What if we hope not merely to expose weak thinking, but to create the conditions under which people begin questioning their own assumptions?

An Example of Working with Deeply Held Stereotypes

There is an experience that taught me more about challenging deeply held beliefs than any political debate ever has: For many years, I taught family life and sex education to Arab teachers in Israel. Because they questioned so much of what secular Jewish participants accepted as a natural starting point, Haifa University, and then the Education Ministry, began offering the course for Arab teachers only. Then, over the course of an academic year, I would successfully teach subjects such as premarital sex, contraception, and homosexuality to conservative Muslim educators who sat politely in class but would say this material has nothing to do with them when they were in the mixed Jewish-Arab classes.

I modified my regular sex ed syllabus for the Arab educators: first, I changed the order of the topics, putting the least potentially contentious topics in the first semester, allowing for a gradual building of trust between the students and me. Secondly, in teaching courtship for example, instead of working on it within the context of male-female relationships, I talked about male-male and female-female friendships. Same material. I trusted that teaching assertiveness within same-sex friendships is transferable to opposite-sex relationships. Third, since from the start, I had to list the topics that would be covered, I gave generic titles to the more problematic subjects, such as calling the class on homosexuality, something like “Dealing with Differences”. The topic on homosexuality, by the way, was the last one covered. In other words, I did not take anything out of the curriculum; rather, I made sure the material was teachable.

But one particular class compelled me to delve deeper and reframe the pedagogic approach entirely.

The first coffee break

The first indication that this would not be an ordinary course came during the first coffee break. One of the female teachers approached me, warning:

If you dare to talk about premarital sex and birth control, I will leave the class and take everyone with me. If you dare to talk about homosexuality, I will leave the class and take everyone with me.

And when you teach sexual anatomy, you must separate the men and the women.

Consider, for a moment, how you think you would have handled this situation. And then think about whether or not that would have accomplished your goals in teaching the class.

My goals included actually having an effect on my students. I was not there just to impart facts and knowledge, I was there to challenge stereotypes and open minds to the complexities of the issues of sexuality and couples relationships. Therefore, it would have been counterproductive were I to say to her that I was there to teach certain material and she could stay or leave as she desired. It would have also been counterproductive for me to even just THINK of her as closed minded and rigid and unmovable. Instead, I saw her as a product of her environment who was, in spite of that, open enough to sign up for a course in sex education.

In order to challenge my students, I had to be familiar with their backgrounds and the culture in which they grew up and lived. When I began teaching sex ed in the Arab sector, many teachers kept even the fact of their attendance in the course a secret from their colleagues. THAT is how conservative their society was at that time and it should give you a sense of the anxiety many of them felt, alongside their excitement at learning new material.

The student who had approached me at the break said,

It doesn’t matter how many courses you have taught to Arabs, I do not believe you can really understand our mentality.

I responded to her thus:

You are correct to assume that I can never totally understand your mentality and I hope you will find me respectful and considerate as I teach this course.

I smiled at her and I had a private inner smile that accompanied the thought that this woman does not yet know what she is in for! I learned a lot from mistakes I had made teaching my first class in the Arab sector and now was quite confident in my ability to bring her to places she never dreamed she would go.

Building the course around disagreement

The changes I had already made in the course when adapting it to the Arab sector were not enough here. I realised that I had to make disagreement a central feature of classroom discussions. Instead of seeking to find a common ground, I sought to bring disagreement to the surface. Beginning with their disagreements with me.

The obstacle was not ignorance. My students could understand new information perfectly well. Intellectually, they often agreed that it made sense. But emotionally, the ideas remained “okay for other people”: Jews, Europeans, Americans. New knowledge could be acquired without becoming personally meaningful, sealed off by a “screen,” a kind of psychological filter that prevented it from becoming integrated into existing values and emotions.

The challenge was helping the facts become relevant to their own lives.

The unexpected advantage

Being Jewish turned out to be an advantage. I was seen so much as “other” that my students expected me to have objectionable opinions and views. They were ready to pounce on any “misdemeanour” of mine that went against their ways. I used that to advantage. Had I been an Arab instructor, they would have expected me to follow the “party line” and any controversial statement would have had them consider me unfit to teach them. They would have rejected ME. As a Jew, I had the freedom to say outrageous things about which they proceeded to argue with me and tell me why THEY could not think or do anything like THAT.

They rejected my ideas but accepted me as an expert.

My goal was never to convince them that I was right. It was to get them talking. They were hearing themselves and each other explaining why I was culturally inept when I said such and such about this or that. And, as they heard the most conservative among them tell me why I was wrong and did not understand them or their culture, they began to see cracks in their own arguments. And then they began to debate each other.

At that point, they were beginning to challenge their own assumptions.

Even with the growing trust among us, they still requested that I teach sexual anatomy separately. Out of respect, I agreed. When the men and women got back together again in the next session, they told me that, after having experienced how I handled the topic, they think they would have been able to be together for that lesson, but that they could not have known that beforehand.

Everything changed

In the second semester they laughed at themselves a lot, laughed at the way they were talking about things they never ever expected to discuss, certainly not in mixed company. In the middle of a group exercise where they were to classify behaviours as either normal or perversions, one dignified man stood up and declared his amazement at how they were using words they never thought they would utter aloud.

They discussed how they could not bring much of what they were learning into the classrooms in their schools, not directly, that is. But since their own attitudes had changed, they were already seeing that they responded differently to issues that arose in the classroom -- and not only regarding sexuality. Furthermore, they were taking their newfound knowledge and understandings home to their spouses and children.

Eventually we reached the final controversial topic.

Homosexuality

Not only did I talk about it, but I even invited a lesbian and a gay male to class to talk with them about what it was like to come out, first to themselves and then to their families, and other aspects of life as a gay person in Israel at that time.

We learned about homosexuality theoretically before the break and I told the class about the guests who would come after the break. Not one person failed to return to class.

The woman who had warned me months earlier never to mention homosexuality stood up afterwards, thanked our guests for coming, and expressed sadness for the difficulties they and their families had experienced.

What this has to do with antisemitism

Kaplan’s article gives us an excellent model for conversations that may never happen again. Those moments matter. Sometimes clarity is exactly what is needed.

But there is another kind of conversation. Teachers have it. Parents, friends, neighbours. Journalists sometimes have it through repeated interviews. The conversations where winning is losing.

People rarely change because they have been cornered. They can change when they feel respected enough to examine their own assumptions without losing face.

It was one thing to accomplish this in the classroom and quite something else to accomplish it in our daily lives. It was one thing to be able to remain cool when I was an expert in the subject matter and something else to remain cool when I do not consider myself an expert in topics relevant to fighting antisemitism. My lack of self confidence can produce anxiety which raises my emotional barometer, reducing my ability to navigate disagreements as easily as I did in class.

Moreover, fighting antisemitism is personal for me, and, I imagine, for most other Jews. We are fighting for our lives. Breaking down the stereotypes we contend with is not a purely cognitive activity, and that raises the stakes of every exchange. Advocates like Yosef Haddad, Chen Mazzig, and Douglas Murray engage with a confidence I don’t yet have in this arena. What they have, I think, is not fearlessness. It’s practice. They have had the exposure, and the repetition, that I had in the classroom I controlled for a full year. I am still building mine.

Conversational Krav Maga

If we hope to challenge antisemitism, prejudice, or any deeply held belief, perhaps we should not expect ourselves to improvise. Krav Maga is taught, not improvised, because under stress people fall back on what they have practised, not on what they intended to do. Conversational Krav Maga would work the same way: practised moves for asking questions, listening without surrendering, and challenging assumptions without immediately triggering defensiveness, so that when the moment for winning gives way to the longer work of changing minds, we are not starting from scratch.

That woman who once threatened to walk out of my classroom did not change her mind because I won an argument with her. She changed because, over a year, she was given the room to argue her way to a different conclusion herself. I cannot manufacture a year with every colleague, neighbour, or relative who holds a belief I want to challenge. But I can practise the moves that make that kind of room possible in conversations instead of two semesters of class time. That practice, not the argument itself, is the work ahead of us.

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I witnessed the events described in this article in November 2024. By the spring of 2025, I finally had confirmation for a fact I spent months trying to track down. Yet I still did not publish.

I was not emotionally ready. What unsettled me was not only what I had witnessed that day, but what the investigation revealed about my own assumptions as a journalist. I still feel some anxiety in publishing this. But enough time has passed. The story deserves to stand on its own.

Since then, I continue investigating how organisations document and report “settler violence.” That work has reinforced for me that large statistical databases and international reporting deserve careful scrutiny. Yet that does not change the value of investigating individual events on their own merits. This article is not based on aggregate statistics or advocacy reports. It is based on what I observed and what I learned after months of trying to verify the facts about one specific place.

What follows is the piece as I wrote it last summer.

____________________________________________________________________________

I could pretend I was never there. I could pretend I don’t know.

But if pretending is not consistent with who I am, do I really have to write this up?

I wonder if my poor heart will act up at some point during the editing and rewriting as it did on the field trip in which I played undercover journalist.

Over the years I have investigated cases of alleged settler violence against Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank). When able to get enough material, I found that the Arabs or their Jewish activist partners instigated the violence and then just recorded the Jewish settlers defending themselves.

But I was never there in real time. I could only research in retrospect and second-hand.

Therefore, one Friday morning in November, I boarded a bus with 45 volunteers with the NGO, Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR), pretending to be one of them. I wanted proof that I was right – that settler violence was a reaction to incitement.

I was certain that the olive groves we set out to help harvest were on Israeli public land in Area C, where Israel has exclusive control under the Oslo Accords, meaning that the Arabs have no legal right to cultivate it unless granted a license by Israel’s Civil Administration. I also expected that violence – if there was any – would likely be incited by RHR activists with settler response being documented as aggression.

The day started out quietly enough.

As our bus pulled over to the side of the road, I saw two vehicles standing alongside each other up the hill across the valley, facing us, as if awaiting our approach. While I found their presence curious, I gave them no further thought.

