It really gets my back up when I see Palestinian flags and symbols astride the icons of Western progressive movements, like the peace sign or Pride flags.

Few things are as antithetical to Palestinianism as LGBTQ+ rights. Gay equality in a “free” Palestine is a fever dream of people who have taken far too much molly.

But peace is equally fantastical in the Palestinian movement. The Palestinian people have been offered opportunity after opportunity for self-determination in an independent state of their own through negotiated peace. Their elites (and, it seems, ordinary Palestinians) have rejected every one of these offers if it meant anything short of total destruction of the Jewish state.

Palestinianism is not, ultimately, about the positive aim of state-building. It is about the nihilistic goal of state-destroying.

Proof? Compare the pre-state Zionist movement with today’s Palestinian movement.

Before 1948, the Zionist movement had already built many of the institutions a functioning state would need. The Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine developed elected political bodies, labor organizations, schools and universities, health services, newspapers, banks, agricultural settlements, and an increasingly sophisticated economy. By the time Israel declared independence in May 1948, the Zionist movement had therefore done far more than campaign for statehood: it had already created much of the administrative, social, economic, and military infrastructure that allowed a state to begin functioning almost immediately.

The only operational infrastructure the Palestinian movement has built are terror tunnels and destructive paramilitary forces aimed at endless war to obliterate Israel. What rudiments of civil infrastructure exist are oriented toward the ultimate goal not of upbuilding the Palestinian state but of destroying the Jewish one.

The most significant infrastructure a people can create — the minds of the next generations — have been poisoned by hatred and the instilling of genocidal loathing of not just Zionists but Jews. (In a “back-to-school special” in the coming days, I’ll discuss the curriculum Palestinian kids are learning these days. Hint: it’s not Kumbaya.)

My previous post addressed the fact that opposition to Israel began as an absolute opposition among Arab and Muslim elites to Jewish people realizing national self-determination. At its absolute root, antizionism began as Arab racial supremacism and fundamentalist Muslim religious chauvinism.

Everything the Palestinian movement has done in the ensuing eight decades has been directed not toward the proactive goal of an independent Palestine but to the demolition of Israel.

If their goal were realized tomorrow, the “State of Palestine” would be a complete shambles. There is effectively no groundwork for Palestinian self-determination. Despite billions of dollars pouring in from the UN, the EU, Canada, the United States and other foreign sources — more aid per capita than any other people on the planet — they have built effectively nothing of value.

All they do is destroy.

This raises the uncomfortable reality that all the positive chants about a “free Palestine” can’t hide.

Palestinianism is not a movement for national liberation.

It is not a movement for social justice, human equality, or social advancement.

It is a cause that deserves to be counted among the most horrific, racist hate movements in history.

I have no doubt that there are activists who think their “pro-Palestinian” agitation is a positive form of social justice.

They are almost all wrong.

As I have written repeatedly, the inflexibility, intolerance, unbending opposition to the existence of Israel — the insistence of global activists to egg Palestinians on to endless war — is the reason Palestinians are dying.

Whatever else these activists may be advancing, the blood of Palestinians and Israelis is on their hands, no matter how many peace flags, doves and olive branches they cynically wave.

Coexistence is the only way this conflict ends peacefully. Palestine will be “free” only when Palestinians agree to live in peace beside the Jewish people, not on their graves. (It will likely not be “free” then, either, because there is effectively no strain in the Palestinian movement that promotes the values of freedom that Western democrats, feminists, LGBTQ+ people, or civil society activists would recognize. But that is a discussion for another day.)

Let me be clear: Palestinianism need not be a hate movement. It could be a legitimate movement for Palestinian national self-determination.

But it’s not.

It does precisely nothing to advance that positive goal and has as its solitary, destructive, nihilistic end the annihilation of the Jewish state — and, in noteworthy mutations, Jews in general.

Palestinianism rejects compromise, thereby pushing Palestinian self-determination further away. It advances and encourages continued war, seeking total victory rather than living side-by-side in peace, thereby leading to more and more Palestinian dead. This is why I always put the term “pro-Palestinian” in scoff quotes.

What strikes me most is the obscene equation in all this “pro-Palestinian” propaganda — which, again, is really just “anti-Israel” and, in many or most cases, anti-Jew — is the perpetrators’ embezzlement of the imagery of all things good.

Palestinianism has done a remarkable job of selling itself as a movement of peace, much like tobacco companies, soda manufacturers, and processed food purveyors have convinced generations of obese, gasping consumers that their products are enjoyable treats.

“Pro-Palestinian” activists may indeed envision a future of peace and coexistence.

But it is a peace and coexistence that somehow exists in the absence of Jews. That is, a peace that happens after the Jews are routed from the Middle East. A coexistence that is possible because the land between the river and the sea is homogenized as a Muslim, Arab religious ethnostate. (“Religious ethnostate” being a common slur for Israel among these selfsame activists when a Jew-free religious ethnostate, which is what a “free Palestine” would be, is not only acceptable to these activists but apparently their primary life’s mission).

Do these activists understand this? Do they know what kind of movement they are endorsing?

I hope not. But I fear so.

Almost two years ago, in response to a comment I read, I pondered the provocative question: Does “free Palestine” mean “Kill the Jews”?

For some, no.

The “pro-Palestinian” movement is rife with deeply ignorant people who literally cannot find the place on a map. It is possible to believe Palestinianism is a movement for peace and coexistence — if you are entirely ignorant of everything the movement has ever said and done.

Those who know what they are talking about — the leaders of the Palestinian movements in Palestine and around the world, the “thinkers,” commentators, propagandists, organizers, protest leaders, boycotters, divesters and sanctioners — understand exactly what their movement stands for.

Palestinianism is an anti-Jewish hate movement.

The antisemitism we are seeing explode worldwide today is not an unfortunate byproduct of antizionism. Acting out by activists against Jewish targets all over the world is not a misguided overreach in the name of Palestinianism. It is the truest representation of Palestinianism itself.

Antizionism is antisemitism made flesh.

“Free Palestine” is a rhetorical wolf in peacenik’s clothing.

It’s a positive, upbeat, hopeful message.

But, when accompanied by the rest of the rhetoric at the same rallies, it’s clear: “Free Palestine,” in a great many instances, absolutely means “Kill the Jews.”

The elimination of the Jewish state — because it is a Jewish state — has always been the core objective of the Palestinianist movement. Now, it is apparently the consensus position of the overseas “pro-Palestinian” movement, which used to pretend to support a two-state solution and now overwhelmingly chants “From the river to the sea …” This is a call for ethnic cleansing, at best, and for genocide, at worst.

That intransigence, the absolutist refusal to compromise and coexist, encourages and rewards more belligerence, which begets Israeli reaction, which begets dead Palestinians. So who is pro-peace here?

Palestinianism, as I wrote on Saturday, is a movement that is, at its heart, racially and religiously supremacist.

Palestinianism has hundreds of terms for “I hate Israel” but no words for “constructive future for Palestinians.”

And Palestinian activists worldwide dare to use the word “pro-peace” to describe themselves.

We need to face facts.

Palestinianism is a hate movement.

We need to treat it that way. And we need to stop letting “pro-Palestinian” activists appropriate the language of peace and coexistence when they advance only hatred and destruction.

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We really need to get our history straight.

We waste a lot of time these days arguing whether antizionism is antisemitism or, if not, precisely where the line can be drawn between the two.

It’s a silly parlor game. If you understand history, you know that antizionism is a wholly-owned subsidiary of antisemitism.

Let me splain.

The opposition to Israel — from 1948 until today — has little to do with what Israel does. It has everything to do with what Israel is.

To be clear, a country like Israel, which for eight decades has been at war with enemies who respect no rules of engagement and who routinely shit on the Geneva Conventions, is going to be forced into some unpleasant corners in defending itself.

So, yeah. You can criticize some Israeli military choices. And criticizing how Israel defends itself is especially easy when you don’t think Israel has any right to defend itself in the first place because it is a — yawn — settler-colonial, apartheid, genocidal, boilerplate blah blah blah.

But the point is that Israel only defends itself in these ways because it is surrounded by enemies determined to destroy it and kill most or all of its citizens (depending on whether the enemies are moderates or hardliners). And those enemies, for whatever fancy explanations they invent to justify their hatred of Israel, actually hate it for one reason only. It’s not the settlements or the checkpoints or the endless litany of fabricated complaints.

The one intolerable fact that has led to nearly eight decades of unrelenting opposition to Israel is that it is a Jewish state.

Until we acknowledge the fact that this entire conflict is premised on the Palestinian and Arab rejection of Jewish self-determination — rather than on advancing Palestinian self-determination — we will never get to the root of the conflict and, therefore, never reach a resolution.

The Arab world unanimously rejected the idea of a Palestinian Arab state in 1947 and 1948 because, under the UN Partition Resolution, such a country would be born alongside a Jewish state. At every opportubnity for Palestinian self-0determination — and there have been many — the Palestinians and their Arab and Muslim “allies” have scuttled the possibility because that has never been the goal.

The goal is the destruction of Israel.

This fact is the heart of 80 years of conflict. All the rest is commentary.

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The Arab world’s rejection of the United Nations Partition Plan in 1947 was motivated by the uncompromising refusal of Arab and Muslim elites to accept the concept of Jewish self-determination in the homeland of the Jewish people.

Coexistence of two peoples in a small area was never the problem. Two peoples sharing a land would be feasible if they both acquiesced to do so in peace. It happens all over the world.

The conflict exists because of a grievance-driven Arab intolerance and a nurturing of Palestinian resentments — all of it based on anti-Jewish animus.

That’s the key to understanding this conflict.

It’s the antisemitism, stupid.

And this did not suddenly emerge in 1948.

At every step in regional history since the idea of a Jewish state emerged as a political movement in the 1800s, Arab entities — political leaders, clergy, the Arab “street” — have railed against the idea.

The two-state solution for Jewish and Palestinian Arab self-determination has been rejected not by Jews or Israelis, but overwhelmingly and repeatedly by Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims.

The choice has been an Arab Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state or no Palestinian Arab state at all.

The Palestinians and the larger Arab and Muslim polities have overwhelmingly and repeatedly chosen no Palestine over a Palestine next to Israel.

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At the San Remo Conference in 1920, the League of Nations set the parameters for the post-First World War Mandates for Palestine. This plan set out the potential for a Jewish state with codified rights for the Arab populations in the area.

Arab leaders rejected both the mandate system and the Jewish homeland proposal.

They did not even make a legitimate push for an independent Arab state — their only objective was preventing a Jewish one. That’s what this has always been about.

The idea that this is about Palestinian self-determination has always been a ruse. There is not, in any real way, a “pro-Palestinian” movement. There is only an anti-Israel movement. And it is anti-Israel because it is anti-Jewish.

Opposition to Jewish self-determination is based on Arab racial supremacy and Muslim religious intolerance.

It’s about uppity Jews who refuse to know and accept their place as subordinate people.

The creation of the “free Palestine” movement, with the invention of the PLO in the 1960s, was an attempt to retrofit this entirely oppositional, destructive anti-Jewish movement into a “positive” movement seeking “Palestinian self-determination.” But that is pretty much bullshit.

“Pro-Palestinians,” whom I always put in scoff quotes, do almost nothing to advance Palestinian self-determination or well-being. Indeed, they are the reason Palestinians are dying, as I wrote in a recent post. But anyways. Back to history.

In 1937, the Peel Commission proposed partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem as an international city. The Jewish leadership, though disappointed at a proposal they viewed as deeply flawed, considered the commission’s proposal a start for negotiations.

The Arab leadership rejected the proposal, demanding a single Arab state and a halt to immigration by Jews.

No Jews was their starting point and their end-point.

Then came 1947.

The United Nations proposed partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with an international administration for Jerusalem.

The Jewish leadership accepted the plan — again, compromising on a deeply disappointing proposal from their perspective — but the Arab states and Palestinian leadership rejected it outright.

They would not tolerate a Jewish state. That was their #1 concern. Palestinian nationhood be damned. That was never their concern. Stopping Jews was (and is) their priority.

Antisemitism led to the rejection of every two-state proposal.

Antisemitism led to the rejection of a Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel.

Antisemitism led to eight decades and counting of conflict.

Despite this, today we continually hear the exhausted mantra: “Antizionism is not antisemitism.”

Antizionism began as opposition to Israel as a Jewish state because it is a Jewish state.

Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq were formed in the same general era that Israel was created. No one suggests those countries do not deserve to exist.

Why?

They’re not Jewish.

The mantra “Antizionism is not antisemitism” attempts to erase the foundational history of the conflict, which is the refusal of the regional players to countenance a Jewish state.

Not every antizionist in the world today is an antisemite.

But antisemitism is the parent, the root, the foundation, and the energizing life force of antizionism.

If we want to resolve this conflict, we need to understand and accept the premises on which this conflict began and that drive it to this day.

It did not begin with settlements.

It did not begin with checkpoints.

It did not begin with Benjamin Netanyahu.

It began when the prospect of Jewish self-determination became real — and much of the surrounding Arab world decided that a Jewish state was the one outcome it would not tolerate.

Until we confront that history, we are arguing about the symptoms while refusing to name the disease.

That has implications for the Middle East — huge ones, obviously.

But the hatred at the heart of the so-called “pro-Palestinian” movement has deep and potentially fatal implications for movements around the world that have taken up the Palestinian banner with a fervency no less fanatical than the antisemites who started this conflict in the first place.

In my next few pieces, I will explore the moral time bomb that the “pro-Palestinian” movement has embedded at the heart of the world’s progressive movements, diplomatic sectors, commentariat, foreign ministries and campuses.

It’s not a pretty picture. But if you want to understand why the world is so effed up and how we got here, we’d better start facing facts.

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We are drowning in evidence of antisemitism. Hate-crime statistics rise. Synagogues need security. Jewish schools require guards to keep students safe. Jews report harassment and exclusion at work, in places of study, in activist circles and in everyday life. Jewish institutions are vandalized, threatened and, in far too many cases, attacked.

And yet the public response is almost unanimously nonchalance. Where is the outrage? Where are the mass demonstrations, the institutional reckonings, the anguished editorials, the compulsory seminars, the demands that everyone examine their prejudices?

For almost every other form of bigotry, we have learned — rightly — that silence is complicity and that minorities should not have to fight hatred alone. But when the target is Jews, the urgency somehow evaporates. The statistics pile up, the incidents become more brazen, Jewish people keep telling us that something is off the rails — and much of society responds with a shrug.

That discrepancy should make us furious. And it raises the obvious (to me, anyway) question: Why, when the evidence is staring us in the face, are so many people still unwilling to stand up to antisemitism?

I’ve got some thoughts …

• “It’s just the Middle East spilling over.”
  People assume antisemitism in Canada, the US or Europe is merely a temporary side effect of war in Gaza or tensions in Israel. The problem is that this reverses cause and effect. Antisemitism long predates the modern State of Israel and has repeatedly shaped attitudes toward Zionism, Israel and Jews. Middle East conflict can activate or provide a socially acceptable vocabulary for antisemitism, but it did not invent it. In other words, antisemitism is a problem here. Foreign events may be the spark that sets it off. Still, people do not feel motivated to stand up because they think the problem is foreign, not domestic.

• The Perfect Prejudice™
  Antisemitism contains its own defence mechanism. Jews are stereotyped as powerful, wealthy, connected and influential. Therefore, when Jews say they are experiencing discrimination, people conclude they cannot really be victims. They are supposedly too powerful to be vulnerable. The stereotype becomes the reason to dismiss evidence of the prejudice created by the stereotype. This is why I call antisemitism the Perfect Prejudice™. People do not feel compelled to stand up because they do not believe antisemitism is a real problem.

• The “victim card” / “persecution complex” trope.
  Related to the last item, Jews are routinely accused of exaggerating antisemitism, “weaponizing” it, or “crying wolf.” They are accused of having a “persecution complex.” This creates another self-sealing loop: Jewish warnings about antisemitism become evidence, in the minds of skeptics (and even many well-intentioned people), that Jews are manipulative. The very act of identifying prejudice is reinterpreted through an antisemitic trope. Therefore, people do not stand up because they hold the culturally embedded (antisemitic) idea that Jews are always complaining.

• People think antisemitism means Nazis.
  Many people have an extremely narrow mental definition: swastikas, skinheads, Hitler salutes and explicit hatred of Jews. If antisemitism appears as conspiracy theory, obsessive double standards, demonization of Jewish collective power, exclusion of Zionists or hostility couched in social-justice language, they do not recognize it. Importantly, these forms are precisely how antisemitism most commonly manifests right now. As a result, people do not stand up because they simply cannot see the antisemitism in front of their faces.

• Holocaust education accidentally froze antisemitism in 1945.
  People are taught that antisemitism was something terrible that culminated in Auschwitz. They are less often taught what antisemitism actually looked like before Auschwitz: conspiracy theories, social exclusion, accusations of disloyalty, economic myths, dehumanization and collective blame. We teach the catastrophe better than we teach the warning signs. Plus, as Dara Horn has noted, if we use the Holocaust as a measuring stick, any concerns about antisemitic outcomes obviously pale in comparison and permit people to ignore the problem. People do not stand up because they see antisemitism as a museum piece, not a contemporary problem.