Most of the volunteers were directed to work in the grove down a slope next to the parked bus. I was in a smaller group that was sent by foot a few hundred meters back to the other side of the road.

As we were walking, the settlers in the two vehicles came down from their perch in the hills and drove past us; they soon made a U-turn and came back to drive past us again, one taking videos with an arm stretched out the car window. Directly ahead of me, a volunteer muttered something in disdain as he knocked the phone out of the settler’s hand.

I picked up the phone and handed it to the young man as he opened the pick-up door. The other car stopped and members of the RHR group and three of the four young settlers were standing with their Smartphones in each other’s faces, videotaping each other. To me, it was a ridiculous sight.

Instead of trying to listen to them, I walked around to the driver’s side of the pick-up and took a video through the car windows. I wanted to talk with the driver and began to ask him a journalistic question but he just told me he was not interested in anything I had to say.

After this unpleasant but not threatening altercation, the two vehicles drove off. I went with the others to the olive grove. Reaching the trees meant scaling a high rock terrace. The hilly region is dotted with rock terraces that enable farming on land that would otherwise erode away with cultivation.

I am 73, overweight, with two artificial knees and a fear of falling. Once, I would have bounded up like a gazelle. Now, to my shame, I needed two people pulling me and one pushing from behind.

As I made sure of my footing on the now-level ground, two Palestinian women spread plastic sheeting under the trees to collect the olives as they fell from the branches. A few farmers and younger members of our group climbed into the trees to get olives higher up. Others had long poles to beat the branches and ‘encourage’ the olives to let go and fall to the ground. And the rest of us were given a kind of comb with prongs that were smaller than the olives’ circumference so that we could pick them off like I used to comb lice from my kids’ hair decades ago.

A short time later, we noticed a commotion in the larger grove down the road. We were told to abandon the harvest and go higher up the hill as some of the young settlers were running toward us. I tried to see what was happening but only got a quick video between two trees of men running along the road near us.

Then I heard the rustling whooshes of stones in the nearby trees. I was there to document whether settler violence was instigated by the settlers or the leftist NGO and here was the violence. I stood still for a moment debating with myself: move to where I had a clear view of the stone-throwers or run away? Not relishing the thought of a stone in my head, I ran away.

Tried to run away. I would have had to climb more unstable terraces. There was nobody near me now and I had to manage on my own. I did not go far before sitting to rest on the largest rock.

I do not remember feeling fear. Just feeling physically uncomfortable. It was hard for me to breathe and I felt pressure in the middle of my chest. Nothing hurt. Only pressure and shortness of breath. Two days later, I discovered that what had looked to me and others as trying to catch my breath had actually been a mild heart attack.

The rock throwing was over and, when I felt better, I went down to the road where volunteers, farmers, and soldiers loitered seemingly aimlessly. I sat on the metal barrier that marks the edge of the road’s shoulder, next to a woman about my age. Two young soldiers approached; in a friendly manner, they asked the other woman where she was from. With a disdainful look, she replied, “It’s none of your business.”

The soldiers’ faces fell and they moved back. I tried to smile and call out in a warm voice, “I’m from Haifa.” But they were no longer interested in engaging.

Part of me wanted to shake her and say: “Don’t you realise these young soldiers risk their lives for our safety?”

Instead, I said nothing. I was shocked by the venom in her voice but did not want to bring attention to myself as someone who opposes the group’s political views. Later, however, I thought that this had nothing to do with politics; it was a matter of decency and respect for those who put themselves at risk for all of us. And as RHR likes to say, silence in the face of injustice is acquiescence.

The soldiers soon received a virtual document declaring the olive groves a ‘closed military zone’ and three members of RHR were arrested -- for arguing with the soldiers, I think. The rest of us got onto the bus to return home. The farmers and the settlers each went their separate ways. That was a quiet finale to the chaos of military orders and arrests.

Both sides shared their versions of events.

The settlers’ perspective was reported on X by a journalist in direct contact with them; he wrote that dozens of activists and Arabs had come to harvest olives as cover for provocation against settlers. He showed a photo of the phone broken by an activist and claimed that Arabs threw stones.

I did not see any Arabs throw stones; rather, it was settlers who did. And if the screen was broken on the phone I handed back to the settler, I did not notice. Was harvesting olives provocation? That depends on who owns the land.

RHR posted a report claiming that about 20 settlers “attacked Palestinian farmers and our volunteers with stones and poles” and that “several Israeli volunteers and a Palestinian farmer were lightly injured and received medical treatment at the scene.”

Our small group was definitely attacked with stones and the other group harassed by settlers, one with a pole in hand. There were nowhere near 20 of them, as far as I could see. I also saw nobody injured or receiving medical treatment at the scene. When I asked the RHR spokesman how I missed seeing any injuries, I was amused when he told me I was one of them. I knew about the heart attack only two days later and of course they learned of it after I did but their post went up before that. He told me that a Palestinian RHR staff member was seen by a doctor back home for a bruised shoulder.

I oppose vigilantism. The settlers were wrong for attacking the farmers and activists whoever owned the land. If the groves were on Israeli public land and the Palestinian Arabs did not have a license to farm there, some would justify the settlers’ actions as protecting Israeli property. If not, they were criminal trespassers on private property who should have been arrested, and not the activists.

The Missing Piece

I had my story and could have written it up as is. It would have made compelling reading with which neither side would be happy, I think. But I felt it was incomplete without knowing who actually owned the land on which the olive groves grew. That was the missing piece.

It took over five relentless months of unanswered queries and with referrals from one person to another before I finally tracked down a source willing to tell me the truth on condition of anonymity: the land is, in fact, privately owned by the Arab farmers, he said.

I stared at the screen, frozen. “What do I do with this?” I asked myself. “Can I even write the article now?” “Will I lose the trust of at least some, if not all, of my sources from the nationalist camp?”

I would have preferred it to have been public Israeli land. And had that been the answer I got in my stubborn pursuit for the truth, my research would have ended there. I would have had everything I needed for my report.

But knowing that it was private land was not enough for me: was it theirs according to Ottoman Land Laws (cultivating land makes it yours) or was it part of the land parcels Jordan handed out when she occupied this region? Can I see the deed to the property? And questions arose that I would like to address to RHR, nationalist NGOs, and Israel’s Civil Administration.

It hit me hard to realise that my digging would have stopped had I received confirmation of my bias; I would have had no more questions. It was only the unwelcome truth that pushed me into the deeper, more comprehensive investigation that I am now pursuing. I am disappointed in myself.

According to official Israeli statistics, the great bulk of the violence in the region is committed by Palestinian Arabs against Jews and some of the Jewish violence is in response to that. But that is not what I saw that day in the olive grove. I witnessed unambiguous settler violence that I cannot condone. I saw what I did not want to see.

My heart attack was the kind called “Takotsubo,” colloquially known as “broken heart syndrome.” I found it condescending when a friend called it that. But now, looking back, I recognise that my heart did break to see Jews throw rocks at us and to see the scorn of the Jewish volunteers toward soldiers who could have been their brothers or grandsons. Later finding out that the land was owned by the farmers, something I suspect the settlers knew and that should have prevented the harassment, at least in that instance, was the final blow to my shattered confidence in what I thought I knew. A harsh reckoning.

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Twenty years later, as a new international coalition prepares to rebuild Gaza, have the fundamental problems that existed then been resolved?

In a previous article, I discussed the Agreement for Mobility and Access (AMA) signed by Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the USA. Six months after the project began, the man the Quartet had appointed to help turn that blueprint into reality resigned.

Why?

We get the answer in a May 2006 press conference held by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement James Wolfensohn, after a meeting during which Wolfensohn resigned, declining the offer to continue in that role. This gives us a real-time explanation for why the political foundation underlying his mission had disappeared.

You can read the document here; I will point out what struck me while reading it.

Israel’s Unilaterial Disengagement but Trilateral Coordination

Firstly, the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is always referred to as a unilateral disengagement. While Israel’s decision was taken without a negotiated agreement, we see in this document, that it was carried out in coordination with the PA and the United States. Wolfensohn’s task, Rice said:

. . . was to assist the Palestinians and the Israelis in a coordinated withdrawal of Israel military forces and settlers from Gaza.

Then:

That has taken place and taken place successfully, despite all the difficulty that was associated with it. . . . and that is in no small part thanks to the tireless efforts of Jim Wolfensohn who worked day and night to make certain that that could happen.

Israeli Occupation of Gaza

Whatever arguments would later be made about Gaza’s legal status, in May 2006 the U.S. secretary of state described the situation unequivocally:

And in fact, the Israelis do not any longer occupy Gaza; it is Palestinian territory. . .

And, the withdrawal, while not following a ceremoniously signed “peace deal,” was followed up by AMA, a PA-Israel agreement brokered by the United States. The agreement detailed the vision of a prosperous Gaza that would promote a healthy Gazan society.

Following the Election of Hamas

In the key passage in his explanation for resigning, Wolfensohn says that Hamas’s election victory made it “a very difficult moment” to negotiate arrangements affecting Gaza and the West Bank:

. . . because of the emphasis that Hamas puts on the destruction of the state of Israel and the less than communicative relationship with that state [Israel].

Rice responded to a question about working with Hamas:

We continue to hope that Hamas will take the will of the international community seriously and set the minimum conditions for engagement with a partner that the Quartet has laid out. And if those political conditions can come into place, then perhaps we can move forward. [Emphasis added]

She did not see the point in appointing a replacement for Wolfensohn given that the political conditions did not allow moving forward with the plans.

Then she mentioned American efforts to get humanitarian aid to the Gazan population who are suffering. Wolfensohn warned against economically punishing ordinary Palestinians, calling starving Palestinians or taking children out of school “a losing gambit.” But, he continued:

I think the Palestinians need to understand and to accept that the future has to be one where the issues, however difficult, need to be resolved, but that you don’t start by telling the other side that you’re going to shoot them.