• Antisemitism does not always resemble other racisms.
  Many prejudices portray their targets as inferior, weak or primitive. Antisemitism often portrays Jews as superior, cunning, rich, controlling or omnipotent. Because people are trained to look for “punching down,” they can miss a prejudice that imagines its target as above everyone else. People don’t stand up because antisemitism looks different than the racisms they have been taught to oppose — and because (antisemitic) cultural prejudices convince them it is not anything to be worked up about because Jews are powerful. They’ll be fine.

• Jews do not fit contemporary oppressor/oppressed categories neatly.
  Jews may be white or non-white, affluent or poor, secular or religious, immigrants or deeply rooted citizens. That complexity does not fit easily into political frameworks that sort populations into fixed categories of privileged and marginalized people. People are not motivated to stand up because, again, antisemitism doesn’t look like a racism they are familiar with.

• Israel is treated as evidence of Jewish power.
  The existence of a militarily capable Jewish state can make people think Jews everywhere are somehow less vulnerable. Yet the existence of Israel does not remove antisemitism from Toronto, London, Paris, Melbourne or New York — and sometimes becomes the pretext through which it is expressed. It is also worth noting that this Israeli power is an example of the world forcing Jews into a corner and then condemning them for coming out swinging. Israel is the last stand of the Jewish people. If it weren’t the most powerful force in its region, its citizens would probably be dead or dispersed. Which would be fine for many of the most virulent Israel-bashers … but even for well-intentioned people, that Israeli power allows people to ignore the genuine threats that force Israel to maintain that military superiority.

• “Zionist” has become a linguistic escape hatch.
  A speaker can substitute “Zionists” for “Jews” and repeat ideas that would be immediately recognizable as antisemitic if the word “Jew” were used: Zionists control the media, Zionists buy politicians, Zionists manipulate governments, Zionists are disloyal, Zionists cannot be trusted. People don’t stand up because overtly antisemitic ideas are dressed up as “legitimate” political commentary simply by subbing the word “Zionist” for “Jew.”

• People fear being called pro-Israel.
  In some progressive, academic, cultural or activist environments, publicly challenging antisemitism can invite suspicion that one is defending Israel, Netanyahu, Zionism or the Gaza war. Silence becomes socially easier. People do not stand up because they lack the courage to do so — or because they fear they can’t explain the nuance in their position against antisemitism and defend themselves against the “slur” of being a Zionist.

• People fear their friends.
  This is less ideological than sociological. Standing up to prejudice is easy when the bigot is a stranger. It is much harder when the questionable comment comes from someone in your political movement, union, faculty, social circle or activist organization. People do not stand up because to do so means calling out your allies.

• Refusal to self-examine.
  People who strongly identify as antiracist may assume that they therefore cannot possibly harbour antisemitic ideas. Their self-conception becomes an exemption from self-examination: “I fight racism, therefore what I am saying about Jews cannot be racist.” They do not stand up because (despite their commitment to unlearning racism) they have convinced themselves that they are immune from bad ideas.

• Progressive credentials can make prejudice harder to recognize.
  If someone uses the vocabulary of liberation, colonialism, justice or human rights, audiences may presume the underlying message must be emancipatory even when it reproduces old prejudices. Some prejudices announce themselves crudely. Antisemitism can present itself as opposition to greed, imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, war, globalism or elite power. So people don’t stand up because they are hoodwinked by anti-Jewish racism in an antiracist costume.

• The news environment is overwhelming.
  This is one of the entirely innocent explanations. People are being asked to care about wars, elections, climate disasters, racism, poverty, healthcare, migration, crime and a dozen crises before breakfast. Attention is finite. People don’t stand up to antisemitism because there are so many problems in the world — and, as the previous list has suggested, antisemitism is not seen as a serious threat.

The reasons people fail to confront antisemitism fall, I think, into two radically different categories. Some are ordinary human failings — ignorance, distraction, fatigue, fear and tribalism. But the most disturbing explanations are circular: antisemitism itself teaches people why antisemitism should not be taken seriously.

Antisemitism is the Perfect Prejudice™ because its own stereotypes make evidence of discrimination seem unbelievable: Jews are supposedly powerful, so they cannot be victims. Jews supposedly manipulate sympathy, so reports of antisemitism are just more Jewish manipulation. Jews supposedly control institutions, so institutional concern about antisemitism proves Jewish control. Jews supposedly exaggerate persecution, so warnings about persecution prove the stereotype.

Jews are imagined as too powerful, wealthy or influential to be genuine victims. When Jews protest antisemitism, that protest is then recast as further proof of supposed Jewish power and manipulation, making the prejudice self-reinforcing.

That is what makes antisemitism the Perfect Prejudice™. Antisemitism supplies both the accusation and the explanation for why the accused should not be believed and the perpetrators are guiltless.

If you’ve got other theories, I’d love to hear them.

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In my previous post, I made the case that people who genuinely seek peace and coexistence would not belong to a Palestinian movement that promotes intolerance over coexistence, maximalism over compromise, and bloody “resistance” over peace.

That argument was premised on the assumption that “pro-Palestinians” actually believe in peace and coexistence.

That was a whopper of an assumption on my part.

All evidence, in fact, suggests that those who call themselves “pro-Palestinian” are so committed to their ideology that they don’t care how many Palestinians die as a result of it.

Stay with me. If you think it through (and it’s really not that complicated), you will realize Palestinians have no worse enemy than overseas “pro-Palestinians.”

Since October 7, 2023, the façade has come down. Activists who used to give lip-service to a two-state solution (that is, to peace and coexistence) now openly call for a very different outcome: A “Palestine” stretching “from the river to the sea.”

An end to Zionism. The disappearance of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

That is the consensus position now. It’s almost unanimous, judging by the “pro-Palestinian” rhetoric.

Let’s leave aside for now the morality of that position and focus on the practicalities.

How, exactly, do you imagine that happens?

Israel is home to roughly 10 million people, about eight million of whom are Jewish. These are the Israelis the world hates, of course — the world doesn’t have a problem with the two million Christian and Muslim Arab Israelis. In fact, ask people who have made hating Israel their life’s work and you’ll find a bunch of them don’t even know there is such a thing as an Israeli Arab. They have been so busy condemning Israel as a “religious ethnostate” that they haven’t had time to learn that Israel is pretty much the only country in the region that isn’t a religious ethnostate.

They sure as hell don’t know that the two million Arabs in Israel enjoy more freedoms and rights than Arabs anywhere in the Middle East or North Africa, and many or most of them wouldn’t trade living in a “Jewish religious ethnostate” for citizenship in a tinpot Palestinian dictatorship.

But, of course, the fate of Israeli Arabs is of absolutely no concern to the overseas activists who know what’s best for Palestinians and the region.

But back to the topic these “pro-Palestinian” activists really care about: Jews.

The overwhelming majority of Jews have nowhere else to go — despite the frequent demands from some of your comrades that they “go back to Poland.”

Again, the ignorance of the activists allows them to imagine Israelis as white interlopers who arrived en masse from Europe in 1948.

Their ignorance knows no bounds. There was a little thing in history that prevented European Jews from flooding into Israel in 1948.

The Holocaust.

No, the Jews for whom Israel would be a home and a refuge, and whose descendants make up more than half the population, are Jews from families expelled from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Morocco, Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.

Should they go back to those places? Not your problem, I know.

As I noted in my previous post, your activism endorses an intolerant, absolutist, violent binary in which one side must win absolutely and the other must totally lose. No compromise. No coexistence. No peace until Israel is annihilated.

But — again — Israel will not be annihilated. It just won’t. And your insistence that it can be, that it will be, just sentences thousands more Palestinians to death in a fruitless battle.

If you, your colleagues, the UN, Amnesty International, European diplomats, smartypants commentators, and the rest of the overseas idiots would demand Palestinian elites end their use of Palestinian people as cannon fodder and instead prepare to live in peace and coexistence, we would be a long way closer to your alleged goal of a “free Palestine.”

Instead, the few Israelis who still believed the conflict could be ended simply by making enough concessions, had their illusions shattered on October 7, 2023.

This is one of the things that makes today’s breathless, outraged news reports about Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank so ridiculous and exasperating.

According to the wise minds of the Western world, by creating more apparently permanent settlements in the area the world views as Palestinian territory, Israel is killing the two-state solution.

That’s the killing the world sits up and notices.

Dead Jews on October 7? Reason to celebrate.

Dead two-state solution? Frame the Jews.

The Palestinian elites killed the two-state solution in 2000. Israelis can’t kill something that has been dead for 26 years.

As I wrote in my previous post, you can continue doing what feels good to your self-righteous ego, or you can do something that might actually lead to Palestinian self-determination and an end to deaths on both sides.

But ending the deaths on both sides is not your goal. Peace and coexistence, despite your cooptation of the language of peace, are not on your agenda.

It has been said that Palestinians want peace — they just don’t want it with Israel.

This is key to the Palestinianist ideology: They talk of peace, but that is a peace that comes after the Jews are routed and/or annihilated.

And that is the genocidal ideology swallowed whole by Western “progressives,” the UN, NGOs like Amnesty and, it seems, judging by propaganda everywhere I go in the world, the average idiot on the street. (I’m in the Netherlands today and boy do I have stories for you — stay tuned).

Politics begins with reality, not wishful thinking.

So here is the tragic consequence. Every chant demanding Israel’s disappearance. Every banner celebrating violent “resistance.” Every campus rally insisting Zionism must be dismantled. Every slogan glorifying “intifada” — none of this moves a “free Palestine” any closer.

It pushes it further away. And, in the process, it guarantees more war. And, as an obvious consequence of the imbalance of power between the two parties you are always railing on about, that means exponentially more dead Palestinians than dead Israelis.

I know you hate that imbalance of power. But it seems you love dead Palestinians more — because your every word and deed hastens more of them.

Again, practical politics recognizes reality. Israel is more powerful.

You can hate that fact. But it does not make it any less true.

So you can encourage Palestinian elites to negotiate with that power, or you can encourage them to keep throwing more generations of Palestinians into the war machine they started and that your activism fuels.

Your activism does not move Israel one millimetre closer to disappearing. It does not advance a “free Palestine.”

It only convinces Israelis that military strength is its only insurance policy.

Who pays the price?

Not the activists marching safely through London or Vancouver or New York. Not the professors, the influencers, the celebrities. They live their comfortable lives and return to their homes, safe and sound, self-satisfied that they have made lives better for Palestinians when they have made things worse.

Palestinians pay. Every time.

The cruelest feature of this movement is not that it asks the impossible. It is that it persuades Palestinians the impossible remains attainable.

It whispers that total victory is just one more protest away. One more boycott. One more resolution. One more intifada. One more generation.

Just a few more thousand dead Palestinians and victory will be nigh.

History says otherwise.

For nearly 80 years, every attempt to destroy Israel has failed. Every war, every intifada, every campaign of terrorism, every effort to isolate Israel diplomatically — Israel has not disappeared.

It has become stronger, more prosperous, more technologically advanced.

One can celebrate that or lament it.

But denying it is not analysis. It is fantasy.

The anti-Israel movement (because, for all intents, that is all the “pro-Palestinian” movement is, in reality) offers Palestinians dreams instead of strategies.

Dreams featuring rivers of Jewish blood, but dreams nonetheless.

Dreams of vindication instead of state-building. Dreams of resistance instead of governance. Dreams based on maximalism instead of compromise.

The result is measured not in slogans — and certainly not in the advancement of Palestinian self-determination — but in graves. Palestinian graves, mostly. And that is not Israel’s fault. It’s yours.

The deepest tragedy is that there is another path. There has always been another path.

A movement that genuinely wanted a Palestinian state would devote its energy to preparing Palestinians for statehood. Building institutions. Demanding accountable leadership. Rejecting corruption. Discarding terrorism. Teaching that Jews are neighbors, not invaders. Preparing children not for martyrdom but for citizenship. Encouraging investment rather than endless revolution.

That work is not as glamorous or romantic as the fist-raising, slogan-chanting Last Great Cause of Palestine.

It attracts fewer hashtags. But it has far fewer dead Palestinians, too.

And this is how countries are actually built.

Instead, much of the international movement has encouraged precisely the opposite.

It has rewarded maximalist rhetoric, romanticized violence, excused terrorism as understandable and legitimate, and assured Palestinians that history will eventually erase Israel.

It will not.

The terrible irony is this: Many people marching beneath Palestinian flags may sincerely believe they are expressing solidarity. Perhaps they are.

But solidarity without honesty is cruelty. Real friends tell one another difficult truths. Real allies do not encourage fantasies that lead only to more funerals.

Real comrades do not applaud deadly strategies that have failed for generations.

Real supporters do not promise victories they know cannot be won.

The most compassionate words anyone could say to Palestinians today are also the hardest: Israel is not going away.

The sooner that truth is accepted — you don’t need to celebrate it, just accept it — the sooner the real work of building a Palestinian future can begin.

Because every year spent chasing the impossible is another year not spent building the possible.

Every child raised to believe that liberation requires Israel’s disappearance is another child denied the opportunity to imagine a future beside Israel rather than instead of it.

If your movement truly wants to free Palestine, then stop asking Palestinians to sacrifice another generation for a dream that has failed every generation before it.

History has already delivered its verdict on the fantasy of eliminating Israel.

The only question remaining is how many more Palestinians will you willingly watch die before you — their supposed friends — finally admit the failure of your strategy?

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Imagine, for a moment, that your neighbor owns a gun because he believes someone is trying to kill him.

You may think he’s overly cautious. You may think he’s paranoid. You may think he’s wrong, crazy, or gun-mad.

But if your strategy for persuading him to put the gun down is to surround his house, scream death threats through a megaphone, and do everything to assure him that his fears are justified, don’t be surprised when he buys more ammunition.

Human beings do not become less defensive when they feel threatened. They become more defensive. Duh.

If there is one lesson Israelis absorbed from October 7, 2023, it is that the nightmare they had spent generations preparing was not a figment of their collective imagination.

The mass murder and other terror did not convince Israelis that their security concerns were exaggerated. It convinced them that they had underestimated them.

And then something extraordinary happened.

Instead of responding to the massacre by reassuring Israelis that they still had a place in the family of nations, instead of pressuring Palestinians to envision a future of peace instead of more bloodshed like that terrible day, the world overwhelmingly did precisely the opposite.

Within days, before Israel had even mounted its military response, crowds gathered in cities around the world celebrating and rationalizing the attacks.

University students blamed Israel. Demonstrators chanted slogans that many Israelis and Jews hear as calls for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state, at best, and for genocide, at worst.

From the river to the sea. Globalize the intifada. By any means necessary.

Whatever individual marchers intend those slogans to mean, millions of Israelis hear something very specific.

They hear: You are not safe. You are not welcome. You do not deserve to live in peace — or live at all.

Then activists express astonishment that Israelis seem militaristic, that they seem to be even less willing than before October 7 to take risks for peace.

If your objective were genuinely to encourage compromise, this is almost exactly the opposite of the strategy you would choose.

You would begin by reducing fear, not amplifying it.

You would reassure Israelis that a Palestinian state would not become another launchpad for rockets or another October 7.

You would demonstrate that coexistence — not conquest — is the objective.

You would tell Israelis, loudly and repeatedly: We recognize your right to exist. We recognize your legitimate security concerns. We want your children to live safely. We — Palestinians and their overseas allies — are not your enemies.

Only then could trust begin to emerge.

Trust requires security. Not merely physical security, but psychological security also. Confidence that tomorrow will not bring annihilation.

Israelis today possess very little of that confidence.

Can anyone blame them?

October 7 was not merely a terrorist attack.

It shattered one of the foundational assumptions of Israeli society — that the state could reliably protect its citizens from mass slaughter.

Then the world responded in ways that reinforced rather than alleviated Israeli fears.

Imagine trying to persuade someone to dismantle the walls around their home while murderous protesters outside are shouting that the walls should come down by any means necessary.

No rational person would agree.

So let us ask a different question.

If the objective really were a “free Palestine,” what would that movement actually look like?

It would begin by acknowledging an uncomfortable truth.

There will never be a free Palestine without a secure Israel.

No Israeli government — left, right, or centre — will voluntarily create conditions it believes invite another October 7.

If you want Israelis to take risks for peace, you must first persuade them that peace will reduce risk rather than multiplying it.

Instead of chanting “Globalize the Intifada,” demand that Palestinian leaders abandon the language of permanent war.

Instead of celebrating “resistance” “by any means necessary,” insist that terrorism has no place in a national liberation movement. (Especially one that could achieve its objective almost instantly if it demonstrated genuine willingness to coexist. This assumes, of course, that coexistence is its objective.)

Instead of teaching another generation that all of Israel is occupied Palestine, and that opposing it is more important than life itself, teach that compromise is not betrayal.

Instead of rewarding maximalism, reward coexistence.

Instead of glorifying martyrdom, glorify state-building.

Instead of promising victory over Israel, promise a future alongside Israel.

That is how nations are built. Not through perpetual revolution. Through institutions, economies that actually work, schools that teach legitimate subjects, not ones that inculcate self-destructive, violent nationalist extremism.

A “free Palestine” would be a result of building real infrastructure, not more terror tunnels, a civil society, not one built on nihilism and hatred.

The tragedy is that many people marching under Palestinian flags sincerely believe they are helping Palestinians.

They are so certain of their rectitude.

But every movement should occasionally ask itself one brutally honest question: “If our methods consistently produce the opposite of our stated goals, is it possible that our methods are wrong?”

Peace requires two peoples who believe they have a future worth sharing.

Fear tells each side the opposite.

Every slogan that deepens existential fear pushes peace further away.

Every threat convinces another Israeli that compromise is too dangerous.

Every celebration of violence persuades another Palestinian that violence works.

Both peoples deserve better than that.

A genuinely pro-Palestinian movement would prepare Palestinians for the difficult work of building a state rather than the impossible dream of eliminating another one.

And, as I have written before, we can make endless demands on Israel — and the world does — but there is only one side in this conflict that can make peace because there is only one side that is making war: the Palestinian elites and their terrorist enablers.

If we truly want Palestinians to live in freedom, dignity, and statehood, then we should be asking not what feels morally satisfying in a protest chant, but what actually makes that future more likely.

Right now, too much of what passes for “radicalized,” activism is accomplishing the exact opposite.

If your strategy leaves Israelis more frightened, Palestinians more radicalized and both peoples more convinced that coexistence is impossible, then it is not a strategy for peace.

It is a strategy for perpetuating the conflict you claim to oppose.

Ah, but there’s the rub.

You are not trying to end the conflict. At best, you are posing as a humanitarian political activist when you have no right to do so. At worst, you are trying to promote an end where Israel is destroyed and Palestine stretches from the river to the sea.

That won’t happen.

And by tirelessly flogging that objective, you are sacrificing tens of thousands more Palestinians to your self-satisfied ideology, wrapping yourself in a self-righteous flag of peace, while almost certainly promoting more decades of conflict in which dead Palestinians outnumber dead Israelis by orders of magnitude.

What will it take before you see that what you call “pro-Palestinian” is anything but?

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US Senator Bernie Sanders is calling on the Democratic Party to ban funding from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in party primaries.

First, it kind of makes you wonder who this guy is, given that he has never been a member of the Democratic Party. But anyways.

This is all part of a growing campaign inside the US Democratic Party to make accepting support from AIPAC politically shameful.

Candidates are being pressured to sign pledges rejecting money from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. More than 100 Democratic candidates have reportedly been endorsed by anti-AIPAC organizations in the 2026 election cycle. Politicians associated with AIPAC have been booed, heckled, and told to return supposedly tainted contributions.

There are legitimate arguments to be made about AIPAC. It is a powerful advocacy organization. Its political arms spend large sums supporting candidates and defeating opponents. Its super-PAC has sometimes run advertisements that focus on domestic issues rather than clearly explaining that the money comes from a group primarily concerned with Israel.

Criticize that. Demand fuller disclosure. Condemn negative advertising. Oppose unlimited super-PAC spending. Campaign against AIPAC’s preferred candidates.

But treating association with one specifically pro-Israel organization as a moral stain raises a different question.

Why, in a political system flooded with money from corporations, unions, trial lawyers, environmental organizations, fossil fuel lobbies, big tobacco, pharmaceutical companies, real estate interests, gun-rights groups, abortion-focused organizations, and ideological billionaires, is Jewish political participation increasingly singled out as uniquely corrupting?

The answer may not be conscious in every case. But the structure is unmistakably familiar:

Jews = money.

Money = influence.

Jewish influence = spooky, devious manipulation.

AIPAC therefore represents not ordinary democratic advocacy but an unfair and sinister power over government.

AIPAC money becomes dirty money.

It may or may not be worth getting into the weeds here a little bit. Discussion of AIPAC is routinely distorted by combining three distinct categories.

Lobbying means money spent trying to influence legislation and government policy.

Traditional PAC contributions are regulated donations made directly to candidates and committees.

Independent expenditures are advertisements and other election spending by super-PACs that legally cannot be coordinated with candidates.

These categories should not be collapsed into one number.

In 2024, the entire pro-Israel category spent about $5 million on federal lobbying, according to figures derived from OpenSecrets. AIPAC accounted for most of it, at roughly $4.4 million. By comparison, total federal lobbying in 2024 exceeded $4 billion.

AIPAC says that, measured as an individual lobbying organization, it ranked 191st in Washington in 2024. That figure demolishes the popular image of AIPAC as the financial colossus towering over every other Washington interest.

Compare AIPAC’s approximately $4.4 million in lobbying with the largest industry sectors in 2024:

• Pharmaceuticals and health products: approximately $294 million

• Insurance: roughly $160 million

• Electronics manufacturing and equipment: roughly $150 million

• Business associations: well over $140 million

• Oil and gas: more than $130 million

• Hospitals and nursing homes: more than $130 million

• Securities and investment: more than $120 million

• Real estate: more than $100 million

Pro-Israel lobbying is not at the top of the lobbying hierarchy. It is nowhere near it.

The comparison changes when we move from federal lobbying to campaign finance.

AIPAC’s traditional PAC was the third-largest federally registered PAC by receipts during the 2023–24 cycle, behind the Service Employees International Union’s political committee and EMILY’s List. The Federal Election Commission reported:

1. SEIU COPE: $78.3 million

2. EMILY’s List: $61.6 million

3. AIPAC PAC: $57.4 million

4. Democratic Action: $27.3 million

5. Stop Republicans: $22.2 million

6. End Citizens United: $21.2 million

7. AFSCME PEOPLE: $19.7 million

8. Progressive Takeover: $19.6 million

9. National Association of Realtors PAC: $18.2 million

10. CHC BOLD PAC: $17.8 million

Other large committees included teachers’ unions, food and commercial workers, electrical workers, auto workers, the National Rifle Association, and the American Association for Justice, representing trial lawyers.

AIPAC is plainly one of the largest electoral fundraising operations in American politics.

Its super-PAC adds substantial independent spending. In 2024, pro-Israel groups poured millions into congressional primaries, most famously helping defeat Representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. In the recent Michigan Senate primary, AIPAC and affiliated groups reportedly spent nearly $30 million supporting Haley Stevens — the largest intervention in a single race in AIPAC’s history. (She lost.)

No one needs to pretend this money is trivial.

But here is the moral question: Why is accepting AIPAC support uniquely discrediting when accepting support from organized labor, reproductive-rights groups, environmental PACs, trial lawyers, realtors, or ideological super PACs is treated as ordinary coalition politics?

A politician backed by EMILY’s List is not accused of being bought by women.

A candidate supported by the SEIU is not presumed to be secretly controlled by janitors and health-care workers.

A politician receiving trial lawyer money is not automatically hounded from public life.

Environmental money is not inherently “dirty money.”

Union money is not foreign money merely because unions take positions on international affairs.

Yet AIPAC support is increasingly treated as a mark of devious affiliations.

AIPAC is an American organization funded by Americans. Its PAC receives regulated contributions from American donors. Its super-PAC operates under the same deeply flawed American campaign-finance rules that govern every other super-PAC.

It is not the Israeli government. It is not a foreign agent secretly transferring Israeli treasury funds into American elections. Its contributors are Americans participating in American politics because they hold a view about American foreign policy.

One may dislike that view. One may argue that American military assistance to Israel should be reduced, conditioned, or ended. One may oppose AIPAC’s candidates and defeat them at the ballot box.

But describing American citizens as a foreign influence because they advocate support for Israel rests on an old accusation: Jews are never fully citizens of the countries where they live. Their political participation is presumably alien. Their loyalties are elsewhere.

Their money is American until Jews spend it on Jewish concerns.

Then, mysteriously, it becomes foreign.

For centuries, antisemitism has associated Jews with money, hidden influence, political corruption, and control over governments.

The modern formula barely requires translation:

Jews → wealth → AIPAC → purchased politicians → Jewish control of America.

Most critics will object that they are discussing a political organization, not Jews.

But AIPAC is targeted precisely because it mobilizes Americans — many of them Jewish — to advocate a cause closely connected to Jewish identity and security.

The organization’s opponents do not normally speak with equivalent alarm about the Catholic Church, Arab-American organizations, Armenian advocacy groups, Cuban-American political networks, labor unions, or environmental organizations attempting to influence foreign and domestic policy.

Only in the Jewish case does ordinary political participation so readily become evidence of secret domination.

The American campaign-finance system is grotesque.

Billionaires, corporations, unions, PACs, nonprofits, and super-PACs can pour extraordinary amounts into elections. Donors can influence which candidates are viable long before most voters cast a ballot. Groups can finance advertisements through obscurely named organizations. Legal independence between candidates and super-PACs can sometimes look theatrical rather than meaningful.

Change it.

Require rapid disclosure. Restrict dark money. Overturn or legislate around the consequences of Citizens United. Limit independent expenditures.

Apply the rules to oil, pharmaceuticals, unions, trial lawyers, real estate, environmental groups, reproductive-rights groups, AIPAC, and everyone else.

But that is not what the “Reject AIPAC” campaign does.

It does not reject PACs.

It rejects the Jewish one.

AIPAC has become the organizing obsession, the loyalty test, and the allegedly corrupting influence against which Democratic candidates must publicly purify themselves.

AIPAC should be scrutinized like every powerful organization. Its spending should be transparent. Its arguments should be challenged. Its candidates should be answerable to voters.

But money donated legally by Americans does not become dirty because those Americans support Israel.

A system is not cleansed by declaring Jewish political power uniquely contaminating.

That is not getting dirty money out of politics.

It is taking one of the oldest ideas in antisemitism — Jews, money, and hidden control — and dressing it up as progressive reform.

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Antisemitism used to be disreputable. Not absent. Never absent, sadly. But disreputable.

The people who spoke openly about Jewish conspiracies, Jewish money, Jewish disloyalty, or Jewish control were generally recognized as inhabitants of the lunatic fringe. They circulated photocopied manifestos, muttered about international bankers, and gathered in political swamps respectable people knew enough to avoid.

Antizionism — the belief that Jewish national self-determination is uniquely illegitimate and Israel must cease to exist — was seen as, if not the same thing, certainly antisemitism-adjacent enough that it, too, occupied the margins of Western politics.

There were always communists, religious extremists, neo-Nazis and various cranks who wanted Israel abolished. But they were understood as extremists.

They were the lunatic fringe.

What has changed is not merely the prevalence of these ideas. It is their centrality.

The lunatic fringe has moved into the mainstream.

In many influential progressive institutions, antizionism is no longer an eccentric deviation from the accepted position. It is the consensus.

The Democratic Socialists of America, who have seen some electoral successes in recent weeks, seem to think antizionism is their ticket to ride. New York’s mayor, the newly minted Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan and the coterie of crackpots who call themselves the Squad, among others, basically have one foreign policy position: hating on Israel.

Never mind the panoply of catastrophes of worldwide — Look! — self-determined Jews are protecting themselves from genociders. They must be stopped!

What would once have been an extreme factional demand became an expression of institutional identity.

In Canada’s New Democratic Party, hostility toward the Jewish state has likewise become the sole motivating foreign affairs issue. Listen to the leader of the party or their foreign affairs spokesmaniac and you would think there were no other issues in the world besides the evil of Zionism.

Across sections of the European left, Israel is not treated as one imperfect state among many. It is treated as a singular contaminant: colonial, genocidal, illegitimate, and beyond moral rehabilitation.

This mania — ostensibly “pro-Palestinian” but in practice just the same old-fashioned fixation with Jews — is visible in parts of the trade-union movement, academia, the arts, feminist organizing, and queer activism.

Again, none of these movements is monolithic. There are a few courageous feminists, unionists, artists, academics, and LGBTQ+ people resisting antisemitism and defending Jewish inclusion.

But in too many organizations, the range of permissible opinion on Israel has become: hate Israel or be canceled.

The folks who “celebrate diversity” demonstrate one hell of a contrary attitude to human and intellectual multiplicity when it comes to Jews.

The coalition built on the concept that minority communities alone define their identities tells Jews that Zionism has nothing to do with Jewishness.

The folks who teach that impact matters more than intent dismiss Jewish alarm because the speakers insist their intentions are anti-racist and, besides, those hypersensitive Jews are always complaining.

The feminists who built entire movements around believing women demonstrate astonishing disregard and doubt when the women are Israeli.

The queer activists who insist that no community’s human rights should be conditional admit Jews to the Pride party only if they repudiate their people’s right to self-determination.

The unions that exist because workers are stronger collectively single out one country — arguably the country in which the collectivist values trade unionists claim to endorse are most foundational — for ridiculous vilification.

Of course, modern antisemitism is rarely advertised under its historic name.

It fancies itself up as anti-imperialism. It dresses itself up as decolonization. It slaps on the lipstick of anti-racism, the sequins of solidarity, the fake lashes of liberation, the rouge of resistance.

The Jewish conspiracy becomes “Zionist influence.” Jewi$h money becomes the Zioni$t lobby. Jewish bloodlust becomes Israel’s alleged appetite for Palestinian children. The deceitful Jew becomes the Israeli whose every statement is derided as propaganda. The collectively guilty Jew becomes the diaspora Zionist required to condemn Israel before being admitted into respectable progressive society.

This became mainstream because institutions stopped imposing a reputational cost, let down the drawbridge and invited the ravening hordes into the castle. This is what the US Democrats, Canada’s New Democrats and Greens, and many leftist European parties have done, as have most unions, queer, feminist, and “progressive” movements.

They have legitimized antizionism and antisemitism. And they have delegitimized themselves.

But delegitimizing themselves carries a price only when the mass of decent people recognizes that delegitimization. In other words, if most Democratic Party voters jump on the hate-Israel bandwagon, the illegitimate becomes legitimate in that sector. That doesn’t mean it is actually legitimate. It is a topsy-turvy, through-the-looking-glass world in which the policy (antisemitism) is legitimate because the vessel has become illegitimate.

Let’s put this in the crudest historical terms. Antisemitism was legitimate in 1930s Germany because the mass of German people said it was.

That is how the lunatic fringe becomes the lunatic mainstream.

I am a progressive. I am gay. I believe in unions, feminism, racial equality, universal human rights, and the obligation to protect minorities.

That is why this matters to me. I can’t stop being pro-union, pro-feminist, gay, anti-racist, or an advocate of universal rights because a bunch of people have hijacked those terms and my movements. The people who agree with me, and who share my values, are the only legitimate “progressives”—but we are being made illegitimate in our own ideological spaces because illegitimate people with illegitimate ideas have taken over the spaces and tried to kick us out.

The worst thing we could do is walk away.

The Jewish Federation of British Columbia, for example, did a kind of genius thing at the Vancouver Pride Parade earlier this month. They acknowledged that Jews (and allies like me) were individually and collectively unwelcome at the event. So they rented a truck with various electronic messages to that effect and entered it in the parade. Bravo!

The left, at its best, has always stood up to majorities who tried to marginalize minorities.

Today, the majority of the left are either marginalizing Jews or remaining silent while a minority on the left do so.

There is, however, an important reason for hope.

There is no moral difference between someone who marginalizes and terrorizes a minority and those who remain silent.

Strategically, though, there is a difference. Because it means we “only” need to convince the silent good people to stand up to a racist minority in our ranks, rather than convince a hate-motivated majority to change their minds. In other words, we don’t need to convert the die-hards. We just need to mobilize those who haven’t succumbed to the ideology.

Success here will depend on unmasking the linguistic shell game the racists have developed and successfully implemented.

Unlike antisemitism on the right, which speaks in the language of race, nationalism, and conspiracy, antisemitism on the left is harder to confront, and more appealing, because it speaks in a faux-language of justice.

It flatters the people expressing it. It tells them they are not participating in an ancient prejudice but opposing power, colonialism, and “genocide.”

The old antisemites believed they were protecting civilization from the Jews.

The new ones believe they are protecting humanity from Zionists.

Everyone is the hero of his own story.

Institutional consensus is not necessarily popular consensus. The apparently monolithic voice is not necessarily representative of everyone — or even a majority — in these spaces.

I know from conversations with former allies in the NDP, the gay rights movement and other causes I have been involved in that many people inside these movements disagree privately. They recognize the obsession, the double standards, and the dehumanization, but remain silent because they fear social exclusion, professional consequences or — and this is the real secret weapon that keeps the majority in line — the raging fury of the crazed and often violent antizionist activists.

Their silence produces an illusion of unanimity.

One person speaking can rupture that illusion.

One union member can oppose the resolution — and that gives dozens, possibly hundreds, more permission to dissent.

One feminist can ask why Israeli women do not count, thereby breaking the immoral consensus.

One queer activist can refuse to make Jewish exclusion a condition of solidarity, and in so doing move our movement slightly back toward the inclusive diversity that our slogans celebrate.