The final question addressed to Secretary Rice was about concern for the humanitarian crisis. She responded:

It can’t be business as usual.

“The goal,” she went on, must be for “everyone to send as strong a message as possible to Hamas” that the interests of the Palestinian people are served “by a peace process and a constructive engagement with their Israeli neighbor.”

She ended with:

. . . you can’t have that kind of relationship if you don’t believe in the right of the other party to exist.

That was in 2006.

Now an international Board of Peace is tasked with making work what failed two decades ago.

Just as this article was being finalised for publication, the Israeli cabinet approved the Board of Peace’s pilot project in Rafah, allowing the first phase of the new international initiative to proceed. This makes James Wolfensohn’s remarks from May 2006 more than a historical curiosity.

Of course, the situation today is not identical to that of 2006. Hamas has been severely weakened militarily, a broader international coalition has been formed than twenty years ago, and today’s reconstruction proposals rest on different diplomatic arrangements. However, given Wolfensohn’s experience, is it reasonable for the new international body to invest its time, money, and effort in rebuilding Gaza economically and institutionally, as it sought to do two decades ago, without first resolving the question of who governs Gaza and that governing authority’s relationship with Israel? Or do they believe that economic success in one part of Gaza can lay the political foundations that Wolfensohn concluded were a necessary first step?

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The broad outlines of Trump’s regional vision are well known. The Abraham Accords are its centrepiece, and Saudi normalisation with Israel has long been a major objective. Hamas’s October 7 attack disrupted the momentum toward that goal.

But we have also watched Trump zigzag: a deal with Iran, then no deal; an attack, then no attack; an attack, then a larger attack; negotiations revived, then apparently abandoned.

Turan extrapolates from visible developments into a theory of where events are leading and why. Her argument is that the apparent chaos has been part of a larger plan, and that we should be patient as what now appears impossible gradually unfolds.

Here she is in her own words:

Among all the news about military and diplomatic moves surrounding Iran, this Trump’s post about the Saudis stands out as by far the most important.

The stage is almost fully set for regime change in Iran, except for one critical missing piece: Saudi Arabia’s cooperation, AKA joining the Abraham Accords.

A month ago, Lindsey Graham repeated it twice: If the MoU with Iran fails, the next step is Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords. He said that after 4.5 hours of discussion with @potus.

Now we are seeing exactly that. The MoU failed as expected ( and designed), and Trump is offering MBS incentives and concessions to persuade him to drop the game and join the Abraham Accords.

Trump doesn’t just want to end the war with the terrorist regime in Iran. He wants to cut it off at the root. He wants to end the nearly century-old Arab-Israeli conflict once and for all.

Remember: October 7th was a suicide operation designed by the Islamic regime and Hamas to derail Saudi Arabia’s accession to the Abraham Accords. The truth is that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states profit from regional instability. By keeping Iran crippled and fighting their “Palestine cause,” they shine without competition. They have always known their security is guaranteed by the US, and that Israel (for their own survival and security), neutralizes major threats in the region. So not only did they not help, they actively poured fuel on the fire of this endless Middle Eastern war.

It was a filthy double game: publicly allies of the West, privately financiers, diplomatic protectors, and propaganda machines for terrorist groups all around the world. Remember when Trump, in January 2025, tried once to get the hostages back and Hamas refused to cooperate? After he greenlit an Israeli strike in Doha, Hamas immediately handed over all the hostages and started behaving. This shows that without cutting off their financial and political lifelines, these terrorist networks cannot be controlled.

The key to permanently ending this “Axis of Resistance” filth, is for Saudi Arabia and Qatar to stop playing the game, just like the UAE recently did. Trump smartly chose not to fully neutralize the Islamic regime’s threat for them this time, and gave the Arabs time to face the consequences of their clever games and understand that the era of free-riding is over.

Now, if they want security, they must share the risk and take responsibility. Remember when he said the Islamic regime is entitled to have a missile program because Saudi Arabia has one too? That was a direct threat to Riyadh: “US has no obligation to defend a country that wouldn’t even let him use American base on its soil to strike the shared threat.”

Among the regime’s proxies, the only ones not yet fully neutralized are the Houthis, who share a border with Saudi Arabia, and Trump seems to have deliberately left them untouched so that Saudi Arabia is forced to finally abandon its double game of supporting the Islamic regime and face its own war.

How is this America First? If Saudi Arabia steps back, Qatar will follow, and gradually the funding for anti-Israel and Islamist propaganda networks in the US will dry up (sad day for Tucker Carlson and woke right).

Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords is the last major piece left on Trump’s chessboard. After that, he can finish the job with the Islamic regime.

He has built up the alliance: the UK finally dropped the game and let the US use its bases, cutting the regime’s lifeline. French embassy workers in Tehran (while under protection) were beaten and detained by IRGC thugs, and it seems France is also on board now.

Marco Rubio is having discussions with Russian Foreign Minister, and has a lot of leverage to force them to drop their support for the regime, and China seems to be handled. A regime without its free oil has no use for China and has already become a headache by disrupting the economy.

This is very important, because for any UN resolution against the regime, Russia and China could veto. Riyadh and Doha are the regime’s last remaining lifelines.

And why do they want nuclear energy while sitting on fossil energy? My guess is they need something to tell their domestic public: “Even though we joined the Abraham Accords, we got the nuclear plan”, just to calm their artificially stirred opposition to Israel. Yes, they want to plant the seed in their people’s minds that they are going to pursue the battle themselves, after Saddam, Gaddafi, and the Islamic regime failed to build the nuclear weapon. But I am confident Trump will make sure not to give them the capability. He knows Saudis and their clever games better than anyone else. He is not naive.

In this scenario, not only will Iran be freed, but it will have a bright future, because Saudi Arabia will no longer try to sabotage its freedom and progress.

Never forget that a large part of the propaganda campaigns against Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi is currently being funded by Saudi and Qatari money, and Riyadh has a long history of backing terrorist and destabilizing groups across the region.

Trump (and actually @jaredkushner ) gave Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE a powerful incentive: instead of making money off regional chaos and Iranian people misery, move toward a prosperous, cooperative regional economy. He waited and forced them to rethink their calculations.

Iran will soon be free. The Shah will return. And with its young, civilized, and capable population, Iran will rapidly become a major economic powerhouse in the region, Iran will rise from the ashes.

Trust President Trump. Trust the plan.

As with any broad strategic interpretation, readers can judge for themselves whether the evidence supports the conclusions or, if the evidence is not yet sufficient, does the theory make sense?

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The women are wearing colourful embroidered dresses and distinctive local head/face coverings typical of celebrations in southern Iran’s Bandar Abbas region, and the song adapts a familiar pro-regime chant into one directed against the regime.

We don’t know how many they are, but we do know that there is a large proportion of the Iranian population opposed to the IRGC, the ruling regime. But there is a difference between hoping the regime will fall and being brave enough to go out and express this hope publicly. After all, when thousands went out in December 2025-January 2026 to demonstrate against the regime, many thousands were killed by IRGC forces, the exact number unknown because of Internet blackouts. Therefore, the bravery of the Bandari women is remarkable and it is not likely that there will be a repeat of the Dec-Jan demonstrations. One Iranian shows that regime forces are out to make sure that does not happen:

From Reform to Rejection

Over the past year, as I followed Iranian social media and conducted research with the help of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Grok, it appeared to me that anti-regime discourse has undergone a gradual progression that began with demonstrations demanding government reforms in 2009, to greater dissatisfaction with the regime in 2019 to the point where some began talking about regime change,

In fact, an Iranian research team analysed how protest slogans evolved across three major waves of demonstrations between 2009 and 2022: (1) the Green Movement that followed the disputed 2009 presidential election; (2) the January 2020 protests triggered by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 and the government’s subsequent cover-up; and (3) protests during the first months of 2022, before the Women, Life, Freedom uprising.

They found a clear shift in protest language: During the Green Movement, slogans focused primarily on specific government officials and individual leaders. For example, they distinguished between the revolutionary ideals associated with the original Basij and its contemporary role in suppressing protesters:

The real Basiji was Hemmat and Bakri,

invoking two celebrated Iran-Iraq War commanders. According to the study, later protest movements abandoned even this distinction, no longer portraying the regime’s institutions as reformable.

In the later protests, they increasingly challenged the political system itself and expressed regret over the 1979 revolution:

We made a revolution. What a mistake we made.

A growing distinction between the Iranian people and the government was documented, together with opposition to the regime’s regional policies:

Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran

Our enemy is right here; they lie when they say it is America.

Therefore, by 2022, anti-regime protest slogans were distinguishing between the Iranian people and the Iranian regime. That distinction helps explain why some opponents of the Islamic Republic could later welcome attacks on the regime without seeing themselves as welcoming attacks on Iran.

That is reflected not only in slogans but also in symbols. Many opponents of the Islamic Republic have revived the pre-1979 Iranian flag bearing the Lion and Sun, rejecting the emblem adopted after the revolution. The flag has become, for many dissidents, a visible expression of the fact that Iran not the regime that currently governs it.

The Real Infrastructure

I began following Iranian X posts last summer, at which time I reported on the spectrum of Iranian voices on social media. While not homogeneous, I have seen clear indications that numerous Iranian dissidents inside the country and in the Diaspora appear to regard the regime as beyond reform and want the IRGC to fall.

Therefore, instead of condemning the attacks, the anti-regime voices I follow on X are welcoming them.

TayTay writes:

As an Iranian living in southern Iran, this image is a very good reflection of my heart.
This time the rescue operation has started from the south. Thank you President Trump @POTUS.
God bless America
God bless US Army.
We are ready! We, Iranians are the boots on the ground.
When his royal highness Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi calls on us, we will be ready to take down the regime with your help.
Hopefully Prime Minister @netanyahu and @IDF will join us very soon. #FinishTheJob #KingRezaPahlaviForIran‌

Ferdosy, an Iranian dissident about whom I have written before, posted on X on 17 July that power could have been peacefully transferred to “the real owners of the country,” in Jan 2026, but that the regime instead chose mass violence against its own people. And Neo­, an Iranian inside the country, tells critics who are horrified by the destruction of bridges and energy infrastructure by the Americans what the real horror is:

It was the human catastrophe of Dey[Jan 2026] where they slaughtered fifty thousand people in two days – not four bridges that a regular person hasn’t even crossed.