One New Democrat can insist that Palestinian rights and Jewish national rights are not mutually exclusive, contesting the despicable false binary that forces people to choose which group to treat as unworthy.

This is the slow process by which we reclaim these movements — and in the process redeem their morality and legitimacy.

The fight is not against unions, feminism, queer liberation, democratic socialism, or the left broadly. It is against the normalization of antisemitism within movements that should know better.

It will require people inside these institutions to stop whispering privately and begin objecting publicly. It will require allies to accept the discomfort and cost that actual allyship entails. It will require progressives to apply their principles even when Jews are the minority asking for protection.

The lunatic fringe became the lunatic mainstream because too many reasonable people moved aside.

We need to make the lunatic mainstream the lunatic fringe again.

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Six very brief lessons from history.

• William of Norwich, 1144: A 12-year-old Christian boy is found dead in England. Jews are accused, without evidence, of ritually murdering him. The story becomes the prototype for the blood libel, a fantasy that would follow Jews across Europe for centuries.

• The Black Death, 1348–1351: As plague devastates Europe, Jews are accused of deliberately poisoning wells. Torture produces “confessions”; Jewish communities are massacred.

• The Khmelnytsky uprising, 1648–49: Cossack rebellion against Polish rule fuses class resentment, religious and ethnic hatred. Jews, associated in the popular imagination with the Polish system, become surrogate targets and Jewish communities suffer catastrophic violence.

• The Damascus Affair, 1840: After a Catholic friar disappears, Jews are accused of murdering him for ritual purposes. The medieval blood libel enters the modern communications age, spreading through newspapers, diplomacy, and international politics.

• The Dreyfus Affair, 1894: A Jewish French army officer is falsely convicted of treason. Evidence of his innocence is superseded by a larger cultural imperative: that Jews are, by definition, suspect. Sophisticated French society erupts in chants of “Death to the Jews!”

• Kishinev, 1903: Antisemitic propaganda, including blood libel accusations, precedes a three-day pogrom in which more than 40 Jews are murdered and hundreds wounded in some of the most grisly horrors of the modern age.

Different centuries. Different countries. Different circumstances. The same recurring theme.

A crisis or unexplained event occurs. A fantastical accusation attaches itself to Jews. The allegation succeeds not because of evidence but because the story resonates with a surrounding society already predisposed to believe the worst about those people.

Repetition turns suspicion to certitude. Eventually people are convinced that the outrageous libels are true, and, being true, righteous people must act upon them.

Today, the world has succumbed to the collective delusion of a Palestinian genocide.

Just as Jews in the past did not kill people to use their blood for matzah or poison wells to kill their non-Jewish neighbors, Israelis today are not perpetrating genocide on Palestinians.

There is no genocide in Gaza.

Only in a world perverted by lies and poisoned by the sorts of antisemitic libels that preceded the six historical atrocities above (among thousands of examples I could have cited) would such a disclaimer even be necessary.

By the most liberal interpretation of the definition of genocide, Israel would have to want to kill many or most Palestinians because they are Palestinian.

Not one of them has died because of their innate identity as Palestinians.

Of course, thousands of Palestinians have died in a war — a war started by their own despotic leaders.

And they have died in such large numbers because those despotic leaders maximize the death toll in order to score macabre PR victories.

But no matter how many Palestinians have died, or the specific circumstances in which they have died, that is not genocide.

Even Amnesty International admitted it had to fudge the definition of genocide in order to smear Israel with it.

Yet the world swallows the allegation with relish.

My argument, of course, is not that Palestinian suffering is imaginary. It plainly is not.

But the allegation of genocide absolutely is.

As George Orwell stated succinctly, “One of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.”

The Palestinian genocide fallacy is accepted as fact because several decades of hysterically escalating hyperbole — settler-colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing — were testing plausibility in a process leading inexorably to the ultimate charge: Genocide. Humanity’s greatest crime.

This mass hysteria, this collective delusion, belongs to an earlier time. It is alarming especially because it takes place now in a globalized culture, rather than in the limited environs of premodern and pre-internet Norwich or Damascus or Kishinev.

One of the most bewildering characteristics of our age is that people who have been trained to interrogate narratives, challenge authority, deconstruct language, and ask who benefits from every claim can become extraordinarily credulous when confronted with an allegation that confirms their existing worldview.

Generations of cynical media consumers and skeptical critical thinkers pride themselves on their sophistication in questioning everything.

Everything except this.

They question vaccines, gender assumptions, the very idea of truth.

The one thing they accept at face value, in the absence of all evidence, is the greatest slander ever perpetrated against any people.

Despite the nonexistence of evidence, in the face of mountains of proof to the contrary, in fact, that nothing of the sort was intended or committed, the fake-genocide of Palestinians is today not just an article of faith among many of the world’s activists, academics, commentators, and diplomats. It is the animating driver of the world’s rage toward Israelis, Jews and anyone who refuses to join the howling mobs baying for their blood.

It is no coincidence that the target is the Jewish state. Just as it was no coincidence that the finger of blame for the death of William of Norwich was pointed at the Jews.

Because Israel is not merely another country in the contemporary imagination. It is the Jewish state. And the Jewish state now plays the role on the global stage that Jews have always played in smaller venues, like Norwich and Kishinev.

Witness the astonishing speed with which the most extreme possible characterization of Israeli conduct became, across enormous swaths of public discourse, not an allegation to be proved but an orthodoxy to which everyone is expected to subscribe.

Refusing to genuflect to the fake genocide is — and this beggars belief — to be accused of supporting and/or denying genocide.

A genocide that is not happening.

No matter where you go in the world today, the strident clamor of anti-Jewish hordes is inescapable. They are not even pretending anymore to be antizionist. The entire world is crawling with outright, unapologetic antisemites who know they no longer have to pretend to be anything but. Because there are effectively no consequences for being antisemitic, there are so few Jews that they make a vulnerable target (a bully’s catnip), and there are almost no non-Jews making the effort to stop them.

Amid this reality, the genocide libel is accepted as fact because it is part of a millennia-long tradition of hysterical allegations against Jews that culminate in mass violence.

Indeed, that is why the genocide libel was invented.

The end-goal of the genocide libel is mass violence against Jews.

I am sorry for disturbing my Jewish friends and readers with these frightening words. But the truth is that Jewish people already know this:

We are in a pre-pogrom phase.

What Jewish people do not know — and what I am struggling every day to understand myself — is why the vast majority of the non-Jewish world doesn’t seem to see this or doesn’t seem to care.

And this — this — is the lesson history offers us from William of Norwich, the Black Death, Khmelnytsky, Damascus, Dreyfus and Kishinev.

When the world went off the rails and turned on the Jews, good people did not come to the aid of the Jews.

They joined the torch-carrying, murderous mobs.

And here we are again.

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Canadians are becoming less supportive of LGBTQ+ rights.

Between 2018 and 2025, the proportion of Canadian women who agreed that people should be able to express their gender however they choose fell from 85% to 77%. Among men, it dropped from 78% to 70%. Support for a family member coming out as transgender was also lower, although Statistics Canada cautions that the wording of that question changed between surveys, making the comparison less exact.

Still, the direction is difficult to miss: after decades in which acceptance of sexual and gender diversity moved inexorably and dependably upward, something has shifted.

The obvious explanation is that Canada is becoming less tolerant of LGBTQ+ people.

Maybe.

But I wonder whether something slightly more complicated is happening.

Maybe Canadians remain broadly tolerant of difference — but are becoming increasingly intolerant of intolerance. Maybe Canadians are getting tired of bullshit and some of the snarky attitudes many young queers are displaying these days — including the LGBTQ+ community’s increasingly unavoidable “Jewish problem.”

Let me explain.

Some people think the declining (albeit still historically massive) acceptance of LGBTQ+ people is because “we” (the “queer” community) are pushing boundaries by, for example, demanding the right of teenagers or even younger kids to define their identities (which is one thing) and to also transition physically in ways that are irreversible (which is quite another).

You don’t have to hate transgender people to think questions of irreversibly medical interventions on kids deserve careful consideration. But gawdforbid you express any reservation whatsoever on this subject, you homophobic, transphobic subhuman Nazi.

When activists respond to every question by declaring the questioner a bigot, they should not be surprised when some otherwise sympathetic people conclude that something has gone off the rails.

That is almost certainly part of it. But there may be something far more basic.

I think people are getting the impression a whole bunch of us are just assholes — and they’re tired of it.

When I first started coming out, I was often the first openly gay person a lot of people had met. Maybe this is why I have come to conclude that real social change happens in one-on-one and small group conversations, not in mass street rallies or legislatures.

I spent hours and hours explaining and discussing gay topics with genuinely curious people. I was glad to do it. I knew this was part of not only building understanding and friendships, but it also reflected the dictum that the personal is political.

I also like to think that the million or so words I wrote in gay newspapers and the countless rallies, parades, protests, and other rigamarole I participated in opened some people’s minds.

Today, though, it seems like the attitude is more along the lines of “I’m trans/non-binary/gender-fluid/ace/demisexual/intersex/some permutation you have never encountered before, and if you have any questions about that, you can go fuck yourself. Get my terminology exactly right immediately. Do not ask me to explain anything. Do your own research.”

I summarize.

But there is absolutely a strain of that defiant “You got a problem?” attitude where a little humility and patience would go a long way.

There is a peculiar kind of activism that treats curiosity or a request for an explanation as evidence of moral failure.

That’s a pretty crappy marketing strategy. It is also remarkably ungenerous.

I think there is yet another problem, though.

If you present yourself as a movement for minority rights, people are going to notice how you treat other minorities.

Which brings me, inevitably, to Queers for Palestine and similar crackpots.

Reasonable, decent, not-completely-batshit people may see maniacs like Queers for Palestine and think, Well, if that’s reflective of LGBTQ+ people, screw them all.

As a gay man who has pretty much been chased out of queer spaces, not because of my age or weight or lack of youthful magnificence, which is an exclusionary problem around which we have made great strides during the past decades, but because of my Zionism.

Or, let me rephrase that: I am unwelcome in queer spaces because I refuse to subscribe to systemic racism in queer institutions that ghettoize the 95% of Jews who are Zionists and tokenize the 5% the Gay Establishment has chosen to falsely represent an entire people.

Sensible people might not think it through quite this way, but when people see queers treating Jews this way, they probably intuit, “If you don’t care about that minority’s rights, why should I care about yours?”

It’s an entirely reasonable conclusion, I think.

It’s the same thought I have when I see a picket line for a union that for years has terrorized Jews and I think, Why shouldn’t I cross your damn line? You don’t respect Jews, why should I respect your collective bargaining rights?

Of course, I don’t do that. Because I’m not an asshole. (Well, usually.)

Gay people, of all people, ought to recognize and oppose tokenizing, patronizing, and exclusionary behaviors. Instead, groups like Pride societies, dyke marches and queer film festivals are among the worst offenders in mistreating Jews.

We LGBTQ+ people demand that society listen when we describe homophobia and transphobia.

But then Jews say: This rhetoric frightens us. These slogans have implications you may not understand. Israel is part of our collective identity. You are excluding us. Please listen to our experiences.

And a bunch of queer activists respond along these lines: No. We’ll tell you what antisemitism, exclusion and tokenizing are — and when you’ve had enough of them.

Even more than the despicable Jew-baiting itself, it’s the hypocrisy that sticks in my craw.

There is a moral incoherence in demanding exquisite sensitivity toward one’s own minority while displaying contempt for another.

Non-Jewish, non-gay people may not consciously formulate the contradiction this way. But I suspect many intuit it.

If our movement insists that people care about our vulnerabilities while we ridicule, diminish, dismiss, and overtly offend someone else’s, why exactly should anyone look to us for moral instruction?

None of this means the decline in acceptance revealed by Statistics Canada is good news. Transgender, non-binary, and all other Canadians should be able to live without discrimination, harassment, or fear.

It means, though, that we should care enough about those rights to ask why support may be eroding.

At this point, it is worth stating the truth plainly.

Just as queer people deserve to live without discrimination, harassment, or fear, so do Jews.

And yet it is the LGBTQ+ movement that seems to be doing as much as any other collective group (save neo-Nazis and a few other choice clubs) to discriminate against, harass, and instill fear in Jews.

Could this explain why Canadians are less tolerant of queer rights lately? It could be part of the answer. Certainly pushing the envelope on a few topics (and a generally snotty attitude by a few of us) account for some of this. But the shitty way my community has been treating Jews lately doesn’t suggest we are up for Miss Congeniality in the minority solidarity pageant. People see that. And even if most people don’t seem willing to stand up for Jews, they also might not look fondly on those who are actively persecuting them.

For example, opinion polls tell us that millions of Canadians are quietly supportive of both Jews and Israel. They just don’t show up for rallies like the “pro-Palestinians” do — hatred seems to be a more powerful mobilizing force than basic decency.

They are also quiet, partly, I’m sure, because of the crazed antizionist nutters and outright antisemitic wingnuts who are likely to come after them if they open their mouths.

But most Canadians are intelligent, reasonable people who look at the LGBTQ+ movement and increasingly see political extremists who are not only cranky and intolerant in general, but especially nasty to Jews.

In short, I’m not at all convinced that Canadians have become less tolerant of LGBTQ+ issues.

I suspect they are less tolerant of intolerance. And the kind of bullshit the Queer Establishment has been pulling lately.

A few jackholes have taken over the queer movement’s foreign policy agenda. (In fact, the only foreign policy the movement has is hating on Israel, something I will write about shortly).

The vast majority of LGBTQ+ people have let them.

In the process, we are squandering decades of accumulated goodwill.

Rights should never depend on popularity. Minorities don’t have to be charming to deserve equality.

But movements do depend on persuasion.

And if we want people to hear us, occasionally we have to listen to them, too.

If we demand tolerance while practicing intolerance, eventually somebody is going to notice.

Apparently, some of them already have.

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There was a long-running series of Palmolive commercials in the 1970s, featuring Madge, a cheerfully intrusive manicurist played by Jan Miner.

A customer would complain about her hands. Madge would praise Palmolive’s supposed softening properties. Then the customer would discover that the little bowl in which her fingers had been resting was not filled with ordinary manicure solution but Palmolive.

“You’re soaking in it,” Madge would declare.

“Dishwashing liquid?” the stunned client would freak the hell out.

It may be the perfect metaphor for antisemitism in Western civilization.

We imagine antisemitism as something outside us: an alien toxin introduced by fanatics, extremists, and obviously wicked people. It belongs to neo-Nazis, medieval mobs, conspiracy cranks, and whichever political faction we already dislike.

Then someone points to the assumptions in which our culture has been resting for centuries.

Antisemitism?

You’re soaking in it.

David Nirenberg’s monumental 2013 book, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, is not a conventional history of antisemitic persecution. It is something more unsettling.

Nirenberg examines the role that ideas about “Judaism,” “Jewishness,” and “the Jews” have played in Western thought over roughly three millennia. His central concern is not simply what societies did to actual Jews. It is how non-Jewish societies repeatedly used an imagined Judaism as a way of explaining what was wrong with the world.

In this sense, anti-Judaism does not even require Jews.

The “Jew” becomes an intellectual tool: a symbol of whatever a thinker, religion, or political movement wishes to reject. The target is not necessarily a Jewish neighbor of flesh and blood. It is the Jew in the mind — the fabricated figure against whom a society defines virtue, truth, spirituality, freedom, or justice.

As one summary of Nirenberg’s distinction puts it, antisemitism needs Jews to persecute, while anti-Judaism can flourish without actual Jews because its target is an idea.

Moreover — and I summarize crudely — Nirenberg suggests that anti-Jewish ideas are not a bug of Western civilization but a feature. To create a unified, Christian European civilization, it was necessary to create a unifying common enemy.

The Jew.

Christianity emerged from Judaism, yet much Christian identity was constructed by defining itself against a caricature of Judaism.

Christianity represented spirit; Judaism was reduced to dead letter.

Christianity represented grace; Judaism represented merciless “Old Testament” legalism.

Christianity offered universal love; Judaism was accused of being tribal particularism.

Christian faith was sincere and inward; Jewish religious practice was derided as mechanical, legalistic, and materialistic.

These contrasts did not accurately describe Judaism. But whatever.

In the Christian/European imagination, Judaism became a fabricated, negative category through which Christians explained what Christianity was not.

The process continued after European thought became less explicitly religious.

For some Enlightenment thinkers who had abandoned theology for rationalism, “Judaism” represented superstition, backwardness, and irrational obedience.

For certain revolutionaries, Jews represented commerce, money, and bourgeois self-interest.

For some socialists, Jewishness became entangled with capitalism and financial exploitation.

For anti-communists, Jews became revolutionaries and Bolsheviks.

For nationalists, Jews represented rootlessness and cosmopolitanism.

For cosmopolitans, Jews could be accused of tribal nationalism.

The contradictions did not weaken the prejudice. They made it versatile.

Jews could be blamed for capitalism and communism, nationalism and globalism, racial separation and unwanted integration, excessive religious tradition and corrosive modernity.

Nirenberg’s history proceeds from the ancient world through Christianity, Islam, European literature, political philosophy, and modern ideologies. His argument is not that every Western thinker was secretly motivated by hatred of actual Jews. It is that thinking negatively through Judaism became one of the West’s recurring ways of thinking about itself.

Anti-Judaism was not merely a stain on the tradition.

It built the tradition.

This is what makes antisemitism so difficult to confront.

We like to believe that our ideas are our own.

In reality, we inherit languages, symbols, categories, and stories assembled long before we arrived. They enter through religion, literature, art, political rhetoric, family expressions, journalism, and popular culture.

We may consciously reject hatred of Jews while unconsciously retaining the mental architecture that has made Jews useful as an explanation for social evil.

Consider how naturally certain ideas continue to circulate.

There are allegations of hidden Jewish influence. There is suspicion of Jewish money. There is the belief that Jews possess unusual control over governments, banks, media, or foreign policy.

There is the portrayal of Jews as simultaneously clannish and globally integral. There is the assumption that Jews exploit victimhood, manipulate guilt, and exaggerate prejudice for political gain.

Most people repeating fragments of these ideas have never read a medieval theologian, a 19th-century racial theorist, or a fascist pamphlet.

They don’t need to.

The residue is already in the water.

The creation of Israel did not abolish this ancient structure. It gave it a new vessel.

Ideas once attached to “the Jew” can now be attached to “the Zionist” or “the Jewish state.”

The “greedy Jew” becomes the Israel lobby buying politicians.

The “conspiratorial Jew” becomes Zionist control of governments and media.

The “bloodthirsty Jew” becomes the Israeli who supposedly delights in killing children.

The “deceitful Jew” becomes the state whose every statement is presumed propaganda.

The “tribal Jew” becomes a country accused of uniquely racist nationalism.

The “cosmopolitan Jew” becomes the Zionist directing an international network.

The “powerful Jew” becomes Israel secretly controlling Western foreign policy.

The “weak” and “wandering Jew” was despised for having no homeland. The Zionist Jew is despised for having one.

When a civilization has spent centuries using Jews and Judaism as shorthand for greed, conspiracy, cruelty, tribalism, materialism, and malevolent power, we should not be astonished when those same themes attach themselves to the collective Jewish political project.

The customer in the Palmolive commercial does not know what surrounds her fingers until Madge tells her.

Likewise, few people knowingly wake each morning and select an antisemitic idea from history’s cupboard. They experience the inherited assumption as common sense.

Of course Israel lies.

Of course Jewish organizations coordinate their messages to hoodwink the rest of us.

Of course politicians support Israel because of money — what other reason could there be?

Of course Jews exaggerate antisemitism to silence critics.

Of course Zionism is uniquely sinister.

The speaker does not hear centuries of anti-Jewish thought echoing through these propositions.

The speaker hears herself bravely challenging power.

That is how cultural saturation works. An idea becomes most powerful when it no longer feels like an idea at all. It’s just part of the zeitgeist.

Which brings us to the endlessly repeated assurance that antizionism is not antisemitism.

As a narrow logical statement, it is possible to imagine opposition to Jewish nationalism that does not arise from conscious hatred of Jews. Jews themselves have held different views about Zionism at different times, for religious, political, and philosophical reasons.

But as a sweeping declaration about contemporary Western culture, the phrase is simply ridiculous.

It asks us to believe that a civilization saturated for millennia in negative ideas about Jews has suddenly discovered a form of hostility toward the world’s only Jewish state that is hermetically sealed from all that history.

It asks us to believe that the old tropes have disappeared at precisely the moment they have acquired a new vocabulary.

It asks us to believe that the Jewish state is uniquely conspiratorial, bloodthirsty, deceitful, illegitimate, money-driven, and malevolently powerful — and that none of this has anything to do with inherited ideas about Jews.

Perhaps some antizionists believe themselves entirely free of antisemitism.

That is not the same as being free of it.

Madge’s customer did not know her fingers were resting in dishwashing liquid.

She was soaking in it.

*

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A safe space is one where people are protected from harassment and violence. It is not a space where people are protected from encountering Jews with ordinary Jewish beliefs.

One of the most effective forms of moral laundering is the demand to make organizations, campuses, cultural spaces, or public institutions “safe” from Zionists.

Safety is a powerful word. It sounds compassionate, humane, and unobjectionable. Everyone deserves protection from harassment, intimidation, and violence. No one should be required to participate in a space where they are threatened or abused.

But that is not what is meant when activists demand safety from Zionists.

They are not asking to be protected from misconduct. They are asking to be protected from the presence of people who hold a particular political or communal conviction.

Zionism, in its broadest and most common meaning, is support for Jewish national self-determination and for the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish homeland.

Zionists disagree profoundly among themselves about borders, governments, settlements, religion, war, peace, and Palestinian statehood. Zionism does not prescribe a single political program any more than Canadian patriotism determines a person’s position on every decision made in Ottawa.

But for a large proportion of Jews, some form of attachment to Israel is not an incidental opinion. It is intertwined with family, history, religion, peoplehood, collective memory, and the experience of centuries of persecution.

A demand for a “Zionist-free space” is therefore not a neutral political boundary. In practice, it is a Jewish-exclusion policy that (not very) carefully avoids saying “No Jews.”

Jews may enter, provided they renounce an important part of Jewish identity. Jews may participate, provided they condemn Israel on demand. Jews may be included as individuals, provided they detach themselves from Jewish collective existence.

The Jew is welcome, in other words, only after passing an ideological inspection.

The purpose of such a test is not merely to determine what someone believes. It is to divide Jews into moral categories: the acceptable Jew and the unacceptable Jew, the enlightened Jew and the tribal Jew, the Jew who has repudiated Israel and the Jew who remains connected to it.

The acceptable Jew may be welcomed, quoted, and displayed as evidence that the space is not antisemitic. The unacceptable Jew may be excluded while the excluders continue to congratulate themselves on their antiracism.

Older forms of exclusion were explicit. They barred Jews as Jews. Contemporary exclusion is more sophisticated. It identifies a conviction held by almost all Jews, declares that conviction uniquely dangerous, and then insists that the resulting exclusion has nothing to do with Jewishness.

The same distortion occurs with the word “solidarity.”

Solidarity should mean standing beside people in their pursuit of dignity, safety, freedom, and justice. It should be broad enough to accommodate disagreement over strategy and complicated enough to acknowledge competing rights.

Within much of the Western “pro-Palestinian” movement, however, solidarity has become a demand for obedience to an entire ideological package.

To demonstrate solidarity, one must accept the approved vocabulary: apartheid, colonialism, genocide, and resistance. All bullshit words that, in this context, mean pretty much the opposite of what they mean in the real world.

Each word carries an argument inside it. To repeat the word is to accept the argument. To question the argument is to reveal oneself as insufficiently committed.

One must not complicate the narrative by discussing Hamas, Palestinian authoritarianism, corruption, religious extremism, rejected compromises, or antisemitism within Palestinian political culture.

One must not speak about Jewish history, Jewish vulnerability, or Jewish national rights.

One must not grieve Israeli civilians without immediately redirecting the conversation to Palestinians, as though Jewish grief is inherently suspect.

One must not advocate coexistence too enthusiastically, because coexistence “normalizes” Israel.

One must not suggest that Israelis have legitimate fears, that Palestinians possess political agency, or that peace will require compromise from both peoples.

The test is not whether one supports Palestinian well-being.

It is whether one demonstrates sufficient hostility to Israel.

This is how hatred becomes the entrance fee to compassion.

A person may advocate Palestinian statehood, civil rights, economic opportunity, freedom of movement, accountable government, and peace — and still be dismissed as insufficiently pro-Palestinian if they also support Israel’s continued existence.

Meanwhile, someone may glorify violence, romanticize “resistance,” justify unspeakable attacks on civilians, and reject coexistence, yet still be welcomed as an authentic voice of solidarity.

The moral categories have been inverted.

Concern for Palestinian life is treated as less important than hostility toward Israel. Supporting a negotiated future is treated as morally weaker than performing revolutionary rage. The actual well-being of Palestinians becomes secondary to the emotional and ideological needs of Western activists.

This explains why “Zionist-free” spaces and compulsory “solidarity” so often appear together.

The first excludes Jews who refuse to repudiate Jewish collective existence.

The second admits them only if they repeat the movement’s required beliefs.

One closes the door.

The other offers entry on condition of obedience.

Both are presented as compassionate. Both are defended as antiracist. And both transform Jewish participation into something conditional.

No other minority is routinely told that inclusion depends on repudiating the national, religious, cultural, or historical attachments of most members of its community. No genuinely pluralistic space should require people to sever themselves from a central part of their identity before they are considered safe enough to enter.

A safe space is one where people are protected from harassment and violence.

It is not a space where people are protected from encountering Jews with ordinary Jewish beliefs.

Solidarity is standing with Palestinians in their pursuit of dignity and peace.

It is not a loyalty oath requiring hatred of Israel.

When “safety” means excluding Zionists and “solidarity” means ideological obedience, compassionate language is being used to disguise coercion.

The words have been moralized.

The practice has not.

And beneath all the therapeutic vocabulary, the message to most Jews remains remarkably simple:

You are welcome only after you become someone else.

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A crisis has emerged at Beaten With A Shtick headquarters.

The subscriber base of Beaten With a Shtick is rising – but not fast enough.

I’m about to exploit our relationship.

I need access to your social circle.

I urgently need more people to figuratively holler at. Things have become desperate. I’ve tried writing better. Now I’m begging.

Apparently Brilliant Content™ wasn’t enough. I need you to do something. This will cost you nothing but will annoy someone you know.

Do you know someone with an email address?

This is not a pyramid scheme. I’m not asking for money. I just want your friends.

I’ve decided to crowdsource my popularity. My latest get-rich-quick scheme contains no riches. In fact, this entire Substack nonsense is precisely why I can’t have nice things.

I’m launching an aggressive acquisition strategy. It’s you. You’re the strategy.

I just need you to help me find more readers.

Please. Seriously. I’m on my knees here, metaphorically speaking.

Will you take one or more of the following actions?

1. Recruit one person

This is the big one.

Think of one person who enjoys sharp commentary, hates antisemitism, is tired of antizionist bullshit, or simply appreciates a well-aimed rhetorical slapdown.

Send them this:

I think you’d enjoy Beaten With A Shtick. It provides snappy smackdowns of antisemitism and antizionism from a snarky Canadian progressive perspective. It’s free to subscribe: Beaten With A Shtick.

One person.

That’s all I’m asking.

If every subscriber brought in one new reader, Beaten With A Shtick would double overnight.

Hence my new campaign: BRING ONE MENSCH.

2. Forward a post you like

When something makes you laugh, swear, nod furiously or say “FINALLY, someone said it,” please don’t just move on with your day.

Forward it.

Use this:

This is one of my favourite Substacks. Beaten With A Shtick provides snappy smackdowns of antisemitism and antizionism. Thought you might appreciate this one.

Then include the post. Send it by email or post it on socials.

This tiny act is enormously helpful.

3. Post about it on Facebook

Copy. Paste. Done.

I highly recommend Beaten With A Shtick, Pat Johnson’s Substack offering snappy smackdowns of antisemitism and antizionism from a snarky, non-Jewish, gay, Canadian, progressive perspective.

It’s free to subscribe: Beaten With A Shtick.

You may even add something flattering about me. I will not object.

4. Share it in a WhatsApp or Signal group

You know that group chat where everybody complains about the state of the world?

Perfect.

Paste this:

Thought some of you might enjoy this: Beaten With A Shtick — snappy smackdowns of antisemitism and antizionism. Free subscription: Beaten With A Shtick.

Ten seconds.

Zero dollars.

Potentially several new readers.

5. Restack, like and comment

Substack notices activity.

When you like, comment on or restack something, you help expose it to people who don’t already subscribe.

So please don’t be a silent lurker.

Click things.

Push buttons.

Make the algorithm think something exciting is happening here.

6. Recommend Beaten With A Shtick on Substack

If you have your own Substack, please add Beaten With A Shtick to your recommendations.

Suggested wording:

Beaten With A Shtick provides snappy smackdowns of antisemitism and antizionism with humour, argument and a distinctly (and weirdly) non-Jewish, gay, Canadian, progressive perspective.

I will be embarrassingly grateful.

7. Send the link to someone who disagrees with me

Yes, really.

Subscribers do not need to agree with every word.

They just need to find the writing interesting enough to keep reading.

Try:

You may disagree with this guy, but I think you’ll find him interesting. Beaten With A Shtick.

Disagreement is engagement.

Engagement is readership.

Readership keeps me motivated.

8. Mention it in the real world

Remember the real world?

Apparently people still speak to one another face to face.

At lunch, at synagogue, at a community event, over coffee: “Do you read Beaten With A Shtick?”

“No.”

“You should. Just Google ‘Beaten With A Shtick’”

Boom.

Old-style, word-of-mouth marketing.

9. Share repeatedly

You are not required to become a full-time unpaid publicist.

But every time a post really lands for you, send it somewhere.

Because this is the frustrating reality of independent publishing: I can write the greatest piece in human history (and, indeed, I sometimes do) but if nobody shares it, it goes nowhere.

There is no giant marketing department behind this newsletter.

There is me.

There is caffeine-induced rage.

And there is you.

So I am asking — begging, really — for your help.

Please help me get Beaten With A Shtick in front of more people.

Recruit one reader.

Forward one post.

Restack one piece.

Mention it to one friend.

BRING ONE MENSCH.

It costs nothing.

It takes almost no time.

And it would mean an enormous amount to the increasingly twitchy person writing this newsletter.

Subscribe and share: Beaten With A Shtick.

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Almost everyone knows about the Palestinian refugees. Their statelessness is a central sticking point in the 80-year conflict.

About 750,000 Palestinians became refugees during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and hundreds of thousands more were displaced during the 1967 war. (Some were forced out. Others were encouraged by their own leadership to leave, promised they could return to the spoils of the routed Jews after the war.)

Today, the UN agency that serves as a quasi-government in Palestine, UNRWA, counts about 5.9 million Palestinian refugees.

How did a few hundred thousand become almost 6 million?

Because, unlike any other refugees in the world, Palestinian “refugees” include the descendants of those displaced — the only inheritable refugee status in the world. UNRWA, of course, is an organization that exists to perpetuate Palestinian statelessness, not to resolve it, which puts a bit of a crimp in the numbers. But anyways.

Ask the average person — including the “experts” who have made Palestinian refugees their favorite hobby — about Jewish refugees from the same era and you are likely to get a blank stare.

During roughly the same period, about 850,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab and Muslim-majority countries, especially after 1948 and 1967; most were resettled in Israel or elsewhere and were therefore not maintained as a multigenerational refugee population.

These stories are not identical, but they are comparable in one important respect. Both involved the uprooting of communities. In the case of the Jewish refugees, almost every one of them could trace their roots back many generations in Algeria or Yemen or, in the case of Iraq, almost three millennia. A large proportion of the Palestinian refugees had arrived in Palestine only a generation or two earlier, drawn by the economic boom created by — wait for it — the Zionists! But anyways.

Both produced refugee populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Yet one refugee story became central to international consciousness. The other was, for all practical purposes, forgotten.

Why?

The overwhelming majority of Jewish refugees rebuilt their lives. About two in three of the refugees settled in Israel. Others dispersed across Europe, North America, and elsewhere. They were absorbed — sometimes reluctantly, sometimes imperfectly, at enormous economic and social cost.

The experience was hardly idyllic. Israel was a desperately poor new state struggling to house wave after wave of immigrants while fighting for its survival.

Jews arriving from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere often encountered prejudice from the predominantly European Jewish establishment. They lived in transit camps. Many endured years of poverty. Integration was difficult.

But the refugees ceased being refugees.

By contrast, much of the Palestinian refugee population remained refugees — not simply because history took an unfortunate course, but because governments and the United Nations made deliberate political choices.

Rather than permanently integrating Palestinians into the societies in which they found themselves, most Arab states refused to grant citizenship or civic inclusion. They penned them up in one of the world’s biggesgt moral atrocities. The refugee issue was preserved as an open political wound, intended to reinforce claims connected to the conflict with Israel.

UNRWA has institutionalized refugee status across generations instead of encouraging permanent resettlement and integration.

An additional hypocritical, irrational aspect of this whole debacle is the lunacy of the refugee label.

Consider the Hadid family. Baba Mohamad, an American property developer, and supermodel daughters Bella and Gigi, are arguably among the United States’ vaunted 1%ers.

They are also Palestinian “refugees,” eligible for all the undeniable rights, bonuses, perks, and victimology brownie points that come with that inheritable birthright.

However ludicrous this situation, more than 75 years after 1948, the Palestinian refugee issue remains one of the defining features of the conflict.

The Jewish refugee issue, by contrast, has entirely vanished from public consciousness.

In practical terms, that is understandable. Humanitarian attention naturally gravitates toward people who continue to suffer. Jewish refugees found homes. They built businesses and raised families. They helped build one country and enriched many others.

They are no longer a humanitarian emergency.

But practical explanations are not moral explanations.