Another Iranian says that the real infrastructure of Iran is its people:

This is Iran’s infrastructure, not a bunch of bridges and IRGC military sites.

If the infrastructure of Iran is its people, and if the Bandari women put on their traditional dress to celebrate the attacks against the IRGC, then I wonder if the culture that preceded the Islamic revolution will find expression once more. Some dissidents are reclaiming cultural symbols that predate the Islamic Republic. For example, this Iranian posted a video of the Whirling Sama Soroastrian Dance.

Iranians never fully surrendered to Islam. Through poetry, rhythm & resistance, we kept our pre-Islamic soul alive against forced Arabization.
The fire of Persia still turns.

Most societies facing foreign attack rally around the flag. That reaction depends on people experiencing the state as their own. But years of repression have lead opponents to stop identifying the government with the nation itself. In fact, some even refer to the current situation as being an “occupation:”

Out of vile malice or sheer stupidity, some people do not consider the Islamic Republic an occupier.

Therefore there are voices within Iran that celebrate the bombs that they hope will set them free.

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Since I began to use AI in all my articles, from research to editing and fine-tuning, I have been following developments in the field and new ways my fellow writers have been experimenting with it. My observations have led me to devise a map of the writers’ AI landscape as I see it today. AI is evolving far too quickly for this to be considered a definitive taxonomy. It is simply one way of looking at a field that is becoming increasingly diverse.

Why AI literacy matters

Some authors are transparent about their use of AI; some are not. Some authors only use AI to come up with better titles. Others use it for research, brainstorming ideas, developing outlines, and editing.

While AI is a useful tool, it has limitations and knowledge of these limitations may cause readers to distrust AI-assisted articles. Perhaps they question the confidence writers show since AI is famous for sounding certain even as it provides “links” to nonexistent sources or invents “facts” that may please the questioner, commonly referred to as hallucinating, and adjusts its answers to what the user seems to want. Authors may hesitate to admit to having used AI in the preparation of their work in order to lower the barrier for readers suspicious of such products, even if they conscientiously check every source and fact presented. This has been found to be true of academic writers and it may be true for journalists and essayists as well.

Reader literacy before the AI era included understanding proper sourcing of factual materials discussed in an article and assessing author bias. Reader literacy today includes understanding the developments authors are pursuing as they employ AI tools in their work. Understanding how writers use AI can help readers become more sophisticated consumers of AI-assisted journalism.

The Current Default: Prompt Engineering

Most people are familiar with the term ‘prompt engineering.’ The basic idea is simple. If you ask better questions, you will receive better answers. This has become almost a discipline in itself, with books, courses, and countless online discussions devoted to crafting prompts that produce clearer, more useful responses. It remains an important skill, but it is only the entry point into AI use.

In fact, sometimes much energy is expended in devising the prompt only to get an answer that is far from helpful. The user may then discover that the question had not been well enough formulated in his or her mind from the outset. The real challenge often turns out not to be writing a better prompt, but thinking more clearly about what you are actually trying to accomplish.

At the same time, more advanced approaches are emerging aiming to increase the trustworthiness and depth of the final published work.

The Emerging AI-Assisted Writing Landscape

Once you stop thinking of AI as a single chatbot and start looking at how experienced writers actually work with it, a much richer landscape begins to emerge.

As I have been developing my own system for researching and editing my articles, I have noticed other people doing the same. This led me to draw up a map of the AI-Assisted writing landscape. This is only a preliminary categorization of how writers use AI and I anticipate the map will change as AI capabilities and understanding of the human-AI interface change. The examples provided are simply illustrations of each approach, not an attempt to catalogue everyone working in the field.

1. Prompt Engineering.
The assumption is that better prompts lead to better answers. But that is now understood to include a pre-requisite clear definition of the user’s needs. Learning the skill of prompting is popular and accessible; however, the user is limited by the constraints of the particular AI model used.

2. Iterative Conversational Dialogue.
Some writers move beyond one-shot prompts by conducting extended, evolving conversations with a single model. They treat the AI as a sparring partner, probing assumptions, asking it to situate arguments in broader traditions, testing strong and weak claims, and iterating in response to the model’s answers. This approach is especially powerful for non-experts entering unfamiliar intellectual territory. Robert Knapp’s analysis of Hussein Aboubakr Mansour’s essay on “Palestine as word-symbol” is a clear example. The result was a level of engagement that would be difficult for the non-specialist to accomplish.

3. Conceptual Framework Definition.
Here, the emphasis shifts from clever questions to giving the AI richer context and an explicit conceptual lens before it begins reasoning. Practitioners supply background documents, competing viewpoints, historical context, or carefully chosen alternative frameworks. The assumption is that better scaffolding can produce better thinking. Whole Story Institute demonstrated this powerfully by feeding Gemini a structural category-separation framework during a long dialogue on Ottoman land law and Zionist purchases. The model’s initial responses reflected the default institutional narrative; once the alternative lens was supplied, its analysis shifted markedly toward internal socioeconomic realities, elite capture, and historiographical bias. The framework itself—not just additional facts—changed how the AI framed the material.

4. Reasoning Framework Systems.
Others go further by shaping how the AI reasons. Can it be taught to distinguish evidence from speculation more reliably? Can it follow explicit principles when weighing competing claims? Can it incorporate process virtues such as transparency, humility, and resistance to ideological capture? Elder of Ziyon built AskHillel, an ethical chatbot grounded in Jewish moral methodology. Beyond values and adjudication rules, he added an “integrity layer” requiring logic traces, clarifying questions, openness to pushback, and auditability. In independent testing (including with Grok), this layer addressed core AI ethics problems in ways most systems do not. It shows how an imported reasoning architecture can make AI outputs more trustworthy.

5. Collaborative AI Workflows
Rather than relying on a single AI model, some writers are beginning to design workflows that use multiple AI systems in complementary roles. One model may help analyse a source, another critique the resulting argument, and another identify assumptions or alternative interpretations. The emphasis shifts from obtaining the best answer from one AI to designing a process that makes better judgement possible. The human writer remains responsible for evaluating the evidence, resolving disagreements, and making the final editorial decisions. Over the past several months, I have been developing one such workflow for my own investigative writing. Explaining how it works deserves an article of its own.

These approaches are not in competition with one another. They build on one another. Good prompting remains an important skill and each new stage in the progression builds on the one before it. In addition, none of them removes AI’s weaknesses. Hallucinations, bias, and poor reasoning remain possible throughout. The difference is that some approaches make those weaknesses easier to detect before publication.

Where Might the Field go Next?

Writers are already combining several of the categories above. For example, while Elder of Ziyon fits most completely in 4 above, Reasoning Framework Systems, he also establishes the conceptual framework we see in 3. In addition, he employs two AI models in his work. We will likely see more of this in future. It is also possible that some of this work will be automated as AIs evolve.

While it seems AI developers are searching for ways to make the perfect AI, the future may see increasingly sophisticated ways of combining several imperfect ones under human direction.

Twenty years ago polished prose implied writing and editorial skill. Today it often simply implies competent use of AI. The scarce resource today is human judgment. Regardless of the direction AI takes in future years, the human element remains the most important.

What does AI Literacy Look Like?

Before AI, readers could assume that a well-written article reflected an experienced writer and editor. Today, similar levels of polish can emerge from very different workflows. A writer may have used AI only for copy editing, or may have used it for brainstorming and idea development. Another may have published the first response from a single AI with almost no oversight, with directions having been given to eliminate AI writing “tells.” The finished prose alone rarely reveals which path was taken.

Ultimately, what distinguishes a strong article is not whether AI was used but whether the finished work demonstrates good judgement, careful sourcing, thoughtful structure, and original insight. This is what readers need to assess as they read today.

And I will share a little secret that may make some writers uneasy: readers are not passive consumers. They can ask AI to test an article’s internal logic, identify unsupported assumptions, or explore alternative interpretations. AI is becoming part of the reader’s toolkit as well. To use it effectively, however, readers need to understand both its strengths and its limitations as well as writers do.

Transparency note: This article was developed through multiple rounds of brainstorming, drafting, critique, and revision with AI. As with all my articles, I remain responsible for the arguments, structure, wording, and final editorial decisions.

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My independent investigations remain free for all readers.

Reader support keeps this work sustainable.

In short:

Just two months after Israel completed its disengagement from Gaza, Israel and the Palestinian Authority reached an agreement, brokered by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, that would have seen Gaza taking an open and active part in world economic activities.

What I remembered from that time

I remember hearing that, after the disengagement, Gaza was supposed to have a seaport and perhaps even an airport. When I asked about this at a talk given by one of the architects of the withdrawal over a decade ago, the speaker dismissed the idea outright. I left the event wondering if I had remembered incorrectly.

I figured that someone involved in the withdrawal must know better than me. But the idea that Gaza was supposed to have a seaport and an airport niggled at me in the back of my head all these years.

Finding the document

All the accusations against Israel since Oct 7^th finally impelled me to look for evidence: either I imagined it all or I remembered it correctly.

I found the agreement and have attached a PDF copy of the document at the end of this article.

Essentially, on 15 Nov 2005, Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed the Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA). It set out to improve the movement of people and goods following Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza while addressing Israel’s security concerns.

The commitments included: the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt would operate under international supervision, crossings would be upgraded to facilitate Palestinian exports and imports, bus and truck convoys were to connect Gaza with the West Bank Palestinian Authority.

My memory of the construction of a seaport was affirmed. In addition, the importance of reopening Gaza’s airport was recognized and discussions on the security arrangements that would make that possible were to continue.