The disappearance of Jewish refugees from our collective memory has had consequences. It has encouraged the misleading impression that only one side experienced mass displacement. It has obscured the fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict produced two refugee populations.

And it has diminished an entire chapter of Jewish history because its victims were, in the end, resilient enough to recover.

There is another irony here.

The success of Jewish refugees has become the reason their story is forgotten.

The continuing tragedy of Palestinian refugees’ failure and enforced poverty (despite receiving more humanitarian aid per capita than any other group on the planet!) has become the reason their story dominates.

Yet we seldom ask why those trajectories diverged.

One refugee population was, however imperfectly, integrated into new societies. The other was, in many places, deliberately kept separate from them. Stories like the Hadids notwithstanding.

That difference did not happen by accident. It happened because political leaders made political choices. Arab and Muslim elites — who coopted UN bodies—perpetuated and exploited Palestinian “refugees” as pawns in one of the grisliest political chess games in human history.

If we genuinely care about justice, we should remember both refugee stories, because Jewish refugees represent an undeniable, crucial chapter in the history of this conflict, the region, and the world. Their story is a narrative of mass injustice that the world has chosen to forget.

But the world remembers (and perpetuates) the Palestinian refugees for all the wrong reasons.

The moral of the Palestinian refugee narrative is Zionist venality: Generations of innocent people held in generations-long statelessness.

But that moral is exactly wrong. Precisely backward.

The Palestinian refugee problem is evidence of a mercenary, corrupt, degenerate conspiracy by Arab and Muslim elites, in cahoots with a subjugated and coopted United Nations, to prolong the Palestinian refugee problem so these human beings can be used a bludgeons in an abominable global PR war against Israel.

The world has spent generations obsessing over Palestinian refugees — without asking why they remain refugees generations later.

It has spent remarkably little time remembering the Jewish refugees from the same era or exploring why and how they are no longer refugees. The world has certainly not learned from the Jewish experience as a model for how a displaced, uprooted, impoverished people can become a forward-looking, successful, constructive nation.

No, “denormalization” has been the watchword for Palestinian relations with Israel — the very country and people whose experiences Palestinians should be emulating in order to stop condemning yet more generations to hopelessness and statelessness instead of building a positive future.

This lack of knowledge — and stubborn absence of curiosity — tells us a great deal about the world’s very distinctive approaches to Palestinians and Jews. And, as usual, the world’s approach to the conflict hurts Palestinians at least as much as it hurts Israelis.

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In Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panther movement, made one of the most horrifying admissions in modern political literature.

Cleaver wrote that he had sexually assaulted Black women as preparation before targeting white women. He described his crimes against white women as politically motivated — an “insurrectionary act,” committed not merely against individual human beings but against the racial order he believed they represented.

It was an unimaginably monstrous idea: violent rape recast as romantic revolution.

Cleaver eventually repudiated this reasoning (well … he repudiated it from prison while serving a term for assault with intent to murder). But the reasoning itself deserves attention because it exposes one of political extremism’s most dangerous operations. First, assign an individual to a collectively guilty class. Then strip that individual of innocence. Finally, recast violence against the person as violence against the system.

Sound familiar?

Yep. It sounds a lot like the global justification for October 7, which included mass rape of men and women, living and dead.

Israeli women were assaulted during the Hamas-led attacks and after hostages were taken into Gaza. Yet almost immediately, people and organizations that had spent years telling us to believe women, centre victims, and understand sexual violence as an instrument of domination suddenly discovered an apparently limitless appetite for disbelief, rationalization, and deflection.

Where other alleged victims might have been offered solidarity, Israeli women were subjected to ideological cross-examination. Were there witnesses? Was there video? Were the bodies examined correctly? Was every reported case independently verified? Could the evidence have been fabricated? Were the allegations merely Israeli propaganda?

October 7 exposed something rotten in a strain of contemporary activism that owes much to the earlier, worst versions of political extremism.

Cleaver was not a direct colleague of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, but their brands of extremism have both infused the “pro-Palestinian” movement. Malcolm X touted his ends “by any means necessary,” which is a familiar slogan at anti-Israel hate rallies worldwide today.

Cleaver’s concept of rape as a political tool is asserted, if not outright celebrated, by people who claim to be humanitarian rights activists seeking a better world by “freeing” Palestine.

For years, feminist and progressive movements developed a vocabulary intended to correct the reflexive dismissal of sexual-violence victims. We were told to listen to women. We were taught that trauma can affect memory and testimony. We were warned that the absence of a perfect forensic record does not prove that an assault did not occur.

When the victims were Israelis, suddenly activists who once treated doubt as an instrument of patriarchal oppression became amateur defence attorneys for Hamas. People who had insisted that survivors should not be retraumatized by impossible demands for proof required Israeli women to provide a kind of evidence rarely available after a surprise massacre, the destruction of crime scenes, and the mass murder of victims and potential witnesses.

Even the dead were presumed to be lying.

Or, more accurately, the Jewish institutions speaking for them were presumed to be lying.

A Palestinian allegation is understood through structures of power, trauma, and historical context. An Israeli allegation is treated as a military information operation until proven otherwise — and often after it has been proven otherwise.

Cleaver transformed the woman he attacked from an individual into a representation of whiteness. Once she became the embodiment of the oppressor, he could tell himself that an act of personal brutality was an act of political rebellion.

Again: Sound familiar?

An Israeli woman is no longer simply a woman. She becomes a settler. A colonizer. A Zionist. A soldier, whether she served in the military or not. A beneficiary of “apartheid.” A representative of a supposedly genocidal state.

Once the political labels have accumulated, her terror can be contextualized. Her rape can be denied (by people who want to maintain some semblance of political credibility) or celebrated (by people who revel in being the most transgressive activist on the block).

This is how an individual human being vanishes inside a theory. It may be the ultimate endpoint of the dehumanizing collectivism of the current race theory, which sees people not as individuals but primarily, or exclusively, as members of a group.

And when the individual vanishes, almost anything can be justified.

Today, activists have signed on to Palestinian resistance “by any means necessary.”

But what does “any means” actually mean? People often repeat the words while declining to examine them. They enjoy the theatrical militancy without accepting responsibility for its content.

Does “any means” include murdering children? Does it include taking civilians hostage? Does it include attacking elderly people? Does it include sexual violence?

If not, then the means are not unlimited, and the slogan is false.

If so, then its advocates should stop hiding behind euphemism and acknowledge the barbarism they have endorsed.

Many of us have already condemned ostensibly legitimate figures — politicians, union leaders, writers, activists — who march alongside people calling for intifada, which is a clarion call for mass murder of Jews.

We need to call out anyone who doesn’t call out the bloodcurdling slogan “By any means necessary.”

For all the good it will do.

Political violence always arrives with a vocabulary designed to make the intolerable sound necessary. This linguistic laundering rarely presents itself to its supporters as atrocity. It presents itself as justice unconstrained by bourgeois morality, colonial law, or the supposed namby-pamby civility of people unwilling to do what liberation requires.

“By any means necessary” is attractive precisely because it abolishes the need to make moral distinctions.

Two things are going on. Denial that rape happened, on the one hand, and, on the other, open acceptance that it happened and either justification or celebration of that fact.

Frankly, I simply don’t believe anyone doesn’t believe the rapes happened. These are more of the mind games that are the backbone of the Palestinian narrative. It’s all a lark to them. Cat-and-mouse antics that take the most serious crimes, like rape — and like genocide — and toy with them just to get the Jews’ goat.

But rape denial protects the narrative of absolute Palestinian innocence and absolute Israeli guilt. Acknowledging atrocities against Israelis would require moral complexity. It would mean recognizing that people identified as oppressed can commit evil and people identified as privileged can become victims.

For an ideology built on rigid categories of oppressor and oppressed, this is intolerable.

Also, sexual violence individualizes suffering. It brings grand political abstractions down to the vulnerability of one human body. The ideological project therefore requires the person to be absorbed back into the collective: Israeli, Zionist, settler, colonizer.

Once that happens, sympathy can be withdrawn without the activist having to think of herself as cruel.

She is not disbelieving a woman, she tells herself.

She is resisting propaganda.

There is, obviously, inevitably, a specifically antisemitic dimension.

Throughout history, violence against Jews has repeatedly been justified by first constructing the Jew as collectively guilty: guilty of deicide, ritual murder, financial conspiracy, revolutionary subversion, capitalist exploitation, or racial contamination.

Violence then becomes not aggression but defense.

The modern category “Zionist” can perform the same function when used not to describe a political belief but to erase individual Jewish humanity.

One need not say “Jews deserve this.”

One need only say that Zionists are colonizers, that colonizers are not civilians, and that resistance is justified by any means necessary.

The conclusion is left for the mob to draw.

October 7 demonstrated how rapidly supposedly universal principles can collapse when the victims are Jews and the accused are members of a movement romanticized as resistance.

Eldridge Cleaver — and now “pro-Palestinians” — showed how ideology can convert a woman into a symbol, a crime into an insurrection, and a perpetrator of the most intimate crime into a revolutionary.

We should have learned from his moral catastrophe.

Instead, after October 7, too many people reproduced its logic: deny the crime, diminish the victim, or explain that the victim represented an enemy so monstrous that ordinary morality no longer applies.

That is where “by any means necessary” ultimately leads.

The answer must be unequivocal.

Rape is not resistance.

Disbelief is not solidarity.

And no political cause — however righteous and romantic it imagines itself to be — has the power to turn an atrocity into an act of liberation.

But the overseas Palestinian movement has tried to do so. And it doesn’t matter that — maybe, possibly — not every person who calls themselves “pro-Palestinian” does not buy into this pro-rape narrative.

They are marching with those who do. Almost unanimously, as far as I can tell, they are refraining from criticizing or condemning the pro-rapists. They are certainly not excommunicating these monsters from their ranks.

So it becomes a matter of not a few rotten apples. It is a movement that has accepted rape as legitimate “resistance.” And that colors every activist who calls themself “defines,” every congressman and member of parliament, every union leader and feminist thinker, every academic and social media hack who define themself as “antizionist.”

That’s where we are now. This is the movement that Israelis — and Jews — are up against.

Isn’t it romantic?

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We hear it constantly, and rightly so: Diaspora Jews must not be held collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli government.

A synagogue in Toronto is not an Israeli embassy. A Jewish student in Vancouver is not a spokesperson for Benjamin Netanyahu. A Jewish-owned business in London is not a branch office of the Israel Defense Forces. Jews living thousands of kilometres from the Middle East are not legitimate targets for anger over decisions made by Israeli politicians or military commanders.

All true.

Yet something about this formulation has been picking at me.

Embedded within it is often an unspoken concession: Diaspora Jews should not be blamed for Israel’s actions — but the lurid catalogue of “actions” for which Israel is supposedly blameworthy is accepted as established fact.

Do not blame Jews for the “genocide.”

Do not blame Jews for the “deliberate starvation.”

Do not blame Jews for the “indiscriminate slaughter.”

Do not blame Jews for the bloodthirsty, sadistic, settler-colonialist, racial supremacist campaign to exterminate Palestinian children.

The collective blame is rejected.

The libel underneath it is implicitly reinforced.

Israeli governments are not infallible. Duh. Military operations are not beyond investigation. Decisions about humanitarian aid, targeting, proportionality, and the conduct of individual soldiers are legitimate subjects for scrutiny.

There are serious international allegations concerning Israeli conduct in Gaza, as there are in probably every violent conflict. Sober assessment of the facts and justified concern over possible infringements of humanitarian norms are serious and must be addressed.

But that’s not what’s happening. Thoughtful analysis is not what dominates public discourse.

What we hear instead is fevered, frenzied, histrionic, apocalyptic, sanctimonious, and usually deranged condemnation.

Israel is not merely accused of making errors in war. It is depicted as a nation of gleeful child killers.

Its military is not criticized for particular decisions. It is characterized as a sadistic extermination squad.

Every Palestinian death is presumed intentional. Every destroyed building becomes evidence of bloodlust. Every humanitarian problem is transformed into proof of a premeditated plan to annihilate a people.

And all of this culminates in the accusation of “genocide” — the crime of crimes, hurled not as a legal conclusion reached after trial, but as a political password whose repetition demonstrates membership in the virtuous class.

The acceptance of this ultimate blood libel is possible only because of the “pro-Palestinian” cheering section’s Goebbelsy certainty that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.

All of this ignores the facts: that the war in Gaza stands as a model of military restraint in unimaginable field conditions, that civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios are among the lowest in modern warfare. It is also not particularly elegant to make the case that, if Israel actually wanted to eradicate the Palestinian people in whole or in part (as the definition of genocide phrases it), the war could have ended on October 8, 2023, and would not have cost Israel so much blood and treasure.

Some genocide.

But back to my main premise. The principle that individuals should not be held collectively responsible for governments is universal. An Israeli citizen should not be presumed to endorse every decision of Israel’s government. A Palestinian civilian should not be presumed to support Hamas (although, I can’t resist digressing, given public opinion evidence on both sides, this is likely a more representative expression of facts than the former). A Canadian Jew should not have to answer for an Israeli airstrike.

But neither should Israel be held responsible for every grotesque embellishment that overseas activists attach to the conflict.

Israel should answer for what it actually does.

Not for inventions. Not for medieval imagery repackaged as human-rights advocacy. Not for inflated casualty figures casually converted into proof of exterminatory intent — especially when those casualty figures owe as much to Hamas’ military strategy as Israel’s.

Not for the fantasy that Israeli soldiers awaken each morning eager to murder children. Not for a caricature assembled from blood libel, Holocaust inversion, conspiratorial thinking, and the peculiar Western need to cast the Jewish state as humanity’s ultimate villain.

“Do not blame Jews for what Israel is doing” is correct.

But “Do not blame Jews for what Israel is falsely accused of doing” is far more accurate.

My moral assessment remains straightforward: the war began because Hamas and other armed groups invaded Israel on October 7, murdered civilians, fired rockets, and took hostages.

Had Hamas not launched that attack, the ensuing war would not have occurred as it did. Every death, injury, and tragedy ever since is at the feet of Hamas.

That does not mean every subsequent Israeli action is automatically justified. Initiating a war does not give the other side unlimited moral or legal permission. Israel remains responsible for its choices, as every combatant is.

But Israel, in the judgment of a global kangaroo court, is given no credit for the humanitarian precautions it takes and the minimization of casualties its military goes out of its way to ensure.

The Hamas strategy of maximizing death and destruction on its own side as incentive for scoring cheap PR victories in the minds of overseas idiots is rewarded, not punished.

Hamas built a strategy around fighting from a crowded territory containing an extensive tunnel system and military infrastructure integrated into civilian surroundings. Israel argues that this creates extraordinary operational challenges and increases danger to civilians. Even critics of Israel cannot honestly assess the war while pretending that this feature is irrelevant.

But the gaming console generals of the West rarely confront those realities.

They pronounce attacks “disproportionate” without understanding that proportionality in the laws of war does not mean equivalent body counts.

They call a campaign “indiscriminate” because civilians died, as though civilian deaths alone prove that no military distinction was attempted.

They describe every damaged hospital, school, or residential building as self-evident proof of criminality, without asking whether it was also being used for military purposes — or considering the evidence and competing claims.

They insist Israel should have achieved its objectives differently, but do not bother to explain how.

How should Israel remove an armed genocidal organization embedded within a dense urban population? How should it rescue hostages? How should it destroy terror tunnels without damaging what is above them? How should it prevent another October 7 while satisfying critics who regard almost every meaningful use of force as inherently illegitimate?

There may be better answers than the ones Israel chose. But most overseas commentators do not possess them.

There is a deeper reason for this.

If you do not believe Israel has a right to exist (or, as at least some of the “pro-Palestinians” worldwide believe, Jews have no right to exist), then any Israeli act of self-defense is morally unjustifiable. This is probably key to understanding the apoplectic reaction to Israel’s military actions: It is not perceived excesses that are the problem. It is the very act of self-defense itself.

This is the inverted moral root of the current discourse around blaming Israel.

So let’s reframe the “Don’t blame diaspora Jews for perceived Israeli crimes” moral panic.

Diaspora Jews are not responsible for genocide.

Individual Israelis are not responsible for genocide.

But neither is Israel responsible for genocide.

There is no genocide.

And pretty much all of the other condemnations we hear against Israel are not legitimate assessments of military practices or facts on the ground, but political propaganda masquerading as humanitarian analysis.

There are legitimate issues worth addressing. But whatever those may be cannot be disentangled by the average person from the brambles of maniacal allegations that dominate the entire discourse.

Almost all of the other “crimes” of which Israel is accused range on a spectrum from significantly embroidered to completely made up.

This is evidenced by the inflamed vocabulary of deliberate starvation, systematic extermination, indiscriminate slaughter, and every other allegation repeated as though bloodthirst, not legitimate military objectives, were always Israel’s motivating impetus.

Do not collectively blame Jews for Israel.

But let’s take that a step further. Don’t blame Israel for stuff that never happened.

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One of the most enduring assumptions in Western discourse about Israel and Palestine is that power determines responsibility.

It seems obvious enough. Israel is strong. The Palestinians are weak. Therefore, Israel must hold all the cards.

Reality, however, is rarely so obliging.

There is no denying the disparity in conventional power. Israel possesses one of the world’s most capable militaries, a thriving economy, and advanced technology. The Palestinians possess none of these things.

That much is true.

But the leap from “Israel is more powerful” to “Israel alone controls whether there is peace” is one of the greatest logical fallacies in the conversation. And since Israel and Palestine are pretty much the only conflict the world seems to give a damn about, it is a logical fallacy that has led the entire world into a tragic dead end.

In fact, this fallacy gets the central issue of the conflict exactly backwards.

Israel’s military power did not emerge as an instrument of conquest. It emerged because every credible alternative carried an existential risk. Had Israel lacked the ability to defend itself, it is difficult to imagine the Jewish state surviving the wars of 1948, 1967 or 1973.

Israeli military strength is the reason Jews still exist in the Middle East at all. The Israel Defense Forces are just that: defensive. The Palestinian narrative that is swallowed whole by much of the world, however, recasts the IDF as an aggressive, expansionist force.

Military power, however, should not be confused with agency.

A country can possess overwhelming military superiority while remaining incapable of forcing its adversaries to accept peace.

History is filled with examples. The United States could not bomb North Vietnam into reconciliation. Britain could not militarily subdue the IRA. Afghani resistance overcame attempts by the British, the Soviets, and the Americans to subdue them. France could not quell Algerian nationalists. Right now, we are watching in awe as Ukraine fights for its survival, with astonishing successes against a neo-fascist onslaught we thought would last days. Superior force cannot manufacture consent.

Ah, but do not take a romantic lesson from these examples.

Too many overseas activists use these cases as evidence that the Palestinians can defeat the Israelis and send the Jews running away with their tails between their legs. Note that in every instance, these were examples of indigenous groups fighting for their survival. Palestinians may fit that mold (let’s not get into that argument right now, chaverim). But so do Israelis.

Israelis, like the Afghans, Vietnamese, Ukrainians, Irish, and Algerians, have nowhere else to go. The Israelis are not colonialist outsiders — and the false narrative that depicts them as such is one of the reasons the conflict has dragged on for most of a century.

Here is where this conflict differs from those examples: Both peoples have rightful claims to belonging in the land.

The power differential means one side (Palestinians) will almost always suffer greater casualties — but they do not have on their side the historical precedent of an indigenous people defeating an external, colonial oppressor.

“Settler-colonialism” is the narrative the Palestinians and their allies purvey, but it is inherently false. And that means that their strategy, their willingness to sacrifice their people, and their likelihood of success—premised on successful conflicts of the past—are built on sand.

The Palestinian elites and their overseas apologists can fight to the last dead Palestinian — and the enthusiasm with which they tally their “martyrs” and parade those numbers to the world demonstrates both a macabre necrophilia and a seeming certainty that these deaths are not in vain.

But they are in vain. The only thing that will end the conflict and lead to peace and Palestinian self-determination is a Palestinian willingness to coexist and engage in a negotiated settlement.

Boring, I know. Not very romantic for the overseas keffiyeh cosplayers and TikTok Trotskyites who think this is the Last Great Cause. But it’s true.

Still, that is not my main point today.

My point is that the party widely portrayed as powerless retains enormous power over one question that ultimately matters more than tanks, fighter jets, or GDP.

Will the war continue?

Only one side can answer that.

Wars require people willing to wage them.

Peace requires people willing to stop.

Israel can deter attacks. It can intercept rockets. It can destroy military infrastructure. It can occupy territory. It can withdraw from territory. It can negotiate, or refuse to negotiate. It can also, as we have seen, respond with what is condemned by instant experts in military strategy as “disproportionate force.”

What it cannot do is compel Palestinians to abandon the objective of eliminating the Jewish state if that remains the objective of the elites who are directing the conflict.

The uncomfortable truth is that military superiority does not confer the power to make your enemy accept your existence. Only your enemy can do that.

This is where so much of the contemporary narrative goes off the rails.

The conversation revolves endlessly around Israeli power while paying remarkably little attention to Palestinian agency.

The United States House of Representatives voted the other day on a motion that would have slashed funding to Israel. This would not have “freed Palestine.” It would simply have left Israeli civilians more vulnerable to people determined to genocide them.

Representative Thomas Massie’s “Part A Amendment №8 to H.R. 8595” (or what I call Massie’s Let the Jews Die Amendment) was defeated 314–104 — a landslide, for sure. But 104 US elected officials voted to tie the Israelis’ hands behind their backs in the face of genocidal terror.

The bigger issue (if you can imagine a bigger issue) is that Palestinians are routinely depicted as almost inanimate objects upon which history takes place, rather than depicting the truth, which is that Palestinian elites are acting within history, fully directing its course.

Palestinians have agency. In many ways, they have far more agency than Israelis. They could end the conflict today by agreeing to live in peaceful coexistence. That is all they would have to do and the dying on both sides would end instantly. (Cue the bloodthirsty overseas cheering section: From the river to the sea! By any means necessary! No surrender to the Zios! And so the dying continues.)

Military power can win battles. It can defend borders. It can create the most advanced anti-missile defense, Iron Dome, and build safe rooms in every home. But it cannot produce reconciliation.

In the end, peace does not belong to the side with the larger army.

It belongs to the side prepared to stop fighting.

That is why the central question has never been who has the most power.

It has always been who is prepared to use the power they do have to choose peace over war.

It is ironic, put mildly, that the overseas activists who call themselves “pro-Palestinian” drape themselves in the language and imagery of peace when it is precisely their endless war-whooping support for perpetual violence that is the reason Palestinians keep dying.

There will be no peace — and there sure as hell will be no Palestinian self-determination — until Palestinian elites recognize that the only route to their stated goal is putting down their arms.

Overseas allies need to stop siding with violence and get on the side of peace — but they seem to take too much joy in counting dead Palestinians to let that gruesome little hobby go.

For those of us who actually care about peace and the lives of Palestinians (and Israelis), there is a single truth we need to keep hammering away at …

Only one side in this conflict can make peace because only one side is making war.

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Intersectionality began with a simple and necessary insight: human beings do not experience prejudice one category at a time.

A person may be Indigenous, lesbian, and disabled. Each identity shapes how she is perceived and treated in the world, and how she responds to that reality. But the effects are not stacked like separate boxes. Her experiences of sexism may be affected by racism. Her access to disability services may be affected by poverty, geography, or homophobia. She may encounter barriers that cannot be understood by examining Indigeneity, sexuality, gender, or disability in isolation.

That is intersectionality in its most familiar, personal form.

The term was introduced by American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to explain how Black women could fall through the cracks of systems that recognized discrimination against Black people and discrimination against women, but failed to recognize the distinctive discrimination experienced by Black women. They were told, in effect, to divide themselves into parts before the law and society could see them.

Intersectionality insists on seeing the whole person.

Over time, the concept expanded beyond individual identities into a broader analysis of social systems. Climate change can disproportionately affect economically disadvantaged communities, Indigenous peoples and women. Economic inequality can intensify racial disparities. War can magnify gender-based violence. Housing policy can intersect with disability, immigration status, and family structure.

Is all of this technically “intersectionality”?

Broadly, yes, though sometimes the term is stretched so far that it becomes a synonym for “everything is connected.” More precisely, intersectionality examines how identities and systems of power overlap to produce particular experiences. The claim that climate change, patriarchy, colonialism, and economic inequality reinforce one another is often described as an intersectional analysis. It can also be called systems analysis, structural analysis or an examination of interlocking oppressions.

Whatever terminology we use, the basic moral insight is sound: injustice does not occur in sealed compartments.

Which raises an obvious question.

Where are the Jews?

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Antisemitism should be a natural part of intersectional analysis. It crosses almost every category the framework claims to recognize. Jews have been persecuted as a religion, an ethnicity, an imagined race, a foreign nation, a social class, and a perceived global conspiracy. They have been accused of being too poor and too rich, too insular and too cosmopolitan, capitalist exploiters and communist revolutionaries, racial inferiors and racial supremacists.

Antisemitism intersects with nationalism, religion, race, migration, class, gender, and sexuality. Jewish women encounter distinct forms of antisemitic misogyny. LGBTQ+ Jews can be pressured to choose between their Jewish and queer identities. Jews of color may face racism outside Jewish spaces and the erasure of their Jewishness within anti-racist ones. Mizrahi, Sephardi and Ethiopian Jews frequently disappear from political narratives that imagine all Jews as white Europeans.

A serious intersectional movement should find antisemitism intellectually fascinating and morally urgent. Arguably, Jewish concerns and antisemitism are (or should be) Exhibit A in the Diagnostic Manual of Intersectionality.

Instead, Jews are often the exception in the intersectional imagination. It is almost as if intersectionality was invented in a world where Jews do not exist.

This is not because Jews lack a history of oppression. Few peoples possess a longer or better documented one. It is because antisemitism has spent roughly a hundred generations preparing the Jew for a very specific social role: not victim, but explanation.

Jews have not merely been hated. They have been used.

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When it comes to intersectionality, I have only recently come to understand, something more is at play. It is not that intersectionality was invented in a world where Jews seemingly do not exist. Conversely, and quite consciously, it now seems to me, Jews play a very special role in intersectionality — precisely the same role they have played for centuries in the very racisms intersectionality is supposed to ameliorate.

Quick history: When societies experienced disease, Jews were accused of poisoning wells. When a child disappeared, Jews were accused of ritual murder. When economies collapsed, Jews were blamed for finance. When workers revolted, Jews were blamed for communism. When nations lost wars, Jews were accused of betrayal. When modernity unsettled traditional life, Jews were blamed for secularism, feminism, immigration, capitalism, socialism, liberalism, and cultural decay.

The allegations changed because the social anxieties changed.

The Jew remained, an empty vessel onto which the fears, anxieties, hatreds, and assorted neuroses of others were projected.

This is the genius of antisemitism. It does not simply portray Jews as an oppressed minority. It portrays them as the hidden force behind oppression itself.

That makes antisemitism uniquely difficult for contemporary progressive frameworks to recognize. Intersectional politics tends to sort society into the powerful and the powerless, the privileged and the marginalized, the oppressor and the oppressed. Antisemitism enters this binary and whispers: Jews are not vulnerable. Jews are the powerful people behind the curtain.

Jews may be a tiny minority, but antisemitism imagines them as omnipresent. Jews may have been expelled from country after country, but antisemitism imagines them as controlling governments. Jews may have survived genocide, but antisemitism recasts survival as privilege. Jews may face violence, but their alleged proximity to whiteness, wealth, or Israel is used to disqualify their fears.

The ancient scapegoat has been updated for the language of social justice.

The medieval Jew was blamed for killing Jesus. The modern Jew is blamed for capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and global inequality. Israel is increasingly presented not as one nation among many, with virtues, failures, conflicts, and contradictions, but as the concentrated embodiment of every evil the intersectional coalition opposes.

Israel becomes colonialism. Zionism becomes racism. Jewish communal organization becomes lobbying power. Jewish concern about antisemitism becomes an attempt to silence others. Jewish self-defence becomes aggression. Jewish trauma becomes manipulation of gentile guilt.

The Jew is not excluded from the intersectional system. The Jew is assigned a very specific role within it: the villain connecting all the other injustices.

This explains a phenomenon that otherwise seems baffling. Movements devoted to protecting minorities have become hostile to one of the world’s oldest minorities. Activists trained to respect self-identification tell Jews that Jewishness is merely a religion, that Jews are not a people, or that Zionism has nothing legitimate to do with Jewish identity. People who insist that outsiders should listen to lived experience lecture Jews on what antisemitism really is.

Every other group is encouraged to define its own oppression. Jews must submit theirs for approval.

Jews are not being ignored by intersectionality. They are actively cast by intersectional analysis and activists in the precise role that racists have forced Jews for millennia: The source of all evil. The handy solution to all our problems. The explanation for every unanswered question. The scapegoat for anything and everything that goes wrong.

Intersectionality says everything is related — climate change, social inequalities of every form, economic injustice — and then, as often as not, explicitly or implicitly, it blames the Jews.

Let me make this crystal clear: It doesn’t have to be this way. Intersectionality is real. An economically disadvantaged Black woman with a learning disability faces overlapping oppressions and challenges, and her needs and differences must be addressed in this context. Denying intersectionality is like denying gravity. It exists.

The problem is that the oldest hatred has seeped into intersectionality the way it has seeped into everything.

And just like everything else antisemitism touches, it desecrates it. By allowing antisemitism to putrefy intersectionality, activists have undermined their own good intentions.

Antisemitism has always served as a distraction. Rather than addressing the real (often complex and confounding) causes of social problems, antisemitism provides easy answers (“It’s the Jews!”) and subverts attempts at deeper systemic reform.

For centuries, societies poured their anxieties into an imaginary vessel called “the Jew.” Today, some activists pour colonialism, capitalism, racism, militarism, and inequality into the same vessel and congratulate themselves for having discovered the source of oppression. (Usually they call the vessel “Israel” or “Zionism.”)

They have not transcended the ancient scapegoat.

They have intersectionalized it.

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Intersectionality needs to confront its antisemitism problem — if not for moral reasons (because antisemitism is evil in itself), then because this one defect in the system is the poison pill that will destroy the entire undertaking.

An intersectionality movement that is antisemitic cannot stand. It will eventually implode of its own internal contradictions.

That doesn’t mean the reality of intersectionality — a genuine, imperative understanding of human inequality — will cease to exist.

On the contrary. The injustices intersectionality recognizes will remain.

It is the movement challenging those injustices that will cease to exist or to constructively address the problem.

Many Jews have understandably given up on the concept of intersectionality, recognizing it as riven with antisemitism.

Intersectionality advocates, though, can give up on Jews only at their own peril.

Intersectionality’s Jewish problem is the booby trap set to blow intersectionality into shards. Either they quit denying the calamitous problem and eradicate the toxin, or give up altogether on the ostensible goal of confronting injustice and inequality.

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Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a scheme to remove $3.3 billion in security assistance to Israel. The amendment failed 104–314; 103 Democrats and one Republican voted to cut the aid, while 98 Democrats voted against doing so. Nevertheless, this was a massive slap in the face to the traditional bipartisan support for it wasIsrael.

I wonder how many of the 103 Democrats who voted for the “Let Israelis Die” bill actually know much about this issue, or care about it that deeply. My guess is that a ton of them voted that way because they are afraid of the Israel-hating crackpots in their party’s grassroots, activists who are not only threatening them politically but often physically.

My advice to the politicians would be: Treat the anti-Israel mobs like the bullies they are. Standing up to them is the only thing that works. Caving to bullies empowers them and leads only to more extortion and stalking.

In my previous post, I wrote about Naheed Nenshi, a politician in Alberta who spinelessly issued a grovelling apology for being photographed with Israel’s ambassador to Canada. I shared this example not because it was exceptional but because it is so ubiquitous. Politicians everywhere are caving to the shakedowns and intimidation by relatively small numbers of extremists. Nenshi, for example, is a moderate, middle-of-the-road guy who took over the leadership of Alberta’s left-wing New Democrats as the only viable vehicle for his political advancement. Rather than molding the party in his own image, it seems he has been transformed into one of the nutjobs.

What did the humiliating apology get him? Just more abuse from the seawater-drinking haters.

“For what?” wrote one commenter. “This isn’t an apology, and he doesn’t even call a genocide a genocide. This just made it worse. So…. I guess, thank you @nenshi for confirming what we already thought. You support (Israel’s) genocide.”

See what happened there? Nenshi issued a scathing, hysterical, ludicrous assault on Israel and the very people he was supposed to be sucking up to declare it proof that he is a genocider.

The theory that appeasing bullies only empowers them has been proven again and again just in recent weeks. Politicians who actually stand firm in the moral position that Israel has a right to exist are generally inured to the maniacs. Strategically, it may be that the moonbats know they have no chance of influencing politicians who have firm values, so they attack the ones who lack moral and ideological moorings.

The pattern is now embarrassingly obvious.

Scott Wiener: Accuses Israel of genocide, gets called a genocidaire

California state senator Scott Wiener is gay, Jewish and one of his state’s most prominent champions of transgender rights. Under pressure from the progressive left, he went so far as to accuse Israel of genocide — a charge that appalled much of the mainstream Jewish community and all decent people who understand the meaning of the word.

Naturally, this bought him approximately nothing.

At San Francisco’s 2026 Trans March, activists surrounded and chased Wiener, declaring that he no longer belonged. They called him a supporter of genocide, and told him that he had ceased to be queer because he had not passed their destroy-Israel loyalty test.

Wiener had already swallowed their most inflammatory accusation. His reward was to be publicly abused as though he were Netanyahu’s lapdog.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Wrong word, wrong day

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is arguably Israel’s most prominent hater on the Hill. She has incessantly condemned Israeli conduct as if there were no other foreign policy issues in the world. Activists nevertheless followed her and her fiancé through a Brooklyn cinema complex, thrusting cameras at them and demanding that she say the word genocide.