Taken together, these provisions describe an agreed framework for increasing Gaza’s connection to the outside world. Contemporary economic assessments anticipated that, if movement and access improved, Gaza would see rising employment, expanding agricultural and manufacturing exports, and a return to positive economic growth.

The AMA was explicitly conditioned on security cooperation. A UN report in anticipation of the Israeli disengagement makes that clear:

The [World] Bank’s June 23 [2004] paper observed that “a maximum PA effort to fulfill its security obligations under the Roadmap is needed if the donor community is to argue for a major easing of today’s closure regime.” . . . it is clear that a revival of the private sector will not take place in an environment plagued by conflict with Israel and by domestic lawlessness.

In late 2005, therefore, the expectation was that movement, trade, and economic development would expand if security measures were respected.

It is important to note that the disengagement did not end every form of Israeli control over Gaza. Israel retained control over airspace, maritime security, and certain external security functions. The AMA did not eliminate those arrangements. Rather, it sought to expand the movement of people and goods within that broader security framework.

The AMA should not be confused with what ultimately happened on the ground. It was an agreement that established a framework and a direction rather than a guarantee of outcomes. Several of its provisions were implemented only partially while others never progressed beyond the planning stage before the security situation deteriorated.

The short life of the Agreement on Movement and Access

Table 1 shows the timeline from the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza onward. The reasons for the disengagement itself are beyond the scope of this article and deserve separate treatment

The timeline also shows that implementation of the AMA encountered difficulties almost immediately. Some stemmed from continuing security incidents, while others reflected the practical challenges of carrying out a complex international agreement.

Table 1. Timeline from Disengagement to the Collapse of the AMA

2000-2005 Ongoing rocket attacks and other militant activity during the Second Intifada.

15 Aug -- 12 Sept 2005 Israel completes the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, evacuating about 8,000 civilian Jewish residents and removing all military installations from inside the Strip.

15 Nov 2005 Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), with U.S. mediation, reach the Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA). The AMA calls for opening Rafah, improving commercial crossings, bus and truck convoys between Gaza and the West Bank, construction of a seaport, and discussions on reopening the airport.

25 Nov 2005 Rafah Crossing opens under the supervision of the European Union Border Assistance Mission (EUBAM).

Late 2005 -- early 2006 Planning continues for other provisions, but implementation slows amid continuing Palestinian rocket attacks and growing political instability within Gaza. The Gaza-West Bank convoy system never begins. Work on the seaport does not start. Discussions about the airport do not progress.

25 Jan 2006 Hamas wins the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections, defeating Fatah. This dramatically changes the political environment in which the AMA was meant to operate.

18 Feb 2006 The newly elected PLC members are sworn in. Israel, the United States, and the European Union refuse to deal with a Hamas-led government unless it renounces violence, recognises Israel, and accepts previous agreements.

29 Mar 2006 Hamas cabinet sworn in, forming the new Palestinian government.

25 June 2006 After months of continued rocket fire from Gaza onto farms and towns in southern Israel, Hamas militants cross the border into Israel, kill two Israeli soldiers, and kidnap Gilad Shalit. Israel launches Operation Summer Rains.

26 June 2006 Israeli naval blockade and Rafah closure due to security alerts. EUBAM suspends operations. Rafah reopens intermittently throughout 2006, with closures influenced by both Israeli and Egyptian security coordination.

Summer -Autumn 2006 Remaining provisions of the AMA effectively stall.

9 June 2007 Egypt closes the Rafah crossing.

14 June 2007 Hamas violently seizes control of Gaza from the PA after several days of fighting, including throwing PA representatives off building roofs. Hamas now controls Gaza; Fatah controls the West Bank PA.

June 2007 onward Israel and Egypt impose tighter border restrictions on Gaza as the assumptions on which the AMA had been negotiated are no longer compatible with the security needs of either. The AMA is overtaken by events and the seaport and airport projects disappear from the diplomatic agenda.

Note that even before the January 2006 election, implementation was already strained because of ongoing rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel. Furthermore, Rafah did not close permanently in June 2006 but only one year later. Egypt’s bilateral security role was an essential part of the AMA and they closed the Rafah crossing to prevent weapons smuggling and Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood activities in Sinai.

History moves forward and not backward. The missed opportunities of 2005-2006 cannot be revived. And there is no way of knowing if Gaza would have succeeded in becoming the fantasied “Singapore of the Mediterranean.”

In any case, that is not the question today. After Oct 7^th, there is no going back. Decades of trust-building through re-education of the population would have to take place for Israel to leave Gaza again, if ever.

The importance of remembering the Agreement on Movement and Access today

The AMA demonstrates that the immediate post-disengagement vision was not one of the permanent isolation of Gaza, but, rather, the integration of Gaza within the global economy.

To understand the conflict today, to understand the blockade on land and sea, the path that was originally laid out and why it was abandoned have to be part of the discussion.

P.S. As I was researching the Agreement on Movement and Access, I was struck by how similar its underlying logic is to that of the recent Israel-Lebanon agreement. Both rest on the same premise: security first, followed by greater freedom of movement and economic development. Whether the newer agreement will fare better than the AMA remains to be seen.

PDF of the AMA

M00290 Theagreeddocumentsonmovementandaccessfromandtogaza Englishtext

71.9KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

This is sophisticated use of AI. In a single essay, Knapp explored systems theory, political theology, post-colonialism, and Arab intellectual history, terrain that would once have required years of specialised reading. Today it can begin with a well-formulated conversation.

But there is a question Knapp’s experiment left open, and it is the one this article investigates: how do you know when AI is helping you understand a field, and when it is merely helping you feel as though you understand it?

To answer that question, I began experimenting with an AI examination of both Mansour’s and Knapp’s articles. I made many false starts that led nowhere before finally discovering that there are stages of AI‑assisted inquiry.

The difference between understanding and confidence

There are four stages to AI-assisted inquiry, and most people stop at stage two:

1. Read the original work.

2. Ask AI to help you understand it, much as Knapp did in his evolving conversation with Opus.

3. If your goal is to write or teach, ask whether that understanding holds up when you ask more than one AI model to evaluate the argument.

4. Check which observations were repeated across all models, and which turned out to depend on how the questions were framed.

Stage two produces understanding. Stage four is where you test whether that understanding is solid enough to stake your reputation on. The distinction matters enormously and AI makes it easy to complete stage two thinking you have what stage four would give you.

N.B. One of the first readers of this article, Robert Goldman, pointed out that the workflow should end by returning to the evidence itself. He was right. While source checking and evidence evaluation should inform every stage of the process, making that final step explicit strengthens the framework:

Stage 5: Verify your conclusions against the underlying evidence and external reality.

You will get a better idea of what I am presenting to you here if, before you continue reading, you take a minute to write down the prompt you would normally give an AI if you wanted help understanding a challenging article.

The experiment

I ran Mansour’s essay through Gemini and ChatGPT using a prompt designed to evaluate it as a serious intellectual work. Table 1 shows how my approach differed from Knapp’s.

At first glance the two approaches look similar. Both Knapp and I know that AI can do more than summarise. But the difference is significant. Knapp’s questions were designed to help him understand the essay. Mine were designed to test whether that understanding holds under pressure.

There is another methodological difference that matters for what follows. Knapp told Opus his own opinion of the article in his prompt. I did not. Sharing your view with AI can sometimes shape the direction the conversation takes, in ways that are not always visible.

What the three AIs agreed on

The most striking finding was how much the models converged. Four points of agreement stood out.

First: the essay is not really about Palestine. Opus, Gemini, and ChatGPT all concluded independently that Mansour begins with politics but ends with a theological argument about meaning, victimhood, and the individual’s relationship to truth. The political apparatus is the entry point. The destination is spiritual.

Second: all three identified the same internal contradiction. For most of the essay, Mansour argues that everyone caught up in the Palestine conflict -- the regimes, the NGOs, the academics, the ordinary believers -- is structurally trapped. Nobody designed the system, nobody controls it, nobody can exit. But then, in the final section, he says the entire apparatus rests on one thing: an individual choosing, every day, to accept a comforting story rather than face a harder truth. If enough people withdrew that choice, the system would collapse. The models all flagged this tension between structural determinism and individual moral responsibility as one that Mansour does not resolve.

Third: Knapp noticed that Mansour’s treatment of Israel was thinner than his treatment of Arab societies. Opus agreed. So did Gemini and ChatGPT. The essay’s most ambitious explanatory framework is not applied with equal depth across all its subjects.

Fourth: all three analyses identified Mansour’s central insight about symbolic interchangeability as his most original contribution. The Palestine cause generates distinct, internally coherent meaning for every ideological frame simultaneously (Marxists, Islamists, liberals, nationalists, conservatives) without those frames needing to coordinate or even agree. Gemini went furthest, claiming that Mansour is the first to have posed this idea with this degree of analytical precision.

Where the models diverged

The differences were fewer than similarities for this particular article. These divergences matter because they show where understanding becomes less stable.

On theology: Opus read Mansour’s theological ending as something of a departure from the political argument that preceded it. Gemini and ChatGPT treated the theological dimension as the essay’s true destination, as the natural conclusion of a political analysis that was always headed somewhere transcendent.

On intellectual genealogy: Opus devoted considerably more attention to placing Mansour within a tradition of thinkers, comparing him with Girard, Luhmann, Voegelin, Fouad Ajami, and others. Gemini and ChatGPT focused less on this and more on testing the internal coherence of his argument.

On the ending: Opus regarded the conclusion as philosophically problematic because it appeared to undermine the essay’s earlier claim that the Palestine system is self-perpetuating and irresolvable. Gemini raised a further question the others did not: did Mansour ultimately replace one symbolic object with another, elevating Israel into a transcendent symbol in the process. Whether that criticism is persuasive is open to debate, but it illustrates how different analytical lenses can expose different tensions in the same text.

When AI models reach radically different conclusions, unlike in this particular case, it would reduce our confidence in the responses we got from step two of the process. That should lead one to explore the material again with further questioning.

What this means for you

Knapp’s goal was to understand a difficult essay. Having now tested his findings against two additional models, I can say that his dialogue with Opus succeeded admirably. It situated Mansour intellectually, identified the essay’s strongest and weakest ideas, and suggested directions for further reading.

Keep in mind that Knapp is a scholar well-trained in the skill of asking questions. That is not trivial.

While my goal was different, Knapp demonstrated something historically important: he showed that a thoughtful non-specialist can use AI to enter an unfamiliar intellectual tradition at a depth that would once have been inaccessible.

I was no longer asking whether I understood Mansour. I was asking whether I understood him well enough to write about him publicly.

That required a different kind of questioning, and it revealed something that the single-model approach could not: which of Opus’s insights were robust across models, and which reflected the way Knapp had framed his questions.

The four stages I described at the top of this article are not a hierarchy of sophistication. Most readers will stop at stage two, and that is the right choice for most purposes. I stop there too, unless I intend to write. The danger is not in stopping at stage two -- it is in stopping at stage two while believing you have completed a thorough examination of the material.

AI accelerates the feeling of understanding long before you have earned the confidence to stand behind it. The gap between those two things is invisible until you go looking for it.

The question behind the prompt

While AI has made it dramatically easier to enter unfamiliar intellectual worlds, it has not eliminated the need for your own judgement.

And for those frustrated with the responses they are getting as they venture into the world of AI: the problem is rarely the prompt. It is the question behind the prompt. Better prompts cannot compensate for asking the “wrong” question. The right question is the one that is actually suited to what you are trying to do.

All of this brings us back to the question you wrote down earlier:

Now look at the prompt you wrote before reading this article. What kind of question does it ask? Does it set the AI up for a particular interpretation, or is it open enough to be driven by the text itself? Try it on the Mansour article using a model that Knapp and I did not use, and share your results in the comments.

P.S. This article was itself a demonstration of the methodology behind a course I am developing. The multi-model approach you saw in the Results section — running the same analytical task across different AI systems and comparing what converges and what diverges — is one component of a practical curriculum for writers who want to use AI as a serious editorial partner rather than a shortcut. More details coming soon.

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The smack in the face was stunning. It was bad enough that it seemed Trump was actually going to move forward with an interim deal with Iran but he added salt to the wound when he unjustifiably came down so hard on Israel and Netanyahu at the G7 Summit in Switzerland a few days ago that my head is still whirling. It felt like a major betrayal.

Trying to orient myself, I turned to people I respect to see how they were digesting what was happening. I turned to Israelis, Iranians, and other Middle Eastern figures. I turned to Andrew Fox. I thought I would find answers. Instead, I found intelligent people looking at the same events and seeing completely different futures.

The Context

On the morning of 28 February Israelis were woken up with a warning to be prepared for war because we just assassinated Khamenei. WOW. Adrenaline surge. We knew the drill.

We had been at war so many times before but this felt different. It was after Sinwar had been eliminated and Hamas greatly weakened. It was after the beeper operation that took Hezbollah terrorists out while doing their shopping and just going about their daily lives. It was after Nasralleh had been assassinated in his bunker.

Now it felt like a war to the finish. A war to finally end in clear victory. A war that would bring down the Islamic Regime, setting the Iranian people free and releasing Israel from the existential threats posed by Hamas and Hezbollah as well as a potentially nuclear Iran that in any case has ballistic missiles it does not hesitate to launch at our cities.

Then came the interminable zigzags: announcements of a deal, threats of more war, announcements of a deal, etc. Many of us in Israel were sure that Iran’s foot-dragging and paper tiger threats would compel Trump to finish the job and bring sanity to the Middle East.

We were in limbo, just waiting for Trump to return to open war.

But suddenly that future fell apart: reports of Trump’s emerging “understanding” with Iran were scheduled to culminate in a preliminary deal-signing by 19 June. A deal that would see the opening of the Hormuz, sanctions relief, and ongoing negotiations toward a final deal 60 days later.

And then he told us Syria could handle getting rid of Hezbollah better than us, For example.

Let me show you what I found in the following tables. Table 1 organises some of the people I follow, showing their major concerns.

The emotional intensity of the posts and articles gets lost in the tables. Here are some quotes to give you a sense of them:

Dave Bender: “The people who know aren’t talking, the people who are talking really don’t know.”

Mosab Hassan Yousef: “This isn’t a deal. This is surrender dressed up as diplomacy.”

Haviv Rettig Gur: “Welp, I think we’re done here.”

Hillel Fuld: “… blow up the deal.”

Ida Turan: “A much larger game is in motion, much larger. He didn’t just change overnight, he has proven you wrong before, he will do it again.”

Elica Le Bon: “I cannot overestimate how devastating this decision will be. It is unforgivable, to say the least.”

A list with links to all my source materials is in the Appendix below this article.

Table 2 shows the reactions we see before the details of the MOU became public and after. It is interesting that the Israelis are quick to enter the conversation before the details were publicised while the Iranians mostly waited until the text became available. And amid all the noise, Dave Bender’s calm suggestion to wait 72 hours was in the back of my head. He offered neither optimism nor pessimism, just the rare discipline of refusing to predict the future.

I began reading these voices hoping I would get some anchoring and orientation upon which to begin to form my own approach to this unwanted development.

Instead, I found certainty everywhere and agreement nowhere: The catastrophe is certain. The strategy is certain. The betrayal is certain. The next war is certain.

And then I realised that I wasn’t really comparing Israelis to Iranians, activists to analysts, insiders to outsiders. Each community was responding to what they feared they were losing: security, freedom, survival, regional balance, strategic clarity. They were all grieving different futures that were supposed to have emerged from the fighting.

I went looking for these voices as a way to stabilize myself and found that the most grounding was the first one I read: Dave Bender’s insistence that we wait 72 hours.

And now? Do we now have to wait 72 hours after the digital signing took place to get some idea of what is really ahead?

We already know that Iran is not planning on attending the in-person signing ceremony in Geneva today. Is that merely arrogance? Is it a demonstration of the lack of compliance Israelis and Iranians mostly expect showing up “while the ink is still wet?”

So where am I after all of this?

Amid all those who are certain they know what is going to happen, I know only one thing.

I know what I hope.

I hope the war resumes and the regime falls. I hope the Iranian people are finally free. I hope we Israelis are released from our cycles of existential war.

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Appendix

Links to source posts, listed in alphabetic order by first name.

Andrew Fox, Substack article, June 18, 2026.

Dan Burmawi, Substack article, June 18, 2026.

Dave Bender, Substack article, June 15, 2026.

Elica La Bon, X, June 18, 2026.

Fil Soof, X, June 18, 2026.

Haviv Rettig Gur, X, June 17, 2026.

Haviv Rettig Gur, Substack article, June 18, 2026,

Hillel Fuld, X, June 18 2026.

Ida Turan, X, June 18, 2026.

Masih Alinejad, X, June 18, 2026.

Melanie Phillips, Substack article, June 16, 2026.

Mosab Hasan Yosef, X, June 17, 2026.

Mosab Hasan Yosef, X, June 19, 2026.

Nazanin Boniadi, X, June 18, 2026.

Paula R. Stern, Facebook, June 18, 2026.

Reza Pahlavi, X, June 18, 2026.

Shira Lankin Sheps, Facebook, June 18, 2026.

Sohrab, Sahar, and Ramin, ABCNews article, June 18, 2026.

Many readers agreed that the “Arafat-was-born-in-Cairo-so-there-is-no-such-thing-as-Palestinians” argument is weak. But several immediately moved to a different question:

“Fine. Suppose we accept that Palestinians are a people. Does that mean they are entitled to a state?”

At first glance, the answer seems obvious. Many people assume that once the existence of a people is established, statehood naturally follows. Perhaps, for some, this assumption lies behind the reluctance to accept Arafat being Palestinian and the Palestinian Arabs being a national group.

For this reason, much of the public debate gets stuck on genealogy — birthplace, surnames, or claims of ‘indigeneity’ — as if national identity were a matter of bloodlines. But modern peoples, including Jews (whose surnames often shifted under pressure), Americans (whose surnames overwhelmingly come from elsewhere), Argentinians (whose population is largely descended from Italian and Spanish immigrants), and Turks (whose surnames were legally assigned only in 1934), show that identity is not determined by ancestral purity.

Reader Zev Spitz offered a helpful way of naming something familiar but often left implicit: There are wider identities, such as Arab or Muslim, and narrower ones, such as clan or tribe. Extending that vocabulary, we can also speak of “middle identities:” the modern national identities that sit between broad civilizational categories and intimate kinship groups. Jordanians can be Arab, Muslim, and Jordanian at the same time. Egyptians can be Arab, Muslim, and Egyptian. So why should Palestinians be unable to be both Arab and Palestinian?

Even granting Palestinian peoplehood, statehood is a separate issue.

While peoplehood and statehood are related, they are not the same thing.

Some peoples achieve states; others do not; and the reasons vary. The table below illustrates this diversity rather than implying direct analogy.

Nor are these the only examples. Scots, Welsh, Corsicans, Baloch, Chechens, Tamils, Sikhs, Kashmiris and many others have maintained distinct identities without achieving sovereign statehood.

These cases are not direct analogies to the Palestinian situation; they simply illustrate that peoplehood and statehood do not always align. In other words, statehood, historically, has depended on a mix of political, territorial, and international factors and not merely the existence of a distinct people.

The existence of a people may explain why aspirations for self-determination emerge; it determines neither if, nor how, those aspirations must be realised.

Why This Matters

The Israeli-Palestinian debate often collapses multiple questions into one.

One side argues:

“There is no Palestinian people; therefore there is no need to talk about a Palestinian state”

The other argues:

“There is a Palestinian people, therefore there must be a Palestinian state.”

But if we want to have a serious discussion about the future, it helps to keep the issues separate. We can acknowledge that today, for whatever reason and by whatever process of evolution, there are millions of people who identify as Palestinians. That does not lock into inevitability a sovereign state.