Later, when AOC condemned chants supporting Hamas outside a Queens synagogue, some “pro-Palestinian” activists attacked her again. Apparently, even opposition to Israel must now include support for people cheering a genocidal terrorist organization outside synagogues.

This is not advocacy. It is a grubby little dominance ritual: say our word, repeat our formula, excuse our extremists and perhaps we will postpone calling you a fascist until Thursday.

Zohran Mamdani: Antizionism still not antizionist enough

Zohran Mamdani has made the Palestinian cause and hating Israel central to his political identity. He has accused Israel of genocide, denounced AIPAC, refused to join New York’s Israel parade and explored whether the city could arrest Benjamin Netanyahu. He is about as close as American municipal politics gets to an antizionist’s wet dream.

Yet when Mamdani said that chants supporting a terrorist organization had no place outside a synagogue, activists rebuked him. One prominent supporter reportedly warned him not to accept his opponents’ “framing” and defended Hamas as Palestinian resistance.

Consider the absurdity. Mamdani can accuse Israel of genocide, threaten its prime minister with arrest and call AIPAC’s allies monsters, but a mild objection to actually cheering Hamas still brings the purity police pounding on his door. There is no finish line because the movement’s fanatics would become unemployed if they ever admitted that anyone had done enough.

Mélanie Joly and Anita Anand: Criticize Israel, get “pro-Palestinian” protesters at your door

Canadian ministers Mélanie Joly and Anita Anand have hardly pursued an indulgent policy toward Israel. They criticized its military conduct and were in the cheering section when their government recognized Palestinian statehood.

The extremists did not send thank-you cards. Protesters descended on Joly’s private residence, while repeated demonstrations and security concerns contributed to the temporary closure of Anand’s constituency office. Anand had already accused Israel of using food deprivation as a political tool. It did not buy her exemption from the intimidation campaign.

This is what politicians must understand: once you teach political bullies that trespassing on normal democratic boundaries produces concessions, they do not become grateful. They become ambitious.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: Help elect the candidate you supposedly fear

President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris during her campaign for the presidency, tried to walk a line between the hate-Israel grassroots of their party and the sensible, generally pro-Israel orientation of most voters. God forbid! Activists disrupted their rallies, accused the administration of genocide and declined to endorse Harris.

Yada, yada, yada. Trump won.

The faction that claimed Palestinian welfare was the supreme moral emergency helped produce an administration far less receptive to its demands. That outcome was irrational only if improving Palestinian lives was the real priority. It was perfectly rational if ideological self-purification, social-media performance, and punishing imperfect allies mattered more.

The escalator has no top floor

The progression is drearily predictable: express concern for Palestinians; demand a ceasefire; condemn Israel; suspend weapons; recognize Palestine; impose sanctions; use the word genocide; reject every Jewish organization deemed insufficiently hostile to Israel; praise Hamas; and finally apologize for any evidence that you ever believed a Jewish state should exist.

At every stage, yesterday’s concession becomes today’s proof that you remain morally deficient. Partial agreement is called complicity. Nuance is called cowardice. Drawing one boundary is called betrayal. The activists’ ugliest faction behaves less like a political constituency than a purity cult run by grievance addicts. It needs permanent enemies, permanent outrage, and permanent escalation. Satisfaction would destroy its business model.

Appeasing them is like feeding an alligator in the hope that it eats you last. The animal does not become loyal. It simply learns where lunch comes from.

There is a lesson that politicians and public figures keep learning the hard way: appeasement does not buy loyalty. It only buys the illusion of peace for a short time.

And sometimes not even that.

There is good news in this, though.

For one thing, eventually any smart politicians will learn that being associated with these cranksmithing sloganistas is a no-win proposition. They are not going to donate to a campaign, knock on doors, or even vote for the candidates who say all the right things. Because it is never enough with those people.

Here’s why, in the long run, this is encouraging …

We need to make sure that even voters who don’t care about Israel or Jews learn the lessons they should about politicians like these. Israel and Palestine aside, these are people who cannot be trusted because they will cave to the most extreme forces at the slightest threat of disruption. That is a dangerous person to have in a place of power.

This is about antizionism and antisemitism, yes. But for those who don’t care about those things, it is a warning to voters that these candidates or elected officials are treacherous shapeshifting weathercocks who will collaborate with the world’s most evil forces.

The good news is that this is a self-destructive force. The fanatics keep demanding more until the appeasers have gone so far down the road of extremism that they are unpalatable to reasonable voters.

May that moment be nigh.

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In my previous post, I wrote about an Edmonton city councillor who circulated the grotesque claim that a newborn baby anywhere on Earth was statistically more likely to be killed by Israel than to die from any other cause.

I focused on Michael Janz not because his behavior was exceptional, but because it was so symptomatic.

The lie was spectacular. The phenomenon was routine.

Today — again in Alberta — we have another case study.

This time, the central figure is Naheed Nenshi, leader of the Alberta New Democratic Party and former mayor of Calgary. His offence, according to the guardians of ideological purity, was not inventing statistics, endorsing terrorism, or defaming an ethnic group.

He posed for a photograph with Israel’s ambassador to Canada at the Calgary Stampede.

Israeli Ambassador Iddo Moed was attending Canada’s most famous civic festival and appeared in photographs with about a dozen Canadian political figures. Nenshi said Moed approached him, they had a brief conversation, and a picture was taken. When protesters later confronted him, Nenshi initially defended the encounter as ordinary politeness.

That should have been the end of it. Instead, Nenshi folded like a cheap lawn chair at the first gust of activist outrage.

After pressure from religious extremists and political fanatics, Nenshi issued a groveling, abject public apology. He said the photograph had caused “a lot of harm to a lot of people,” that people were “very hurt,” and that he was “very sorry.”

What a load of shit. No one was harmed or hurt — other than Nenshi’s possible career if he did not suck up to the antisemitic extremism among his nutso New Democratic Party base. The people who complained were not “hurt” or “harmed.” They are crybullies who are seeking to hurt and harm.

He then padded the apology with a denunciation of Israel, accusing it of “indiscriminate bombing” and invoking Gaza and Lebanon as though these assertions explained why smiling beside a diplomat was an act requiring repentance. It wasn’t quite the overt blood libel Janz engaged in, but it was close.

What is most disgusting is that no politician would be forced to issue a mortified confession after appearing beside the ambassador of China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, or almost any other country whose government is accused of serious abuses. Nor would one be cowed into doing so.

No, actually — that’s not the most disgusting part. I’ll get to that later.

For now, let’s consider: Only Israel has been transformed into a global contaminant. Only an Israeli diplomat is treated as though proximity itself leaves a moral stain. Only Zionism requires ritual purification.

This is not ordinary criticism of a government. It is the political construction of Israel as uniquely untouchable and its representatives as socially infectious.

That is why this episode is so revolting.

If you, by any chance, think that is an appropriate response to a representative of the Israeli government because, say, Israel is perpetrating “genocide,” that is not a statement about Israel. It is a statement about your own hopeless stupidity.

Nenshi’s apology did not merely appease his critics. It validated their premise. It accepted that there was something inherently injurious about an Israeli ambassador appearing in a photograph at a Canadian public celebration.

Ambassador Moed was right to say, as he did after Nenshi’s slimy, cringing “apology,” that it is unacceptable for hatred to creep into an event meant to embody hospitality. The ambassador had attended Stampede with a six-person Israeli technology delegation, promoting cooperation in areas including energy, agriculture, clean technology, and cybersecurity. He was doing precisely what ambassadors do: meeting people, building relationships, and representing his country.

A subtext of this despicable incident is that Alberta would rather not engage with Israel in any of the spheres where Israel has expertise. Given that Alberta’s economy is powered primarily by fossil fuels and that they have done pretty much piss all in the past half-century to diversify that Earth-destroying and finite revenue source, Albertans actually have a lot to learn from Israel. They can ignore that partnership at their peril.

Again, though, this is not really about Alberta or Nenshi. In the bigger picture, he’s a nobody. And whatever credibility he had with decent people before the Stampede has evaporated. I raise this incident because it is part of a much larger phenomenon.

Everywhere, politicians and institutions are responding to hate-driven, extremist anti-Israel crackpots by giving them what they demand.

A speaker is canceled. A Jewish organization is disinvited. An Israeli academic is boycotted. A cultural festival erases Israeli participation. A politician deletes a photograph. A university negotiates with encampment leaders. A union adopts language that would be recognized as extremist in any other context.

The people applying the pressure do not need to persuade the majority. They are the tail wagging the dog. They only need to make resistance more painful than submission. They create a storm online, confront someone in public, invoke “harm,” threaten reputational consequences, and wait for the apology.

Again and again, the apology comes.

The target offers a little sacrifice in the hope of making the mob go away.

But it never works. Capitulation does not satisfy fanatics. It rewards them.

I used to admire Naheed Nenshi. As mayor of Calgary, he often seemed like an independent thinker and a straight-shooter: intelligent, articulate, willing to challenge his own side, and uninterested in fitting comfortably into conventional political categories.

That credibility evaporated in an instant last week.

Nenshi knew that exchanging words and posing for a photograph with an ambassador was not harmful. He initially described it accurately: politeness. Then a few fanatics came at him, and he surrendered.

Worse, he translated their intolerance into the therapeutic language of “harm” and “hurt,” granting moral authority to people whose complaint was that an Israeli had been treated like a normal human being.

That is the most despicable part of this whole ugly scenario.

Real political leadership should involve explaining to angry supporters that they are wrong.

Instead, he accepted the radical extremist premises of the haters and bowed to their extortionate demands.

This is how the boundary keeps moving.

One day, an Edmonton city councilor alleges that Israel kills half the babies in the world.

A few days later, the guy who wants to lead the province after the next election grovels for forgiveness from exactly the same sorts of nutjobs after standing beside an Israeli ambassador.

Tomorrow, what will require an apology?

The haters are telling us exactly what they want: the removal of Israel and Zionists from respectable public life. The destruction of the state of Israel. Globalizing the intifada, which means killing Jews everywhere.

Far too many politicians lack the guts to tell them no.

Nenshi had the opportunity to draw a line.

He erased it.

What a spineless ass.

He — and people like him — should never be permitted anywhere near the levers of power. People who lack the fortitude to stand up to ideological shakedowns are as dangerous as the extortionists themselves. For Zionists like me, Nenshi destroyed whatever credibility he had. But most Alberta voters won’t be voting based on that.

What Nenshi demonstrated to every potential voter, though, is that he has no moral and ideological moorings, that he will bend to the slightest threat and align with the most misogynistic, homophobic, violent, and totalitarian forces in the world to buy a few moments of peace.

This does not make Nenshi an exception. No, it makes him sadly typical of politicians today. And in my next post, I will demonstrate why those few moments of peace, like Chamberlain’s fated pact at Munich, will ultimately destroy the spineless capitulators. Because appeasement never works.

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Good morning! I am incredibly honored to share a guest post today from Kile B. Jones, a reformed antizionist, whose “Inverted World” Substack is one of the smartest, sharpest, and most necessary voices on the subjects we care about. If you like my posts, you’ll love Kile’s. Please subscribe to Kile’s “Inverted World” for more brilliance like this one.

If a citizen harbors rage against a foreign government, the coordinates are fixed: the embassy on the capital’s highway, the consulates in metropolitan hubs, and the ministry buildings where statecraft is executed. These are the addresses of power. They’re the only terminus realistic enough for an argument about foreign policy. They represent the state, and therefore, they represent the accountability protesters demand.

For the last few years, however, a different pattern has taken hold—an inversion. A movement claiming to challenge the actions of a state six thousand miles away has persistently bypassed the seats of power to settle upon a different set of coordinates. They’re not marching on embassies, they head to the synagogue, the elementary school, the bookstore, and the neighborhood.

This is a diagnostic of a profound breakdown occurring. If this were a debate over the Middle East, the targets would be governmental. That they are exclusively, repetitively, and violently Jewish reveals antizionism for what it truly is: Jew-hatred.

The Trail of Fire: 2023–2026

The evidence for this transvaluation isn’t abstract. It’s recorded in police logs, security footage, and the remains left of community buildings. The timeline of this siege begins in late 2023. On November 12, the Yeshiva Gedola in Montreal was struck by gunfire. Less than twenty-four hours later, the Talmud Torah elementary school suffered an identical attack. These were not random acts of vandalism, they were strikes against the educational arms of a minority community.

The pattern migrated westward with staggering precision. In Toronto, the Bais Chaya Mushka school for girls was targeted by gunfire. When it was struck yet again, the “outlier” hypothesis collapsed. By spring 2026, the situation reached a boiling-point. A string of drive-by shootings targeted Temple Emanu-El, Shaarei Shomayim, and Beth Avraham Yoseph. In each instance, the choice of target was deliberate: they were houses of worship, spaces defined by their role in Jewish congregational life.

The 2025 B’nai Brith Audit adds quantitative weight to these attacks. The report documented 6,800 acts of antizionist hate—an average of 18.6 per day—shattering all records since before I was born in 1982. Of these, 6,248 occurred online, a 203.9% surge since 2022. This digital volume isn’t separate from the physical reality, it’s an antecedent. It provides the tactical coordination that allows a protest to morph into an antizionist siege.

The Impunity

The transition from policy critique to street-level siege is sustained by a failure of the legal system. In many jurisdictions, the intimidation of private locals, bookstores, restaurants, and worship halls, has been met with a refusal to categorize the actions as hate crimes.

Consider the legal proceedings following the 2025 assault on a Jewish man in a Montreal park. Despite clear documentation of the motivations of the assailant, the court navigated to a finding of the psychiatric. This is a recurring trend showing the path of least resistance for the legal system individualizes the grievance rather than confronting the movement behind it.

Similarly, the 2026 blockades at the Indigo bookstore chain demonstrated this. Despite the occupation of commercial businesses, actions clearly intended to place pressure on Jewish entities, authorities struggled to go beyond warnings. When charges were ultimately withdrawn, the message sent to the world was that the cost of disrupting Jewish life is nothing. The benefit of signaling antizionism is worth the risk.

This is further bolstered by the adoption of an aggressive symbolism and lexicon. The inverted red triangle, a symbol used in Hamas propaganda to designate a target for a snipe, has moved from digital darkness into your squares. When a protester wears this symbol, they’re not engaging in free speech, they’re designating targets. When that symbolism is paired with the slogan “globalize the intifada,” it’s a call for the import of Gazan violence into Canadian neighborhoods.

Intellectual Permission

The engine of this antizionist surge is the employment of academic theories to create a permission structure for violence. Terms such as “settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” have been stripped of their nuance and weaponized as blunt instruments. They work as a universal solvent, dissolving the distinction between the Jewish state and the Jewish individual.

In this perspective, the “Zionist” label is applied to every Jewish entity. A congregant at a Sabbath service is no longer viewed as a private citizen, but as a proxy for whatever Israel happens to be doing. By this logic, an elementary school is a center of indoctrination, and a bookstore is a node in an enemy complex. This is the logic of war, applied to your communities. Chants like “from the river to the sea” act as a blueprint, legitimizing the removal of a Jewish presence from the public as a requirement for sanctity.

The Testing

This remains a definitive diagnostic for the state of Canadian society. If the grievance were about Middle Eastern policy, the protests would be centered on the consulates. Instead, the evidence shows the school for the ministry, the bookstore for the arms exporter, the neighborhood for the city hall, and the congregation for the state building.

This substitution is a mapping signature of the antizionism around us. The normalization of this hate isn’t a crisis of foreign policy, it’s the active, accelerating collapse of protections meant for the less than one percent. You’ve witnessed the line between the protester and the persecutor effectively erased. The evidence—the bullet trajectories into schools, the 203% surge in hate, the withdrawal of charges for commercial blockades—is mountainous and devastating.

When the history of this time is written, the failure will not be attributed to a lack of information. It will be attributed to the deliberate blindness of those who prioritized the optics of “protest” over the reality of death. The map of where the fire is burning provides all that’s required to identify who’s being hunted, and who’s hunting. There’s no ambiguity. The target is the Jewish citizen, and the evidence of the hunt is the burning around you. The question remains: does your state possess the will to protect its own, or has it already been abandoned to the fire?

Postscript

My heart goes out to Jewish Canadians. Since witnessing the protest with the effigy being hung in Montreal, I’ve felt nothing but sadness and worry for them. I can’t imagine living under those circumstances. I’ve spoken with a school teacher there, and have developed a few meaningful friendships with Canadian Jews since my “deconversion” from antizionism — they strike me as nothing but loving people in a country that isn’t protecting them. I send you my care and hope for your safekeeping. We cannot let antizionism and antisemitism quash your safety; not because ours is next, but because it’s unjust and morally indefensible. And since you are worth caring for. You’re not alone.

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From Pat:

I’ll be back Monday with my regular stuff. Meanwhile, if you liked this taste of Kile B. Jones, please subscribe to his “Inverted World” Substack.

Inverted World

Deconstructing Antizionism and Standing with Jewish persons in an Inverted World.

By Kile B. Jones

And here’s my usual bumf …

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