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Very recently, I came across this Substack Note in my feed:

Ten years ago I had a run-in on Facebook with a popular pro-Israel activist who made that same claim. I responded with what seemed to me an obvious question: if birthplace determines national authenticity, what do we do with Golda Meir? His response was to insult me and block me.

My response was to write an article about it. You can read it here and I still stand by it. Today, I want to take that one step further.

Let’s look closely at what the claim in the Substack Note actually says:

1. Yasser Arafat was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1929. True

2. He was an Egyptian engineer, educated in Cairo. True

3. He became the chairman of the PLO, an organisation whose founding charter was drafted in Moscow in 1964... The amount of Soviet influence is debated

The implicit conclusion is: Arafat was not Palestinian. And, if he was not Palestinian, then Palestinian nationalism as represented by the PLO is artificial and Palestinian political claims are invalid.

It is important to debunk the common misconception that the PLO was founded by the Soviets in 1964. In 1964, the PLO was founded by the Arab League and its first chairman was Aḥmad Shuqayrī. After the Arab defeat against Israel in 1967, the militant Yasser Arafat rose into the position of PLO chairman and the Soviets, as part of Cold War geopolitics, became actively involved in influencing its actions as it evolved.

Regarding the legitimacy or lack of legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism, the argument that Arafat was not Palestinian is the weakest and least justified. Questions of Palestinian identity and political claims have to be analysed separately from whether or not Arafat, himself, was Palestinian. I have done this in other articles such as this one.

The Salience of Arafat’s Place of Birth

Any argument that disqualifies Arafat because he was born in Cairo must explain why Golda Meir’s birth in Kyiv does not disqualify her as a legitimate leader of the Jewish state during its formative stage.

Note that we cannot call Golda “Israeli” at birth, because Israel did not yet exist. She belonged to the Jewish People before the modern Jewish state existed. The test, then, is not where she was born relative to a country. It is whether birthplace determined her membership in a people. It did not. So why should it determine Arafat’s?

Historically, the Jewish People predate the Palestinians by centuries. However, since nations and peoples arise, evolve, and sometimes disappear across the millennia, this is irrelevant to my argument. Regardless of whether the peoplehood in question is ancient or modern, birthplace does not do the work it is meant to do. One must explain why birthplace outside the homeland would not disqualify other leaders of national independence movements who were born outside their national homelands.

The table below shows how birthplace, and sometimes even childhood residence, do not determine national identity.

Arafat was not the child of Egyptian parents. His father came from an established Gazan family and his mother from an established Jerusalem family. He was born in Cairo because his parents were living there when he was born, not because the family originated there.

The more one looks at the actual family history, the less the Cairo birth appears unusual and the more it appears typical of a mobile eastern Mediterranean family of that period.

There is also a distinction worth making explicit. Was Arafat connected to Palestine? The answer is an undeniable “yes.” Is that the same as settling every question about Palestinian national identity -- when it emerged, how it developed, what political conclusions follow from it? It is not.

The Substack Note collapses both issues into one. Pointing to his birthplace does not answer the larger debate. It does not even address it. And almost no one stops at “he was born in Cairo.” They immediately reach for something else: his Egyptian education, the PLO’s supposedly Moscow-drafted charter, Soviet KGB influence. As if these are mutually reinforcing arguments.

It’s worth noting that even well‑informed people can repeat this claim without realising they are wrong because popular narratives can take on a life of their own, especially when they seem to support a broader political point.

Arafat’s Cairo birth may be historically interesting. Where he studied at university may be historically interesting. But it does not tell us whether or not he was Palestinian.

If birthplace were the decisive criterion, Golda Meir would fail the test as well.

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Most discussions about Lebanon, Hezbollah, Iran, and ceasefires happen at the level of strategy. Analysts talk about deterrence. Politicians talk about leverage. Military experts talk about capabilities.

Lieutenant Colonel Sarit Zehavi is founder and president of Alma, an independent research and education centre specialising in security challenges along the northern border of Israel. As a resident of the north, she has spent the past two and a half years watching the events she analyses unfold around her own family and community.

She recently sent out a personal email to subscribers. I wanted to share it because, as we discuss military operations, diplomacy, and regional power struggles, we should keep in mind that every strategic decision plays out in someone's living room, someone's classroom, or someone's mourning tent.

Today, my message to you is that of a resident of northern Israel, a mother, and someone who is grieving.

The residents of the north are deeply frustrated by yesterday's developments. It feels as though Washington and Tehran are dictating whether our children can safely go to school. Despite the undeniable military achievements of the IDF over the past two and a half years, and particularly this past week, the outcome of yesterday means that Hezbollah is now free to rebuild its military capabilities in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley.

This immunity for Hezbollah will ultimately cost more Israeli lives, both civilian and military. We are left living with two major fears. First, we do not know the magnitude of the future military capabilities Hezbollah will now be allowed to build against us. Second, it seems that whenever the Iranians want leverage over the Americans, they simply press the "Hezbollah button," throwing our entire region into chaos to achieve their goals.

Ultimately, this geopolitical game dictates our daily lives. The mental exhaustion of living under constant fire is indescribable. As a parent, you constantly feel you are falling short. You cannot leave your children alone at home, even if they are older. You cannot host family celebrations or cultural events. Small businesses cannot survive. We live continuously in the shadow of war. And when we see such significant restrictions placed on Israel's freedom of action, it reinforces the dreadful feeling that this will never end.

Let me share a few examples from my own life just this past week. The rocket attacks on Karmiel caught me in a very large, crowded shopping center. The sirens wailed, and the interceptions were exploding directly over our heads. There were so many people, and nobody, including myself, could reach a shelter in time. It is a truly terrifying moment when you realize you are completely exposed, armed with nothing but a prayer that the Iron Dome will not miss.

Meanwhile, high school matriculation exams across the north have been postponed. My daughter, like so many others, has been sitting at home instead of going to school.

But these disruptions pale in comparison to the true, heartbreaking cost of this war. Last week, I spent every day sitting Shiva. My cousin's son, IDF Staff Sgt. Noam Hamburger, was killed on his base inside Israeli territory. Noam was a soldier whose job was to repair tanks. He was killed just one month before he was due to be discharged from the army.

Noam was a truly wonderful young man. Before he was drafted he chose to spend his free time once a week delivering food to families in need with his mother. He was a devoted big brother to his three sisters. He fundamentally believed in the value of giving to others.

This is now the third generation of Israelis fighting in Lebanon. Yesterday's events only emphasized how far away the end of this cycle truly is.

Right now, Noam's family needs support. If you feel moved to do so, please reply to this with a message for his parents and his siblings. I will collect all of your messages and deliver them directly to his family.

Sarit Zehavi
Your eyes and ears on the northern border,
Alma Research and Education Center

Sharing Sarit's email with my readers is my way of offering condolences to Noam Hamburger's family, and of reminding ourselves that the subjects we discuss as policy, strategy, and diplomacy are experienced by real people in real places.

For further reading: “What we need to know about Hezbollah (but are afraid to know)”

You can sign up to receive Alma’s emails here.

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I am presenting her argument to add another dimension to our discussions about what-the-hell is going on with Trump! Why is he continuing this zigzagging negotiation for a deal that everyone knows the Iranians will violate?

Ida Turan’s post on X:

Those who are frustrated with Trump for not “finishing the job,” and who catastrophize that he has abandoned Iranians or has been bought by Arabs, have no idea how dangerous this situation really is.

Yes, US had the ability to eliminate all the regime commanders, but they didn’t. Why? Because there is still some degree of central control over the extremists.

You may not have seen them, but I grow up in Iran among them in top universities, I have seen those who genuinely believe they are among the only 313 followers of Mahdi, and everyone else is lost, and that their job is to blow the world up. and no, they are not dumb or incompetent. Don’t underestimate them.

Just imagine what would happen in a power vacuum after a sudden regime collapse. If the remaining fanatical elements got access to 60% enriched uranium that is already 97% of the way to becoming weapons‑grade, and then everyone lost track of it.

No, uranium doesn’t have GPS. No, you can’t track it with satellites. If even part of it goes missing, the consequences could be catastrophic.

We are not living in a superhero world where the U.S. and Israel can control everything. They can’t control chaos. The U.S. seriously messed up in Afghanistan and Iraq, people have catastrophically short memories. But luckily Trump's admin don't.

The regime is like a psychopath with its finger on the trigger, capable of commiting unimaginable atrocities.

The reason Trump is “negotiating” with it is not because they want to reach a fair agreement with these lunatics, or they are naive and you need to teach them not to trust the regime. no. It’s because they first need to take that trigger away.

Stop oversimplifying and catastrophizing events panicans. If you can't handle the news, just don't read them. You are not helping by constantly screaming and insulting Trump. Respectfully, all you have to do is to shut up.

Trump knows what he is doing, let’s hope he succeeds. This is a price he is paying to maintain control over the aftermath of the regime’s fall.

Patience is strength, is maturity. be strong, be patient.

Interested to know your take on what Ida wrote here.

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I had not intended to write about the flotilla until a single Facebook post forced me to confront a deeper question about images, memory, and meaning.

“Spare me the outrage,” Merkulova began in her Facebook post.

“Three photos. Look at them carefully,” she goes on.

Photo[s] one and two: children — CHILDREN!!!— flattened on the floor, hands over their heads, while rockets fall from the sky. No choice. No warning. Just terror.

Photo three: Adults who chose to be there, . . .

Adults who sailed into a wartime naval blockade, fully aware they would be intercepted by the IDF because that is what happened with every flotilla before this one. They are kneeling on the deck of a ship after having being apprehended, listening to the Israeli national anthem while Israeli Minister Ben Gvir holds the Israeli flag high and welcomes them to Israel.

Merkulova asks:

You want to call that humiliation? Fine.

Israelis call it poor optics. Some Israelis were livid and others in favour of Ben Gvir’s behaviour.

The gap between those images lies in vulnerability and agency.

The children had no choice.
They [the activists] did.

After all, the flotilla organizers were running a media operation. They filmed the departure, the voyage, the interception. While there were participants who likely believed in the overt purpose of the flotilla, the confrontation was not an obstacle to the mission. For the organizers, confrontation had become central to the mission’s symbolic power.

And, Merkulova writes:

. . . when you run a multi-step operation specifically designed to confront a nation fighting for its survival — you don’t get to be shocked by the ending.

Ben Gvir handed them imagery far more potent than anything they could have staged.

But political theatrics are not the same thing as injustice, and I don’t think it merited the apology Prime Minister Netanyahu offered the national leaders who complained about it.

Merkulova ends her post with this:

When the right people are on their knees the rules suddenly get very specific. International law gets cited. Dignity gets invoked. Cameras appear.

Where was this energy for the children in photo[s] one and two?

Don’t answer that. We both know.

And who will be remembered with time?

Reflections

The deeper story here isn’t about Ben Gvir or Spain (whose police beat those same returning activists with batons at Bilbao airport after reported clashes) or Egypt (which turned back and roughed up those making attempts via the Sinai). Those images flare briefly, then vanish. They don’t compete. They don’t stick.

Rather than from facts or context, public memory is built from images that achieve immediate emotional recognition.

A photo of rows of kneeling detainees is instantly legible, requiring no background knowledge. It plugs directly into a universal moral template: bound bodies, lowered heads, perhaps a flag in the frame; these are the semiotics of subjugation, familiar from a century of iconic photographs of oppression. The symbolism is preloaded and requires almost no interpretive effort from the viewer.

Children hiding from rockets, on the other hand?

That image demands something far more challenging from the viewer: the willingness to accept that the rockets are real, ongoing, and morally relevant. It requires acknowledging Israeli vulnerability — a vulnerability many audiences have come to treat as politically inconvenient.

So one image becomes iconic.

The other becomes invisible.

We can assume the flotilla organizers understood this perfectly. For sixteen years, flotillas have sailed toward Gaza, as humanitarian missions, but increasingly, as recurring political theater with a script refined since the Mavi Marmara: Symbolic cargo. Mediasavvy participants. Predictable interception. Viral outrage.

Israel has tried apologies (to Turkey), hospitality (bottled water and sandwiches), and now rapid deportation. None of it disrupts the script because the real cargo has never been the aid. It has always been the footage.

Israel behaves as though facts should outweigh images, as though legality should outweigh optics. (The naval blockade itself was upheld as legal by the UN Palmer Report following the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident.)

Meanwhile, the flotilla operates as though imagery is the battlefield — and it is.

The symbolic outcome was not accidental; the flotilla model has evolved around exactly this kind of imagery.

And this time an Israel minister participated in the manufacture of Israel’s symbolic defeat.

Ben Gvir, thinking he was standing up for Israeli pride, stepped into the frame.

Meanwhile, the morning after the flotilla dominated headlines, children in Kiryat Shmona and the Confrontation Line crouched in classrooms as Hezbollah rockets were launched into northern Israel so close that there isn’t enough time to go into shelters.

What will survive in memory over time?

The cargo manifest?
The legality of the blockade?
Spanish police violence?
Egyptian crackdowns?
The contested allegations of abuse that emerged later?
Israeli pupils cowering as best they can in the seconds they get after a rocket alarm is sounded?

The kneeling rows of activists and Ben Gvir with the Israeli flag may turn out to be the iconic image representing May 2026.

There is a deeper mechanism shaping which images become memory, a mechanism older than this conflict. I call it the script.

Who is in charge of the Script?

The flotilla organizers do not manufacture this memory on their own. They provide the image. It is the audience who writes the script.

In other words, what makes the script so durable is not activist sophistication or Israeli miscalculation (though both matter). It is that the audience arrives preloaded.

Many Western audiences do not need to be persuaded that rows of kneeling detainees equal oppression. The image simply confirms what they already recognize from civil rights and colonial photography and a century of war reporting.

Part of this template is rooted not only in older visual traditions but in contemporary power asymmetries. Israel’s military strength, territorial control, and the long visual archive of the occupation shape how viewers interpret any new image. These factors make Israeli vulnerability harder to register emotionally, even when it is real.

Therefore, children under desks during rocket alerts do not trigger ingrained emotional reflexes. Even Israelis being carried from their homes to Gaza, alive or dead, on motocycles and the backs of trucks, while shocking, did not establish a lasting symbolic framework comparable to older narratives of oppression.

That is why facts arrive too late. The Palmer Report does not disrupt it. Daily aid tonnage entering Gaza via Israel does not disrupt it. Legal arguments do not disrupt it.

The template is older than this conflict, older than the flotilla, older than any single image. The organizers triggered it. The audience animated it. And the only exit from someone else’s script is to stop performing in it.

What would that look like on the symbolic battlefield?

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At first, I thought I was simply having just another debate about Israel.

I was wrong.

What unfolded instead was a useful case study in how some online arguments about Israel move from analytical disagreement through moral reframing, category collapse, collective attribution, and narrative accumulation.

The exchange took place in response to three unrelated Notes I posted. The same patterns resurfaced for them all. It began analytically. (Screenshots of all communications with Jonny5pants can be seen [here].)

12 April 2026

I posted a Note, about my response to a German professor who reached out to me with his idea of “an honorable solution,” to the Israel-Palestine problem: for us to vacate all occupied land. I told him that if he is listening to our enemies, he will understand that “all occupied lands” includes all of Israel.

Under the note, Jonny5pants argued that the current conflict should primarily be understood through the emergence of political Zionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Earlier Jewish history, he argued, could not explain the present structure of the conflict. The decisive rupture, in his view, came from a modern political project.

That is an argument that can be debated so I engaged.

As the conversation developed, the structure began to change.

At first, the disagreement remained methodological. He said that Zionism should be treated as the primary explanatory force for the current conflict but that reversing that would not solve the problem of trauma, displaced populations, mistrust, and more. I paraphrased his explanation, writing that if I understood him correctly, he is saying that political Zionism outweighs other factors, such as Arab nationalism, collapse of the Ottoman Empire, British policy, regional wars, and leadership decisions.

When I asked if I accurately paraphrased his ideas, he went silent.

20 April 2026

He reappeared after I reposted a quote distinguishing between civilian suffering in war and the Holocaust. The quote argued that civilian suffering in Gaza or Lebanon could be real and horrific without collapsing every form of violence into the Holocaust.

Jonny5pants rejected the distinction entirely, first saying that this post shows why he stopped responding to our earlier discussion.

According to him, the issue of Gaza civilian deaths versus the Holocaust was not category conflation but “moral framing.” By distinguishing between different types of violence, I was supposedly “normalizing mass civilian death” and saying Gazan suffering was not “allowed moral gravity.”

That shift matters.

The discussion was no longer about whether different categories of violence exist. It became a challenge to the legitimacy of making distinctions at all.

War versus genocide.
Civilian casualties versus extermination.
Military conflict versus annihilation.

The categories themselves became suspect.

Then, the structure of the exchange changed again.

Instead of remaining focused on the original discussion, the conversation expanded outward into a broader moral indictment of Israel by means of quotes from one segment of a popular right-wing television programme in which panelists expressed glee at demolishing towns from which Hezbollah operated, ending with a call for the hope that the Third Temple will be built in our lifetime.

I asked him why he hid behind a pseudonym. He did not answer but came back on 7 May with a post saying that Ben Gvir’s death penalty for terrorists law is why the world has a problem with the “Israelites.”

Then came another shift.

18 May 2026

Then he crossed another line.

Under a Note I wrote the day before about a Viennese coffee shop that had made itself visibly welcoming to Jews and Israelis during Eurovision, Jonny5pants posted approval of an Italian restaurant that had reportedly expelled Israelis, exclaiming that this was “better” and “why we love you [Italy].”

Now he was not discussing Israeli policy, military conduct, or historical causation of the conflict. He had moved from explaining the reason for having a problem with “Israelites” into approval of exclusionary treatment directed at us as individuals.

The progression had become visible:

• analytical disagreement

• moral reframing

• collapse of distinctions

• collective attribution

• justification of exclusionary treatment

And throughout the exchange, we note that his responses did not directly engage with what I wrote. Instead, emotionally charged counter-material would be introduced:

A conceptual argument about distinguishing civilian casualties from genocide? His response was not to the argument but to my character; my credentials as a therapist were mocked, my humanity denied, “just another bloodthirsty Zionist supremacist.”

A note about a Viennese coffee shop welcoming Jews during Eurovision? Here is a restaurant ejecting Israelis in Italy offered, approvingly, as “better.”

The Larger Issue

In one comment, he linked to a news article that was supposed to support his position; it did the same thing he did, followed the same structure the conversation itself had followed.

The article began with an extreme quote from a fringe rightwing Israeli figure. It paired that with quotes from a politician widely considered a leftwing extremist, leaving only Netanyahu’s rebuttal to represent the Israeli mainstream. The article mentioned Oct 7^th merely as a timestamp, not as context for why the war began or what triggered it, and humanitarian suffering and international criticism were layered in to reinforce the moral indictment of Israel.

The article was not entirely false. What mattered was the selection and arrangement of the material. The structure of the reporting mirrored the structure of the exchange with Jonny5pants.

And that is the larger issue.

In most online arguments about Israel, facts and claims are filtered through pre-existing interpretative structures that determine in advance: what counts as morally relevant, which context is foregrounded, which context disappears, which distinctions are permitted, and which forms of Jewish or Israeli experience are treated as legitimate at all.

What began as what appeared to be an interesting debate changed when it became apparent that facts were irrelevant because the disagreement was not operating at the level of facts.

When we see that happening, it changes our approach.

The goal is no longer to exchange ideas with someone equally invested in the conversation.

The goal becomes making the structure of the argument visible to those who are watching.

Reminder: You can see the entire conversation in screenshots here.

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First Note – April 12, 2026

The conversation:

Second Note – April 20, 2026

The Conversation

Third Note – May 18, 2026

The “Conversation”

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